101 East visits the islanders caught in the ongoing tensions between North and South Korea.

North Korea's Kim Jong-un inspects nuclear facility, increasing pressure on US and South Korea

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South Korean authorities have released initial findings concerning the Jeju Air plane crash that occurred last month. Submitted to the UN aviation agency, along with authorities in the United States, France, and Thailand, the…

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Both engines of Boeing 737-800 jet contained DNA from Baikal teals, a migratory duck that flies to South Korea.

A South Korean president has no immunity in insurrection charges, which is punishable by life imprisonment or death.

Yoon Suk Yeol has made his first appearance at an impeachment trial which will decide if he should be permanently removed.

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Over the past several months, bird-flu numbers have been steadily ticking up, especially among farmworkers who interact closely with cows. I spoke with my colleague Katherine J. Wu, who reports on science, about her level of concern right now, and the government’s response to the spread of the virus so far.

Lora Kelley: We last spoke in April, after a dairy worker became infected with bird flu. At the time, you described your level of concern about bird flu as “medium.” How would you describe your level of worry now?

Katherine J. Wu: At this point, I would upgrade it to “medium-plus.” I don’t think I will upgrade to “high” unless we start to see strong evidence of human-to-human transmission. I am not ruling out that possibility, but we aren’t there yet.

The situation has gotten quite a bit worse since last spring. We are seeing consistent infection of dairy workers, meaning an especially vulnerable population is exposed in their work environment. Each time the virus infects a new person, it’s an opportunity for it to evolve into something that could eventually become a pathogen that moves easily from person to person.

Lora: What could public-health officials have done differently in recent months to contain the outbreak?

Katherine: Part of the reason I feel concerned is the government’s lackluster response. The movement of the virus into cows was a huge red flag. Cows have never been a known source of this flu, so that was a complete surprise. That should have been a moment when officials said: We really need to contain this before it gets out of control. If some of the first afflicted herds had been kept from moving around, or even culled, it’s possible that the virus might have been contained before dairy workers got sick.

The USDA has ramped up its testing of milk, and the CDC is still working hard to do outreach to farmworkers, who are the population most at risk here. But there could still be more testing at the individual level—individual animals, individual people. There could be more frequent, aggressive sampling of where the virus is in the environment, as well as on farms.

Representatives at USDA and CDC have denied that their response has been inadequate—though independent experts I have spoken with dispute that. To be clear, officials can’t fully predict the future and stop an outbreak the second it starts to get bad, and critics aren’t demanding that. But right now, it’s still a very reactive approach: We see that the virus has been here; I guess we can keep checking if it’s there. But a more proactive approach with testing and better communication with the public would really help.

Lora: How has the government’s response to bird flu compared with its response to COVID?

Katherine: There’s no doubt that having COVID in the rearview affected the government’s response. I think they didn’t want to overreact and cause widespread panic when there wasn’t a need. That’s fair, but there’s a middle ground that I think they missed.

The response to COVID was by definition going to be haphazard, because we didn’t have a preexisting arsenal of tests, vaccines, and antivirals. We hadn’t dealt with a coronavirus like that in recent memory. Here, though, there is a slate of tools available. We’ve dealt with big flu outbreaks. We know what flu can do. We know that flu, in general, can move from animals into humans. We’ve seen this particular virus actually move into people in different contexts across the world.

Lora: Have we missed the opportunity to mitigate the spread of bird flu?

Katherine: Because there has not yet been evidence of sustained human-to-human transmission, there is still time to intervene. Did officials miss some opportunities to intervene more and earlier? Yes. But that doesn’t mean that from here the attitude should be I guess we should just let this roll.

Lora: We may have RFK Jr., a vaccine skeptic, leading the Department of Health and Human Services soon. How might his leadership affect the bird-flu response?

Katherine: I don’t think there is a need to roll out bird-flu vaccines to the general public yet. But I think there are likely to be major changes to public-health policy in this country. RFK Jr. has specifically said that the National Institutes of Health will be taking a break from focusing on infectious disease for the next few years, and that doesn’t bode terribly well. Infectious diseases are not going to take a break from us.

Lora: Are there lessons from the COVID era that the public should better absorb in order to deal with illness more broadly?

Katherine: To be fair, it’s hard to avoid getting sick in general, especially at this time of year. During the worst of the pandemic, when people were still masking more consistently and not going into public places, we did get sick a lot less often because we were avoiding each other.

That said, I think people did forget very, very quickly that the things that worked against COVID work well against a lot of other diseases, especially other respiratory viruses. I am not saying that we all need to go back to masking 24/7 and never going to school or work in person. But maybe don’t go to work when you’re sick—a practice that all employers should enable. Maybe don't send your child to day care sick. Maybe don’t sneeze into your hand and then rub your hand all over the subway railing. Wash your hands a lot.

