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National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins served for 12 years under three presidents and presided over an expansion of the agency's budget and efforts to develop new cures to diseases. Graeme Jennings/Pool/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins served for 12 years under three presidents and presided over an expansion of the agency's budget and efforts to develop new cures to diseases.

It's Dr. Francis Collins' last few weeks as director of the National Institutes of Health after 12 years, serving under three presidents.

Collins made his name doing the kind of biomedical research NIH is famous for, especially running The Human Genome Project, which fully sequenced the human genetic code. The focus on biomedicine and cures has helped him grow the agency's budget to over $40 billion a year and win allies in both political parties.

Still, in a broad sense, Americans' health hasn't improved much in those 12 years, especially compared with people in peer countries, and some have argued the agency hasn't done enough to try to turn these trends around. One recently retired NIH division director has quipped that one way to increase funding for this line of research would be if "out of every $100, $1 would be put into the 'Hey, how come nobody's healthy?' fund."

In a wide-ranging conversation, Collins answers NPR's questions as to why for all the taxpayer dollars going to NIH research there haven't been more gains when it comes to Americans' overall health. He also talks about how tribalism in American culture has fueled vaccine hesitancy, and he advises his successor on how to persevere on research of politically charged topics like guns and obesity and maternal health even if powerful lobbies might want that research not to get done.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Selena Simmons-Duffin: After you announced you'd be stepping down from the director role, you told The New York Times that one of your "chief regrets" was the persistence of vaccine hesitancy during the pandemic. How are you thinking about the role NIH could play in understanding this problem?

Francis Collins: I do think we need to understand better how in the current climate people make decisions. I don't think I anticipated the degree to which the tribalism of our current society would actually interfere with abilities to size up medical information and make the kinds of decisions that were going to help people.

To have now 60 million people still holding off of taking advantage of lifesaving vaccines is pretty unexpected. It does make me, at least, realize, "Boy, there are things about human behavior that I don't think we had invested enough into understanding." We basically have seen the accurate medical information overtaken, all too often, by the inaccurate conspiracies and false information on social media. It's a whole other world out there. We used to think that if knowledge was made available from credible sources, it would win the day. That's not happening now.

So you mentioned the idea of investing more in the behavioral research side of things. Do you think that should happen?

We're having serious conversations right now about whether this ought to be a special initiative at NIH to put more research into health communications and how best to frame those [messages] so that they reach people who may otherwise be influenced by information that's simply not based on evidence. Because I don't think you could look at the current circumstance now and say it's gone very well.

Looking at how America has fared in the pandemic more broadly, it really is astoundingly bad. The cases and deaths are just so high. CDC Director Robert Redfield, when he was leaving, told NPR he thought the baseline poor health of Americans had something to do with how powerfully the pandemic has hit America. What do you think about the toll of the pandemic, even as it's clearly not over?

It's a terrible toll. We've lost almost 800,000 lives. In 2020, before we had vaccines, there was not a really good strategy to protect people other than social distancing and mask-wearing, which were important, but certainly not guarantees of safety. And yes, it is the case that the people who got hit hardest, oftentimes, were people with underlying medical conditions.

But in 2021, we should have been better off. We had vaccines that were safe, that were available for free to all Americans. The ability to get immunized really went up very steeply in March and April, and yet it all kind of petered out by about May or June. The [vaccine] resistant group of 60 million people remains, for the most part, still resistant. Unfortunately, now, with delta having come along as a very contagious variant and with omicron now appearing, which may also be a real threat, we have missed the chance to put ourselves in a much better place.

Let's step back from the pandemic. In your 12 years as director, the NIH has worked on developing cures and getting them from the lab to patients faster, and the agency's budget has grown.

But, in that time, Americans haven't, on a broader scale, gotten healthier. They're sicker than people in other countries across the board, all races and incomes. When you were sworn in in 2009, life expectancy was 78.4 years, and it's been essentially stuck there.

Does it bother you that there haven't been more gains? And what role should NIH play in understanding these trends and trying to turn them around?

