The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books

To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school, Rose Horowitch wrote in the November 2024 issue.

I’m an English teacher at a private college-preparatory school, and much of “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” sounded familiar. My students, too, now struggle to read long texts. Unaddressed in this apt article, though, are changes to the broader high-school context in which reading for homework now occurs. Today, students with elite college aspirations have extracurricular schedules that demand as much—if not more—time than school itself. These commitments are necessary, in their eyes, to gain admission to selective institutions. As a result, teachers face considerable pressure from not only students but also parents and school administrators to limit homework time—no matter if the assignment is a calculus problem set or Pride and Prejudice. In combination with considerably slower rates of reading and diminished reading comprehension, curtailed homework time means that an English teacher might not be able to assign more than 10 to 15 pages of relatively easy prose per class meeting, a rate so excruciatingly slow, it diminishes one’s ability to actually grasp a novel’s meaning and structure. I see how anxious and drained my students are, but I think it’s important for them to experience what can grow from immersive reading and sustained written thought. If we want students to read books, we have to be willing to prioritize the time for them to do so.

Anna Clark
San Diego, Calif.

As a professor, I agree with my colleagues who have noticed the declining literacy of American students at elite universities.

However, I am not sure if the schools are entirely to blame. In American universities, selection is carried out by admissions offices with little interest in the qualities that faculty might consider desirable in a college student. If faculty members were polled—something that has never happened to me in my 20-year career—I’m sure we would rank interest and experience in reading books quite highly.

Admissions decisions in the United States are based on some qualities that, however admirable, have little or nothing to do with academic aptitude. In contrast, at Oxford and Cambridge, in the United Kingdom, undergraduate admissions are typically conducted by the same academics who will teach those students. Most personal statements primarily consist of a discussion of which books the student has read and what they learned from them. Students are then expected to discuss these books in more detail in an interview. When considered alongside the undergraduate selection process, the decline in literacy among American undergraduates is totally understandable.

Ione Fine
Psychology Professor, University of Washington
Seattle, Wash.

Having taught English in a public school for 32 years, I am not surprised that colleges and universities are discovering that incoming students lack the skill, focus, and endurance to read novels. Throughout my career, primarily teaching ninth graders, I fostered student readership not by assigning novels for the whole class to read, but rather by allowing students to select young-adult books that they would read independently in class. Thousands of lifelong readers were created as a result.

Ten years ago, however, my district administration told me that I could no longer use class time for independent student reading. Instead, I was to focus on teaching skills and content that the district believed would improve standardized-test scores. Ironically, research showed that the students who read more books scored significantly better than their classmates on standardized reading tests.

I knew that many students were unlikely to read at home. So I doubled down: I found time for students to read during the school day and repurposed class time to allow my students to share their ideas; to question, respond, and react along with their peers. The method was so successful that the district adopted my approach for seventh through ninth grade, and I published a university-level textbook preparing teachers to create similar communities of readers in their own classrooms.

Whole-class novels just aren’t working: Some students will always be uninterested in a teacher’s choice, and perceive the classics as irrelevant and difficult to comprehend. But allowing students to select their books can help them fall in love with reading.

Michael Anthony
Reading, Pa.

I am an educator of 16 years living in New Hampshire. “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” reflects a lot of what I’ve seen recently. But a large piece of the puzzle is public-school budgets. A major reason novels have been removed from curricula is money: Many districts cannot afford to purchase a book for every student, especially in the upper grades. Typically, districts will buy a “class set” of novels, about 20 to 30 books—that’s it. The books must be used during the English blocks for instruction and reading time. There are not enough books for students to take home and read; if they are reading them only in their class block, a novel will take months and months to finish. I knew of one district that would have teachers make copies of entire novels to share with their students; they’d take turns on copy duty to pull it off. I wish I could teach more complete novels, because students love it. But districts need budgets large enough to buy books for everyone.

Meaghan Kelly
Rumney, N.H.

When teaching my college history courses, I have polled my students to see how many have ever read a book cover to cover. Sometimes, only a few students would raise their hand.

I inquired because I always gave them the option to read a book instead of writing a 10-page research paper. They then would have a one-on-one, hour-long discussion with me about the book they’d selected. Students who chose that option generally had a good experience. But one student shines bright in my mind. In truth, I didn’t remember him well—but he stopped me at an alumni function to say thank you. He had taken my class the second semester of his senior year to fill an elective, and he had chosen to read David McCullough’s 1776. He’d devoured the book—and he’d loved our discussion. He told me that the assignment had changed his life: Up to that point, he had never read a whole book. Since that class, he has read two or three books a month, and now has hundreds of books in his own library. He assured me that he would be a reader for the rest of his life.

It was one of the most gratifying moments of my career. I hope more teachers, professors, and parents give their students a chance to learn what this student did—that books are one of the great joys in life.

Scott Salvato
Mooresville, N.C.

Rose Horowitch replies:

Anna Clark’s letter builds on an idea that I hoped to convey in the article: that the shift away from reading full books is about more than individual students, teachers, or schools. Much of the change can be understood as the consequence of a change in values. The professors I spoke with didn’t think their students were lazy; if anything, they said they were overscheduled and frazzled like never before, facing immense pressure to devote their time to activities that will further their career. Under these circumstances, it can be difficult to see how reading The Iliad in its entirety is a good use of time. Acknowledging this reality can be disheartening, because the solution will not be as simple as changing curricula at the college, high-school, or middle-school level. (And as several of these letters note, changing curricula isn’t all that straightforward.) But letters like Scott Salvato’s are a hopeful reminder of the power of a good—full—book to inspire a student to become a lifelong reader.

The Atlantic Behind the Cover

In this month’s cover story, “How the Ivy League Broke America,” David Brooks describes the failure of the United States’ meritocracy, created in part by James Conant, the influential president of Harvard from 1933 to 1953. Conant and like-minded reformers had hoped to overturn America’s “hereditary aristocracy of wealth”; instead, they helped create a new ruling class—the so-called cognitive elite, selected and credentialed by the nation’s top universities. For our cover image, the artist Danielle Del Plato placed the story’s headline on pennants she created for each of the eight Ivy League schools, which have been instrumental in shaping and perpetuating America’s meritocracy.

— Paul Spella, Senior Art Director

Corrections

Due to an editing error, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” (November) misstated the year Nicholas Dames started teaching Literature Humanities. He began teaching the course in 1998, not 1988. “What Zoya Sees” (November) misstated where in Nigeria Zoya Cherkassky-Nnadi and her husband, Sunny, have a home. Their home is in Ngwo, not Igwo.

This article appears in the December 2024 print edition with the headline “The Commons.”

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

For anyone who teaches at a business school, the blog post was bad news. For Juliana Schroeder, it was catastrophic. She saw the allegations when they first went up, on a Saturday in early summer 2023. Schroeder teaches management and psychology at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. One of her colleagues—­­a star professor at Harvard Business School named Francesca Gino—­had just been accused of academic fraud. The authors of the blog post, a small team of business-school researchers, had found discrepancies in four of Gino’s published papers, and they suggested that the scandal was much larger. “We believe that many more Gino-authored papers contain fake data,” the blog post said. “Perhaps dozens.”

The story was soon picked up by the mainstream press. Reporters reveled in the irony that Gino, who had made her name as an expert on the psychology of breaking rules, may herself have broken them. (“Harvard Scholar Who Studies Honesty Is Accused of Fabricating Findings,” a New York Times headline read.) Harvard Business School had quietly placed Gino on administrative leave just before the blog post appeared. The school had conducted its own investigation; its nearly 1,300-page internal report, which was made public only in the course of related legal proceedings, concluded that Gino “committed research misconduct intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly” in the four papers. (Gino has steadfastly denied any wrongdoing.)

Schroeder’s interest in the scandal was more personal. Gino was one of her most consistent and important research partners. Their names appear together on seven peer-reviewed articles, as well as 26 conference talks. If Gino were indeed a serial cheat, then all of that shared work—and a large swath of Schroeder’s CV—was now at risk. When a senior academic is accused of fraud, the reputations of her honest, less established colleagues may get dragged down too. “Just think how horrible it is,” Katy Milkman, another of Gino’s research partners and a tenured professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, told me. “It could ruin your life.”

Juliana Schroeder (LinkedIn)

To head that off, Schroeder began her own audit of all the research papers that she’d ever done with Gino, seeking out raw data from each experiment and attempting to rerun the analyses. As that summer progressed, her efforts grew more ambitious. With the help of several colleagues, Schroeder pursued a plan to verify not just her own work with Gino, but a major portion of Gino’s scientific résumé. The group started reaching out to every other researcher who had put their name on one of Gino’s 138 co-authored studies. The Many Co-Authors Project, as the self-audit would be called, aimed to flag any additional work that might be tainted by allegations of misconduct and, more important, to absolve the rest—and Gino’s colleagues, by extension—of the wariness that now afflicted the entire field.

That field was not tucked away in some sleepy corner of academia, but was instead a highly influential one devoted to the science of success. Perhaps you’ve heard that procrastination makes you more creative, or that you’re better off having fewer choices, or that you can buy happiness by giving things away. All of that is research done by Schroeder’s peers—­business-school professors who apply the methods of behavioral research to such subjects as marketing, management, and decision making. In viral TED Talks and airport best sellers, on morning shows and late-night television, these business-school psychologists hold tremendous sway. They also have a presence in this magazine and many others: Nearly every business academic who is named in this story has been either quoted or cited by The Atlantic on multiple occasions. A few, including Gino, have written articles for The Atlantic themselves.

Francesca Gino (LinkedIn)

Business-school psychologists are scholars, but they aren’t shooting for a Nobel Prize. Their research doesn’t typically aim to solve a social problem; it won’t be curing anyone’s disease. It doesn’t even seem to have much influence on business practices, and it certainly hasn’t shaped the nation’s commerce. Still, its flashy findings come with clear rewards: consulting gigs and speakers’ fees, not to mention lavish academic incomes. Starting salaries at business schools can be $240,000 a year—double what they are at campus psychology departments, academics told me.

