I Just Want a Normal Drink
Yasmin Tayag
Recently, a balmy spring day left me feeling parched. I needed a beverage--stat!--and had forgotten my water bottle at home. I ducked into a nearby CVS to pick up a drink.The choices were so overwhelming, I nearly forgot my thirst. The drink aisle included a bevy of the usual thirst-quenching options--and some that looked like they belonged in an apothecary rather than next to the LaCroix. Row upon row of multicolored cans and bottles held drinks with purposes beyond mere hydration and flavor. Some ...
Daniel Kahneman Wanted You to Realize How Wrong You Are
Daniel Engber
I first met Daniel Kahneman about 25 years ago. I'd applied to graduate school in neuroscience at Princeton University, where he was on the faculty, and I was sitting in his office for an interview. Kahneman, who died today at the age of 90, must not have thought too highly of the occasion. "Conducting an interview is likely to diminish the accuracy of a selection procedure," he'd later note in his best-selling book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. That had been the first finding in his long career as a...
A Drug Half as Good as Ozempic for One-30th the Price
Daniel Engber
"In my lifetime, I never dreamed that we would be talking about medicines that are providing hope for people like me," Oprah Winfrey says at the top of her recent prime-time special on obesity. The program, called Shame, Blame and the Weight Loss Revolution, is very clear on which medicines she means. At one point, Oprah stares into the camera and carefully pronounces their brand names for the audience: "Ozempic and Wegovy," she says. "Mounjaro and Zepbound." The class of drugs to which these fou...
No Parent Can Make Home-Cooked Meals All the Time
Yasmin Tayag
On Sunday evening, I fed a bowl of salmon, broccoli, and rice to my eight-month-old son. Or rather, I attempted to. The fish went flying; greens and grains splattered across the walls. Half an hour later, bedtime drew near, and he hadn't eaten a thing. Exasperated, I handed him a baby-food pouch--and he inhaled every last drop of apple-raspberry-squash-carrot mush.For harried parents like myself, baby pouches are a lifeline. These disposable plastic packets are sort of like Capri-Suns filled with ...
It's Not the Economy. It's the Pandemic.
Richard A. Friedman
Sign up for The Decision, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage.America is in a funk, and no one seems to know why. Unemployment rates are lower than they've been in half a century and the stock market is sky-high, but poll after poll shows that voters are disgruntled. President Joe Biden's approval rating has been hovering in the high 30s. Americans' satisfaction with their personal lives--a measure that usually dips in times of economic uncertainty--is at a near-record low, according ...
The Mothers Who Aren't Waiting to Give Their Children Cystic-Fibrosis Drugs
Sarah Zhang
At six months pregnant, Sonja Lee Finnegan flew from Switzerland to France to buy $20,000 worth of drugs from a person she had never met. The drug she was after, Trikafta, is legal in Switzerland and approved for cystic fibrosis, a rare genetic disease that fills the lungs with thick mucus. Finnegan could not get it from a doctor, because she herself does not have cystic fibrosis. But the baby she was carrying inside her does, and she wanted to start him on the Trikafta as early as possible--befor...
DNA Tests Are Uncovering the True Prevalence of Incest
Sarah Zhang
When Steve Edsel was a boy, his adoptive parents kept a scrapbook of newspaper clippings in their bedroom closet. He would ask for it sometimes, poring over the headlines about his birth. Headlines like this: "Mother Deserts Son, Flees From Hospital," Winston-Salem Journal, December 30, 1973.The mother in question was 14 years old, "5 feet 6 with reddish brown hair," and she had come to the hospital early one morning with her own parents. They gave names that all turned out to be fake. And by 8 o...