An Exile Looks at 40

As of summer 2020, with just about everything locked down except for riots in the streets, turning 35 was a distinct downer. As society teetered in indefinite limbo, I had ample time to ponder what I’d actually been accomplishing in the 13 years since graduating from Brown and heading to Manhattan to become a progressive public interest journalist.

Things had begun so promisingly: somehow, I’d landed my dream job working for my hero Bill Moyers on PBS. In those auspicious early days I still saw the terms “progressive” and “public interest” as essentially synonymous. It was a great privilege to get to work closely with Bill as his blogger and research assistant, but once Barack Obama entered office our weekly public affairs interviews drifted toward guests who more typically glorified and defended the new administration rather than offer much in the way of analysis and critique. It wasn’t all Bill’s fault, as he was mostly mirroring the high-end discourse as it was in those heady days, but I grew increasingly uncomfortable throughout our extensive coverage of the hashing out of Obamacare.

I don’t claim to be an expert in health care policy, but I did major in public policy, and one didn’t have to be an expert to see that the Obama administration’s narratives selling the Affordable Care Act were fanciful and misleading. The notion that introducing many tens of millions of disproportionately poor and sick people to insurance rolls that had basically been built to serve the gainfully employed middle class and above would somehow “bend the cost curve” through mass expansion of preventative care had always been too good to be true, regardless of that one Atul Gawande New Yorker article that people liked to namedrop. No, the case for universal health care was fundamentally a moral rather than a fiscal one.

But to have that moral argument honestly would have been to have to acknowledge that the middle and upper classes would inevitably end up paying substantially more for somewhat lower-quality care, and that would have been politically dangerous. And so by and large the prestige media chose to suspend disbelief as the administration made obviously untrue blanket promises like “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.” In the case of Bill Moyers Journal, we did platform various critics of the emerging Affordable Care Act, but nearly all of them were advocates for “single-payer,” i.e. “Medicare for All,” arguing that the legislation didn’t go nearly far enough. I understood where Bill and my colleagues were coming from, that some form of universal health care felt like the great unfinished business of the Great Society, but began to feel that our weekly broadcasts were painting viewers a misleading portrait of the true policy debate. In my little fiefdom of the Journal’s blog, somewhat under the radar with some degree of editorial independence, I did what I could to smuggle in the most rigorous and cogent critiques of the legislation I could find from more diplomatic voices on the right, typically from outlets like the Wall Street Journal and The Weekly Standard. I felt certain that our audience would benefit from exposure to the other side.

As the Journal wound down, and Bill retired for what turned out to be the second to last time, I assumed I’d probably have to go to law school. But, literally the day before I was set to submit my applications, I lucked into a job up at Columbia Journalism School producing its centennial commemorations and celebrating the Pulitzer Prizes. In addition to my immense relief at dodging the bullet of law school, I felt somewhat relieved to be serving as a public relations flack rather than a journalist per se, and hoped that might help me feel less guilt about massaging the truth for maximum fundraising. And so began an intensely disillusioning eleven-year journey across the university that culminated with my disgusted departure to become a whistleblower as The Ivy Exile.

After a honeymoon first few months, I gradually came to understand that the J-School was essentially an exalted diploma mill that offered the cheapest and easiest way to earn an Ivy League credential in under a year while living out a glamorous Manhattan fantasy. There were some truly impressive journalists on faculty, and a narrowing pipeline of smart and interesting people passing through, but the standard curriculum was a rather threadbare ten-month boot camp that hardly justified the claim of having earned a “Master of Science” degree. The two-year “Master of Arts” degree focused on magazine writing was a much more legit program, but represented a small fraction of the overall business model.

With the conclusion of my two-year contract at the Journalism School, I soon crossed campus to promote Columbia Law School. I’d lost much respect for the J-School because it had turned out to be an increasingly chintzy and unserious place. The law school proved far more substantive, but also toxic to a terrifying extent. That isn’t to say that there weren’t many brilliant professors who meant well, most notably the great Philip Hamburger, and that most of the students weren’t decent enough grinds who just wanted to make tons of money as corporate lawyers, but the bulk of my job was lionizing the most narcissistic and power-hungry villains on campus. In truth, Columbia Law was primarily known as a feeder to BigLaw and Wall Street, which was something of a turn-off to a lot of idealistic and/or woke twenty-somethings applying to top law schools, not to mention lots of aging philanthropists. Despite being an Ivy League institution, Columbia Law was steadily losing ground to competitors like the NYU School of Law, with its vaunted Brennan Center for Justice. As a result, to perfume its corporate stink, Columbia Law threw money and jobs at domineering social justice ideologues, more than a few of whom were unambiguous bigots like Katherine Franke.

