Adam Kinzinger, the former Republican congressman from Illinois, is best known for his service on the congressional committee that investigated the January 6 insurrection. He and Liz Cheney were the only two Republicans on that committee, and completely noncoincidentally, neither one is in Congress today. The new speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, is more typical of the House Republican caucus: He was a leader of the election deniers.

In his new book, Renegade: Defending Democracy and Liberty in Our Divided Country, Kinzinger details his manifold struggles: with his conscience, with his ambition, and, ultimately, with the Republicans who attempted to subvert the Constitution. A six-term congressman and an Air Force veteran, Kinzinger today is chastened but still somewhat hopeful—not hopeful about the short-term future of the Republican Party, but hopeful that pro-democracy voters are still sufficient in number to turn back the authoritarians.

I first met Kinzinger in 2014, when we were both members of the late Senator John McCain’s delegation to the Munich Security Conference. Also in that delegation were Senator Lindsey Graham and then-Representative Mike Pompeo, who later became Donald Trump’s CIA director and secretary of state.

[Peter Wehner: The man who refused to bow]

What follows is an edited and condensed transcript of a conversation I had with Kinzinger earlier this month on stage at the Democracy360 conference, sponsored by the Karsh Institute at the University of Virginia. We started by talking about that now-unlikely constellation of Republicans: Kinzinger, McCain, Graham, and Pompeo.

Jeffrey Goldberg: You guys were all in the same camp, the muscular internationalist Republicans. Two of you went one way, and two of you went another way. What happened?

Adam Kinzinger: Craven politics, craven power—that’s what it is. This is something I still try to grapple with every day, when I look back on January 6. I always thought everybody had a red line. Like, okay, we can play politics to a point, but there’s a red line we'll never cross. I’ve learned that’s not the case.

I’d say [we] are all still probably for a muscular foreign policy. The difference, though, between people that went one way or another is the recognition that U.S. foreign policy also means we have to have a healthy democracy at home, and that democracy-building overseas is fine, but having a strong democracy here, where people have faith in the voting system and faith that whoever gets the most votes will win, is just as important.

I think there are unfortunately too many people that got into the Trump sphere, that it  just became about power, identity, and not looking at the broader picture of your impact in this world.

Goldberg: So I want to stay on this for a while because I want you to name names.

Kinzinger: I can name names for an hour. A couple off the top of my head: One of the ones I’m most disappointed in generally is [former House Speaker] Kevin McCarthy, because I always thought that McCarthy had some version of a political soul. And I’ve come to realize that to him it was all about just the attainment of power. Somebody like Ted Cruz never surprised me. He’s always been a charlatan. But Lindsey Graham has also been a big disappointment to me, because I’ve traveled with Lindsey, leading congressional-delegation trips around the world. I always thought he and I were eye to eye on a lot of these foreign-policy issues. And to watch him so closely adopt and closely support Donald Trump, when Trump was doing exactly what Graham was preaching against just prior to Trump’s arrival on the scene, was a pretty disappointing moment.

[Read: ‘We put sharp knives on the hands of children’]

During this speaker fiasco, I would listen to names during the roll call, people like Mike McCaul, people like Mike Gallagher, and hear them say the name Jim Jordan and know, for a fact, they have no respect for Jim Jordan. But it’s all about that determination to survive politically. I have come to learn that people fear losing their identity and losing their tribe more than they come to fear death.

Goldberg: You saw Lindsey Graham throughout this process. What were conversations like? Did you ever just say, “Lindsey, what are you doing?”

Kinzinger: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, our relationship hasn’t been that strong in the last few years, obviously. So I can’t say there were recent conversations, but it would just be like, “What’s going on? So Donald Trump did this thing. Why are you okay with that?”

People have given so much of their soul, of their values. They’ve compromised so much that at some point to stop compromising, or to recognize that this is a mistake and you need to correct course, would be an indictment against who you are and what you have done for the last four or five years. And I think Lindsey has been a victim of that. He liked the idea of being in the room with Donald Trump.

And I will tell you, I’ve met with Donald Trump a number of times; he is actually one of the most fun people to meet with, because he’s crazy, but it’s like a fun crazy. And he’s really good at drawing you in and making you feel seen at that moment, because he knows how to manipulate you. And it works perfectly with Lindsey. Lindsey says, “Now I have a seat at the table. I care about foreign policy.” But what he didn’t realize is that bargain came with selling who he was as a person.

