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In 2000, the CDC declared that measles had been eliminated from the United States. But now America is at risk of losing that status: A measles outbreak has sickened more than 150 people in Texas and New Mexico since late January. An unvaccinated school-aged child recently died from measles in Texas—the first known death from measles in America in about a decade, and the first child to die from the disease since 2003. I spoke with my colleague Katherine J. Wu, who covers science and health, about why vaccination is the only way to prevent the spread, and how a surge in illnesses that had previously faded from American life could reshape childhoods.
Lora Kelley: Why is measles so reliant on vaccines to prevent its spread?
Katherine J. Wu: Measles is arguably the most contagious infectious disease that scientists know about. Researchers have estimated that, in a population where there’s zero immunity to measles, one infected person is going to infect roughly 12 to 18 other people. That is extremely high. In most cases, it is a respiratory infection that’s going to cause fever, cough, and rash, but it can also restrict breathing, cause complications such as pneumonia, and be deadly.
This is a disease that requires really, really high levels of vaccination to keep it out of a community, because it’s so contagious. Researchers have estimated that you want to see vaccination rates in the 95 percent range to protect a community. If you start to dip just a bit below that threshold, like even 92 percent or 90 percent, you start to get into trouble. Lower uptake creates an opening for the virus to start spreading. And the more unvaccinated people there are, the faster the virus will spread, and the more people will get seriously sick.
Lora: Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said last week that this recent outbreak is “not unusual” and pointed to past measles outbreaks. How do you view this current outbreak relative to other times when cases spiked, such as the 2019 outbreak in New York?
Katherine: The current outbreak actually is not as big as the 2019 New York one yet. And we almost lost our elimination status for measles then. But there are ways in which I would argue that this one is worse than the 2019 outbreak. An unvaccinated kid has died. We haven’t had a reported measles death in this country in about a decade. If the situation worsens, that death might only be the first.
Lora: Could people who are vaccinated be affected by a measles outbreak?
Katherine: The MMR vaccine, which protects against measles, mumps, and rubella, generally provides immunity from measles for decades. But there are kids who are not old enough to be fully vaccinated against measles (kids get one shot at 12 to 15 months and then again at 4 to 6 years old). And it’s rare, but some people, including immunocompromised people, might not respond well to vaccination and may not be protected by it. Also, as people get further from their vaccination date, they may be more vulnerable to the disease. The more measles is around, the more vulnerable even the vaccinated population will be.
Lora: Measles hasn’t been a big issue in this country for a long time. What tools does America have to fight this disease if it resurges in a big way?
Katherine: Because this disease spreads so quickly, the main tool we’ve used to fight it is vaccination. And if people are letting that go, we’re in trouble. There are no antivirals for measles. Doctors generally just have to do what they can to manage the symptoms. Plus, health-care workers aren’t used to diagnosing or dealing with measles cases anymore, which makes it easier for outbreaks to get out of control.
Lora: How might the recent layoffs at federal agencies focused on public health and disease affect America’s ability to respond to outbreaks?
Katherine: I do worry that a lot of the public-health workforce is slowly getting hollowed out, including at the CDC. We’re going to lose our ability to prevent and stop epidemics—we saw resources that researchers rely on to track outbreaks temporarily disappear from the CDC website in January and February, for example. If people’s attitudes keep shifting away from childhood vaccination, a whole other host of diseases could creep in. In refusing the MMR vaccine, you are by definition also refusing protection against the mumps and rubella.
And RFK Jr. has made rampant speculations about the MMR vaccine being more dangerous than the disease itself, which is completely untrue. This week, he published an op-ed on the Fox News website acknowledging the importance of vaccinating against measles but also framing vaccination as a “personal” choice, and described nutrition as “a best defense against most chronic and infectious illnesses.” I can promise that no multivitamin will work against measles as well as the MMR vaccine, which has been proved safe and effective at protecting people from disease. Measles, meanwhile, can kill.
Lora: What would more frequent outbreaks mean for America’s kids and their childhood?
