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On a rain-soaked day in 2017, thousands marched on Washington DC to fight for science funding and scientific analysis in politics. | Vlad Tchompalov/Unsplash Every year since 2019, Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan think tank and polling organization, has asked nearly 10,000 American adults how they feel about science. In 2019, the vast majority of people surveyed across the political spectrum were confident that scientists act in the public’s best interest. In fact, Americans placed more confidence in scientists than nearly anyone else, including elected officials, journalists, business leaders, and even schoolteachers. Then the Covid-19 pandemic happened. Democrats doubled down in their confidence while Republicans lost theirs. During the height of the pandemic, this partisan divide in science skepticism manifested as culture wars between those who wore masks and lined up for vaccines, and those who did not. The public’s trust — or lack thereof — in science shapes political decisions around climate change, research funding, and food and drug regulation. As Donald Trump prepares to take office again, the scientific community is grappling with what his agenda means for them. Scientists worry that a second Trump term will stall efforts to fight climate change and eviscerate federal agencies involved in public health.  According to Pew’s latest survey, Republican confidence in science went up this year, the first increase in trust reported since before the pandemic. But the incoming Trump administration, now prominently featuring Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is placing science skepticism at the heart of promises to “Make America Healthy Again.” The belief that health care practitioners, federal agencies, and institutions of science are colluding against us is being pushed by rising GOP leaders like conservative health influencers Calley and Casey Means to stoke conservative anxieties. According to Pew, nearly two-thirds of conservatives believe that scientists should stay out of science-related policy debates. Now that Trump has selected Kennedy to lead the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), those conservatives may get their wish. Here are three charts that make sense of America’s relationship with science today, and highlight how scientists can earn the public’s trust back. Confidence in science is rising for the first time since early 2020 — but trust splits along party lines Covid-19 caught the world with its pants down, and public trust in science never fully recovered. As the virus spread, the imperfect process of science was laid out for everyone to see.  Normally, publishing a biomedical science paper is a years-long process. The experiments themselves can take many weeks or months, depending on the nature of the project. Once data is analyzed, written up, and submitted to a journal for peer review, it can take anywhere from a few months to a few years to get published — reviewers often ask scientists to make changes or include more information, to make sure their findings are as airtight as possible.  This story was first featured in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here to explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week. But in the early stages of the pandemic, people were desperate for answers — and scientists stepped into the vacuum to publish rushed, sometimes error-filled papers without peer review. Journalists published news articles about those pre-print studies without effectively communicating their uncertainty. Policymakers were left to make huge decisions based on limited, inconclusive, and sometimes downright fraudulent data. But science is a messy, nonlinear process, and new data can overturn previously held truths at any moment. The scientific method involves making an educated guess about how the world works, finding a way to test that guess, and seeing what happens — basically, science is the act of messing around and finding out.  In most cases, it takes many iterations of this process before the scientific community reaches a consensus (and even then, new experiments can shatter what was once accepted as fact). For scientists, this is a given. “The consistency is only to the data, not your position,” said Sudip Parikh, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The problem, he said, is that politics don’t work that way. “In politics, you should be consistent about your position,” Parikh said. And when you’re not consistent, as Vice President Kamala Harris discovered during the 2024 campaign, voters can punish you for it. So when the government seemed to flip-flop during the pandemic — like telling people to only wear cloth masks to preserve limited supplies for front line health care workers, only to later say that cloth masks aren’t very effective — most people didn’t instinctively think it was all part of the learning process. They felt betrayed. And that sense of betrayal ultimately extended to vaccines. The public lost trust in science for years following the pandemic. According to Pew, though Democrats’ confidence fell by a few percentage points between 2019 and 2023, they still overwhelmingly trusted scientists throughout the pandemic. Republicans’ trust, however, plummeted between 2020 and 2021, and it’s only just beginning to recover. The massive partisan divide is striking: When surveyed in October, 88 percent of Democrats said they have “a fair amount” or “a great deal” of confidence in scientists, compared to 66 percent of Republicans. Most people agree that scientists are smart, but bad at communicating When asked, about 9 in 10 people, regardless of party affiliation, agreed that research scientists are “intelligent.” Alec Tyson, an associate director of research at Pew, pointed out that in general, scientists “engender high levels of trust from the public in a low-trust