Sunday, August 16, 2026
Saturday, August 15, 2026
How Cyclospora Evaded the U.S. Food Safety System to Sicken Thousands - The New York Times
How Cyclospora Evaded the U.S. Food Safety System to Sicken Thousands
The Trump administration delayed a rule last year that could have sped up the effort to pinpoint the source of the contamination. Critics charge that food safety oversight has eroded overall.
Cases of cyclosporiasis were mounting rapidly in Michigan and state health officials were homing in on a common thread: Many of those who had fallen ill had eaten at Taco Bell.
On July 1, they asked the company for its supply chain records, crucial information in tracing ingredients that may have caused the outbreak.
On July 3, they wrote and asked for the records again.
On July 6, they wrote a third time.
“With the rapid nature of this outbreak and the number of people affected, we need to ensure we are completing traceback in a timely manner to preserve public health,” Lauren Edwards, an epidemiologist on the state’s rapid response team, said in an email to executives at Yum Brands, which owns Taco Bell. (The New York Times obtained the correspondence under Michigan’s open records law.)
Later that day, Taco Bell provided some records to the state, which by then was working with the federal Food and Drug Administration. The F.D.A. asked for additional records two days later. Finally, on July 13, the agency received all the records it needed to pinpoint lettuce from a Taylor Farms plant in Mexico as a source of the outbreak.
A federal rule that had been scheduled to take effect in January would have required Taco Bell to send those records within 24 hours. But last year, the Trump administration delayed the implementation of that rule until mid 2028, saying companies needed more time to prepare.
Food safety experts say the postponement has hindered the response to the outbreak, the largest cluster in a record number of cyclospora cases in the United States this year.
“Time translates into illnesses and lives,” said Thomas Gremillion, director of food policy at the Consumer Federation of America, who reviewed the emails from Michigan. He added: “We would have had a much better response to this outbreak if they hadn’t delayed that rule.”
Cyclospora, which can cause explosive diarrhea, cramps and other severe symptoms, has been a recognized driver of foodborne illness for nearly 30 years. But this year’s massive toll — totaling more than 24,500 confirmed or suspected cases so far and two deaths — reveals shortcomings in the U.S. food safety system that may leave Americans more vulnerable to future pathogens, public health experts say.
Many point to an erosion of food safety oversight during the Trump administration, stemming in part from its aggressive efforts to roll back regulations and shrink the federal government. Last year, the F.D.A. laid off many of the staff who supported food inspectors’ travel planning and who coordinate with foreign governments on food safety. (An F.D.A. spokesman said on Friday that “travel support staff and staff that coordinated with foreign governments have been reinstated.”) The administration eliminated a committee tasked with studying problems that led to outbreaks. It also cut a program focused on cyclospora tracking.
“So far this administration has made our food less safe, not safer,” said Scott Faber, the senior vice president for government affairs at the Environmental Working Group. “By firing food safety experts, by reducing the number of inspections, by tracking fewer pathogens, and by failing to set up a traceability system that makes sure that we’re able to to clear the shelves quickly.”
Donald Prater, the F.D.A.’s acting deputy commissioner for food, said the agency responded swiftly with the information it had on hand. He added that even if the 24-hour rule had been in effect, it would not have made a major impact on managing this outbreak response.
An F.D.A. spokesman said that protecting the nation’s food supply remains a core responsibility, and the agency has the personnel and resources to respond to outbreaks of foodborne illnesses.
Taco Bell said it responded to requests from Michigan and federal officials in a timely manner. “We acted immediately, voluntarily and proactively to protect our guests and support health officials,” the company said in a statement.
On July 15, federal authorities tied the outbreak to iceberg lettuce that had been supplied to Taco Bell from a plant in Mexico owned by Taylor Farms, the large U.S.-based producer of fresh vegetables, fruits and greens. The next day, Taylor Farms began a recall of their products containing iceberg lettuce that had been shipped to 27 states.
A spokeswoman for Taylor Farms said it promptly responded to requests for information and is cooperating with health officials in the U.S. and Mexico. On July 19, it sent independent third-party experts to conduct a “top-to-bottom review” of food safety processes there.
