Happy Thursday. It’s Editor Audrey Moorehead, fresh off a family trip to Gatlinburg, Tennessee, nestled in the heart of the Smoky Mountains, where life is as peaceful as a baby’s sigh. Gatlinburg is best known for its — shall we say — tackiness, but there’s a quaint charm to the little town, and I’m grateful that I could make my family’s annual trip for the first time in five years.

A lot has changed in the world in those five years, and today I’ll be writing about one such change — the rise of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs. Then, read on for our recap of the stories we didn’t cover this week and some good news about the falling U.S. poverty rate. 

It’s a 14-minute read.

Suspension of the Rules.

It’s a Big Apple episode for apple season. On the most recent Suspension of the Rules, Isaac, Ari, and Kmele talk about the ongoing UN assembly in New York. Then, a discussion of a New York Times Magazine article about public schooling and race. Plus, guess who has a complaint about leaves? (hint: Kmele. It’s Kmele.)

Check out the conversation here:

Quick hits.

1. A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to restore White House press credentials to CNN, MS NOW and Politico reporters, finding that the administration’s ban is likely unconstitutional. (The order) 
2. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian addressed the United Nations General Assembly, criticizing the U.S. and Israel for attacking his country and saying that it will fight the war “until our last breath.” (The speech)
3. Chinese President Xi Jinping arrived in Washington, D.C. for a state visit hosted by President Donald Trump. Shortly after Xi’s arrival, the U.S. and China announced an extension of their trade truce until January 2027. (The visit)
4. The 10-year Treasury yield, the annual interest rate paid by the federal government to investors who own 10-year debt notes, rose to 5.14% on Wednesday, the highest rate since July 2007. (The rate)
5. Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao informed lawmakers that eight sailors assigned to the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier strike group attempted suicide during the ship’s recent deployment to the Middle East. Cao said the rate of attempts was approximately consistent with the rate for the entire active-duty Navy in 2024. (The disclosure)

Today’s topic.

GLP-1s. In recent years, use of new weight-loss medications has risen in the United States. A 2026 Gallup poll found that a record 11% of U.S. adults are taking GLP-1 medications for weight loss, up from 3% in 2024. Furthermore, high-profile figures like Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) and decorated tennis player Serena Williams have extolled their experiences taking the drug. The rising prevalence of GLP-1 use for weight management has sparked a debate over their potential impact on health and wellness in the U.S.

Back up: GLP-1s, or “glucagon-like peptide-1 agonists,” are a class of medication that primarily treats Type 2 diabetes and obesity. GLP-1 agonists mimic the GLP-1 hormone, which is made in the small intestine, to trigger insulin release, slow down digestion, and increase the feeling of fullness after eating. The Food and Drug Administration first approved GLP-1s for medical use in 2005, but their popularity has increased significantly in recent years with the introduction of brand names like Ozempic and Wegovy. 

The rising adoption of GLP-1s has coincided with U.S. obesity rates decreasing from 39.9% in 2022 to 36.8% in 2026. Users like Gov. Pritzker have reported health improvements after lifetime struggles with weight management; Pritzker said he has lost 80 pounds in the two years since he began taking a GLP-1 medication. 

Under current federal law, Medicare and Medicaid mostly cover GLP-1s if prescribed for diabetes, but new initiatives are exploring potential coverage for obesity. In July, Medicare launched a pilot program to provide certain GLP-1s to some Medicare Part D beneficiaries. The Trump administration has sought to negotiate reduced prices for the drugs for Medicare and Medicaid recipients, as well as U.S. consumers paying for them out-of-pocket.

The side effects of the drugs are still being studied, and a March 2026 study by the Washington University School of Medicine found that people who start and then stop GLP-1 treatments experience a “meaningful increase in the risk of major cardiovascular events compared with [those] remaining on the medication.” Another study identified a biological mechanism that may be causing users to regain lost weight after they stop taking the medication. Separately, hundreds of consumers have sued GLP-1 manufacturers Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, alleging that the drug increases the risk of a condition that causes blindness. 

Today, we’ll share views from the right and left on the rising prevalence of GLP-1s. Then, Editor Audrey Moorehead’s take.

The Washington Post editorial board argued “the promise of weight-loss drugs keeps growing.”

