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During the 2024 campaign, after years of attacking the media as “enemies of the people,” Donald Trump presented himself as not a scourge of free speech but as its champion, promising to be a President who would reclaim this most fundamental right from the “left-wing censorship regime.” In his second Inaugural Address, on January 20, 2025, he pledged to reverse “years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression,” promising to sign an executive order that same day “to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America.” After pausing for a standing ovation led by his new Vice-President, the self-styled free-speech warrior J. D. Vance, Trump added, “Never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents. Something I know something about. We will not allow that to happen, it will not happen again. Under my leadership we will restore fair, equal, and impartial justice under the constitutional rule of law.”

There are many brazen falsehoods that have shaped Trump’s second term thus far, but this might be the most offensive lie of them all—because it is this President’s systematic campaign to stamp out dissent and punish those who disagree with him that will be remembered as among the most singularly un-American aspects of his disruptive tenure. Donald Trump relies on the First Amendment when he belittles, denigrates, humiliates, and slurs his opponents. The First Amendment protected him when he lied during the campaign about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio, and the First Amendment protected him last week when he reposted a racist video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. But it is now clear that he sees the Constitution as something that applies only to those who agree with him. For everyone else, this is not the free-speech Presidency he promised but a free-speech crackdown without modern precedent.

On Tuesday evening, it was revealed that Trump’s Justice Department had sought to indict six members of Congress for the alleged crime of recording a video with a message for U.S. troops—that members of the military are not required to obey illegal orders—which enraged the President. In much of Washington, this development was greeted with horror, but also with a sigh of relief, because the grand jurors in D.C. who had been presented with the bogus criminal case took the extraordinarily unusual step of rejecting the proposed indictment against the “Seditious Six,” as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth called them. On Thursday, a federal judge issued a temporary injunction against another effort by the Trump Administration to punish one of the six lawmakers, Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, a retired Navy captain whom Hegseth had moved to censure and retroactively demote. In a scathing decision, Richard Leon, a George W. Bush appointee, ruled that the Defense Department had “trampled on Senator Kelly’s First Amendment freedoms” and denounced its arguments as “horsefeathers!”

By all means, let’s cheer these heartening signs of the backbone and integrity of everyday Americans in the face of once unthinkable attacks on our democracy. But best to remember, too, that what Trump is pursuing here is an attempted criminalization of political speech the likes of which has never happened.

Scroll through the list of members of Congress who have been convicted of crimes over the two hundred and fifty years of American history. There have been plenty of crooks, Democrats and Republicans alike, who took bribes or extorted them. But you’d have to go back to 1798 to find the one disgraceful example of a congressman prosecuted for exercising his constitutional right to free speech: Matthew Lyons, of Connecticut, was convicted and jailed for four months after publishing an editorial critical of President John Adams in violation of the Alien and Sedition Acts, which, thankfully, have long since been repealed and repudiated.

The point is this: not even during the violent rupture of the Civil War or the Red Scare crackdown of the First World War or the worst excesses of McCarthyism did any President attempt what Trump has this week. He failed with one indictment and one grand jury, but he has three more years to go. Can anyone say confidently that he will not succeed when he tries once again to jail his political opponents for speaking out against him, as he seems so intent upon doing?

In the immediate aftermath of news about the attempted indictment, there was a furious reaction from Democratic colleagues of the targeted six. Brian Schatz, the senator from Hawaii, called it “absolutely obscene, disgusting,” and “the stuff of dictatorships.” Chris Murphy, the senator from Connecticut, came out within minutes with a message to those “who have been biding their time and waiting for him to cross the magic red line before speaking up”; with Trump actually moving to arrest senators, Murphy suggested, now “is a good time to get off the fucking sidelines.”

A couple of days later, it’s clear that the sidelines are still filled with those who are not likely to say anything unless and until Trump comes for them, too. On Thursday morning, when I spoke with Jason Crow, a Democratic congressman and military veteran from Colorado who was one of the six targeted members, he told me that, “in the last twenty-four hours since this news broke, zero Republicans have come up to me” or reached out to express their alarm. Instead, House Speaker Mike Johnson, a constitutional lawyer by training who certainly knows better, endorsed the failed indictment and claimed that shooting the video constituted “obstructing law enforcement.” The silence of those who so recently claimed that free speech in America was under attack by left-wing thought police speaks for itself.

Just as worrisome is that this attempted indictment is not some crazy one-off or stupid error on the part of Jeanine Pirro, the President’s Fox News cheerleader turned U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. It’s the policy now, not the aberration. I think we have failed to appreciate that Trump has undertaken such a sweeping campaign against free speech precisely because it has proceeded so swiftly over the past year on so many fronts: lawsuits against news organizations; arrests of protesters in cities such as Chicago, Portland, and Los Angeles; the expulsion of disfavored journalists from the White House and Pentagon press corps; pressure on media ownership by Trump and other senior executive-branch officials.

Examples are so numerous, I stopped when the list I jotted down went into the dozens: Trump suing the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the BBC for coverage he didn’t like and demanding billions of dollars in damages; the F.B.I. raid a few weeks ago on a Washington Post reporter’s home on the basis of a search warrant obtained without informing the judge of the relevant media law; the Federal Communications Commission, at Trump’s behest, pushing for the comedians Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, and others to be taken off the air; censoring exhibits at the Smithsonian and various national parks; the expulsion of the Associated Press from the White House press pool because it refused to go along with Trump’s decision to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America.” When Trump’s former friend Chris Christie said something the President didn’t like on ABC, Trump said that a federal investigation into the 2013 Bridgegate scandal should be reopened. When the Times published a poll that Trump didn’t like, he threatened to sue; when the paper published a story questioning his age and health, he said it was sedition. In recent weeks, Trump has intervened to try to get new ownership for CNN that would be more politically favorable to him and pushed for a TV-station merger because he hopes it will combat “the Fake News National TV Networks.”