Katherine: In the world kids live in now, when they get sick with a disease they catch from other children, it’s not that big of a deal most of the time. Measles outbreaks are just so different from the colds picked up from day care or the stomach bugs you catch at Disneyland. If we choose to let measles and other vaccine-preventable diseases come back, there will be more childhood mortality. Kids might get pneumonia more often. They might be hospitalized more often. Some might grow up with permanent brain damage. Childhood will not only be about whether a kid is going to get a good education or make enough friends. It will once more be about whether a kid can survive the first few years of their life.
The Trump administration imposed 25 percent tariffs on most imports from Canada and Mexico, and doubled tariffs for China. In response, Canada put 25 percent tariffs on billions of dollars of American goods, Mexico will announce retaliatory tariffs on Sunday, and China will add tariffs on some American imports on March 10.
Donald Trump will deliver a speech to a joint session of Congress tonight at 9 p.m. ET, in which he is expected to lay out his vision for his second term.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote that last week’s Oval Office meeting was “regrettable” and proposed a partial cease-fire with Russia to resume peace negotiations.
Evening Read
Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Sources: Bettmann / Getty; Harold M. Lambert / Getty.
When America Persecutes Its Teachers
By Clay Risen
Several states, most notably Florida, have ordered schools and colleges to restrict or eliminate courses on gender, while groups such as Moms for Liberty have rallied parents to police curricula and ban books from school libraries. Ideological battles over education may be proxies for larger conflicts—Communism in the ’40s and ’50s; diversity, equity, and inclusion today. But such fights are particularly fierce because of how important schools are in shaping American values. To control the country’s education system is, in no uncertain terms, to control the country’s future.
Watch. Even the most mundane moments are riveting in the new deep-sea dramaLast Breath (out in theaters), David Sims writes.
Listen. A hugely popular podcast tries to prove that nonspeaking people with autism have supernatural powers—but it misses something more compelling, Dan Engber writes.
The exchange was so awkward, it should have been followed by the Curb Your Enthusiasm theme song. While President Donald Trump was shaking hands down the aisle, exiting the House chamber after his address last night, network cameras caught him as he turned to Chief Justice John Roberts, patted him on the back, and said, “Thank you again. Thank you again. I won’t forget.” Roberts, whose back was to the camera, then headed for the exit.
We can’t know precisely what the president meant, but Trump does have a lot to thank Roberts for. After all, the chief justice and the other conservatives on the Supreme Court helped rewrite the Fourteenth Amendment, completely gutting the ban on insurrectionists holding office in order to allow Trump to run for president again following his attempt to seize power by force after the 2020 election. Then Roberts and the other conservative justices manifested an absurd, imperial grant of presidential immunity, with no textual basis in the Constitution, to shield Trump from criminal prosecution, and in so doing set the stage for a despotic second term during which Trump will try to ignore court efforts to impose limits on his power.
In fairness, Roberts has not been as supplicant as some of his colleagues. He has been willing to occasionally refuse Trump demands; this morning, Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett sided with the three Democratic appointees in declining to overturn an order from a lower court to unfreeze $2 billion in USAID funding. The underlying dispute here is more high-stakes than it might sound; the Trump administration is publicly, though not yet in court, claiming the right to usurp Congress’s constitutional authority over spending, which, if sustained, would bring the country closer to dictatorship. The dissent was so unhinged that one might conclude that there are only five votes on the Supreme Court to uphold the basic constitutional structure. But even though Roberts went against the president on this occasion, he is unlikely to be a reliable check on Trump’s lawlessness. Trump may well have more to thank Roberts for in the future.
Any casual observer of the Supreme Court can see what many prestigious constitutional lawyers can’t, which is that the conservative justices are frequently accomplices to Trump’s assault on democracy—a flag signaling support of the January 6 insurrection flew outside Justice Samuel Alito’s house. (Alito, vital specimen of right-wing masculine energy that he is, blamed his wife.) That sort of open partisanship is a bit inconvenient for Roberts, however, who during his confirmation hearing famously compared justices to umpires calling balls and strikes in a baseball game. A more appropriate sports analogy for how Roberts and his right-wing comrades approach cases appeared a few months later, when several referees in the Italian soccer league were implicated in fixing matches for top teams during the 2006 Calciopoli scandal.
