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On Christmas Eve of 2020, my father was admitted to the hospital with sudden weakness. My mother was not allowed to join him. She pleaded with the staff—my dad needed help making medical decisions, she said—but there were no exceptions at that grisly stage of the coronavirus pandemic. I contemplated making the trip from Maryland to New Jersey to see whether I, as a doctor, could garner special treatment until I realized that state and employer travel rules would mean waiting for a COVID test result and possibly facing quarantine on my return. In the end, my father spent his time in the hospital alone, suffering the double harm of illness and isolation.

These events still frustrate me years later; I have a hard time believing that restrictions on hospital visitation and interstate travel helped more people than they hurt. Many Americans remain angry about the pandemic for other reasons too: angry about losing a job, getting bullied into vaccination, or watching children fall behind in a virtual classroom. That legacy of bitterness and distrust is now a major political force. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is on the precipice of leading our nation’s health-care system as secretary of Health and Human Services. The Johns Hopkins professor Marty Makary has been tapped to lead the Food and Drug Administration. And the Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya is expected to be picked to run the National Institutes of Health. These men have each advocated for changes to the systems and structures of public health. But what unites them all—and what legitimizes them in the eyes of this next administration—is a lasting rage over COVID.

To understand this group’s ascent to power and what it could mean for America, one must consider their perception of the past five years. The world, as Kennedy, Makary, Bhattacharya, and their compatriots variously understand it, is dreadful: SARS-CoV-2 was likely created in a lab in Wuhan, China; U.S. officials tried to cover up that fact; and the government responded to the virus by ignoring scientific evidence, violating citizens’ civil rights, and suppressing dissent. In the face of this modern “dark age,” as Bhattacharya has called it, only a few brave dissidents were willing to flip on the light.

Makary, Trump’s pick for the FDA, presents as being in the truth-to-power mold. A surgeon, policy researcher, and—full disclosure—my academic colleague, he gained a loyal following during the pandemic as a public-health critic. Through media outlets such as Fox News and The Wall Street Journal, Makary advocated for a more reserved use of COVID vaccines: He suggested that adults who had recovered from a COVID infection, as well as children more generally, could forgo some doses; he is also skeptical of booster shots for everyone and vaccine mandates. Makary, too, thinks that public-health officials have been lying to the American people: “The greatest perpetrator of misinformation during the pandemic has been the United States government,” he told Congress last year, referring to public-health guidance that emphasized transmission of COVID on surfaces, downplayed natural immunity, encouraged boosters in young people, and promoted the efficacy of masking.

[Read: The sanewashing of RFK Jr.]

Bhattacharya, a doctor and health economist, rose to fame in October 2020 as a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated for a “focused protection” approach to the pandemic. The idea was to isolate vulnerable seniors while allowing low-risk individuals to return to their normal lives. Much of the public-health community aggressively criticized this strategy at the time, and—as would later be revealed—NIH Director Francis Collins privately called for a “quick and devastating” takedown of its premise. Twitter placed Bhattacharya on a “trends blacklist” that reduced the reach of his posts, according to internal documents released to the journalist Bari Weiss in 2022. Among conservatives and lockdown skeptics, Bhattacharya has come to be seen as a fearless truth teller who was silenced by the federal government and Big Tech. (In reality, and despite his frequent umbrage, Bhattacharya was not ignored. He met with the Trump administration and was in communication with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.)

In response to their marginalization from polite scientific society—and long before they were in line for key government positions—Makary and Bhattacharya have each sought out a public reckoning. They both called for the medical establishment to issue an apology to the American people. Makary demanded “fresh leadership” at an FDA that had made serious blunders on COVID medications and vaccines, and Bhattacharya asked for the formation of a COVID commission as a necessary first step in “restoring the public’s trust in scientific experts.” They even worked together at the Norfolk Group, a cohort of like-minded scientists and doctors that laid out what they deemed to be the most vital questions that must be asked of the nation’s public-health leaders. The gist of some of these is: Why didn’t they listen to “focused protection” supporters such as Bhattacharya and Makary? The report wonders, for instance, why Deborah Birx, a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, avoided meeting with a cadre of anti-lockdown advocates that included Bhattacharya in the summer of 2020. (“They are a fringe group without grounding in epidemics, public health or on the ground common sense experience,” Birx wrote in an email to the vice president’s chief of staff at the time.)