Consider what has happened in Minnesota over the past month. Not even two weeks ago, two reporters—the former CNN anchor Don Lemon and a local Minneapolis journalist, Georgia Fort—were arrested and charged in federal court after covering an anti-ICE protest at a local church. This is the literal criminalization of journalism. Countless regular Minnesotans have been harassed, pepper-sprayed, physically attacked, or taken into custody for protesting the ICE raids in their state as well. We’ve all seen the shockingly violent videos. Alex Pretti was killed while filming the masked, armed federal agents who would soon shoot him to death. And yet he and other protesters were demonized as “domestic terrorists” by senior officials in the federal government. When Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, and the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, urged their constituents to resist peacefully, the Trump Administration launched a criminal investigation into them, for allegedly obstructing federal law-enforcement officers.

Minnesota, in other words, is not just a story about the excesses of Trump’s immigration crackdown but what appears to be an effort to strip an entire city of its right to speak out against the abuse of governmental power. The First Amendment was designed for precisely such a moment.

At a time like this, even small victories are worth celebrating. So, huzzah for Judge Leon, hurray for the anonymous grand jurors keeping our Congress safe for democracy, and a special shout-out to the people of Minneapolis, whose courage and determined opposition to the atrocities being inflicted on their city forced the Trump Administration on Thursday morning to announce the end of its Operation Metro Surge. It’s one war, many fronts. But there’s nothing more worth fighting for. Trump himself, disingenuous liar that he is, was right when said this: “If we don’t have free speech, then we just don’t have a free country. It’s as simple as that.” ♦

“You don’t tell me anything, you washed-up loser lawyer. Not even a lawyer.” The Attorney General of the United States was yelling. The target of her fury, who shouted right back, was Jamie Raskin, a Democrat from Maryland, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, and, as it happens, a graduate of Harvard Law School and a former professor of constitutional law. Bondi’s four-and-a-half-hour session with the committee on Wednesday was supposed to be an oversight hearing, part of the regular give-and-take between the executive branch and Congress. Instead, it quickly descended into legislative roller derby. “You’re about as good of a lawyer today as you were when you tried to impeach President Trump,” Bondi told Dan Goldman, a Democrat from New York. “Your time is up,” she instructed Hank Johnson, a Democrat from Georgia.

In a partisan age, every congressional hearing contains an air of spectacle: both parties are complicit in creating moments they hope will go viral. Lawmakers from the other party may seize the moment to pummel the unlucky Cabinet secretary appearing before them. But a hearing with Bondi is a gloves-off event, in which she seems determined to deliver the verbal equivalent of the near-fatal caning of Senator Charles Sumner, the abolitionist Republican, by a pro-slavery House member in 1856. With Bondi, there is none of the ordinary veneer of respect for the opposition, no feint at finding common ground, no pretense that the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer is anything but the most fervent disciple of President Trump.

By now, Bondi’s playbook at these hearings is both familiar and seemingly impregnable. Members of Congress have been unable to get past her defenses to obtain facts or even hear a serious argument. It begins with what-aboutism—which, on Wednesday, took the form of asking committee members whether they had pressed Bondi’s predecessor, Merrick Garland, on the same subjects. It continues with often irrelevant, planned attacks on the questioner; Bondi came prepared with a tabbed binder—a “burn book,” Raskin called it—so she could flip to the names of individual committee members and refer to criminals apprehended in their districts. Then comes indignance mixed with undisguised disdain. “You don’t get anything regarding public safety, nothing,” Bondi told Mary Gay Scanlon, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, who had the effrontery to ask for a list of groups that have been designated domestic terrorist organizations. “Thank you for the insult,” Scanlon replied. The Florida Democrat Jared Moskowitz asked Bondi to turn to the “oppo” on him that her staff had prepared. “Give me your best one,” Moskowitz taunted.

Party provides no shield from Bondi’s ire. Confronted by Thomas Massie, a Republican from Kentucky who has led efforts to force the release of the Justice Department’s Jeffrey Epstein files, Bondi derided him as a “failed politician” suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Then she went after Massie for opposing a measure last year to prevent A.I.-generated revenge porn. (Massie said at the time that he was concerned about unintended consequences.) “Only two people voted against it, and you were one of them, hypocrite,” Bondi said.

The Attorney General’s disrespect for opponents is matched by her gushing praise for Trump, however off topic; for Bondi, who has been reported to be on thin ice with the President, there is no ignoring the audience of one. “The Dow is over fifty thousand right now, the S. & P. at almost seven thousand, and the Nasdaq smashing records, Americans’ 401(k)s and retirement savings are booming,” Bondi said on Wednesday. “That’s what we should be talking about.” At another point, Bondi insisted that her questioners should apologize to Trump for having impeached him twice during his first term. “You-all should be apologizing,” she said. “You sit here, and you attack the President, and I am not going to have it.”

