60 Minutes - 11/09/2025: The Family Farm, Collateral Damage, The Indomitable Margaret Atwood

Episode Date: November 10, 2025

American farmers have faced months of uncertainty after China stopped buying soybeans in retaliation for the White House reciprocal tariffs strategy. Correspondent Cecilia Vega interviews farmers from Tennessee and Missouri who are struggling with high costs and low prices for their crops, and who fear they could be the generation to lose the family farm. President Trump has accused elite universities of liberal bias and antisemitism and has been threatening their federal research funding to pressure them to change. At Harvard University, scientists tell correspondent Bill Whitaker that the government’s actions are jeopardizing their research into potentially life-saving advances in medicine and could dismantle America’s lead in scientific innovation. Correspondent Jon Wertheim profiles literary titan Margaret Atwood, author of the dystopian classic The Handmaid’s Tale. At 85, with 64 books to her name, Canada’s best-known author has been called the “prophet of doom” for her uncanny ability to write about catastrophes in her fiction before they happen in real life. Wertheim talks to Atwood about her new memoir, Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, why she thinks The Handmaid’s Tale became a cultural touchstone, and how she refuses to be silenced by an increasing number of bans on her books. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Kahn, Kahn, Kahn, Kahn, the untold story of Star Trek's most legendary villain. Kirk did us a favor. From this quintessence of dust, we will rise. Listen to Star Trek Kahn, wherever you get your podcasts. I am Kahn! American farmers have long struggled with high costs and low prices for their crops. But this year, amid trade wars and tariffs, there is even greater uncertainty in the fields.

I heard it's affecting your health. Yes. Four blood pressure pills a day. Three different medicines. Two years ago, none. What do you think about when you go to bed at night? what's going to be left in a year. Am I the one that broke what started in the late 1800s?

So this is your lab. Tonight, inside the labs where scientists are conducting life-saving research, they worry will become collateral damage in a political war between the White House and the nation's elite universities, including Harvard. The attack on universities is a tragic blunder. For all the foibles of universities, and there are many, universities' research makes life better massively so. Why would you want to cripple it?

Here she is taking a flamethrower to her own book. Margaret Atwood was firing back at would-be book burners. Her books have been banned for content deemed overly sexual, morally corrupt, anti-Christian. The government put out an edict to, all school boards saying that they couldn't have any books in the library that had either direct or indirect sex. What is indirect sex? I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Scott Pelley. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonci. I'm John Worthott. I'm Cecilia Vega. Those stories and in the last minute, what viewers thought about our interview with President Trump, tonight on 60 Minutes.

Star Trek Khan, The Star Trek Khan, the untold story of Star Trek's most legendary villain. Kirk did us a favor. From this quintessence of dust, we will rise. Listen to Star Trek Khan, wherever you get your podcast. I am caught.

American farmers have long struggled with high costs and low prices for their crops. But this year, there is even greater uncertainty in the fields. China stopped buying all U.S. soybeans in May, retaliation for President Trump's tariffs. Many American farmers were left without their largest export market. President Trump and China's President Xi Jinping, King came to a temporary truce, but farmers told us that whatever happens next with tariffs, the problems on their farms continue to run deep. We went to rural Tennessee and Missouri and met soybean and cotton farmers who told us they feared they could be the generation to lose

the family farm. Welcome to the 170th annual West Tennessee State Fair in Henderson, Tennessee. Since 1855, the West Tennessee State Fair, South Tennessee. Since 1855, the West Tennessee State Fair has been the place where farmers from across the state come to show off their prized livestock and crops. It's where we met Jeffrey Daniels and Franklin Carmack, friends since high school. They grow cotton, soybeans, and corn on their family farms. As far back as I've been able to trace my great granddaddy's daddy was a sharecropper and then just got passed down through the generations. I guess you could say you've got farming in your blood. Yes, ma'am.