Unfortunately, there is this tendency for a really binary response of doing everything or nothing. Right now, people seem to be leaning toward doing nothing, because they are fatigued from what they felt like was an era of doing everything. But there’s a middle ground here too.

Related:

Bird flu is a national embarrassment. America’s infectious-disease barometer is off. (From April)

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

MAGA’s demon-haunted world How Trump made Biden’s Gaza peace plan happen David Frum: Justin Trudeau’s performative self-regard The one Trump pick Democrats actually like

Today’s News

Israel and Hamas have agreed to a 42-day cease-fire deal that will include an exchange of hostages and prisoners, President Joe Biden announced. Senate confirmation hearings were held for multiple Trump-administration nominees, including Pam Bondi for attorney general and Marco Rubio for secretary of state. During Bondi’s testimony, she refused to say that President-Elect Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. South Korea’s impeached president, Yoon Suk Yeol, was detained and questioned last night over his attempt to impose martial law last month.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

The Hipster Grifter Peaked Too Soon

By Sophie Gilbert

In the spring of 2009, Vice published a blog post, notorious even by its own standards, titled “Department of Oopsies!—We Hired a Grifter.” An employee had started chatting with the magazine’s new executive assistant, Kari Ferrell; after she reportedly began coming on to him over instant messages, he Googled her, only to find out that she was on the Salt Lake City Police Department’s most-wanted list. Instead of simply firing Ferrell, Vice outed her online.

Read the full article.

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In the spring of 2009, Vice published a blog post, notorious even by its own standards, titled “Department of Oopsies!—We Hired a Grifter.” An employee had started chatting with the magazine’s new executive assistant, Kari Ferrell; after she reportedly began coming on to him over instant messages, he Googled her, only to find out that she was on the Salt Lake City Police Department’s most-wanted list. Instead of simply firing Ferrell, Vice outed her online, confessing that it probably should have done a cursory search before hiring someone with “less-than-desirable traits, like, say, five outstanding warrants for fraud.” Oopsie! Read it now and you might find the post unrepentantly confessional in a prescient kind of way, anticipating a future in which any sin or failure can be transfigurated as long as it makes for good-enough content.

Which is to say: The fact that only now is Ferrell profiting from her own story illustrates how innocent—easily shocked, even—we once were, and what brazen shamelessness we’ve since come to accept as normal. In 2009, Ferrell’s unfortunate tendency toward pathological lying and light theft made her the internet’s main character for weeks on end. She was fodder for countless Gawker updates and a detailed profile in The Observer titled “The Hipster Grifter” before she ended up serving time in jail and changing her name to evade her past. Conversely, consider Billy McFarland of Fyre Festival fame, sentenced to prison in 2018 for defrauding investors of more than $26 million, who, during the 2024 presidential campaign, served as a conduit between rappers and Donald Trump. Or Anna Delvey, convicted in 2019 for stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars while posing as an art-world heiress, who, since her jail stint, has gained more than 1 million Instagram followers and drew attention for a recent appearance on Dancing With the Stars in which her court-mandated ankle bracelet featured prominently.

[Read: The scams are winning]

You can understand why Ferrell might think it’s well past time for a comeback. Her new memoir, You’ll Never Believe Me, is subtitled A Life of Lies, Second Tries, and Things I Should Only Tell My Therapist, as if to sublimate the unreliability of its narrator into an honest and unfiltered account. And, for the most part, it works. Ferrell is, as she herself confesses, a gifted communicator and manipulator of words, charming and garrulous and breezily intimate. Her story is compelling by any standard. She tells us she still doesn’t know exactly why she did what she did: tricking her closest friends into cashing bad checks, leaving one on the hook for thousands in bail fees; lying about having terminal cancer; seducing easy marks by writing them notes in which she invited them to “throw a hot dog down my hall.” (Her Instagram handle is still “hotdoghandjobs.”) But she is at least willing to consider the question—which these days is perhaps as much as we can ask for.

New York, in the spring of 2009, was still reeling from the financial crisis, which had revealed profiteering and scammery to be essential American traditions. The implosion of the global economy had fostered a kind of hedonistic nihilism among many recent graduates, which Ferrell worked to her (minimal, it turned out) advantage. But there also just wasn’t that much happening online yet—it was the era after Myspace had normalized online connection and before Instagram had turned creative self-branding into a viable career—which helps explain why the exposure of a very small-time Brooklyn grifter with a prominent chest tattoo fascinated people so much. After The Observer’s Doree Shafrir ran a lengthy feature on Ferrell, uncovering her history of conning her friends and lovers, she became an obsession at Gawker, Gothamist, and other New York–area publications. She was an origin story for an enduring generational cliché: the feckless, inked-up Millennial indulging in petty larceny and shameless self-mythologizing for avocado toast and a Viceland email address. (Remember Hannah Horvath on Girls, quietly filching the cash her parents had left for their hotel maid?)