Wednesday’s hearing, like so much else in Washington these days, was consumed by questions about Epstein—in this case the Justice Department’s handling of the release of the files and its treatment of Epstein’s victims. The Administration has been criticized both for redacting too much information in the documents and for exposing victims’ identities. (The department has removed thousands of documents in response to victims’ complaints.) Lawmakers had invited a dozen victims and their family members to attend the hearing, and they were wearing white shirts with blacked-out text and the message “The truth is—Epstein survivors are still waiting.” Democrats did not refrain from introducing them like so many useful props.

Pramila Jayapal, a Democrat from Washington, asked the survivors to stand and raise their hands if they had not been able to meet with the Justice Department. Their hands went up. Jayapal asked Bondi, “Will you turn to them now and apologize for what your Department of Justice has put them through with the absolutely unacceptable release of the Epstein files and their information?” Bondi invoked Garland, and then, not surprisingly, demurred. “I’m not going to get in the gutter for her theatrics,” Bondi said, waving her hand dismissively. Jayapal, along with a number of other legislators, had viewed the unredacted Epstein files. Photographers at the hearing captured shots which appeared to show that the Attorney General had a document with Jayapal’s search history. Jayapal later described such surveillance as “totally inappropriate.”

As a political matter, the demands for the full release of the Epstein files, which were a rallying cry for Republicans during the 2024 election season, have now become an even more effective cudgel for Democrats. Bondi botched her handling of the matter from the outset, by claiming that she had an Epstein “client list,” releasing little to nothing, and announcing that the investigation was complete. Even after the congressionally mandated release of a searchable database of millions of documents, questions remain about whether the Justice Department is continuing to protect Trump or other friends of Epstein’s by imposing unwarranted redactions or failing to pursue avenues of inquiry.

But Democrats’ focus on Epstein also distracts attention from the deeper problems of the department under Bondi—ones that go to the core of its mission and that threaten its ability to operate even after Trump leaves office. Most alarming is Trump and Bondi’s overt weaponization of the department to pursue Trump’s political enemies. In September, 2025, Trump used a Truth Social post to demand that she bring charges against James Comey, Letitia James, and the California senator Adam Schiff, insisting, “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility.” Shortly after, Bondi secured indictments of Comey and James—both of which were ultimately dismissed by a federal judge. As Raskin told Bondi in his opening remarks, “Trump orders up prosecutions like pizza and you deliver every time. . . . Nothing in American history comes close to this complete corruption of the justice function and contamination of federal law enforcement.”

Lawmakers, however, dealt with these and other instances of Justice Department overreach only glancingly. They did not mention the threatened indictments of the Federal Reserve’s Jerome Powell and Lisa Cook. They did not ask Bondi about the latest embarrassment for the department, which had occurred the day before the hearing, when a federal grand jury in the District of Columbia took the rare step of rejecting the proposed indictment of six members of Congress for reminding servicemembers that they do not have to obey unlawful orders. Lawmakers spent little time on the Justice Department’s refusal to investigate an ICE agent’s killing of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, or on the reported resignation of six federal prosecutors there after the office was tasked with investigating Good’s widow instead. Bondi was not asked directly about the department’s raid on the home of the Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson, or about the F.B.I.’s seizure of voting records from the 2020 election in Georgia. According to Trump, Bondi instructed the director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, to take the extraordinary step of going to the scene, but Bondi was not asked to confirm that. Also unaddressed: the evisceration of the department’s Civil Rights Division and the debilitating vacancies in U.S. Attorneys offices nationwide.

In the course of Bondi’s testimony on Wednesday, the phrase “reclaiming my time” was invoked more than any other. As Raskin explained to Bondi, in House parlance, “that means it’s time for you to stop speaking.” The witness, he said, after she failed to heed his initial instruction, has “no choice. You have to be quiet.” Bondi, of course, was undeterred. “You don’t get to reclaim your time,” she told Joe Neguse, a Democrat from Colorado. Democrats may reclaim the House in November, at which point they may be able to exert more control over the witness. The bigger worry is what will be left to reclaim of the Justice Department once Bondi and Trump are done. ♦

When the telephone rang shortly before Thanksgiving in 2013, Sharon Gore was surprised by how much the caller knew about her private medical history. A forty-six-year-old special-education coördinator in South Carolina, Gore was mostly in great shape, but after three Cesarean sections her abdominal muscles were weak, and she sometimes experienced discomfort and sharp pain. She had been diagnosed with a prolapsed uterus, and her gynecologist performed a partial hysterectomy, but that surgery didn’t fix all of Gore’s problems, and the mystery caller that day seemed to know every intimate detail of her ongoing symptoms: urinary-tract infections, tingling and numbness, and pain during intercourse.

“You have a ticking time bomb in you,” the woman on the phone told Gore menacingly, explaining that her symptoms stemmed from the mesh sling that her gynecologist had placed during surgery. Gore hadn’t even known there was mesh in her body. She assumed that the caller was with Boston Scientific, a company that she was told had manufactured the mesh, and which was now proposing to remove it, apparently at no cost, so long as she signed a few forms.

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When Barbara Shepard got the same call a year later at her home in New Hampshire, she thought it was someone from Johnson & Johnson, since that company had made the pelvic mesh she’d had inserted seven years earlier. A school-bus driver who also worked the evening shift at a local light factory, Shepard had trouble controlling her bladder after having two kids. When neither Kegel exercises nor prescription drugs helped, leaving her plagued by accidents and reliant on pads, she opted into having a mesh sling installed. The woman who called Shepard said she needed to have the mesh removed, asked if she had a lawyer, and seemingly offered to cover the cost of the surgery, which would need to be performed at a specific clinic in Florida. She could even bring a friend, whose travel expenses would also be covered.