Goldberg: If John McCain hadn’t died, would Graham have gone over?

Kinzinger: I don’t think so. I think Lindsey Graham needs a strong person to  mentor him or carry him, and it was John McCain. And when John McCain passed, the next guy, the strongman that Lindsey Graham was drawn to, was Donald Trump.

Goldberg: You got to Congress when the Republican Party is still the Republican Party you imagined it to be. One question that people like you always get is: Were you kidding yourself the whole time, or did something actually change?

Kinzinger: Looking back, I can say, “Oh, yeah, there were signs from the very beginning,” but I was part of the moderate Republicans, who constantly had this optimistic view that the Republican Party was this thing of smaller government, hope, opportunity, strong national defense, that kind of stuff. And I always just saw these elements of crazy nationalism, of authoritarianism, of racism exist in the party, but it’s a battle. And I’m fighting on the good side here to try to save the party. And then when Donald Trump came, we lost that fight.

I think the moment I started to realize, like, Okay, we have lost, was January 6. Before that point, I thought, Donald Trump is going to lose; people are going to wake up. Even on January 6 I said, “People are definitely going to wake up now.”

Now, with the benefit of time and looking back, I can say, “You know what? Those strains were there.” Some of them were hidden because it was not yet socially acceptable to say things like “Let’s throw out the Constitution.” I hear a lot of people say “You’re naive, because the Republican Party’s always been this way.” And inevitably those are people on the left that have always had a bad view of the GOP. I understand the viewpoint, but I don’t think that’s correct. I think there were a lot of really good factions in the GOP.

Goldberg: Explain the psychology there. What motivates this outburst of anger on the part of the voters that led to Trump’s triumph?

Kinzinger: I think the resentment came from Fox News and the right-wing-media echo chamber. Why do I say that? So this is something I take a lot of personal blame for being part of as well, although I think I did better than most.

In 2010, we learned that fear is the best way to raise money ever. If I send you an email and it says, “Dear Jeffrey, I want to lower tax rates and we need some help, blah, blah, blah,” you may give me money. But if I send you an email and it says, “Nancy Pelosi is trying to murder you and your family,” and in essence, I convince you that I’m the only thing standing between you and the life of you or your family, you’ll part with anything, including a significant part of your fixed income from Social Security. So in 2010, we learned this. And instead of using that kind of fire in a controlled way like politicians do, sometimes we let it burn. There was always this fire going, and we stoked it too far.

Goldberg: How do you reach people who haven’t been reached, to change their minds? There’s 30, 35 percent of the voters who are hard-core.

Kinzinger: Well, if the January 6 committee didn’t do it and the people still believe the scandals, I’m not sure that 35 percent can be turned on a dime today. But here’s the two things we can do. We can convince their children. You would be amazed how many children have a different viewpoint than their parents, and how they can pull their parents off the ledge. I did that with my parents when I got elected. My dad would call, and he’s watching Fox News all the time. And I finally said, “Dad, I’m in the middle of this and I don’t have near the stress you do, and you can’t even see the difference. Right?” And he’s like, “You know what? You’re right.”

The other thing is, if only every one of those people running against Donald Trump in the primary would tell the dang truth, people would actually believe it. Donald Trump gets indicted with all these different indictments and then they ask, you know, ‘What do you think, Tim Scott?” “What do you think, Nikki Haley?” “What do you think, Vivek Ramaswamy? What are your feelings on these indictments?” But every one of those people say this is a witch hunt.

Goldberg: I appreciate the view. I’m not sure I believe you, though. The truest thing that Donald Trump ever said was that he could shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue and his followers would still support him. It seems like he understood something elemental there.

Kinzinger: I guess I would caveat that. I don’t necessarily believe, if Nikki Haley alone came out and said it, that it would be game over for Donald Trump. I think this is a specific moment where if all these people told the base the truth, they could damage his support significantly.

Goldberg: Stay on this question of Trump and Trumpism. Who do you blame for his return?