Yet efforts by authorities to figure out how the iceberg lettuce in Mexico became contaminated by cyclospora, a single-cell parasite that infects the small intestine and spreads through feces, continue to move slowly. Although Taylor Farms temporarily shut down the plant on July 18, F.D.A. inspectors did not arrive in Mexico to inspect it until this week, nearly a month later.
The investigators from the F.D.A. were delayed in traveling partly because of clearances needed to work in an area deemed unsafe for Americans, according to a person familiar with the effort, who was not authorized to speak about it. They also needed to coordinate with the Mexican government and gather enough testing supplies to do a thorough investigation, the person said.
The slow start could make it difficult to discover a root cause of the contamination, said Sandra Eskin, chief executive of Stop Foodborne Illness, a nonprofit working to protect against foodborne pathogens.
Declining inspections
Some of the problems that have hampered the response to this outbreak developed over decades: Scientists who study cyclospora said they have lacked the funding to better understand the parasite, including how it spreads and how to detect it. Food safety advocates say the goals of a landmark food safety law enacted in 2011 have not been met amid weak regulations and falling numbers of foreign food facility inspections.
The federal rule requiring companies to swiftly produce records in an outbreak investigation was drafted under that law, the Food Safety Modernization Act, which gave the F.D.A. new powers to keep food free of parasites and pathogens, to rapidly trace produce through the supply chain and to aggressively expand inspections.
The law set a goal of 19,200 annual foreign inspections by 2016. But foreign inspections have fallen markedly even as the foreign food supply has surged. In 2025, the agency made about 1,100 visits to foreign food plants and cited significant lapses in about 80 of them. Its last visit to the Taylor Farms facility in Mexico was in 2019, records show.
Even though finding the tiny cyclospora parasites during a site visit is challenging, such visits could reveal indicators such as irrigation water with high levels of fecal matter.
A spokeswoman for Taylor Farms said that it has a “robust fecal indicator testing program that includes cyclospora for all of our water sources. All of those tests have been negative.”
With the exception of the pandemic years, the F.D.A.’s foreign food inspections in 2025 were at a 15-year low, agency data show.
Currently, the F.D.A. has about 440 staff charged with inspecting more than 300,000 registered animal and human food facilities — domestically and abroad.
“Other things help ensure the safety of the food supply, but inspection is the classic consumer protection when it’s done correctly,” Ms. Eskin said.
Another major safeguard outlined in the law was meant to add visibility into the food supply chain, particularly for public health officials and regulators charged with limiting harm during an outbreak.
The rule that the F.D.A. ended up delaying last year was meant to “limit food-borne illness and death.” It required food sellers, including restaurants and grocers, to provide the agency or an authorized representative with a spreadsheet detailing their suppliers within 24 hours of an outbreak, or a reasonable amount of time the agency agrees to.
The F.D.A.’s decision to delay the rule was followed by action from the Republican-controlled Congress, which took additional steps to bar the F.D.A. from using its funding to enforce the rule and urged a revision favoring greater flexibility.
In Michigan cyclospora has now sickened more than 12,000 people and contributed to two deaths. Officials said in the internal emails, which were first obtained by Bloomberg News, that they had to contend with an antiquated disease surveillance system and analyze the information from interviews with 700 people who fell ill.
Once Taco Bell emerged as a common thread the interviews, getting the company’s supplier list was crucial, said Susan Mayne, a former F.D.A. official who remains active in food policy. In such a large outbreak, she said, it’s important to determine if one ingredient came from a central source, in contrast to those from an array of farms.
“The faster you can get back to the records, the faster you can identify the source of the outbreak and remove those products from the market and prevent further exposures,” she said. “So speed is everything.”
Searching for solutions
This week is not the first time F.D.A. officials flew to Taylor Farms’ Mexican processing plant to investigate a cyclospora outbreak.
In 2013, in the wake of an outbreak that sickened more than 600 people who ate salad at Olive Garden and Red Lobster, federal inspectors descended on the facility and examined more than 1,000 samples of lettuce, irrigation water and the feces of the farm workers, a main harbor for the cyclospora parasite.
They found virtually nothing, an inspection report shows. Every result was negative, except for one considered inconclusive.
The F.D.A. did note that the facility’s practice of washing the salad mix with recycled water had the potential to spread cyclospora, if it was present. But ultimately the agency could not “determine how or at what point in the supply chain” the cyclospora was introduced. Taylor Farms said it then began a new process for testing water and produce.