Forty-five-year-old Jerri Plummer was told that she’d have to go to Florida as well, when later that same year she got a call on her cellphone about defective mesh, hers inserted around her bladder to fix incontinence issues, too. Plummer was living with her daughter in Arkansas, waking up at 4 A.M. most days to make breakfast for her four grandchildren and then get them ready for school. She had been getting these calls for a few weeks now, but was afraid of any costs that she might incur from another surgery. She lived off seven hundred and fifty dollars a month in disability benefits and another hundred and twenty-nine in food stamps, and she worried about her family’s finances constantly; flying to Florida for the surgery would have been her first time on an airplane, and she was reluctant about the whole idea. But her fourteen-year-old granddaughter eavesdropped on one of the calls, and then pleaded with Plummer to accept: “Granny, please go. I want you to go. I don’t want you to die.”

How Gore, Shepard, and Plummer—along with hundreds of other women—found themselves on operating tables in surgery centers and strip malls several states away from where they lived is the outrageous scandal recounted in Elizabeth Chamblee Burch’s new book, “The Pain Brokers: How Con Men, Call Centers, and Rogue Doctors Fuel America’s Lawsuit Factory” (Atria/One Signal). The calls that the women received were not from the doctors who had placed their mesh, nor from the hospital networks where their mesh surgeries had taken place, nor from the manufacturers that pushed for the use of pelvic mesh in surgeries that had previously been done successfully with stitches. They were not even from the lawyers who sued those companies and obtained billion-dollar settlements for patients who claimed that their pain, bleeding, and organ damage were caused by mesh—and they weren’t from representatives of the states that believed the manufacturers had engaged in deceptive marketing of these products, concealing severe risks and side effects. The calls, Burch writes, were part of a forty-million-dollar scam that should terrify us all: marketing firms allegedly used confidential medical information to solicit clients for lawyers whom those clients never met, and coördinated with finance companies that pushed high-interest loans for unneeded surgeries by doctors who had been recruited by the marketers themselves.

Burch isn’t typically in the business of terrifying people. She teaches civil procedure, class actions, and mass torts at the University of Georgia School of Law. The last of those areas is the subject of this book. For anyone who didn’t sit for the bar exam, she explains in “The Pain Brokers” that a mass tort “is personal-injury litigation on steroids. It’s not just one fender-bender victim with whiplash out for a few thousand bucks. Nor is it a class action over $3 ATM fees that alerts consumers via junk mail. It’s hundreds, thousands, and sometimes more than one hundred thousand people suing over life-changing physical harm from asbestos-laced baby powder, N.F.L. concussions, pacemakers, hip implants, and other medical products.”

Burch is the Jane Goodall of complex litigation, which she’s devoted some twenty years of her life to observing. She studies the terrain, whether it’s a federal court in South Dakota or the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. She humanizes plaintiffs, surveying people whose cases have been consolidated into large lawsuits and offering a data-driven account of how frustrating they find the experience. And she traces the serpentine pathways that these cases can travel through the courts, clarifying how drug manufacturers might use bankruptcy to cap damages, and what scientific hurdles plaintiffs might face in proving a particular pesticide caused their cancer.

When I wrote a story, a few years ago, about the tens of thousands of women suing Johnson & Johnson, alleging that the company’s talc-based baby powder had caused their ovarian cancer or mesothelioma, Burch was a thoughtful source. (Johnson & Johnson maintained that its products were safe, but has pulled the talc-based baby powder from the market.) She talked me through that specific M.D.L., or multidistrict litigation, and she outlined the frustrations of everyone involved in such cases. M.D.L.s were created by Congress in 1968 to try to unclog the federal courts, but they became a justice-system hair ball of their own. As of early this year, there were a hundred and fifty-seven active M.D.L. dockets. Most of them are data breach, consumer privacy, and antitrust mass torts, with an average of around twelve hundred cases per docket. But the largest M.D.L.s are generally product-liability cases, and advocates for mass torts argue that, in the absence of a stronger regulatory system, this kind of litigation is the only way consumers can hold accountable corporations that put short-term profits above long-term safety. Twenty-seven thousand patients sued the pharmaceutical company Merck claiming that the painkiller Vioxx caused their strokes and heart attacks. (Merck settled for some five billion dollars, but denied liability.) Three thousand new plaintiffs have filed lawsuits alleging that GLP-1 drugs, such as Ozempic and Wegovy, caused their gastrointestinal issues or blindness. (The makers of these drugs maintain that they’re safe and effective.)

Burch tracks these cases, and has conducted her own research on plaintiffs’ experiences. Her findings are sobering: plaintiffs almost never feel that justice has been served, even when they get a financial settlement, since the cases take forever and the plaintiffs frequently lose anywhere from thirty to fifty per cent of their settlements to fees. Lawyers on both sides report that they find the cases maddening, too, describing them as black holes into which they disappear for years, with only a tiny cabal emerging with the seven- and eight-figure paydays for which the plaintiff’s bar has become famous. The judges and magistrates who oversee M.D.L.s are often buried in millions of pages of discovery, court filings, and depositions, and feel pressured into avoiding trials and reaching global settlements hastily. Corporations themselves claim that they are besieged by junk science, dodgy recruiters who troll for clients both online and with expensive advertising (if they’re not just inventing clients wholesale), and questionable third-party financers—including private-equity firms and hedge funds that are turning legal services into another financial market.

