Hey folks, a little bit of an unusual schedule today — in about an hour I’m going to post a guest column from Yale Law School’s David Schleicher about the New York City mayor’s election (but really about the fall of big city machine politics and its role in creating the contemporary housing crisis) so right now I’m going to do a weekend-style quick takes post, the return to regularly scheduled programming on Wednesday.

What’s up with the CDC?

Jeneen Interlandi in the New York Times and Erin Banco in Politico both have stories about the diminished public esteem for the Centers for Disease Control and what new chief Rochelle Walensky can do to turn that around after the departure of several high ranking veterans of the agency. I liked both of those articles, and if you want to get a more in-the-weeds view of how the CDC works I recommend them both — especially Interlandi’s point about how CDC funding actually operates.

But to me there’s a kind of …