“Eli Lilly announced [in May] that the highest dose of its new weight-loss drug helped people shed more than 30 percent of their body weight, on par with gastric bypass surgery,” the board wrote. “Eli Lilly’s innovation promises to unlock surgery-free treatment for people with a severely high body mass index, for whom weight-loss medications have not been a durable option… Studies have found that users of these drugs cut their grocery expenditures.”

“That could mean reducing future health care costs on chronic illnesses such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease,” the board said. “Not long ago, addressing America’s obesity epidemic was seen as something only the government could solve by micromanaging consumers’ eating habits. As is often the case, however, science-based innovation has proven far more effective than any initiative from Washington.”

In National Review, John R. Puri said “don’t ruin GLP-1 prices by having the government cover them.”

“Over the past few years, the American health-care sector has seen a real-time experiment in what happens when a revolutionary treatment runs outside traditional payment systems,” Puri wrote. “Usually, when the FDA approves a new drug, its cost is quickly covered by employer-run insurance plans and the government through Medicare and Medicaid. Yet the makers of GLP-1 drugs, approved for weight loss, have had to compete for patients’ dollars more directly.”

“Individual patients may be annoyed that insurance won’t pick up the tab on a pricey brand-name drug, but the result of widespread self-payment has been vicious price competition to win market share,” Puri said. “The price of GLP-1 drugs will probably keep falling, but only if patients have to pay for the drugs themselves. Governments should limit their appetite for providing short-term relief at long-term expense.”

In the Daily Wire, Benjamin Chacko asked “are we using medicinal drugs to support healthy living, or as a substitute for it?”

“One extreme dismisses GLP-1s as another ‘miracle cure’ sold by Big Pharma. The other imagines that a weekly injection can replace the hard work of building health. Both are false gods,” Chacko wrote. “Disease begins with what we eat, how we sleep, how we move, and a food environment that has been, for decades, making processed calories cheaper, more addictive, and more accessible than real nutrition. The Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement is rightly focused on those upstream causes. 

“GLP-1s should complement that mission, not compete with it,” Chacko said. “Medicine is crossing an important threshold as we develop drugs that will influence motivation, reward, and desire themselves. That is an extraordinary scientific achievement, but it also demands extraordinary wisdom. We know GLP-1s work, but they cannot replace the habits, character, and choices that allow people to flourish. The question at hand is whether we’ll use them to support health or to substitute for it. Those are two very different futures.”

In New York Magazine, Sarah Jones asked “why can’t we treat GLP-1s like medicine?”

“When I first started taking the drug, I was reluctant to mention it to anyone,” Jones wrote. “Diabetes is complicated enough by itself, and the American health-care system is one more obstacle to good health. In my case, Cigna refused to cover Mounjaro at the lowest dose, which forced me to increase it on corporate timing, not my own or my doctor’s. I hoped it would be all right. The endocrinologist’s nurse told me I might have gastrointestinal symptoms, but the drug was good for my blood sugar and the side effects usually got easier over time. She was right, for a while.”

“I lost nearly a third of my total body weight by April and saw a new endocrinologist, who told me that I’d developed a significant vitamin-D deficiency. I told her I wanted to have children, and she finally took me off Mounjaro,” Jones said. “I don’t know who to blame for any of this… Perhaps I could blame the Reformation, or capitalism, or some unholy combination thereof; the damage is the same. We’ve lost sight of Mounjaro as medicine. A GLP-1 is not snake oil or a miracle drug but a tool, and it can be helpful without being right for every person.”

In Vox, Dylan Scott suggested “Americans still have a toxic relationship with weight.”

“GLP-1 drugs promised to usher in a new era of treating obesity as a disease. We could leave behind the anti-fat biases of the past, which blamed obesity on moral failing or personal weakness,” Scott wrote. “Instead, these drugs would allow us to approach it as a medical condition, a complex matrix of genetics and other forces which could be changed with the right dose of these powerful new medicines. Or so the thinking went.” 

“Even as millions of Americans shed pounds in bulk for the first time, they are also contending with fierce stigma and shaming from others — instead of being criticized for being fat, they are being criticized for using GLP-1s,” Scott said. “Americans have internalized the message that being overweight is a personal failure so thoroughly that… many people struggle to see [the availability of these drugs] as good news. They see it as cheating.”

