On this fifth anniversary of the Covid pandemic, there is ample examination of what America got wrong. But what America got right was the astonishingly quick development of effective vaccines.
That effort, Operation Warp Speed, began toward the end of President Trump’s first term in the White House. He crowed about it — deservedly, because it probably saved millions of American lives. But he clearly didn’t understand the lessons of its success.
Those vaccines synthesized decades of scientific research. But the Trump administration is taking a hatchet to such experiments and scholarship now.
Those vaccines were hastened by an instant infusion of enormous federal spending. But the Trump administration is currently trying to stanch the flow of such money to organizations, including universities, that will nurture tomorrow’s most consequential discoveries.
That makes zero sense in the context of Trump’s past experience in the presidency. It’s even less logical in the context of his promise to lift the United States to new peaks of glory and make us the envy of the world.
Among our most significant competitive advantages are our scientists, our laboratories, our system of higher education. They’re a kind of superpower, their output an engine of our wealth — of frontier-expanding technology, medical breakthroughs and production innovations that enrich companies as they improve lives.
But Trump doesn’t seem to get that. Doesn’t want to get that. Gets only that the wonky and effete denizens of the world of ideas aren’t his people, aren’t guaranteed supporters, don’t lavishly praise him and sometimes dare to disparage him. They need their comeuppance, no matter how much damage it does to everyone else.
And it’s not just professors ambling among centuries-old buildings on ivy-fringed campuses who must be put in their place. It’s just about anyone and everyone involved in the existing infrastructure of education. On Tuesday his administration announced that it was firing more than 1,300 workers in the federal Department of Education, which had already been reduced by more than 600 workers since Trump took office. That will leave it with roughly half the number of employees it had just two months ago.
Trump and his allies would clearly prefer even fewer than that; they have spoken repeatedly of eliminating the department — which, to be fair, has suffered over time from a fuzzy purpose, shifting vogues and a bevy of inanities. It’s almost nobody’s vision of government at its finest.
But how would its erasure improve the shameful reading and math scores of America’s schoolchildren? Administration officials don’t really say. They just see an unruly forest, itch to bulldoze it and have no clearly articulated plan for seeding new maples, fresh elms or even a single scraggly Charlie Brown Christmas tree.
That destructive impulse carries over to the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the nation’s universities — all of which surely have their own problems. I can speak best to universities, because I work at one and have visited and written about many others, and I concede that higher education in this country has paid inadequate heed to ideological diversity, been inconsistent about free speech and frequently fallen too hard for intellectual fashions. It has some fat in it, absolutely — what mission of its scope doesn’t?
But Trump and his allies aren’t recommending a diet. More like starvation. And they’re not saying much at all about the side effects, not giving us any assurances — no credible ones, at least — that on the far side of their demonization and diminution of this country’s colleges and universities, America will stand as tall and bright as it did before Trump started meting out his punishments, so many of them so very petty.
Ever inconsistent, Trump has at times expressed admiration for learned, brainy people. He bragged during his first term about having the highest-I.Q. cabinet ever. He has repeatedly mentioned an uncle who was a professor at M.I.T. as proof of family genius. M.I.T. is a curious fixation: He reportedly told Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy that he should hire air traffic controllers from that elite school.
But Trump also derides learning and mostly despises intellectualism. And he often signals that. During his 2016 campaign, for infamous example, he proclaimed, “I love the poorly educated.”
I despise some intellectualism, too, the kind that’s streaked with arrogance, stippled with condescension and as closed off to dissent as Trump is. But that’s not all or even most of it. Intellectualism has served America well, putting us far, far ahead of any other nation in our tally of science-related Nobel Prizes, many of them won by immigrants who came here because of a welcoming climate and prodigious resources for scientists. We degrade that climate and deplete those resources at our peril.
Intellectualism, science, education — and respect and funding for all three — are what positioned Operation Warp Speed to operate at warp speed. They gave Trump something big to brag about. How can he of all egomaniacs sacrifice the boasts of the future?
For the Love of Sentences
Much of the most spirited journalism these days is about the president and his cracked, corrupt coterie, but I want every so often to leave them out of this section of the newsletter. They’re gone this week. I’ll save some of the best recent prose about them for next week. Meantime …
In her newsletter, Fresh Hell, Tina Brown registered her disenchantment with Meghan Markle’s new Netflix reality series: “‘With Love, Meghan’ never really recovers from its preposterous opening scene of Meghan, dressed in a veiled beekeeper’s spacesuit, whispering with her apiarist about the wonder of bees. (But is the apiarist really hers? The house where the show is shot isn’t. Perhaps he was found on Air Bee and Bee.)” (Thanks to Stephanie Cooper Greenberg of Baltimore for nominating this.)
In The Atlantic, Rachel Sugar questioned many Americans’ quests for a weeknight meal that they themselves prepare, sort of, but that equals the ease of delivery or takeout minus the impersonal stamp: “The notion that there is a permanent way out — a hack, a kit, a service that gives you all the benefits of dinner cooked from scratch without the labor — is an illusion. You cannot have a meal that both is and is not homemade: Schrödinger’s salmon over couscous with broccoli rabe.” (Nan Valrance, Apex, N.C.)
In The New Yorker, Rebecca Mead appraised recent books that spoke to a surge of interest in menopause: “Each of the three volumes vies to be the must-have companion for women of a certain age, a thumbed copy on the night stand of a sweat-drenched bed — a kind of ‘What to Expect When You’re Exploding.’” (Stephanie Leveene, Hayward, Calif.)