And it's got to be in your blood nowadays to keep doing it. Both of us are fifth generation farmers. Instead of showing crops at the fair this year, like other farmers, they are selling T-shirts made from the cotton they grow to offset their losses in the fields. They sold about 250 shirts. At $35 a piece, it was hardly enough. This year combined, they expect to lose nearly $800.

thousand dollars, leaving them in the red, like many farmers across the country. Major row crops, including corn, soybeans, cotton, and wheat have not been profitable since at least 2022. You know, we're selling our commodities at the same price that we were selling them for and that our grandparents were selling them for in the 70s. So, you know, if you think about that, what can you go by today that costs the same as it did in the 70s? Nothing. Nothing. Times are especially tough now because of what are called input costs.

Everything a farmer needs to pull income from the ground, such as seed, equipment parts, and fertilizer. Those costs have increased by more than 30% in the last five years, in part due to inflation and rising interest rates. The morale in the farming industry, not just farmers, is the lowest I've ever seen that. Everybody's on edge. In the first six months of 2025, there were 57% more farm bankruptcies than the same period last year. Daniels and Carmack say tariffs have made this year even harder.

Every time we go buy something now, you know, the tariffs, what I've seen, And the tariffs passed down to the consumer. So if you have to go buy a new sprayer, like the one behind you... Anything that comes from China that's on that sprayer, there's a tariff, and they're just going to pass it directly to us. So the tariffs are hitting you more on the purchasing end than they are on the crop sales end. China primarily uses soybeans to feed its massive livestock industry, grinding the beans into powder for feed.

Soybeans have long been the largest U.S. export crop worth nearly $25 billion last year until sales ground to a halt this past May. This weighs around 5,000 pounds. Wow. It's not just the soybean market. Cotton farmers have struggled with dwindling prices and decreased global demand as clothing manufacturers use more synthetic fabrics. Daniels and Carmack have had to take on second and third jobs.

not just selling t-shirts, but driving trucks and repairing boats when they are not in their fields. You've said you have almost no equity left. It's getting down. It's getting down. It's getting low. Do you think you can make it another year? I don't know. I don't know. Do you just keep rolling the dice hoping things will turn? I mean, it's not looking good. President Trump has promised a new bailout for American farmers

as much as $13 billion that he said would be paid for by the tariffs. We're going to take some of that tariff money that we made. We're going to give it to our farmers who are for a little while going to be hurt until it kicks in. The tariffs kick into their benefit. Like most farmers we spoke to, Daniels and Carmack say they'd rather work their fields than rely on taxpayer money. It will help pay some bills, but that's not fixing the problem.

It's a Band-Aid when we need stitches. Can you wait? Can you wait this out? Foreign families can't wait. I hear it's affecting your health. Yes. Four blood pressure pills a day. Three different medicines. Two years ago, none. What do you think about when you go to bed at night? What's going to be left in a year? Two years.

Am I the one that broke what started in the late 1800s? Nearly all U.S. farms are family-owned, and farmers told us one of the greatest pressures they face today is maintaining that legacy, keeping their farms in the family in the face of mounting debts. We were surprised by how often our conversations turn to the issue of farmers taking their own lives. something that has plagued farming communities for generations.

But farmers we spoke to told us concerns for their neighbors rise when crop sales drop. This is really odd for me. This video went viral in the agriculture community last year. Soybean farmer Alex Kerr showed a grim reality in Illinois, where he also sells used farm equipment. There are three tractors up here that I bought on auction. I'm not going to tell you which ones, but they came off of suicide, the reason that the farmers are no longer there, the reason I've got the tractors. The suicide rate among agriculture workers is three times higher than the general working population, according to the CDC's most recent data in 2021. Our reporting shows that many rural mental health groups are now seeing increased crisis calls to their hotlines.

