Stop Saying There’s a Nursing Shortage

You may remember (but probably don’t) that in 2021, I extensively covered the trucking industry. I wrote about how truck driver training is terrible, and about how many people quit in their first months or years as a trucker because the job initially is very miserable. I wrote about a trucker who was murdered by his co-driver (many first trucking jobs are with a ‘co-driver’ who is supposed to show you the ropes.) I bought a stuffed giraffe from the Internet and followed its extremely slow progress to my house, including on ships, trains, and a trucks.

And I wrote about how, despite many publications saying that there was a shortage of truck drivers during the supply chain crisis, that was not true. What was actually happening was that a lot of people were getting trained as truck drivers, and then, realizing how terrible the job was and how little they actually got paid, they quit and did something else.

I thought about that story recently when I read about a rise of “Uber for nursing” gig apps in which hospitals can hire nurses for a day because they were short-staffed. The apps themselves, which have names like ShiftKey, ShiftMed, and CareRev, claim to be “tackling healthcare’s labor crisis” but in reality, according to researchers, are just driving down wages and benefits for healthcare workers. The more I read about these apps, the more I recognized a familiar story: employer squeezes worker, and then claims it can’t find enough workers.

I talked to a professor at Penn who had many, many studies to confirm my thesis. Nursing, she found, has gotten worse since the pandemic, since many hospitals are cutting back on staff. Many nurses are more burned out than ever, and they cite insufficient staffing as the reason. The rise of for-profit hospitals and private-equity backed hospitals hasn’t helped, since those hospitals have been found to cut staff more frequently. Many hospitals have turned to technology like virtual sitters, which actually put more pressure on nurses.

I sympathize for some hospital administrators—hospitals are having a rough go of it right now with insufficient Medicaid compensation (more on this soon.) But studies have repeatedly showed that investing in nursing more than pays off with better patient outcomes, which means hospitals save money since they lose money the longer a patient stays in the hospital. And there is a solution—California has mandated nursing staffing ratios and it appears to reduce burnout.

Read the story here:

Stop Saying There’s a Nursing Shortage

Books to Fall Asleep To

To refresh your memory, I end this newsletter with a recommendation of an audiobook I listen to at night to help me fall asleep. This is not an insult to the book, if it is boring (or if the narrator is bad), I won’t listen. Today I’m going to recommend Radio Free Afghanistan, a book by Saad Mohseni, whose girlfriend, to his dismay, once called him the “Rupert Murdoch of Afghanistan.” Mohseni’s family fled Afghanistan in 1979, but returned following the U.S.’s war on terror (and on Afghanistan) in 2001. They launched a radio station in 2003 and built it into a television network, and still tried to run it once the U.S. left and the Taliban took over in 2021.

When a gunman shot up what he thought were the offices of the NFL this summer to bring attention to CTE—and allegedly asked Nowinski to study his brain in his suicide note—I decided to call up Nowinski and ask whether anything had changed in terms of sport leagues paying more attention to CTE. The answer was surprising:

Is the NFL Safer Than High School Football?

The NFL had done a lot since we last talked, he told me, to try and change the game of professional football to minimize head trauma. Other sports leagues like the NCAA, the National Federation of State High School Associations, and even Pop Warner, have not.

“Everybody in football is aware of what the NFL has done and has made an active choice not to follow,” Nowinski told me. “It’s just a dramatic failure of leadership.”

I looked into it and found that he was right. The NCAA kept emphasizing that it had done a lot to change the game and minimize head impacts, but there was little emphasis that the league has changed much at all. And it certainly didn’t go as far as the NFL. The NFHS, which gives guidance to high school leagues, has denied any link between CTE and playing high school football. And just go online and search youth football leagues and you’ll find all sorts of evidence of kids doing very dangerous drills in which their heads get hit again and again.

It’s problematic that other leagues have not done much because CTE is not caused by concussions per se, but rather by repeated strong impacts to the head. So the more tackle football someone plays over his life, the more drills he does with pads on, the more hitting he practices, the more likely he is to develop it, research suggests. And right now, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of movement to push leagues for younger players into thinking more seriously about CTE. A California bill that would have banned tackle football for kids under age 12 had support until Gov. Gavin Newsom pledged to veto it, and if California can’t ban tackle football, who can? The story, again, is here:

Is the NFL Safer Than High School Football?

I also wrote a story about scammy companies that lure people into thinking they are buying health insurance on the Affordable Care Act marketplace, while instead actually selling them junk plans that aren’t compliant with the ACA.

How Fake Insurance Is Luring People In

Many of these sites are owned by lead generation companies, which make money by getting the contact info of potential customers for certain businesses, and then charge businesses for that contact info. The lead generation sites create websites that look and sound like they’re places to buy Affordable Care Act insurance, often with domain names ending in .org, and then when people enter their name and contact information, they get deluged by calls and texts from people who sometimes sell them things that aren’t actually health insurance.

Another problem is that people sometimes go to brokers to help them choose ACA plans, but brokers don’t always have their best interests at heart. Brokers can sell ACA-compliant plans and non-ACA compliant plans, and often get higher compensation for selling non-ACA compliant plans.

One woman I talked to had fixed indemnity insurance—not actual health insurance—for three years before she realized she had been duped. She’s lucky to not have suffered a catastrophic health event during that time, but paid over $16,000 she need not have paid nonetheless.

This is especially important this year because, as I’ve written about before, premiums for Affordable Care Act insurance are about to spike unless Congress takes action. (This is the whole reason the government is currently shut down.) As premiums go up an average of 75%, people are going to Google around for lower prices and end up on these websites, ending up with junk health insurance.

I’m surprised the sites are not more regulated, but they are selling a legitimate product. It’s just not the health insurance product that people think they are buying. And that’s a consequence of our overly complicated healthcare system, which is confusing even before you introduce lead generation sites and health insurance brokers.

“I think she holds a third of the blame, and another third of the blame goes to this company that knowingly does this marketing to get people to pay for things they don’t actually want,” says the son of one of the women who got scammed. “But the other third of the blame goes to our health care system, which is so complicated that companies just thrive in the confusion and an astute person can’t make heads or tails of it.”

That story, again, is here:

How Fake Insurance Is Luring People In

Lastly, I did a story on why employer-sponsored health care is getting so expensive. Surveys expect costs to jump 6-7% for next year. You’re actually probably getting a good deal as an employee—employers pay about 75% of your health insurance costs and employees pay about 25%.