Ferrell resists this kind of lazy stereotyping. She is, and has only ever been, she insists, entirely her own person. The early chapters of her memoir act as a kind of ABCs of scamming, trying to lightly analyze how she might have been led astray. Adopted from South Korea as a baby, she was raised lovingly by parents who did their best, recalling a home where household goods were often purchased on layaway. When Ferrell was 2, her parents became Mormon converts, packing their family up and moving to Salt Lake City. Ferrell credits Sunday services for providing her with what she describes as “a MasterClass in manipulation,” and a doctor who put her on a diet as a child for unintentionally teaching her to lie (to her parents, about what she’d eaten that day). She writes that, as a teenager, she shoplifted with enthusiasm from big-box stores, as did her friends, but also had a gun drawn on her once for stealing a Sidekick from an acquaintance’s little sister.

With regard to her first con, which she orchestrated in Utah when she was 18, Ferrell writes, “It all sort of happened.” The mark was Charlie, her “brilliant, emotionally mature … caring, and trusting” boyfriend at the time; the scam was to get him to cash a check from her at his bank and pass her the funds (which she didn’t have in her account). That was it. After scoring her first $500 from Charlie, Ferrell repeated the scheme with other friends and acquaintances, sometimes ripping off new people to pay back the old ones when the checks bounced. “I didn’t steal money for drugs,” she writes. “I stole money in hopes that people wouldn’t forget me.” I’m not a therapist, but it’s hard not to psychoanalyze Ferrell’s behavior: the need to feel loved and tended to, coupled with the compulsion to lie and steal, forcing the people closest to her to reject her in ways that would ultimately affirm her worldview. When she was arrested for check fraud, identity fraud, and forgery, she marveled at how flattering her mug shot was and wondered whether she could buy it as a high-res print. She then persuaded another friend to pay her bail, before skipping town when a group of her victims banged on her door demanding their money back.

[Read: Millennial burnout is being televised]

Ferrell fled Utah for New York, where she had dreams of working at Vice or some other idealized cult brand. At first, she wanted to turn over a new leaf. But, she writes somewhat unconvincingly, she “grappled with how to be good in a world that punishes kind people. Mr. Rogers always said to ‘look for the helpers’ in times of turmoil, but whenever I found them they’d be getting kicked in the face by a richer, more ambitious person in power.” Still, she insists, “I didn’t want to blame the world for the way I was.” She’d often laser in on men at parties and concerts, send them sexually aggressive notes, and then pinch whatever she could from them. She’d reportedly love-bomb friends with offers of VIP passes; if they proved resistant, she’d occasionally tell them she had terminal cancer or a psychotic ex-boyfriend who was threatening her, or that she was pregnant. (Not all of this is in the book—I’m relying on other sources.) “I could have gone anywhere to find my marks, but I liked to shit where I ate,” Ferrell writes. This was ultimately her downfall—when her mug shot first appeared online, it wasn’t hard for gossip bloggers to find people who knew her. Some even had Ferrell stories of their own.

A strong personal brand is helpful for a Millennial internet personality; it’s less so for a con artist. You might wonder why people got so caught up with what Ferrell was alleged to have done at the time, given the $1.3 trillion value of subprime loans in 2007, or the $18 billion lost in Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme before his arrest in 2008. But the reality is that money lost to institutions can feel depressingly clinical. The betrayal of being robbed by a friend, or a lover, or a hipster with a pixie cut who likes all the same music you do and signs her notes “Korean Abdul-Jabbar,” is different—more intimate, and much harder to anticipate. Combine this dynamic with revelations about Ferrell trying to scam for things as trivial as Flight of the Conchords DVDs and cab fare, and you have all the absurd, small-scale ingredients for a bona fide internet spectacle.

The title of Ferrell’s memoir is, if you recall, You’ll Never Believe Me, and we probably shouldn’t—there’s enough that she seems to omit, or gloss over, that her account is best taken as an interpretation of events rather than as historical record. But she’s commendable for the ways in which she does try to confess, reflect, self-analyze, adjudicate. Her inability to check her worst impulses seems to have caused her considerable pain, to the point that when she was finally arrested, she writes, she was smiling in the photos—“an expression of pure relief.” Of all the infamous, shameless scammers who emerged after her, none has tried as she has to wrestle with the need to cheat others and the psychology behind the art of the steal. For that, consider You’ll Never Believe Me a job worth waiting for.

The country is deeply polarised by the president's attempt to impose martial law.

South Korea's President Yoon Suk-yeol arrested by anti-corruption agency after weeks-long standoff