Airborne Assumptions and Subventilated Science
The Gist
Mike Pesca
4.4 • 3.6K Ratings
🗓️ 31 July 2025
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Carl Zimmer joins to discuss Airborne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe, a book that excavates the forgotten science of airborne disease transmission—from Louis Pasteur’s broth experiments to why COVID’s airborne nature was dismissed by health authorities. Also : praise for the New York Times’ recent front-page study that honestly asses the failure of a cash transfer program to aid in childhood development.
Produced by Corey Wara
Production Coordinator Ashley Khan
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's Thursday, July 31st, 2025 from Peachfish Productions. It's the gist. I'm Mike Peska. |
| 0:09.2 | So over the last couple days, I've led the show with news stories that were, let's call them what |
| 0:14.4 | they were, complaints about how the New York Times covered something. And so today, I make it up to the |
| 0:19.6 | times. Now, to be fair, there's value in my |
| 0:22.2 | critiques. It holds the Times to account. They can recalibrate their coverage based on what the |
| 0:27.2 | gist says. But I'm thinking about you. Let's say you're not a Times subscriber. Well, you could |
| 0:32.0 | always get a couple of stories for free and then some of their stories run in other papers. But just |
| 0:36.7 | listen to the gist and you'll |
| 0:38.3 | figure out what they've been talking about. And you'll also know the bad parts of the stories, |
| 0:42.7 | even better than what the Times would give you. So now I want to make partial amends by pointing |
| 0:48.5 | out a couple of very good stories the Times has run recently, but also to note that it's not just the Times that's deserving |
| 0:56.1 | of criticism, specifically the kind of criticism I leveled yesterday, which was when they allowed |
| 1:02.5 | a mass shooter to essentially set their news agenda. Now, I get it. Someone takes a gun, goes into a |
| 1:07.9 | New York City office building, kills people. There's going to be curiosity |
| 1:11.5 | about which tenants he was targeting. And in this case, the answer was the NFL. But he couldn't |
| 1:16.7 | get to the NFL's offices, so he went to the office of the real estate company, Rudin, which |
| 1:21.4 | owns the building. So I discuss all this on the just list today. That's Mike pesca.substack.com. |
| 1:29.6 | Bloomberg ran with the Ruden angle. Just like the New York Times ran with the NFL angle yesterday. Today's Bloomberg |
| 1:34.8 | subhead was the deadly day at 345. Park Avenue is thrusting a longtime private real estate |
| 1:41.8 | family, the Ruden, into the spotlight. |
| 1:49.7 | Well, Bloomberg, you're the ones doing the thrusting, and it's your spotlight that's shining. |
| 1:51.3 | But that's fine. |
... |
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