All is not well in the campaign to Make America Healthy Again—and it’s not just because of the movement’s fracturing alliance with the Trump administration. @nimabassiri.bsky.social writes on MAHA’s newfound obsession: the alleged problem of overmedicalization.

Overmedicalization and Its Discontents | Nima Bassiri

The MAHA camp turns to psychiatric reform and the alleged problem of overmedicalization.

thebaffler.com

"Science . . . is not the object of antagonism; the people are." Nima Bassiri, the author of MADNESS AND ENTERPRISE, discusses the Trump administration's cuts to science funding in @thebaffler.com:

Scientific Methods | Nima Bassiri

Commentators have long bemoaned the right’s presumptive “war on science.” It may be a war, but science is not the target.

buff.ly

Nina Bassiri’s Madness and Reason: Psychiatry, Economic Reason, and the Emergence of Pathological Value is great, and here he takes his arguments about pathological value to understand Trump’s cuts to basic science press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

Madness and Enterprise

Uncovers a powerful relationship between pathology and money: beginning in the nineteenth century, the severity of mental illness was measured against a patient’s economic productivity.  Madness and E...

press.uchicago.edu

The Baffler@thebaffler.com · last yr.

“They call it a war on science. It may indeed be a war, but it is not science that is the target.”

When the Trump administration proposed cuts to the National Weather Service, it wasn’t acting in ignorance—it was acting out of economic interest. After all, why fund climate research when the wealthy can afford the next catastrophe?

Scientific Methods | Nima Bassiri

Commentators have long bemoaned the right’s presumptive “war on science.” It may be a war, but science is not the target.

thebaffler.com

The right may very well be at war with science. But science is not its intended target. As @nimabassiri.bsky.social argues, what we are seeing is the latest salvo in a long campaign against the poor and disenfranchised.

Scientific Methods | Nima Bassiri

Commentators have long bemoaned the right’s presumptive “war on science.” It may be a war, but science is not the target.

thebaffler.com

President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” aims to cut spending across the board, including at major scientific agencies. Liberal commentators say it’s part of a MAGA war on science. But the battle lines are less clear than you might think.

Scientific Methods | Nima Bassiri

Commentators have long bemoaned the right’s presumptive “war on science.” It may be a war, but science is not the target.

thebaffler.com

I wrote a new piece for @thebaffler.com where I try to reconsider what might really be at stake in the current attacks on science funding…

Scientific Methods | Nima Bassiri

Commentators have long bemoaned the right’s presumptive “war on science.” It may be a war, but science is not the target.

thebaffler.com

"If what was good and what was healthy were increasingly conflated with what was remunerative (and vice versa), then a conceptual space opened through which madness itself could be converted into an economic form and subsequently redeemed—and even revered." interview w/ @nimabassiri.bsky.social

newbooksnetwork.com/madness-and-...

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been confirmed as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. He’s been accused of politicizing science. But as Nima Bassiri writes, it’s inherently political.

Science Will Not Save Us | Nima Bassiri

The most dangerous way to politicize science is to claim that it is off-limits to debate, safeguarded in some way by truth and expertise.

thebaffler.com

I wrote this piece for @thebaffler.com on RFK Jr and the politicization of science (drawing on some ideas I’m developing for my new book…)

Science Will Not Save Us | Nima Bassiri

The most dangerous way to politicize science is to claim that it is off-limits to debate, safeguarded in some way by truth and expertise.

thebaffler.com