Jim Gorny, a produce safety expert who retired in 2024 from the F.D.A., said cyclospora wasn’t viewed inside the agency as high-risk like E. coli or listeria. Yet, some scientists were growing increasingly worried as cyclospora outbreaks grew in size and scope. Originally found in berries and basil, by the 2000s, it was affecting larger numbers of people after eating salad.
Cyclospora is a uniquely difficult parasite to detect, monitor and eliminate. Testing for it in the environment — especially in agricultural water — is extraordinarily challenging, and, as a result, rarely done.
Moreover, cyclospora does not grow in laboratory culture. Scientists often use culture as a tool to amplify tiny bits of bacteria, like salmonella or E. coli, to detectable levels. The same cannot be done for cyclospora, said Kalmia Kniel, a microbiologist at the University of Delaware who researches the parasite.
And because cyclospora are distributed sparsely in large volumes of water, finding them is like dipping a net in the ocean to find a single type of fish. There’s also no way to kill them in processing plants that wash produce like lettuce: They can survive chlorination, a standard process used to kill bacteria.
Dr. Kniel and other food safety researchers have been asking the government repeatedly for $10 million to fund work to develop new ways to spot the cyclospora in the environment and to set testing standards. But after four consecutive years submitting grant proposals to the United States Department of Agriculture, the work remains unfunded.
The U.S.D.A. said its peer reviewers had selected projects viewed as “most impactful” for growers and that it had supported some cyclospora research last year.
Dr. Gorny noted that he helped develop an F.D.A. action plan for cyclospora that was released in 2023. The plan called for increased and improved education, testing for cyclospora and rapid root-cause analysis of outbreaks. Recently, officials working on the plan held an educational session in a region of Mexico that had been tied to prior cyclospora outbreaks.
But progress toward solutions has been slow. F.D.A. guidance on produce safety released this weekacknowledged that the agency does not know of any treatment the would prevent the spread of cyclospora “and be suitable for use on fresh-cut produce.”
As a result, there may be more summers of cyclospora.
“Until we get down to the hard work of better research, getting tools for better and faster detection and better root cause analysis,” Dr. Gorny said, “this is going to happen again.”
Caroline Hopkins Legaspi contributed reporting.
Christina Jewett covers the Food and Drug Administration, which means keeping a close eye on drugs, medical devices, food safety and tobacco policy.
Julie Creswell is a business reporter covering the food industry for The Times, writing about all aspects of food, including farming, food inflation, supply-chain disruptions and climate change."
Friday, August 14, 2026
Democrats Pull Back From the Edge of Disaster. Again.
Democrats Pull Back From the Edge of Disaster. Again.
By E.J. Dionne Jr.
"Mr. Dionne is a contributing Opinion writer.
My candidate for the most unexpected but also most important word of this summer of Democratic dissonance comes from an unlikely source.
When a New York Times reporter asked Abdul El-Sayed, the Democrats’ left-wing Senate nominee in Michigan, to describe Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, in one or two words, he said “pragmatic.” This is the same Dr. El-Sayed who had said earlier this summer, “If you’re Chuck Schumer, I’m pretty damn dangerous.”
It seems that two can work the pragmatic side of the street. For Democrats who hope for a truce in the factional warfare that has engulfed the party since the June victories of democratic socialists in primaries in New York and Colorado, Dr. El-Sayed’s single conciliatory word had the ring of high poetry.
Democratic primary voters in Wisconsin proved themselves to be pragmatic, too. On Tuesday David Crowley, the moderate Milwaukee County executive supported by the outgoing Gov. Tony Evers, narrowly defeated Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist who had enjoyed a large polling lead. Mr. Crowley profited from fears of the state’s Democratic rank-and-file that Ms. Hong would allow Republicans back into the governor’s mansion — worries aggravated by Ms. Hong’s past social media activity. The grabber: In 2020, she said that Thanksgiving should be canceled and called it a “colonizer holiday.”
In Minnesota’s Democratic primary, the progressive Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan comfortably defeated the moderate Representative Angie Craig. Like Dr. El-Sayed, Ms. Flanagan ran as a foe of corporate power — she cast the choice as “the many versus the money.” But she also had a long history with the state’s Democratic voters and enjoyed the support of Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren (both of whom did not endorse Ms. Hong) as well as Tina Smith, the senator she is bidding to replace.