For an expert in such an unlikable form of litigation, Burch is remarkably likable. She is quick to answer questions and quick-witted as well, a purveyor of analogies and metaphors to explicate arcane legal concepts and a walking archive of legal minutiae going back to the origins of product-liability law—the kind of professor a student hopes to find. She is also the kind of professor who is apparently always a student: not long after I met her, she finished an M.F.A. in narrative nonfiction at the University of Georgia’s journalism school and mentioned in an e-mail that she was “working on a new book with a complicated plot.”

“A complicated plot” is an understatement for the debacle that Burch describes in “The Pain Brokers.” M.D.L.s involving allegations of product liability are awful even when no liability is found, for at their core is real harm, from excruciating symptoms and grievous injury to the death of loved ones, and that harm persists even if the courts conclude causation can’t be proved or if they find that the product in question was not defective. The pelvic-mesh scandal, though, was particularly awful, and everyone involved comes off badly.

Pelvic mesh is made from polypropylene, the same stuff that’s in drywall, rope, shampoo bottles, and car-battery casings. Medical mesh had long been used to treat hernias in men, so manufacturers were able to exploit an expedited approval process that did not require clinical trials to prove the device was safe and effective since it was “substantially equivalent” to an already used device. Manufacturers began marketing the mesh to women in the late nineties as a miracle material for plugging bladder leaks and holding prolapsed organs in place. But some ten to fifteen per cent of the almost ten million women around the world with transvaginal mesh experienced complications, including bacterial infections, incontinence, organ perforation, and excruciating pain. In 2019, the F.D.A. finally banned the use of mesh for pelvic organ prolapse. (The companies that produced the mesh, including Johnson & Johnson and Boston Scientific, have maintained that their products were safe.)

Hundreds of thousands of women like Sharon Gore, Barbara Shepard, and Jerri Plummer had mesh implants in their bodies that regulators acknowledged could lead to serious complications. In some cases, doctors discouraged the risky removal of the mesh, which, by design, bonds with human tissue. Other women had experienced relief from their original symptoms and had no reason to proactively remove the mesh that wasn’t harming them. But for the lawyers who chase product-liability cases, plaintiffs were more valuable if their mesh had been removed: removal is definitive evidence of a defective device, providing proof of financial damages for settlement purposes. The value of this mesh litigation is thought to be some eleven billion dollars, and Burch estimates that nearly half of it will go to lawyers.

That’s why Alpha Law, the firm at the heart of “The Pain Brokers,” worked so hard to recruit women, not only to be its clients but to insist that they have their mesh removed, making them the most lucrative possible clients, potentially worth ten to fifteen times more than if they still had their mesh. Some of these women believed that their removal surgeries would be free but were instead charged exorbitant surgical fees—and exorbitant interest rates on the loans issued to pay for those surgeries and for related travel. Then they were hit with additional legal fees for filings they did not always know were being undertaken on their behalf. Alpha Law never expected to represent any of these women in court, Burch writes. From the beginning, it planned to sell them— bundled, like mortgages, and proffered to the highest bidder.

A law firm essentially in name only, Alpha Law was the successor entity of a firm called Sigma Law, but effectively it was a series of call centers, including Law Firm Headquarters L.L.C., which was opened by a dot-com entrepreneur after he got out of prison for running a rogue online pharmacy and a puppy mill. Under the umbrella of Alpha Law, one set of overseas callers took advantage of electronic medical records, identifying potential leads by treatment codes, then cold-calling women and trying to convince them that their privacy had not been violated, sometimes telling them that they’d submitted an online form or survey somewhere. Another set of telemarketers, in an office building in Fort Lauderdale, waited for those calls to be transferred once the foreign operators confirmed that the women were qualifying plaintiffs without legal representation. Then a third set of operators, in the same office building, persuaded the women to sign letters of protection, liens against any future settlement, to cover the cost of their surgeries and travel with lenders like Surgical Assistance, Inc., at places like Women’s Health & Surgery Center L.L.C. Burch provides examples of the oleaginous questions these callers asked vulnerable women after they had been scared with medical horror stories: “Would you like me to help you get to a doctor that can help you?” “Do you have a few minutes so I can get some information to best tell you how we can help you get to the right doctor for your case?” (Alpha Law and its related operations are now defunct, and never admitted liability.)

If you have ever clicked through user agreements without reading them or used Docusign to endorse a form you didn’t fully understand, then you can appreciate how this happened to the fourteen thousand women caught in the mesh scam. Women with graduate degrees, like Shannon Gore, didn’t realize that they were forfeiting the right to use their health insurance for their surgeries. Others, like Barbara Shepard, had no idea that they were being overcharged for travel and medical care that they almost certainly could have received closer to home and from more qualified surgeons. Most, especially the most desperate, like Jerri Plummer, did not notice the provisions about double-digit interest rates on their settlement liens, or, if they did, couldn’t afford to object. Many women missed the arbitration clauses that sought to prevent them from challenging any fees or from suing those taking advantage of their pain. The lawyers involved were numerous, a litany of co-counsels structured out of need and greed as the legal-services market passed their cases between firms: Alpha Law eventually sold these women’s cases to the Houston-based firm AkinMears for forty million dollars. Burch describes how it borrowed funds to buy Alpha’s cases, relying on litigation-finance firms, reportedly agreeing to a twenty-four-per-cent interest rate and betting it would still earn more than a hundred and thirty million dollars.

