Category: Uncategorized

  • The quiet way Republicans are trying to undo abortion rights again — starting in Kansas

    A woman places signs on a podium and small stage reading “Stop the Ban, Vote No.”

    A field organizer places signs on the podium before the pro-choice Kansas for Constitutional Freedom primary election watch party in Overland Park, Kansas, August 2, 2022. | Dave Kaup/AFP via Getty Images

    Four years after the Dobbs decision, abortion battles have largely taken a backseat in national news to other policy fights this cycle. Leaders in the anti-abortion movement say they’re disillusioned with President Donald Trump’s unwillingness to push for further restrictions. The federal battle over access to abortion medication seems to be settled — for now. Public awareness of that fight is limited, and even at the state level, a couple years have passed since the high-pitched but successful state-level efforts to protect abortion access in red states.

    Yet a little-known battle has been playing out in Kansas, where a ballot measure to change the way state supreme court justices are selected serves as a reminder that these fights over abortion are still active, even if they take the form of creative procedural and administrative efforts. 

    If it succeeds, opponents say, it would open the floodgates for similar efforts in other states to politicize the remaining independent state courts (13 other states use a method similar to Kansas) and provide a roadmap to undoing abortion protections in other states that have safeguarded them.

    On Tuesday, Kansans are deciding whether to change the way judges on the state’s highest court are selected. Up until now, judges were selected through a nonpartisan merit-based system: When a spot opens on the bench, a nine-member commission submits a list to the governor, who then selects a replacement.

    The referendum would replace this system with direct, partisan elections of judges, like any other politician. Proponents say it’s a democratic move, a way to better express the will of voters over “unelected” bureaucrats. Yet critics say it’s first and foremost about restricting abortion rights — which both the court and voters have rejected.

    How Kansas became an abortion rights flashpoint

    In 2019, the state supreme court recognized the right to abortion in the state constitution; three years later, after Dobbs, voters rejected a Republican-championed proposal to overturn that ruling, choosing to preserve abortion rights by a 59-41 margin in a deeply red state.

    It was after that failed vote in 2022 that then-state attorney general Republican candidate Kris Kobach outlined a new strategy for undoing these protections: changing the way the supreme court is selected, electing anti-abortion candidates, and “slowly and quietly” overturning the 2019 decision and 2022 vote.

    “If you look at the various proposals, one of the proposals that is crystal clear is allowing people to popularly elect justices to the supreme court, which is the most common system among all of the states in the country,” Kobach said in 2022.

    He’s a bit more careful talking about this in 2026: “There is a real desire to bring back some accountability to the judiciary,” he told the New York Times this week. “It’s not just about abortion.”

    The Tuesday results would have huge ramifications, critics said, given that non-elected state courts have been a final bulwark against Republican supermajorities and governors in red states. Kansas has been an island for abortion access for women in the South and central US since the Dobbs decision.

    The victory in 2022 also inspired abortion rights advocates to try to use ballot measures to enshrine these protections in about a dozen other states, which successfully overturned abortion bans in Missouri and Ohio. State courts in Utah and Wyoming, meanwhile, blocked bans.

    The next frontier in the abortion wars

    These independent checks on power have been under attack for years, Michael Milov-Cordoba, a court expert and counsel in the Brennan Center for Justice’s judiciary program, told me. 

    “State legislators across the country are increasingly trying to undermine those courts…That retaliation takes a few different forms, but changing how judges are selected is top of the list,” Milov-Cordoba said. “And what we’ve seen is that in many states where courts stand up for abortion rights and strike down abortion restrictions, efforts to change state judiciaries have followed.”

    He noted the complete reworking of the Utah supreme court in the last year, including by expanding and packing it. Similar retooling of the state supreme court happened in Iowa in 2022. Montana is likely the next battleground, where Republican legislators are exploring various avenues to strip or limit the state supreme court’s powers. That in turn has led the ACLU to get involved to boost a constitutional amendment this year that would preserve the nonpartisan status of judicial elections.