In The New York Times, Jessica Grose suggested “GLP-1s feed our sick culture.”

“Multiple things can be true about GLP-1s: They are truly miracles and may treat a whole range of conditions beyond obesity and diabetes. And they are often misused, partly because we have told women in multiple ways that being thin makes them valuable,” Grose wrote. “As my colleague Tressie McMillan Cottom has written, our culture ‘makes being fat a woman’s burden, a means test for dignity, work, social status and moral citizenry.’”

“[In a recent JAMA Psychiatry study,] researchers found that the use and misuse of GLP-1s is higher among people with eating disorders than among the general population and that some of them may be attempting to maintain their ‘eating disorder psychopathology through rapid restriction and weight loss.’ They found that over 10% of participants with anorexia had tried GLP-1s,” Grose said. “Though GLP-1s may be a promising treatment for some kinds of disordered eating, like binge-eating disorder, it appears much riskier for women with other kinds of diagnoses.”

My take. Audrey Moorehead Editor

The benefits of GLP-1s are increasingly apparent: lower obesity rates, improved health outcomes, and less strain on public health.  But the prevalence of the drugs also raises difficult questions about cultural norms on appearance. I considered taking GLP-1s, but opted for diet and exercise first; that choice has been effective and fulfilling.

Reminder: This is where we share a personal opinion. If you have feedback, criticism or compliments, leave a comment or reply to this email.

In this era of hyperpartisan polarization, which is now affecting the conversation on weight-loss drugs of all things, it’s important to remember: The internet is not real life. Issues are not flat and two-dimensional. In the real world, where the sky is brilliant blue and the air smells of crisp leaves and your body fat (wherever it may be) jiggles while you walk, multiple things can be true at once.

First and foremost — as with many new medical technologies — GLP-1s are a net good for American public health. It’s hard to argue otherwise. From 2017–2020, nearly 42% of U.S. adults over 20 were obese, increasing their risk of serious chronic health problems like heart disease and diabetes. According to the CDC, obesity-related issues and treatments accounted for $173 billion (in 2019 dollars) of annual healthcare costs. And a study from the 2010s found that obesity-related deaths increased from 1.8 per 100,000 people in 2010 to 3.1 per 100,000 in 2020. In short, before the advent of Ozempic, obesity was one of the leading — if not the leading — health issues facing Americans, and things were getting worse, not better. In my mind, then, a new set of drugs that relieves the worst of this public health crisis is an unquestionable good for the world.

But, as is the case with many new medical technologies, GLP-1s aren’t a magic wand we can wave to fix the culture that produced an obesity epidemic; and because weight loss and weight gain are often a game of extremes, it’s fair to question whether these drugs will swing the pendulum to the other dangerous end. It’s disappointing, but not surprising, to see that these concerns have ended up divided along partisan lines. 

Under today’s “What the right is saying” section, Benjamin Chacko points to the “Make America Healthy Again” movement and its concern that GLP-1s change problematic behaviors that produce obesity but don’t change problematic mindsets. The thinking goes that the drug might reduce a person's desire for food in the short term, but it doesn’t adequately address the twisted relationships to food Americans might have. Frankly, I’m sympathetic to fears that disconnecting unhealthy actions and thought processes from their consequences can exacerbate, rather than cure, societal dysfunction. It’s a long-game assertion, hard to measure when GLP-1s are so new, but we’ve seen it happen in other spheres. 

Look at the problem of grade inflation. Studies from the ’80s showed that students who receive poor grades can be discouraged from learning, turning the students who most need more instruction away from education. So, educators started grading more gently. But when teachers give students higher grades than their work might otherwise deserve, students get a short-term boost but ultimately have lower lifetime outcomes. Isn’t it possible that the same handicapping might be true of giving people with unhealthy habits access to a miracle drug that suppresses their desire for food? Many GLP-1 users regain the weight once they stop using the drugs, which signals early support for that hypothesis from the right.

The left (including Jessica Grose in “What the left is saying” today), in the spirit of body positivity, fears that GLP-1s are ushering in a new wave of eating disorders and reckless pursuits of an imagined ideal of thinness. One only needs to read about how GLP-1s have exacerbated the already-harmful parts of sorority culture — prompting girls of such gargantuan proportions as size 8 in dresses to call up their moms for the shots — to understand that this fear is well founded. 