Eight years ago, when Burch started surveying plaintiffs whose personal-injury cases had been consolidated into these large lawsuits, even she was surprised by just how dissatisfied the vast majority were—with their lawyers, with the unreasonable fees associated with their litigation, and with the lack of information about their case as it moved through the courts, usually taking four years or more. Around half of the plaintiffs that Burch surveyed could not even name the attorney representing them; less than two per cent felt their lawsuit accomplished what they had hoped it would.

With more than two decades of research into M.D.L.s, Burch has plenty of ideas about how to improve complex litigation. Some of her simplest solutions involve transparency: creating accessible websites to differentiate official court information from all the phishing and predatory search results of client-seeking firms and marketers; live-streaming hearings, depositions, and bellwether trials so plaintiffs anywhere can follow their cases; public disclosures for settlement allocation so legal fees and settlement amounts are known to all parties; and better lawyer-client communication so that clients hear from their actual attorneys throughout the process. She also argues for better conflict-of-interest screening for lawyers, judges, and magistrates, since there are so many repeat players in the world of complex litigation.

But sometimes a rookie makes a play, too. One of the few heroes in “The Pain Brokers” is J. R. Baxter, a young lawyer from Arkansas who ends up representing Jerri Plummer when she sues the L.L.C.s that targeted her and convinced her to have surgery that she almost certainly didn’t need, which made her incontinence worse than ever and left her dependent on diapers. Baxter grew up in the same town as Plummer and was fresh out of the University of Arkansas School of Law when Plummer called his father to ask if the family’s firm could help with her lawsuit. It took five years, but the Baxters got Plummer her day in court, where she was awarded two-and-a-half million dollars. J. R. went on to represent Shannon Gore and Barbara Shepard and a hundred and eighty other women who were victims of the mesh scam, too. (Some of those lawsuits are still pending.) As plainspoken as Burch, he sounds less like Clarence Darrow than Ben Matlock when he tells her, “This is such a stupid process.”

Yet process is all these women have, and Baxter is one of the first professionals to treat them not like “cash machines” but like real people with real stories, who were failed first by a regulatory system that did not protect them from a defective device, then dismissed by their own doctors and thereby left vulnerable to anyone promising a cure to their pain, and finally recruited and abandoned in the midst of litigation so complex that even lawyers have a hard time following it. Burch’s book cannot make this right, but it at least provides an account far more accessible and comprehensible than any case record, and no less appalling. ♦

Rats were leaving Manhattan, hurrying across the bridges in single-file lines. Some went to Westchester, some to Brooklyn. It was the pandemic, and the rats, which had been living off the nourishing trash of New York’s densest borough for generations, were as panicked about the closure of restaurants as we were. People were eating three meals a day at home, and the rats were hungry. At least that was the story going around. P., a Brooklyn friend of mine, told it to me. “We had rats in our front yard,” P. said. “And also in our back yard.” Respectable sources confirmed her sense of suddenly seeing rats everywhere. In 2021, there were twenty-five thousand reported rat sightings, more than double the number from 2010.

P. and her husband thought that they would find a way to coexist with the rats; that’s the kind of people they are. Some neighbors of theirs, who had been passing pandemic evenings on their stoops, spoke of seeing “a huge patriarchal rat” making its way into the crevices of the retaining wall of P.’s front garden. P. and her husband replaced the charming old wall with a solid slab of concrete. Nevertheless, their son and his friends had been spending a lot of time in the back yard and reported seeing one of those fabled head-to-tail rat parades, “where it looks like a decision has been made, and they have a destination in mind,” P. said. One day, while watching a movie, P. looked down and saw rat feces on the sofa. “At that point, it was a war,” she said.

Winning a rat war is famously difficult. Poison isn’t the definitive move that most people think it is, and it also can result in a vast underground network of tunnels becoming dense with decaying rat corpses. Among the many steps that P. and her husband took, the inarguably cutest one—the only cute one—was driving out to Amish country to pick up a rat terrier, though they returned with not one but two: a sister and a brother, Tillie and Brutus. That was another story going around at the time—that terriers could solve rat problems.

The dominant species of rat in New York City, and in most American cities, is Rattus norvegicus. These Norway rats are also known as brown rats. Sewer rats are brown rats that live in sewers, and street rats are brown rats that live on the streets. Norway rats did not originate in Norway, though for a time it was thought that they did. They trace back to the high-steppe area that is now China and Mongolia, and are thought to have arrived in New York Harbor sometime in the seventeen-hundreds, displacing the extant Rattus rattus population. Norway rats can and still do sometimes live in the wild, but more commonly they are connoisseurs of old pizza slices; empty coffee cups; crumbs from a bacon, egg, and cheese on a sesame bagel. They are urbanites. And, in terms of population and reach, they are a tremendous success.

The key species in rats’ ecosystem is us. But they are generally unwelcome. The rats that live among us don’t merely have unsettlingly long tails and a bad reputation. Cities work to keep their numbers down because they pose real perils. They are carriers of plague, murine typhus, hantavirus, rickettsialpox, rat-bite fever, leptospirosis, lymphocytic choriomeningitis, and tularemia, to name only the marquee diseases. They can chew through electrical wires. (The word “rodent” comes from the Latin rodere, to gnaw.) As the rodentologist Bobby Corrigan observed, “Even if they didn’t carry any disease, a wire looks like a plant stem to them. If they’re in your ceiling, or in your utility wall, or on a plane—that’s a no-brainer.”

When a family (or business or neighborhood or city) needs help with a rat problem, they often call Corrigan, a seventy-five-year-old independent consultant. He has worked in Copenhagen, Chiang Mai, Buenos Aires, Tokyo, London, Quito, Vancouver, and Paris, and in forty-six states. He also leads the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s “Rat Academy,” which offers courses on rat prevention.