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The ideologically split Midwest verdict may have the salutary effect of pushing back against the sometimes hysterical (and also inaccurate) commentary about a Democratic electorate in the thrall of a Bastille Day showdown. The shrewdest politicians on both sides of the left-versus-center (or, if you prefer, insurgent-versus-establishment) barricades understand that the only hope Republicans have of avoiding a devastating defeat this fall is to keep voters from focusing on President Trump and their complicity in his deeply unpopular failures. They want to make it instead about Democratic “radicalism” and — ah, that hallowed shibboleth — “disarray.”
But both sides of the fight will have to internalize this danger. In his excellent collection of essays “What Caused the Civil War?” the historian Edward L. Ayers summarizes a central lesson from the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr: “All people,” Mr. Ayers writes, “are capable of both self-awareness and self-deception.” Factionalism encourages the latter and makes it hard for foes to concede even the valid parts of their rivals’ story lines.
For starters, the left and the center have to harmonize their differences in how they think about Mr. Trump. As the political writer Ron Brownstein observed recently, the left typically argues that while Mr. Trump is dangerous, he is more symptom than cause of the country’s problems. More centrist Democrats tend to insist that the Trump catastrophe is unique in our history and the crisis the country faces is primarily of Mr. Trump’s making.
The answer is obvious: Mr. Trump is indeed a symptom of something bigger, but he is also singularly corrupt, incompetent and dangerous to democracy.
The left is correct that Democrats need to offer voters far more than an end to Trumpism and a restoration of the earlier status quo. The campaigns of both Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Kamala Harris in 2024 counted too much on voters recognizing Mr. Trump’s awfulness and did not spend enough time addressing economic discontent. Whatever the centrists think of Dr. El-Sayed, his campaign mantra — “Money out of politics. Money in your pocket.” — brilliantly married disaffection from the political system with voters’ unhappiness over their financial circumstances. Ms. Flanagan’s campaign did the same.
But there can be no getting away from the fact that winning in 2026 depends above all on mobilizing the roughly 60 percent of Americans who are fed up with Mr. Trump. The fury among Democrats that their leaders failed twice to keep him out of the White House is understandable. But inwardly directed rage won’t drive Mr. Trump’s allies from office. It’s revealing that Wisconsin Democrats, who understood the costs of an eight-year Republican trifecta of power before Mr. Evers’s 2018 victory, opted for safety over adventure.
The other central difference between the center and the left is their theories of who wins elections. The left is adamant that progressive insurgents can win closely fought contests; the center thinks only moderates can.
Centrists are right that more moderate candidates tend to perform better in swing states and districts (although some political scientists have noticed a decline in the impact of ideology). But the left is right that to win, Democrats need a more populist approach rooted in progressive economics. Most moderate Democrats have heard the call. The Iowa Senate candidate Josh Turek prevailed in the Democratic primary against a candidate to his left, but he is running on what he calls “a prairie populist’s platform.”
Mr. Turek’s program embraces, among other things, “a federal ban on price gouging on food,” barring “Wall Street private equity firms from purchasing single-family homes and farmland,” promising to “take on Big Pharma,” and “cracking down on unfair wages” and monopolies. Opposing corporate power, unfair taxes and concentrated wealth is now mainstream.
The left, in turn, must confront the reality that many of its candidates have struggled to gain traction with the very working class for which they claim to speak. In Michigan, Dr. El-Sayed overwhelmed his opponent Representative Haley Stevens in university towns and among younger voters and highly educated liberals, while Ms. Stevens carried the Black vote in Detroit and performed well among older voters and in working-class communities.
Since championing workers goes to the moral and intellectual heart of the left’s project, well-educated lefties bridle at charges of elitism. But the voting patterns are what they are, and the most electorally successful politicians on the left have privileged egalitarian economic policies over cultural questions.
The two wings of the party actually agree on the need to focus on pocketbook issues while finding more politically sustainable ways of keeping faith with their commitments to marginalized groups.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York caused a stir on Sunday when she quoted a fellow politician who declared, “Woke 1 was crazy.” Often lost in the accounts is what she said next: That the Woke 1 discussions “were quite fruitful.” Her point was that the protests of 2020 unleashed a necessary reckoning with injustice, but that the “rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today.” Progressives, she said, also want to bring crime down.