The research scandal that has engulfed this field goes far beyond the replication crisis that has plagued psychology and other disciplines in recent years. Long-standing flaws in how scientific work is done—including insufficient sample sizes and the sloppy application of statistics—have left large segments of the research literature in doubt. Many avenues of study once deemed promising turned out to be dead ends. But it’s one thing to understand that scientists have been cutting corners. It’s quite another to suspect that they’ve been creating their results from scratch.

[Read: Psychology’s replication crisis has a silver lining]

Schroeder has long been interested in trust. She’s given lectures on “building trust-based relationships”; she’s run experiments measuring trust in colleagues. Now she was working to rebuild the sense of trust within her field. A lot of scholars were involved in the Many Co-Authors Project, but Schroeder’s dedication was singular. In October 2023, a former graduate student who had helped tip off the team of bloggers to Gino’s possible fraud wrote her own “post mortem” on the case. It paints Schroeder as exceptional among her peers: a professor who “sent a clear signal to the scientific community that she is taking this scandal seriously.” Several others echoed this assessment, saying that ever since the news broke, Schroeder has been relentless—heroic, even—in her efforts to correct the record.

But if Schroeder planned to extinguish any doubts that remained, she may have aimed too high. More than a year since all of this began, the evidence of fraud has only multiplied. The rot in business schools runs much deeper than almost anyone had guessed, and the blame is unnervingly widespread. In the end, even Schroeder would become a suspect.

Gino was accused of faking numbers in four published papers. Just days into her digging, Schroeder uncovered another paper that appeared to be affected—and it was one that she herself had helped write.

The work, titled “Don’t Stop Believing: Rituals Improve Performance by Decreasing Anxiety,” was published in 2016, with Schroeder’s name listed second out of seven authors. Gino’s name was fourth. (The first few names on an academic paper are typically arranged in order of their contributions to the finished work.) The research it described was pretty standard for the field: a set of clever studies demonstrating the value of a life hack—one simple trick to nail your next presentation. The authors had tested the idea that simply following a routine—even one as arbitrary as drawing something on a piece of paper, sprinkling salt over it, and crumpling it up—could help calm a person’s nerves. “Although some may dismiss rituals as irrational,” the authors wrote, “those who enact rituals may well outperform the skeptics who forgo them.”

In truth, the skeptics have never had much purchase in business-school psychology. For the better part of a decade, this finding had been garnering citations—­about 200, per Google Scholar. But when Schroeder looked more closely at the work, she realized it was questionable. In October 2023, she sketched out some of her concerns on the Many Co-Authors Project website.

The paper’s first two key experiments, marked in the text as Studies 1a and 1b, looked at how the salt-and-paper ritual might help students sing a karaoke version of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” in a lab setting. According to the paper, Study 1a found that people who did the ritual before they sang reported feeling much less anxious than people who did not; Study 1b confirmed that they had lower heart rates, as measured with a pulse oximeter, than students who did not.

As Schroeder noted in her October post, the original records of these studies could not be found. But Schroeder did have some data spreadsheets for Studies 1a and 1b—she’d posted them shortly after the paper had been published, along with versions of the studies’ research questionnaires—and she now wrote that “unexplained issues were identified” in both, and that there was “uncertainty regarding the data provenance” for the latter. Schroeder’s post did not elaborate, but anyone can look at the spreadsheets, and it doesn’t take a forensic expert to see that the numbers they report are seriously amiss.

The “unexplained issues” with Studies 1a and 1b are legion. For one thing, the figures as reported don’t appear to match the research as described in other public documents. (For example, where the posted research questionnaire instructs the students to assess their level of anxiety on a five-point scale, the results seem to run from 2 to 8.) But the single most suspicious pattern shows up in the heart-rate data. According to the paper, each student had their pulse measured three times: once at the very start, again after they were told they’d have to sing the karaoke song, and then a third time, right before the song began. I created three graphs to illustrate the data’s peculiarities. They depict the measured heart rates for each of the 167 students who are said to have participated in the experiment, presented from left to right in their numbered order on the spreadsheet. The blue and green lines, which depict the first and second heart-rate measurements, show those values fluctuating more or less as one might expect for a noisy signal, measured from lots of individuals. But the red line doesn’t look like this at all: Rather, the measured heart rates form a series going up, across a run of more than 100 consecutive students.

DATA FROM “DON’T STOP BELIEVING: RITUALS IMPROVE PERFORMANCE BY DECREASING ANXIETY” (2016), STUDY 1B (Charts by The Atlantic. Based on data posted to OSF.io.)

I’ve reviewed the case with several researchers who suggested that this tidy run of values is indicative of fraud. “I see absolutely no reason” the sequence in No. 3 “should have the order that it does,” James Heathers, a scientific-­integrity investigator and an occasional Atlantic contributor, told me. The exact meaning of the pattern is unclear; if you were fabricating data, you certainly wouldn’t strive for them to look like this. Nick Brown, a scientific-integrity researcher affiliated with Linnaeus University Sweden, guessed that the ordered values in the spreadsheet may have been cooked up after the fact. In that case, it might have been less important that they formed a natural-­looking plot than that, when analyzed together, they matched fake statistics that had already been reported. “Someone sat down and burned quite a bit of midnight oil,” he proposed. I asked how sure he was that this pattern of results was the product of deliberate tampering; “100 percent, 100 percent,” he told me. “In my view, there is no innocent explanation in a universe where fairies don’t exist.”

Schroeder herself would come to a similar conclusion. Months later, I asked her whether the data were manipulated. “I think it’s very likely that they were,” she said. In the summer of 2023, when she reported the findings of her audit to her fellow authors, they all agreed that, whatever really happened, the work was compromised and ought to be retracted. But they could not reach consensus on who had been at fault. Gino did not appear to be responsible for either of the paper’s karaoke studies. Then who was?

This would not seem to be a tricky question. The published version of the paper has two lead authors who are listed as having “contributed equally” to the work. One of them was Schroeder. All of the co-authors agree that she handled two experiments—labeled in the text as Studies 3 and 4—in which participants solved a set of math problems. The other main contributor was Alison Wood Brooks, a young professor and colleague of Gino’s at Harvard Business School.

From the start, there was every reason to assume that Brooks had run the studies that produced the fishy data. Certainly they are similar to Brooks’s prior work. The same quirky experimental setup—in which students were asked to wear a pulse oximeter and sing a karaoke version of “Don’t Stop Believin’ ”—­appears in her dissertation from the Wharton School in 2013, and she published a portion of that work in a sole-authored paper the following year. (Brooks herself is musically inclined, performing around Boston in a rock band.)

Yet despite all of this, Brooks told the Many Co-Authors Project that she simply wasn’t sure whether she’d had access to the raw data for Study 1b, the one with the “no innocent explanation” pattern of results. She also said she didn’t know whether Gino played a role in collecting them. On the latter point, Brooks’s former Ph.D. adviser, Maurice Schweitzer, expressed the same uncertainty to the Many Co-Authors Project.

Plenty of evidence now suggests that this mystery was manufactured. The posted materials for Study 1b, along with administrative records from the lab, indicate that the work was carried out at Wharton, where Brooks was in grad school at the time, studying under Schweitzer and running another, very similar experiment. Also, the metadata for the oldest public version of the data spreadsheet lists “Alison Wood Brooks” as the last person who saved the file.

Alison Wood Brooks (LinkedIn)

Brooks, who has published research on the value of apologies, and whose first book—Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves—is due out from Crown in January, did not respond to multiple requests for interviews or to a detailed list of written questions. Gino said that she “neither collected nor analyzed the data for Study 1a or Study 1b nor was I involved in the data audit.”

If Brooks did conduct this work and oversee its data, then Schroeder’s audit had produced a dire twist. The Many Co-Authors Project was meant to suss out Gino’s suspect work, and quarantine it from the rest. “The goal was to protect the innocent victims, and to find out what’s true about the science that had been done,” Milkman told me. But now, to all appearances, Schroeder had uncovered crooked data that apparently weren’t linked to Gino. That would mean Schroeder had another colleague who had contaminated her research. It would mean that her reputation—and the credibility of her entire field—was under threat from multiple directions at once.

Among the four research papers in which Gino was accused of cheating is one about the human tendency to misreport facts and figures for personal gain. Which is to say: She was accused of faking data for a study of when and how people might fake data. Amazingly, a different set of data from the same paper had already been flagged as the product of potential fraud, two years before the Gino scandal came to light. The first was contributed by Dan Ariely of Duke University—a frequent co-author of Gino’s and, like her, a celebrated expert on the psychology of telling lies. (Ariely has said that a Duke investigation—which the school has not acknowledged—discovered no evidence that he “falsified data or knowingly used falsified data.” He has also said that the investigation “determined that I should have done more to prevent faulty data from being published in the 2012 paper.”)

The existence of two apparently corrupted data sets was shocking: a keystone paper on the science of deception wasn’t just invalid, but possibly a scam twice over. But even in the face of this ignominy, few in business academia were ready to acknowledge, in the summer of 2023, that the problem might be larger still—and that their research literature might well be overrun with fantastical results.

Some scholars had tried to raise alarms before. In 2019, Dennis Tourish, a professor at the University of Sussex Business School, published a book titled Management Studies in Crisis: Fraud, Deception and Meaningless Research. He cites a study finding that more than a third of surveyed editors at management journals say they’ve encountered fabricated or falsified data. Even that alarming rate may undersell the problem, Tourish told me, given all of the misbehavior in his discipline that gets overlooked or covered up.

