Month: January 2024

Former President Donald Trump won big in Iowa. Join Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway and Senior Editor David Harsanyi as they break down the future of the 2024 Republican primary, explain why calling elections early interferes with voters' decisions, and analyze Nikki Haley's standing with conservatives. Mollie and David also quibble with the historical inaccuracies in "The Chosen" and share their excitement about 1970s movies.

If you care about combatting the corrupt media that continues to inflict devastating damage, please give a gift to help The Federalist do the real journalism that America needs.

Hello!

In today’s episode, we talk about Octavia Butler’s “The Parable of the Sower,” a science fiction novel from 1992 that unexpectedly found itself on the best seller’s list in 2020. The novel imagines a violent and grim future in which the world has warmed beyond safe inhabitation, the lucky get to live in walled off communities while the poor all kill one another in the streets. We talk about visions of climate apocalypse and how Butler, through no fault of her own, might have created a hegemonic vision of a warmed earth, one that has become almost cliche in the thirty years since Sower’s publication. Why don’t we have other, new visions for climate death? What would those even look like?

We also get a bit into a recent article in The Atlantic about Butler and her use of “historofuturism” in her work.

And we talk a bit about the state of the Black quarterback and muse on why Lamar Jackson might get a more traditional, sports-talk-racist treatment than other Black quarterbacks in the league.

We will be continuing our look into extinction literature next week with a look at Becky Chambers’s “A Psalm for the Wild-Built.” If you’d like to read it before the show, please do so!

As always, if you’d like to upgrade your subscription and help support the show, we rely on your contributions to keep it going. Please click over and help us for $5 a month!

— TTSG

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It’s been four years since the first American death from the coronavirus.

Four years since we were told that wearing masks—even cloth masks—were essential to keeping us safe. The same goes for lockdowns and social distancing. Any inconvenience to society was outweighed by the lives saved. 

And remember what President Biden told us after Covid vaccines were rolled out a year later?

“The CDC is saying, they have concluded, that fully vaccinated people are at a very, very low risk of getting Covid-19,” Biden said in a Rose Garden press conference.

We now know that so much of what we were told in those years was wrong. (Last week, Anthony Fauci admitted in closed-door congressional testimony that the six-feet apart rule was “likely not based on scientific data.”) And if the guidance wasn’t flat-out wrong, it was certainly debatable. But debate was not only discouraged—it was shut down. Respected dissident scientists were dismissed as fringe scientists. They were deplatformed on social media.

For most of us, all of this seems like a lifetime ago. But the problem is that here we are, four years later; millions of Americans suffered, more than a million died, and it’s not clear we have any better understanding of what exactly went wrong. How was it that our leaders—and our economy—were so brutally underprepared for a global pandemic?

That’s what today’s conversation on Honestly is about.

Guest host Michael Moynihan talks to The Free Press’s own Joe Nocera about his new book, co-authored with Bethany McLean: The Big Fail: What the Pandemic Revealed About Who America Protects and Who It Leaves Behind.

The Big Fail takes a critical look at what the pandemic uncovered about our leaders, our broken trust in government, and the vulnerability of the biggest economy in the world. Nocera also investigates the perverse incentives (and devastating effects) of hospital systems and nursing homes run by private equity firms. All this makes him ask: Does capitalism have its limitations when it comes to healthcare?

Most importantly: Are we able to learn our lesson from the Covid pandemic and do better when the next emergency hits us?

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