Kinzinger: One person: Kevin McCarthy. And I’m going to tell you exactly why. So there was a period after January 6 for two or three weeks. It was quiet. And we’d meet in a room with all the Republican men and women of Congress. Kevin would stand up, all that stuff—if you’re in the room, you could sense there was this trepidation in the room about, like, “We don’t know what’s next. We don’t know where we’re going. What are we supposed to do?” Until the day Kevin McCarthy showed up with a picture of Donald Trump. And just like that, everything changed.

[David Frum: Kevin McCarthy, have you no sense of decency?]

Goldberg: You’re talking about his visit to Mar-a-Lago.

Kinzinger: His visit to Mar-a-Lago. Those of us that voted for impeachment were leading the charge against Donald Trump. People were actually coming up to us and asking us, “How do I do this?” We were talking about “How do we get the downtown PAC community to only support those that are pro-democracy?” We were going to set up our own scoring and vetting system to say This person voted against certification; this person voted for it, and only give money to the people that voted for it. And you think about the power that could have had.

Then that picture happened in Mar-a-Lago, and all of a sudden we went from considering doing a vote of no confidence against Kevin McCarthy because of his role in January 6 to a point where everybody turned against me, Liz Cheney, and the others that voted to impeach, all because of that picture.

Goldberg: So you must be at least a little bit happy about Kevin McCarthy’s downfall.

Kinzinger: I’m very happy about it. I’m very happy. I’ve got to be honest. I’m sorry. It’s not great for the country, but it’s really good.

Goldberg: You’re describing Kevin McCarthy as a person who went along with the radical pro-Trump, anti-democracy right and then he eventually got eaten by them.

Kinzinger: This dynamic to an extent has always existed. It would be people like me fighting against the Jim Jordans, but it was behind the scenes. Now it’s brought out to the open because for the first time you now see the people like me—I will call them the moderates, even though there’s really no moderates left. The moderates are finally standing up and fighting back with some of the tactics that Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordan used.

Why is it that terrorists are so powerful? Because they’re willing to do something that most other people aren’t: you know, commit an act of terror if you’re a legislative terrorist, like John Boehner called Jim Jordan very accurately, and he’s willing to vacate the chair or Matt Gaetz is willing to vacate the chair. They’re powerful unless people push back. And that’s what’s happening. How does a Kevin McCarthy get to this point? A man who I thought had a red line, I always thought he was a very good politician and that he could play around the edges, but he wouldn’t cross [the line]. And in January, he cut a deal that made what happened a few weeks ago completely obvious. Everybody knew this would happen. That’s how we’ve gotten to where we are. And this is a moment where the Republican Party either will collapse in a heap of fire or they will actually fix themselves somehow through this.

The country needs a healthy Republican Party regardless of what you feel about the Republican Party, because we need a liberal and a conservative philosophy competing in the United States. That’s what a healthy democracy is.

Goldberg: Does Trumpism survive Trump?

Kinzinger: Five months ago, if we were sitting here and you said, “Does it survive past Trump?” I’d be like, absolutely. Because Trumpism has now been learned by others. But I’m starting to play with the idea that maybe enough Republicans are starting to get exhausted of Trump and maybe Trumpism doesn’t survive. Donald Trump got elected in front of a wave of people that wanted to break the system. But there is an undercurrent right now of people that are desperate to fix and heal the system. And when that right person comes along, like an Obama-type character, I think that may revolutionize the future, but I’m not sure.

Goldberg: Can you imagine yourself back in Congress as a Republican?

Kinzinger: That’s two different questions. Could I imagine myself back in the House? No. Could I imagine myself back in politics? Yes. Could I imagine myself back in politics as a Republican? Not in the current environment.

Goldberg: In other words, do you think that the fever would break to a point where the Republican Party would be a different party and have you back?

Kinzinger: I think someday; I just don’t know when that’s going to be. And it’s not now. I think if I ran as a Republican now, I wouldn’t do too well.

Goldberg: Are you still a Republican?

Adam Kinzinger: It’s an interesting question. I will not vote Republican. I voted Democratic last election. I intend to vote Democratic this election, not because I’ve changed my mind necessarily—I’ve moderated, you know, quite a bit—but because I think it is a binary choice. Do you like democracy or don’t you like democracy? And I think that the only thing we can vote on in 2024 is democracy. So I’m not giving up the title Republican yet, because I haven’t changed. They have. And I refuse to give them that satisfaction yet. But I feel like a man without a party.