Do you feel like something's different right now? I do. And to put my finger on it, it's just really hard, but I know the numbers are going up. I know more people are affected. I know the prices of everything get higher and higher, and the stresses are added to it. Jo Lee Foreman runs Shelby County Cares, a nonprofit focused on the high number of suicides among farmers. The organization is named after her eastern Missouri County where there are no stoplights and one therapist for 6,000 people. When you first started, you were seeing how many people take their own lives? So back in 22, if you calculated it out, it was averaging out

to about a life every three months. And it was like, this has to stop. Though it's difficult to know how many lives have been saved, Foreman believes her program is working. County had the highest rate of suicide for capita in the state of Missouri. Wow. Suicide is so hard. We cannot really determine our success. We only can calculate the losses. But we do know that the numbers here had started to trend down. But in neighboring Macon County, Missouri, just a few miles away, there were two confirmed farm suicides this year. Research shows that for every suicide, 130 people are affected. Are you worried you could see an increase because of the situation?

Yeah. And just knowing that the counties around us have had increased, you know, deaths by suicide, that's, I think, why the communities came together so well. Shelby County Cares connects farmers with therapists either in person or remotely. Foreman said walk-ins and calls to her office have increased since the beginning of the year. She's learned the best way to get farmers who are traditionally stoic and fiercely independent. to talk is through their wives and their stomachs. Today we're going to make taco soup and crock pot ranch pork chops and

pull barbecue chicken. Her way in is a regular gathering of farmers' wives and friends, where we met as they prepared meal kits. How many of you have been touched by suicide in your lives or your communities? Almost everybody at this table. They isolate, they bottle things up, they think they need to solve their own problems and they're afraid to reach out and they're afraid to lean on people

so they may feel that there's no other way or that somebody's gonna be better off without them. It's very much this perception of you have to be strong, you have to be tough, you know, the weight of the world is ultimately on your shoulders. Do you know farmers personally who have taken their own lives? I do, I do. I mean, in my own family, we've definitely had tragic.

and have lost some very, you know, important people in our own family. Come on girl! Since the 1970s, Jolie's father-in-law, Brent Foreman, has lost three relatives, all farmers, to suicide. Two neighbors of the family farm also recently took their own lives. I've always had a fear for my kids and now my grandkids that we sure don't want history to repeat itself. You know, no matter how bad things get,

things always have a way of working out. They'll always get better. Brent and his son Gerald grow more than 1,000 acres of soybeans and 650 acres of corn on a farm they manage themselves. They also raise more than 200 head of cattle, which means they are not reliant on soybeans as their sole source of income and can afford to wait for details on President Trump's new trade deal. I have a lot of faith in him and a lot of trust in him, and I think he's trying to make us the best deal he can for the whole country, but for the American farmer for the long term. Nearly 80% of voters in what are called farming dependent counties voted for President Trump

in the last election. I feel like a lot of American farmers, cattle people, it's a lot, a lot of people probably feel let down currently. Now, maybe there's a method to the madness, you know, that's still to be seen. Many are now taking their frustrations directly to Republican lawmakers at town halls across the country. I'm about ready to lose my farm. I am pissed and I'm pissed at you. This fall, the White House promised a $40 billion bailout of Argentina and its president Javier Millet, President Trump's political ally. Argentina also grows soybeans and is considered a competitor. During the trade war, China had purchased soybeans from Argentina instead of buying them from the U.S. The bailout enraged many American farmers who felt betrayed.

President Trump said Argentina has got no money. They have no anything. They're fighting so hard to survive. Come to the farm. Come to walk in my shoes. What would you show the president if he took you up on your offer to come and see the farm? I'd show him the daily life that I do. cleaning equipment, running equipment, dispatching trucks,

and then I'd hand him a stack of bills. And then I would show him the receipts what I'm getting from my cropping. He's a smart man. I'm not going to take that away from him. And he won't take him to five minutes to say, this isn't going to work. This is Free Range with Von. Free Range with Von Miller, the podcast where I step outside the lines and I take you with me.