    And in recent years, state supreme court elections have been inundated with spending and attention from both in- and out-of-state backers. Last year’s Wisconsin judicial election, for example, became the most expensive race of its kind in US history, with more than $100 million spent — just two years after a contest for a different seat on the state supreme court had set its own record at more than $50 million spent.

    “If these courts become partisan, then they will be just like any other election fight — subject to being bought and sold by billionaire political funders,” Deirdre Schifeling, the chief political and advocacy officer at the ACLU, told me. “They become a race to the bottom… and [Republicans] are finding backdoor ways to seize power to push their ideological agenda.”

    Already, Kansas has seen heavy spending: more than $12 million have been spent from both sides, including about $5 million from the ACLU, Schifeling told me.

    ”Everyone’s focused on the Michigan Senate race, other kind of big-ticket, sexy elections,” Schifeling said. “Well, this is just as important and much more under the radar. Without a balanced court, we are going to lose rights and liberties across the board in a state like Kansas.”

    Source: Vox.

  • Boxer arrested in Greece over discovery of Scottish woman’s body in suitcase

    Sharif Ahmadzai, from Afghanistan, is expected to appear in court in Athens on Wednesday.

    Source: BBC.

  • Apple issues new challenge against UK order for access to private user data

    It is the latest development in the ongoing dispute between Apple and the Home Office over data privacy.

    Source: BBC.

  • Michigan voters to weigh in on critical Senate, House races

    Candidates are also vying to replace Gov. Whitmer, who is term-limited.

    Source: ABC News

  • WATCH: 83 neighbors bring Halloween to boy with autism on his birthday

    ABC News’ Danny New shows how a neighborhood in Alabama came together to help a young boy with autism enjoy one of his favorite activities on his birthday.

    Source: ABC News

  • BP’s $5.7bn profit highest since 2022 as Iran war pushes up oil price

    Higher oil prices boost the energy giant’s results while environmental groups accuse it of profiteering.

    Source: BBC.

  • Yes, Emily Wilson, Odysseus has been changed for the movie. Deal with it

    Critical swords are clashing, but there’s a way to cut through the debate and really talk about how we review art.

  • The simple idea that helped prevent millions of traffic deaths

    Stop sign in neighborhood

    Road injuries remain the leading cause of death for everyone between the ages of 5 and 29 — ahead of malaria, ahead of war and homicide, ahead of every disease we spend more time worrying about. | Sharon Steinmann/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images

    Let me start with the most local of local stories: the intersection down the street from my apartment in Brooklyn, where Columbia Street meets Summit Street.

    Since my family moved into the neighborhood in 2023, I’ve hated this intersection. It has no stop signs, no crosswalks, no signal. Crossing on foot with my son meant grabbing his hand and hoping any oncoming cars would slow down, which, given that this is New York, is maybe a 50/50 proposition at best. Everyone knew a stop sign or signal was needed, but the city did nothing.

    That finally began to change late last year, after a 10-year-old girl was struck and injured by a car just two blocks north of the intersection. The neighborhood organized, packed a public meeting and eventually walked a city official down the block so he could stand in the intersection and see what they saw every day. Which is how I woke up on July 17 to see four stop signs and freshly painted crosswalks at the intersection I hated so much.

    My very local story is part of a much bigger one. Cars kill about 1.16 million people a year worldwide — more than the population of San Jose, erased every year. Road injuries remain the leading cause of death for everyone between the ages of 5 and 29 — ahead of malaria, ahead of war and homicide, ahead of every disease we spend more time worrying about.

    For most of the 20th century, that was simply the price of moving around faster. Being in a car was the most dangerous thing most of us did on any given day, and we seemed to have no choice but to accept the consequnces.