This sense of outrage over COVID will be standard in the next administration. Trump’s pick for surgeon general, the doctor and Fox News personality Janette Nesheiwat, has called the prolonged isolation brought about by shutdowns “cruel and inhumane,” and said that the collateral damage caused by the government’s actions was “worse than the pandemic” for most Americans. His nominee for secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, pushed for herd immunity in May 2020 and encouraged anti-lockdown protests.

[Read: Donald Trump’s most dangerous Cabinet pick]

Bhattacharya, at least, has denied having any interest in revenge. Last year he helped write an op-ed that cautioned against initiating a “Nuremberg 2.0” and instead presented scientists like himself and Makary as “apostles of evidence-based science” who are simply “calling for restoring evidence-based medicine to a pride of place in public health.”

Taken on its own, I’m sympathetic to that goal. I consider myself a fellow member of the “evidence-based medicine” movement that values high-quality data over blind loyalty to authority. I’m also of a similar mind as Makary about the FDA’s long-standing dysfunction. The COVID skeptics are correct that, in some domains, the pandemic produced too little knowledge and too much bluster. We still don’t know how well various social-distancing measures worked, what the best vaccination policy might be, or what the true origins of the virus were. I remember following the debates about these issues on Twitter, which functioned as a town square for doctors, scientists, and public-health leaders during the pandemic years. Mainstream experts tended to defend unproved public-health measures with self-righteousness and absolutism: You were either in favor of saving lives or you were one of the skeptics who was trying to kill Grandma. Nuanced conversations were rare. Accusations of “misinformation” were plentiful.

[Read: COVID science is moving backwards]

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was indeed spreading misinformation with a fire hose. (For example, he has falsely said that the COVID shots are the “deadliest vaccine ever made.”) Bhattacharya and Makary have been far more grounded in reality, but they did make their own share of mistakes during the pandemic—and they haven’t spent much time rehashing them. So allow me to reflect on their behalf: In March 2020, Bhattacharya argued that COVID’s mortality rate was likely to be much lower than anyone was saying at the time, even to the point of being one-tenth that of the flu. “If we’re right about the limited scale of the epidemic,” he wrote, “then measures focused on older populations and hospitals are sensible.” Bhattacharya continued to be wrong in important ways. A pivotal assumption of the Great Barrington Declaration was that as more healthy people got sick and then recovered, the residual risk of new infections would fall low enough that vulnerable people could safely leave isolation. This process would likely take three to six months, his group explained. SARS-CoV-2, however, is still circulating at high levels nearly five years later. At least 1.2 million Americans have died from COVID. Had effective vaccines not arrived shortly after the 2020 declaration, senior citizens might be in hiding to this day.

As for Makary, his most infamous take involved a February 2021 prediction that the United States would reach herd immunity within two months. “Scientists shouldn’t try to manipulate the public by hiding the truth,” he wrote in The Wall Street Journal. The Delta and Omicron waves followed, killing hundreds of thousands more Americans.

When I reached out to Bhattacharya, he said his early guess about COVID’s mortality rate was meant only to help describe a “range of possible outcomes,” and that to characterize it otherwise would be false. (Makary did not respond to my questions for this story.)

The incoming administration’s COVID skeptics have also expressed sympathy for still-unproved theories about the pandemic’s origin. If you want to become an evidence apostle, believing that SARS-CoV-2 came from an NIH-funded lab leak seems to be part of the deal. Kennedy wrote multiple books purporting to link Anthony Fauci, in particular, to the creation of the virus. Similarly, Makary appears in a new documentary called Thank You Dr. Fauci, which describes “a bio-arms race with China and what could be the largest coverup in modern history.” (Fauci has denied these claims on multiple occasions, including in congressional testimony. He called the idea that he participated in a cover-up of COVID’s origins “absolutely false and simply preposterous.”)