Also in The New Yorker, Ruth Marcus, who recently resigned from The Washington Post, explained that she and other columnists were confused by the Post owner Jeff Bezos’ new edict that the Opinions section write only in favor of “personal liberties and free markets”: “Without further clarification, we were like dogs that had been fitted with shock collars but had no clue where the invisible fence was.” (Susan Casey, Palm City, Fla.)
In The Times, Rhonda Garelick interpreted an enormous balloon in Times Square that depicted Kim Kardashian in a tiny blue bikini and hawked her Skims company’s new swimwear: “This structure was not a portrait or a sculpture of Ms. Kardashian, but rather a very faithful recreation of the workings of Ms. Kardashian’s empire, which is built on the meticulously crafted project she has made of her body — a collection of highly public, highly exposed curves and spheres, sculpted and polished to perfection, displayed according to Ms. Kardashian’s diktats, and offered up as a series of ideals to be aspired to and emulated via the purchase of products.” Rhonda also described Balloon Kim as a “pure, impenetrable surface, self-contained and aloof. A pneumatic odalisque for our times.” (Walter Cain, Piermont, N.Y., and Maria Jette, Minneapolis)
In The Washington Post, Catherine Rampell explored the challenge of bringing down the prices of supermarket staples: “Importing more eggs has proved complicated, though, and so far there’s not much additional poultry in motion.” (Jim Kazmierczak, Madison, Wis.)
In The Seattle Times, Danny Westneat expressed doubt that Gov. Bob Ferguson of Washington could forge an acceptable compromise between the state’s Democrats and Republicans: “Ferguson is going old-school to try to straddle the two parties on budget issues. But when they’re this far apart, he might just end up doing the splits.” (Nancy Dillingham Waite, Sammamish, Wash.)
And in the newsletter The View from Rural Missouri, Jess Piper reflected on Democrats’ desire to reconnect with middle-class voters without college degrees: “Everyone wants a quick fix, but that’s not how this works. It looks like overalls, not a tuxedo. It’s manual labor, not a desk job.” (Jane Colombino, San Diego)
To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.
What I’m Doing, Reading, Watching and Listening To
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What has been most alarming about Trump’s first 50 days? While the possible answers are infinite, my Times colleagues Patrick Healy and Michelle Goldberg and I focus on a few of the most disturbing developments in this episode of the “Opinions” podcast, published yesterday.
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If you’re in or around Stuart, Fla., on Tuesday, March 25, I’ll be discussing many Americans’ strained relationship with higher education and with the news media at Temple Beit HaYam, as part of the Rappaport Speaker Series. Ticketing information is here.
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You should see Maureen Dowd at work on a profile. Actually, if you write the occasional profile yourself, you shouldn’t, because her example — her industriousness — is daunting. By reading everything that she can get her hands on, by talking to any relevant source who will take a call, Maureen spelunks deep into the hidden recesses of her subjects’ lives. Many times over many years, I’ve watched her, I’ve marveled and, upon a profile’s publication, I’ve thought I should tuck it away, save it forevermore. Alas, Maureen has done that for me. For us. A collection of her profiles, “Notorious,” was published on Tuesday, and its reach — into Washington, into Hollywood, into Silicon Valley — makes it a chronicle, equal parts juicy and wise, of the past several decades of American life.
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Remember how good Naomie Harris was as the protagonist’s drug-addicted mother in “Moonlight”? She’s superb as well in “The Wasp,” which is now streaming (on Amazon Prime and Apple TV+, for example). It’s not a great movie; its final minutes are preposterous (though audacious!). But if you keep your expectations in check and go in knowing little about the plot, you may well be impressed by its revelations and twists. You’ll definitely be wowed by Harris and her equally talented co-star, Natalie Dormer.
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I’ve praised Rickie Lee Jones before, in this 2022 edition of the newsletter. I’m a big fan of her best work, and I qualify my regard that way because she grew more eccentric, erratic and self-indulgent over time. But one of her sustained hallmarks was her excellent judgment about blending other voices with her own and having them swirl around and dissolve into the instruments in the mix. On her fourth full-length studio album, “Flying Cowboys,” there’s a wisp of a song near the end, “Away from the Sky,” with a subtle melody that tiptoes along for two verses and two minutes before reaching a gorgeous, glorious chorus. That chorus is merely the four words in the song’s title, over and over, sung by a collection of rich voices in delicate harmony. Whenever I’m down, it lifts me up.
On a Personal (By Which I Mean Regan) Note
Speaking of pick-me-ups: Regan. Sweet, steadfast Regan. It’s now almost four months to the day since she had major knee surgery and commenced a precisely scripted, tediously paced recovery. And what progress she has made! Several times over the past week, we’ve done woodland walks of nearly four miles. Not bad for any 11-year-old dog, let alone one who had no use of one of her hind legs just before the operation.
Her gait at times is perceptibly asymmetrical. She darts less and idles more. But I can feel her growing confidence. I can sense her welling joy. And I’m suffused with gratitude, not only for this outcome but also for her composure and forbearance en route to it.
I know: She didn’t have any choice, and dogs naturally persevere, doing or not doing whatever they must to get through the next hour and then the hour after that. But she was also served by her gentle disposition. By her patience. And, above all, by her trust in me.
I’ll cop anew to my and other dog lovers’ tendency to anthropomorphize our beloveds. My reads of Regan could be wrong. But I’d bet everything I own that she succeeded in beating back her fear about all the strange things happening to her because, on some level, she maintained a correct faith that I would keep anything too awful at bay. When I began to push her to move more or to try the stairs again, she assumed I had a reason for that. Bottom line: She felt protected. Safe.
There’s a lesson for humans in that. When we’re navigating our workplaces, forging our friendships, committing to our romantic relationships, few things should be more important to us than placing ourselves among and with people we trust. There’s no steadiness without that. No thriving, either.
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