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Discrimination against the unattractive is widespread—and widely tolerated.

n 2007, Miranda Fricker, a British philosopher, published a book called “Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing.” It became a smash hit, philosophically speaking, because it diagnosed a problem that had been hard to put into words. Imagine that you witness a crime, Fricker wrote, but find that the police won’t credit your testimony because of the color of your skin. Or suppose you’re being tormented by someone in power, but lack the ability to explain to others—or even to yourself—exactly how you’re being wronged. (You might be like the women in “Mad Men,” who were being sexually harassed by their bosses but lacked the term “sexual harassment.”) These two kinds of injury seem different but are actually related, Fricker argued, because they both have to do with knowledge. In the first case, you know something, but no one will listen to you; in the second, you have trouble fully knowing what’s going on in your life. In either case, you’re suffering from an unfairness of knowledge that limits what you’re able to communicate, what others are willing to hear from you, or what you can understand about yourself and your circumstances.

In the years since the appearance of Fricker’s book, the effort to overcome bias and discrimination has acquired a new flavor. In this latest phase, many harms that were once difficult to describe have been given names, so that they can be better identified and confronted. (We now talk about mansplaining, microaggressions, and gaslighting.) Populations that might not otherwise have seen what they have in common—neurodivergent people, or patients with contested diagnoses—have formed identities and found cause for solidarity. It can be life-changing to have a name for what harms you; society can shift when new groups assert themselves. And yet the pursuit of epistemic justice also risks what the psychologist Nick Haslam has called concept creep—“the progressive expansion of concepts of harm.” The new terms or categories that some find liberating might not reflect an underlying reality. (Not all patients with contested diagnoses face the same struggle.) A new identity can create burdens that aren’t easily shrugged off.

“I have never, until now, confessed to anyone that I felt I was ugly,” the journalist Stephanie Fairyington writes in her new book, “Ugly: A Letter to My Daughter.” Since childhood, she’s felt unattractive; she’s also found it “hard to say the words I am ugly or even I am seen as ugly.” When she’s succeeded in giving voice to such ideas, perhaps using softened language (“My looks aren’t my strong suit”), well-meaning people are quick to disagree, telling her that she looks good. But she’s certain that this isn’t true, and that her appearance has shaped her life. She recalls a moment from her childhood, on “a sunny day in 1986,” when the mother of a friend, parked in a minivan, leaned out the window and exclaimed, incredulously, “That’s Chrysí’s daughter?” Fairyington’s mother and brother were notably good-looking. “Where they had full lips, I had thin ones,” she writes. “Where they had aquiline noses, I had a bulbous red one.” Moreover, “it wasn’t just my face that made me unattractive . . . it was also the legibility of my queerness.”

“I have never, until now, confessed to anyone that I felt I was ugly,” the journalist Stephanie Fairyington writes in her new book, “Ugly: A Letter to My Daughter.” Since childhood, she’s felt unattractive; she’s also found it “hard to say the words I am ugly or even I am seen as ugly.” When she’s succeeded in giving voice to such ideas, perhaps using softened language (“My looks aren’t my strong suit”), well-meaning people are quick to disagree, telling her that she looks good. But she’s certain that this isn’t true, and that her appearance has shaped her life. She recalls a moment from her childhood, on “a sunny day in 1986,” when the mother of a friend, parked in a minivan, leaned out the window and exclaimed, incredulously, “That’s Chrysí’s daughter?” Fairyington’s mother and brother were notably good-looking. “Where they had full lips, I had thin ones,” she writes. “Where they had aquiline noses, I had a bulbous red one.” Moreover, “it wasn’t just my face that made me unattractive . . . it was also the legibility of my queerness.”

Fairyington cites the philosopher Thomas J. Spiegel, who, in a paper from 2022, argued that “lookism”—discrimination based on unattractiveness—is not just unfair in itself but also a form of epistemic injustice. Lookism’s existence is beyond dispute: research has shown that pretty people have an easier time making money, finding partners, and even succeeding in court, while unattractive people are judged more harshly, treated more meanly, and seen as lower performing. Yet there is a “taboo” around the subject of ugliness, Spiegel writes, that leads us to hide from ourselves the toll it takes on individuals. Lookism “does not generate the same awareness as gender or race-based discrimination partially for the reason that there is a different kind of discomfort associated with being identified as ugly,” he writes.