A certain amount of sycophancy toward the more bizarre elements of the coalition is also common. Makary and Bhattacharya have both praised Kennedy in extravagant terms despite his repeated falsehoods: “He wrote a 500-page book on Dr. Fauci and the medical industrial complex. A hundred percent of it was true,” Makary said of a volume that devotes multiple chapters to casting doubt on HIV as the cause of AIDS. Earlier this month, Bhattacharya called Kennedy a “disruptor” whose views on vaccines and AIDS are merely “eccentric.” (Bhattacharya has also suggested that the vaccine skeptic and conspiracy theorist Robert Malone would be an “amazing leader” for the country’s health agencies.)

Anger about the government’s response to the pandemic swept the COVID contrarians into power. Resentment was their entrée into Washington. Now they’ll have a chance to fix some genuine, systemic problems with the nation’s public-health establishment. They’ll also have the ability to settle scores.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is wrong about a lot of things in public health. Vaccines don’t cause autism. Raw milk is more dangerous than pasteurized milk. And cellphones haven’t been shown to cause brain cancer. But the basic idea behind his effort to “Make America Healthy Again” is correct: America is not healthy, and our current system has not fixed the problem.

Joe Biden entered office promising to “beat” the coronavirus pandemic, cure cancer, and get more people health care. Arguably no one on Earth can talk more passionately about funding cancer research than Biden, whose son Beau died of brain cancer in 2015 and who, in 2022, announced an initiative to halve U.S. cancer deaths in the next 25 years. Robert Califf, Biden’s FDA commissioner, has been particularly stalwart in arguing that the agency must play a role in reversing a “catastrophic decline” in Americans’ life expectancy, and has repeatedly warned of “an ever-growing epidemic of diet-related chronic diseases,” such as cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. A 2019 study found that just 12 percent of Americans are considered metabolically healthy, based on their waist circumference, blood sugar, blood pressure, and cholesterol.

Of course Biden’s White House was never going to end cancer or obesity in four years. But many of its policies barely scratched the surface of America’s wide-ranging health problems. Despite Califf’s dramatic language about the country’s diet problems, for example, the FDA’s efforts to improve the situation have mostly revolved around giving Americans more information about healthy foods.

The public-health bureaucracy that the Trump administration will inherit is more focused on and skilled at treating America’s health problems than preventing them. That shortcoming—despite the billions of dollars spent every year at these agencies—has damaged the credibility of the public-health establishment enough that Kennedy is now Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services. Marty Makary, Trump’s pick to lead the FDA, has similarly risen in prominence by second-guessing "medical dogma" in the U.S. and beyond. And Trump’s pick to lead the CDC, former Representative Dave Weldon, has criticized the agency’s vaccine policies and once attempted to block its vaccine-safety research because of what he claimed were conflicts of interest. A set of men who have made careers of distrusting our existing health-care agencies may soon be empowered to try to blow them up.

The Biden administration, to be fair, had less time to deal with America’s deeper health issues, because it was forced to deal with at least a few calamities. Much of Biden’s term was spent navigating the country out of the pandemic. On the whole, his administration achieved most of its COVID goals. The Biden White House provided Americans with free COVID tests and mounted a vaccination campaign that resulted in more than three-quarters of the country getting a shot. Still, the pandemic left the CDC beleaguered by claims that it was simultaneously too slow and too aggressive in its efforts to fight the virus. During Biden’s presidency, the agency promised to “share science and data faster” and “translate science into practical policy,” but it has struggled to respond to the continued spread of bird flu. Public-health experts have slammed the CDC for not sharing enough information about the virus’s spread, including a human case in Missouri earlier this year, and farmers have been reluctant to implement the agency’s recommendations for preventing transmission of the virus from sick cattle to humans.

Some of those calamities were self-inflicted. The FDA is entrusted with ensuring that our food and medicines are safe, and it generally does spot issues quickly after they occur. But for months, the FDA failed to act on a whistleblower complaint alerting regulators to deplorable conditions at an infant-formula factory that eventually caused nationwide formula shortages and two infant deaths. The FDA is also supposed to decide what tobacco products can be sold, but it has failed to police the illegal market for vapes and nicotine pouches, such as Zyn. And for all the administration’s talk of being guided by “science and truth,” the White House seemingly bowed to political pressure and abandoned a plan to ban menthol cigarettes at the very end of a long rule-making process. The past four years have revealed that crucial parts of the agency’s remit—most notably its oversight of tobacco and the food system—have been neglected by agency leadership; in 2022, independent reviews of the FDA’s food and tobacco centers found that both lacked clarity on mission and goals.