Each week, we're talking everything from the biggest stories around the league to the biggest stories off the field. This isn't your average sports podcast. This is game meets culture. Locker room meets living room. And no topic is off limits. So if you're in the good conversations that ruffle a few feathers, join me every Wednesday and follow free range with Von Miller everywhere you get your podcast. For generations, federal research funding to universities has fueled breakthroughs in medicine, technology, and national defense.

Now, the White House is using that support as leverage, pressuring a dozen elite universities to align with President Trump's political agenda or risk losing funding. The government has used the power of the purse before to shape higher education, but President Trump's effort is unprecedented in scale. He's accused universities of anti-Semitism and liberal bias, demanding they do more to safeguard conservative voices. Some universities have cut deals to protect their funding, but Harvard, the nation's oldest university and the president's most prominent target has refused, citing academic freedom.

The threat has disrupted hundreds of Harvard research labs, forcing scientists to halt projects, lose staff, and fear their work is becoming. collateral damage in a political fight that could jeopardize the future of American discovery itself. If you were talking to the American public, what would your research do for them? My research has the potential to prevent their daughters and their wives and their cousins from developing breast cancer. And I don't think any taxpayer would want to interfere with progress on a project like that.

Joan Brugge is director of the Ludwig Cancer Center at Harvard Medical School. For 50 years, she has applied for and won competitive federal grants that helped uncover how tumors form and resist treatment and discovered innovative therapies. When her million-dollar annual funding was canceled last spring, she was leading a team that had identified the earliest precursors of breast cancer. The ultimate goal is to find a treatment that will eliminate those cells that carry the mutations.

And in effect, prevent the cancer? Yes, prevent the cancer. Last spring, you got an email. What did it say? It listed two grants from the National Institute of Health and said that they were terminated. Terminated? Terminated.

What went through your mind? It was just like a gut punch. My knees buckled, and I had to sit down because I just never imagined that research, focused on a disease like cancer would be canceled for a reason that was unrelated to the quality of the research or the progress of the research. But this was across the board for issues relating to diversity and anti-Semitism at Harvard. Accusations of anti-Semitism at Harvard stem from student protests over the Gaza War that often were hostile to Israel. Harvard tightened rules around protests and commissioned reports on anti-Semitism and

Islamophobia. A survey on campus found that 40% of Jewish staff, faculty, and students who responded said they felt discriminated against because of their views. 71% of Muslim respondents said the same. President Trump has focused on anti-Semitism at Harvard. I think Harvard's a disgrace. I think what they did was a disgrace. They're obviously anti-Semitic. The president broadened his criticism and called for dismantling DEI and for audits on hiring, admissions, and academic programs. When Harvard refused federal oversight, the Trump administration froze more than $2 billion in grants, mostly for scientific and medical research. So has your progress been stalled? So our progress has been significantly affected. Now I'm spending most of my time

ringing doorbells to find alternate funding so that we can keep the lab going. This past April, Harvard sued the government to regain its funding. And in September, a federal judge sided with Harvard and ruled the funding freeze unlawful, saying the Trump administration used anti-Semitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically motivated assault and ordered all the money restored. The funds have started to flow again, at least for now. But researchers say much damage has been done. And the Trump administration has vowed to appeal the judge's ruling

and block Harvard from receiving future grants. There's now this existential threat that this could happen again. What does that mean for science, that uncertainty? It will eventually draw people away from the United States to carry out research where that kind of threat and that kind of insecurity. doesn't exist. Bioengineer Don Inber is founding director of the Vise Institute at Harvard. Like the university's medical and public health schools,

it is not on Harvard's main campus in Cambridge where protests erupted. It's in Boston, three miles away across the Charles River. Did things get out of control at all these universities? Yes, I think they did. Have universities, including Harvard, made amends and made things better? The answer is yes. The Trump administration has accused Harvard of discrimination and says the federal government doesn't have to give money to the university.