Trump has threatened to criminally prosecute those who criticize the Court, declaring that they should be “put in jail,” consistent with the right-wing belief that the right to free speech allows people to say only what conservatives want them to say. But as is often the case, no critic of the Court could implicate the conservative majority’s partisanship as effectively as Trump’s own behavior.
In his own way, the president agrees with the liberal critique that the Roberts Court is a partisan institution, with a majority that will generally do what he wants. He just believes that this is both good and exactly how it should be. Perhaps the only person who is still in the dark about what the Supreme Court has become is Roberts himself.
Donald Trump’s highly public schism with Volodymyr Zelensky has yielded the kind of doublethink that is common in personality cults. Those believers who approve of the policy hail the great leader’s strategic genius. And those who oppose it cast the blame elsewhere, constructing ever more elaborate accounts of Trump’s strategy to avoid acknowledging the obvious: Trump has an affinity for Vladimir Putin.
In the first category, you can find members of the so-called national-conservative movement, who have long rationalized Russia’s aggression and opposed American support for Ukraine. “Trump understands what establishment figures do not: that U.S. voters are no longer willing to allow Washington to write checks on the American people’s account,” the national-conservative intellectual Rod Dreher wrote exultantly after Zelensky’s Oval Office browbeating. Christopher Caldwell, another natcon writer, argued in The Free Press that Trump’s posture toward Ukraine “is a deeper and more historically grounded view than the one that prevailed in the Biden administration,” rejecting Joe Biden’s view of the war as a “barbaric” invasion. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, Trump’s admirers include the Russian government itself, which has congratulated him for “rapidly changing foreign policy configurations,” which “largely coincides with our vision.”)
In the second category, you have Trump defenders who support Ukraine, and reacted to Friday’s events with dismay. To resolve their cognitive dissonance, or perhaps to retain their influence, they do not blame Trump for initiating the breach with Zelensky. Instead, they blame Zelensky.
The Ukrainian president’s responsibility for the crisis includes such actions as failing to dress properly. “I mean, all Zelensky had to do today was put on a tie, show up, smile, say ‘Thank you,’ sign the papers, and have lunch,” complained Scott Jennings, who had reportedly been considered for White House spokesperson and performs essentially the same function for CNN. “That’s it. And he couldn’t do that.”
Ah yes, the tie. Apparently Trump and his supporters care deeply about the tie. If we take this line of argument seriously, it posits that the United States reversed its foreign policy based on an outfit choice—and this argument is being made as a defense of Trump’s judgment.
A related and only slightly less damning defense is that Zelensky erred by arguing with Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance when they presented him with a series of pro-Russian positions during their photo op. Trump insisted, falsely, that security guarantees for Ukraine were unnecessary because Putin would never violate one. (He praised Putin’s character and spoke wistfully of how the two men had to endure the “Russia hoax” together.) “Why on earth did Zelensky choose to fact-check Trump in front of the entire world rather than debate the wisdom of a ceasefire behind closed doors?” demands conservative columnist Marc Thiessen, a foreign-policy hawk who has sought to steer Trump toward his own view.
This viewpoint has influenced some mainstream media coverage of the fateful White House meeting. A recent Politicostory filled with inside-Trump-world reporting, for example, suggests that Trump was eager to cut a deal, if only Zelensky had flattered him sufficiently: The Ukrainian president “infuriated Trump last week with his public suggestion he was swallowing Putin’s disinformation—a response to Trump’s suggestion that Ukraine started the war.” Or perhaps the source of Trump’s split with Ukraine is revealed by him regurgitating Russian propaganda blaming Ukraine for the war, rather than Zelensky correcting him.