Well, sure, it does bother me. In many ways, the 28 years I have been at NIH have just been an amazing ride of discoveries upon discoveries. But you're right, we haven't seen that translate necessarily into advances.

Let's be clear, there are some things that have happened that are pretty exciting. Cancer deaths are dropping every year by 1 or 2%. When you add that up over 20 years, cancer deaths are down by almost 25% from where they were at the turn of the century. And that's a consequence of all the hard work that's gone into developing therapeutics based on genomics, as well as immunotherapy that's made a big dent in an otherwise terrible disease.

But we've lost ground in other areas, and a lot of them are a function of the fact that we don't have a very healthy lifestyle in our nation. Particularly with obesity and diabetes, those risk factors have been getting worse instead of better. We haven't, apparently, come up with strategies to turn that around.

On top of that, the other main reason for seeing a drop in life expectancy other than obesity and COVID is the opioid crisis. We at NIH are working as fast and as hard as we can to address that by trying to both identify better ways to prevent and treat drug addiction, but also to come up with treatments for chronic pain that are not addictive, because those 25 million people who suffer from chronic pain every day deserve something better than a drug that is going to be harmful.

In all of these instances, as a research enterprise because that's our mandate it feels like we're making great progress. But the implementation of those findings runs up against a whole lot of obstacles, in terms of the way in which our society operates, in terms of the fact that our health care system is clearly full of disparities, full of racial inequities. We're not at NIH able to reach out and fix that, but we can sure shine a bright light on it and we can try to come up with pilot interventions to see what would help.

A 300-page report called Shorter Lives, Poorer Health came out in 2013 it was requested and financed by NIH and conducted by a National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine panel. It documented some of the things you just talked about, in terms of how Americans' health falls short compared with people in other countries. And it is filled with recommendations for further research, many specifically for NIH, including looking to how other countries are achieving better health outcomes than the U.S.

I'm curious, since this report came out when you were director, if it made an impact at the agency and whether there's been any progress on those recommendations or was there a decision not to pursue those ideas?

I do remember that report and there have been a lot of other reports along the lines since then that have tried to point to things that other countries may be doing better than we are. One of the things I've tried to do is to provide additional strength and resources to our Office of Disease Prevention, because that's a lot of what we're talking about here. One of the knocks against the National Institutes of Health is that we often seem to be the National Institutes of Disease that a lot of the focus has been on people who are already diagnosed with some kind of health condition. And yet what we really want to do is to extend health span, not just life span, and that means really putting more research efforts into prevention.

One of the things that I'm excited about in that regard is the All of Us study, which is in the process of enrolling a million Americans, following them prospectively, many of them currently healthy. They share their electronic health records, they have blood samples taken that measure all kinds of things, including their complete genome sequences; they answer all kinds of questionnaires, they walk around with various kinds of wearable sensors. That's going to be a database that gives us information about exactly what's happened to the health of our nation and what could we do about it.

You've served under both Democratic and Republican administrations. One thing you've talked about in interviews is the culture wars. What role do you think NIH has to play in terms of developing trust and trying to get past some of that tribalism that you talked about before?

I think medical research should never be partisan. It should never get caught up in culture wars or tribal disagreements. But in our current society, it's hard to think of anything that hasn't at least been touched by those attitudes.

My goal as NIH director over these 12 years, serving three presidents, was to always try to keep medical research in a place that everybody could look at objectively and not consider it to be tainted in some way by political spin. I've made friends in Congress in both parties and both houses, in a way that I think has really helped the view of medical research to remain above the fray. And many of the strongest supporters for medical research over these 12 years have been in the Republican Party.

This is not something that people can really disagree about. You want to find answers to medical problems that are threatening yourself or your family or your community or your constituents. So I don't have a hard job in terms of explaining the mission or why we work so hard at what we do.

