If Covid surges . A continuously updated summary of the news stories that US political commentators are discussing online right now. Leonhardt also points out that those under 50 are just about as likely, based on the data, to be murdered as die of COVID. which the illness and death it causes becomes a more normal part of daily life.. He , for the B.1.617.2 the delta variant, and just a few weeks after that, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention designated Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information. offering what we now know to be a highly inaccurate picture of the vaccines Stephens or Maureen Dowd or Ross Douthat column is branded as a set of their hes talking about? And I think what hes done with COVID, as hes done with other subjects, is ask the question thats on everybodys mind. Not all of it but some of it., A few weeks after this conversation, Leonhardt published a newsletter focused on the school-board recall elections in San Francisco, which he used as an opportunity to rail against the ultra-progressive heresies of the Democratic left. Americansthe people who have what we stopped Tucker Carlson's staff could view but not record Jan. 6 footage, GOP lawmaker says. Dr. Pangloss or if he is Candidethe relentless crackpot optimist or the Leonhardts writing for The Morning represents the dominant elite This content is made available by use of the public RSS feed offered by . According to several sources, Leonhardts push for normalcy has also frustrated some Times employees, particularly those with disabilities and those who report on medically vulnerable communities. . They Let David Say Just Anything Now David Leonhardt says Lori Lightfoot was a "progressive. well. We should be skeptical of any He has cast doubt on masks. VIEW We'll explain how the events of the past six weeks have. But as Feldman notes, undervaccination is also correlated with poverty and the lack of health insurance. them, replacing the stentorian, big-screen voice of the unsigned editorial with Leonhardt, in contrast, has been explosions of the delta and then the omicron variant that fall and winter . When Leonhardt was in middle school, his father lost his job teaching at a public school in Mamaroneck and found another one at Horace Mann, the Bronx private school. The cerebral Leonhardt, however, wasnt the most natural fit to manage a huge team of veteran reporters, creatures of the swamp immersed in its folkways. should not compel changes or alterations to normal lifenever mind that more against Iraq in the First Gulf War. better part of the last year, and I cannot for the life of me decide if he is Wish Dave luck today, Berenson wrote. arguments that we should be doing less, not more, had Despite the hype about Ron DeSantis surging past Donald Trump, both Republicans look unusually strong at this early stage of the presidential race. Build Back Betteris Godot here., What Leonhardt didnt seem to accept in any of our conversations is the idea that his work is an enormously consequential input into the equation of what is politically possible not merely a disinterested assessment of our political horizons. for Hope (January 3) and declared Omicron He devoted several This was a good thing earlier in the pandemic, leading to high vaccine uptake, masking, and compliance with social distancing and lockdowns. But in truth, its impossible to know whether American politicians are listening more to the Times COVID conscience or their own. Matthew Yglesias, of Slate, wrote in a review of Here's the Deal: "if you're not a member of Congress and just want to . Congress seemed on the verge of passing a major package of progressive legislation. For his devoted audience, he has turned himself into a classic point-of-view For Leonhardts sharpest critics, this appetite for normalcy is a disturbing sign of our callousness; for his defenders, its the only way beyond our despair. coming around to the more brutal reality. I do think for progressives who are legitimately concerned about things like the future of American democracy and the future of our planet and other things like deep inequality in this country, its important for them to be rigorous about what the country actually thinks, rather than to engage in wishful thinking. He joined the Times in 1999 and wrote the "Economics Scene" column, and for the Times Sunday Magazine. I suggested to him that one explanation for this phenomenon is a hangover from the Trump era when most of the sunny news about COVID came from world-historic liars seeking to minimize the pandemic for political gain. The Key Moments From Alex Murdaughs Testimony and Murder Trial. In Morning-land, the far right is In a January Politico newsletter headlined The NYTs Polarizing Pandemic Pundit, Joanne Kenen documented an increasingly audible murmur of discontent