Trump may be vain and childish, but he does have some substantive beliefs. Lindsey Graham, another Trump-worshipping Republican hawk, toldThe New York Times that he had warned Zelensky before the meeting, “Don’t take the bait,” and publicly criticized the Ukrainian president for not following his advice. But how did Graham know there would be bait? Perhaps because Trump has spent years expressing sympathy for Russia and contempt for its enemies, including Ukraine and the Western alliance.
Trump’s Russophilia used to stand almost unique within the Republican Party. But he has brought large segments of the right around to his position, and many of them have turned Zelensky into a hate figure. The enthusiastically anti-Ukraine conservatives are happy to credit Trump for reversing the Biden administration’s support for Kyiv. Say what you want about the tenets of national conservatism; at least it’s an ethos. The more traditionally anti-Russian conservatives, by contrast, need to find a way to disagree with the outcome of the Oval Office meeting without seeming to criticize Trump. That is how authoritarian political cultures operate: The only permissible way to express disapproval of the leader’s choices is to pretend they were someone else’s.
This leads to absurd logical contortions. Anti-Russia conservatives treat their putative objections to Zelenky’s conduct as legitimate standards that he could have met, as if this is a game with fixed rules. Presented with the obvious objection —that Elon Musk had dressed even more slovenly in the Oval Office and a Cabinet meeting just a few days before—the National Review editor in chief, Rich Lowry, retorted, “When Zelensky is named the head of DOGE, he can do the same and get away with it.” Yet no principle of decorum says that a head of state can’t wear a military uniform in the White House but “the head of DOGE” can wear a T-shirt and baseball cap. Everything about this solemn rule is made up, including the position “head of DOGE.” If you have ever watched a school bully, you may recall that accusing their victim of violating some rule or standard, and then flouting the standard themselves, is part of the abuse, a way of signaling that they hold all the power.
Trump’s base was poised to explode at Zelensky—for his shirt, for his alleged lack of gratitude—because Trump has signaled that he is their enemy. In their desperation, anti-Russian conservatives have reversed the obvious causation.
During Trump’s first term, the theory that he loved Putin was complicated by his inability to overcome resistance by bureaucrats and his own hawkish advisers. This created room for analysts to accept explanations for Trump’s stance other than simple affinity for Putin. Now, however, he is able to quickly carry out such steps as cutting off weapons to Ukraine without sneaking around or being slow-walked by mid-level staff. Meanwhile, he publicly blames Ukraine for the ongoing war and accuses Zelensky of being a dictator who spreads hatred against Russia. The theory that Trump trusts and wants to help Putin can parsimoniously explain his rhetoric and actions.
It is the alternative theory, that Trump is playing a clever geopolitical game, that relies on whispered conversations and intricate double-meaning interpretations of his public positions. A Wall Street Journalreporter deduces from “nearly a year of Trumpworld chatter and (sometimes secret) talks with foreign officials” that Trump’s real strategy is to “split Russia from China” and that “there is no way the US will sell Ukraine down the river.” In some foreign-policy circles, analyses discerning a far-reaching plan from wisps of buried evidence are considered sophisticated, while positing that Trump simply believes the things he says almost daily on camera is considered slightly nutty.
Whatever you want to say about the anti-Ukraine right’s moral posture, it is at least able to grasp the reality of Trump’s position: He wants to leave Ukraine at Putin’s mercy. The anti-Russia Trumpers, with their missing-tie theory of Trump’s Russia strategy, and their convoluted efforts to explain away his plain wishes, are the ones who have drifted into the realm of fantasy.
Serena Kocourek dreaded the lullaby. She worked in a hospital, and every time a baby was born, staffers would play the same song over the loudspeaker. She was going through IVF, trying without success to conceive a baby. When the lullaby played, she told me, “I felt like I was two feet further away from finally being a mom.”
One thing helped: messaging her IVF coach, Kristin Dillensnyder. She’d say, “They just played the lullaby thing and I didn’t cry.” “Win,” Dillensnyder would respond. Or she’d remind Kocourek, “Just because somebody else is having a baby doesn’t mean that you can’t have a baby.” Dillensnyder also offered advice for staying hopeful during the grueling process of IVF: She suggested that Kocourek create a playlist of songs to listen to as she gave herself hormone injections. Kocourek liked that Dillensnyder had gone through IVF herself and would help her come up with responses to insensitive questions from family and friends about when she planned to get pregnant. Occasionally, in the middle of her day, she’d think, “I just need to step away. I just need to talk to Kristin real quick.”
