We’re Killing Kids Around the World

Reporter Stephanie Nolen does a restrained job this morning of rounding up some of the medical trials around the world that got canceled as a result of the administration’s recent decision to shut down the U.S. AID. (Read the story here).

The piece opens with a 22-year-old woman in South Africa who got a phone call last Thursday telling her to go to a clinic that was testing a new device to prevent pregnancy and HIV infection. The trial was shutting down, a nurse told her, and the device she had implanted inside her needed to be removed right away.

The reporter also rounds up a few other trials that have been abruptly stopped, including these:

I can’t help feeling that malarial children in Mozambique deserve our support. When you read about programs like this in a bullet-pointed list they seem abstract, but tuberculosis in kids in Peru is a concrete monstrosity. Another story by Michael Crowley reports on the agency’s disempowered director, Marco Rubio, asking for trust and patience at a private event. Those words are in quotes, which I feel is as close as the New York Times gets to direct mockery of the person they’re quoting.

It’s hard to be patient with the man in charge of an agency who just cut 10,000 staff to 290, and to just 12 in Africa. Rubio tells the room that foreign aid is unpopular politically, although last time I checked, so was forcibly displacing millions of people in Gaza, and yet the President himself espoused the U.S. takeover of the territory at the White House this week, dominating the news cycle. That was the subject of the newspaper’s front page yesterday!

Rubio reminds me of the tech bro boss who cries when he’s firing all his staff and then posts the video on LinkedIn to show how vulnerable a leader he is. I read this story as showing that Marco Rubio is concerned about political blowback for killing kids all over the world, but the sad truth is that I don’t think he needs to be too concerned because this story was buried on page 11 and will be “chip paper”, as we say in England, by Monday. He is an instrument of his boss’s foreign policy. My concern more broadly is that as a nation, besides it being morally wrong, we don’t win friends when we kill children all over the world. It shouldn’t be hard to explain that to people, but people are so hopped up on misinformation and dopamine crack from all the apps that they’re able to be manipulated.

Reading these stories patiently on the subway before writing this newsletter, I was struck both by how tricky it was going to be to explain them to you, friends, and also, how furious I found myself. Then I read this story, which was buried in the business section, and I almost had an aneurysm. Something about being on the subway while reading it, where the guy, Daniel Penny, killed a mentally ill dude last year, really got to me.

That’s right. Silicon Valley Venture Capital firm Andressen Horowitz has hired a guy with no investment experience. The guy is a hero of the part of society that likes to be able to kill people, in this case, a black homeless dude with mental health issues, and get away with it. The firm fielded a few concerned calls, apparently, but presumably is asking for “trust” and “patience” from such people, while it shepherds him into meetings with crazy people as the opposite of a virtue signal. He will help them to make money.

I think we could probably end today’s newsletter with the obligatory “Network” clip, don’t you?

And that’s the newspaper today. You’re welcome! If you know someone who’d benefit from this service please do forward them the link. It’s a huge compliment.

Matt Davis reads the newspaper so that you don’t have to. He lives in New York City with his wife and kid.