Call it, well, pragmatism, or just learning lessons the hard way. To use a phrase Ms. Ocasio-Cortez invoked, the success of a “big tent” party depends on welcoming people inside, not on finding ways of driving out everyone who falls short of one faction’s idea of perfection. Midwest Democrats seem to get that.
E.J. Dionne Jr., a Times contributing Opinion writer, is the author of “Why Americans Hate Politics,” “Our Divided Political Heart,” “Why the Right Went Wrong” and, most recently, “100% Democracy,” with Miles Rapoport.
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Opinion | Is Ocasio-Cortez Ready for the Glass Cliff? - The New York Times
Opinion | Is Ocasio-Cortez Ready for the Glass Cliff?
Is Ocasio-Cortez Ready for the Glass Cliff?
Oh, she’s running.
"I’ve been watching the signs that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may be considering a bid for president for over a year. She spoke about foreign policy at the Munich Security Conference in February. A few months later, she brandished her organizer street cred with a visit to a rural Georgia community fighting a data center. She is among the astonishingly few big-name Democrats embracing data center resistance, a rare point of bipartisan agreement in a divided electorate.
This week she all but soft launched the presidential bid so many of us have been expecting, with a video series about freezing her eggs. The rollout — personal, confessional and intimate — had all the social media savvy that made her a political star. It also gets ahead of the inevitable questions about how, or if, she will have children. In short, Ocasio-Cortez has crafted a political message in which the form and content suggest that she will run as a woman but unlike how every woman before her was forced to run.
That she is a viable potential presidential candidate is no small feat for any woman, much less a young, attractive woman without a political dynasty. Were she to formally declare a presidential bid, she would be one of the youngest and most progressive people to do it. She can run. But can she win?
To say women haven’t had an easy path to presidential power would be an understatement.
Hillary Clinton was both too unfathomable (a first lady who wanted more) and too well known (saddled with her husband’s scandals and positions). Kamala Harris was, alternately, too novel (a mixed-race Black woman) and too much like the same old (a capitalist hawk). They each were condemned as too uncharismatic to overcome a culture that is supremely suspicious of women who want, pursue and hold power. The ambition that brought them within reach of the presidency was a trap that ensured they couldn’t win it.
That is the gist of years of women’s political ambitions — a woman who wants the top job must be assertive but not aggressive, nurturing but not weak. She has to be the epitome of a mother and the epitome of a boss. It is an impossible needle to thread, and any woman who contorts herself to do so comes off as disingenuous at best and a liar at worst. This likability trap has hindered every qualified woman who has run for president.
But these are different times. Ocasio-Cortez is a different woman, and Americans love to turn to women when the house is burning down. Social scientists call it the glass cliff — the phenomenon in which women are often recruited to lead failing companies. President Trump’s businessman brand of governance has many Americans feeling this nation is failing. I suppose the dumpster fire of climate denialism, political corruption and general scamminess of, well, everything would be dire enough circumstances to make a female president possible.
In particular, Democrats — whom you might expect to be wary of placing another female candidate before the American public — are facing a political disaster of their own making. Americans are primed for an anti-incumbent electoral wave. They want an alternative to Trump’s MAGA-dominated Republican Party, but a lot of them indicate they would have to hold their nose to vote for mainstream Democrats. This “Is the enemy of my enemy really my friend?” game between the base and the party leadership has created an opening for progressive candidates in state races. Despite this, a lot of Democrats are faithful to conventional political wisdom that they cannot win the White House by running from the left.
Ocasio-Cortez is made for this moment. It’s not because she has tempered her progressiveness (as some democratic socialists worry). It’s because she has the greatest chance of sidestepping the likability trap that has foiled so many female presidential candidates who came before her. Whether she wins or loses, if she runs as she governs, an Ocasio-Cortez campaign could model a new way for women to lead.
Research on female candidates suggests that women who emphasize feminine traits are penalized while women who talk about female issues are advantaged. Ocasio-Cortez does both. She has shown off her favorite red lippie on Instagram and has live-streamed how government works for millions of people. There have been the usual consequences. Conservatives revile her, and even men who share her politics discount her gravitas. Too young. Too pretty. Too ambitious.