“Ugly” is an ugly word. It’s painful to point it at yourself, and cruel to point it at others. It’s also a complicated word, since, as Fairyington shows in her wide-ranging book, beauty and ugliness are not just aesthetic ideas—they have cultural, biological, subjective, intersubjective, political, commercial, and historical dimensions. All this contributes to the fact that there’s no National Association for Unattractive People. No one urges H.R. departments to hold training sessions on overcoming lookism in the workplace; schools don’t teach kids about the costs of lauding beauty and denigrating its opposite. This gap in our defenses against bias may be understandable—but it leaves lookism unnamed and unopposed. What would it take for us to face the problem directly?

The writer Ted Chiang imagines a solution to lookism in the short story “Liking What You See: A Documentary.” In his near-future scenario, it’s become easy and cheap to get your brain modified so that you don’t notice facial beauty. Someone who’s undergone the reversible procedure, which is called calliagnosia—kalos is the Greek word for beauty—“can tell the difference between a pointed chin and a receding one, a straight nose and a crooked one, clear skin and blemished skin,” a neurologist explains. But “he or she simply doesn’t experience any aesthetic reaction to those differences.” The story’s protagonist, a college freshman named Tamera, had the procedure done when she was a child, because her progressive parents were against lookism. Gazing into the mirror, she can’t tell if she’s pretty. It’s only when someone else sees a picture of her with her ex-boyfriend that she learns that she’s out of his league.

At Tamera’s college, an organization called Students for Equality Everywhere, or SEE, wants to amend the school’s code of conduct so that calliagnosia is mandatory. They argue that it makes no sense to fight racism and sexism while tolerating lookism. They also point out that young people are pawns in a technological-arms race. In the story, generative video technology is being used to make models, spokespeople, and politicians unnaturally persuasive, charismatic, and beautiful. An advocate of calliagnosia says that, while it’s reasonable to enjoy looking at ordinary beautiful people, these digital manipulations conjure the equivalent of “pharmaceutical-grade beauty”—“the cocaine of good looks.” Various people in Chiang’s story proffer all sorts of arguments, philosophical, practical, and aesthetic, against blocking the perception of human beauty. But others decide to fight fire with fire, or embrace the technology on philosophical grounds. “The foundations of our culture were laid in classical Greece, where physical beauty and the body were celebrated,” a religion professor at the college explains. “But our culture is also thoroughly permeated by the monotheistic tradition, which devalues the body in favor of the soul.”

It’s interesting to consider how our present-day world compares with Chiang’s fictional one. Like the students in his story, we’re living in an age of technologically accelerated lookism. In our sci-fi reality, those with the means can use GLP-1s to become ultra-slim; they can employ cosmetic surgery to reverse signs of aging, and to redesign their faces and bodies so that they reflect algorithmically adjudicated images of “perfection.” Dating websites reduce people to photographs, even as photo editing gets easier; the video-conferencing apps we use for work offer to enhance our appearances. We are, quite literally, surrounded by “pharmaceutical-grade beauty.” And yet our world, unlike the one in the story, does not offer an equivalent of calliagnosia. Although there are some circumstances in which we can make “blind” decisions—in ninth grade, I auditioned for the school orchestra from behind a curtain—for the most part, our predicament is worse than theirs.

We might, therefore, conclude that we have no choice but to confront lookism head on. What would that effort look like? In her book “The Beauty Bias: The Injustice of Appearance in Life and Law,” from 2010, the legal scholar Deborah L. Rhode proposed that appearance ought to be added to current anti-discrimination laws. Today, there are jurisdictions, across the country, in which discrimination based on height and weight is specifically outlawed; only a handful of statutes use words such as “appearance.” We might imagine a world in which people more regularly sue their employers for appearance-based discrimination. (But would that be a better world?) In the past, it was not unusual to include a photograph of yourself when you submitted a résumé—an obvious vector for lookism—but the hiring process has evolved. Photographs are often prohibited, and anonymized applications and structured interviews have become more commonplace. And yet the consequences of such measures are hard to predict. There is some evidence that they lead to the hiring of candidates who end up performing better at work. But a study conducted by the Australian government, based on “blind” hiring practices in the Australian Public Service, found that they had unpredictable effects on bias, in part because “de-identification may frustrate efforts aimed at promoting diversity.”

