Atul Gawande on Elon Musk’s “Surgery with a Chainsaw”

Atul Gawande on Elon Musk’s “Surgery with a Chainsaw”

Two weeks after the Inauguration of Donald Trump, Elon Musk tweeted, “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into a wood chipper.” Musk was referring to the Agency for International Development, an agency which supports global health and economic development, and which has saved millions of lives around the world. “A viper’s nest of radical-left lunatics,” Musk called it. U.S.A.I.D.’s funding is authorized by Congress, and its work is a crucial element of American soft power. DOGE has decimated the agency with cuts so sudden and precipitous that federal workers stationed in conflict zones were stranded without safe passage home, as their own government publicly maligned them for alleged fraud and corruption. Courts have blocked aspects of the federal purge of U.S.A.I.D., but it’s not clear if workers can be rehired and contracts restarted, or whether the damage is done.

In January, 2022, Atul Gawande, a surgeon and leading public health expert who has written for The New Yorker since 1998, was sworn in as assistant administrator for global health at U.S.A.I.D. He resigned as the new administration came to power, and is watching in shock as Trump and Musk make U.S.A.I.D. a guinea pig for the government-wide purge now under way. U.S.A.I.D. was, he admits, a soft target for MAGA—helping people in faraway countries. Gawande calls U.S.A.I.D. “America at its best.” But with Trump and Musk, “there’s a different world view at play here,” he says. “Power is what matters, not impact.”

Jaksot(1020)

John Brennan, Former C.I.A. Director, on Being Targeted by Trump

John Brennan, Former C.I.A. Director, on Being Targeted by Trump

In Donald Trump’s first term, he was furious that people were investigating his connections to Russia—“Russia, Russia, Russia,” he complained. Now, as Trump fulfills a campaign promise of retribution,...

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Dexter Filkins on Drones and the Future of Warfare

Dexter Filkins on Drones and the Future of Warfare

Since the end of the Cold War, most Americans have taken U.S. military supremacy for granted. We can no longer afford to do so, according to reporting by the staff writer Dexter Filkins. China has dev...

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Mayor Karen Bass on Marines in Los Angeles

Mayor Karen Bass on Marines in Los Angeles

The city of Los Angeles has declared itself a sanctuary city, where local authorities do not share information with federal immigration enforcement. But L.A.—where nearly forty per cent of residents a...

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Director Ari Aster Explains His COVID-Era Western “Eddington”

Director Ari Aster Explains His COVID-Era Western “Eddington”

“I’m personally desperate for art that at least attempts to grapple with whatever the hell is going on right now,” the writer-director Ari Aster tells Adam Howard, a senior producer of the Radio Hour....

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Michael Wolff on MAGA’s Revolt Over Jeffrey Epstein

Michael Wolff on MAGA’s Revolt Over Jeffrey Epstein

The sense that the White House is covering something up about Jeffrey Epstein has led to backlash from some of Trump’s most ardent supporters. Even after the financier was convicted for hiring an unde...

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Carrie Brownstein on Cat Power. Plus, “Materialists,” “Too Much,” and the Modern Rom-Com.

Carrie Brownstein on Cat Power. Plus, “Materialists,” “Too Much,” and the Modern Rom-Com.

For The New Yorker’s series Takes, Carrie Brownstein—the co-creator of Sleater-Kinney and “Portlandia”—writes about an iconic rock-and-roll image. In the summer of 2003, the musician Chan Marshall, be...

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Janet Yellen on the Danger of a “Banana Republic” Economy. Plus, Susan B. Glasser on Why “We Are the Boiled Frog.”

Janet Yellen on the Danger of a “Banana Republic” Economy. Plus, Susan B. Glasser on Why “We Are the Boiled Frog.”

In conservative economics, cuts to social services are often seen as necessary to shrink the expanding deficit. Donald Trump’s budget bill is something altogether different: it cuts Medicaid while sla...

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Kalief Browder: A Decade Later

Kalief Browder: A Decade Later

Kalief Browder was jailed at Rikers Island at the age of sixteen; he spent three years locked up without ever being convicted of a crime, and much of that time was spent in solitary confinement. In 20...

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