The reasons costs keep rising are predictable: more people using GLP-1s, more people using health care after the pandemic, general inflation making its way into the healthcare system. But it’s still surprising to see the bills: in 2025, a family of four on employer-sponsored health care cost $26,993.

The higher cost of healthcare leads to fewer jobs in the economy, research suggests, because employers don’t have as much money to spend on workers.

Why Your Health Insurance Costs Keep Rising

Taking a pause for a moment to say this is probably my last post for awhile, as I am due to give birth to our second child in the next couple of weeks and am going on leave. But I’ll be back with more stories about health and economics and whatever else crosses my path in spring 2026.

Books to Fall Asleep To (BFAT)

This one was actually engaging enough that it was hard to fall asleep, so maybe this is one you should save for awake time. But I just finished Glen Weldon’s The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture. As someone who is married to a comic book person and who is the mother of someone who really likes superheroes, I really enjoyed learning about the history of Batman in the comics and in TV. The book, read by Weldon, who also hosts NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour (which I also recommend) traces Batman from his roots in the comic books to the much-hated (by fans) TV show of the 1960s to the many movie franchises in the 1990s (Michael Keaton), 2000s (Val Kilmer and George Clooney) and 2000 (Christian Bale). It’s fun to hear about what changes comic book nerds loved and hated, and all the different worlds and iterations of the Dark Knight through his long history.

Why Baby Boxes Are Suddenly Everywhere

The spread of these devices, which cost around $16,000 and are installed in fire stations and hospitals, is somewhat astounding. There were just 29 in 2020, and now there are more than 350. They’re going into mostly red states that have banned abortion because, as one lawmaker told me, “To be a pro-life state, you have to give options,” which is kind of an ironic statement overall.

But there are many critics, too. In Nov. 2024, a bunch of doctors, lawyers, and ethicists wrote a letter to HHS arguing that the boxes are unregulated and “fraught with unintended harms and negative consequences.” One of the biggest problems seems to be that they don’t facilitate face-to-face surrender, in which trained professionals can check in on a mom and make sure she’s ok. They also don’t let the mom take her child back if she changes her mind: in Alabama, babies can be formally adopted within 6 weeks.

Other people argue that baby boxes are unnecessary. That’s because since around 2000, most states have passed safe-haven laws that allow parents to surrender a newborn to hospitals and fire stations without repercussions, a law that would have helped the mom of the doula I had coffee with. Safe haven laws at least facilitate a face-to-face surrender, and many safe haven groups try to keep families together and provide the moms with the resources necessary to raise their children, if they so desire. While reporting this story, I read Relinquished, a 2024 book by Gretchen Sisson about adoption in the U.S., and found it very relevant: it turns out many moms would keep their babies if they had resources like a car seat or $1,000. Baby boxes do not try to keep mom with child.

“There’s a place for anonymous surrender, but is that what we want to push?” says Leah Kipley, assistant director of the National Safe Haven Alliance. “That’s what’s been around since the Middle Ages.”

One thing that struck me was how, for many people, baby boxes seemed to be devices that generate a supply of infants for loving families who want to adopt. This minimizes the trauma of a birth mom who has likely given birth alone at home and has to make the difficult decision to give up her child. We don’t want to acknowledge the mother, or think about the birth mom in crisis,” says Grace Howard, a professor at San José State University and the author of The Pregnancy Police: Conceiving Crime, Arresting Personhood, which follows state attempts to criminalize and surveil pregnant women. “If we acknowledge the mother, then we look at the people adopting these brand-new infants, and it’s not romantic anymore. It’s a tragedy.”

Read more of my story here:

Why Baby Boxes Are Suddenly Everywhere

I also wrote about why afterschool programs are disappearing across America, partly inspired by my own town’s insufficient afterschool system. It still astounds me that the work day is 8-9 hours and the school day is 5-6 hours and no one seems particularly incensed that there are not a whole lot of options for reconciling those two. Many families have two working parents because they have to, and they don’t have a lot of options for what to do with their kids when school is out.

Lastly, I covered why Medicare’s telehealth options ended Oct. 1 and who that’s going to hurt. They may go back up if the government ever does, but as of right now, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of progress on either

Books to Fall Asleep To (BFAT)

I am currently listening to Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel. A few things I did not know about Meir, the first (and only) female prime minister of Israel is that 1. She actually grew up in Milwaukee (like my own grandmother!) and emigrated to what is now Israel in the 1920s and 2. her name was Golda Meyerson until David ben-Gurion pressured her into Israel-izing it into Golda Meir. I like learning her diplomatic tactic of essentially leaning into the Jewish grandmother role — even when she was fairly young — and pressuring heads of state into doing what she wanted them to do. She traveled to Israel aboard the SS Pocahontas, which was essentially a cursed ship because a bunch of dock workers kept sabotaging it, which confirms my previously held belief that boats are always less fun than you’d think.

This goes against the advice of many nutritionists, who say whole milk is high in saturated fat and that there’s no reason to push it in schools. It also goes against the advice of the 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines committee, which released a report in December saying there was no reason to recommend whole milk over low-fat milk. (The 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines will be released by the end of the year.)

In my latest story, I look into the growing debate over whole milk and whole fat dairy:

A Battle is Brewing Over Whole Milk

There was a time when people thought that drinking whole milk—and eating red meat—was healthy. At that time, people also had extremely high rates of heart disease. Since 1980, the dietary guidelines have recommended reducing saturated fat in Americans’ diets. That means, for adults, and kids over 5, drinking less whole milk.

But MAHA has other ideas. There’s a bill making its way through Congress, the Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act of 2025, that would overrule the current dietary guidelines to allow schools to offer whole milk. And the Trump administration has said the above comments about whole milk, also pledging to get whole milk back into schools in its recent MAHA Strategy report (which I wrote about here.)

I can’t tell if the push for whole milk is some kind of confusion that conflates whole milk with unprocessed foods (whole milk is just as processed as skim milk, so that doesn’t really make sense) or if it’s based on science. I talked to a bunch of nutritionists for this story, and a few said that there’s strong evidence that whole milk is not healthy, and one said that the science is changing and maybe whole milk isn’t that bad.