In “Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful,” from 2011, the economist Daniel Hamermesh attempts to estimate the “beauty premium”: he suggests that attractive people earn about a hundred and forty thousand dollars more than regular people over a lifetime. (The effect is “not small, it’s not huge,” Hamermesh has said.) In a concluding section, he weighs various options for compensating or protecting those who are denied that premium. One challenge is that attractiveness unfolds along a spectrum, rather than in categories; if the whole bottom third of the spectrum were protected, it would be the largest protected class in society. Even if it existed, would it be a class that people wanted to join?

Moral progress isn’t confined to legislation, of course. It also happens individually and interpersonally; it’s created and promulgated one person at a time, through conversation. In “Ugly,” Fairyington shows how she and her spouse, Sabrina, have tried to give their daughter the tools she’ll need to perceive and resist lookism. In ways both sophisticated and simple—visiting museums, going shopping, listening to Le Tigre—they offer their child a rich understanding of the forces that shape our relationships with our corporeal selves. Their conversations can be hyper-intellectual: “Teasing apart your friend’s ‘fat’ comment, I thought about how the neo-Assyrians preferred heaviness over thinness,” Fairyington writes. But they’re also frank and revelatory; often, they move from questions about bodies or body image into discussions of history, politics, and the broader human experience. As a parent myself, I found the book inspiring.

Around the time he published “Beauty Pays,” Hamermesh did a Q. & A. with readers of the blog “Freakonomics.” “Take advantage of what you’re good at—other things in which you have a comparative advantage,” he told a reader who asked about “how to utterly defeat pretty people.” “Looks are only one of many things that affect success,” he went on. Although Hamermesh was speaking in the language of economics, this isn’t too different from some of what Fairyington puts into practice. An important way to fight lookism is by recognizing human multidimensionality. Like all forms of prejudice, lookism flattens people; we can resist it by being curious, open-minded, and expansive. We can notice that giving in to lookism—a harm we can inflict by degrees, and visit upon ourselves—becomes easier when we use technologies that encourage shallow relationships and assessments.

Does this require us to break the taboo around ugliness—to name it, as Fairyington does? Reading her story, I found myself uncertain. Throughout the book, Fairyington uses the word “ugly” to speak with clarity and force about unfairness. Hearing the term directed at her in middle school was “a new kind of painful,” and it “solidified my ugly self-concept”; at the same time, it “provided a weird kind of relief to know, unequivocally, that my self-understanding was accurate.”

And yet, as Fairyington’s narrative shows, the self-understanding she achieved as a middle schooler wasn’t accurate. Back then, she heard “ugly” as an epithet, simple, brutal, and factual—an objective verdict. But “ugly,” as she uses it in “Ugly,” turns out to be a different kind of word: to use it to describe yourself is to evoke a whole constellation of values, many of them questionable, being brought to bear on a person whose inherent dignity resists them. It’s a word that wishes to undo itself—a word that, if we were truly to vanquish lookism, wouldn’t be needed.

Health-care workers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo are fighting the third-largest outbreak in history—and trying not to get infected themselves.

On May 17th, the director general of the World Health Organization declared the current Ebola outbreak a public-health emergency of international concern in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and in Uganda. More than twenty-four hundred people have tested positive and more than nine hundred and ninety have died, in the third-largest outbreak ever recorded. “It’s like a big fire,” Chikwe Ihekweazu, the executive director of the W.H.O. Health Emergencies Programme, told me. “The center of it is still hot, and it’s also spreading.” Many factors are fanning the flames: the area has been wracked by conflict, global funding cuts have weakened the health system, and an exodus of health-care staff has deprived hospitals of experience from previous outbreaks. The early phases of Ebola can be indistinguishable from those of infections such as malaria and typhoid fever, but the virus eventually causes fluid losses that can lead to shock, multi-organ failure, and a mortality rate that often exceeds fifty per cent. The most profound complication is hemorrhagic fever, in which platelet counts drop and the blood loses its ability to clot normally, leading to bleeding throughout the body.