Goldberg: Why do your colleagues want to stay in Congress so badly?

Kinzinger: I don’t know.

Goldberg: It doesn’t look like the greatest job.

Kinzinger: It’s not the greatest job. But, okay, when you walk into a room for five or 10 years and no matter what room you walk in, unless it’s the White House, you are the center of attention because you’re the highest-ranking person there and you’ve spent your whole life to attain this job—a lot of my colleagues spent everything to become that. Losing that freaks you out. As somebody that announced I wasn’t running again, the thing you fear the most is how do I feel the second after I put out that press release?

My co-pilot in Iraq sent me a text that said, “I’m ashamed to have ever served with you.” I had family that sent me a certified letter saying they’re ashamed to share my last name, that I was working for the devil. I used to laugh about it 10 months ago, but I’ve really allowed myself to accept what damage that’s done to me and my family. It’s not easy to go through. But I’m going to tell you, I have 0.0 percent regret for what I did, and I would do it all the exact same again.

In Los Angeles, where I live, the rites of autumn can feel alien. Endless blue skies and afternoon highs near 90 degrees linger long after Griffith Park opens its Haunted Hayride. When the highs dip toward more seasonably appropriate numbers, they’ll be accompanied by one of California’s unfortunate traditions: wasted clean energy.

During the fall and spring, cloudless afternoons produce a spike in solar power at a time when milder temperatures necessitate less air-conditioning. When that happens, the state’s solar farms make more energy than the state can use, and some panels are simply turned off. This maddening problem—a result of what energy wonks call the “duck curve”—has been getting worse as the amount of available solar power outpaces the state’s ability to move that power around. In early 2017, just more than 3 percent of the state’s solar was wasted this way. The total reached 6 percent by 2022, according to California’s grid operator, and 15 percent in the early afternoons of March 2021. Wind power also can be wasted if the weather is especially breezy, and California’s combined curtailment of wind and solar set a new record this April.

Now the state has punted this dilemma to its residents. In December, the California Public Utilities Commission voted to slash the amount of money homeowners with new solar panels can make from “net metering,” the practice of selling your own extra solar back to the power company. Because the math for buying new panels is less favorable, fewer Californians are installing them, according to the Los Angeles Times. Many sunny rooftops that could generate clean energy simply won’t.

California is outpacing the rest of the country in the energy transition, but its misadventures in solar are going national. Moving away from fossil fuels requires a huge expansion of renewable energy in America. One government report estimated that meeting Joe Biden’s goal of supplying half of the country’s energy with solar would mean doubling America’s capacity annually until 2025—and then quadrupling it annually through 2030. But without better ways to transport that solar power or store it for later, California and several other states are already turning off perfectly good solar panels and clawing back incentives that entice Americans to install their own. Far more of America’s sunny potential is about to go to waste.

A little clean-energy wastage is inevitable, Carey King, the assistant director of the University of Texas at Austin’s Energy Institute, told me. Such is the very imperfect nature of integrating unpredictable renewables onto a power grid built for the predictability of fossil fuels. Compared with an inflexible coal or gas plant, solar panels are easier to turn off and on, so they are first to be cut during times of energy surplus. Ideally, we could stash away sun power and use it to light up the skyline at night, but that would require a build-out of big batteries that is still in early stages. Excess solar can be moved to less sun-soaked places to help them burn fewer fossil fuels, but electricity doesn’t just teleport from sunny Palm Springs to drizzly Portland. Moving it across long distances requires heavy-duty power lines and navigating the bureaucracies of various agencies that operate them.

Take Texas: The state’s famously independent power grid has relatively few interconnections with neighboring systems to send spare renewable energy elsewhere. When Texas started making a big push toward renewables in the 2000s, King said, the state began turning off solar panels and wind turbines, and slowing the construction of new ones because it lacked enough so-called transmission lines capable of zipping renewable energy from windy West Texas to the big cities in the east. A state-mandated power-line expansion solved the problem then. Now, as Texas’s total wind-energy capacity leapt from 10 gigawatts in 2010 to 40 gigawatts by 2022, those new wires have reached their limit. In 2022, Texas wasted 5 percent of the wind and 9 percent of the solar energy it could have created. Without another big fix to the grid, those numbers could jump to 13 percent of wind and 19 percent of solar by 2035.