    But, it turns out, we don’t. According to new data released last month, between 2011 and 2025, the rate at which the world’s roads killed people, measured against population, fell 21 percent, even as more than a billion motor vehicles were added to the world’s roads. It’s still far too high, and the death rate actually increased in Africa, as more vehicles are added to often substandard roads. But in epidemiological terms: Globally, exposure went up while deaths went down. What ultimately changed was an argument about whose fault it really is when a car crashes.

    The doctor who decided crashes were not accidents

    It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that American cars were once all but literal death traps. In 1966, they killed 50,894 Americans and injured 1.9 million more, in vehicles with rigid steering columns aimed at the driver’s chest and metal dashboards studded with knobs that lacerated and impaled human bodies. The toll was horrific; as President Lyndon Johnson put it in 1966, the million and a half Americans who had died on the roads so far that century were “nearly three times as many Americans as we have lost in all our wars.”

    Detroit’s answer to all this was that Americans were bad drivers. A doctor named William Haddon Jr. thought the industry was looking at the wrong thing. Haddon trained as a physician and came to car crashes as an epidemiologist. He saw them as systems failures and understood that cars had to be designed to protect drivers against themselves.

    Haddon wasn’t working alone. In April 1959, a Labor Department official named Daniel Patrick Moynihan published “Epidemic on the Highways,” making a version of the same argument: The problem was how cars were built, not who was driving them. In 1965, the consumer advocate Ralph Nader — whom Moynihan had hired the year before to help write the government’s highway safety report — published Unsafe at Any Speed, a catalog of everything automakers already knew they should fix and had decided not to.

    Nader’s book became a national bestseller, and, in September 1966, President Johnson signed the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act, which finally gave the federal government power to mandate how cars could be built. Johnson appointed Haddon Jr. to lead the new federal traffic- and highway-safety agencies that later became National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

    A safer system

    NHTSA estimated that federal vehicle-safety standards prevented more than 860,000 deaths and 49 million nonfatal injuries from 1968 through 2019. Preliminary data released this week showed that the US motor vehicle death rate for the first quarter of 2026 was 0.99 per 100 million vehicle miles traveled: the second lowest first quarter figure on record and down 82 percent from the 1966 death rate, when Congress passed the vehicle safety act.

    But while America has largely aimed to make crashes survivable, other countries decided that wasn’t ambitious enough. In October 1997, the Swedish parliament adopted a national policy called Vision Zero, built on the premise that nobody should be killed or seriously injured on the roads — and that, when someone is, ultimate responsibility belongs to the people who designed the system, rather than solely to the person who made the mistake. Sweden began adding median barriers to rural highways in 1998, and a national revision of speed limits rolled out in 2008-09. Since Vision Zero’s adoption, Swedish road deaths have fallen about 61 percent, from 541 in 1997 to 213 in 2024 — about 2 deaths per 100,000 people, the lowest rate in the EU.

    New York adopted the same framework in February 2014, explicitly modeled on the Swedish work, and cut its default speed limit from 30 to 25 miles per hour that November. By the end of 2025, the city’s traffic deaths were down 31 percent from 2014. The year closed with 205 road deaths, the fewest since New York began keeping records in 1910. In the first half of 2026, pedestrian deaths were more than 42 percent below the comparable period in 2014.

    Four stop signs on a Brooklyn corner are what that idea looks like at its smallest possible scale.

    The people we left outside the car

    But, in our effort to make our cars safer, we neglected to do the same for everyone else on the street. Between 2009 and 2023, US pedestrian deaths rose 80 percent, even as other categories of traffic deaths increased just 13 percent. By 2022, pedestrian deaths had climbed to a 40-year high — back to 1981 levels.

    One major contributor is as simple as geometry. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found that vehicles with hoods above 40 inches are about 45 percent more likely to kill the pedestrian they hit than vehicles with hoods of 30 inches or less and a sloped profile. A low, sloped hood catches an adult at the legs and rolls the body up onto it. A tall flat one catches the torso and drives the body down and under. Light trucks — which have gone from under a fifth of new vehicle sales in 1975 to more than four-fifths today — accounted for 54 percent of US pedestrian deaths with a known vehicle type in 2023.