The thing that was most interesting to me, though, that came out of this reporting was when I talked to Jerold Mande, who was in the Obama administration and spearheaded the effort to replace the outdated food pyramid with a clearer graphic in 2011. They came up with something called MyPlate, which tells us to eat vegetables, fruit, whole grain, and protein. And then they have a little circle next to the plate that says “dairy.” This little blue circle, Mande says, was totally unnecessary—water is actually more important to the diet than milk—but the dairy industry was adamant that dairy be included.

Which made me wonder—is there really any reason to have dairy at all? Put aside for a moment the many struggles of dairy farmers, which I wrote about in 2019 and did an NPR Indicator episode about, why drink dairy? Two-thirds of the world is lactose intolerant and doesn’t drink dairy, and they are perfectly healthy. Milk has calcium, which is important, and is fortified with Vitamins A and D, but if you get those from other sources, there might not be a compelling reason to drink milk.

One reason we’re told to drink milk is so that we avoid bone fractures later in life, one doctor and researcher told me—but the countries with the lowest rates of later-in-life fractures are those with populations that are mostly lactose intolerant.

Here’s the milk story again: A Battle is Brewing Over Whole Milk

I also wrote about why it’s so hard to make school lunches better, after blanching at the menu for my kindergarten-aged son’s school. Why It’s So Hard To Make School Lunches Healthier, covered RFK Jr’s latest Congressional hearing, and explained why Obamacare prices are about to skyrocket.

As a follow-up to my story about women dropping out of the workforce, I also took a closer look at why so many childcare centers are struggling. I talked to a center that has run for 18 years in Wisconsin that is closing down and explored why others are closing: basically the end of federal and state subsidies from the pandemic. Interestingly, money spent on childcare often ends up back in the government’s coffers in the form of taxes from working parents, so there’s a good case for more spending government money. That probably isn’t going to happen in this political climate.

Why So Many Childcare Centers are Closing

Books to Fall Asleep To

I just finished listening to a random book called The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia by James Bradley that I highly recommend. It details how the U.S. in the early 20th century really, really wanted China to be governed by Chiang Kai-Shek, a general who was Mao’s rival, mostly because he was a devout Christian and many of his family members and associates went to school in the U.S. and had nice, approachable Southern accents. In the years leading up to World War II, the U.S. under Franklin Delano Roosevelt secretly supplied Chiang and the Chinese army with supplies and training from the U.S. army. Relevant too is that the Delano family, which generated much of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s fortune, made most of its money through the illegal opium trade in China. The book is basically about how the U.S. antagonized Mao and the Japanese by supporting Chiang and denying the Japanese oil for their attacks in China, and how many prominent U.S. leaders were wowed by Chiang Kai-Shek and the Chinese businessman and Methodist missionary Charlie Soong. Random suggestion from the library, but a winner!

Why So Many Women Are Quitting the Workforce

I have been keeping an eye on women’s labor-force participation, which is the share of women in the population at work or looking for work. And after rising during the pandemic, it appears to have peaked in January 2025 and started falling again. One researcher found that labor force participation of women ages 25-44 living with a child under five fell a whopping three percentage points from January 2025 to June.

What’s going on here? The most obvious thing to me is the return to office policies being pushed by everyone from the federal government to Starbucks to JP Morgan. All places, by the way, run by men. One of the experts I talked to had thoughts about this: “When I hear about these companies making everyone go back to the office, the most normal situation is it’s being ordered by some old white male person with what I call care privilege, which is that they have someone who cooks their meals, irons their clothes, or picks their kids up from daycare,” she told me.

I don’t really understand why more people aren’t calling these old white male persons on this. I actually looked for lawsuits arguing that RTO policies are discriminatory against women and disabled people, but didn’t find any. But RTO policies do not appear to be a hill that modern feminism seems to want to die on, perhaps because they benefit upper and middle-income women more than others.

Still, it’s a reality that many families who moved during the pandemic because of cost of living or family issues are being faced with the difficult choice of either moving back to the place that didn’t really work for them, or having one parent quit their job. And it seems to be usually the woman who quits, whether it be because women get paid less so their salaries are more dispensable, or because women more traditionally take on caregiving responsibilities.

I admire the companies that are standing up and saying people can work from wherever, as long as they get their work done, but they are sadly the minority. Only about 9% of job postings on LinkedIn are remote job listings, but 38% of applicants were for remote jobs.

One thing to keep an eye on in this story is how families fare once one parent drops out of the workforce. Things are expensive these days, and I’ve talked to a good share of families who say it’s a struggle to survive on one income, even if the working partner has a good job. That means more families limping along towards retirement, saving less, and spending less.

Once again, you can read the story here: Why So Many Women Are Quitting the Workforce

A little side note: I was commiserating with a journalism colleague at another publication the other day about how hard it is to get stories out to the general public. It’s especially difficult because of the demise / radicalization of Twitter, which used to be a pretty reliable place to share content. So when this story didn’t take off on the web as much as I wanted, I went to Reddit and posted a link to it in one of my favorite communities, R/TwoXChromosomes . According to Reddit, that post got 298k views, which is much, much, MUCH more than it got at TIME. I don’t think many people actually clicked on the link, more just engaged in the discussion below the story, but it just goes to show the many jobs that journalists have today — reporter, editor, fact checker, social media promoter. Have ideas for how to get my stories read by more people? Let me know!

And if you like the ‘bosses stink now’ storyline, check out my 2023 story, No More Mr. Nice Boss (as I called it), or, as TIME called it, Flexible and Empathetic Employers Were a Pandemic Blip

Books to Fall Asleep To

I am listening to a book called Save Our Souls, about a family of five with bad luck who were hired in the 1880s to take a ship on a shark-fishing expedition in the Pacific. Their boat was then wrecked in a storm and they got stranded on a desert island. It’s billed as a real-life Swiss Family Robinson. Apparently they are not alone on the desert island — some guy called Hans had been stranded there previously and greets them. I keep falling asleep during the Hans parts (not because they are boring, because I am tired!) but I am heralding a guess that if you get stranded on a desert island and there’s already some guy named Hans there, he is bad news.

Why Seniors Can’t Afford Long-Term Care

It turns out the U.S. is an outlier in long-term care—many countries, including the Netherlands, Japan, and Singapore, have mandatory long-term care insurance programs that take a bit out of people’s paychecks and then gives them a fund for long-term care when they retire. But the U.S. has nothing like that, with the exception of long-term care insurance, which is private. There are many horror stories about long-term care insurance, and about people who pay premiums for decades and then are told that because of some loophole, they don’t get the care they need. Only about 4-5% of Americans have long-term care insurance.