era,” inspiring more votes of confidence than people are willing to give just about any other occupation. However, while over three-quarters of Democrats believe scientists are also “honest” and “focus on solving real-world problems,” only about half of Republicans agree. On the flip side, many more Republicans than Democrats agree that scientists are cold, closed-minded, ignore moral values of society, and feel superior to others. The majority of Americans surveyed also think scientists are socially awkward and bad at communicating. “Look, scientists are human,” Parikh said. “We have the whole spectrum of the population. Every personality type that’s out in the real world is in the scientific laboratory as well.” So, sure — some scientists are certainly socially awkward (and as a former scientist, I’ve both witnessed and likely contributed to this stereotype). And unfortunately, scientists rarely learn how to write for non-academic audiences or speak with the press as part of their training. There are some easy steps scientists can take to improve their overall vibe. A group of scientists, including Samantha Yammine and Daniel Toker (@ScienceSam and @the_brain_scientist on both Instagram and TikTok), ran an experiment in 2019 to see whether posting selfies on social media could change people’s perception of scientists. When scientists posted friendly-looking pictures of themselves against a science-y backdrop, like their lab bench, viewers rated them as significantly warmer than if they had posted a picture of their lab equipment alone. Parikh thinks that building long-term relationships between researchers, policymakers, reporters, and their community — whether through social media, fellowship programs, or citizen science — can strengthen trust over time. “Science is a human endeavor,” Parikh said. “The way you build trust is by being open and honest about both the strengths and the limitations of your process.” Most Republicans don’t want scientists involved in science-related policy decisions Pew’s survey asked respondents another big question: “If you trust scientists,” Tyson said, “what role do you want them to play in public life?” According to the National Science Foundation, the federal government in 2020 employed about 175,000 scientists, the vast majority of whom conduct research for the Department of Defense. Though elected officials hold final authority, scientists can influence policy decisions by advising politicians, and may work for the federal government, or nongovernmental organizations like universities or think tanks. In times of crisis, like the Covid-19 pandemic, scientists in government have the power to sway decisions that affect everyone. People were divided: About half of US adults think scientists should take an active role in science-related policy debates, while the other half thinks scientists should just stick to science. Again, there was a big partisan gap, with many more Republicans wanting scientists to stay out of policy debates. One possible explanation, Parikh said, is that people are worried that scientists are so married to their data, they ignore everything else. During the 2020 lockdowns, for example, many people disagreed with school closures — though closing schools was a largely evidence-based decision, that evidence was limited and uncertain, and closures ultimately caused real, lasting damage to children’s education and mental health. In policy debates like that, where scientific evidence is pitted against economic reality, family values, and individual emotions, some people may worry that scientists would only consider the science. That’s not to say that science and data matter when it comes to policymaking — nearly all hot-button issues today, like reproductive care, climate change, and drug regulation, have science at their core. But science and data are “not the only part of the equation,” Parikh said. “That’s why we have policymakers. We have to have a discussion about what the data means.” Tyson’s team has an eye on the Trump administration’s health proposals, and what they might mean for the public’s perception of science. While it’s too early to know exactly what role he will play, Kennedy has long held outright conspiratorial beliefs around vaccines, fluoride, seed oils, and pesticides, and has said he would dramatically restructure HHS, the federal organization responsible for public health. “I think we’ll be ready, a year from now, to take stock of the change in administration and see where the conversation goes from there,” Tyson said. For years, science communicators believed that the gap between scientists and the rest of the population could be explained by inadequate information. This paradigm, called the “deficit model,” states that if only the public were more educated about the scientific method, they would be more willing to trust scientific expertise. In this model, scientists hold crucial information that non-scientists don’t have, and sharing that information should be enough to sway hearts and minds. While that theory makes some intuitive sense, it doesn’t seem to be how humans actually work. Pew reported that, among politically aligned voters, whether someone went to college didn’t change their trust in science. It’s not about education — it’s about transparency, relationship-building, and a willingness to acknowledge when science makes mistakes. If the deficit model were an experiment, the data would suggest it’s not working. While I don’t believe that science is — or should be — apolitical, it ought to be bipartisan. “It’s a process for thinking,” Parikh said, “and that process for thinking is not partisan.” Parikh is cautiously optimistic that this year’s upswing in Republican confidence in science marks the beginning of the end of science’s post-pandemic slump. “If we can do five point increases for three years in a row on the Republican side, we’re right back at complete bipartisanship,” Parikh said.

