On #DavidRemnick. The @newyorker.com has some great science writers. But there is an affinity high-up for COVID contrarianism: Jessica Winter's piece on school closures, Dan Immerwahr's ode to "In COVID's Wake," & the best of 2025 for that book. 1/ Something to note-it's not the science writers who are doing these stories. Easy enough to ask your best to write on these subjects, but the editorial choice here is to eschew scientific expertise and experience. 2/ So all of a sudden you are lifting up David Zweig, with ties to far-right Brownstone Institute, or those who have drunk the Kool-Aid of the Great Barrington Declaration (Macedo and Lee, when they're not waxing sentimental over Jay Bhattacharya) as your go-to-sources. 3/ #Remnick also had their religion/culture reporter do a piece on COVID back in 2023 that was so terrible, I wrote about it for The Nation. 4/ thenation.com
www.thenation.com
All of these form a genre for #Remnick, a departure from the science mainstream, playing footsie with the far-right purveyors of conspiracy theories and pseudoscience, based on a vibes-based instinct that gives him someone to blame for the pandemic. 5/ I mention this because it is just so odd and out-of-character in the context of their other health and science reporting. 6/ It also bears notice because the people that #Remnick is getting in bed with are the same people who are tearing down public health and science in America as we speak. 7/ Displacement of the trauma we all experienced from this pandemic has been exploited in so many ways, but the mainstreaming of COVID contrarianism in the pages of @newyorker.com is a sad affair. 8/ Worse yet, it gives cover to those in the Trump administration who have used people's anger about the pandemic for their own ideological purposes. 9/ Even now, the destruction these people have caused put lives at risk--public health and scientific institutions are on the brink--and it is getting late in the hour to pull back from the precipice. 10/ Of course, we still have great science and health reporters in the US, at @science.org, @nature.com, @statnews.com and generalist outlets like @wired.com, @propublica.org doing great work, but mainstream journalism has let us down once again. end/