On July 19th, I spoke with Abdou Sebushishe, a physician and a senior global-health adviser with the International Medical Corps, who hails from Goma, in eastern D.R.C., about what it’s like to care for patients with Ebola right now. Sebushishe previously worked on the Ebola response in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and South Sudan. The D.R.C. has experienced sixteen previous Ebola outbreaks—just last year, Sebushishe responded to one of them in the Kasai province—but this one is different. Some early patients were tested for the wrong strain of Ebola, so infections initially went undetected. “Modelling has suggested that the outbreak might have started in February,” Sebushishe told me. “We missed the critical window of detecting, isolating, and tracking cases early.” A major 2018 outbreak in the D.R.C. took nearly eight months to grow beyond a thousand cases. This time, a thousand people were confirmed positive within the first forty days of the emergency response. Experts continue to worry that the outbreak could spread to neighboring countries. (The risk to the U.S. remains low.)

Bunia General Hospital, where Sebushishe spends much of his time, comprises an aging cluster of buildings and employs about a hundred and fifty health-care workers. Arriving patients wash their hands, have their temperatures taken, and are assessed in a triage area. Anyone with Ebola symptoms is sent to the Ebola Treatment Center (E.T.C.), a semipermanent wood structure surrounded by barbed wire. “Non-Ebola patients cannot cross to the treatment center,” Sebushishe told me. “That could cause them a problem.” His day usually begins at 5 or 5:30 A.M. He showers, drinks coffee, and sends e-mails to help coördinate teams across the D.R.C. Then he goes to the hospital and prepares to treat patients. His account has been edited for length and clarity.

“At 8 A.M. every day, the team that was on the night shift hands over patients, starting with the critical ones. They describe their symptoms and what patients they suggest the day team focus on. Then we go inside. We put on personal protective equipment, following a checklist. We have a buddy system, and we have a third person who is monitoring what we are doing. Once we are in boots and scrub suits, we wash our hands and then put on the first layer of gloves. We put on coveralls. A supervisor comes and zips them for us, to insure that the zipper reaches the neck. After the coveralls, we put on a surgical mask or N95, and then we put goggles on top. When we speak, the supervisor sees if it creates any fog on the goggles, and he adjusts or replaces them before we enter. Then we put on a second pair of gloves on top of the coveralls, up to the mid-arm.

“After that, we put on a hood, and then an apron. We are checked for any leaks of air, and they write our names on a piece of tape on the apron. This way we know each other when we are inside, and the patient knows whom he is talking to. They write, also, the time when we finish putting on the full P.P.E. If I finish before my buddy, my time is written first. We monitor who reaches a maximum of one hour inside the P.P.E. so that the buddy can tell him to go out.

“Most of the time, when doctors enter, the nurses go through the vital signs, but for critical patients we have to take vitals again and do a quick A.B.C.D. (airway, breathing, circulation, disability) assessment. If there are not many critical patients, we can see up to six patients in one hour. But when there are more critical patients we sometimes see only two. We go out, refresh, and then go back after one or two hours of rest.

“Before we leave the red zone, we write the status of the patient. In Bunia, we have a Plexiglas divider where we hang what we’ve written. The clinician on the other side can quickly copy the notes before we discard them in the red zone. (In Beni, we go to a designated area within the E.T.C. where we can talk to clinicians who are on the other side—the green side. We dictate to them each patient’s instructions.) Once we finish that, we doff our P.P.E. under supervision. Someone receives us with a bottle of water and biscuits. And then we go sit down, recover for a few minutes, and we start discussing each patient again.

“The first obvious thing you feel in P.P.E. is the heat. It’s really hot. You are putting everything on top of the scrubs that you are wearing. I come out of the red zone and I’m totally wet with sweat. I’ve seen in past outbreaks, like in Liberia, colleagues falling inside P.P.E. The second thing is breathing. When you have everything on, there is a barrier for airflow. Often, if the supervisor did not pay attention, we have to say, ‘O.K., let’s go out, because your goggles are fogging.’ If you don’t see well, you can easily stumble on something and fall.