IVF coaching may sound niche, but it’s far from the most specialized type of coaching on offer. These days, if a problem exists, there seems to be a coach for it. Having trouble focusing? An “executive function” coach might be right for you. Undecided about having kids? There’s a coach for that too. Too burned out to plan a “transformative” vacation? A travel coach can help you for $597 (a price that does not include the actual booking of the trip).
Discovering all these types of coaches made me wonder: Whatever happened to asking people you know for advice? So I set out to try to understand why people hire coaches and what they get from the experience. Most of the coaching clients I spoke with asked to use only their first name because of the personal nature of the issues they sought help for. One woman, Sarah, sees a meditation coach for $350 a session, justifying it because she does not own “expensive purses or clothes.” Another woman, Liz, has, at various points, had a career coach, an executive coach, a doula (or birthing coach), a co-parenting coach, and two different accountability coaches who focus on diet and exercise. She recently added a Disney “concierge”—a coach for navigating the Magic Kingdom. Each one of her coaches costs at least a couple of hundred dollars a session. She told me that if she hasn’t done something important before and wants to do it right, she tends to hire a coach to help her. “Winging it is so not my style,” she said. “Why not go into it informed if you can?”
People have long sought advice for some of life’s biggest questions—marry that guy or don’t; take or don’t take that job. But over the past few decades, the options for living one’s best adult life have expanded so much that knowing the right or wrong way to do anything can be difficult. Today, many Americans can join a polyamorous triad, remain child-free by choice, launch a new career in their 30s, or dedicate themselves to running ultramarathons, all without ruffling any feathers within their community. “Identities are no longer given,” Michal Pagis, a lecturer of sociology and anthropology at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, who has studied coaching, told me. “They are now achieved … It’s a project.” A number of people seem to crave sounding boards for all of this identity making, especially if they want to do it “correctly”—i.e., in a way that is still impressive, if unconventional. Erik Baker, a Harvard historian and the author of Make Your Own Job, told me that coaching is the latest example of “the therapeutic culture that emerged in the United States in the 20th century: a sense of needing to have some kind of expert to help optimize your performance.” Being “normal” is no longer enough, so people hire coaches to help them transcend normal.
In some ways, coaching stands in for the free, civic sources of support that over the past decade have been slowly fading away. People are less likely now to be members of the kinds of community groups or religious congregations where they might have previously sought help. In some circles, an idea has taken hold that asking strangers for advice without paying is gauche. Emailing someone to “pick their brain” has become a corporate misdemeanor. (“Set the precedent that you are not comfortable talking without a pre-booked and pre-paid official meeting,” goes some typical advice on how to respond to such an affront.)
People today also have fewer close friends than they used to, and they may be reluctant to rely on those friends for help. Overwhelmingly, the coaching clients I spoke with told me that they would not expect their (few, flawed, busy) friends to provide the same level of guidance that their coaches do. Friends and family members are biased. (“You never know if someone has your best interest in mind,” Liz told me.) A stranger who doesn’t know you seems more likely to be neutral. Friends may say clumsy or unsupportive things as they respond to your texts between meetings; a coach’s job is always to have the right mantra at hand.
In her book The Outsourced Self, the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild writes that when it comes to advice, “anything you pay for is better.” A coach is like a super-friend—someone very smart and attentive who can help you make the best possible decision. Kiya Thompson, a travel coach, refers to her service “like a best friend pre-trip, during the trip, and … after the trip.” Dillensnyder, the IVF coach, told me that she sees herself as kind of like “a big sister”—one whose counsel is, presumably, better than your real sister’s. “Friends and family are really good,” Dillensnyder said. “However, they often give advice that is not helpful.” Another refrain I heard was that coaches allow you to be messy and depressed around them so that you can be bubbly and interesting around your friends. As another woman, Emily, put it to me about her weight-loss coach, “Your friends don’t want to listen to you talk about that all the time.”