Even more disturbing is that many Americans who can’t get their doctor to prescribe peptides are turning to “gray market” drugs with no FDA approval or medical oversight. This in particular alarms me: When Americans order drugs from overseas, there’s no way to ensure they’re getting what they’re ordering, and it’s harder to ensure that the drugs are prepared and dosed safely. Sure enough, some people have experienced side effects after taking illicit GLP-1s, and regulators have found that purported vials of the unapproved drug retatrutide have sometimes contained very different ingredients. If Americans are willing to risk taking unproven mystery drugs just to lose a few pounds, is that really a sign of a culture primarily concerned with health?

The culture of GLP-1s isn’t a zero-sum game — both fears of personal and societal degradation can be true at once. In fact, if GLP-1s have had any impact on the culture so far, it’s been to force a reckoning with how Americans think about our weight and health. I’m not exactly watching this story at a remove. In fact, I almost feel as though my life is a microcosm of many Americans’ relationship with weight, and GLP-1s have forced me to confront my own habits and lifestyle as much as anything else.

I won’t go so far as to say I’ve always struggled with my weight. I spent most of elementary, middle and high school blessedly average, despite being decidedly inactive and not really watching what I ate. But in college, to deal with the stress of moving far away from home, taking difficult classes and struggling to make new friends, I turned to food as a coping mechanism. When I started gaining weight, I didn’t stop to reflect on whether I had a problem; I assumed that obesity couldn’t just “happen” to me. But, slowly and surely, and without me noticing, it did. Even after I’d resolved the emotional stresses that led me to adopt bad habits, the bad habits stuck around, and I wasn’t paying attention to them.

When GLP-1s first came out, I was still in denial about problems with my weight, even as I noticed that I was struggling to take long walks or get up stairs. But as people around me began using the drugs — some privately, some more openly — I felt curious. I wasn’t obese, I thought (though I was), but sure, I could stand to lose a few pounds. Would it be so bad to take a drug to get those off? And suddenly, I was paying attention to how I looked in the mirror, or in photos. For the first time in my life, I really felt self-conscious about how I appeared, and that self-consciousness prompted me to probe my physical health. After all, I was young and supposed to be in the prime of my life, but somehow, exercise was a struggle. 

I don’t remember who brought it up first, me or my friend using gray-market retatrutide, but I remember the night I ended up scrolling through the website they used, looking at vials and needles and dosage sizes. I asked my friend how the injections worked, and they dutifully assured me that swabbing and jabbing my skin would be easy. But at that description, I chickened out: There was no way I could stab myself with a needle when I had to psych myself up just to get a flu shot. I thanked them for the links and the info and said I might try it later. Instead, I called up my brother (a bona fide fitness nerd) and asked him about losing weight the old-fashioned way; I told myself if diet and exercise failed, I could fall back on the drugs.

To my surprise, I discovered I did have the willpower to keep up with the diet, and the rewards of getting back to a healthy weight created a self-perpetuating motivation cycle. I only dealt with constant food cravings for a couple of weeks before the “food noise” subsided permanently; and when I ate too much while at dinner with friends, I could snap back to discipline the next day. But not everyone has the same experience. Some people’s cravings never subside, and even just one night off-track can feel like it resets all their progress. I don’t experience that with food, but I do experience it in other areas of my life where I’ve tried and failed to curb bad habits on my own before (like managing screen time). So I can’t begrudge the use of GLP-1s for people for whom food is a constant temptation — especially when the alternative is untreated obesity.

Beginning to lose weight forced me, for the first time, to confront the culture I’d ingested since I was a teenager. I grew up on Instagram, Tumblr, and Twitter at the peak of the body-positivity movement. Influencers’ and activists’ attempts to raise eating-disorder awareness and discourage body comparison were well founded and well meaning, and I took them to heart as a teen. Being overweight wouldn’t make me a bad person or worth less than anyone else. But they never mentioned that it would mean I was more susceptible to illness and injury, or less capable of physical activity than other people.

