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.”

Episoder(1018)

How the Trump Administration Made Higher Education a Target

How the Trump Administration Made Higher Education a Target

The swiftness and severity with which the Trump Administration has tried to impose its will on higher education came as a shock to many, not least university presidents and faculties from Harvard to U...

17 Okt 202529min

John Carpenter Picks Three Favorite Film Scores

John Carpenter Picks Three Favorite Film Scores

The filmmaker John Carpenter has a whole shelf of cult classics: “They Live,” “The Thing,” “Escape from New York,” “Halloween,” and so many more. And while he hasn’t directed a new movie in more than ...

14 Okt 202512min

Zohran Mamdani Says He's Ready for Donald Trump

Zohran Mamdani Says He's Ready for Donald Trump

Next month, New York City may elect as its next mayor a man who was pretty much unknown to the broader public a year ago. Zohran Mamdan, who is currently thirty-three years old and a member of the Sta...

10 Okt 202548min

How Lionel Richie Mastered the Love Song

How Lionel Richie Mastered the Love Song

Lionel Richie has been making music for fifty years. He has sold more than a hundred million albums, his hits too numerous to list, and he has endeared himself to younger generations as a judge on “Am...

7 Okt 202530min

A Conservative Professor on How to Fix Campus Culture

A Conservative Professor on How to Fix Campus Culture

Robert P. George is not a passive observer of the proverbial culture wars; he’s been a very active participant. As a Catholic legal scholar and philosopher at Princeton University, he was an influenti...

3 Okt 202526min

Jimmy Kimmel and the Power of Public Pressure

Jimmy Kimmel and the Power of Public Pressure

The Political Scene’s Washington Roundtable—the staff writers Jane Mayer, Susan Glasser, and Evan Osnos—discuss how, in the wake of the reinstatement of Jimmy Kimmel’s show, public resistance has a ch...

30 Sep 202543min

Ezra Klein’s Big-Tent Vision of the Democratic Party

Ezra Klein’s Big-Tent Vision of the Democratic Party

The author and podcaster Ezra Klein may be only forty-one years old, but he’s been part of the political-culture conversation for a long time. He was a blogger, then a Washington Post columnist and ed...

26 Sep 202550min

The Cartoonist Liana Finck Picks Three Favorite Children’s Books

The Cartoonist Liana Finck Picks Three Favorite Children’s Books

Liana Finck is a cartoonist and an illustrator who has contributed to The New Yorker since 2015. She is the author of several books, including the graphic memoir “Passing for Human.” Like many of her ...

23 Sep 202511min

Populært innen Politikk og nyheter

giver-og-gjengen-vg
aftenpodden
aftenpodden-usa
stopp-verden
popradet
forklart
lydartikler-fra-aftenposten
rss-ness
nokon-ma-ga
det-store-bildet
dine-penger-pengeradet
rss-gukild-johaug
hanna-de-heldige
aftenbla-bla
fotballpodden-2
rss-dannet-uten-piano
rss-utenrikskomiteen-med-bogen-og-grasvik
e24-podden
bt-dokumentar-2
rss-garne-damer