Anonymous surveys of various fields find that roughly 2 percent of scholars will admit to having fabricated, falsified, or modified data at least once in their career. But business-school psychology may be especially prone to misbehavior. For one thing, the field’s research standards are weaker than those for other psychologists. In response to the replication crisis, campus psychology departments have lately taken up a raft of methodological reforms. Statistically suspect practices that were de rigueur a dozen years ago are now uncommon; sample sizes have gotten bigger; a study’s planned analyses are now commonly written down before the work is carried out. But this great awakening has been slower to develop in business-school psychology, several academics told me. “No one wants to kill the golden goose,” one early-career researcher in business academia said. If management and marketing professors embraced all of psychology’s reforms, he said, then many of their most memorable, most TED Talk–able findings would go away. “To use marketing lingo, we’d lose our unique value proposition.”

It’s easy to imagine how cheating might lead to more cheating. If business-school psychology is beset with suspect research, then the bar for getting published in its flagship journals ratchets up: A study must be even flashier than all the other flashy findings if its authors want to stand out. Such incentives move in only one direction: Eventu­ally, the standard tools for torturing your data will no longer be enough. Now you have to go a little further; now you have to cut your data up, and carve them into sham results. Having one or two prolific frauds around would push the bar for publishing still higher, inviting yet more corruption. (And because the work is not exactly brain surgery, no one dies as a result.) In this way, a single discipline might come to look like Major League Baseball did 20 years ago: defined by juiced-up stats.

In the face of its own cheating scandal, MLB started screening every single player for anabolic steroids. There is no equivalent in science, and certainly not in business academia. Uri Simonsohn, a professor at the Esade Business School in Barcelona, is a member of the blogging team, called Data Colada, that caught the problems in both Gino’s and Ariely’s work. (He was also a motivating force behind the Many Co-Authors Project.) Data Colada has called out other instances of sketchy work and apparent fakery within the field, but its efforts at detection are highly targeted. They’re also quite unusual. Crying foul on someone else’s bad research makes you out to be a troublemaker, or a member of the notional “data police.” It can also bring a claim of defamation. Gino filed a $25 million defamation lawsuit against Harvard and the Data Colada team not long after the bloggers attacked her work. (This past September, a judge dismissed the portion of her claims that involved the bloggers and the defamation claim against Harvard. She still has pending claims against the university for gender discrimination and breach of contract.) The risks are even greater for those who don’t have tenure. A junior academic who accuses someone else of fraud may antagonize the senior colleagues who serve on the boards and committees that make publishing decisions and determine funding and job appointments.

[Read: Francesca Gino, the Harvard expert on dishonesty who is accused of lying]

These risks for would-be critics reinforce an atmosphere of complacency. “It’s embarrassing how few protections we have against fraud and how easy it has been to fool us,” Simonsohn said in a 2023 webinar. He added, “We have done nothing to prevent it. Nothing.”

Like so many other scientific scandals, the one Schroeder had identified quickly sank into a swamp of closed-door reviews and taciturn committees. Schroeder says that Harvard Business School declined to investigate her evidence of data-tampering, citing a policy of not responding to allegations made more than six years after the misconduct is said to have occurred. (Harvard Business School’s head of communications, Mark Cautela, declined to comment.) Her efforts to address the issue through the University of Pennsylvania’s Office of Research Integrity likewise seemed fruitless. (A spokesperson for the Wharton School would not comment on “the existence or status of” any investigations.)

Retractions have a way of dragging out in science publishing. This one was no exception. Maryam Kouchaki, an expert on workplace ethics at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and co–editor in chief of the journal that published the “Don’t Stop Believing” paper, had first received the authors’ call to pull their work in August 2023. As the anniversary of that request drew near, Schroeder still had no idea how the suspect data would be handled, and whether Brooks—or anyone else—would be held responsible.

Finally, on October 1, the “Don’t Stop Believing” paper was removed from the scientific literature. The journal’s published notice laid out some basic conclusions from Schroeder’s audit: Studies 1a and 1b had indeed been run by Brooks, the raw data were not available, and the posted data for 1b showed “streaks of heart rate ratings that were unlikely to have occurred naturally.” Schroeder’s own contributions to the paper were also found to have some flaws: Data points had been dropped from her analysis without any explanation in the published text. (Although this practice wasn’t fully out-of-bounds given research standards at the time, the same behavior would today be understood as a form of “p-hacking”—a pernicious source of false-positive results.) But the notice did not say whether the fishy numbers from Study 1b had been fabricated, let alone by whom. Someone other than Brooks may have handled those data before publication, it suggested. “The journal could not investigate this study any further.”

Two days later, Schroeder posted to X a link to her full and final audit of the paper. “It took *hundreds* of hours of work to complete this retraction,” she wrote, in a thread that described the flaws in her own experiments and Studies 1a and 1b. “I am ashamed of helping publish this paper & how long it took to identify its issues,” the thread concluded. “I am not the same scientist I was 10 years ago. I hold myself accountable for correcting any inaccurate prior research findings and for updating my research practices to do better.” Her peers responded by lavishing her with public praise. One colleague called the self-audit “exemplary” and an “act of courage.” A prominent professor at Columbia Business School congratulated Schroeder for being “a cultural heroine, a role model for the rising generation.”

But amid this celebration of her unusual transparency, an important and related story had somehow gone unnoticed. In the course of scouting out the edges of the cheating scandal in her field, Schroeder had uncovered yet another case of seeming science fraud. And this time, she’d blown the whistle on herself.

That stunning revelation, unaccompanied by any posts on social media, had arrived in a muffled update to the Many Co-Authors Project website. Schroeder announced that she’d found “an issue” with one more paper that she’d produced with Gino. This one, “Enacting Rituals to Improve Self-Control,” came out in 2018 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology; its author list overlaps substantially with that of the earlier “Don’t Stop Believing” paper (though Brooks was not involved). Like the first, it describes a set of studies that purport to show the power of the ritual effect. Like the first, it includes at least one study for which data appear to have been altered. And like the first, its data anomalies have no apparent link to Gino.

The basic facts are laid out in a document that Schroeder put into an online repository, describing an internal audit that she conducted with the help of the lead author, Allen Ding Tian. (Tian did not respond to requests for comment.) The paper opens with a field experiment on women who were trying to lose weight. Schroeder, then in grad school at the University of Chicago, oversaw the work; participants were recruited at a campus gym.

Half of the women were instructed to perform a ritual before each meal for the next five days: They were to put their food into a pattern on their plate. The other half were not. Then Schroeder used a diet-tracking app to tally all the food that each woman reported eating, and found that the ones in the ritual group took in about 200 fewer calories a day, on average, than the others. But in 2023, when she started digging back into this research, she uncovered some discrepancies. According to her study’s raw materials, nine of the women who reported that they’d done the food-arranging ritual were listed on the data spreadsheet as being in the control group; six others were mislabeled in the opposite direction. When Schroeder fixed these errors for her audit, the ritual effect completely vanished. Now it looked as though the women who’d done the food-arranging had consumed a few more calories, on average, than the women who had not.

Mistakes happen in research; sometimes data get mixed up. These errors, though, appear to be intentional. The women whose data had been swapped fit a suspicious pattern: The ones whose numbers might have undermined the paper’s hypothesis were disproportionately affected. This is not a subtle thing; among the 43 women who reported that they’d done the ritual, the six most prolific eaters all got switched into the control group. Nick Brown and James Heathers, the scientific-integrity researchers, have each tried to figure out the odds that anything like the study’s published result could have been attained if the data had been switched at random. Brown’s analysis pegged the answer at one in 1 million. “Data manipulation makes sense as an explanation,” he told me. “No other explanation is immediately obvious to me.” Heathers said he felt “quite comfortable” in concluding that whatever went wrong with the experiment “was a directed process, not a random process.”

Whether or not the data alterations were intentional, their specific form—flipped conditions for a handful of participants, in a way that favored the hypothesis—matches up with data issues raised by Harvard Business School’s investigation into Gino’s work. Schroeder rejected that comparison when I brought it up, but she was willing to accept some blame. “I couldn’t feel worse about that paper and that study,” she told me. “I’m deeply ashamed of it.”

Still, she said that the source of the error wasn’t her. Her research assistants on the project may have caused the problem; Schroeder wonders if they got confused. She said that two RAs, both undergraduates, had recruited the women at the gym, and that the scene there was chaotic: Sometimes multiple people came up to them at once, and the undergrads may have had to make some changes on the fly, adjusting which participants were being put into which group for the study. Maybe things went wrong from there, Schroeder said. One or both RAs might have gotten ruffled as they tried to paper over inconsistencies in their record-keeping. They both knew what the experiment was meant to show, and how the data ought to look—so it’s possible that they peeked a little at the data and reassigned the numbers in the way that seemed correct. (Schroeder’s audit lays out other possibilities, but describes this one as the most likely.)

Schroeder’s account is certainly plausible, but it’s not a perfect fit with all of the facts. For one thing, the posted data indicate that during most days on which the study ran, the RAs had to deal with only a handful of participants—sometimes just two. How could they have gotten so bewildered?

Any further details seem unlikely to emerge. The paper was formally retracted in the February issue of the journal. Schroeder has chosen not to name the RAs who helped her with the study, and she told me that she hasn’t tried to contact them. “I just didn’t think it was appropriate,” she said. “It doesn’t seem like it would help matters at all.” By her account, neither one is currently in academia, and she did not discover any additional issues when she reviewed their other work. (I reached out to more than a dozen former RAs and lab managers who were thanked in Schroeder’s published papers from around this time. Five responded to my queries; all of them denied having helped with this experiment.) In the end, Schroeder said, she took the data at the assistants’ word. “I did not go in and change labels,” she told me. But she also said repeatedly that she doesn’t think her RAs should take the blame. “The responsibility rests with me, right? And so it was appropriate that I’m the one named in the retraction notice,” she said. Later in our conversation, she summed up her response: “I’ve tried to trace back as best I can what happened, and just be honest.”