Across the country, clean energy is similarly hemmed in by the limits of transmission lines. Existing plants can’t get all their electricity where it needs to go, because there aren’t enough power lines for them to thrive, says Timothy Hade, the co-founder of Scale Microgrid Solutions, which builds clean-energy systems for homes and businesses. The Biden administration has pledged billions to modernize the grid and expand high-voltage transmission lines, but actually building them is very, very, very hard. As Robinson Meyer wrote in The Atlantic last year, “If you want to build new transmission, then you need to win the approval of every state, county, city, and in some cases, landowner along the proposed route.”

[Read: Unfortunately, I care about power lines now]

The Herculean task of building new transmission lines wasn’t such a pressing issue before the rise of renewable energy. But now solar power is so pervasive that parts of the country have no choice but to turn down the supply. Although that could take the form of fewer industrial-size wind and solar plants coming to fruition, the other option is giving a cold shoulder to people who have their own solar panels and sell it back to the power company through net metering. After all, net metering can create lots of power: California gets more than 15 percent of its energy from big solar farms and roughly 10 percent from residential rooftop panels, according to the EIA.

Like California, other states are choosing the second option. Indiana phased out net metering, and in North Carolina, solar advocates are now suing the state for allowing its giant utility, Duke Energy, to force a minimum monthly bill upon its customers and adjust net metering in a way the advocates say will reduce payouts. Arizona is considering cutting payments for homemade solar, as is Madison Gas and Electric in Wisconsin, according to Energy News Network. A few other close calls show the perilous state of net metering: This year, it has so far survived in New Hampshire, barely, when utilities backed the practice at the last moment. Last year, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis vetoed a bill that would have ended the practice and hit home-solar users with extra fees.

That isn’t to say that the clampdown has happened everywhere. Texas, for example, has allowed Tesla to set up a “virtual power plant” so that people with Elon Musk’s solar panels and batteries can make gobs of money selling back energy whenever they have extra. And there are legitimate fears about using this method as a way to grow the country’s solar supply. Hade calls net metering a “blunt instrument”—too crude an approach for the complex energy system of the future. One major problem is that solar-panel owners tend to be far richer than the average American but don’t pay their fair share for the upkeep of the electrical grid, which is built into the price the power company charges everybody else. The more houses that have rooftop solar, the argument goes, the more that people without solar must pay to maintain all the infrastructure that everyone needs. “Net metering can’t be the end-all solution as we go forward,” King said. “It’s just going to create a little bit too much disparity.”

The growing backlash against net metering isn’t just a response to wasted solar power—it’s also about for-profit power companies wary of rooftop solar panels that don’t make them money. The idea of turning homes, apartment buildings, and businesses with solar panels into mini power plants is a potentially transformative one—and net metering is a big part of how people can afford solar panels in the first place. Solar panels can cost upwards of $10,000, and in California, the extra cash from net metering has helped residents recoup the expensive cost of panels in five to six years. Now it will take up to 15 years, according to one analysis.

In that way, America will end up squandering more potential clean energy down the line. Fewer than 10 percent of U.S. homes have installed solar panels so far. The rest constitutes an enormous swath of untapped real estate—billions of square meters of sun-drenched rectangles that could be making clean energy. Incentives for solar energy still exist from states and the federal government, but the result of slowing down net metering is that residents will put on smaller solar panels that make only enough energy for their own use, Hade told me, because they can’t make much money selling their bonus juice. Or they won’t get solar at all.

The squeeze on homemade solar is a missed opportunity in the making. A retreat from net metering makes solar-panel owners less like mini power plants and more like doomsday preppers, perhaps filling the backup battery in the basement with electricity to get through a blackout but adding nothing to the country’s clean-energy supply. With a more nuanced form of net metering to allow people to sell their surplus, or with the advent of “microgrids” that tie together communities and allow them to share energy, American rooftops could contribute gigawatts toward running the country on clean energy. Such a DIY approach would be a way around our inability to build new power lines, but it is deeply at odds with the way America has operated for a century, and will seemingly operate for many more years to come: The power company sends you the power, and you use it.

Diana Henriques was first stricken in late 1996. A business reporter for The New York Times, she was in the midst of a punishing effort to bring a reporting project to fruition. Then one morning she awoke to find herself incapable of pinching her contact lens between her thumb and forefinger.