But instead of changing to accommodate these men’s discomfort — a quickie political marriage or a boxy power suit comes to mind — the self-described “girl from the Bronx” took it on like, well, a girl from the Bronx, with unabashed confidence in her ability to persist without permission. In doing so, she has fashioned female political power in a way that does not contort itself for male comfort.
Many Americans expect the president to be a father for the nation. A woman in the White House is supposed to be his wife and the mother to his children, a political appendage, as opposed to a person who wields power in her own right. One reason Clinton’s narrative never gelled with a lot of Americans is that she intended to amass power independent of her role as first lady. Her role in leading health care reform was considered by many to be too significant a task for a first lady, an unelected wife and mother. Not even her years as secretary of state could upend the idea that she somehow usurped power meant for men.
Harris’s campaign was a test of what makes a powerful woman legible while a man, who seemingly has no political ambitions of his own, stands behind her. However, she does not have biological children, and even though she talked often about her stepchildren calling her Momala, the idea of seeing her as the nation’s first makeshift mother never fit. Her blended family was not rare; many American families are now some form of nontraditional, meaning stepparents are a normal part of American life. But the presidential family is not supposed to be normal. It is supposed to be aspirational, a secular symbol of many Americans’ religious belief that ours is a nation uniquely blessed by God to prosper and reproduce.
Harris had the additional challenge of being a woman of color. People might have hated Clinton for insisting she wasn’t a stand-by-your-man little lady. But our culture has a legacy of hatred for women of color and our family formations. It isn’t said often enough, but a right-wing political vision that pairs a resurgent natalist movement with great-replacement theory is one that encourages white women to marry young and multiply in a way it does not for Black or brown women. There is no edict for women of color to reproduce for this nation because a large part of this nation would rather the nation not exist at all than be majority-minority.
This is why Ocasio-Cortez’s choice to lead her campaign intentions with a very public discussion of reproductive choices is so important. She is performing the preservation of her status as a mother for the public, creating the possibility that she would be a mother for the nation, even if she is not yet a mother. However, she also recognizes that whatever marriage or motherhood choices she makes, a New York Latina cannot embody the aspirational presidential family. Nothing she does will satisfy the haters, so instead, she’s charting a new path that presents new political possibilities. As is often the case, the best choice for a woman of color creates better choices for all women.
The American right has conducted a national assault on abortion care, birth control access and in vitro fertilization since the fall of Roe v. Wade. These are attacks on women’s enfranchisement and ability to work. No woman who has to consider which states allow her to control her reproductive decisions without her or her doctor going to prison is truly free.
In the face of this, Ocasio-Cortez’s decision to talk publicly about freezing her eggs is the kind of leadership women are hungry for. She is demonstrating that planning for a family while building the career she wants is still a compromise. She is implying that the best we can do right now is to plan for the worst while we work toward the best. She is also saying that reproductive health is a choice that a woman can make, on her own, for her own reasons, without apology or censure. That’s a message very different from the ones about family, gender and power that have bedeviled women’s political campaigns.
Ocasio-Cortez will have other, more workaday political challenges to overcome. Despite what the right-wing media pundits said, she didn’t totally bomb in Munich. But, her speech this year at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta was stilted and uncomfortable. It’s easier to learn geopolitics than it is to become fluent in Black Southern rhetoric. Black voters are pragmatic. But she will have to reconcile progressive policies for cultures outside New York City to win. A Southern running mate who matches her vibe and brings that fluency, like Georgia’s Jon Ossoff, would be a bold solution. Regardless, she will need to figure out how to speak to an electorate beyond her own.
Maybe we aren’t ready to finally join the long list of countries that have elected a woman to lead them. But the best time to issue the test is when the opposition grows fat and lazy with winning. That’s where the MAGA movement is now. It has control of both chambers of Congress, a favorable Supreme Court and almost total presidential legal immunity. After 2004, when the so-called compassionate conservatives felt this inevitable, Barack Obama made history by becoming a resounding countervailing force.
As we learned in 2008, when history says it’s your time, it’s your time.
Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2022. She is a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science, the author of “Thick: And Other Essays” and a 2020 MacArthur fellow. @tressiemcphd"
Thursday, August 13, 2026
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