Stop noticing things!

Go beyond the title and digest the story. Dig a little. Look through the other programs. Look into the program directors at NPR. Draw your own conclusions. Mine can be summed up in one word.

Knowingly.

No, but at Event 201, months before COVID hit, one of them said, "This is the new normal." A catch phrase that we would all suffer through for the next two years. It's one thing to do a simulation, but another to have the language mapped out and ready to go.

You're right. But u/TheTroof pointed out what I believe OP was cluing us in on.

Hanna Rosin and Alix Spiegel performed social experiments on how to radically change peoples' belief systems in order to produce desired behaviors. They referred to this as "The New Norm"

If we look into Hanna Rosin, who was the new co-host of the show in 2016, she's got a track record of being at the forefront of negative cultural changes.

Here's a link to her Wikipedia bio-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanna_Rosin

Archived link - https://archive.ph/ZcVcO

Using the Wiki article, I was able to do a pretty quick dig on what she's been involved in prior to this show being aired.

Here she gives a 2010 Ted Talk-

Hanna Rosin reviews startling new data that shows women actually surpassing men in several important measures, such as college graduation rates. Do these trends, both US-centric and global, signal the "end of men"? Probably not -- but they point toward an important societal shift worth deep discussion.

https://www.ted.com/talks/hanna_rosin_new_data_on_the_rise_of_women

A year before that, in 2009, she wrote an article for The Atlantic titled The Case Against Breast-Feeding

In certain overachieving circles, breast-feeding is no longer a choice—it’s a no-exceptions requirement, the ultimate badge of responsible parenting. Yet the actual health benefits of breast-feeding are surprisingly thin, far thinner than most popular literature indicates. Is breast-feeding right for every family? Or is it this generation’s vacuum cleaner—an instrument of misery that mostly just keeps women down?

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/04/the-case-against-breast-feeding/307311/

Archived link - https://archive.ph/fpQqo

Rosin was nominated for a National Magazine Award for her article on transgenderism.

A Boy's Life

Since he could speak, Brandon, now 8, has insisted that he was meant to be a girl. This summer, his parents decided to let him grow up as one. His case, and a rising number of others like it, illuminates a heated scientific debate about the nature of gender—and raises troubling questions about whether the limits of child indulgence have stretched too far.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/11/a-boys-life/307059/

Archived link - https://archive.ph/Tx9U3

So Rosin was pushing changes in attitudes towards transgenderism, breastfeeding, and also directed feminists to begin pondering about the "end of men" AKA the end of the patriarchy.

She also wrote a book in 2010 titled The End of Men: And the Rise of Women.

From a New York Times book review-

“The End of Men”? This is not a title; it is a sound bite. But Hanna Rosin means it. The revolution feminists have been waiting for, she says, is happening now, before our very eyes. Men are losing their grip, patriarchy is crumbling and we are reaching “the end of 200,000 years of human history and the beginning of a new era” in which women — and womanly skills and traits — are on the rise. Women around the world, she reports, are increasingly dominant in work, education, households; even in love and marriage. The stubborn fact that in most countries women remain underrepresented in the higher precincts of power and still don’t get equal pay for equal work seems to her a quaint holdover, “the last artifacts of a vanishing age rather than a permanent configuration.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/books/review/the-end-of-men-by-hanna-rosin.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Archived link - https://archive.ph/EtgPO

My thing is… if we’re about to pass each other and you don’t feel like saying hi, smiling, or giving a head-nod/ chin raise, then don’t even look at me. People who look but don’t acknowledge come off as hostile.