At the same time, the rise of GLP-1s has brought back the “skinny culture” that body positivity was created to resist, and I’ve learned that you can’t put the self-awareness genie back in the bottle. Once I became aware of my weight, I became hyperaware of it — perpetually conscious of my own imperfections. And in some ways, “skinny culture” is even worse now that people can use drugs to lose weight, because it now comes with the added moralizing dimension of how you become and stay skinny, not just whether you do.

It’s hard to say what the ultimate solution to this problem even is, when the healthy-weight conversation seems to constantly oscillate between the two extremes of “you’re healthy at any weight” and “you’re only healthy at a very specific weight in a very specific way.” But I think it probably requires walking a path between those extremes. Obsessing over being skinny and looking a certain way is unhealthy, and learning not to hang your self-worth on your physical appearance is vitally important for your mental and physical health. However, obesity is also unhealthy, and finding a solution — whether it’s the diet plan that has worked for me or the GLP-1s that have worked for others — is vitally important for your mental and physical health. 

Oddly, I’m hopeful that the rise of GLP-1s, with their extreme short-term effects, will balance things out in the long run. I’m also hopeful that the attempts to stigmatize GLP-1s are just the last gasp of a moralizing weight-loss culture finally dying out — and that in its place, a culture that can stop thinking so much about food and weight will arise.

Staff dissent.

Isaac Saul

Executive Editor

 

I agree with Audrey that GLP-1 use is a great choice for some people and will likely improve overall health throughout American society. Yet I can’t shake the concern that GLP-1s are the latest rung on the ladder to a frictionless life. The AI chatbots do our thinking, the influencers summarize our news in one-minute videos, and GLP-1s shed our weight. There’s no need to read, think critically, research, or exercise anymore. There’s very little discipline. Shoot, even the bikes are now electric and do our pedaling.

 

I have no idea if GLP-1s will have some long-term, unseen downside, but given how many parts of our lives they impact, I suspect they will (people’s personalities are known to change, as well as other non-food-related habits; heart rates also increase, and we don’t yet fully understand any of this). I have a hard time finding GLP-1s encouraging in that larger context, and am inherently skeptical of any so-called “miracle drug.”

 

But I mostly find myself worried about how few challenges people are overcoming on their own anymore.

 

Take the survey: What is your relationship to GLP-1s? Let us know.

Disagree? That’s okay. Our opinion is just one of many. Write in and let us know why, and we’ll consider publishing your feedback.

The road not taken.

Another week, another packed news cycle. Our first three editions of the week were nearly set in stone coming out of the weekend: the latest in the Middle East, Trump’s press bans, and the Greenland agreement. The range of timely issues available for today’s edition was broader, including the Paramount settlement, the Missouri redistricting court case, the ICE shooting in Austin, and rising diesel prices. 

Why, then, did we choose to discuss GLP-1s, a topic that’s been in and out of the news for years? For one, the contours of the left–right debate on those newer topics are still forming, and we thought that holding off on immediate coverage would allow for more comprehensive analysis as the dust settles. But in the bigger picture, we liked the idea of exploring a topic that spoke to broader cultural themes — and that featured compelling disagreements within the left and right. It’s easy to fall into the habit of following the news cycle wherever it goes, but we still want to discuss the evergreen issues shaping our daily lives, even when they aren’t dominating the headlines.

The extras.

• One year ago today we covered the Trump administration’s autism and Tylenol claims.
• The most clicked link in our last regular newsletter was FinanceBuzz’s eight tips for smart debt management.
• Nothing to do with politics: The top 24 Gen Alpha slang terms of 2026. 
• Our last survey: 2,911 readers responded to our survey on the agreement between the United States, Denmark and Greenland, with 80% saying they support the deal but disagree with President Trump's approach. “Important gain but at a completely avoidable cost,” one respondent said. “[The deal is] a win for America that we should all be celebrating,” said another.

Have a nice day.

In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared a “war on poverty” and directed U.S. resources to tracking the nation’s poverty rate. In 1967, the Census Bureau published its first-ever poverty data. 59 years later, this September, the Census Bureau announced that the U.S. poverty rate declined for a second straight year, down to an all-time low of 10.2% in 2025. Additionally, the poverty rate for children fell to a historic low of 13.4%, while median household income rose to a record high of $87,460. Reuters has the story.