What do you say to that? The money that's given to the university for scientific research and medical research is not just given. We have to compete for it. And we are doing a service for the United States because they've identified needs that need to be met. This is your lab. Yes, this isn't where we do the organ chip cultures.

Inber relies largely on federal funding for his work identifying new therapies using what he calls organs on chips. This breakthrough technology, tiny tissue-line devices, can replace animal testing. So what does that allow you to do? We can study how the body normally works. We study response to drugs, response to toxins, drug delivery systems. Federal grants have made up almost half the university's research funding. Ingber and other scientists told us

government's support of university research, now under threat, is what has powered America's scientific supremacy in the world. We are truly putting the brakes on scientific innovation in this country at a time where our ostensible adversary, China, is just going faster and faster and faster. You have said that we are handing our future to China. On a silver platter, absolutely. If we can't be the leader, we're going to be the follower. Harvard and the federal government have been in settlement talks for months.

And in a statement, the Department of Education told us that Trump administration is actively working toward a deal with Harvard that holds them accountable for egregious civil rights violations and discrimination on campus. while restoring generous taxpayer-dollar support to the institution. Harvard, in turn, says it's working to improve existing programs promoting ideological diversity. Harvard has not done enough to ensure a wide range of opinions being represented on campus.

Harvard psychology professor Stephen Pinker has been a member of the faculty for 22 years and has been outspoken about what he says is liberal bias on campus. In your estimation, where has Harvard gone wrong? I think there have been too many incidents in which someone has expressed a controversial opinion and has been shamed or cancelled. He points to biology lecturer Carol Hooven, who says she felt ostracized on campus after her remarks on Fox News in 2021 sparked controversy. And the facts are that there are, in fact, two sexes.

There are male and female. She has said the criticism and pushback on campus drove her to resign. President Trump has described Harvard as a liberal mess, that it has been hiring almost all woke, radical, left idiots and bird brain. The language is a bit harsh, but does he have a point here? Not there, no. I do not agree with that. I think there's a grain of truth in that. What's the grain of truth?

I think there should be more voices on the right. at Harvard. I don't want Donald Trump to decide who those people are going to be, or how many we should have. You do have the president, and you have lots of supporters of the president who say, we don't like what they're doing there at Harvard. So why should my tax dollars go to support its research? Do you want Alzheimer's to be cured? Do you want to have cancer treatments for kids? Do you want treatments for people with paralysis? Consider Harvard chemist and molecular biologist David Liu. a winner of this year's breakthrough prize, often called the Oscars of science.

To inject into mice. He says the instability of federal funding is making it difficult for him to retain and attract researchers. The funding is restored. Does that fix the problem? Science research, at the cutting age especially, is a slow-moving process. When you disrupt that process, it can take years to, you have to hire those people back. You have to generate those samples, many of which are perishable. BVRQR... David Liu and his team invented gene editing tools

that can correct and rewrite defective genes. Here's a small segment of the human genome. You have six billion of these letters. This sequence causes brain disease. It's caused by these four extra letters. So a prime editor finds that sequence and then replaces it. And you get to type in the sequence that you want to

replace it with. Just fix it. Fix it at the root cause. Gene editing technologies invented in David Liu's labs at Harvard and here at the nonprofit Brode Institute could one day help hundreds of millions worldwide with genetic diseases like sickle cell and muscular dystrophy. This is a tube of the DNA instructions that finds a DNA sequence of our choosing. that unassuming clear liquid.

That's right. We can fix the mutation, fix the disease, and hopefully never have to treat the patient again. It was this tiny little syringe. And it was just one injection of this little vial. Just one injection of this tiny little vial. And that was it. Alyssa Tapley, who lives outside London, was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia.

She endured a year of failed treatments, chemotherapy, a bone marrow transplant, and her doctors ran out of options. I was 13 when I was told that I was going to die. And they're talking about end-of-life care? Yeah, and I said, please don't give up on me because I haven't done anything with my life. I'm just going to be this kid who died because of cancer. Her doctor read about Professor Lou's novel gene editing research. and thought it might just might help Alyssa.