While I did enjoy chronicling outstanding legal minds pursuing valuable work in areas like intellectual property law, half or more of my role was taking notes on unhinged diatribes from zealots I often felt were mentally unwell, and figuring out how to make all that venom and bile palatable and even persuasive to the public. Some of the people I promoted harbored hatreds against entire demographic categories, but it was my job to portray them as beatific Mahatma Gandhi types. There was no denying that I’d become complicit in their malignant agendas, and I began to hate myself for that. Some part of me got a kick out of getting paid to attend fancy galas and rub elbows with fancy people, with open bars and multicourse dinners, but I was selling my soul and felt like a prostitute. I had to get out.

Fortunately, I had an escape hatch: I’d also started writing for Columbia Engineering, my first assignment being to handle its 150^th anniversary commemorations, and could stay afloat writing only for them. And so I tendered my resignation from Columbia Law and focused on covering Columbia engineers’ groundbreaking scientific research. I ended up staying there eight years, so much did I enjoy the work: it was a privilege to help endearing nerds translate their boring incremental research into grander visions of the possibilities gradually being unleashed, and a joy to see stammering aspiring entrepreneurs grow in the months between the annual Fast Pitch competition in the fall and the higher-stakes Startup Columbia competition each spring.

Yet by 2017 the corruption and rot I’d witnessed elsewhere on campus were creeping into the engineering school, too. More and more of my assignments were writing up propaganda about climate change and, more unsettlingly, woke data scientists gushing about the potential for discriminatory algorithms to automate the constant and universal imposition of social justice according to the tenets of intersectionality espoused by Columbia Law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw.

And so, turning 35 in summer 2020, I felt trapped and at a loss. I’d written a manuscript about my time at Brown and road to New York, but the market for thoughtful critiques of the left from closer to the center had become a smoking crater. For the crime of a book as muted and inoffensive as The Once and Future Liberal, my fellow Columbian Mark Lilla had been lucky not to lose his job. Intellectually, much of the left seemed to have collapsed into a mob braying for identitarian socialism, and speaking out was a recipe for excommunication or worse. But in early 2021, when Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health recruited me to handle their centennial commemorations, I realized immediately that I’d found my ticket out.

Much of the work would involve sugarcoating the indefensible and be almost unbearably distasteful, I knew, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to get an inside look at the scandal of the century: public health technocrats’ opportunistic tyranny exploiting Covid to advance unrelated policy goals. It was the biggest story in the world, and the missing piece of the puzzle that would make it fully viable for me to become a whistleblower about Columbia’s sordid underbelly. The Mailman School turned out to be even worse than I’d expected; I really liked my coworkers, to the extent that I got to know them working from home, but the institution was profoundly compromised. My impression was that roughly a third of the school consisted of impressive professionals pursuing important life-saving work, that roughly a third were doing somewhat useful research that was badly distorted by ideology and partisanship, and that roughly a third were unprincipled rent-seekers pushing empty slop for grant money.

I did a genuinely good job for the Mailman School, which to be fair does have quite a proud history and even prehistory up until the past few decades, and it was a subversive thrill to mastermind its centennial even as I drafted the opening salvos of what would become The Ivy Exile: I felt like a secret agent in a cat and mouse game of cloaks and daggers. The Mailman School still owes me many thousands of dollars, I should mention, but that’s a story for another day.

Since launching this Substack three years ago, I’ve been having the time of my life. I’m working harder than I ever have, but feeling more personally and professionally fulfilled than ever. I’m doing the public interest work that I came to New York to pursue, I’ve met tons of interesting people, and I can sleep at night. A few weeks ago, I was pleased to appear on a Mike Pesca podcast with the great Ruy Teixeira, who I’ve read religiously for years. I could pinch myself that this is my life now; being 40 is awesome!

All that is true, and yet being 40 has also been an absolute nightmare. Last spring, my near-octogenarian mother was diagnosed with lung cancer, and I’ve spent most of the past year flying back and forth to St. Louis to stay for weeks or months at a time keeping her company and making sure she gets to all of her medical appointments. She did well with radiation, which proved much more effective than the doctors expected, but entered a steep downward spiral after she started immunotherapy, losing weight and most of her vitality at an alarming rate. Two and a half months ago, a few days after I returned to town, she fell and fractured her pelvis. It took a few days to coax her into agreeing to go to the emergency room, and she ended up being hospitalized for nearly a month before getting discharged to a rehab facility. Her physical therapy initially looked promising, but she was obviously regressing in the days before she got discharged over my vehement objections.

