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60 Minutes

11/09/2025: The Family Farm, Collateral Damage, The Indomitable Margaret Atwood

60 Minutes

CBS News

Cbs, Tv & Film, Society & Culture, News

4 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 10 November 2025

⏱️ 43 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

American farmers have faced months of uncertainty after China stopped buying soybeans in retaliation for the White House reciprocal tariffs strategy. Correspondent Cecilia Vega interviews farmers from Tennessee and Missouri who are struggling with high costs and low prices for their crops, and who fear they could be the generation to lose the family farm. President Trump has accused elite universities of liberal bias and antisemitism and has been threatening their federal research funding to pressure them to change. At Harvard University, scientists tell correspondent Bill Whitaker that the government’s actions are jeopardizing their research into potentially life-saving advances in medicine and could dismantle America’s lead in scientific innovation. Correspondent Jon Wertheim profiles literary titan Margaret Atwood, author of the dystopian classic The Handmaid’s Tale. At 85, with 64 books to her name, Canada’s best-known author has been called the “prophet of doom” for her uncanny ability to write about catastrophes in her fiction before they happen in real life. Wertheim talks to Atwood about her new memoir, Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, why she thinks The Handmaid’s Tale became a cultural touchstone, and how she refuses to be silenced by an increasing number of bans on her books. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

American farmers have long struggled with high costs and low prices for their crops.

0:13.0

But this year, amid trade wars and tariffs, there is even greater uncertainty in the fields.

0:19.0

I heard it's affecting your health. Yes.

0:21.6

Four blood pressure pills a day.

0:23.6

Three different medicines.

0:24.6

Two years ago, none.

0:26.6

What do you think about when you go to bed at night?

0:28.6

What's going to be left in a year?

0:30.6

Am I the one that broke what started in the late 1800s?

0:36.6

So this is your lab.

0:40.3

Tonight, inside the labs where scientists are conducting life-saving research, they worry will become

0:47.3

collateral damage in a political war between the White House and the nation's elite universities,

0:53.3

including Harvard. The attack on universities is a tragic blunder.

0:58.0

For all the foibles of universities, and there are many,

1:01.0

universities, research makes life better, massively so.

1:06.0

Why would you want to cripple it?

1:16.6

Here she is taking a flamethrower to her own book. Margaret Atwood was firing back it would-be book burners. Her books have been banned for content deemed overly sexual, morally corrupt,

1:24.2

anti-Christian. The government put out an edict to all school boards saying that they couldn't have

1:29.8

any books in the library that had either direct or indirect sex.

1:34.7

What is indirect sex?

1:36.1

I don't know.

1:37.9

I'm Leslie Stahl.

...

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