Ready for yourself? She became the first human to try the experimental treatment made possible by U.S. federal funding. I knew if I did it, even if it didn't end up working, it would end up making a difference to somebody else's life. Now 16, she vividly remembers the day her doctor told her the experimental treatment had worked. After thinking for so long that this was it and, you know, there was nothing left and I would never be able to grow up.

I finally had this future again that no one could take away from me. Cancer-free? Yep. All from that little vial. It's astounding what research can do and what people can do with the resources that they're given. Research works. If you want to freeze society where it is, society where it is, then cripple the research enterprise.

Is that whole idea being lost in the harsh rhetoric by the administration? The attack on universities is a tragic blunder. For all the foibles of universities, and there are many, and I've pointed them out, universities' research makes life better massively so. Why would you want to cripple it? It's something that the United States does really, really well. You're an 85-year-old Titan of Literature, have been for a half-century now. You're Canada's best-known author, 64 books and counting. And increasingly, you find your work on lists of banned books scrubbed from 135 American school districts.

Yes, that includes your breakthrough work, the dystopian novel to Handmaid's Tale, but you've also been censored for work like the Testaments and the Blind Assassin, both of which won the Booker Prize, the top award for English-language fiction. What to do? Sure, you take to the keyboard and write sternly worded opinion pieces, but if you're the indomitable Margaret Atwood, you don't stop there. Here she is taking a flamethrower to her own book. Atwood was firing back at would-be book burners by Torrey.

an unburnable edition. It was all promotion for a charity auction to benefit Pan America, a non-profit that champions free speech. Atwood's books have been banned for content deemed overly sexual, morally corrupt, anti-Christian. She told us she was particularly peeved when a recent ban came from Edmonton, Alberta, in her own country. The government put out an edict to all school boards saying that they couldn't have any books in the library.

that had either direct or indirect sex. What is indirect sex? You've had any indirect sex lately? Second wave feminism here. Atwood speaks as she writes, with a mix of wisdom and deadpan wit. Last month, she invited us into her Toronto home. Do you know offhand how many languages your books have been translated in?

Well, we say over 50 for everything. How old are you? Over 50? How many books have you written? Over 50. How many awards have you won? Over 50. I thought so.

Under his eye. Under his eye. Published in 1985, the Handmaid's Tale depicts a near-future America overtaken by religious dictatorship, where a dwindling number of fertile women are forced to cloak themselves in red and bear children for the elite. Give me children, or else I die. The book would sell more than 10 million copies and spawn an Emmy-winning Hulu series. Beyond that, its scarlet costume would become a uniform of real-life protest and resistance. Shame! Shame!

Handmaid's tale is your magnum opus. You think? Your great Gatsby. How are you with that? Well, I would question the premise. You what? Yeah. It's not due to me or the excellence of the book. It's partly the twists and turns of history. With the ongoing rollback of reproductive rights and the eventual overturned,

turning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, the Handmaid's tale began for many readers to feel eerily prescient. Had it been so that none of this ever got enacted, then it would probably be sitting on a shelf somewhere and people would be saying, I'm jolly good yarn, but it didn't happen. Or didn't it? In 2003's Orix and Craig, for instance, Atwood wrote of environmental collapse and a global pandemic. Pick a catastrophe, any catastrophe, before the real-world did its thing, she warned about it in her fiction. It wasn't, you know, this is going to happen without a doubt. This could happen.

This might happen. So you should be on the watch for it. What is your relationship with this idea that you're the prophet of doom, this Cassandra, the forecaster of dystopia? Well, I think I'm very positive. I didn't kill everybody off at the end, you know. Some people do. These are rare books.