At the same time, the administration has failed to deliver on its loftier ambitions. Biden quietly dropped some of his bolder ideas, such as his campaign promise to create a public-option insurance plan. The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, a new government agency that funds high-risk, high-reward research and is essential to Biden’s cancer goals, is in its infancy, and Republicans in Congress are already eager to cut its budget. And some promises, such as Biden’s grand goal to help change America’s diet, have been approached more like trivial pursuits.

The administration branded its 2022 hunger and nutrition conference, for instance, as the largest and most important gathering on nutrition policy since the Nixon administration. That 1960s conference led to millions of children gaining access to school lunch and to the creation of the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (or WIC), which provides food to about 6 million Americans each month. The Biden administration’s summit ended with a pledge to end hunger and improve America’s diet by 2030, but the steps taken toward tackling those goals—such as developing a plan to add warning labels to unhealthy foods—have been modest. And all the agency has done so far on that project is conduct research on the labels’ potential design. The FDA has also pledged to lower the sodium in foods, but the targets it’s set for the food industry are entirely voluntary.

These efforts are understandably careful and bureaucratic. The agency’s caution over warning-label design comes amid threats from the food industry to sue over any label deemed unjustified. Indeed, in the U.S. legal system, regulators have trouble mandating that companies do much of anything without it being branded as unconstitutional. But the Biden administration’s efforts look comically inadequate given the scope of America’s health problems.

RFK Jr. is promising a break from the status quo. This is not to say that he, should he be confirmed as health secretary, has a better plan. Most of his ideas amount to little more than pronouncements that he will take sweeping actions immediately once Trump is sworn in as president. The reality is that many of those efforts would take months, if not years, to implement—and some might not be feasible at all. He has signaled, for example, that he will clear house at the FDA’s food center, despite rules that prevent government bureaucrats from being fired willy-nilly. He also has pledged to ban certain chemicals from food, which he’s argued are contributing to American’s lower life expectancy. But for every chemical the FDA bans, it will have to go through a lengthy regulatory process, which would likely be challenged by food companies in court. Kennedy’s notion of significantly altering the system of fees that drug makers pay the FDA to review their products would likely send the agency into a budgetary crisis.

If Kennedy gets confirmed to lead HHS, he will quickly be confronted with the reality that governing is a slow and tedious process that doesn’t take kindly to big, bold ideas, even with an impatient leader like Trump calling the shots. At the outset of his first term, Trump declared war on drug companies, which he claimed were “getting away with murder” due to their high prices. Trump’s then–health secretary, Alex Azar, in turn spent the next four years trying radical fixes that included requiring drug makers to post their prices in TV ads, importing drugs from Canada, tying American drug prices to other countries’, and eliminating the rebates that middlemen negotiate for insurance companies. But each idea got bogged down in bureaucracy and lawsuits. Trump’s early attempts to contain COVID by blocking international air travel similarly did little to keep the virus out of America, despite his claims at the time that the policy “saved us” from widespread outbreaks.

Biden benefited from Operation Warp Speed's rapid push to create vaccines, but it was his team of technocrats that finally got them distributed. And they eventually lowered drug prices too, in a much simpler way than Trump was proposing. But technocracy has also failed to address our most pressing—and most visible—health problems. Trump’s picks have little experience navigating the Rube Goldberg puzzle that is American bureaucracy. They certainly aren’t afraid of trying something new, but we’re about to find out how far that will get them.

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In the almost three weeks since his victory in the presidential election, Donald Trump has more or less completed nominations for his Cabinet, and he and his surrogates have made a flurry of announcements. The president-elect and his team have spent much of November baiting and trolling their opponents while throwing red meat to the MAGA faithful. (Trump, for example, has appointed Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to a nonexistent “Department of Government Efficiency,” an office whose acronym is a play on a jokey crypto currency.) And though some of Trump’s nominees have been relatively reasonable choices, in recent days Trump has put forward a handful of manifestly unqualified and even dangerous picks, reiterated his grandiose plans for his first days in office, and promised to punish his enemies.