    It’s only recently that this second curve has begun to bend. Preliminary state data indicated that US pedestrian deaths fell about 7 percent in 2025 to an estimated 6,732, a third consecutive annual decline. Part of it is that a pandemic-era spike in reckless driving is receding. Part is states spending on infrastructure and enforcement. And part is that cars now come with automatic emergency braking with pedestrian detection spreading, which IIHS found cuts pedestrian crash risk by about a quarter. Pedestrian-detecting automatic emergency braking is spreading, as well. IIHS found that it was associated with a 27 percent reduction in pedestrian crashes, though detection spreading, which IIHS found cuts pedestrian crash risk by about a quarter. (But there is work to do; those systems don’t reduce risk on unlit roads at night, and more than three-quarters of pedestrian deaths happen after dark.)

    Driver Zero

    I’m glad there are stop signs at Summit and Columbia now, but it was a good outcome produced by a bad process — one that required a child being hit by a car to get started. There are more dangerous intersections in this country than there are communities with the voice and the stamina to demand fixes. A real Vision Zero wouldn’t wait for the crash; it would identify which intersections could kill someone and fix those first.

    New York is also an outlier. As my colleague Marina Bolotnikova wrote earlier this year, Vision Zero hasn’t worked nearly as well elsewhere in the country, largely because the American public is less accepting of road designs that inconvenience drivers.

    That’s why the US, for all its long-term improvement, lags behind its peers. Over the decade to 2021, road deaths fell 36 percent in WHO’s European region and did not move at all in the Americas. The US sees about 12 road deaths per 100,000 people, more than twice the rate in Australia, Israel, or South Korea — a gap so large that the International Transport Forum publishes OECD road safety averages both with the US included and without it, presumably to keep us from skewing the results.

    Since the US probably won’t adopt Sweden’s approach, a more realistic hope might be autonomous vehicles. This month, the Insurance Institute compared about 50 million driverless Waymo miles across four cities with human driving in the same places and found that, per mile, the robotaxis were involved in 68 percent fewer crashes of the kind a human driver would typically report to police. Waymo’s own tally across more than 220 million driverless miles claimed 93 percent fewer injury-causing crashes involving pedestrians — which is to say the technology is best at precisely the thing American road design has been worst at.

    If William Haddon Jr.’s fundamental insight was that systems have to be built to counter the inevitable errors when a human drives a two-ton hunk of metal and glass at 60 mph, then maybe it makes sense that the ultimate system response is to remove the human altogether. For now, though, I’m simply happy that, in my local corner of the world, the streets got just a little bit safer.

    A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!

    Source: Vox.

  • John Candy’s family opens up about the beauty and pain unearthed by Emmy-nominated doc

    Rosemary Candy and children Chris and Jennifer explain why they turned down countless offers to make a film about the late actor — until ‘John Candy: I Like Me.’

  • The one thing Ozempic still can’t fix

    a figure running across overturned bottles of a GLP-1 drug as large, oversized fingers point at them

    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. 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. 

    While the clinical potential of these drugs remains immense, they have yet to change how the broader US culture perceives and engages with weight and weight loss. 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. 

    The social media communities that have blossomed around GLP-1s are filled with tales of awkward conversations and much worse. Partners who berate a significant other who wants to go on Wegovy or Zepbound. Coworkers who blame the drugs for their rising insurance costs. Even dismissive and unsympathetic doctors and nurses

    Some people who take GLP-1s must contend with an uneasy sense of living behind enemy lines: Many people describe being at work or out in public and overhearing people talking about GLP-1s and passing judgment on people who they think are taking a “shortcut” to lose weight.

    “It’s like you’re being stigmatized without the person who’s [saying] it even realizing it, necessarily,” said Adriana, a 33-year-old GLP-1 user who lives in the Chicago area. (Vox agreed to identify the people we spoke to by their first name, to protect their privacy when discussing stigma.)