A self-described “nature nerd,” Corrigan grew up as one of eight children in Flatbush, Brooklyn, and paid his way through a degree in entomology, at SUNY Farmingdale, by working as an exterminator. Later, as a graduate student in rodentology, at Purdue University, his research entailed hours upon hours of observing rats outside the lab, in such settings as chicken farms and granaries. He also spent many weekends doing observational overnights in a rat-infested barn. Although much was known about rats in laboratories, little was understood about them out in the wider world, and that remains somewhat true even today. “They’re amazing mammals,” he told me, emphasizing that the genetic makeup of Homo sapiens is extremely close to that of rats. “But a rat in my house—not good.”

A devoted reader of Sherlock Holmes stories, Corrigan came to see a parallel between solving mysteries and solving rat problems. “They’re so cryptic,” he said of rats. “And that whole thing gets me going. It’s, like, I need to know where they live, how they do their thing, how they hide from us.” At the first-ever National Urban Rat Summit, held in New York City, in 2024, he gave a presentation on how remote rat-sensor technologies are enabling early intervention, before the problem gets out of hand. Treating a rat issue by putting out poison is “definitely not the smartest thing,” not only because those poisons end up affecting hawks, owls, raccoons, opossums, and neighborhood cats but also because it fails to quash the problem. At the rat summit, Corrigan said, “There were no presentations from exterminators saying how they get the best kill, because that’s not what it’s about.” Poison wins battles, not wars. He explained to me that rats reproduce so quickly that you would need to have a ninety-six-per-cent kill rate to prevent a population rebound, a rate that extermination services almost never achieve. “Rats in a city, rats in a block—that’s an environmental issue,” Corrigan said. “It’s not a pesticidal issue.” Rather than thinking of exterminating rats, we should ask: Why are they here? “But that has no pizzazz to it,” he said. “No attention-grabber. It’s, like, ‘Hey, you’re telling me that I need to get better garbage cans?’ ”

Rats are appealing, though, if you inhibit an instinct or two. When Corrigan was sleeping in the rat-infested barn, he recalled thinking, “I could have sworn that rat just brought a gift to this other rat.” At the time, he discounted his observations, telling himself that it could have been coincidence, or that maybe he was losing it. But these days, he reads studies confirming much of what he saw. “I was witnessing altruism,” he said. “I did see kind rats. I did see rats that were doing these happy dances. And I saw depression and sadness and anger and everything.” Recent work has demonstrated that rats have imaginations. Or, at least, that is a respectable interpretation of the relevant studies. While still, they daydream of making their way along paths they have followed to food in the past. Kelly Lambert, a neuroscientist at the University of Richmond and the author of the 2011 book “The Lab Rat Chronicles,” conducted experiments designed to look at learning in rats. After observing that the rats learned to drive miniature vehicles not only in pursuit of treats but also just for fun, Lambert shifted the focus of her research to look into how positive events—joyrides, for example—affect the brain.

In April, 2023, not too long after Brutus and Tillie moved to Brooklyn, Mayor Eric Adams appointed Kathleen Corradi as the director of rodent mitigation, a.k.a. the rat czar. As part of Adams’s war on rats, the city had run a social-media campaign that spoofed the scrolling text of the opening of “Star Wars”: “For generations, trash bags sat on the curb for hours and hours every day. The Rat Rebellion feasted by night, growing stronger and meaner. . . .” Jason Munshi-South, a behavioral biologist and urban ecologist at Drexel University, who has done extensive research on New York City rodents, said of Adams’s Rat Wars initiative that he at first “thought it was going to be terrible, because the ad he put out was, like, they were going to murder them all.” But Munshi-South was impressed by Corradi, under whom a variety of rat-control measures were deployed.

There was some murdering: carbon monoxide was pumped into rat burrows under tree beds, an approach that some saw as an improvement on poisoning and that others saw as cruel and of limited efficacy. The “better trash cans” approach was also tested, with a pilot program on eight West Harlem blocks of mod-looking, key-card-access trash bins. Rat sightings in the area fell by around sixty per cent, and the program has since expanded. More buildings now must put their trash in rat-proof bins instead of in trash bags, and new side-loading trucks collect those containers more quickly. Another pilot program is looking at the potential effectiveness of edible rat birth control. In 2024, rat complaints went down by about a quarter, and in 2025 they again declined. Corradi stepped down in October, and rat-aware New Yorkers hope that Zohran Mamdani will maintain the rat-czar position.

Brutus and Tillie, the rat terriers, have also impressed. Tillie regularly stays out in the back yard after midnight, patiently waiting for a rat to emerge. Brutus sometimes barks them out. He and his sister have both caught large rats, whose corpses they have presented to their humans. Nowadays, with the diminished rat population, Brutus and Tillie mostly catch rat pups. “They’re quite cute, it’s quite sad,” P. said. “Our rat guy”—a local expert, who began the de-rattification with less celebrated methods, including poison—“says the dogs have sent a message to the neighborhood.”

This past summer, the researchers Emily Mackevicius and Ralph Peterson went searching for some of the city’s surviving rats. They weren’t trying to kill rats but to record them. Mackevicius’s background is in neuroscience, and she is a co-founder and a director of Basis, where she leads the Collaborative Intelligent Systems group, of which Peterson is now a member. (Basis is a nonprofit applied-research organization founded to do “human values first” A.I.-assisted research.) The researchers made audio recordings as well as heat-mapping videos of rats in Central Park, Marcus Garvey Park, and the Union Square subway station. “Sometimes friends will want to come bird-watching with me, but everyone wants to come along when I’m doing a rat walk,” Mackevicius told me.

