Life's Pleasures Quote by Mort Kondracke

The line lands with the soft thud of cable-news reassurance: don’t panic, the adults in lab coats are on it. Mort Kondracke, a Washington journalist by trade, isn’t delivering poetry here; he’s performing a familiar Beltway function - translating a complicated, frightening public-health or policy moment into a faith-restoring sound bite. The syntax does a lot of quiet work. “Lots of” is strategically vague, a quantity that signals abundance without inviting verification. “Working on” promises motion and effort while sidestepping the only metric that matters to patients: results. And the wobble between “cure or medicine” reveals the real subtext: we’re not sure what’s possible, but we’d like you to hear progress either way.

Contextually, it fits the late-20th/early-21st-century media habit of framing biomedical research as an always-advancing frontier - a narrative that comforts audiences and flatters institutions. The sentence assumes the drug industry as default protagonist, the sector we expect to rescue us, even though “drug companies” also carry an ambient suspicion: profit motive, pricing scandals, patent games, lobbying. By emphasizing multiplicity (“lots”), the quote implicitly crowds out that skepticism. If many companies are chasing the solution, the market begins to look like a public service.

The intent, then, isn’t to inform so much as to stabilize: to keep the story pointed toward hope, activity, and eventual deliverance. It’s a small act of agenda-setting disguised as optimism, the kind of line that lowers temperature while raising trust.