The Revelatory Cringe of Anthony Fauci

From theatlantic.com

By Gal Beckerman

The private notes of the man who oversaw COVID policy are deeply embarrassing—and surprisingly instructive 

My teenage daughter has a diary. It’s pink and, most important, has an elaborate lock on it. And if I could go back in time to 2020, I might send this exact sort of journal to Anthony Fauci. Every night, when he was finished sharing his thoughts about battling COVID, he could have locked it, scrambled the combination, and then buried it in his sock drawer, as I think my daughter does.

                                                                 Illustration by Jonelle Afurong / The Atlantic. Source: Peter Dazeley

Before this weekend, I would never have dreamed of comparing the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases with a teenage girl. But now that I’ve seen his diary, I’m convinced that my daughter has a more secure way of expressing her most private thoughts. I’m also willing to bet that she uses far fewer exclamation points than he does. “Stock Market crashing!” the president’s chief medical adviser writes on February 27, 2020. “Amazing day!” a few entries later. And on March 28, “WHAT A NIGHT!!!”

The contents of Fauci’s diary, revealed this past weekend and published online by Senator Rand Paul, are—there is no other way to put it—embarrassing to an excruciating degree. Eventually, we might read those notes differently, as a key text in the history of the coronavirus pandemic. But what we know right now is that during months when the country shut down, when panic and death dominated, Fauci was spending part of his time cataloguing his own growing fame with the excitement of a child star who had been asked to sign an autograph for the first time.

“Brewery in Georgia named a beer after me,” he writes. “Bobbleheads of me being made in massive quantities in China,” he adds on another day. “Intense publicity about me continues with stories of granmothers who have crushes on men. Petitions to vote me ‘Sexiest Man Alive.’” (All typos, just as embarrassing, are his.) He can’t seem to get enough of the attention. He compiles lists of famous people he has met or who have called to congratulate him. At times, reading this, I truly worried about someone who would take a call from Dionne Warwick to talk about vaccines in a moment when the country really needed him to be a bit more focused.

What makes this all the more unfortunate is that most of these excited personal asides come right under his listing of the figures for infections and deaths. “Global—3,300,000/230,000; USA—1,130,000/66,000,” the entry begins for May 3, 2020, two months into the pandemic. And then he proceeds to write, “Fauci-maddness continues with multiple articles and every sort of paraphernalia and restaurant and foods named after me.”

Those looking to discredit Fauci will surely make hay of these journal entries, which run from December 2019 to December 2022. Besides the self-regard, what Paul has picked on is Fauci’s openness in the early months of the pandemic to considering the lab-leak theory, which he disputed and delegitimized when talking with the press. “We’ve probably never ever seen people so completely at odds with their private thoughts, and then publicly proclaiming the opposite of what they were truly saying in private,” Paul told reporters this week.

The U.S. senator from Kentucky seems to forget, however, that this is what a diary is for: private thoughts. Fauci’s mistake was not in recording what was going through his mind and lifting his ego, but in doing so on government servers, which are never, ever private. For this, the 85-year-old has only himself to blame.

Would we want to live in a world, though, in which people couldn’t keep diaries? In 2020, Fauci found himself in a strange position: a man asked to become an avatar of science and authority when Americans were desperate for some semblance of certainty. He was at high-level meetings in the White House every day, on television constantly, portrayed by Brad Pitt on Saturday Night Live. What he put down in his diary was an unfiltered procession of his thoughts and observations as he was living them. And they are not all banal and self-obsessed. He was also describing his encounters with the president. He was working through his ideas. He was transcribing debates about policy and parsing transmission rates. It’s a diary. And if he seems to have been endlessly tickled by his own fame, this is also valuable data of a different kind—insights into the kind of complexity that we all contain. In retrospect, what seems unfair is that we expected one man to make the whole country feel safe, and then were surprised to find out that he’s only a human.

Many of us have probably kept a diary in our life. I did, in my 20s, although I’m sure that, as a self-serious young man, I insisted that it was a “journal.” I stopped as my life became more settled in my 30s and 40s, when the contours of my identity—of whom I would marry, what my children would be like, what career I would have—went from sources of anxious speculation to my actual reality. Most of us keep a diary at precisely those moments when we feel unmoored, when we feel assaulted by new stimuli or are forced to question who we are or what is happening to the world around us—phases such as adolescence, and wartime, and crisis. Fauci probably needed a private outlet for processing all that he was experiencing, and it’s a good thing that a diary can provide that. Would Twitter have been a better place for him to air his uncertainties, along with the details of calls from Barbra Streisand?

