Understanding Other Realities
In life and also in our brain-smoothing TV shows.
Today we learn how to fight anti-vaxxers by not fighting them anymore, evade a rage aneurysm while reading about Gary Shteyngart’s watch collection, and enter a fugue state of semiconsciousness in which And Just Like That … just makes sense. —Emily Gould
MAHA MADNESS!
We’re Talking to Anti-Vaxxers All Wrong
Physician Rachael Bedard says it’s time to accept that some public-health battles have been lost for good and pivot to figuring out what we can do now.
I chatted with Rachael Bedard (who, full disclosure, is my friend) about the fire article she published today, examining the limits of the “anti-science” argument when it comes to RFK Jr. and vaccine skepticism.
You do a really good job of explaining why responding to the MAHA agenda by continuing to reiterate “THESE ARE THE FACTS” is not working and will never work. First, how did we get here? It still feels shocking to me, like, “I can’t believe we’re even having this discussion!” Yet here we are.
RFK Jr. is a zealot for a cause in a way that makes him much more dangerous than someone like him would be if he were merely another charlatan grifter. Frankly, I think he's less transactional and more committed to his vision. But what that vision is has been a little bit undertheorized because we don't talk a lot about what his driving values are. Instead, we attack the facts that he advances on behalf of his case.
So we're in this endless fight with him about whether he is right or wrong about vaccines. Meanwhile, we lose people every year. Every year, the number of Americans who describe themselves as vaccine hesitant or report that they are spreading out or delaying vaccines for their children grows. We don't gain people back; we just lose them. And so he's speaking to something very real and shouting facts at him back is just not a persuasive strategy either to convince him that he's doing the wrong thing or to convince the public that he's doing the wrong thing.
Yeah, no one's about to be like, “Oh, thank you for this information. I can see that I have been wrong.”
And really that's because for people to be receptive to the information that you are offering them, they have to trust you. And for people to trust, they have to feel that you have their best interest at heart or that their values and your values are aligned in some way. The academic public-health Establishment and scientific Establishments have not done a great job over the last five years at getting people to trust us who didn't already trust us or who haven't become more inclined to trust us because of polarization.
When you tell people “Wear masks, don’t wear masks, it's on surfaces, oh, it's not on surfaces,” a lot of people are going to be like, “Okay, I am never going to believe anything you say ever again.” That's completely understandable.
People made hard decisions with the best information they had available to them. They wanted to communicate with a level of clarity. But then what happened is when they had to revise those decisions, which is understandable, the way that those revisions were communicated didn't quite convey either “Here's how we got it wrong before” or “Here's why we know more now.” So they didn't really accept any accountability.
In general, there's just been a lack of nuance and acknowledgment of uncertainty for a long time in the way that public health has communicated with the public. And not just public health but medicine in general. For the last 45 years, the most interesting dynamic in medicine has been this tension around the democratization of science. Who decides what should happen to a woman's breast cancer — the patient or her oncologist, right? That's the question Susan Sontag wrote about. That's at the heart of ACT UP and the AIDS movement. So they’re way before RFK Jr., way before the internet even. There have been these tensions, but those tensions were being managed for a long time still within science or in a way where science was sort of deciding how much to open the gate and how much to keep it closed. The internet blew the gate off. I think we're failing because of the way that we have miscategorized the fight we're having right now as a fight about science instead of a fight about politics.
We can't put this toothpaste back in the tube. What do we do? What should we do now? Where do we go from here?
First, we have to categorize the fight correctly. There are already other issues in health that we recognize as political. Do we want single-payer health care or not? There are facts implicit in that debate. Obviously taking Medicaid away from people is going to kill people. Those are facts borne out in tons and tons of evidence, but we're not debating the veracity of that fact. We're talking about power and how to get it back and how to exercise it. And then we also think about protection strategies that are like, okay, if at the federal level we're going to lose this, what can be done at the state level? What can be done at the local level?
If public health is going to be so defensive against any move Kennedy makes, it also has to become more explicitly partisan. Being more explicitly engaged in electoral politics feels like something that we should do rather than holding our noses about that part.
I also think we have to think really hard about what it looks like to develop and elevate trusted messengers and communicators. I have a friend who says the thing that America needs more than anything is a new Oprah, and that feels true to me. I am way, way less interested in male alienation than I am in what it would look like to put more women in thought-leadership roles.