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I have been staring at this silver dish of fried chicken for what feels like hours but what really, actually, has been days. Twenty-three days, to be exact, over the course of the three-month Dead Forever run at the all-new, all-American pleasure palace—the Las Vegas Sphere.I grew up on the road. First on the family bus, traveling from city to city to watch my father, Mickey Hart, play drums with the Grateful Dead and Planet Drum, and then later with the various Grateful Dead offshoots. When I was old enough, I joined the crew, working for Dead & Company, doing whatever I could be trusted to handle: stringing strands of plastic Grateful Dead–bear lights; ferrying tie-dyed tapestries, extension cords, and gaffer tape by golf cart; helping VIP-ticket holders smuggle ziplocks filled with vegan sandwiches and granola into the venue. Then, late-night, drinking whiskey from the bottle with the techs, sitting in the emptying parking lot as the semitrucks and their load-out rumble marked the end of our day.But this summer, for the first time in the band’s history, there would be no buses; there would be no trucks. Instead we stayed in one place, trading the rhythms of a tour for the dull ache of a long, endlessly hot Las Vegas summer.It’s a new way of doing things, one with just enough of our former existence to keep it comfortable and just enough change to keep the road forward exciting—even if the road is now an illusion, stretching out below an AI-generated sky. The Grateful Dead had been famous for its Wall of Sound—about 600 speakers painstakingly assembled by the crew at each venue, then just as painstakingly packed back up for the next stadium or concert hall. The Sphere is a wall of light : a 160,000-square-foot display programmed to transport the audience members, their necks craned upward, as the band plays below, a little dot against the expansive animated horizon.Before that high-tech spectacle can begin, however, a very old, analog tradition must be observed: dinner. Sometime between sound check and the show opener, everyone sits down for a shared meal. The monitor tech and the bassist, the head of security and the lighting director, the man selling merch and the man playing drums—we all shuffle forward holding the same white dinner plates and napkins, arms outstretched, ready to receive whatever food is served, like kids in a cafeteria.The catering options rarely differ. Almost always, there’s a salad bar with every possible variety of Newman’s Own dressing. There are sandwich fixings. There’s a soupy fish dish and a vegan pasta that congeals into the shape of its serving tray, like Jell-O in a mold. At the end of the table, inevitably, a giant chunk of meat waits to be carved.[From the March 2010 issue: Management secrets of the Grateful Dead]Still, I always looked forward to certain venues. For the old hands on the crew, the Shoreline Amphitheatre, in Mountain View, California, was notorious for having been built on top of a landfill—methane from the decomposing trash would seep out of the earth, leading to flaming eruptions when audience members lit a joint. But for me, Shoreline meant soft serve. Old, decrepit, but functional, the machine was hidden in the far-left corner of backstage hospitality. I’d fill a bowl with ribbons of ice cream, topping them off with a downpour of chocolate sprinkles.Here at the Sphere, dinner is fried chicken—again. Every night, chicken is prepared in the same fryer, seasoned with the same spices, and delivered by the same person. It’s placed on an identical white tablecloth with serving utensils angled at matching degrees. This is life in a corporate commune.Staring at the serving platters, I have an idea. I try the fried chicken in a new combination. I take some salsa from the empanada platter on the left, some mac and cheese from the platter on the right. It’s still fried chicken, but it works—something new made from something familiar.I have a memory of a birthday in some Midwest backstage. I think it was my 9th, but it’s hard to say for sure. I had been craving cheesecake for weeks. Out of fear of sending some runner on a wild-goose chase, I told no one. I was perpetually terrified of becoming an inconvenience, a feeling I imagine is pretty common for kids who grow up on the road.There was the glow of a birthday candle, my mother’s hand cupped over an obscured slice of cake. The stagehands sang “Happy Birthday” as I shrank into the couch cushions, embarrassed by the attention. My father played a drumroll on a toaster as my mother handed me the plate. I looked down. The cake was giant and oozing rich frosting and most definitely, 100 percent … chocolate. I smiled and blew out the candle. I made a wish—for cheesecake.Later, both band and crew migrated to catering for dinner. I walked down the row of long plastic tables, wondering if the package of sourdough bread was the one I had opened in Milwaukee the week before, or if it was just an identical one. I imagined an old Grateful Dead road case stuffed to the brim with sandwich materials—mustard and mayonnaise in the stick drawer, a series of plastic-wrapped tomatoes where the drum pads should be, a head of lettuce stuffed inside a cajón. It was possible. We brought just about everything else with us, even the lights and the stage.On one table sat a large plastic bag of Kraft shredded cheese—the Mexican blend, with little cheddar and Monterey Jack worms flattened against the clear casing. I grabbed the package and pushed it under my shirt, then walked back out toward the stage casually, like an expert jewel thief.I collected the chocolate-cake slice and took it underneath the stage to the below-deck depths where the riggers set up hammocks for naps after sound check. I looked around to ensure I was alone, then I removed the cheese from under my shirt and poured all of it onto the cake plate. I tore off the end of the slice, stray cheese falling onto the cold cement floor, and greedily shoved it into my mouth.I chewed my cheesecake