The researchers monitored audio between zero and two hundred kilohertz. Sounds above twenty kilohertz are ultrasonic, which can’t be heard by humans but can be heard by rats. Most rat vocalizations are ultrasonic. “They’re quite distinct,” Peterson said. “When you’re looking at a picture of the audio”—a visualization of sound called a spectrogram—“you can see the rat vocalizations outside of the typical noise that you would see in the city, which is centered in the lower-frequency bands.” It turns out that city rats are “chatting” almost constantly. If humans could perceive the ultrasonic range, rat chirruping would be as much the sound of New York as sparrows, starlings, and traffic.

Although the researchers can’t straightforwardly decode the rat sounds, they can make reasonable surmises. A rat foraging in a garbage bag made repeated “alarm-call-style” sounds. “It makes a kind of sense. If you’re out in the world, in a dangerous situation—like foraging for food in a trash bag—these vocalizations could be like a beacon,” Peterson said. “They could let your family know where you are, and that you’re O.K.”

It was the successful techniques for recording, more than the recordings themselves, that impressed Munshi-South. He had already assumed that rats were in constant communication. Corrigan recalled recordings of rats made during his student days, with more basic equipment. “I call it rat song,” he said, making the comparison to whale song. Peterson related what followed the whale-song recordings of the nineteen-sixties and seventies made by the biologist Roger Payne: a near-total moratorium on whale hunting.

Incidental findings of a study can be more affecting than what is sought. Munshi-South recalled work that his team had done on rat birth control. “As part of that study, we had put up cameras to monitor whether the rats were drinking the birth-control bait,” he said. “We had thousands of pictures of rats grooming each other, playing with each other, wrestling.” He contrasted that with the more typical image humans have of rats, hurriedly scurrying: “We tend to see them when they’re nervous.”

While working on a rat survey in a subway tunnel on the Lower East Side, Corrigan saw a rat in the beam of his flashlight. It didn’t scamper away. Instead, it stood up on its haunches and stared directly at him. Most rats will run if you make a sudden movement. “This one did not,” he said. “This rat was curious about me.” Corrigan felt compelled to follow the rat. “I was, like, ‘We had this moment. Is there anything to that?’ ”

Soon he was in an unlit back room. He couldn’t see, but he could hear rat sounds above his head, and he could smell rat. Standing still, with his back against a wall, he took out his camera, figuring that maybe he would learn something. “One of their vocalizations is that they grunt when either they’re nervous or curious,” he said. “And then they chatter their teeth, those incisors, right? Like sabre-rattling.” Corrigan had the sense that the rat was nearby, on a ledge above his head: “I could hear his breathing.” Rats have poor eyesight. They use their long whiskers—vibrissae—to do what’s called sweeping, or whisking, which provides them with a detailed sense of the world around them. They sweep walls, they sweep objects, they sweep other rodents as a kind of greeting. That rat leaned down toward Corrigan, “and he swept those long whiskers across my face,” he said, running his fingertips along his cheek. “I’m, like, What was that? Like a handshake? A nice-to-meet-you thing?” After the sweep, the rat disappeared into the dark again. No stare, no attack. “Swimming with a whale has long been on my bucket list,” Corrigan told me. “But I did a facial sweep with a rat, which may be just as good as the whale swim.”

When Corrigan resurfaced, he was asked if he had seen any rats. He had been down there, after all, on a job. “I said, ‘Not a single one,’ ” he told me. He was emotionally overwhelmed. He had never lied like that. “It sounds silly, but it’s the only time in my career that’s happened. I thought, If that rat is super cool in some way, in its relationship with other species, including people—we need those genetics.” Corrigan, a natural talker, was reaching for words to articulate his feelings. “If rats could speak, they’d say, ‘You guys are pretty crummy co-partners on planet Earth.’ I’m sure if they could curse it would be one long string of curses at us.” ♦

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Once the fervor around Charli XCX’s 2024 album “brat” had cooled, the singer was approached to make a documentary about the tour—a practice that’s been embraced by the likes of Taylor Swift and Beyoncé. But Charli, who has built her brand in opposition to mainstream expectations, instead released “The Moment,” a tongue-in-cheek satire about the pressures stars face to milk career highs like “brat summer” for all they’re worth. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz consider “The Moment” alongside both the sanitized documentaries it mocks and other artists’ attempts to subvert the form. Many of these projects promise genuine insight into their subjects, but what they actually show is the increasingly delicate balancing act of “authentic” celebrity. “It is really hard to both reveal and conceal at the same time,” Fry says. “To invite the fan in—but not in a way that feels unsafe, or that could get you cancelled, or could make you sell less, or could make you unloved.”

See Critics at Large live: the hosts will be discussing “Wuthering Heights” onstage at the 92nd Street Y on February 19th. Both in-person and streaming tickets are available. Buy now »

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

Charli XCX’s “brat”
“The Moment” (2026)
“Homecoming: A Film by Beyoncé” (2019)
“Gaga: Five Foot Two” (2017)
“A Hard Day’s Night” (1964)
“Spice World” (1997)
“Taylor Swift: The End of an Era” (2025)
“Sean Combs: The Reckoning” (2025)
“Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé” (2023)
“Gimme Shelter” (1970)
“Madonna: Truth or Dare” (1991)
“I’m Still Here” (2010)

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