The other two options: be super rich and pay for a fancy retirement community that costs $1 million for entry and has monthly fees of $13,000 a month or so. Or spend down all the money that you’ve worked your whole life to earn, and qualify for Medicaid, the government payer of last resort. But nursing homes that have a lot of Medicaid clients don’t always have the best reputation, and are often chronically understaffed.

My story talks about why there aren’t many options for middle-income folks, and what happens to the millions of people who are too “rich” for Medicaid but too poor for good long-term care.

Why So Many Seniors Can’t Afford Long-Term Care

I also wrote about a phenomenon that I’ve been mulling over in my head since my 2024 reporting trip to Alabama to write about IUDs being forced on poor women. A doctor there told me that it was extremely difficult to negotiate better rates because there is essentially one insurer in the state of Alabama: Blue Cross Blue Shield. In fact, BCBS controls about 94% of the group insurance market in Alabama. That’s a huge market share and what you could definitely call a monopoly if you did mind getting persistently pestered by their PR folks.

Alabama has the insurer with the biggest market share, but it isn’t alone; lots of other states have one dominant insurer. That makes premiums go up, doctor pay go down, and nuisances like prior authorization processes take longer, according to research. One doctor told me a story of an Alabama spine surgery that he was going to perform that he had to cancel at the last minute because of prior authorization problems, all of which he blamed on BCBS Alabama. That story is here:

How Health Insurance Monopolies Affect Your Care

I also wrote about how domestic violence support groups are seeing sharp funding cuts because of declining federal resources, a problem that is going to get worse if Trump’s 2026 budget goes through as currently proposed. I talked to groups that have closed shelters, shut hotlines, and put a lot more stress and work on remaining workers. These people are professionals who already have tough jobs and are working on shoestring budgets, but all of these factors are getting worse.

‘People Are Going to Die’: Cuts Leave Domestic Violence Support Groups Reeling

I also sat through an interminable FDA hearing last week in which many many scientists, dentists, and doctors weighed in on whether the FDA should ban fluoride supplements from the market. This was at times fascinating, in part because of the personalities involved, some of whom seem to have drunk the current administration’s Kool-Aid (but not its fluoride) and think that scientific studies can’t be trusted. There were many scientists, pediatricians, and experts who pointed to studies and cases of fluoride really helping people avoid cavities, but the administration seems disinclined to listen to them. (As do the two states, Florida and Utah, that recently banned fluoride from the water.) The new FDA exec who talked at the hearing, a longtime pharmaceutical CEO, seemed predisposed to ban fluoride supplements no matter what doctors said. You can read more here:

The FDA Might Ban Fluoride Supplements. Dentists Are Upset

Books To Fall Asleep To

Women are spies, too! That’s what I’m learning in the audiobook I am listening to now, The Sisterhood: The Secret History of Women at the CIA. It’s meticulously researched and quite engaging, and there is only one flaw: the author narrates the audiobook. Authors, I compel you, unless you are Tina Fey (and maybe even if you are Tina Fey), DON’T NARRATE YOUR OWN AUDIOBOOK. There are professionals who will do this for you and they are much nicer to listen to than you are.

You may have noticed I was shifting into healthcare with my stories on IUDs being forced on poor women and why maternity care is underpaid, but I’ve made it official now, transitioning to TIME’s powerhouse of a health team.

So far, I’ve looked a lot at what the Trump Administration is doing to health as it guts HHS and other departments. That’s what my most recent story is about. It looks at how, as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. vows to find a “cause” for autism, his agency and others in the federal government are slashing funding for autism research and programs that support autistic children and that fund doctoral students hoping to help children with autism.

Trump Administration Cuts Autism Funding As It Pledges To Find a Cause

https://time.com/7279068/trump-administration-autism-research-cuts/

Some of the details in this story are truly maddening, like how generations of doctoral students have been funded by the Department of Education to both research autism and learn how to help autistic students in the classroom, and that grant was abruptly canceled April 2. Another two programs that helped autistic children transition from high school to college or work, and one that funded autistic college students, were also cut.

I also looked at cuts to HHS are changing newborn testing in the U.S., putting newborn screening programs in jeopardy and potentially creating bigger disparities between states in what rare diseases children are tested for. I’m very interested in how health services and interventions available to you vary by state, and was surprised to talk to some parents whose children died from rare diseases because their states didn’t test for them, while neighboring states did.

How Having a Baby is Changing Under Trump

Another recent health story looked at how cuts to the FDA are making food safety experts worried because the U.S. is already very bad at food safety. (For example, there was a rule that made farmers test water to make sure they weren’t spraying manure on vegetables and we just decided to make it ‘honor system.’)

Food Safety Was Slipping in the U.S. Then Came Massive Layoffs

I also wrote a fun story about people who hated health insurance so much that they stopped paying for it. Instead, they joined a company called CrowdHealth that has them pay cash for medical bills—when you pay cash, you get a steep discount—and then ask others in the network to help them out with the bill. This is a model that’s been used by religious health-sharing ministries for decades, but is now being pioneered in the health tech space by CrowdHealth.

They Hated Health Insurance. So They Started Paying For Each Other’s Care

Stay tuned here or on X or BlueSky for more health stories, or you can always go to my TIME author page: https://time.com/author/alana-semuels/

And please bring me your healthcare ideas!

BFAT, Books to Fall Asleep To

I know Kevin Starr is the unofficial (maybe even official?) biographer of California, but I just listened to a fantastic history of California that was really detailed and engaging. It’s by John Mack Faragher and it’s called California. It’s always interesting to hear the stories of the people (okay men) that San Francisco streets are named after, the early interactions with native people, and how few oranges sailors ate and how much scurvy they all had.

For Many of America’s Aging Workers, ‘Retirement is a Distant Dream’

I’ve been thinking a lot about what America’s workforce will look like as it ages, since older workers are going to have to stay working longer for financial reasons. We’re living longer and longer — half of babies born in 2007 are projected to live to 103 —and many of us haven’t saved up enough money to live to 103. Or 70, if we had service industry jobs without benefits.