    “There’s a lot of internalized stigma and judgment we have from the culture about our bodies and ourselves.”

    Erin Standen, psychology professor who studies health and behavior change at Rice University

    This is not just evident from anecdotes. Researchers have put the question to the test. And they have found that Americans not only feel more negative stigma toward somebody who lost weight with a GLP-1 than somebody who lost weight through diet and exercise — they also feel more negatively about the GLP-1 user than somebody who never lost weight at all.

    “It seems like people are really reacting negatively to the idea that somebody who has lost weight with a GLP-1 might be, quote-unquote, ‘taking the easy way out’ or cheating the system,” said Erin Standen, a psychology professor who studies health and behavior change at Rice University and led one such study. “There’s a lot of internalized stigma and judgment we have from the culture about our bodies and ourselves.”

    Americans have internalized the message that being overweight is a personal failure so thoroughly that, now that the kind of extraordinarily powerful weight-loss shots and pills long hoped for are here, many people struggle to see it as good news. They see it as cheating.

    GLP-users feel damned if they do, damned if they don’t 

    GLP-1 users have found themselves in a trap. They’ve felt judged for years for their bodies: Studies have found that up to 42 percent of adults with obesity have experienced some kind of weight discrimination; and between 40 and 50 percent have internalized weight bias. One survey from this year found that 81 percent of people taking GLP-1s said that they had felt social pressure to be thin, and more than half said that those attitudes influenced their decision to take one of the new weight-loss drugs.

    And yet, now that they’re cutting weight, they’re being judged for how they lose it. In the same survey, 69 percent of GLP-1 users said other people saw the drugs as a cheat code, 23 percent said that it was hard to handle other people’s feelings about the meds, and 43 percent said that they didn’t like talking about their GLP-1 use for fear of judgment.

    “Culturally we have a widespread belief that weight isn’t complex — it’s simply energy in versus energy out,” Susan Persky, a behavioral scientist at the National Institutes of Health who has studied GLP-1 stigma, told me in an email. “If everyone ‘should’ be able to manage their weight through diet and exercise, engaging willpower and hard work, using GLP-1s is seen as a cheat or a hack. So someone with higher weight who uses a GLP-1 is not only seen as lazy or weak, they’re also seen as cheating to achieve weight loss that other people have ‘earned’.”

    Perhaps the most extensive study on GLP-1 stigma so far is from scholars at Rice University, UCLA, and the Mayo Clinic, published in the International Journal of Obesity in April. It followed an earlier paper, published in April 2024 in the same journal, that suggested people had more negative views of a woman who lost weight with a GLP-1 versus somebody who lost weight with diet and exercise.

    The new experiment sought to replicate those findings and extend them. How did people feel about somebody who took a GLP-1 versus somebody who never lost weight at all? How would people feel about somebody who regained weight? They gave more than 600 participants short profiles of hypothetical patients who were all alike except for one thing: One had lost weight with diet and exercise, one had lost weight using a GLP-1, one didn’t lose weight. They were asked to rate the person on various positive and negative metrics, to measure how they perceived the person and whether they’d want to associate with them socially.

    What they found revealed how deep the bias against GLP-1 users seems to run.

    When comparing the two hypothetical people who lost weight, study participants offered far more negative traits and far fewer positive ones to the people who had used a GLP-1, Standen told me. “That really stuck out,” she said. They also ranked the GLP-1 user as more unhealthy. 

    But even beyond that, people actually rated the person who didn’t lose weight at all more positively than the GLP-1 user. “People were more likely to say they were willing to connect socially with the person who hadn’t lost weight as compared to the person who was a GLP-1 user,” Standen said.

    The study didn’t ask the participants to explain in detail why they felt the way they did about GLP-1 users. But Standen and other experts attributed the attitude to those cultural norms around body weight that have turned obesity in the minds of many into a matter of personal morality rather than the medical and socioeconomic issue that most clinicians view it as.