But I do have to sometimes worry that for whatever reason, politics will creep into this. And certainly with COVID, politics has crept into the space of misinformation in a fashion that has not helped with vaccine hesitancy. Frankly, I think it's pretty shameful if political figures trying to score points or draw attention to themselves put forward information about COVID that's demonstrably false.

Some of the reasons why Americans tend to be less healthy than people in other countries can get political pretty quickly like healthy environments and gun injuries and drug overdoses and maternal health. But the research is important.

Do you have any guidance or thoughts for your successor on how to support the kind of research that's not as universally embraced on both sides of the aisle?

I think the guidance is you have to look at all the reasons why people are not having a full life experience of health and figure out what we, as the largest supporter of medical research in the world, should be doing to try to understand and change those circumstances. A lot of this falls into the category of health disparities. It is shameful that your likelihood of having a certain life span depends heavily on the ZIP code where you were born, and that is a reflection of all of the inequities that exist in our society in terms of environmental exposures, socioeconomics, social determinants of health, et cetera.

We are ramping up that effort right now, especially not just to observe the situation or, as some cynics have said, admire the situation. We actually want to try pilot interventions to see if some of those things can be changed. But that's about as far as we can go. Again, if there's a major societal illness right now of tribalism and overpolarization and hyperpartisanship about every issue, probably the NIH is not well-positioned all by ourselves to fix that. We have an urgent need, I think, across society, to recognize that we may have lost something here our anchor to a shared sense of vision and a shared sense of agreement about what is truth.

You are leaving this post. Where do you imagine the agency might go next? I know you're still going to be doing your work on Type 2 diabetes you'll still be a part of it. So what do you see in NIH's future?

I think it is in a remarkably positive place right now as far as what we are called to do, which is to make discoveries, to learn about how life works and then apply that in a way that will lead to answers for diseases that currently don't have them. I think of NIH as not just the National Institutes of Health, but the National Institutes of Hope, and we are able now to provide hope for lots of situations that previously couldn't have really been confident in that. Look what's happened in terms of gene therapies we're curing sickle cell disease now, something I thought would never happen in my lifetime, with gene therapies. Look at what we're able to do with cancer immunotherapy, saving people who have stage IV disease, in certain circumstances, by activating the immune system. And of course, in infectious diseases not only have we now got mRNA vaccines for the terrible COVID-19 situation, we can apply those to lots of other infections as well.

So, anybody listening to this who's thinking maybe of moving into a career in biomedical research, this is the golden era and we need all the talent and the vision that we can possibly recruit into our midst because it's going to be a grand adventure in the coming decades.

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Francis Collins on medical advances, vaccine hesitancy and Americans' ill health : Shots - Health News - NPR

Despite denials by officials, University of Florida academics continue to insist the chill on academic freedom is real. Its affecting critical research, they said in a new report. The role of universities on society should not be ignored. A new study shows they have major effects. Read on for those stories and more Florida education news.

The fear of upsetting state officials has become pervasive at the University of Florida. Some faculty members said they felt compelled to destroy COVID-19 data in the midst of the pandemic.

How much does a university impact its community? Researchers pegged the University of South Floridas economic effect at $6 billion a year.

Masking: A Flagler County School Board member told students they didnt have to wear masks during their SAT test. The SAT had issued rules requiring masks, the Palm Coast Observer reports. More from Flagler Live.

Security: The Escambia County school district is looking to hire 20 additional school guards for elementary schools, the Pensacola News Journal reports.

Culture wars: Students at a Sarasota County middle school were disciplined for chanting (expletive) Joe Biden. Their parents support the punishment, the Herald-Tribune reports.

Construction costs: The Palm Beach County school districts construction plans are delayed as costs increase. The district has taken on additional loans to cover the rising expenses, the Palm Beach Post reports.

Teacher pay: The Orange County school district said it cannot afford longevity supplements for veteran teachers as union officials have requested, the Orlando Sentinel reports.

A University of Miami football booster wants to build a new stadium on the Coral Gables Senior High campus. Miami-Dade County school district leaders are not on board, WFOR reports.