I traveled to Vermont, where 25% of people 65 and older are still working, to find out what the aging workforce looks like. I spent time with Walter Carpenter, who, at 69, says he doesn’t know if he’ll ever be able to retire, and who works a pretty physical job at Mad River Glen ski area in Vermont. Fun fact: I got stuck on a mountain while reporting this story since I didn’t bring a 4WD car to Vermont in the winter because I left it at home for my family. (Pro tip: Don’t travel to Vermont in the winter without a 4WD vehicle.) Walter mercifully helped me and drove me around. He was a great companion for the weekend, and a fascinating guy, as you’ll find if you read the story.

Other stories from the past few weeks:

—Today, I wrote about how Trump’s cuts to DEI and environmental justice are hurting poor, white communities who voted for him: How Trump’s Attacks on DEI Are Hurting Communities That Voted for Him

—For the issue before the one that features Walter, I wrote about Paw Patrol, a TV show and toy company that my son loved for a long time. If you’re a parent, you probably know that it’s ubiquitous, and I wanted to find out why. Long story short: It’s a TV show created by a toy company. How a Children’s Toy Company Launched a TV Juggernaut

—I wrote about how cuts to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau could reverse recent consumer victories, like lowering bank overdraft fees and removing medical debt from people’s credit reports: What Cuts to the CFPB Could Mean for Consumers

—I wrote a few tariff stories: Here’s Where China’s Retaliatory Tariffs on the U.S. Could Hit the Hardest and How Trump’s Tariffs Could Affect U.S. Consumers

—And, shortly after the FDA banned red dye 3, I looked at what food additives are still banned in Europe and allowed in the U.S. Why Some Food Additives Banned in Europe Are Still on U.S. Shelves. This one was especially fun because I took to the aisles of my local grocery story, Key Foods, to look on the back of many food packages to look at which ones had ingredients banned in Europe. The answer was a lot.

There’s another piece of the aging workers story I wanted to talk briefly about here. There are many people like Walter Carpenter who are working because their jobs haven’t afforded them the stability to retire. But there are also lots of people who are still working to help out family members or former employers because there aren’t enough workers overall. This is something that’s going to continue if immigration is targeted by the current administration and birth rates stay low.

I think the workplace is going to have to change to accommodate workers in their 70s and 80s—I remember reading a great Wall Street Journal a few years ago about how factories were having older workers wear exoskeletons that could help them do heavy lifting without hurting themselves. I’m curious to hear other ways that employers are trying to extend older peoples’ work lives (aside from flexible schedules, which I mention in this piece.) Heard of anything? Let me know!

And don’t forget, read my story about Walter Carpenter in this week’s issue of TIME or online:

For Many of America’s Aging Workers, ‘Retirement Is a Distant Dream’

Books to Fall Asleep To (BFAT)

Can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this one, but I really enjoyed Fire in Paradise by Alastair Gee and Dani Anguiano. It tells the story of the most destructive fire in California history, the Camp fire, and it is unnerving to hear how slowly alarms and warnings went out and how many people were completely trapped. Maybe not great bedtime reading but interesting nonetheless.

Welcome to the Golden Age of Scams

Why Your Pharmacy Experience is Miserable

Why You Can’t Find a Pediatrician

The first story, about how we are in a golden age of scams, was inspired by a conversation I had with the attorney general of Connecticut when I was writing about car dealerships. If you’ll recall, I was trying to buy a car and got royally scammed by a dealer in Connecticut, which made me investigate the whole car dealership industry. When talking to the Connecticut AG about car dealers, he said to me, “We have entered the age of scams,” or something along those lines, and the quote stayed with me. After writing about solar scams and financial scams and credit card scams and hearing about pool scams and home-buying scams, I decided to look into what was going on, and why scams seem so pervasive now.

I also was curious about the effects on society as scams seem to be everywhere. We trust strangers less, answer our phones less, and are generally more skeptical as a result. I recently was at a NY pizza establishment that was cash-only and didn’t have any cash and tried to Venmo a stranger money so they would give me cash and they looked at me like I was a thief, so I have experienced this skepticism firsthand. Read my piece to find out why we’re falling victim to so many scams, and stay for the scam baiters trying to do something about it.

Welcome to the Golden Age of Scams

The second story, about pediatrician pay, relates to a story I did back in May about why maternity care is underpaid and why maternity wards are closing across the country. A few doctors had mentioned to me that it wasn’t just ob-gyns who were struggling, but really any doctors that worked with women and children. When I started to hear stories of pediatrician shortages, I wondered if the two were related. They are. Pediatricians are paid less than almost any other specialty, in part because they do fewer procedures and spend more time on preventative medicine, which the reimbursement system doesn’t value. It also can’t be a coincidence that women make up a lot of pediatricians and ob-gyns, and that pay for those types of doctors as a share of the average physician’s salary has fallen as more women entered the fields.

Part of the reason pediatricians don’t make as much as other specialties, some doctors argue, is because of the RUC, a relatively secretive committee of doctors convened by the American Medical Association that makes recommendations for how much different procedures should be valued. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid then take these recommendations and develop reimbursement amounts; insurers use them as a guidance too. Every interaction I’ve had with the AMA has gone something like this:

Me: Some people allege that the RUC undervalues procedures on women and children

AMA: No we don’t, prove it, you’re wrong

Me: Ok, here are some peer-reviewed studies and some data

AMA: These studies aren’t definitive, prove it more

Me: Can you just give me some sort of comment or response? I don’t want to argue about the premise of the story

AMA: You’re a one-sided journalist, I’m going to complain to your editor

Methinks the AMA doth protest too much… Anyway, I almost made this into a story about how none of the professions that involve taking care of children—childcare workers, teachers, pediatricians—pay very well, because I find it odd that everyone seems to value children and want them to thrive, but no one seems to want to put their money into those values and increase pay for the people taking care of our kids.

Here is the story again, alongside the story about how health care for women is undervalued. Put together, it’s pretty damning to see how we seem to undervalue care for women and children.

Why Maternity Care is Underpaid

Why You Can’t Find a Pediatrician

Lastly, I did a story last year about shopping about Walmart and how the FTC was looking into whether suppliers were giving better deals to Walmart than it was giving to smaller grocery stores. The story made me very interested in the role of FTC action in my everyday life, something I think about every time I go to the pharmacy. I go to the Rite Aid in my town, wait in line forever, and get very cranky. It turns out there’s a reason for that—one that the FTC is looking into.