We’ve seen this before. As I warned this past April, stunning his opponents with more outrages than they can handle is a classic Trump tactic:

By overwhelming people with the sheer volume and vulgarity of his antics, Trump and his team are trying to burn out the part of our brains that can discern truth from fiction, right from wrong, good from evil … Trump isn’t worried that all of this will cause voters to have a kind of mental meltdown: He’s counting on it. He needs ordinary citizens to become so mired in moral chaos and so cognitively paralyzed that they are unable to comprehend the disasters that would ensue if he returns to the White House.

Neither the voters nor the members of the U.S. Senate, however, should fall for it this time. Professor Timothy Snyder of Yale University has written that the most important way to resist a rising authoritarian regime is not to “obey in advance”—that is, changing our behavior in ways we think might conform to the demands of the new ruling group. That’s good advice, but I might add a corollary here: People should not panic and exhaust themselves in advance, either.

In practice, this means setting priorities—mine are the preservation of democracy and national security—and conserving mental energy and political effort to concentrate on those issues and Trump’s plans for them. It’s important to bear in mind as well that Trump will not take the oath of office for another two months. (Such oaths do not matter to him, but he cannot grab the machinery of government without it.) If citizens and their representatives react to every moment of trollery over the coming weeks, they will be exhausted by Inauguration Day.

Trump will now dominate the news cycle almost every day with some new smoke bomb that is meant to distract from his attempts to stock the government with a strange conglomeration of nihilistic opportunists and self-styled revolutionaries. He will propose plans that he has no real hope of accomplishing quickly, while trying to build an aura of inevitability and omnipotence around himself. (His vow to begin mass deportations on his first day, for example, is a logistical impossibility, unless by mass he means “slightly more than usual.” He may be able to set in motion some sort of planning on day one, but he has no way to execute a large-scale operation yet, and it will be some time before he has anywhere to put so many people marked for deportation.)

The attempt to build Trump into some kind of unstoppable political kaiju is nonsense, as the hapless Matt Gaetz just found out. For all of Trump’s bullying and bluster, Gaetz’s nomination bid was over in a matter of days. Two of Trump’s other nominations—Pete Hegseth for defense secretary and Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence—might be in similar trouble as various Republicans begin to show doubts about them.

Senator James Risch, for example, a hard-right conservative from deep-red Idaho and the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, declined over the weekend to offer the kind of ritualistic support for Hegseth and Gabbard that Trump expects from the GOP. “Ask me this question again after the hearings,” Risch said on Saturday. “These appointments by the president are constrained by the advice and consent of the Senate. The Senate takes that seriously, and we vet these.”

What Risch seems to be saying—at least I hope, anyway—is that it’s all fun and games until national security is involved, and then people have to get serious about what’s at stake. The Senate isn’t a Trump rally, and the Defense Department isn’t a backdrop for a segment on Fox & Friends.

Similar thinking may have led to Scott Bessent as Trump’s nominee to run the Treasury. Bessent would have been an ordinary pick in any other administration, but in Trump World, it’s noteworthy that a standard-issue hedge-fund leader—and a man who once worked for George Soros, of all people—just edged out the more radical Trump loyalist Howard Lutnick, who has been relegated to Commerce, a far less powerful department. Culture warring, it seems, matters less to some of Team Trump when real money is involved.

None of this is a case for complacency. Hegseth and Gabbard could still end up winning confirmation. The anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could take over at the Department of Health and Human Services. Meanwhile, reports have also emerged that Trump may move Kash Patel—the very embodiment of the mercenary loyalist who will execute any and every Trump order—into a senior job at the FBI or the Department of Justice, a move that would raise urgent questions about American civil liberties.

But Trump cannot simply will things into existence. Yes, “the people have spoken,” but it was a narrow win, and Trump again seems to have fallen short of gaining 50 percent of the popular vote. Just as Democrats have had to learn that running up big margins in California does not win the presidency, Republicans are finding yet again that electoral votes are not the same thing as a popular mandate. The Senate Republican conference is rife with cowards, but only a small handful of principled GOP senators are needed to stop some of Trump’s worst nominees.