Across the many months I spent reporting this story, I’d come to think of Schroeder as a paragon of scientific rigor. She has led a seminar on “Experimental Design and Research Methods” in a business program with a sterling reputation for its research standards. She’d helped set up the Many Co-Authors Project, and then pursued it as aggressively as anyone. (Simonsohn even told me that Schroeder’s look-at-everything approach was a little “overboard.”) I also knew that she was devoted to the dreary but important task of reproducing other people’s published work.

As for the dieting research, Schroeder had owned the awkward optics. “It looks weird,” she told me when we spoke in June. “It’s a weird error, and it looks consistent with changing things in the direction to get a result.” But weirder still was how that error came to light, through a detailed data audit that she’d undertaken of her own accord. Apparently, she’d gone to great effort to call attention to a damning set of facts. That alone could be taken as a sign of her commitment to transparency.

But in the months that followed, I couldn’t shake the feeling that another theory also fit the facts. Schroeder’s leading explanation for the issues in her work—An RA must have bungled the data—sounded distressingly familiar. Francesca Gino had offered up the same defense to Harvard’s investigators. The mere repetition of this story doesn’t mean that it’s invalid: Lab techs and assistants really do mishandle data on occasion, and they may of course engage in science fraud. But still.

As for Schroeder’s all-out focus on integrity, and her public efforts to police the scientific record, I came to understand that most of these had been adopted, all at once, in mid-2023, shortly after the Gino scandal broke. (The version of Schroeder’s résumé that was available on her webpage in the spring of 2023 does not describe any replication projects whatsoever.) That makes sense if the accusations changed the way she thought about her field—and she did describe them to me as “a wake-up call.” But here’s another explanation: Maybe Schroeder saw the Gino scandal as a warning that the data sleuths were on the march. Perhaps she figured that her own work might end up being scrutinized, and then, having gamed this out, she decided to be a data sleuth herself. She’d publicly commit to reexamining her colleagues’ work, doing audits of her own, and asking for corrections. This would be her play for amnesty during a crisis.

I spoke with Schroeder for the last time on the day before Halloween. She was notably composed when I confronted her with the possibility that she’d engaged in data-tampering herself. She repeated what she’d told me months before, that she definitely did not go in and change the numbers in her study. And she rejected the idea that her self-audits had been strategic, that she’d used them to divert attention from her own wrongdoing. “Honestly, it’s disturbing to hear you even lay it out,” she said. “Because I think if you were to look at my body of work and try to replicate it, I think my hit rate would be good.” She continued: “So to imply that I’ve actually been, I don’t know, doing a lot of fraudulent stuff myself for a long time, and this was a moment to come clean with it? I just don’t think the evidence bears that out.”

That wasn’t really what I’d meant to imply. The story I had in mind was more mundane—and in a sense more tragic. I went through it: Perhaps she’d fudged the results for a study just once or twice early in her career, and never again. Perhaps she’d been committed, ever since, to proper scientific methods. And perhaps she really did intend to fix some problems in her field.

Schroeder allowed that she’d been susceptible to certain research practices—excluding data, for example—that are now considered improper. So were many of her colleagues. In that sense, she’d been guilty of letting her judgment be distorted by the pressure to succeed. But I understood what she was saying: This was not the same as fraud.

Throughout our conversations, Schroeder had avoided stating outright that anyone in particular had committed fraud. But not all of her colleagues had been so cautious. Just a few days earlier, I’d received an unexpected message from Maurice Schweitzer, the senior Wharton business-school professor who oversaw Alison Wood Brooks’s “Don’t Stop Believing” research. Up to this point, he had not responded to my request for an interview, and I figured he’d chosen not to comment for this story. But he finally responded to a list of written questions. It was important for me to know, his email said, that Schroe­der had “been involved in data tampering.” He included a link to the retraction notice for her paper on rituals and eating. When I asked Schweitzer to elaborate, he did not respond. (Schweitzer’s most recent academic work is focused on the damaging effects of gossip; one of his papers from 2024 is titled “The Interpersonal Costs of Revealing Others’ Secrets.”)

I laid this out for Schroeder on the phone. “Wow,” she said. “That’s unfortunate that he would say that.” She went silent for a long time. “Yeah, I’m sad he’s saying that.”

Another long silence followed. “I think that the narrative that you laid out, Dan, is going to have to be a possibility,” she said. “I don’t think there’s a way I can refute it, but I know what the truth is, and I think I did the right thing, with trying to clean the literature as much as I could.”

This is all too often where these stories end: A researcher will say that whatever really happened must forever be obscure. Dan Ariely told Business Insider in February 2024 : “I’ve spent a big part of the last two years trying to find out what happened. I haven’t been able to … I decided I have to move on with my life.” Schweit­zer told me that the most relevant files for the “Don’t Stop Believing” paper are “long gone,” and that the chain of custody for its data simply can’t be tracked. (The Wharton School agreed, telling me that it “does not possess the requested data” for Study 1b, “as it falls outside its current data retention period.”) And now Schroeder had landed on a similar position.

It’s uncomfortable for a scientist to claim that the truth might be unknowable, just as it would be for a journalist, or any other truth-seeker by vocation. I daresay the facts regarding all of these cases may yet be amenable to further inquiry. The raw data from Study 1b may still exist, somewhere; if so, one might compare them with the posted spreadsheet to confirm that certain numbers had been altered. And Schroeder says she has the names of the RAs who worked on her dieting experiment; in theory, she could ask those people for their recollections of what happened. If figures aren’t checked, or questions aren’t asked, it’s by choice.

What feels out of reach is not so much the truth of any set of allegations, but their consequences. Gino has been placed on administrative leave, but in many other instances of suspected fraud, nothing happens. Both Brooks and Schroeder appear to be untouched. “The problem is that journal editors and institutions can be more concerned with their own prestige and reputation than finding out the truth,” Dennis Tourish, at the University of Sussex Business School, told me. “It can be easier to hope that this all just goes away and blows over and that somebody else will deal with it.”

Pablo Delcan

Some degree of disillusionment was common among the academics I spoke with for this story. The early-career researcher in business academia told me that he has an “unhealthy hobby” of finding manipulated data. But now, he said, he’s giving up the fight. “At least for the time being, I’m done,” he told me. “Feeling like Sisyphus isn’t the most fulfilling experience.” A management professor who has followed all of these cases very closely gave this assessment: “I would say that distrust characterizes many people in the field—­it’s all very depressing and demotivating.”

It’s possible that no one is more depressed and demotivated, at this point, than Juliana Schroeder. “To be honest with you, I’ve had some very low moments where I’m like, ‘Well, maybe this is not the right field for me, and I shouldn’t be in it,’ ” she said. “And to even have any errors in any of my papers is incredibly embarrassing, let alone one that looks like data-tampering.”

I asked her if there was anything more she wanted to say.

“I guess I just want to advocate for empathy and transparency—­maybe even in that order. Scientists are imperfect people, and we need to do better, and we can do better.” Even the Many Co-Authors Project, she said, has been a huge missed opportunity. “It was sort of like a moment where everyone could have done self-reflection. Everyone could have looked at their papers and done the exercise I did. And people didn’t.”

Maybe the situation in her field would eventually improve, she said. “The optimistic point is, in the long arc of things, we’ll self-correct, even if we have no incentive to retract or take responsibility.”

“Do you believe that?” I asked.

“On my optimistic days, I believe it.”

“Is today an optimistic day?”

“Not really.”

This article appears in the January 2025 print edition with the headline “The Fraudulent Science of Success.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the bear-fondling, gravel-voiced Camelot scion, is President-Elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, where presumably he will “go wild on health,” to quote Trump. His nomination has raised concerns among public-health experts because many of Kennedy’s views on health are, well, wild.

To be sure, among Kennedy’s battier ideas are a few reasonable ones, such as reducing obesity and cracking down on direct-to-consumer drug commercials and conflicts of interest among researchers. But these are eclipsed by some troubling ones, such as the ideas that common cooking oils are poisonous, that fluoride doesn’t belong in tap water, and that childhood vaccines are questionable.

What if Kennedy did, in fact, go wild on health, get his way, and remake America in his own image? If his worst ideas come to pass, experts tell me, heart attacks might increase, dental infections might spike, and children might needlessly die of completely preventable diseases.

[Read: RFK Jr. collects his reward]

Even if he is confirmed as health secretary, Kennedy’s influence on some of these domains might be limited. Most public-health measures—including water fluoridation and vaccines—are a matter for states and localities, not the federal government. (This is why different states had such different COVID-19 responses.) But even so, a Secretary Kennedy would have a prominent perch from which to espouse his ideas, and his position would give him a veneer of credibility that he has not earned. Right-leaning states and judges might listen, and adapt local policies to suit his worldview. At the very least, parents who support Trump and Kennedy might take the administration’s views into account when making decisions for their families.

Let’s begin with seed oils, which keep popping up in Kennedy’s speeches and media clips. (He even mentioned them while suspending his presidential bid.) Kennedy has called seed oils, which include common cooking oils such as canola oil and sunflower oil, “one of the most unhealthy ingredients that we have in foods,” and says Americans are being “unknowingly poisoned” by them.

Kennedy believes that seed oils cause “body-wide inflammation” and disease. But this isn’t true, Christopher Gardner, a nutrition scientist at Stanford, told me. In fact, replacing foods high in saturated fat, such as butter, with those high in unsaturated fat, such as canola oil, has been proven again and again to lower cholesterol levels and reduce the risk of heart disease. To the extent that seed oils are bad, Gardner said, it’s because they often show up in highly processed junk and fast food.