The Flagler County school district is seeking an impact fee increase. Officials find themselves needing to correct political rhetoric criticizing the proposal, Flagler Live reports.

The Duval County school district wants a new administration headquarters. First, it has to sell the current one, the Jacksonville Daily Record reports.

Yes, threats of school violence get you arrested even if a hoax. A 12-year-old Broward County girl was arrested for an Instagram threat to shoot up a middle school, WPLG reports. A 15-year-old Sarasota County boy was arrested over social media threats of violence against his high school, WFLA reports. A 15-year-old Miami-Dade County student faces felony charges after allegedly posting a threat against a high school, the Miami Times reports.

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The diagnosis of a split in society is commonplace today societies are shaken by discord and divisions are intensifying. The claims differ in details but on some basic assumptions, there is usually agreement.

First, there are increasingly testy disputes, largely along a traditional left-right axis but sometimes deviating from it. Culture wars break out over gender issues, racism and anti-racism, immigration and who belongs to the us even lifestyles. Pundits talk about societies breaking into hostile tribes.

There is also a degree of unanimity in the analyses about alienation from the conventional political system anger that they are not interested in us at all especially in underprivileged segments of the population, including the old working classes but also the marginalised lower middle class and the underclass.

Those who are victims of growing insecurity feel that they can no longer rely on solidarity: You cant count on anyone anymore. Many people say I just look out for myself now in a depressed, negative individualism. These social milieux are then particularly appealing to right-wing populists and extremists who proclaim: Yes, no one listens to you but I am your voice.

This is a particular challenge for progressive political parties: the social democrats, the Labour Party, the American Democrats, the vast majority of traditional labour and left-wing movements. On the one hand, left-wing parties have a great deal of sympathy with popular revolts against ruling elites and systems of chronic injustice indeed, for many decades of their existence, they were the bearers of them. Yet, on the other hand, in the eyes of many who turn away in disappointment, they themselves are part of that detested elite. Even if they the parties see themselves as part of the solution, many of their potential voters see them as part of the problem.

Those who are under economic pressure, who struggle with job insecurity and who generally see themselves as losers of economic transformations easily feel politically unheard.

This is by no means to say that the supporters of right-wing, anti-system parties are primarily part of a working-class that has become politically homeless but they do also come from this group. Those who are under economic pressure, who struggle with job insecurity, who are confronted with stagnating wages and who generally see themselves as losers of economic transformations easily feel politically unheard, no longer represented, disrespected and left behind as innocent victims of injustice. I have analysed all this in my bookThe False Friends of the Ordinary People, including how right-wing populists appeal successfully to the traditional values of the working classes.

The left-wing and progressive parties have, of course, already recognised the problem and are responding to it in a wide variety of ways: shifting to the left, managing a gradual course correction, or dissolving into hopeless debates about strategy. The fact that the German social democrats went into the recentBundestagelection campaign with the slogan Respect is due to this diagnosis, and at least it led to the SPD regaining first place and the chancellorship.

It is remarkable that, while different countries on different continents have strikingly different political cultures and traditions, these discourses and rhetorics are astonishingly similar. The structural transformation of debate in the public sphere through the internet, blogs, and social media of course contributes massively here and yet this is oftendramatically underestimated.

These days, however, the diagnosis of polarisation is being invoked almost daily in a specific context. That is the anti-virus regime, with the disputes over lockdowns, rejection of vaccination, denial of the pandemic or its danger and the rise of conspiracy theories. This, too, is global, but there are nonetheless notable national differences.

In the United States, opposition to measures to contain Covid-19 is a common slogan of the radical right under its front figure, the former president, Donald Trump. In other countries, this is less pronounced.

Scepticism and rejection of modern medicine and thus of vaccination also varies widely. Portugal has a vaccination rate of around 90 per cent and Denmark 87 per cent but, of the traditionally western European countries, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland have the lowest rates. Theystagnatedfor a long time at just around 65 per cent.