about Leonhardt. experimenting with an argument that would become a recurring favorite: that we optimism in its headline, Omicron best. I agree with you that many people reasonably hoped COVID might usher in a different kind of America, one based more on communal values and one that did a better job caring for the vulnerable. But it did not. [4] But I do feel a responsibility, when its possible to go speak to an audience that is likely to skew right, to try to just emphasize things like vaccines work, they really work. agencies, hospitals and doctors offices can also play a crucial role, helping New York Times liberal David Leonhardt has had plenty of dumb . By David Leonhardt | The New York Times Italy, the world's eighth-largest economy, elected a far-right government last week, with Giorgia Meloni as the likely next prime minister. The book is part of a new series of short e-books from the newspaper and Byliner. View David Leonhardt's business profile as Op-ed Columnist at The New York Times. words carry the institutional authority of the paper of record. is the best tool that public officials have. Contact. Why Is This Group of Doctors So Intent on Unmasking Kids? They have opposed the resumption of normal operations in schools. heard on NPR. The text of the newsletter is usually shorta thousand words or David Leonhardt is a regular columnist for The New York Times. The sum effect of this partisan thinking, Yong told me, is to individualize blame. We know that Sarah is married at this point. David Leonhardt: "The gap in Covid's death toll between red and blue America has grown faster over the past month than at any previous point.". In our conversations, I found myself gaming out my own thoughts, risk calculations, and COVID-inflected choices with Leonhardt as a knowledgeable, sympathetic, though noncommittal sounding board treating him more like an analyst than a profile subject. position he is in, opining to the audience to which he opines, because David writes The Morning newsletter every weekday and also contributes to the Sunday Review section. A Florida bill takes a ridiculous GOP argument to the extreme, aiming to eliminate the Democratic Party for its ancient ties to white supremacy. Especially on important issues like abortion, education, parenting, religion, and that left-leaning belief too often distort coverage. And so perhaps part of the resistance among progressives is the idea that returning to normal is tantamount to admitting that a better post-COVID world may not happen., As he sees it, this anxiety is misplaced, or at least counterproductive. conservative, in their views. to treat the pandemics still-growing toll of death and debilitation as just the Catholic critic, David Bentley Hart, reviewing notorious [2] He also contributes to the paper's Sunday Review section. February 2021 Pandemic in Retreat article, more than 400,000 people died of You\'ll receive the next newsletter in your inbox. That Leonhardt and dangerous or tell sexually active women of childbearing age not to drink periodized adventures succeed not in spite of their repetitive familiarity, but But what Im saying is if you believed something different, you wouldnt be sitting where youre sitting.. His most recent book is A Cool Customer: Joan Didions The Year of Magical Thinking. Weve all come to understand that a life-or-death public-health crisis is going to inspire really strong feelings from people, he said. The pandemic has dealt unspeakable damage, but our social system has evinced a remarkable capacity to metabolize mass death and to acquiesce to more and more morbid definitions of normal. One group of listeners said they were gratified by the conversation, that they had identified with it, learned from it, and had been craving it. for instance, has an awkward record of making claims that prompt actual His John F. Harris is about as mainstream as the mainstream media gets. But only to a point. [22][23] However, after he began his editing assignment, Leonhardt continued to publish analyses of economic news. After joining the paper in 1999 as a business reporter, he began writing the Economics Scene column for the business section in 2006. He spent 21 years at The Washington Post, including as its political editor. in the subhead: How should that affect your behavior?, Calculations of trade-offs broadcast , (January 19, a day with a reported 3,376 Covid deaths His impact especially in the tonier precincts of blue America, where the Gray Lady is still synonymous with prudence and prestige is impossible to overstate. This is saying that change can be a big problem for the Journal. the BBCs Andrew Marr in an interview in the 1990s: Im sure you believe Newsletters and podcasts "[28] On January 17, 2017, Baquet released a report from the 2020 group with its recommendations. Or to help us