And Kennedy’s solution to this supposed health crisis—to replace seed oils with beef tallow—is troubling. (Several of his seed-oil clips end with a promo of red Kennedy swag that reads MAKE FRYING OIL TALLOW AGAIN.) Whatever you do with seed oil, “don’t replace it with beef tallow,” Gardner said. “That’s friggin’ nuts.” Replacing all the oil you eat with beef fat can cause cholesterol to pile into plaques in your arteries, impeding the flow of blood. “That’s how you get a heart attack,” Gardner said.

Kennedy has also said he wants to remove fluoride from tap water, claiming that the compound is an “industrial waste associated with arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders, and thyroid disease.”

There is some risk associated with excessive fluoride intake: Consuming fluoride above a level of 1.5 milligrams a liter—about twice the level that’s in most fluoridated tap water—has been linked to lowered IQ in children. Fluoridated water can also cause light stains on teeth, which affect about 12 percent of people in the United States.

But researchers say these risks are generally worth it because the consequences of removing fluoride from the water are much worse. Fluoride helps strengthen tooth enamel, and it also fights off the acid that attacks our teeth any time we eat carbohydrates. If the teeth lose this battle, decay can set in—and if the decay goes untreated, it can cause excruciating pain and, in extreme cases, pus-filled abscesses. “There will certainly be an increase in dental decay if fluoride is removed from the drinking water,” Gary Slade, a dentistry professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told me. Slade found in a study that fluoride in drinking water reduces decay by 30 percent in baby teeth and 12 percent in permanent teeth.

Some cities and countries have removed fluoride from the water, and kids’ dental health suffered as a result. After Israel ceased water fluoridation in 2014, dental treatments in a clinic in Tel Aviv increased twofold across all ages. In Canada, after Calgary ceased water fluoridation in 2011, second graders there experienced more cavities than those in Edmonton, where water was still fluoridated. After Juneau, Alaska, ceased water fluoridation in 2007, children younger than 6 underwent more cavity-related dental procedures—at a cost of about $300 more a year per child. Some cities have even reintroduced fluoride into the water supply after noticing an uptick in tooth decay among children.

Kennedy is perhaps most infamous for his skepticism of vaccines, and this is also likely the issue where his views are most consequential and worrisome. Although Kennedy sometimes shies away from calling himself anti-vaccine, he is the founder of the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense and once wrote a (now-retracted) magazine story on the (false) link between vaccines and autism. He’s called vaccines “a holocaust” and has claimed that “there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.” A co-chair of the Trump-Vance transition team has said that Kennedy would be given access to federal health data in order to assess the safety of vaccines.

Though school vaccine requirements are determined by states, a prominent national-health figure casting doubt on vaccines’ safety can influence both state policy and individual parents’ decisions to vaccinate. If vaccination rates do drop, among the diseases that health experts worry will return is measles, the most contagious of the vaccine-preventable diseases.

A person infected with measles is most contagious right before they develop symptoms. They can infect others simply by sharing their air space; tiny droplets infected with measles can hang in the air for two hours “like a ghost,” Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told me.

Kids with measles are sick and miserable. They’re photophobic—afraid of the light—and may struggle to breathe. Before the measles vaccine came along in 1963, 48,000 people were hospitalized with measles each year in America, many with pneumonia or inflammation of the brain. Five hundred of them died each year. When Samoa suffered a measles outbreak in 2019, 83 people died, out of a population of just 200,000.

Measles can also weaken the immune system, Matthew Ferrari, a biology professor at Penn State, told me. For two to three years after contracting measles, you’re likely to be hit harder by flu and other viruses. In rare cases, measles can cause a chronic form of brain inflammation that leads to a gradual loss of mental faculties and motor skills, and eventually, death.

[John Hendrickson: The first MAGA Democrat]

Measles is such a menace, in fact, that giving people “a choice” about whether to vaccinate their kids, as Kennedy often suggests, is not sufficient. People who have received two doses of the MMR vaccine are 97 percent protected against measles. But about 9 million people, including kids who are undergoing chemotherapy or who are on some kinds of immunosuppressants, can’t get vaccinated. These individuals rely on herd immunity from other vaccinated people, and when more than 5 percent of people choose not to be vaccinated, herd immunity suffers.

“Is it your right to catch and transmit a potentially fatal infection? No, it’s not,” Offit said. “You are part of this society, and you have to recognize that what you do affects other people.” Offit told me he’s already talked with pediatricians who say parents are hesitant to get their children vaccinated because of what they’ve heard Kennedy say.

Of course, there is a way to prevent Kennedy from having this much influence over public health: The Senate could reject his nomination. But that would require Republicans to stand up to Trump, which is a wild idea in itself.

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When Mary-Claire King discovered the first gene linked to hereditary breast cancer in 1990, she also got to decide its name. She settled on the four letters BRCA, which had three distinct meanings. The name paid homage to UC Berkeley, where King worked at the time; more to the point, it was a nod to Paul Broca, the 19th-century French physician whose work established a link between family history and breast cancer. It was also an abbreviation for breast cancer.

A few years after King discovered BRCA1, a second BRCA gene, BRCA2, was identified. Together, they now have more name recognition than probably any other gene, their profile boosted by research that has shown staggering effects on cancer risk. Awareness campaigns followed. A 2013 New York Times op-ed in which Angelina Jolie revealed she’d had a preventive double mastectomy because of her own BRCA mutation drove many women to seek DNA tests themselves. The BRCA genes became inextricably linked with breasts, as much as the pink ribbons that have become an international symbol of breast cancer. And in driving more women to find out if they have BRCA mutations, it’s helped to greatly reduce the risk of hereditary breast cancer.

But in the three decades since the genes were discovered, scientists have learned that BRCA mutations can also lead to cancer in the ovaries, the pancreas, and the prostate. More recently, they have been linked with cancers in other parts of the body, such as the esophagus, stomach, and skin. As many as 60 percent of men with changes in BRCA2 develop prostate cancer, yet men are generally far less aware than women that BRCA mutations can affect them at all.

“It’s a branding problem,” Colin Pritchard, a professor of laboratory medicine and pathology at the University of Washington, told me. Men with family histories of breast cancer may not realize that they should get screened. Physicians, too, lack awareness of which men should get tested, and what steps to take when a mutation is found. Now Pritchard and other researchers are working to rebrand BRCA and the syndrome associated with it so that more men and their doctors consider testing.

Normally, the BRCA genes produce proteins that help repair damaged DNA throughout the body. Most people who carry mutations that impair the gene’s function are diagnosed with hereditary breast and ovarian cancer syndrome. (Having HBOC means a person is at increased risk for cancer, not that they already have an illness.) Most breast-cancer cases have no known hereditary link, but more than 60 percent of women with a harmful BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation will develop breast cancer, compared with about 13 percent of the wider female population. Men, of course, can get breast cancer too, but it's rare, even among BRCA-mutation carriers.

[Read: Cancer supertests are here]

The full significance of the link between BRCA mutations and pancreatic and prostate cancer has become clear only recently—perhaps in the past decade, said Pritchard. The exact risk these mutations impart to men varies widely in studies. But it’s clearly significant: Not only are men with BRCA mutations more likely to develop prostate cancer, they are also more likely to develop the more aggressive forms of the disease.

Roughly one in 400 people carry a harmful mutation in BRCA1 or BRCA2, and half of them are men. But women are far more likely to have been tested for the mutations—up to 10 times as likely, according to one study. “Beyoncé’s dad was the only man that I had ever heard of who had it,” Christian Anderson, a 46-year-old social-sciences professor in Washington State who carries a BRCA2 mutation, told me. Anderson got tested after his sister was diagnosed with breast cancer, but countless men like him go undetected. Only about half of Americans get an annual physical, and doctors aren’t always aware of BRCA-screening recommendations for men. Many men who do test for a BRCA mutation report doing it for their daughters, and studies have shown that they tend to be confused about their risks of developing cancer themselves.

BRCA-awareness campaigns have led many women to get tested; in the two weeks after Angelina Jolie’s viral op-ed, researchers found that BRCA-testing rates went up by 65 percent. In that case, more people may gotten tested than needed to, but in general, the rise in cancer screenings and elective surgical interventions have helped reduce the rates of deaths from breast and ovarian cancers. Education about the genes’ links to other cancers could do the same for men. To that end, Pritchard argued in a 2019 Nature commentary that Hereditary Breast and Ovarian Cancer syndrome should be renamed King Syndrome after Mary-Claire King. “We need to really rethink this if we're going to educate the public about the importance of these genes for cancer risk for everyone, not just women,” he told me.

[Read: I’ll tell you the secret of cancer]

As understanding of BRCA’s risks for men has grown, Pritchard’s idea has started to catch on. King, who is now a professor of genome sciences and medicine at the University of Washington, demurred when I asked her whether the syndrome associated with the BRCA genes should be renamed after her, but agreed that awareness campaigns have focused too narrowly on breasts and ovaries. “We need to bring this awareness to men in the same way that we have for 30 years now to women,” she told me.

How exactly Pritchard’s plan might be put into action is unclear. Gene names are overseen by an international committee and rarely changed. That’s part of why Pritchard is suggesting that the name of the syndrome associated with BRCA mutations become King Syndrome—no single governing body oversees that. Recently, ClinGen, an international group of researchers that works to parse the medical significance of genes, recommended that HBOC be rechristened BRCA-related cancer predisposition. (Pritchard told me he thinks that name isn’t quite as “catchy” as King Syndrome.)

Uncoupling the syndrome associated with BRCA mutations from breasts would likely be only the first step in getting more at-risk men screened for cancer. It would also be an important step in understanding the full impact of BRCA mutations on men. Because fewer men than women have been tested for BRCA mutations, scientists still don’t have a complete picture of their risk. For example, Pritchard told me, it’s only as more attention has been drawn to male BRCA risk that researchers have discovered mutations are linked to especially aggressive forms of prostate cancer. Penn Medicine recently launched a program dedicated to men and BRCA in part to continue this sort of research.