Hold on here because it gets a little complicated, but if you have health insurance, there is a middleman called a PBM that determines how much you pay for a drug and what the pharmacy gets reimbursed. As pharmacies have lost retail sales since the pandemic, PBMs have been squeezing them more, paying less and less for drugs. The twin forces have meant that pharmacies are cutting staff, pharmacists have poor working conditions, and everyone involved is pretty unhappy. Well, except for the PBMs. They’re making a lot of money. They can do that because the three biggest of them dominate 80% of the marketplace.

I explain it more in the story here:

Why Your Pharmacy Experience is Miserable

Last week, after my story ran, the FTC announced that it was taking action against the three largest PBMs, alleging that they artificially inflated insulin prices, making the consumer pay more. It’s a warning shot over the bow of the PBM yacht, and it will be interesting to see where it goes. Will it make your pharmacy experience better anytime soon? Probably not. But in the course of reporting the story, I switched from Rite Aid to the independent pharmacy across the street and am much happier. Do you have an independent pharmacy in your town? Try it! Maybe you’ll be less miserable.

BTFAT Books to Fall Asleep To

This isn’t a book, exactly, but I just discovered the NY Times Audio App, where you can listen to articles from magazines like the New Yorker, New York Magazine, NYT Magazine, and the New York Times, as well as This American Life and some podcasts. Last week in the Sunday magazine there was an extremely extremely long story about a deserter from the Russian army that I wanted to read but did not have time. But! They have it on the audio app, read by Liev Schrieber, and I’ve been listening to it before (and while) I fall asleep. It’s really well done and I’d recommend it if you have the app.

Rooftop solar’s dark side

If you’re here because you heard the story and want to find my original solar series, links below:

Rooftop Solar Power Has a Dark Side

Meet the Solar Sales Bros

The Rooftop Solar Industry Could Be On the Verge of Collapse

There is something that’s really fun about radio/podcasting, and I think it’s that the medium is so different from writing. I’ve been a writer for as long as I can remember, so sitting down to write something is second nature; when I worked at newspapers, editors liked to joke that longtime reporters could write news stories in their sleep. But radio is not at all natural to me. I could not do it in my sleep. You have to speak conversationally and clearly while actually reading a script. When you’re interviewing people, you can’t really interrupt them because it might ruin the tape (reforming interrupter here.) And radio—or at least Planet Money—does A LOT of edits.

Still, it was really fun doing this episode precisely because it was so different. Keith, the host, and I interviewed Nat Kreamer, who founded SunRun, which is one of the largest solar companies in the country. We interviewed a self-described solar sales bro. And we interviewed an analyst who used the fun phrase “residential solar death spiral.” I hope to do more podcast/radio down the road, but the industry is a bit saturated right now (TIME just lost its person in charge of podcasting) so we’ll see.

Other CONTENT you may have missed: I look into some bananas fraud cases, including one in which a scammer takes out $40,000 loans on people’s behalf without their knowledge and a company takes a lien out on their house; two separate couples who had their checks stolen in the mail and rewritten for tens of thousands of dollars and who could not get the banks to give them their money back (!), and a few pieces on what happens when the largest solar installer in the nation abruptly closes, which it just did.

But first! Go listen to Planet Money. Rooftop solar’s dark side.

BFAT, Books to Fall Asleep To

I get most of my audiobooks from the public library, and I recently did a search for the word “Hudson” because I wanted to find some history books about the Hudson Valley, where I live. Instead, (after the many romance novels about a handsome man named Hudson), I stumbled across a bunch of books with titles like Get a Good Night’s Sleep and Confidence and Switch Off and Relieve Anxiety by a woman named Lynda Hudson. I looked her up and she is a hypnotherapist who reads these books that are meant to kind of hypnotize you into sleep / relaxation. If you are someone who has trouble sleeping, give them a try, I find her voice very soothing and for some reason, I like the idea of being hypnotized. (Don’t @ me with your gold watches.)

‘I Don’t Have Faith in Doctors Anymore.’ Women Say They Were Pressured Into Long-Term Birth Control

The story is set in Alabama, but what these women experienced happens everywhere. One woman, Miannica Frison, had an IUD inserted after a traumatic birth despite not really wanting it at the time. When she asked her doctor to take it out because she didn’t like the side effects, she was rebuffed over and over again; her doctor told her to lose weight first and that she needed to make sure she wasn’t going to have a fourth child. This happened to many women I talked to, and many of them happened to be low-income and Black.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with IUDs and implants, and they’re an extremely effective way to prevent unplanned pregnancy. But these methods are also provider-controlled, meaning a woman can’t just decide to stop taking a pill, she has to go to her doctor to remove the contraceptive. And sometimes the doctor, thinking he has the woman’s best interest in mind, won’t. When women don’t have agency to make their own choices about birth control, we have a problem, as the fight over abortion rights demonstrates.

As I detail in the story … actually, maybe it got cut for space … the whole idea that unplanned pregnancy causes poverty arose out of a pronatalist eugenics mindset. In the 1940s, researchers puzzled about relatively low birth rates set out to study white, married, Protestant families in Indiana to find out why they weren’t conceiving more, and whether their pregnancies were planned and unplanned. Though the study was looking for what could get this narrow subset of people to conceive more, the federal government then took up some of its methods, tracking unintended pregnancies. This is a good academic article about this, if you can’t access it and want to read it, email me and I’ll send you a pdf! But basically, there are problems characterizing unplanned pregnancy as a social ill, especially since the pregnancy might actually be desired, if unplanned. And saying poor people should wait to give birth until their finances improve is another way of saying maybe poor people shouldn’t procreate.

Anyway, this obsession with reducing unplanned pregnancy made philanthropists, led by the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, to give many millions of dollars to researchers providing women access to LARCs. But they went a step beyond providing access to IUDs and implants, doctors started to counsel women that LARCs were the most effective birth control, and started really pushing them on people. Policies sprung up so that, in some cases, if a woman wants birth control, she has to get a provider-controlled method like an IUD or implant. Today, there’s a particularly persistent policy in which doctors try to get women on Medicaid to get an IUD immediately after they give birth, even though the risks of expulsion are high. They do this because they think women on Medicaid won’t come back for a follow-up appointment and are likely to have another pregnancy soon.