Just getting to the place where we can have a conversation without anyone storming out of the room forever would be huge.
There wasn't a way for me to put this in the piece, but the right comparison case for vaccines is nuclear technology. We figured out nuclear energy is a miracle. It's incredibly complicated. We figured out a way to create a ton of abundant power with very few downsides in a way that's environmentally sustainable. And then because of a few high-profile incidents and political stigma, that became politically toxic and we stopped expanding its use and we started to shut down nuclear plants. That's really interesting to me as a comp case for vaccines, which are also this technology that's a miracle where for various reasons they've become stigmatized and people are very fearful about them now and they don't want to take them. And so practice is changing; even if the science is there, what do we do?
Thank you, Rachael. Please be the new Oprah!!
BOOK GOSSIP
The New York Times Is Trying to Rage-Bait Us Into Hating Gary Shteyngart
But it just won’t work. He’s a mensch who blurbs everyone. After what happened to his schmeckel, let him have his little watches!
In the interest of brevity, I will bullet-point my reactions to Alexander Nazaryan’s profile of the author, headlined “Is Gary Shteyngart One of the Last Novelists to Make Money Real From the Craft?” in the order that I had them. Come along on this journey.
This headline is such classic Timesian bullshit. Getting us in the door by asking a question the article absolutely does not answer and is also a ridiculous, bad-faith question. Of COURSE Gary Shteyngart is not “one of the last” “novelists” to make “real money” from “the craft,” unless Emily Henry et al. do not count as novelists. Excuse me, have you seen Roxane Gay’s home tour? (JUST SAY MEN IF THAT’S WHAT YOU MEAN, NEW YORK TIMES! ARGGH!!)
Wow, okay, that’s a lot of very expensive watches. What’s with Soviet people and watches? He’s not the only one I know of who collects them. I understand the need to fill a gaping hole left by childhood deprivation with stuff, but why watches specifically? It’s a mystery …
He wears a $10,000 suit … that he got for free after writing about it. What obscene wealth!
He has a new book out, and this visit to an expensive boutique, a fancy restaurant, and his upstate home is meant to … make us want to run out and buy this book? I’m going to be generous and assume that his publicity team at Random House begged him not to do this rather than pitched the idea.
Oh my God, I forgot about his botched circumcision and its aftermath. Dear God, let this man have as many watches and suits and houses as he needs.
His wife is an attorney … okay … and that has nothing whatsoever to do with his house upstate, watch collection, fancy martini-lunch habit, et cetera. GARY SHTEYNGART, RELEASE YOUR TAX RETURNS!!!!
(Deep breaths). “The hair knot around my skin bridge could not be prized loose using tweezers, and any attempts to dislodge it with my fingers only tightened it around the string of superfluous skin.” Okay. okay. Have another martini on me, Gary.
WORLDS WITHIN WORLDS
And Just Like That … Is Basically Twin Peaks: The Return
Close-reading the show we can’t stop watching, even though it hurts us more every time.
“And Just Like That … takes place in a reality that resembles ours but is not, a reality unbound by certain natural laws that we take for granted as constant and unshakable. By extension, Sex and the City takes place in this world, too. Maybe it’s a world in a dream, or maybe just a world resembling a dream. The pacing of And Just Like That … often resembles a sort of flowy, ambling dream state already, where it’s unclear where these characters are in space or time, how their stories are relating to each other, or where the stakes are supposed to be. Events presented as normal plot points also take the form of events in a dream; on the surface, they’re explained and received plainly, but when you try to return to them in the light of day, they make no sense at all.”
Rebecca Alter, writing in this material plane of existence, finds a plausible explanation for the fact that Lisa Todd Wexley’s dad has died twice on And Just Like That … that’s far more interesting than HBO’s flailing “the first one was her stepdad” attempted retcon.
Click Your Way Out
Please don’t overdose on turmeric supplements, but if you do, please write about it.
Go ahead and hire an escort for your 70th birthday! Have all the escorts and watches you want, people. Life is short and hard!
Bookshop is doing free shipping until the 11th, and it did a very clever little IG post about it.
On the other hand, the Strategist is live-blogging Prime Day.
What happened this morning, MTAologically, can never happen again.