These countries have far-right and right-wing populist parties mobilising against vaccination. The same groups which score points on the culture war issues claiming to be the voice of the common people, the regular guy are now saying: the elites, the government, want to poison you with a vaccine. They are establishing enforced vaccination, a corona dictatorship. They are bought by Big Pharma, street mobsters of sinister world rulers. And they are exploiting an invented or exaggerated disease to destroy freedom and bully the common people.

There is evidently a massiveloss of trustin the entire political system so that many no longer believe anyone perceived in any way to be part of an imaginary establishment.

Given its obvious madness, the astonishing thing is that a not insignificant part of their followers buy into all this craziness. Those who believe the whole radical nonsense are rather few. But a much larger group have doubts about medical science and are less willing to believe the experts than people who pontificate on the internet. Whats happening here?

There is evidently a massiveloss of trustin the entire political system, so that many no longer believe anyone perceived in any way to be part of an imaginary establishment. How alienated and frustrated must they be if they simply dont believe anything anymore and, on the contrary, are willing to take at face value what they read in some weird group on Telegram or WhatsApp?

Rebellion has traditionally connoted emancipation. But this is a revolt against reason.

Especially in the German-speaking countries, where enlightenment rationalism took less deep roots romanticism with its anti-rationalism rather more hostility to science is probably even more widespread than in other cultures. The Nazi movement and its totalitarianism, too with its penchant for the occult and the obscure as well as its contempt for reason may have left deeper traces in this respect than one might think.

Progressive and left-wing parties have always been in the traditional stream of the enlightenment, acting as educational movements. But they too have seen simplifications and conspiratorial ideas among their followers: in 1890 Ferdinand Kronawetter described anti-Semitism as the socialism of the stupid guys (der Socialismus der dummen Kerle).

Also, the environmental movement, considered by many to be alternative and somehow a product of the rebellious counter culture of the 1960s, has its questionable traditions. It upholds the natural and the feeling, life in balance with nature, and has a scepticism of the rationality of science and technology. Natural healing methods, homoeopathy, alternative medicine, and obscurantism of all sorts are quite popular here and are opposed to orthodox medicine, which primarily wants to cram chemicals into people.

Anyhow, if we want to understand current, extremely weird and yet still unclear events, then we should start to bring these elements together. The alienation from the system of politics caused massive annoyance even before the pandemic and is now making the fight against the pandemicdifficult. There is an exasperation with the system on the part of people who often rightly no longer feel represented or even noticed by it.

The popularity of right-wing populism and extremism is certainly a revolt with legitimate aspects but in perverse forms. The depth of this loss of trust is also evident in anti-rationalist revolts against management of the pandemic and even against medical science.

Those who fall into the clutches of such an ideology and an entire system of misinformation come to believe ever more absurd things. They remodel themselves, so to speak, and fall into a dynamic of self-radicalisation which can very soon become truly dangerous.

This is a joint publication by Social Europe andIPS-Journal

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The revolt against reason Democracy and society - IPS Journal

Watch 'Eye on NW Politics' at 6 p.m. Sunday on KOIN

PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) Newberg is a gateway to Oregons world-class wine country, but its also a place where the culture wars are in an all-out political battle being mostly waged in the citys school system.

The national spotlight on Newberg began in August, when a majority of the school board voted to ban Black Lives Matter and Pride symbols on school campuses, leading to an immediate backlash as students voiced their opinions against it and residents started putting up their own symbols, leading to more than a few heated school board meetings.

Now, there are recall efforts against School Board Chair Dave Brown and Vice-Chair Brian Shannon, who also used to be the boards chair, and lawsuits are being filed across both groups.

Shannon and the three other conservatives who make up the school boards majority fired the districts superintendent in early November. Meanwhile, the school board members are suing a group of constituents for doxing, or making their personal information public, and the Newberg teachers union is suing the board, saying the ban on symbols is discriminatory and unconstitutional.

Tai Harden-Moore, who recently announced her candidacy for Yamhill County Commissioner, is a diversity and equity consultant who lives in Newberg and has a child in the school district. She also previously ran for the school board.