Henriques’s hands were soon cursed with numbness, frailty, and a gnawing ache she found similar to menstrual cramps. These maladies destroyed her ability to type—the lifeblood of her profession—without experiencing debilitating pain.

“It was terrifying,” she recalls.

Henriques would join the legions of Americans considered to have a repetitive strain injury (RSI), which from the late 1980s through the 1990s seized the popular imagination as the plague of the modern American workplace. Characterized at the time as a source of sudden, widespread suffering and disability, the RSI crisis reportedly began in slaughterhouses, auto plants, and other venues for repetitive manual labor, before spreading to work environments where people hammered keyboards and clicked computer mice. Pain in the shoulders, neck, arms, and hands, office drones would learn, was the collateral damage of the desktop-computer revolution. As Representative Tom Lantos of California put it at a congressional hearing in 1989, these were symptoms of what could be “the industrial disease of the information age.”

By 1993, the Bureau of Labor Statistics was reporting that the number of RSI cases had increased more than tenfold over the previous decade. Henriques believed her workplace injury might have had a more specific diagnosis, though: carpal tunnel syndrome. Characterized by pain, tingling, and numbness that results from nerve compression at the wrist, this was just one of many conditions (including tendonitis and tennis elbow) that were included in the government’s tally, but it came to stand in for the larger threat. Everyone who worked in front of a monitor was suddenly at risk, it seemed, of coming down with carpal tunnel. “There was this ghost of a destroyed career wandering through the newsroom,” Henriques told me. “You never knew whose shoulder was going to feel the dead hand next.”

But the epidemic waned in the years that followed. The number of workplace-related RSIs recorded per year had already started on a long decline, and in the early 2000s, news reports on the modern plague all but disappeared. Two decades later, professionals are ensconced more deeply in the trappings of the information age than they’ve ever been before, and post-COVID, computer use has spread from offices to living rooms and kitchens. Yet if this work is causing widespread injury, the evidence remains obscure. The whole carpal tunnel crisis, and the millions it affected, now reads like a strange and temporary problem of the ancient past.

[Read: Yes, the pandemic is ruining your body]

So what happened? Was the plague defeated by an ergonomic revolution, with white-collar workers’ bodies saved by thinner, light-touch keyboards, adjustable-height desks and monitors, and Aeron chairs? Or could it be that the office-dweller spike in RSIs was never quite as bad as it seemed, and that the hype around the numbers might have even served to make a modest problem worse, by spreading fear and faulty diagnoses?

Or maybe there’s another, more disturbing possibility. What if the scourge of RSIs receded, but only for a time? Could these injuries have resurged in the age of home-office work, at a time when their prevalence might be concealed in part by indifference and neglect? If that’s the case—if a real and pervasive epidemic that once dominated headlines never really went away—then the central story of this crisis has less to do with occupational health than with how we come to understand it. It’s a story of how statistics and reality twist around and change each other’s shape. At times they even separate.

The workplace epidemic was visible only after specific actions by government agencies, employers, and others set the stage for its illumination. This happened first in settings far removed from office life. In response to labor groups’ complaints, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration began to look for evidence of RSIs within the strike-prone meatpacking industry—and found that they were rampant.

Surveillance efforts spread from there, and so did the known scope of the problem. By 1988, OSHA had proposed multimillion-dollar fines against large auto manufacturers and meatpacking plants for underreporting employees’ RSIs; other businesses, perhaps spooked by the enforcement, started documenting such injuries more assiduously. Newspaper reporters (and their unions) took up the story, too, noting that similar maladies could now be produced by endless hours spent typing at the by-then ubiquitous computer keyboard. In that way, what had started playing out in government enforcement actions and statistics morphed into a full-blown news event. The white-collar carpal tunnel crisis had arrived.

In the late 1980s, David Rempel, an expert in occupational medicine and ergonomics at UC San Francisco, conducted an investigation on behalf of California’s OSHA in the newsroom of The Fresno Bee. Its union had complained that more than a quarter of the paper’s staff was afflicted with RSIs, and Rempel was there to find out what was wrong.

The problem, he discovered, was that employees had been given new, poorly designed computer workstations, and were suddenly compelled to spend a lot of time in front of them. In the citation that he wrote up for the state, Rempel ordered the Bee to install adjustable office furniture and provide workers with hourly breaks from their consoles.

