august 1903

Imagine it’s 2026. A man shows up in an emergency room, wheezing. He’s got pneumonia, and it’s hitting him hard. He tells one of the doctors that he had COVID-19 a few years earlier, in late 2021. He had refused to get vaccinated, and ended up contracting the coronavirus months after most people got their shots. Why did he refuse? Something about politics, or pushing back on government control, or a post he saw on Facebook. He doesn’t really remember. His lungs do, though: By the end of the day, he’s on a ventilator.

You’ll pay for that man’s decisions. So will I. We all will—in insurance premiums, if he has a plan with your provider, or in tax dollars, if the emergency room he goes to is in a public hospital. The vaccine refusers could cost us billions. Maybe more, over the next few decades, with all the complications they could develop. And we can’t do anything about it except hope that more people get their shots than those who say they will right now.

The Trump presidency may be over, but the Trump era has only just begun—at least when it comes to influence over the nation’s courts. Measured solely by the number of judges he appointed, Donald Trump’s impact is staggering: 234 judges, including 54 powerful appellate judges, almost one out of every three. By comparison, President Barack Obama appointed 172 judges (30 of them appellate) in his first term, while George W. Bush managed 204 (35 appellate). But Trump will have an even greater influence than this measurement suggests. That is because his judges won’t reach the apogee of their power until the early 2040s, when Trump-appointed chief judges are on track to simultaneously sit atop nearly every appeals court in the country.

Every so often, an emerging technology changes the global balance of power, alters alliances, and shifts the relationships among nations. After World War II, nuclear weapons overthrew all of the existing geopolitical paradigms. The countries that got the bomb were considered global powers; countries that did not have it sought it, so that they could be considered powerful too.

Now a different technology is shifting global politics: the coronavirus vaccines—or, quite possibly, vaccines more broadly. Unlike nuclear weapons, vaccines don’t have the potential to end life on Earth, and their production and distribution will never require rigid rules to limit who gets them. Indeed, the international institutions being created to govern vaccine distribution are designed to promote proliferation, not restrict it. Nevertheless, global politics will be shaped by the vaccines, as will domestic politics in some countries, and in ways that might outlast this particular pandemic.

In August 2011, Mitt Romney was campaigning for president at the Iowa State Fair and explaining why he didn’t want to raise taxes on the American people when a heckler shouted that corporations should pay a greater share of taxes.

“Corporations are people, my friend,” Romney replied. He was jeered in the crowd, and jeered even more by Democrats afterward. “I don’t care how many times you try to explain it,” Barack Obama said on the stump. “Corporations aren’t people. People are people.”

Ten years later, there’s been a strange inversion. Corporations, responding to pressure from Democrats, are acting more like people—using their clout to weigh in on legislation and social-justice issues that don’t immediately affect their taxes or bottom line. Republicans, meanwhile, are furious at the idea that companies might act this way.

Earlier this week, The Hollywood Reporter published a detailed cover story on the veteran film and theater producer Scott Rudin’s alleged mistreatment of his employees. The piece features on-the-record testimonies from former staffers and a slew of accusations describing physical assaults, traumatizing outbursts, unreasonable demands, and a penchant for throwing things. In one account, Rudin reportedly broke a computer monitor on an assistant’s hand, sending the bleeding employee to the ER. In another, he allegedly chucked a glass bowl at a colleague, causing a human-resources representative to have a panic attack and leave in an ambulance.

As vivid as these stories may be, the article isn’t exactly an exposé. Rudin’s behavior, as The Hollywood Reporter notes, has been an open secret in the industry for decades, so much so that it’s regularly written about in major publications. His temper was labeled “legendary” by Variety in 1999, the Los Angeles Times in 2003, The New York Times in 2004, and Page Six in 2014. “Mr. Rudin holds the unofficial crown of Hollywood’s most feared boss,” read one line in a 2005 Wall Street Journal piece headlined “Boss-Zilla!” And though Rudin declined to comment on specific allegations in the Hollywood Reporter article, he has openly acknowledged his reputation several times in the past. “At least people who apply here know they’re not coming to work for Florence Nightingale,” he once told The New York Times.