A lot of them are pretty obscure. If Atwood can see around corners, it's because her visions have historical precedent. They come rooted in actual events. At the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library in Toronto, Atwood is archived stacks of her research. That is the hundreds of news clippings that substantiate her plots. So this is folder upon folder of your research for Handmaid's Tale. Oh, yeah, lots of bit. She writes by a strict rule.

If it didn't happen, somewhere at some time, it doesn't make it into the pages of her fiction. Women forced to have babies. Communists are making women have babies. Persistent non-pregnancy will be considered a crime against the state. It's not all doom and gloom. Atwood showed us the cover she designed for her first volume of poetry. She writes short stories and children's books. For her new book, a new genre.

Her memoir, Book of Lives, published this past week, takes the full sweep of her life starting with a free-range childhood spent in the deep wilderness of Quebec. She was homeschooled until the age of 12, while her father did field work on insects as an entomologist. You wrote some family stopped for ice cream on the side of the road. You stopped for infestation.

We stopped for infestation. So what was that like? You screeched to a halt. father would get out of the car with his tarpaulin and his axe and he would go to the infestation he would spread the tarp out under the tree and hit the trunk with an axe

and then the things would fall out and he would collect them and you're in the backseat thinking what? Oh no, we were usually out of the car watching him do it. What did you learn watching him go to work? I think probably growing up with the biologist makes you quite particular about details

because you're not saying that's a butterfly, you're saying what kind of butterfly. You're not saying that's a tree. You usually know what kind of tree. That's what draws people to reading. Intent on spinning details into prose and becoming a writer, Atwood enrolled at Victoria College at the University of Toronto. Well, poetry was the big form in Canada in the 60s.

A young poet, she hit the reading circuit and performed in student plays and reviews here at Harvard. Cardhouse, one of Canada's oldest theaters. No, I'm not, I'm just to show off. And when Margaret Atwood wants to show off, you surrender the stage. You have to stand over there. Hold my purse. Here's not just any curtsy, but she informed us the 17th century Jacobian court curtsy

she learned for a college production. We told you she's a stickler for detail. How do I respond to that? Oh, you bow. Thank you. You remember that. Why are you so surprised that I remember things? Before we left the theater, Atwood showed us another party trick.

I'm not getting vibes. Okay. You're not getting vibes for me? No. We're doing the classic Renaissance hand reading. Yes, she reads Poms, another mode for investigation. People might think that you're just a very reasonable sort of rational person, but in fact you have this other, this, this, this, this, this,

intuition. So some people stop there, and they're very logical, and that's it. You were not one of those people. And we can see that you'll never be a murderous dictator for which we are pleased. I got that going for me. Back to our protagonist, when she graduated in 1961, Canadian writers were encouraged to pursue careers outside the country. Give us a sense of the Canadian lit scene when you were in college. What Canadian lit scene? Still, Atwood stayed and helped found the country's now thriving literary institutions.

Along the way, she met another writer, the late Graham Gibson, who would become her longtime partner. So quintessentially Canadian, their courtship peaked with a canoe trip. We were both the kinds of people that if the canoe trip hadn't worked out, that would have been it. Good barometer for a relationship. Yeah, if you can deal with the canoe trip, you can probably deal with lots of other things, too. And they did. Gibson came to the relationship with some baggage, a quote, undivorced wife and two kids. In her memoir, Atwood confront the complications of the blended family.

Could I ask you to read a bit for us? Yes. There are several letters in this book for me to my inner advice columnist. Everybody has one. Dear inner advice columnist, sorry to bother you. Atwood uses the columnist device to confess that though she and Graham have a daughter of their own, she wants more children. We are back at the farm after Scotland, and I've brought up the subject of a second child. I would like one, but Graham has said that a total of three is enough for him. I feel deprived, resentful, and disrespected. If that sounds harsh, listen to the columnist's response.

The advice she gave herself. Oh, for heaven's sakes, count your blessings. Some people don't know when they're well off. Many would give the shirt off their back to have your luck in men. Suck it up. Cherish your child. Get another cat. Your inner advice columnist.