A computer workstation at The Fresno Bee in 1989 (Courtesy of David Rempel)

Similar injury clusters were occurring at many other publications, too, and reporters cranked out stories on the chronic pain within their ranks. More than 200 editorial employees of the Los Angeles Times sought medical help for RSIs over a four-year stretch, according to a 1989 article in that newspaper. In 1990, The New York Times published a major RSI story—“Hazards at the Keyboard: A Special Report”—on its front page; in 1992, Time magazine ran a major story claiming that professionals were being “Crippled by Computers.”

But ergonomics researchers like Rempel would later form some doubts about the nature of this epidemic. Research showed that people whose work involves repetitive and forceful hand exertions for long periods are more prone to developing carpal tunnel syndrome, Rempel told me—but that association is not as strong for computer-based jobs. “If there is an elevated risk to white-collar workers, it’s not large,” he said.

[Read: Chronic pain is an impossible problem]

Computer use is clearly linked to RSIs in general, however. A 2019 meta-analysis in Occupational & Environmental Medicine found an increased risk of musculoskeletal symptoms with more screen work (though it does acknowledge that the evidence is “heterogeneous” and doesn’t account for screen use after 2005). Ergonomics experts and occupational-health specialists told me they are certain that many journalists and other professionals did sustain serious RSIs while using 1980s-to-mid-’90s computer workstations, with their fixed desks and chunky keyboards. But the total number of such injuries may have been distorted at the time, and many computer-related “carpal tunnel” cases in particular were spurious, with misdiagnoses caused in part by an unreliable but widely used nerve-conduction test. “It seems pretty clear that there wasn’t a sudden explosion of carpal tunnel cases when the reported numbers started to go up,” Leslie Boden, an environmental-health professor at the Boston University School of Public Health, told me.

Such mistakes were probably driven by the “crippled by computers” narrative. White-collar workers with hand pain and numbness might have naturally presumed they had carpal tunnel, thanks to news reports and the chatter at the water cooler; then, as they told their colleagues—and reporters—about their disabilities, they helped fuel a false-diagnosis feedback loop.

It’s possible that well-intentioned shifts in workplace culture further exaggerated the scale of the epidemic. According to Fredric Gerr, a professor emeritus of occupational and environmental health at the University of Iowa, white-collar employees were encouraged during the 1990s to report even minor aches and pains, so they could be diagnosed—and treated—earlier. But Gerr told me that such awareness-raising efforts may have backfired, causing workers to view those minor aches as harbingers of a disabling, chronic disease. Clinicians and ergonomists, too, he said, began to lump any pain-addled worker into the same bin, regardless of their symptoms’ severity—a practice that may have artificially inflated the reported rates of RSIs and caused unnecessary anxiety.

Henriques, whose symptoms were consistent and severe, underwent a nerve-conduction test not long after her pain and disability began; the result was inconclusive. She continues to believe that she came down with carpal tunnel syndrome as opposed to another form of RSI, but chose not to receive surgery given the diagnostic uncertainty. New York Times reporters with RSIs were not at risk of getting fired, as she saw it, but of ending up in different roles. She didn’t want that for herself, so she adapted to her physical limitations, mastering the voice-to-text software that she has since used to dictate four books. The most recent came out in September.

As it happens, a very similar story had played out on the other side of the world more than a decade earlier.

Reporters in Australia began sounding the alarm about the booming rates of RSIs among computer users in 1983, right at the advent of the computer revolution. Some academic observers dismissed the epidemic as the product of a mass hysteria. Other experts figured that Australian offices might be more damaging to people’s bodies than those in other nations, with some colorfully dubbing the symptoms “kangaroo paw.” Andrew Hopkins, a sociologist at the Australian National University, backed a third hypothesis: that his nation’s institutions had merely facilitated acknowledgement—or stopped suppressing evidence—of what was a genuine and widespread crisis.