The other reality is that Trump has already accomplished the one thing he really cared about: staying out of jail. Today, Special Counsel Jack Smith moved to dismiss the January 6–related case against him. So be it; if enough voters have decided they can live with a convicted felon in the White House, there’s nothing the rest of us can do about that.

But Trump returning to office does not mean he can rule by fiat. If his opponents react to every piece of bait he throws in front of them, they will lose their bearings. And even some of Trump’s voters—at least those outside the MAGA personality cult—might not have expected this kind of irresponsible trolling. If these Republican voters want to hold Trump accountable for the promises he made to them during the campaign, they’ll have to keep their heads rather than get caught up in Trump’s daily dramas.

Allow me to add one piece of personal advice for the upcoming holiday: None of the things Trump is trying to do will happen before the end of the week. So for Thanksgiving, give yourself a break. Remember the great privilege and blessing it is to be an American, and have faith in the American Constitution and the freedoms safeguarded within it. If your Uncle Ned shows up and still wants to argue about how the election was stolen from Trump four years ago, my advice is the same as it’s been for every holiday: Tell him he’s wrong, that you love him anyway, that you’re not having this conversation today, and to pass the potatoes.

Related:

Pam Bondi’s comeback Another theory of the Trump movement

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Revenge of the COVID contrarians The end of the quest for justice for January 6 Caitlin Flanagan on the Democrats’ billionaire mistake

Today’s News

Special Counsel Jack Smith filed motions to drop the federal election-subversion and classified-documents cases against Trump, citing a Justice Department rule against prosecuting sitting presidents. A California judge delayed the resentencing date for Lyle and Erik Menendez, the brothers imprisoned for killing their parents in 1989, to give the new Los Angeles County district attorney more time to review the case. The Israeli cabinet will vote tomorrow on a proposed cease-fire deal with Hezbollah, which is expected to pass, according to a spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli ambassador to the U.S. said on Israeli Army Radio that an agreement could be reached “within days” but that there remain “points to finalize.”

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Climate negotiations at COP29 ended in a $300 billion deal that mostly showed how far the world is from facing climate change’s real dangers, Zoë Schlanger argues. The Wonder Reader: One of the most humbling parts of being alive is realizing that you might need to reconsider some long-held habits, Isabel Fattal writes.

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Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Everyone Agrees Americans Aren’t Healthy

By Nicholas Florko

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is wrong about a lot of things in public health. Vaccines don’t cause autism. Raw milk is more dangerous than pasteurized milk. And cellphones haven’t been shown to cause brain cancer. But the basic idea behind his effort to “Make America Healthy Again” is correct: America is not healthy, and our current system has not fixed the problem.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

“Dear Therapist”: No one wants to host my in-laws for the holidays. The right has a Bluesky problem. The leak scandal roiling Israel What the broligarchs want from Trump

Culture Break

Everett

Watch. Every generation has an Oz story, but Wicked is the retelling that best captures what makes L. Frank Baum’s world sing, Allegra Rosenberg writes.

Try out. Group fitness classes aren’t just about exercise—they’re also a ridiculous, perfect way to make friends, Mikala Jamison writes.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I often tell people to unplug from the news. (Hey, I get paid to have opinions about national events, and yet I make sure to stop watching the news now and then too.) If you’d like a break that will not only get you off the doom treadmill but refresh and recharge you, allow me to suggest binge-watching the new Ted Danson series on Netflix, A Man on the Inside. It’s charming and funny, and it might bring a tear to your eye in between some laughs.

Danson plays a recently widowed retired professor who takes a job with a private investigator as the “inside man” at a senior-citizen residence in San Francisco. (As someone who watched the debut of Cheers 42 years ago, I feel like I’ve been growing old along with Danson through his many shows, and this might be his best role.) He’s tracking down a theft, but the crime isn’t all that interesting, nor is it really the point of the show: Rather, A Man on the Inside is about family, friends, love, and death.

My wife and I sometimes found the show almost too hard to watch, because we have both had parents in assisted living and memory-care settings. But A Man on the Inside never hurts—it has too much compassion (and gentle, well-placed humor) to let aging become caricatured as nothing but tragedy and loss. It is a show for and about families, just when we need something we can all watch over the holidays.

— Tom

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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