Harden-Moore said shes running to bring new ideas and fresh perspective after seeing push back against diversity and inclusion in the community amid the ongoing school board controversy.

I think thats due to a lack of information and education really around these issues and over-reliance on trigger words, like CRT that folks are hearing on their media stations or from other folks in the community and its really disappointing to see, she said.

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Breaking down the spotlight on Newbergs school board - KOIN.com

I idolized Candace Bushnell without knowing the facts. I grew up watching Sex and the City, and really, that was enough for me. She was the real Carrie Bradshaw, the writer behind the 90s New York Observer columns whod accidentally struck print oil (those columns made up the 1997 best-selling essay collection) and reaped HBO gold. Then finally, after 94 episodes (multiplied by at least seven rewatches), I sought out a first edition of her original Sex book (easier than youd think) inspired by the news of her upcoming one-woman show, Is There Still Sex in the City?, opening Tuesday and devoured it. It was gritty, darkly humorous, and keenly anthropological. Unlike Carrie, who floated from brunch to brunch without much attention to deadlines or finances, Bushnell was a hardworking freelancer with an eye on the bottom line. Watching the stage show during previews, I was struck by the 62-year-olds impressive career: a life made up of leveraging the natural talent and right-place-right-time fortune that got her writing gigs at 19 into a lasting aesthetic empire of up-front sexuality and social acuity.

Her 2019 book (also titled Is There Still Sex in the CIty?) detailed Bushnells return to dating after her divorce from New York City Ballet principal Charles Askegard and saw her leave the Manhattan shuffle, at least partly, for the tranquility of Sag Harbor. And, well, just like that (sorry) shes back. Its not quite the Hello, Dolly! return to the lights of 14th Street, but its close enough: eight times a week, for the next ten weeks, shes inviting close to 500 people into a variation of her living room remounted at the Daryl Roth Theatre on 15th Street (and Park Avenue, of course).

At a nearby brasserie, between rehearsals and her 7 p.m. preview performance, we meet for a quick bite, as her publicist put it, that turns into a leisurely meal. The two of us take up a table for four alongside the restaurants mirrored walls, her arm slung around the empty seat next to her, practically cradling an invisible cigarette. She looks stunning with her sleek legs crossed delicately to her side, though she complains not fishing but not accurately about the flatness of her hair. Its easy to see exactly why and how she hypnotized her way to the top following her arrival to the city in the late 70s. When she listens, she has a look: Its piercing, knowing, and somewhat skeptical. The sort of look that makes people continue speaking until they say something she would hopefully deem important or impressive.

Its what she used to get all of the gory and glorious insight into the sex lives of New Yorkers for that now-iconic column, the on-the-ground hookup reporting we all do for free on Twitter now. Whenever her answers to my questions turn into queries about my own life Everyone used to be at restaurants, but now its clubs? its hard to resist indulging her sparkling curiosity. She seems disappointed that the gash on my forehead Id sustained from walking into the steam-room door at the gym earlier did not involve any loose-toweled friskiness. Shes also visibly concerned I might have a concussion. I told her I wasnt sure.

That active inquisitiveness may be part of the strategy. On the one hand, Bushnell is refreshingly open and self-aware at one point she tells me point-blank, Darling. Babe. Ive written 150,000-word novels. This show is less than 10,000 words. I can write 10,000 words in two days. (In the years since her 1997 literary debut, Bushnell has published nine novels including The Carrie Diaries and Lipstick Jungle, which were also adapted for television.) Still, shes wary of questions that appear to her like traps despite my reassurances of the opposite. Some variation of Theres no hidden meaning made its way into the conversation no fewer than four times during our dinner.

I tell her theres a line from the show that has stuck with me in the week since I first heard it: We all know there are more than just four types of women, Bushnell says onstage, referencing the now-landmark prototypes of the Carrie, the Miranda, the Charlotte, and the Samantha that the HBO adaptation created. But its easy to organize in case theres a war.