[Read: Scientists have been studying cancers in a very strange way for decades]

BRCA’s name is a legacy of a time when scientists thought genetics would offer a simple way to diagnose and treat disease—that one specific mutation would point definitively to one specific cancer. But today, “the idea that a gene would only affect one type of cancer risk is probably outmoded,” Pritchard said. The more scientists explore the human genome, the more complex its connections to health appear. It turns out that when genes don’t work like they should, the possible consequences may very well be infinite.

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Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nominee to be the next secretary of Health and Human Services, is America’s most prominent vaccine skeptic. An advocacy organization that he founded and chaired has called the nation’s declining child-immunization rates “good news,” and referred to parents’ lingering doubts about routine shots as COVID-19’s “silver lining.” Now Kennedy may soon be overseeing the cluster of federal agencies that license and recommend vaccines, as well as the multibillion-dollar program that covers the immunization of almost half the nation’s children.

Which is to say that America’s most prominent vaccine skeptic could have the power to upend, derail, or otherwise louse up a cornerstone of public health. Raising U.S. vaccination rates to where they are today took decades of investment: In 1991, for example, just 82 percent of toddlers were getting measles shots; by 2019, that number had increased to 92 percent. The first Trump administration actually presided over the historic high point for the nation’s immunization services; now the second may be focused on promoting vaccines’ alleged hidden harms. Kennedy has said that he doesn’t want to take any shots away, but even if he were to emphasize “choice,” his leadership would be a daunting test of Americans’ commitment to vaccines.

In many ways, the situation is unprecedented: No one with Kennedy’s mix of inexperience and paranoid distrust has ever held the reins at HHS. He was trained as a lawyer and has no training in biostatistics or any other research bona fides—the sorts of qualifications you’d expect from someone credibly evaluating vaccine efficacy. But the post-pandemic era has already given rise to at least one smaller-scale experiment along these lines. In Florida, vaccine policies have been overseen since 2021 by another noted skeptic of the pharmaceutical industry, State Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo. (Kennedy has likened Ladapo to Galileo—yes, the astronomer who faced down the Roman Inquisition.) Under Ladapo’s direction, the state has aggressively resisted federal guidance on COVID-19 vaccination, and its department of health has twice advised Floridians not to get mRNA-based booster shots. “These vaccines are not appropriate for use in human beings,” Ladapo declared in January. His public-health contrarianism has also started spilling over into more routine immunization practices. Last winter, during an active measles outbreak at a Florida school, Ladapo abandoned standard practice and allowed unvaccinated children to attend class. He also seemed to make a point of not recommending measles shots for any kids who might have needed them.

Jeffrey Goldhagen, a pediatrics professor at the University of Florida and the former head of the Duval County health department, believes that this vaccine skepticism has had immense costs. “The deaths and suffering of thousands and thousands of Floridians” can be linked to Ladapo’s policies, he said, particularly regarding COVID shots. But in the years since Ladapo took office, Florida did not become an instant outlier in terms of COVID vaccination numbers, nor in terms of age-adjusted rates of death from COVID. And so far at least, the state’s performance on other immunization metrics is not far off from the rest of America’s. That doesn’t mean Florida’s numbers are good: Among the state’s kindergarteners, routine-vaccination rates have dropped from 93.3 percent for the kids who entered school in the fall of 2020 to 88.1 percent in 2023, and the rate at which kids are getting nonmedical exemptions from vaccine requirements went up from 2.7 to 4.5 percent over the same period. These changes elevate the risk of further outbreaks of measles, or of other infectious diseases that could end up killing children—but they’re not unique to Ladapo’s constituents. National statistics have been moving in the same direction. (To wit: The rate of nonmedical exemptions across the U.S. has gone up by about the same proportion as Florida’s.)

All of these disturbing trends may be tied to a growing suspicion of vaccines that was brought on during COVID and fanned by right-wing influencers. Or they could be a lingering effect of the widespread lapse in health care in 2020, during which time many young children were missing doses of vaccines. (Kids who entered public school in 2023 might still be catching up.)

In any case, other vaccination rates in Florida look pretty good. Under Ladapo, the state has actually been gaining on the nation as a whole in terms of flu shots for adults and holding its own on immunization for diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis in toddlers. Even Ladapo’s outlandish choice last winter to allow unvaccinated kids back into a school with an active measles outbreak did not lead to any further cases of disease. In short, as I noted back in February, Ladapo’s anti-vaccine activism has had few, if any, clear effects. (Ladapo did not respond when I reached out to ask why his policies might have failed to sabotage the state’s vaccination rates.)

  

If Florida’s immunization rates have been resilient, then America’s may hold up even better in the years to come. That’s because the most important vaccine policies are made at the state and local levels, Rupali Limaye, a professor and scholar of health behavior at Johns Hopkins University, told me. Each state decides whether and how to mandate vaccines to school-age children, or during a pandemic. The states and localities are then responsible for giving out (or choosing not to give out) whichever vaccines are recommended, and sometimes paid for, by the federal government.  

But the existence of vaccine-skeptical leadership in Washington, and throughout the Republican Party, could still end up putting pressure on local decision makers, she continued, and could encourage policies that support parental choice at the expense of maximizing immunization rates. As a member of the Cabinet, Kennedy would also have a platform that he’s never had before, from which he can continue to spread untruths about vaccines. “If you start to give people more of a choice, and they are exposed to disinformation and misinformation, then there is that propensity of people to make decisions that are not based on evidence,” Limaye said. (According to The New York Times, many experts say they “worry most” about this aspect of Kennedy’s leadership.)

How much will this really matter, though? The mere prominence of Kennedy’s ideas may not do much to drive down vaccination rates on its own. Noel Brewer, a behavioral scientist and public-health professor at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, told me that attempts to change people’s thoughts and feelings about vaccines are often futile; research shows that talking up the value of getting shots has little impact on behavior. By the same token, one might reasonably expect that talking down the value of vaccines (as Kennedy and Ladapo are wont to do) would be wasted effort too. “It may be that having a public figure talking about this has little effect,” Brewer said.

Indeed, much has been made of Kennedy’s apparent intervention during the 2019 measles crisis in Samoa. He arrived there for a visit in the middle of that year, not long after measles immunizations had been suspended, and children’s immunization rates had plummeted. (The crisis began when two babies died from a vaccine-related medical error in 2018.) Kennedy has been linked to the deadly measles outbreak in the months that followed, but if his presence really did give succor to the local anti-vaccine movement, that movement’s broader aims were frustrated: The government declared a state of emergency that fall, and soon the measles-vaccination rate had more than doubled.

As head of HHS, though, Kennedy would have direct control over the federal programs that do the sort of work that has been necessary in Samoa, and provide access to vaccines to those who need them most. For example, he’d oversee the agencies that pay for and administer Vaccines for Children, which distributes shots to children in every state. All the experts I spoke with warned that interference with this program could have serious consequences. Other potential actions, such as demanding further safety studies of vaccines and evidence reviews, could slow down decision making and delay the introduction of new vaccines.

Kennedy would also have a chance to influence the nation’s vaccine requirements for children, as well as its safety-and-monitoring system, at the highest levels. He’d be in charge of selecting members for the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which makes recommendations on vaccines that are usually adopted by the states and result in standardized insurance coverage. He’d also oversee the head of the CDC, who in turn has the authority to overrule or amend individual ACIP recommendations.

Even if he’s not inclined to squelch any determinations outright, Kennedy’s goal of giving parents latitude might play out in other ways. Brewer, who is currently a voting member of ACIP (but emphasized that he was not speaking in that capacity), said that the committee can issue several different types of rulings, some of which roughly correspond to ACIP saying that Americans should rather than may get a certain vaccine. That distinction can be very consequential, Brewer said: Shots that are made “routine” by ACIP get prioritized in doctor’s offices, for instance, while those that are subject to “shared clinical decision-making” may be held for patients who ask for them specifically. Shifting the country’s vaccination program from a should to a may regime “would destroy uptake,” Brewer told me.

Those would seem to be the stakes. The case study of vaccine-skeptical governance that we have in Florida may not look so dire—at least in the specifics. But Kennedy’s ascendancy could be something more than that: He could steer the public-health establishment off the course that it’s been on for many years, and getting back to where we are today could take more years still.

When you hear that thousands of writers have signed a petition, you can already guess what they are calling for: What other than boycotting Israel could generate such enthusiasm among the literati?

A staggering 6,000 writers and publishing professionals have signed a letter to address “the most profound moral, political and cultural crisis of the 21st century.” They are calling for a boycott of Israeli cultural institutions. The letter says that these institutions have played a crucial role in “normalizing … injustices” and that cooperating with them harms Palestinians—the implication being that withholding cooperation will help Palestinians. Signatories include some of the best writers alive. If you like to read, chances are a favorite of yours is on here. Among the best-known are the novelists Percival Everett, Sally Rooney, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Annie Ernaux. Some of my own favorites include the Indian writer Arundhati Roy, the Canadian novelist Miriam Toews, and the British critic Owen Hatherley.

[Read: The cowardice of open letters]

Predictably, the letter has led to a backlash. Almost 1,000 writers issued a counter-letter. They include the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright David Mamet, the essayist Adam Gopnik, the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, and the Nobel laureate Herta Müller. My favorite signatory on this one is another Nobel laureate, the fiery left-wing feminist Austrian Elfriede Jelinek, known for her 1983 masterpiece The Piano Teacher.  

I am as horrified as anyone by Israel’s brutal and criminal war in Gaza and its decades-long regime of occupation. As a writer, my primary solidarity is with the dozens of journalists killed in the conflict in the past year, the majority of whom were Palestinian. But I also have no doubt as to which side of this literary civil war I am on.