Some personal diaries do become public, ideally long after the subject is dead. The great ones don’t just provide private solace; they also reveal much about the times when they were written—precisely because their focus is on the personal. Think of what we learn about the plague in mid-17th-century London while we read Samuel Pepys detailing his many infidelities, or what Victor Klemperer exposes about creeping intimidation in Nazi Germany even as he is being petty and judgmental when it comes to other Jews. What makes those diaries such meaningful documents is that they are written by fallible people. They preserve consciousness before history has become history. They show what it was like to inhabit uncertainty.

I can’t claim that Fauci’s thoughts (both serious and silly) will have any lasting literary merit. In fact, I’m definitely not claiming this. But his not-so-secret thoughts do tell us something about the reality of the pandemic that he, and the rest of us, lived through—the frenzy and panic of it, and even the nervous exhilaration of living through what we all understood to be a sudden rupture in time. One day, historians might use this diary to help figure out what happens to a society under such pressure. They might see more clearly the way that people can become desperate for a saviour, and realize what a fantasy it is to imagine that such people exist.

https://www.theatlantic.com/books/2026/07/anthony-faucis-embarrassing-revealing-diary/688107/

‘We Would Pile Into the Convertible and Head to Chinatown’

From nytimes.com

The writer Jean Hanff Korelitz, the comedian Roy Wood Jr. and other notable friends of Metropolitan Diary share their New York City stories as the column marks its 50th anniversary 

Their Chinatown

Dear Diary:

When I was growing up on the Upper East Side in the 1960s and ’70s, Manhattan’s Chinatown was a faraway place offering highly exotic food.

American palates had by then had a couple of decades to get used to what we called “Chinese food,” but for many people, my family included, spare ribs, egg rolls and chicken chow mein were the outer limit of what we were brave enough to order.

Every few weeks, we would pile into the convertible and head to Chinatown. There, we ate only and always at a restaurant called Lin’s Garden. In time, I came to realize that every uptown family had “their” Chinese restaurant.

When I moved to South Street Seaport in 2024, the first thing I did was time the walk to Chinatown: 11 minutes.

With such variety nearby, I decided to eat in every Chinatown restaurant, and for the past two years I’ve been working my way through a spreadsheet of nearly 200, from hole-in-the-wall dumpling shops to dim sum palaces.

It’s an illogical project, given my still very American palate and inability to eat spicy food. But I want to resist the temptation to return, Lin’s Garden-style, only to familiar places.

New York City, consumed as it is by its own forward motion, will always decline to respect our individual nostalgias, so it’s up to us to do the remembering. Lin’s Garden is long gone, but recently I unearthed the address, 53 Bayard Street.

Now, when I’m on the block, I make a point of looking inside, and into the back corner where the four of us — my parents, my sister and me — once adventurously ate those spare ribs and egg rolls, so far from the Upper East Side.

Today, the restaurant is called Yunnan Rice Noodle House, and it’s No. 65 on my Chinatown spreadsheet. I’ll get to it eventually.

— Jean Hanff Korelitz

Ms. Korelitz is a writer. Her most recent book is “The Sequel.”

Coney Island in Mind

Dear Diary:

My daughter returned home to New York from college in Michigan for summer break. Her three roommates came along for a weeklong stay.

Sitting around the kitchen table one morning, they were eagerly planning things to do in the city. They mentioned a nightclub.

“There’s a really good diner around the corner for afterward,” I said.

Marisa, born and raised in Michigan, looked confused.

“Diner?” she said. “What do you mean ‘diner?’”

“Huh?” I replied. “What do you mean?”

“What’s a diner?”

“What?”

Marisa’s eyes darted around to the other Michigan girls. They also looked confused.

I was confused too.

“It’s a casual restaurant, open 24 hours,” I said. “You can get breakfast any time, burgers, fries. You sit in a booth.”

“Oh,” Marisa said. “You mean a Coney Island.”

“What?” I said.

“Yeah,” Marisa said. “In Michigan, we call those Coney Islands.”

“Why?!”

“I don’t know. That’s just what they’re called.”

This annoyed me. You can’t just name stuff in other states after our New York City icons without our New York City permission, right? I mean, who approved this?

I needed to get to the bottom of this ridiculousness, and I learned that, yes, diners in Michigan are called Coney Islands.

Apparently, Greek immigrants who came through Ellis Island on their way to Michigan sampled Coney Island hot dogs and liked them so much they named the restaurants they eventually opened after them: Lafayette Coney Island, Jackson Coney Island, American Coney Island and on and on, all over Michigan.