You can chase. He's rather severe. That's very get-over-yourself advice you gave yourself. Very get-over-your-self advice, but Canadians are pretty get-over-your-self people. Handmaids' tale! Humility aside, Canada's leading literary figure has become something of a cult figure and a leading voice on all things Canadian. We asked her about the recent chill between her country and the United States as President

Trump raises tariffs and threatens to turn our northern neighbors into a 51st state. Atwood says the Canadian response is best summed up by one phrase. It's a hokey thing, and it was this character called Gordy Howe, who was very reverend. hockey player. Elbows up is when somebody gets you into the corner and you block them by putting your elbow up. And it means don't mess with me. And for those who speak of the 51st state, I do point out that it wouldn't be just one state. What do you mean? It's very big. You can't make the whole thing just one state. And anyway, Quebec would never stand for it. You think you're going to make them part of a unilingual big entity? Think again.

Atwood is a student of government, power, and the overreaches of both. She wrote much of the handmaid's tale on a rented typewriter in 1984, West Berlin. She recalls hearing sonic booms from the other side of the wall. In her ventures to the Eastern Bloc, she witnessed policing, paranoia, and the absence of freedom. In her memoir, too, she addresses the erosion of democracy. You say the overriding ordinary civil liberties is one of the signposts on the road to dictatorship. Do you see the U.S. on that road right now? I don't think I would be wrong if I said it's concerning.

There's certain things that totalitarian coups always do. Like what? One of them is trying to get control of the media. But the other thing is making the judicial arm part of the executive. In other words, judges just do what the chief guide tells them to. If you're saying the sideposts, the signifiers of totalitarian society are... There's some warning lights flashing for sure. Amid the warning lights, a series based on the Testaments,

her sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, will begin streaming on Hulu next year. But just when you think you can predict on which side of the political divide outward falls, she confounds by saying something like this. Just for the record, I've always been attacked more from the left than I have from the right. Why's that?

Well, I think the right thinks I'm irrelevant. And the left thinks that I should have been preaching their sermon, whatever it may happen to be, and that I am therefore a traitor for not having done that which they themselves would do. And what's your response to that? It's unprintable. It involves a finger. Do I see a little blush? She may turn us red, she did not turn us to stone.

I'm paraphrasing here. But in your memoir, you say you sometimes cut this medusa-like figure with a medusa-like stare with interviewers? I feel like we're doing okay. The earlier me. The earlier me. Now I'm a nice old lady, so you don't have to be worried. Why the pivot? I've gone older.

I became a blonde. This was my way of saying I enjoyed this conversation. Oh, is that your way of saying it? So why aren't you a scary old witch? Is that weird your way of saying it? What inspired the signature red cloaks from The Handmaid's Tale? Yes, well, if you have a cult, you have to have outfits. At 60 MinutesOvertime.com.

In the mail, we received hundreds of notes about our interview with President Trump. The country may be politically divided, but the criticism we got from viewers was bipartisan. instead of interviewing him, it appeared as an attack. You should have more respect than what you showed. Others complained we were too deferential to the president. You wanted to show Trump in the best possible light. There were no hard questions, no meaningful pushback. And there was this. Donald Trump gets lots and lots of time on TV as president. He has power. And so do I. When I saw that he was being interviewed on last Sunday's show, I used my power and turned it off immediately. I'm Cecilia Vega. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.

Khan, Khan, Khan! Star Trek Khan! The untold story of Star Trek's most legendary villain. Kirk did us a favor. From this quintessence of dust, we will rise. Listen to Star Trek Con, wherever you get your podcasts. I am God! Now streaming. Everyone who comes into this clinic is a mystery. We don't know what we're looking for.

Their bodies are the scene of the crime. Their symptoms in history are clues. You saved to them? We're doctors and with detectives. I kind of love it if I'm being honest. Solve the puzzle, save the patient. Watson, all episodes now streaming on Paramount Plus.