I’ve never joined a cultural boycott of any country—not Israel, not Russia, and not Iran, my own country of birth. The latter informs my outlook on the issue.

I grew up in one of the most culturally isolated countries on Earth. Our case was of course very different from Israel’s. Iran’s isolation was partly the doing of its own government, which banned foreign cultural products that violated its religious and political strictures—meaning most of them. Cinemas hardly ever showed newly released foreign films (rare exceptions included Michael Moore’s Sicko and Frank Darabont’s The Green Mile). The censors constrained what foreign literature Iranian publishers could translate and publish.

But our isolation also owed to the international sanctions on Iran that made any financial exchange with foreign entities into a potentially criminal affair. For example, we might have accessed banned foreign literature by ordering copies in original languages from abroad—except that this was not so easy in a country that had no credit cards, partly because international banks faced legal penalties for transacting with anybody inside it. When I was a teenager, my mom once helped me order a copy of Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation through Amazon, using a prepaid card we went to some trouble to obtain from Dubai. The ordering process was labyrinthine, and even then, the book took six months to arrive. (My Palestinian friends in the occupied West Bank tell me of similar travails, because their post is sometimes held by Israel for months.) In 2002, Iran’s clandestine nuclear program was exposed, and the United States imposed a progression of sanctions that effectively blocked even this circuitous route. Today, many such simple exchanges between Iran and Western countries are close to impossible.

Some opponents of the Iranian regime abroad have reinforced Iran’s isolation by equating cultural exchange with an unwanted “normalization” of the regime. They have protested the inclusion of Iranian films at festivals and the travel of Western cultural figures to Iran. I left Iran in 2008, but I have never supported such efforts, because I saw for myself how cultural isolation served Iran’s oppressors. Many of us in Iranian society wanted nothing more than to find allies, counterparts, and inspiration abroad, and our regime wanted nothing less for us. Boycotting the country simply advanced the cause of our adversaries—namely, to cut the Iranian population off from influences that could bolster its courage and expand the reach of its solidarity.

That the Iranian people yearned for such contact was evident to those Western thinkers who did manage to visit. Jürgen Habermas, Immanuel Wallerstein, Michael Ignatieff, and Richard Rorty were among those who traveled to Iran and were treated like pop stars, filling meeting halls and taking part in enthusiastic exchanges with Iranians. Sadly these visits have dwindled in recent years, not just because of the regime's restrictions, but also because sanctions make any such exchange a tremendous hassle and a potential violation of U.S. law. (Foreign visitors also fear coming, because of the regime’s grim track record of taking Western citizens hostage.) That Iranians can still enjoy a good deal of foreign literature in Persian translation owes entirely to the courage and persistence of Iranian publishers, many of whom have tangled with both the censors, who determine what is permissible, and the sanctions, which make dealings with publishers around the world difficult.

When I hear of boycotts on Israeli writers, I think of those Israeli writers who have been published in Persian translation regardless of these obstacles. I ask myself who would benefit if fewer Iranians could read Amos Oz’s enchanting fairy tale, Suddenly in the Depths of the Forest, rendered in Persian by the Marxist poet Shahrouz Rashid. The book tells of two children in an unnamed village who decide, against the advice of their parents, to seek out a demon that has taken all the animals away. Some critics saw this story as an allusion to the Holocaust. I remember discussing it with friends in Tehran and finding within it our own meanings and references. We dreamed of meeting Oz, who died in 2018, and of sharing our interpretations with him. What good is served by severing such cross-cultural exchange?

Some supporters of boycotts will address these concerns by saying that their means are selective, that they punish only those writers or other artists who are linked, financially or ideologically, with states engaged in objectionable behavior, and that doing so has a track record of success in changing state behavior. But the question of which artists to tar as complicit with their governments’ policies is not a simple one, and boycotts are a blunt instrument at best.

For instance, the writers’ petition explicitly calls for sanctioning only those Israeli cultural institutions that are “complicit in violating Palestinian rights” or “have never publicly recognized the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people.” Any Israeli cultural institution that has had to rely on state funding, in any form or at any point, could conceivably fall afoul of this criterion. Perhaps this explains why LitHub, the outlet that first published the letter, has done away with niceties and simply headlined it as a “pledge to boycott Israeli cultural institutions,” as have most other outlets.

[Read: When writers silence writers]

Since it was founded in 2005, the Palestinian-led movement for boycotts, sanctions, and divestment (BDS) against Israel has shown that it likes to paint with a broad brush, censuring organizations that promote contact between Palestinians and Israelis on the grounds that they “normalize” Israel: In the past, BDS has boycotted the Arab-Jewish orchestra started by the Palestinian scholar Edward Said; one of its most recent targets was Standing Together, a courageous group of anti-war Israeli citizens, both Jewish and Palestinian, whose leaders and members have faced arrest in their long fight against Israel’s occupation. A similar zeal seems to animate those who have promoted a boycott of Russian culture following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Many of those who advocate cultural sanctions point to South Africa as the shining example of boycott success. As is often the case with politicized appeals to history, the purpose here is to draw a strong moral injunction: Who could possibly stand on the side of the apartheid regime, which was triumphantly brought down in the 1990s and replaced by a multiracial democracy? But the history of the boycott movement against South Africa is more complicated than those analogizing it commonly acknowledge.

Started in 1959 following a call by the African National Congress, the movement encompassed pledges not to work with South African universities or publishers and not to perform in South African venues. Several major U.S. publishers refused to provide books to South African libraries. The boycott’s proponents included not only fiery left-wingers but liberal doyens, such as the philosopher Isaiah Berlin and the American Library Association (ALA), which refused to work with any publisher that traded with South Africa. In 1980, the United Nations General Assembly voted to back the boycott and asked member states to “prevent all cultural, academic, sports, and other exchanges with the racist regime of South Africa.” When apartheid finally collapsed in the 1990s, Nelson Mandela proudly proclaimed the return of his country to the international community.

But for all that they may have achieved, the boycotts were far from uncontroversial, even among opponents of apartheid. Many South African trade unions and social movements were in favor of them, but the Congress of South African Trade Unions, the main workers’ organization that helped bring down the regime, was concerned that divestment could lead to the loss of jobs and pensions. Parts of that group embraced selective boycotts instead of a blanket ban.

Sanctions were even more contested in the art world. In 1975, Khabi Mngoma, the legendary principal of Johannesburg’s African Music and Drama Association (AMDA), which had produced stars such as Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela, visited New York to campaign against the boycott movement. “We feel isolated inside South Africa,” he told The New York Times, “and we also feel isolated by the outside world.”

Mngoma was especially incensed that Black Americans were boycotting his country. “The students in our school, for example, would gain tremendously simply by being exposed in seminars and other classes to the expertise of black American artists,” he said. “By staying away, blacks here do us a great disservice.” But the zealots of the boycott movement didn’t listen to the likes of Mngoma. In 1972, Muhammad Ali was scheduled to compete in South Africa, but a vociferous campaign dissuaded him from doing so.

Mngoma believed that engagement could be more constructive than sanction. On an earlier trip to New York, in 1968, he met with theater personalities and tried to persuade them to perform in South Africa instead of boycotting; they could tax white audiences and channel the money to Black theater. That strategy had some successes. The Broadway musicals Cabaret and Fiddler on the Roof were performed in South Africa and contributed tens of thousands of dollars in royalties to AMDA. Later, the American playwright Arthur Miller agreed to stage his plays in South Africa, but only for desegregated audiences. The singer Paul Simon recorded his Graceland album in South Africa in 1986, insisting on the importance of working with Black artists in the country. A year later, he headlined an enormous anti-apartheid concert in Zimbabwe with Makeba and Masekela. That same year, boycott proponents picketed his concert in London’s Royal Albert Hall and denounced him.

Just how important a role the boycotts played in ending apartheid is disputed. Mattie C. Webb, a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher at Yale, tells me they were significant, “but they were only one factor in a broader movement that also included internal social movements against apartheid. The sanctions themselves were limited, and frankly came rather late in the broader struggle against apartheid.” Lior Sternfeld, an Israeli American historian of Iran at Penn State, put a finer point on this, telling me: “I have tried in vain to find any empirical evidence that the boycott movement helped topple the South African regime.”

Sternfeld has taken an interest in the question because of his work involving Israel and Iran. He is a critic of Israeli policy—both the occupation and the conduct of the war in Gaza—and he makes no brief for Israeli universities, which he says have tried “to get cozy with the government.” He does favor some sanctions—for example, kicking Israel out of the FIFA World Cup and other sporting events, as has been done to Russia. But he believes that cultural boycotts will primarily hurt Israeli intellectuals, who are already demonized by their government.

“I have always believed that activism is about engagement, whereas BDS is articulated as a call for disengagement,” he told me. “I oppose the boycotts because it is important to have some sort of a bridge to Israeli intelligentsia.”

Sternfeld’s position, like mine, is informed by observing the results of sanctions against Iran. He points specifically to How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare, a book published earlier this year by four Iranian American scholars, which argues that isolation has had adverse effects on Iran’s political culture and has counterproductively strengthened the regime’s repressive apparatus. The Iranian scholar Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, an outspoken opponent of the sanctions on Iran, has raised questions about boycotting Israel for similar reasons, to the ire of some on the left.

Lately Iran and Israel have found themselves ever more dangerously at odds, and the lack of people-to-people contact between the two countries doesn’t help. That’s one reason Sternfeld accepted a surprising overture in September: The Iranian mission to the United Nations invited him to attend an interfaith meeting with President Masoud Pezeshkian on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. This encounter made Pezeshkian the first post-revolutionary Iranian president to knowingly and openly meet with an Israeli citizen. Iranian hard-liners attacked him for it relentlessly. As for Sternfeld, some critics of the Iranian regime in the United States denounced him for taking the meeting, even as hard-liners in Tehran called him a Zionist infiltrator.