Its the kind of incisive, funny remark that shoots naturally from her, but I wanted to know if there was some stinging societal disappointment behind it. At one time, she tells me, there were only two types of women: the Madonna and the Whore. Now there are four. Beat. This is an improvement. She doesnt sound weathered by this observation but almost contradicts herself when discussing the impulse to categorize. Echoing another onstage line that all women on TV are written by men, she informs me, The first thing men do is categorize women into types. Thats how you sell things you put it in a package. I ask about her own system of classification, especially in her columns mentions of modelizers and toxic bachelors, which contributes to so much of her writings sociological wit. You go out with different typestheres that word againof men: the banker, the artist, she says between bites of her steak frites. Of course, I put people into categories, too, because thats what I do as a writer.

The HBO series, like Bushnells book and column before it, are products of their time, a post-Reagan 90s still clenched by the rule of H.W., when bisexuality and (groan) metrosexuality were news to many. Media coverage unsurprisingly went through the usual cycles of backlash and appreciation, so weve gotten just as many endless think pieces on why actually the series portrayal of womens friendship is feminist as we have on why Carries vanilla tendencies are anti-feminist. If the discourse is exhausting enough online, it is perhaps draining for Bushnell to see her work as reimagined through showrunner Michael Patrick Kings glitzy eye for Manolos and cosmos recycled by tired culture wars.

I expect people to be flawed, and not a lot fazes me, she tells me. I ask if this is a hard-won lesson, but she assures me she has always been this way. In fact, its that steely determination that drove her from a quiet Connecticut suburb into a New York that, according to her, was full of characters people came to see and among whom she felt seen. New York City was one of the few places probably in the world where you could see women who were genuinely successful, she says. And it made you feel like you could do it. People were saying, Hey, if this person can do it, how come I cant? And, well, thats the internet now.

Shes puzzled at her perception so many people can have 20 million followers on TikTok and laments the transition from physical to online persona-building. There used to be so much posturing. Now theres a lot of posturing online, but there used to be a lot of posturing in person. Isnt being online at the club just another way of documenting social scenes, much as she was doing with her column? No, she explains (correctly) because now the cameras are turned inward instead of out, and she questions what its like going out in the age of Instagram.

At this point, I couldnt help but wonder (again, sorry): For many of us especially the youngs whose public horniness this summer has been chronicled by just about every single publication sex is definitely still in the city, but is there room for a Candace Bushnell type? Is there room for Candace Bushnell herself? Both her book and her one-woman show make a strong case on her behalf, even if only as the chronicler of how her zippy generation has grown into the older crowd they once dated. She may not be tearing up the downtown scene as she once did, but she remains the blueprint for anyone seeking to find a dash of glamour to their narratives. Glitzy costume changes and behind-the-scenes deets aside, the strongest part of her show is her own story; she asserts as much onstage, and doubles down at dinner: When I say Sex and the City is my lifes work, thats the reality.

That life-spanning work is now our own reality as we eagerly call our no-nonsense friends the Miranda of the group or use a Samantha sexcapade as a vivid point of reference my own go-tos are the two times in the series her orgasmic moans are paralleled with opera singers. As the world quite literally (and not at all glamorously) comes to an end, who wouldnt want to instead reimagine a bathroom-stall encounter that left you locked out of your apartment because the toilet swallowed your keys through a cosmo-colored lens i.e., as just another fabulous tale of city life gone hilariously, beautifully wrong? (Yes, this is a true story; no, I did not tell Candace any more of it I have to have some respect!)

Filling her in on some of my nightlife adventures, I begin to realize I have no idea who Bushnell would be at the party. The sharp insights imply a wallflower, but the vitality and immediacy of the stories suggest an active, if almost chaotic, agent. Ive always been able to be a participant and an observer, she tells me, and I believe her. It would be ungrateful of me not to as a young gay on the go whose love of partying is matched by a love of talking about it. But if I do end up in the corner watching, she says, just to watch people is endlessly fascinating.

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This Is Still Candace Bushnells City - The Cut