The Books Briefing: When the Status Quo Doesn’t Cut It

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Why are so many Americans so eager to find alternatives—political, medical, vocational—to the status quo? By many measures, the 9-to-5 workplace, the medical industry, and other mainstays of American life seem to have served the country’s population very well: The United States has the world’s largest economy, and its population is far healthier and wealthier than it was before World War II. Yet in 2023, North Americans spent an average of $5,800 each on “wellness” treatments whose efficacy has not always been backed by research. One in 13 Americans have participated in multilevel marketing, even though research has shown that 99 percent of them lose money in the process, and 30 percent supported a Cabinet position for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the leader of the movement to “make America healthy again,” who has falsely claimed that vaccines cause autism. This state of affairs has animated several stories in The Atlantic’s books section over the past two weeks, and all of them identify the same basic answer: The status quo is no longer working.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s books desk:

As Adam M. Lowenstein wrote in his essay on Gardiner Harris’s No More Tears, an exposé about the pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson’s persistent efforts to downplay the risks of some of its products, evidence that the health-care system puts profits first may have “left some people so disillusioned and distrustful that they were willing to try anything else.” Cases of pharmaceutical wrongdoing give a message like Kennedy’s—that the medical industry is corrupt—an understandable appeal. This same message underlies the $6.3 trillion wellness industry, with its array of purported miracle cures. Sheila McClear, in an essay on Amy Larocca’s new book, How to Be Well, wrote this week that “Americans are exhausted from navigating a health-care system so costly and inconvenient that it has sent many of them scrambling for alternatives.” Those who can’t find a therapist who takes insurance can instead buy a “$38 jar of adaptogenic ‘dust’ that claims to improve your mood,” for example, while the wealthy can enroll in boutique health services that make house calls.

This deep distrust in American institutions—and the parade of disruptive entrepreneurs eager to take advantage of it—extends far beyond the medical arena. Last week, Lora Kelley wrote about Bridget Read’s book Little Bosses Everywhere, a history of MLMs—companies that hire salespeople who earn commissions by signing up more salespeople. These businesses first proliferated during the Great Depression, and it felt like no coincidence to Kelley that they resurged online a few years ago during the “Great Resignation,” when growing numbers of workers were laid off or quit out of frustration. Many modern MLMs, Kelley writes, “promise what American jobs used to: security, freedom, dignity. Those promises have consistently failed to materialize. But the fact that so many are desperate to get in on the schemes each year is not a credit to the broader job market.” She summarizes Read’s argument like so: “MLMs are a toxin masquerading as a cure.”

McClear, in her article, writes that the second Trump administration has opened the gates to medical skeptics. Casey Means, a wellness influencer, is the current nominee for surgeon general, and Kennedy now leads the Department of Health and Human Services. McClear notes that some of Kennedy’s policy positions, such as curbs on microplastics, unhealthy foods, and unscrupulous pharmaceutical companies, could be productive reforms, and others, such as reducing access to vaccines and fluoride, feel like dubious solutions in search of a problem. It’s not so hard to argue that the current state of the nation has left many people disappointed—in some cases, desperate for something that works. But this doesn’t mean that any alternative is necessarily better. Some are proving to be demonstrably worse.

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The Perilous Spread of the Wellness Craze

By Sheila McClear

A new book reveals how health-care inequality fueled the spread of anti-science conspiracy theories.

Read the full article.

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What to Read

Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson

Johnson’s drama of the American frontier is barely a novel; the thin paperback can be started on a hot afternoon and finished by happy hour. Yet it has accrued a devoted following in the nearly 15 years since it was published, because it conjures a great expanse—the mythic West. Its main character, Robert Grainier, works as a contract laborer for the railroads running through Idaho and Washington State. Sweating and straining, he hauls down giant conifers in the region’s old-growth forests. He feels a sweet freedom while riding over freshly laid rail, watching the wilderness blur by through a boxcar’s slats. Train Dreams is not overly romantic about its time and place: In the first chapter, Grainier’s boss orders him to throw a Chinese laborer off an unfinished bridge. A curse later seems to fall upon Grainier. He experiences God’s cosmic vengeance, a cleansing fire racing across the dry landscape. Johnson has a cinematic style, lingering on images. But the novella barrels forward with the locomotion evoked in its title, until the end of Grainier’s days, and the end of the Old West. Give it a few hours in June, and it may hold on to your imagination until August.  — Ross Andersen

From our list: The 2025 summer reading guide

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Out Next Week

📚 Atmosphere, by Taylor Jenkins Reid

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Your Weekend Read

The Talented Mr. Vance

By George Packer

J. D. Vance poses a problem, and at its core is a question about character. In the years after the 2016 election, he transformed himself from a center-right memoirist and public speaker, offering a complex analysis of America’s social ills and a sharp critique of Donald Trump, into a right-wing populist politician whose illiberal ideas and vitriolic rhetoric frequently out-Trump the original. According to Vance and his supporters, this change followed a realization during Trump’s first term that the president was lifting up the fallen working class of the heartland that had produced young J. D. To help his people, Vance had to make his peace with their champion. According to his critics, Vance cynically chose to betray his true values in order to take the only path open to an ambitious Republican in the Trump era, and as a convert under suspicion, he pursued it with a vengeance. In one account, a poor boy from the provinces makes good in the metropole, turns against his glittering benefactors, and goes home to fight for his people. In the other, the poor boy seizes every opportunity on his way up, loses his moral compass, and is ruined by his own ambition.

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