From WNYC Studios, I'm Brian Lerer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Tuesday, January 28th.

Tomorrow morning, the Senate will begin its confirmation hearings for RFK Jr., nominated to be Secretary of Health and Human Services.

We plan to cover tomorrow's hearing for most of tomorrow's show, and we'll preview it for a few minutes right now.

Our guest is New Yorker magazine staff writer Claire Malone.

She had that long article last summer called What Does RFK Jr. actually

want? Remember, that article mostly made news for revealing that he once dropped a dead bear

into Central Park and made it look like the bear had been hit by a bicycle and he did it as a joke.

But the article had a lot more in it than that. And so Claire Malone is with us now

for this preview of tomorrow's hearing. Hey, Claire, welcome back to WNYC. Great to be here.

First, did I get that bear story right? It did have several moving parts that had to fit together.

You got the gist. You got the gist. Dead bear in Central Park.

Shouldn't be there.

But was he trying to be anti-bicycle in some way?

That was one question that I got left with reading the article.

Yeah, he was, at the time there had been, I think, a spade of, of, like, biker accidents around the city.

And he thought he was making some kind of joke about it.

Yeah, or some sort of commentary, visual commentary about it.

Yeah.

All right.

But yeah, because I thought the particular accidents had been one or two bikes hitting pedestrians in Central Park, terrible.

Yes.

But, you know, it plays into the whole bikes versus cars and all of that.

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