Iran bans its citizens from visiting Israel, but numerous Iranian writers and artists in exile have traveled to the country anyway in recent years. Their visits have helped show Israelis, used to hearing of the “Iranian threat” from their government, a more human side of the country.

The filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf was a guest of honor at the Jerusalem Film Festival in 2013. Makhmalbaf was once an Islamist revolutionary; he spent four and a half years in prison before the 1979 revolution. But he went through a remarkable metamorphosis in the 1990s, becoming an anti-regime dissident and winding up in exile in Paris.

“I am one of the ambassadors for Iranian art to Israel, and my message was of peace and friendship,” he told The Guardian of his trip at the time. “When I flew to Israel last week, I felt like a man flying to another planet, like a man flying to the moon.” Makhmalbaf criticized the logic of boycotters, saying, “If I make a film in Iran, and you come to my country to watch it, does it mean you confirm dictatorship in Iran and you have no respect for political prisoners in Iran?” he asked rhetorically of his critics. “If you go to the US, does it mean you confirm their attack on Afghanistan and Iraq?"

Orly Cohen, a Tehran-born scholar who has lived in Israel most of her life, has helped organize the trips of several Iranian artists to the country. Now a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Haifa, she has also translated the work of Iranian poets into Hebrew.

“In the Israeli news, all Israelis hear of Iran is war,” she told me by phone. “They don’t know about Iran’s culture and how much beautiful art is made in the country today.”

[Read: Iranian dissidents don’t want war with Israel–but they can’t stop it]

Cohen translated a book of poems by Mehdi Mousavi, known in Iran as the “father of postmodern poetry,” and facilitated his visit to Israel last year for its publication. He was the subject of a cover story in Haaretz, and he struck up a relationship with a well-known Iraqi-born poet, Ronny Someck. “He was seen as a bridge of friendship,” Cohen told me. “For the first time,” she said of Mousavi’s Israeli audience, “they saw Iran through Iranian, not Israeli, eyes.”

Cohen also helped organize an exhibition about Iranian feminist movements at Jerusalem’s Museum of Islamic Art. Israeli feminists took an interest, but what surprised Cohen more was the feedback from religious Jews, some of whom were inspired by the example of Iranian women standing up to religious repression.

Boycotts preclude such experiences and connections. In the years since 2005, when the Palestinian movement adopted BDS, the tenuous links that once allowed Israeli and Palestinian scholars and artists to be in contact have been cut one after another. Israeli peace activists used to travel frequently to the West Bank and speak at events there. But in 2014, Amira Hass, Haaretz’s correspondent in Ramallah and a vociferous critic of the Israeli occupation, was kicked out of an event at Bir Zeit University by two professors.

Some boycotters do seem concerned about punishing people like Hass, hence the guidelines that carve out ostensible exceptions for those who are critical of the policies of the boycotted state. But I don’t see how any freedom-loving writer can embrace such a position. What distinguishes us from authoritarians and censors if we impose ideological litmus tests to decide which writers can present their work at festivals—if we ask them to declare their opposition to a political regime before they are allowed to speak?

This world is full of walls that divide peoples, and of regimes that impose ideological purity tests on writers. If writers are to use our collective powers, it should not be to add to them.

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Donald Trump appears to experience the world through the glow of a television screen. He has long placed a premium on those who look the part in front of the camera. Paging Dr. Mehmet Oz.

Trump has picked Oz to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. CMS, as the agency is known, falls under the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Last week, Trump nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to serve as HHS secretary. As you may have guessed, Kennedy and Oz are not only friends but kindred spirits. Oz is a global adviser at iHerb, a for-profit company that offers “Earth’s best-curated selection of health and wellness products at the best possible value.” He and Kennedy, two relative outsiders, are now positioned to enjoy a symbiotic relationship within Trump’s chaotic ecosystem.

Oz was last seen running for a Pennsylvania Senate seat in 2022. He lost to John Fetterman, who, despite dealing with the aftereffects of a stroke, carried the state by five points. Throughout that race, Oz struggled to combat the perception that he was a charlatan and carpetbagger who primarily lived in New Jersey. (Fetterman’s team repeatedly tagged Oz as an out-of-touch elitist, trolling him, for example, when he went grocery shopping for crudités and lamented high prices.) After that electoral defeat, Oz’s political dreams seemed all but dashed. But he wisely remained loyal to Trump—a person who has the ability to change trajectories on a whim.

In the pre-Trump era, it might have been a stretch to describe CMS administrator as an overtly political position. But Oz’s objective under Trump couldn’t be clearer. In a statement, Trump, using his reliably perplexing capitalization, telegraphed that Oz will bring a certain ethos to the job—a little MAGA, a little MAHA. Oz, Trump promised, will “cut waste and fraud within our Country’s most expensive Government Agency, which is a third of our Nation’s Healthcare spend, and a quarter of our entire National Budget.” And, because he’s Trump, he mentioned Oz’s nine daytime Emmy Awards.

Some 150 million Americans currently rely on the agency’s insurance programs, including Medicaid, Medicare, and Obamacare. Oz has been a proponent of Medicare Advantage for All. Though that sounds like the Medicare for All initiative championed by progressives such as Senator Bernie Sanders, the two programs are quite different. At its core, Medicare for All would set the U.S. on a path toward nationalizing health care. Trump would never go for that. But Medicare Advantage already exists within America’s patchwork private/public system, and Oz might push to strengthen it. He could also face budgetary pressure to weaken it. Oz’s own health-care views haven’t remained consistent. Though he once praised the mandatory universal models of Germany and Switzerland, as a Republican politician he threw his support behind privatized Medicare.

When asked about Oz’s nomination, Fetterman, his former opponent, told CNN: “As long as he’s willing to protect and preserve Medicaid and Medicare, I’m voting for the dude.” Some people were pissed. Victoria Perrone, who served as the director of operations on Fetterman’s Senate campaign, called out her old boss on social media: “Dr. Oz broke his pledge to ‘do no harm’ when he said red onions prevent ovarian cancer. My sis died of OC in 6/2022. This is a huge personal betrayal to me. We know he won’t protect the Medicaid that paid for her treatments,” Perrone posted on X. “I feel like I’ve been duped and 2 years of working on your campaign was a waste,” she added.

The above argument is illustrative of another reality Trump acknowledged in announcing his pick: “Make America Healthy Again” keeps growing. Oz, Trump declared, “will work closely with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to take on the illness industrial complex, and all the horrible chronic diseases left in its wake.” He went a step further, promising that Oz will bring “a strong voice to the key pillars of the MAHA Movement.” Oz holds degrees from Harvard and Penn, and he worked as a professor of surgery at Columbia. In spite of that pedigree, Oz has spent years facing credible accusations of medical quackery for his endorsement of dietary supplements. In 2014, he received a dramatic dressing-down on Capitol Hill. Senator Claire McCaskill read three statements that Oz had made on his eponymous show:

“You may think magic is make-believe, but this little bean has scientists saying they’ve found the magic weight-loss cure for every body type: It’s green coffee extract.”

“I’ve got the No. 1 miracle in a bottle to burn your fat: It’s raspberry ketone.”

“Garcinia cambogia: It may be the simple solution you’ve been looking for to bust your body fat for good.”

Oz’s defense that day was that his job was to be a “cheerleader” for the Dr. Oz audience. “I actually do personally believe in the items I talk about in the show. I passionately study them. I recognize oftentimes they don’t have the scientific muster to present as fact, but nevertheless, I would give my audience the advice I give my family,” he testified.

He emerged from that hearing largely unscathed. Two years later, Oz would go on to read what he claimed were Trump’s medical records on that same show. He famously praised Trump’s testosterone levels and supposed all-around health. Four years after that, once Trump was president, Oz sent emails to White House officials, including Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, pushing them to rush patient trials for hydroxychloroquine, an unproven treatment for COVID.

In the next Trump administration, those are the sorts of exchanges Oz could be having with Kennedy—or with Trump himself. How did we get here? Oz landed this gig because he’s good on TV, yes, but also because, when he entered the political arena, he fully aligned himself with Trump. The 47th president rewards loyalty. If there’s one thing that’s become clear from his administration nominations so far, it’s that.

Some of Trump’s appointments will be less consequential than others. Anything involving the health and well-being of tens of millions of Americans is inarguably serious. Oz’s confirmation is not guaranteed, but his selection has already confirmed that nothing about Trump 2.0 is mere bluster.

Related:

Trump is coming for Obamacare again. (From January) Why is Dr. Oz so bad at Twitter? (From 2022)

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Another theory of the Trump movement What the men of the internet are trying to prove Arash Azizi: The problem with boycotting Israel

Today’s News

Republican members of the House Ethics Committee blocked the release of the investigation into the sexual-misconduct and drug-use allegations against former Representative Matt Gaetz. Jose Ibarra, who was found guilty of killing Laken Riley on the University of Georgia campus, was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole. Trump tapped former WWE CEO Linda McMahon, who previously led the U.S. Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term, to be the secretary of education.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Drought is an immigration issue, and Trump’s climate policies are designed to ignore that, Zoë Schlanger writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Video by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic. Sources: Archive Films / Getty; Internet Archive; Prelinger Associates / Getty.

Put Down the Vacuum

By Annie Lowrey

The other night, a friend came over. A dear friend. A friend who has helped me out when I’ve been sick, and who brought over takeout when I had just given birth. Still, before he arrived, I vacuumed.

I thought about this while reading the Gender Equity Policy Institute’s recent report on gender and domestic labor. The study finds that mothers spend twice as much time as fathers “on the essential and unpaid work” of taking care of kids and the home, and that women spend more time on this than men, regardless of parental and relationship status. “Simply being a woman” is the instrumental variable, the study concludes.

Read the full article.

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Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Getty

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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