    “Stigma toward GLP-1 use reflects deeply rooted cultural beliefs about effort, discipline, and personal responsibility for weight and health,” Stacy Post, a postdoctoral scholar at Georgetown University who authored the 2024 study on GLP-1 stigma with Persky, told me over email. “In this context, it is not surprising that GLP-1s are often viewed as a ‘quick fix’ for a problem that many believe should be solved through willpower and lifestyle changes alone.” 

    And the consequences of stigma go beyond straining someone’s personal relationships. People can feel shame and stress when they think they’re being judged, and that in turn can have direct physical effects that are bad for their health

    “These small little moments where people feel discriminated against do accumulate in the body,” Standen said. “Experiencing stigma or feeling judged for having used or not used a GLP-1 is directly harmful to your overall physical and mental health.”

    Feeling judgment “also might lead you to either avoid health care or be less open when seeking healthcare in ways that could long-term harm your health as well,” Standen said. We know how much GLP-1s can improve the health prospects of somebody who is obese, so if somebody decides not to take a weight-loss med for fear of being judged, that is a net loss to their health. 

    What it’s like to be a GLP-1 user when society shames GLP-1 users

    The Rice study affirms something GLP-1 users have been saying in online communities since these drugs hit the market a few years ago. I have spent the past few months reading these stories on the various Reddit communities dedicated to GLP-1 drugs and weight loss, and the frustration that users experience in being judged for medications they feel are approaching a miracle drug is palpable.

    One poster described her boyfriend becoming “extremely upset” when she said she was considering going on a weight-loss medication; another person also detailed their fight with an unsupportive partner. Others have contended with rude comments from coworkers. People have faced judgmental questions when they were visiting a hospital’s emergency room for something unrelated. One person even encountered the stigma at their cross-stitch club.

    I spoke with two people, Adriana and Mike, who had shared their experiences of GLP-1 stigma on Reddit.

    Mike, 50, and living near Boston, says he had been big his entire life, but after seeing an unflattering vacation photo a couple years ago, he decided he wanted to get serious about losing weight and thought a GLP-1 could help him. After losing some weight through Weight Watchers, he went on Zepbound; all told, he’s shed about 170 pounds.

    He and others have encountered judgment for his weight loss in surprising places. Mike told me the story of going to visit an old friend from college, after he had started taking Zepbound. 

    His friend’s mother was there and she inquired about his evident weight loss. He told her he was taking a GLP-1 medication. And for the rest of the weekend, she badgered him about whether whatever he was eating fit with his “diet.”

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    “It was eye-opening because when I first went on it, I’m like, ‘I don’t understand why people don’t want to tell anybody. This is a good thing. The world should know,’” he told me. “And then you realize, ‘Oh, God, this is affecting my ability to enjoy myself this weekend because I have to answer for it every two seconds.’ That’s when you’re like, ‘Okay, I understand why people don’t want to tell.’” (He added that the incident has, fortunately, become a running joke between him and his friend.)

    Adriana from Chicago had been naturally thin for most of her life, never developing particularly good diet or exercise habits. But a couple of years ago, she had a bad mental health episode and started to cope by overeating, she says; she gained 50 pounds in a year. She had a family history of diabetes, and her doctor told her she was prediabetic. She felt an urgency to do something, she told me: “I just need to go on this medication before I do irreversible damage to my health.”

    The medicine has revitalized her she said. She hasn’t experienced serious side effects and the food temptations that led her to binge-eat have been quieted. She says she’s seeing a therapist and a dietitian and feels as good as she has in years.

    But she’s experienced stigma at every stage of her journey too. Adriana said that growing up, she was often praised by her family for being thin. Then when she gained weight, her family nagged her about it and friends started cutting her out of more physical activities.

    Since she started taking Zepbound, she hasn’t told a lot of people — but she has still felt the prejudice toward GLP-1 users in unexpected ways. Many people in her life just assume that she is reverting back to her previous body type and compliment her for looking slim, then turn around and judge somebody else who’s on a weight-loss drug.