proudly, nodding to myself like I was a judge on some fancy cooking show. “9.5!” I announced, my voice echoing in the empty space below the stage. “Half a point off—no whipped cream!”I knew the cake was terrible. It didn’t matter. I loved it. I had made my wish come true.From an early age, I could taste a tour route as soon as I saw it. Tracing the list of cities with my index finger, I knew the roads we’d travel and the meals we’d eat. Show nights meant dinner in catering, but even the relentless schedule of a Dead tour had the occasional off night, a chance to escape the venue and seek out old favorites.Madison Square Garden always, without compromise, meant orange chicken and water chestnuts, the fat that falls off the edge of spare ribs, and duck-sauce stains on old merch shirts. Madison Square Garden meant New York, and New York meant Wo Hop.Established in 1938, Wo Hop is, as far as I can tell, the most famous dive in Chinatown. My father first went there in the 1960s, when, as he remembers it, it still had sawdust on the floor. It was known for its midnight clientele—John Belushi, Patti Smith. It’s the hidden gem that everyone thinks they’ve discovered.For our family, Wo Hop represents the frayed tether connecting East Coast to West Coast, our past to our present. Though my parents made their home in California, my lineage, on both sides, comes from New York. My Jewish great-grandfathers lived and worked in the same city while inhabiting entirely different worlds. One opened Ohrbach’s, the Manhattan department store where knockoffs of Parisian couture were sold to eager housewives. Around the same time, somewhere in Brooklyn, another great-grandfather got his cab medallion.The first thing I do when the buses drop us off in New York is start walking. I like to think about my great-grandfathers when I do, imagining what their days looked like and what version of New York they knew.In the summer of 2023, on what was billed as Dead & Company’s final tour, I went for a very long walk, crisscrossing the city. I passed the former site of the Fillmore East, Bill Graham’s famous music hall, which had once been my family’s second home, and where some of the greatest live albums of the ’60s and ’70s—notably, ones by Miles Davis and the Allman Brothers—were recorded. It was now a bank. I gave $5 to a man sitting outside with a long gray beard and a sign that said We all get old but at least I saw Jimi Hendrix.Eventually, as the sun began to set, I found myself at 17 Mott Street—deep in the heart of Chinatown—standing at the steps that lead down to Wo Hop. There’s something about the red tiles that line the walls to its lower entrance, the light from neon signs bouncing across them. The pull of Wo Hop is so strong that I always end up there, even without intending to, like I’m following its siren song across the city. Wo Hop is like a familiar refrain: You know you must return to it a few more times before the song is over.I sat down and gestured to the waiter that I was ready to order. He walked over, pen and pad in hand.“Welcome to Wo Hop,” he said with a smile. “Have you been here before?”On show days, the sushi arrives at 3 p.m., just before sound check. It’s been there all my life, a kaleidoscopic swirl of salmon pinks and opalesque creams, with a slight variance in quality depending on the distance to the ocean. It comes in shiny cellophane wrapping that sticks to the outer edge of the sashimi and twinkles under the harsh fluorescent lights overhead.It’s pure protein, a source of energy smooshed across a six-inch tray. The sushi is in my father’s rider: Assortment of Sashimi upon arrival at 3:00 p.m.(6) Ika(6) Salmon(6) Toro(6) Hamachi(6) Unagi On tour, it’s easy to forget that you need to stop and eat, or to see eating as a mere obstacle to putting on the show. Sometimes, it’s just a question of priorities—waking up in a hotel room and knowing that if you don’t shower now, it’ll be three days on the bus before you get another chance. So you skip the continental breakfast and drink coffee from the machine in your room. You arrive at the venue before catering opens, and by the time it does, you’ve moved on to some task that requires crossing the length of the venue and back. Rider food is insurance, a contractual guarantee that there will be something to keep us going.[Read: How I faked my way to rock stardom]It’s not until week three or four, when we’re near the midpoint of the tour, that the sushi starts to morph into something else. It’s a bizarre turn—we begin to resent the sushi platter, blame it for the monotony of our lives. (“Maddening,” my father likes to say.) But we still go after it every night, tearing off the cellophane and grabbing at the raw fish like black bears at a salmon stream. Sometimes, a funny little fishhook smile appears on my father’s face after the last of the sushi is gone, an acknowledgment that, in his words, “we all got to eat.”There is a specific kind of emotion that comes with the end of a tour. All the decisions that were once in someone else’s hands come raining down as normal everyday life returns. It always hits at the airport after the last show, when suddenly no one’s telling you where to go. You’re in charge, in control of your own schedule, and for the first time in a very long time, you have to decide what you want to eat.After all the moaning about postshow pizza and stale pasta, all the daydreaming about things you’d eat if you were back home, the reality is that those first steps into the world of free will rarely feel anything other than lonely.At the end of the summer, I wander around Harry Reid International Airport, surrounded by the glow of the slot machines, until I see a to-go food counter, walk over, and stare at the menu.“What can I get you?” the person behind the cash register wants to know. My eyes scan across what feels like an endless abyss of options. “Do you have any cheesecake?”This article appears in the December 2024 print edition with the headline “One for the Road.”

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