Call them 'Nuzzi Pox'

You have to hand it to Bobby Kennedy Jr., unfortunately, even if you can only reach him over FaceTime.

The universe’s shellacked reminder never to name your son is living his fantasy of bringing measles back to America. The year 2025 has now had more cases of the virus than any annum this century. You have to go back to at least 1992 to find so many cases. And that appears to be the goal, at the very least.

Because the outbreaks keep outbreaking.

Seeing this characteristically excellent and timely post from Judd Legum, one of the best at covering stories that matter and being missed, caused me to muse, "More Americans got measles this week than Olivia Nuzzi’s book. Guess which got more press coverage."

Turns out I was wrong, at least according to the CDC.

Our once-great Centers for Disease Control reported 17 new cases last week. This may be because the South Carolina outbreak hasn't been logged yet or because Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has effectively broken the CDC. But there have indeed been more measles cases this year than sales of Nuzzi's book.

Nuzzi sold 1,165 copies of her hardcover in its first week. Normal numbers for a new book, yet impressively bad—much like America's measles numbers—if you have any context at all.

A no-brainer

Still, you can see why Simon and Schuster thought Olivia Nuzzi's new book would be a blockbuster.

1. The disgraced writer had not delivered any comment on her "affair" with Bobby Kennedy Jr. before the 2024 election or during Kennedy's confirmation hearings.
2. The press loves obsessing over itself, resulting in tons of buzz as the book's first excerpt dropped.
3. Nuzzi is, for lack of a better phrase, blonde.

Men prefer blondes, as at least one study tells us. Respondents identified blonde women as more attractive, younger, healthier, and more promiscuous. And Nuzzi's story of a younger woman's flirtation with an iconically married, self-obsessed man, with a name as old and famous as the transistor radio, has all that.

Our society's obsession with fair hair cuts deep.

"Some research finds that blondes make more money than brunettes (that might explain why they have more fun)," Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote. "The blonde stereotype I’m thinking of is a modern invention of advertising and pop culture. The sociopolitical meaning of blonde as genetically superior, desirable is much older and more sinister. "

And the publishers had to believe Nuzzi's story would capitalize on a mutation of Missing White Woman Syndrome. That's the familiar dynamic where stories of blonde white women in peril often dominate the news. Meanwhile, the traumas of non-white, non-blonde women receive general indifference if they're noticed at all.

Nuzzi's book had everything going for it to be the literary sensation of the season—except, it seems:

1. A title that meant anything to anyone except the author.
2. Significant insights into her scandals.
3. Any serious attempt to explain her extraordinary failures of professional ethics.

A top .01% journalist attempting to depict her reasoning for not—despite disgracing herself and her field—stepping when it mattered would be compelling.

Why did she save her revelations about the now Secretary of Health and Human Services' ongoing drug abuse and moral failings for her book? Why hadn't she shared them when they mattered, when they might have prevented at least some of those cases of measles?

Tim Miller tried to get her to answer that question:

She said, "I don't know how to responsibly answer this on camera with you here."

We all have our own understanding of responsibility that allows us to cope with the immeasurable good we don't and can't do. So let's leave Nuzzi as a person aside and focus instead on how her name is occupying so much of our precious public attention, while plagues of the last century are returning.

Instead, let's use Missing White Woman Syndrome to our advantage.

I proposed trying to shift the public's focus from matters of old man and young blonde to issues of life and death, using a counter that compares measles cases to Nuzzi's book sales. Marcy Wheeler had a better idea. She suggested we use the press's penchant for mentioning Nuzzi's name for good by calling measles "the Nuzzi rash."

I suggested Nuzzi Pox, since pox sounds worse than rash, and there should be a pox on everyone in Nuzzi's story, including her creepy, older ex-fiance, who is trying to defend his name and add context to their mutual ethical failures with a series of paywalled blog posts.

Don't want to blame the woman in the story? I get it. I'd gladly call them "Cassidy Pox," after Bill Cassidy, the medical doctor and Republican Senator whose support made Bobby Jr.'s confirmation inevitable. But we're talking about how to harness the press's worst instincts to wake America up.

Will that get the press and public to care less about scandal and more about what looks like either a public health disaster in the making and/or a canary in a coal mine chirping about the dawn of a greater pandemic?

Well, we couldn't get them to care any less.

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