    “My coworkers will say, ‘Oh, you look so good,’ and then they’ll mention some other person who was maybe always bigger, and they’ll say, ‘But she’s on the shot,’” Adriana said.

    And online spaces, where so many of our health and wellness conversations take place these days, are filled with people expressing hurtful opinions about GLP-1 users, often fixating on reports — both credible and not so credible — of dangerous side effects. That was what prompted Adriana to post her frustrations on Reddit.

    “What really bothers me is the fake concern for our health, which is the thing that always comes along when people are policing other people’s bodies,” she said. “When people are overweight, people say, ‘Well, I’m just concerned for their health.’” she said. But “now that there is this medication that’s helping, the stigma is: ‘Well, what about the side effects?’”

    Will the GLP-1 stigma ever go away?

    As GLP-1 use continues to rapidly expand across the country, there are signs that this stigma could eventually be broken down.

    It starts with sheer numbers: The more people who take a GLP-1 or know somebody who has, the more likely they might have a more charitable view of GLP-1 users. About 12 percent of Americans said in an August 2025 survey that they had taken a GLP-1 drug. As of May 2026, one in five US households had at least one GLP-1 user, according to data from PricewaterhouseCoopers. This growth may be the best hope for breaking the stigma that is a nasty asterisk on what is otherwise a remarkable moment in medicine. 

    “As these medications become more prevalent and more people have either used them themselves or have a close loved one who has used them, it is possible that that will help to reduce the stigma and increase acceptance,” Standen said. “We know that in general, one of the more robust findings in social psychology is that as people have more contact with folks who have identities or situations that might be unfamiliar to them, bias tends to go down over time.”

    It is expected to be one of the largest prescription drug rollouts ever.

    Mike said he has confronted acquaintances who spoke badly of GLP-1s, explaining how they have worked for him and the hard work he has put into the process. “Your perspective always changes when you suddenly know someone,” he said. 

    The number of GLP-1 users is probably as low as it will ever be. Medicare launched its $50 GLP-1 prescription program in July, and millions of Americans will be eligible to receive these medications cheaper. It is expected to be one of the largest prescription drug rollouts ever.

    And access should continue to expand. Pharmaceutical executives say they are making inroads with the private employer-based insurance plans that cover about half of the US population; at a health conference — Aspen Ideas: Health — in late June, Laura Steele, group vice president of US cardiometabolic health at Eli Lilly, said the company has seen large employer coverage increase significantly, from about 20 percent covering the medications in 2025 to 67 percent. 

    In a decade, 50 percent or more adults in the US may be taking one of these drugs, Alison Furman, partner and US consumer markets industry leader at PwC, said at the Aspen panel. 

    As bad as things might still feel to people taking GLP-1s right now, social attitudes do seem to be evolving. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers data shared with Vox, 23 percent of current GLP-1 users openly share that they are on the drugs, compared to the 2 percent who say they haven’t told anyone. People who are considering going on a GLP-1 are even more open-minded. More than half of those considering the drugs (53 percent) say they would share their use with their immediate family members, versus 42 percent of current users.

    “The stigma is subsiding,” Furman said. “You see an increase in just openness around this drug. All those signs we believe point to increased adoption over time.”

    Adriana has even seen hints of it herself. She has opened up to a few friends who had asked about her weight loss. “Once you start that conversation,” she said, “it’s kind of shocking how many people are like, ‘You know what? I’ve been thinking about going on.’”

    Source: Vox.

  • For Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos, the quest to revive ‘All My Children’ is personal

    The TV power couple, who met on the show, is developing a series of Lifetime movies checking in on key characters. It could be the next evolution of the soap opera form.

  • ‘Your Friends & Neighbors’ is unafraid to tackle the indignities of middle age

    Star Amanda Peet and creator Jonathan Tropper break down the Apple TV series’ matter-of-fact treatment of aging, from perimenopause to back pain.