This story was difficult to report because I talked to a lot of researchers and reproductive justice advocates who said that this type of coercion was happening, but they couldn’t point me to any one woman who would talk about it. I kept looking and looking and getting nowhere, until I found a Facebook post by Miannica Frison, who talked about the difficulties her IUD caused her. I reached out to her and she was generous enough to share her story and put me in touch with her doula, who had seen the type of coercion she experienced multiple times. With Birmingham appearing to be the place I could center my story, I took a trip down there, meeting with many women and doulas and also reporting the maternity care story I published last week, Why Health Care for Mothers is Underpaid. I was very glad I was able to meet the women in person, because when UAB and others pushed back against my story, even calling the editor of TIME to protest before it ran, I was extremely confident in the women’s stories. Believe women, I kept telling myself, and we did.

Both of these stories were only possible to do because I got a generous fellowship from USC’s Center for Health Journalism that allowed me to travel and for us to hire a great photographer. I’d highly encourage other journalists to apply if you’re interested in getting funding to write about health and equity. Check out their various programs and fellowships here.

And again, here’s the story, there’s much more in it than I put here: ‘I Don’t Have Faith in Doctors Anymore.’ Women Say They Were Pressured Into Long-Term Birth Control

Books to Fall Asleep To BFAT

I don’t think I’ve ever shared the GOAT of all BFATs, the book that got me into BFATs. It is The Great Bridge by David McCullough, and it is about the design and construction of the Brooklyn Bridge in the 19th century. It is both fascinating and extremely detailed, and some of those details, like the depth and length of the caissons that held up the bridge, are very soothing for some reason. Listen while you drift off to sleep and learn about just how crappy much of life was in the 19th century, and how they built an awesome bridge nevertheless.

Why Maternity Care is Underpaid

I was talking to a bunch of women in Alabama about their birthing experiences, and many women in Birmingham kept talking about a hospital called Princeton that was everything they’d dreamed of for maternity care. Though in the U.S., Black women have high rates of maternal mortality and morbidity, high c-section rates, and high obstetric trauma, the labor and delivery ward at Princeton had great outcomes. It had midwives. It had groups of women coming together to talk about their birthing experience. And then, in October 2023, it closed.

It’s one of hundreds of maternity wards to close in recent years, and though news stories you might read blame low birth rates, there’s really something else going on. In short — maternity care is severely under compensated, and so doctors and hospitals can’t afford to keep doing it unless they have high volume units processing lots of women and not really giving them the care they want. The compensation is especially bad for women on Medicaid, which a lot of women are, since Medicaid covers pregnant women up to a higher income bracket than non-pregnant women. About 41% of U.S. births are covered by Medicaid.

Consider this: a doctor who cares for an Alabama Medicaid patient for ALL of her prenatal visits, her labor and delivery, and her postpartum visit — we’re talking about nine months of care here — would get $1,690 for all that time. A doctor who does a two hour hip replacement gets $1,617. Does that seem fair?

One controversial reason for the low rates of compensation, some doctors argue, is something called the RUC. (Warning: do not say the RUC is the reason for low compensation unless you want to have the American Medical Association argue with you for dozens upon dozens of emails. They do not agree.) The RUC is basically a committee of doctors that meets a bunch of times every year to set values for different procedures that doctors perform. Medicare and Medicaid then use those values to help set rates.

A number of academic studies over the years have suggested that the RUC sets values lower for procedures for women (that not coincidentally are also often performed by women) than for men. (For a cool paper on this, check out Double Discrimination, the Pay Gap in Gynecologic Surgery, and Its Association With Quality of Care.) There are other reasons care for women doesn’t pay well, including abysmal Medicaid compensation rates and insurance monopolies. But it all adds up to doctors and hospitals realizing that it’s not very profitable to do one of the things that you’d think would be the most important for our society—bringing a baby into the world.

Why Maternity Care is Underpaid

I also sat down for interviews with the CEO of Lyft (in person), the CEO of Chanel (virtually), and wrote a story about why I don’t like the term Forever Home for home-buying.

Lyft’s CEO on Layoffs, Leading With Purpose and the Future of Ride-Sharing

Why Chanel CEO Leena Nair Is Leading With Compassion

Stop Looking for Your Forever Home

Books to Fall Asleep To

This was a random one, but I listened to The Quiet World: Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 by Douglas Brinkley. It’s basically about all the people that tried to keep Alaska wild and free of development, which includes some famous people and also some randoms.

The Rooftop Solar Industry Could Be On the Verge of Collapse

This is a slightly complicated story, but it basically goes like this: Rooftop solar is expensive. Few homeowners wanted to spend the money to pay for it upfront. So big companies came up with a way to get people to sign up for no money down by selling solar leases to consumers. This was expensive, so to raise money to pay for these leases, they did two things: they sold the tax credits they could get because they, not the consumer, owned the panels, and they packaged the solar loans and sold them to investors as asset-backed securities.

This helped companies win over lots of consumers but it also put a lot of pressure on them to grow fast. To get a lot of tax credits, and to bundle and sell loans, you have to have a lot of systems to bundle together. You also have to grow quickly so you can spread the cost of all those expensive bankers and accountants over lots of people.

If you’ve heard of the Silicon Valley mantra of “move fast and break things,” you know that rapid growth sometimes works out for companies but it also often doesn’t work out for the rest of us. And that appears to be what has happened in a lot of rooftop solar companies. The cost of financialization significantly raised what consumers had to pay for rooftop solar, so it wasn’t as good a deal as it could be, and many people who get financing or loans don’t save that much on their energy bills.

The companies were also so focused on rapid growth that they looked the other way when door-to-door salesmen, who I wrote about here, lied to grannies and homeowners and sometimes even forged signatures and took out loans on behalf of people who didn’t even want solar systems. This is happening even as loans, rather than leases, become more prevalent in the solar industry. New companies pop up to offer loans and then give out TERRIBLE terms that they hide in the weeds, so that consumers think they’re getting a low interest rate but are actually paying 30% of the cost of the loan in fees.

This isn’t the only problem facing the residential solar industry. Some Wall Street analysts are accusing them of inflating the value of the tax credits they sold to investors, and “bamboozling,” in the words of one investor, the IRS. If they should have to pay back these tax credits, they’re going to be in trouble—they’re already incinerating money. And then there’s the problem of interest rates rising, homeowners losing appetite for rooftop solar, and states like California making residential solar more equitable but less profitable for homeowners.

