The New Yorker:

Amid the destruction of America's public-health systems, Trump’s Surgeon General nominee believes that your wellness is yours alone to defend.

By Jessica Winter

If you close your eyes and imagine an up-from-the-bootstraps embodiment of boomer triumphalism—the ambitious young technocrat of a systems novel by Don DeLillo or Thomas Pynchon, sprinting toward his fully vested stake in the American Century—you might see a man like Grady Means, whose daughter, Casey Means, is now President Trump’s nominee for U.S. Surgeon General. Grady was born in the Los Angeles area in 1946, and received scholarships at Stanford, where he studied economics and engineering and excelled at track-and-field. He worked for Fairchild Semiconductor, one of Silicon Valley’s seminal ventures, and for the Northrop Corporation, an avatar of Southern California’s then flourishing aerospace industry. “This was a state,” Joan Didion wroteof California, in 1993, “in which virtually every county was to one degree or another dependent on defense contracts”—including “billions upon billions of federal dollars that flowed into Los Angeles County,” until the cutbacks of the early nineteen-nineties. The idea that the military-industrial complex could continue to nurture communities of happy, landowning citizens, Didion went on, “was a sturdy but finally an unsupportable ambition, sustained for forty years by good times and the good will of the federal government.”

Go to link