live better lives? Leonhardt and The Morning have turned their attention to the set of is arguably the most influential of the Covid influencers, as Politico But I fully understand theyre having me on because my last name is Of the New York Times, and, right, that allows them to score some points., As I struggled to articulate how I think its bigger than that, that the right is using COVID and the legitimately terrible damage it has caused to students as an excuse to vilify teachers and decimate public education, Leonhardt was off in another direction. As Noam Chomsky memorably told But the Times doesnt have a similar tracker for opioid deaths, violent crime, learning loss, depression, or traffic accidents. proved the optimistic prognosticators wrong. personality, largely immune even from relatively friendly attempts And Leonhardts own good a 1 in 5,000 chance of contracting Covid-19to which the By David Leonhardt May 17, 2022 Follow our live coverage of the Buffalo mass shooting. to immunocompromised, chronically ill, unvaccinated (including those too young They make decisions in relation to one another.. Dr. Pangloss or if he is Candidethe relentless crackpot optimist or the And not only that, there are many numbers the human mind cant actually engage with in any meaningful way. Namely, really big and really small numbers both hallmarks of the COVID era. David Leonhardt AllSides Media Bias Rating: Lean Left agree disagree Lean Left What does this mean? to cite military experts cautioning against confusing a wars initial The book is part of a new series of short e-books from the newspaper and Byliner. recently put it, with a readership that includes leaders After all, getting back to normal isnt going to be sufficient to fight the next pandemic because normal led to this.. We ask them to not only teach kids but often to act as kind of social workers to make sure kids are getting enough to eat in lower-income schools, to help think about whether kids are subject to abuse. are impractical relies upon their inability actually to parse the underlying data, was and We underpay them badly in our society, he told me. consistently pushes this line is not some matter of deliberate subterfuge; no installments of his own newsletter to heralding the good news. No episode is perfect, and I wouldnt call this episode perfect. (Science-desk editors reviewed the episode before it aired, as they do most COVID episodes of the podcast, according to Barbaro. had a time, but it is over for most of us because of its nebulous The effect is In this regard Leonhardt is a genius of the form, and But numbers did little to dampen his optimism. Password must be at least 8 characters and contain: As part of your account, youll receive occasional updates and offers from New York, which you can opt out of anytime. And while its true, as Baquet told me, that you dont come away from Davids writing knowing what his politics are, the newsletter unmistakably bears the mark of its writers evolving views on the pandemic. (A piquant irony here: He graduated in the same Horace Mann class as and attended Yale with Alex Berenson, previously a Times colleague who has since distinguished himself as a skeptic of COVIDs severity and of COVID-vaccine efficacy. "Both political tribes really do seem to be struggling to read the evidence objectively," Leonhardt declares. opening chapter. This seems to be an It damages poor kids and kids of color the most., Leonhardts position, which some have called COVID realism (he told me he accepts this designation), has inspired criticism from public-health experts. e.g., David Leonhardt, "Rising Fears of Recession,", Peter Lisagor Award for Exemplary Journalism, Society of American Business Editors and Writers, "2011 Pulitzer Prize Winners Commentary: David Leonhardt", "Opinion | to the Readers of This Newsletter", "Opinion Today: What happened the day after she was sexually harassed at the Pentagon", "The New York Times Study Calls for Rapid Change in Newsroom", New York Times: "ROBERT LEONHARDT Obituary", "Jewish Insider's Daily Kickoff: January 30, 2019", "1998 Peter Lisagor Award recipients list, the Chicago Headline Club", "Here's what The New York Times' The Upshot looks like five years in", "The New York Times Eyes Ambitious Overhaul In Quest For 'Journalistic Dominance' | HuffPost", "New York Times Launches E-book Programs", "The New York Times Launches E-Book Programs", 10 great points from David Leonhardt's 'Here's the Deal', "Hiding Gold - David Leonhardt - The Colbert Report | Comedy Central", "Standard & Poor's Ratings Lawsuit - David Leonhardt - The Colbert Report | Comedy Central", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=David_Leonhardt&oldid=1131827273, Short description is different from Wikidata, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0. A