What’s so frustrating about this whole situation is that if companies had just focused on selling solar, they might be fine. Some small, local installers who weren’t big enough to engage in financialization are doing okay, and one analyst told me that he expects all the big national ones to go away and only the small ones to survive. That could actually be better for consumers in the long run. Financialization has significantly driven up the cost of rooftop solar, even for the people who sign up for it without being misled. In Germany, where the market is dominated by local companies, solar costs about 50% less.

Some people have asked me if I hate solar as I’ve written about the problems in the industry. Not at all! I know we have to transition to more renewables to cut our reliance on fossil fuels. But I also think three things:

1. Relying on residential solar for the transition to renewables isn’t going to work, it represents a tiny, tiny percentage of renewable energy. Utility-scale and community scale solar can do a lot more. That’s not to say residential solar can’t work, but pushing it so much incentivizes companies to target homeowners for financial products that don’t benefit them, with the promise of saving the world.

2. There’s no reason to have giant, national solar companies. We don’t have giant, national roofing companies or carpenters or boiler repair companies. If you want to get solar, I think it makes a lot more sense to go with a trusted, local installer that neighbors or friends have used. It will likely be a lot less expensive, and at least you know you’re not paying for all those financial products they’re trying to make money off of.

3. Don’t buy anything from anyone knocking on your door. I know there’s a group of people (okay men) trying to revive the door-to-door sales industry, but it’s important to do a lot of research before making such a big investment. And the people knocking on your door are incentivized to close a sale, fast, so they can make money. Closing a deal fast is the opposite of what will help you save money and do research.

To put them all in one place, here are my three big stories on the residential solar industry:

Rooftop Solar Power Has a Dark Side

Meet the Solar Sales Bros

The Rooftop Solar Industry Could Be On the Verge of Collapse

Lastly, in case you don’t follow media twitter, there were a whole bunch of layoffs this week at TIME and at my former employer, the Los Angeles Times. I’m safe this time, but journalism increasingly feels like a game of musical chairs, and eventually, I, too, am going to lose my seat. Some really good people got laid off in these rounds, and it’s frustrating and demoralizing, especially because both companies are owned by billionaires. I’ve never seen a publication cut its way to success, but if you have, let me know!

What can you do? Not much. Subscribe to journalism, and not just the New York Times. Keep reading stuff that’s unique and well-written, and that AI couldn’t write. If you’re a billionaire, buy a news organization and turn it into a non-profit publication. That seems to be the only model that sort-of works, unless you want to be a puzzle or meme company that also happens to cover news.

Books to Fall Asleep To (BFAT)

This one was random, but I really enjoyed Precious Objects but Alicia Oltuski. The author’s father and grandfather were (are?) dealers in New York City’s diamond district along 47th street, where 90% of diamonds entering the U.S. pass through on their way to somewhere else. The industry is very insular, male, and orthodox Jewish, and the book is a fascinating window into the world of diamond dealers, brokers, cutters, and detectives. It also gives some history of diamonds and of her family’s involvement with the industry, which including bartering in a refugee camp.

You’re Not Imagining It, Cellphone Reception is Getting Worse

This poor reception is something I puzzled over every time I go into the office, and the more I thought about it, the more I noticed it in other places. Try to make a call on my cellphone from my house, from my parents’ house, from my car, from just about anywhere, and I was met with garbled reception and dropped calls. I started Googling around and not finding much of anything, so I talked to some analysts—and still did not find much of anything.

It wasn’t until I talked to Craig Moffett, an analyst who has covered the telecom industry for more than 30 years, that I finally started making progress. The problem, he told me, was that cellphone signals are transmitted over electromagnetic waves, just as radio signals are. The lower the band on the spectrum, the further signal can travel, which is why you can sometimes hear AM radio from other states. But the midband of the spectrum is getting very crowded as more people use more and more data. So what Verizon, my carrier, did, Moffett says, is decided to go after the ultra high-frequency bands of the spectrum. That spectrum was available because high frequency waves have a harder time traveling far and penetrating walls and buildings. That bet has not paid off, he says, since Verizon’s high-frequency spectrum waves have not proven very good at going very far.

Now, Verizon and AT&T both spent tens of billions of dollars on mid-frequency waves of the spectrum—but according to Verizon, they’re using that spectrum for 5G and specifically, for people who pay $10 a month extra for 5G. To get their high-frequency spectrum to go farther, they probably need to build more towers.

I was interviewed on Marketplace about this story, you can find the tape here: The fix for crummy cell reception? Probably more towers.

I was also interviewed on TV on NBC Morning News Now, which I think is NBC’s streaming news? I hate doing TV appearances, especially about things I am not an expert on, so you can watch me be awkward on TV, if you really want, here: Can You Hear Me Now?

I am also going to be on KQED, San Francisco’s public radio station, Tuesday at 9 am Pacific time, talking about Invitation Homes and my 2019 story on the single-family rental industry. Depressing fact: though a lot of publications followed my reporting about the shoddy practices of companies like Invitation Homes and American Homes 4 Rent, these companies’ share prices are trading above what they were when I wrote the story. Why? Because there’s such a housing shortage and they have a lot of inventory.

I also wrote a story about what the government is doing about robocalls. It was short.

Robocalls Finally Have the U.S. Government’s Attention

Also, since where else can I vent such frustrations, I would like to point out that a Wall Street Journal story has been making the rounds this week that echoes the premise—and headline—of my story from earlier this year. Mine was Why Return to Office Plans Spell Trouble for Working Moms. Theirs was Return To Office Mandates Are a Disaster for Working Moms. Both talked about women’s labor force participation and RTO mandates. As my friend Emily would say, put that in your pipe and smoke it.

BFAT. Books To Fall Asleep To.

This week I present a book that I liked—mostly—until I Googled the author and found that she is the spokeswoman for RFK Jr.’s campaign (and is married to his son) and has some not-helpful social media posts about vaccines. It’s called Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA by Amaryllis Fox, and it’s about a woman who was recruited into the CIA’s clandestine ops division and flew and lived all over the world working for the CIA. It’s an interesting window into what it’s like to work for the CIA and be a spy and also why, for someone who doesn’t really support war, it is an unsustainable career.