That took place on a Friday afternoon, unfortunately, so a home health nurse couldn’t come to assess my mother until Monday afternoon. That was an all but sleepless weekend, my mother toggling unpredictably between being two thirds of her old self and sudden vomity listlessness bordering on the comatose. Thankfully I have a saintly aunt, her ex-sister-in-law, who stepped up to help. When the home health nurse finally arrived, it didn’t take her long to recommend that we call the doctor and head back to the emergency room. Three more weeks of hospitalization followed, in which we discovered that my mother hadn’t been ailing because of cancer, as we’d assumed, but because her stomach was badly distended on account of her intermittently losing her ability to digest food. When she’s able to absorb nutrients, she’s recognizably her feisty and still fairly lucid self, but when she can’t she has no more reserves to draw upon and becomes more akin to a sweet, angelic child. The doctors are “flummoxed,” to use their term, and could only refer me to palliative and hospice care.

Eventually, my mother got stabilized enough that it was time to transfer her to what euphemistically is described as an extended care facility, but more frankly a nursing home. We’d had a thousand conversations over the years on how much she hated nursing homes and never wanted to go to one, but at or near the end of the day there was no better alternative. She was supposed to be transferred to a fancy place on a Thursday, but her paperwork got delayed and the transfer got pushed to the next day. I got a call from the fancy place saying that they wouldn’t have a bed for my mother the next day unless I spent $535 to lock it down. At that point, I wasn’t sure if she was actually going be transferred the next day, so I declined.

But the next day, when I saw the nursing home my mother got transferred to instead, I would have dropped that $535 in a heartbeat. To describe the dump my dear mother got placed in as a hellhole of Dickensian squalor would be too generous: all I could think of walking its dingy halls and witnessing its indifferent staff was George Orwell’s essay on “How the Poor Die.” I’d done my best, but I’d dropped the ball, and the rage and guilt—my God, the guilt—I felt seeing the person I cherish most in the world get treated like an animal in a factory farm were indescribable. At least the first night my mother had her room to herself, but Saturday afternoon a couple of EMTs moved in a roommate who’d badly fractured her leg in several places. From then on, only a curtain away, the days were punctuated with a stranger’s howls of pain.

I was back on the phone with the fancy place first thing that Monday morning, and thankfully they had a room, but the dump in which my mother was marooned was too slow and sloppy with paperwork for her to be transferred until the next day. With my aunt there for moral support, wheeling my mother down the hallway and out of that place forever felt like a jailbreak, but I couldn’t help but feel for the inmates who were damned with no other recourse. I had the option of switching my mom to a more civilized environment because she can afford it, but tens of millions of aging and elderly Americans cannot.

In the midst of all of the stress, I’ve not had the bandwidth to publish anything long-form in months, and it’s turned out that posting impromptu thoughts in Substack Notes is far more productive in terms of accruing subscribers. The last piece that I wrote before my life turned upside down concerned my decades-long advocacy for immigration policy that puts American citizens’ interests first by preventing the mass influx of impoverished migrants and cracking down on businesses unscrupulous enough to hire unauthorized labor. Both Barack Obama and Joe Biden shamelessly abused their executive powers to administratively dismantle immigration enforcement, incentivizing millions and millions of impoverished migrants to flood into the United States and leading directly to Donald Trump getting elected, twice. And yet the fact was not lost on me that, on the very day the Trump administration announced that they were ending Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of Haitians, the health aide who bathed my mother was a lovely Haitian woman. In that context I wasn’t concerned with her immigration status, only grateful that she was treating my loved one with kindness and compassion.

I’m a longtime border hawk. The vast majority of the millions and millions of migrants that Joe Biden illegally admitted via mass asylum fraud need to leave or be removed. Temporary Protected Status is supposed to be just that, temporary, and I do believe that it’s past time for many of the Haitians living in the United States under TPS to return home. But, unavoidably, America is in dire need of many more health aides to take care of Baby Boomers in their final stage of life. Millions of migrants need to leave, but I’m also inclined to think that if someone is an honest woman with a gentle demeanor and a strong back who’s willing to fill a depressing job in eldercare, she should probably be allowed to stay. We need people like her, millions of them.

The day draws late, but it’s not over yet. My mother seems to slowly be regaining more ability to digest solid foods some of the time, and she’s gained a tiny bit of weight for the first time since her initial diagnosis. I’ve been with her most of the day every day, except for the one Sunday when I was literally snowed in, doing what I can to keep her alive and comfortable. My definition of a good day has become one that I can still tell her that I love her and she can still say it back, and by that standard it’s been almost all good days. I’d welcome a miracle, but it seems likely that she’s running out of time. Death is often not a single discrete event, like in the movies, but a lingering process of weeks or months.

If you, dear reader, are so fortunate to have a mother you love still among the living, stop everything you’re doing and call her to tell her all that she means to you. Better yet, if you’re within driving distance, show up and tell her that with hugs and kisses and flowers and chocolates. Do it today, not tomorrow, because tomorrow might be too late.

Next: On the Exercise of Soft Power