These hard-working immigrants were paying homage to our famous hot dogs. There’s no boardwalk, no ocean, no roller coasters — just a lot of love for a Brooklyn icon.

— Darlene Rodriguez

Ms. Rodriguez is a co-anchor of “Today in New York” on WNBC.

On the Radio

Dear Diary:

My first time in New York City was in 1993, a life-changing year for me. I was from Atlanta and had real pride in my home town. But the saying “If you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere” has always been a thing, and at that point in my life I wanted to make it.

I was 17, still in high school and part of a girl group called Xscape. We were starting our careers, excited to see the world, excited to have hit records. To get those hit records, we were told we had to be accepted in New York City.

Jermaine Dupri had signed us to his label; our first single, “Just Kickin’ It,” was being released; and the label had decided that we should go to New York first to promote it.

As a group, LaTocha, Tamika, Tiny and I were excited to make the trip. I knew nothing about New York except what I had seen in movies and on TV.

The thing that stood out to me was the Manhattan traffic. So many cars, so many taxis, so many bike riders. And nobody cared about lanes.

The four of us were split between two cars. As we were riding, the radio was set to Hot 97, I believe, one of the hottest radio stations in the country at the time.

“Just Kickin’ It” came on. We screamed and had the two cars ride side-by-side with the windows down so we could scream to one another to make sure we all heard the song playing.

It was our first time hearing our song on the radio, and it happened in New York City before our hometown stations even started playing it.

It was like being welcomed with a warm hug.

— Kandi Burruss

Ms. Burruss, who appeared on “The Real Housewives of Atlanta,” is a singer, songwriter and actor.

New School Pitch

Dear Diary:

I was being interviewed for the British publication The Spectator. We settled into a communal table in the lobby of the Marlton Hotel on Eighth Street because my apartment was undergoing some renovation.

My interlocutor, Anne Margaret Daniel, is a literary scholar who was extremely knowledgeable about my work and about American literature in general, and the conversation was lively.

I couldn’t help noticing that a gentleman at the table seemed to be paying attention, and it occurred to me that we might be annoying him. But he didn’t say anything until we were wrapping up.

At that point, he introduced himself and said it was an honour to meet me, which made me only slightly uncomfortable, and that he was a writer himself.

Ms. Daniel and I had finished the interview by talking about my experiences in Hollywood. The gentleman who had just introduced himself said that his family had been involved in the early days of motion pictures and that he was a descendant of an early movie star named Blanche Walsh.

He said he was planning to name a projected humanistic studies centre for her and hoped the New School would finance it to the tune of $100 million.

Ms. Daniel, who teaches at the New School, raised her eyebrows when she heard this.

“I suspect that before the New School would give $100 million for the humanities these days,” she said, “the whole campus would collapse and sink into the Greenwich Village mud like the House of Usher into the tarn.”

Nonetheless, we wished him success in his venture before exiting onto the chilly street.

— Jay McInerney

Mr. McInerney is a writer. His most recent book is “See You on the Other Side.”

Hardcore Fan

Dear Diary:

It wasn’t until I lived in the city that I realized how dedicated New Yorkers are to their teams.

When I moved here, I lived in a fourth-floor apartment. I arranged the living room so that my television was positioned on the side wall so that you could look directly into the room and see it while my couch remained hidden.

On the fourth floor, you’re not completely removed from what’s happening outside. You hear the rattle of a fire truck’s suspension as it ploughs through a pothole. You hear the one defiant wheel rattling on someone’s hand truck or laundry cart.

I also remember once hearing someone yell, “You know what you did. You better not come back over here,” with expletives added in the usual places.

It wasn’t evident to me just how clearly someone could see my TV until one night I had the Yankees game on. I’m a Cubs fan, but I love baseball above all and can watch pretty much any team any night.

It was a close game, but I did what I sometimes do: record the rest to watch in the morning while getting ready for work.

I had just picked up the remote to peruse what else was on when I heard a man’s voice from outside.

“There’s no way,” he said, interjecting the same expletive, then adding: “Turn it back to the game please.”

I didn’t even go to the window to see who had barked this command. I simply complied. Whatever was going on in that man’s life, watching Yankees games from a TV four floors up was his only peaceful moment of the day.

Also, I’m pretty sure he was the guy I heard yell, “You know what you did.” The last thing I want is that guy coming for me.

— Roy Wood Jr.

Mr. Wood is a comedian, actor and writer. He is the host of CNN’s “Have I Got News for You.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/19/nyregion/metropolitan-diary.html