“To fire a competent civil servant is a pain in the ass. To fire a competent presidential appointee is as easy as tweeting.”
― The Premonition: A Pandemic Story
― The Premonition: A Pandemic Story
“He’d been born in Poland and moved to the United States as a child. He had memories of Poland as a communist regime, and of the total breakdown of the government’s ability to be useful to its citizens. What he saw in the local U.S. public-health offices remined him of public services in Poland, but before the collapse of communism.”
― The Premonition: A Pandemic Story
― The Premonition: A Pandemic Story
“The entire United States government had been drifting that way for some time—management jobs once done by career civil servants being turned into roles performed by people appointed by the president. One of the problems this created was management inexperience: the average tenure of the appointees fluctuated between eighteen months and two years, depending on the administration. Another was the kind of person the job now selected for. There would be exceptions, of course, but the odds favored the pleaser. The person who did not present risks to the White House’s political operation.”
― The Premonition: A Pandemic Story
― The Premonition: A Pandemic Story
“The Mexicans, interestingly, had taken the new pandemic strategy of the United States and run with it. They’d closed schools, and socially distanced the population in other ways that, studies would later show, shut down disease transmission. The CDC, by contrast, sent the message that each American school should make its own decision, which was a bit like telling a bunch of sixth graders that the homework was optional. A few schools closed, but the vast majority did not. The local public-health officials with the power to close the schools had no political cover to do what needed doing. In that moment it was clear to Richard and Carter that there’d be no cohesive national strategy.”
― The Premonition: A Pandemic Story
― The Premonition: A Pandemic Story
Nicole’s 2025 Year in Books
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