“It is well known to sociologists that statistics often tell us more about collection procedures than they do about the phenomenon they are supposed to reflect,” Hopkins wrote in a 1990 paper that compared the raging RSI epidemic in Australia to the relative quiet in the United States. He doubted that any meaningful differences in work conditions between the two nations could explain the staggered timing of the outbreaks. Rather, he suspected that different worker-compensation systems made ongoing epidemics more visible, or less, to public-health authorities. In Australia, the approach was far more labor-friendly on the whole, with fewer administrative hurdles for claimants to overcome, and better payouts to those who were successful. Provided with this greater incentive to report their RSIs, Hopkins argued, Australian workers began doing so in greater numbers than before.

Then conditions changed. In 1987, Australia’s High Court decided a landmark worker-compensation case involving an RSI in favor of the employer. By the late 1980s, the government had discontinued its quarterly surveillance report of such cases, and worker-comp systems became more hostile to them, Hopkins said. With fewer workers speaking out about their chronic ailments, and Australian journalists bereft of data to illustrate the problem’s scope, a continuing pain crisis might very well have been pushed into the shadows.

Now it was the United States’ turn. Here, too, attention to a workplace-injury epidemic swelled in response to institutional behaviors and incentives. And then here, too, that attention ebbed for multiple reasons. Improvements in workplace ergonomics and computer design may indeed have lessened the actual injury rate among desk workers during the 1990s. At the same time, the growing availability of high-quality scanners reduced the need for injury-prone data-entry typists, and improved diagnostic practices by physicians reduced the rate of false carpal tunnel diagnoses. In the blue-collar sector, tapering union membership and the expansion of the immigrant workforce may have pushed down the national number of recorded injuries, by making employees less inclined to file complaints and advocate for their own well-being.

But America’s legal and political climate was shifting too. Thousands of workers would file lawsuits against computer manufacturers during this period, claiming that their products had caused injury and disability. More than 20 major cases went to jury trials—and all of them failed. In 2002, the Supreme Court ruled against an employee of Toyota who said she’d become disabled by carpal tunnel as a result of working on the assembly line. (The car company was represented by John Roberts, then in private appellate-law practice.) Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress managed to jettison a new set of OSHA ergonomics standards before they could go into effect, and the George W. Bush administration ended the requirement that employers separate out RSI-like conditions in their workplace-injury reports to the government. Unsurprisingly, recorded cases dropped off even more sharply in the years that followed.

[Read: When the computer mouse was new]

Blue-collar workers in particular would be left in the lurch. According to M. K. Fletcher, a safety and health specialist at the AFL-CIO, many laborers, in particular those in food processing, health care, warehousing, and construction, continue to suffer substantial rates of musculoskeletal disorders, the term that’s now preferred over RSIs. Nationally, such conditions account for an estimated one-fifth to one-third of the estimated 8.4 million annual workplace injuries across the private sector, according to the union’s analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.

From what experts can determine, carpal tunnel syndrome in particular remains prevalent, affecting 1 to 5 percent of the overall population. The condition is associated with multiple health conditions unrelated to the workplace, including diabetes, age, hypothyroidism, obesity, arthritis, and pregnancy. In general, keyboards are no longer thought to be a major threat, but the hazards of repetitive work were always very real. In the end, the “crippled by computers” panic among white-collar workers of the 1980s and ’90s would reap outsize attention and perhaps distract from the far more serious concerns of other workers. “We engage in a disease-du-jour mentality that is based on idiosyncratic factors, such as journalists being worried about computer users, rather than prioritization by the actual rate and the impact on employment and life quality,” Gerr, the occupational- and environmental-health expert at the University of Iowa, told me.

As for today’s potential “hazards at the keyboard,” we know precious little. Almost all of the research described above was done prior to 2006, before tablets and smartphones were invented. Workplace ergonomics used to be a thriving academic field, but its ranks have dwindled. The majority of the academic experts I spoke with for this story are either in the twilight of their careers or they’ve already retired. A number of the researchers whose scholarship I’ve reviewed are dead. “The public and also scientists have lost interest in the topic,” Pieter Coenen, an assistant professor at Amsterdam UMC and the lead author of the meta-analysis from 2019, told me. “I don’t think the problem has actually resolved.”

So is there substantial risk to workers in the 2020s from using Slack all day, or checking email on their iPhones, or spending countless hours hunched at their kitchen tables, typing while they talk on Zoom? Few are trying to find out. Professionals in the post-COVID, work-from-home era may be experiencing a persistent or resurgent rash of pain and injury. “The industrial disease of the information age” could still be raging.