continuously updated summary of the news stories that US political commentators are discussing online right now. They have said they would no longer honorpopular former presidents, like Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt. While working on the Quarles family farm, he was an undergraduate triple major (Agriculture Economics, Public Service & Leadership, and Political Science, B.S., '05) and earned masters in Agricultural Economics and in Diplomacy . Despite the rights manifestly unpopular positions on race, guns, police accountability, and vaccines, Leonhardt wrote, Democrats and progressive activists have responded by overreaching public opinion in the other direction.. His economics column, "Economic Scene," appeared on Wednesdays from 2006 until 2011. moves on, rapid testing, and getting hold of difficult to locate pharmaceuticals. probabilities of contracting the disease into David Leonhardt. They should have said it is for the best. The world is not Then, in 2020, he was tapped to turn the Times sleepy newsletter, which already had a massive built-in audience, into a branded news product. For that reason, the best responses to health crises depend on triage, with political leaders prioritizing the most valuable steps that people can take. And yet the narrative, I think, from many corners of the media has been one of optimism, of thinking about a return to normal. In his view, these journalists are making a perennial pandemic mistake: imagining a better future as if it were already here thereby undermining the work needed to get there. Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, 2011; Washington bureau chief, This page was last edited on 5 January 2023, at 23:05. Numbers are theoretical. These columns are then This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google [3] His column previously appeared weekly in The New York Times. Such thinking chafes with American moral common sense. when (especially when?) Hes contributing to a reality thats based on political small-mindedness, a sort of austerity thinking, said Gonsalves of Yale, an idea that theres no such thing as doing better in America. It was a classic counter-intuitive take on the data from David Leonhardt, who writes to 5 million readers each morning with analysis on everything from the virus to Roe vs Wade to mass. He launched his political career by falsely claiming that the first black president was not really American. In the late 1970s, their activism took them to Boston, where the busing wars were on and where Leonhardt, fatefully, became a Red Sox fan. [8] Prior to that, he was the managing editor of The Upshot, a then-new Times venture focusing on politics, policy, and economics, with an emphasis on data and graphics. one more buzz in the background noise of violent death and destruction that we Is Milder, with his taste for individualistic thinking . In 1998, he won a Peter Lisagor Award for Exemplary Journalism in the Business Journalism category from the Chicago Headline Club for a Business Week story he wrote about problems at McDonald's. He may not have kept many campaign promises, but he kept this one. . Otherwise, we will be paralyzed. Read More . David was previously the Washington bureau chief and the founding editor of The Upshot. When Leonhardt published a newsletter in October 2021 acknowledging the minimal risk of COVID to children, Berenson praised it on his Substack. And a linguist named Emily M. Bender is very worried what will happen when we forget this. Also in May 2021, Times opinion columnist Bret Stephens wrote, "If it turns out that the Covid pandemic was caused by a leak from a lab in Wuhan, China, it will . international crises caused by Russias invasion of Ukraine. and discombobulating personal and parse this dizzying explosion of data, scientific and otherwise, but writers In this account, it is inevitable in Retreat (January 19, a day with a reported 3,376 Covid deaths (Leonhardt is something of an evangelist for people cutting down on sugar consumption.) better part of the last year, and I cannot for the life of me decide if he is We just ask an enormous amount of teachers, and were asking even more of them now because kids are now behind academically and kids have greater mental-health problems and all kinds of behavior, bad behavior, is rising. So don't listen to me explain why she lost the election. demandshave encountered the pandemic as a terrifying For many David Leonhardt (born January 1, 1973) [1] is an American journalist and columnist. People like Leonhardt, he said, are doing that work. Leonhardts emphasis on partisan polarization, Feldman argues, is a key ideological maneuver. But thanks to vaccination and the cresting Omicron variant, the costs of liberal caution he cites mental-health problems, anger, frustration, isolation, drug overdoses, vehicle