But using coaching in this way undermines one important aspect of friendship: reciprocity. During a common type of friend hang, one person shares their problems for a while and the other person offers their best stab at some solutions. Then they switch. Pagis told me that debts—for example, owing someone a few minutes of uninhibited venting—“are important for social relations.” With coaching, however, “you are avoiding creating these debts.” If part of friendship is being there for each other, what becomes of the institution when you don’t have to be? When the well-heeled can afford to take their problems to a coach, friends risk becoming merely the people with whom we have pleasant catch-up brunches before we rush home to pay by the hour to give the real dirt to a stranger.
Yet the advice a coach dispenses may not be as reliable as clients hope. Coaches, who in many cases bear no qualifications other than personal experience, do not need to adhere to official standards. Some coaches might be only dabbling in the practice: A 2023 report by the International Coaching Federation, a credentialing body for some types of coaches, noted that the average coach spent just 12 hours a week coaching.
The casualness of these arrangements, and the lack of standards, can lead to disappointment—and little recourse—when people pay hundreds for coaching that turns out to be lackluster. One woman I spoke with, Maria, told me she was scrolling through TikTok when she came across a bariatric-surgery coach who promised to help her adjust to the dramatically different eating habits the procedure requires. “I booked a call with her,” Maria said, “and she sold me within, like, 20 minutes.” For about $500 a month, the coach would check Maria’s MyFitnessPal food log and text her an emoji assessing her performance—a fire emoji if she was doing well, for example. But during their one-on-one sessions, Maria felt like she was talking with the coach’s TikTok character rather than with a devoted adviser. “She has, like, five things that she repeats over and over again,” Maria said. She quit after two months.
Coaching can also be a problem if it replaces therapy, which, unlike coaching, is regulated and typically covered by insurance. Most coaches take pains to point out that they are not therapists, and most of the coaching clients I interviewed either have or have had therapists. Still, about 25 to 50 percent of coaching clients have a diagnosable mental-health condition, and they aren’t getting any formal mental-health treatment from their coaches, Elias Aboujaoude, a psychiatry professor at Stanford, told me. “In my clinical work, it’s a common thing that comes up,” he said. “We recommend a therapist to someone, and they’ll say, ‘Oh, but I’m seeing a life coach.’”
I do have a therapist. Even so, the more I dug into coaching, the more I wanted to understand what people saw in it. I soon had the opportunity to find out. In the course of my reporting, I spoke with Nell Wulfhart, a “decision coach” who, for $247 per hour-long session, helps her clients make one big life decision—as varied as whether to have kids or what color to paint their kitchen.
Wulfhart told me that she’s always had a “fixer brain,” and that often, she’s simply listening for what the person really wants to do anyway. “It just helps to have a totally neutral third party to check your work,” she said, “and make sure, ‘Yes, this is not a ludicrous risk you’re taking.’” What qualifications does she have? “Nothing,” she said. “People have said to me, ‘You’re so wise.’ And I was like, I think they mean you’re in your mid-40s.”
I’m allergic to people who embellish their credentials, so I liked that she admitted her lack thereof. I also liked that she has worked as a journalist, a profession I associate with straight shooters. And as it happened, I did have a decision I was struggling with. So I decided to book a session with her.
I told Wulfhart that I couldn’t decide whether to move to Florida or to Texas. She began asking me questions about what was important to me, what else I’d considered, and what each place had to offer me. Unlike my therapist, she didn’t ask about my childhood—in fact, she didn’t seem much interested in my backstory, my neuroses, or any of my usual patterns of behavior. “Why you feel this way is not that relevant,” she said. “The only thing that matters is that you do feel this way.”
It did feel like talking with a super-friend—someone who was smart and likable, but also disinterested and ruthlessly rational. After about 30 minutes, she told me what I should do. It was what I’d wanted to do anyway.
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