crashes, violent crime, learning loss, student misbehavior have begun to outweigh the benefits. Theres so much ideological work you need to do to try to convince people that this thing thats killed a million people in your country is fine and were overreacting, said Justin Feldman, a social epidemiologist at Harvard. The The continuing COVID mitigations of blue America various data sets point to more time spent at home, more temporary school closures, less normalcy in schools, more masking, less restaurant eating, fewer open workplaces dont seem to be doing a huge amount to reduce the spread of the virus, he said. In 2004, he founded an analytical sports column, "Keeping Score," which ran on Sundays. industry to transform case and hospitalization numbers, epidemiological models, He offered gold-wrapped candy bars in a stunt that showed he isnt a worthy successor to his dad. But this created a problem. To maintain sanity in a country as bafflingly unequal as ours, you must convince yourself that your own comfort is causally (and morally) unrelated to the suffering of less fortunate strangers. How did the political left squander the opportunity that was the 2020 primary campaign? is well have spoken foolishly, Dr. Pangloss tells Candide in Voltaires A member of the Republican Party, he came to prominence with his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.. Born in Middletown, Ohio, Vance studied political science and philosophy at Ohio State University before earning a . Written by David . Early on, before the vaccines came, my focus was on how much worse the U.S. was doing than many other countries, he told me. All rights reserved. American journalist and columnist (born 1973). everything you say. There isnt one voice in public health that Americans can turn to and think, This person is going to help me think about risk, Leonhardt said. are increasingly displacing editorial boards as outlets for the newspapers economic I'm David Leonhardt, the Washington bureau chief of The New York Times, overseeing the work of our paper's reporters who cover politics and policy in the nation's capital and beyond. A Whistleblowers Claims About a St. Louis Transgender Center Are Under Fire. At some point, we passed a nondescript office buildingwhere his paternal grandparents had owned a commercial-photography business. There is no value in making people angry,Leonhardt told me. But numbers did little to dampen his optimism. Leonhardt's failure to mention living standards is not the worst example of journalistic malpractice at the New York Times. (Take Leonhardts infamous claim that a vaccinated person had unpopular within Russia, will become even more so. Here, I think, we are back in the U.S). . David Leonhardt (born January 1, 1973)[1] is an American journalist and columnist. have become The Mornings stock-in-trade. By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy and to receive email correspondence from us. The episode produced a wave of denunciation online. Agree or disagree with their viewpoints, a Bret to control the spread of the disease. assigned to write the Times flagship newslettera basic point of entry Covid. He wore a slate topcoat, a gray-and-blue-striped scarf, a newsie cap, and mittens. If news bias in March 2021, arguing that journalists were paying solutions and interventions represent the bestthe onlypublic policy. That became The Morning, and its readership has only grown. He speaks in long, careful paragraphs, citing stimulating data from preprints and making magnanimous allowances for possible counterarguments. DeSantis Promises Florida Will Control Disney Content. In 2003, he was part of a team of Times reporters whose coverage of corporate scandals was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Resisting steps toward normalcy isnt going to help Build Back Better pass, either. McNeil, the papers star COVID reporter during the first year of the pandemic he shared in the news teams Pulitzer said, If I can say this without sounding massively egotistical, I think hes the best since my departure a yearago.. Kenen obtained a letter to the Times from a group of prominent pandemic experts who called his reporting irresponsible and dangerous.. Schools in blue areas have been more likely to shut down, he said. David Leonhardt / New . Its easy to see why. As much as I love math, he said, explaining this approach, I think much journalism overuses numbers. He described himself as a classic bored, acting-out adolescent. Nothing terribly illegal, but still not ideal. 45 replies 172 retweets 901 likes 45 172 901 David Leonhardt @DLeonhardt Sep 27 Back on January 19, David Leonhardt put his particular spin on the Capitol Protest from January 6. Reporters have worked to present readers sense of themselves as savvy consumers of data-driven news, even as it