“In the red zone, I know I’m going to see patients who are confirmed to have Ebola. If I make any mistake, I will also be in quarantine for twenty-one days—or I will also be infected. So we enter with that anxiety, knowing that this is a risk that I’m taking. I know that everybody has that level of fear. But I have to go. Because I’ve been in many other outbreaks, I trust that, if I respect the protocols, there is nothing that will happen to me. And that has helped me a lot in gaining confidence. I always tell my colleagues that, if we continue to respect the protocol, none of us will be affected.

“People need to be trained well to avoid being in a panic when they are removing the P.P.E., because that’s the critical moment. We have entered the red zone. We have touched patients. Our colleagues sometimes have to mop the blood of confirmed patients, or body fluids. I myself was taking care of a patient, and he sneezed and everything went on my apron. We have a mirror so that you can see what you are doing. We have, also, a huge banner showing each step. And then there is a person in the green zone, in light P.P.E., who is also giving instructions: ‘O.K., now you can wash your hands.’ And then we have a sprayer who is spraying us with disinfectant. If there is visible soiling on our P.P.E., he cannot spray, because he will spread those things. So he will just tell us what to do, like removing it carefully and dropping it in chlorine very quickly before we wash hands.

“Recently, a man in his forties was brought in. He had spent two weeks with symptoms. He had a light fever first, with vomiting and muscle pain, but it was mild enough for him to stay in the community. And then when symptoms started to worsen—especially when he started having profuse diarrhea and vomiting, ten days later—he was brought to us. He was already very weak. He was no longer fully conscious and was not able to listen. And he was still passing a lot of diarrhea. Because of vomiting, we put in a nasogastric tube. A moment later, he started bleeding everywhere.

“That is one of the things that I don’t wish anybody to see—a human being bleeding from wherever you have an opening. Nose, eyes, mouth. When he coughs, he spits blood. Even from his ears you see traces of blood. The urine is full of blood. So it’s quite a nightmare when you see a patient in the later stage. I’m sorry, I have that image in me. It makes me feel some emotion, as well. At that stage, it was quite difficult for the team to resuscitate him. He passed away that same day.

“There is not enough blood for transfusions. With the outbreak, they stopped collecting blood in the provinces that are affected, so blood has to come from other locations. And Congo is too big, so it has to come by flight—it has to be scheduled. So when someone reaches that level, as a doctor, you sometimes don’t have anything else to do. And I can tell you seeing a patient for whom you can’t do anything is almost a torture.

“We have a team of psychosocial workers—mental-health specialists—who are part of our team. They bring relatives of patients to a dedicated visit space. There are Plexiglas screens that allow visits without physical contact. The psychosocial workers have to be careful to make sure that they sit at least one metre away from the relatives. They explain what will happen inside, including the reason for isolation. If the relative is required to stay in quarantine for twenty-one days, we give them options like phone calls to help them talk to the person inside. We always welcome visitors. When we don’t, rumors start to spread: ‘Doctors are removing organs to sell them. That’s why they bury patients themselves.’ In reality, with Ebola, we have to do a safe burial to prevent it from spreading.

“In Bunia, I can feel a mix of fear and frustration. Everyone can see buckets of water everywhere to wash their hands before they access any public space. It’s a reminder that something is happening in this city. And then seeing the funerals being organized here creates fear among the people. Frustration because no one knows when it will end. If I meet colleagues who are not working on Ebola, at a restaurant, they ask me, ‘When are we going back to our normal life?’ And I keep telling them I don’t know—maybe six months, maybe a year. And that causes more frustration.

“When I was a kid, I witnessed what was probably the worst cholera outbreak in my city of Goma, D.R.C. It left a kind of trauma, seeing suffering all around. One of the things that helps me overcome this is when we see results. When we see someone who came in very, very sick, and then is able to walk after one week or ten days or two weeks—able to recover and go out happily, reunite with their family. Those moments, they are not every day. But, when they happen, it’s so rewarding. That’s one of the things that make it worth it.

“The second thing is the team. I manage a team that is close to a thousand people. Sometimes I’ll see a logistician working until 10 or 11 P.M., just to make sure everything is done. When I see that around me, it’s an additional motivation for me. If the people I’m working with are behaving like this, I also need to maintain that courage. We are seeing interest from journalists, from donors, from colleagues. They are asking us, ‘How are you doing? How is the situation there?’ They will support the team here to stop this outbreak. That helps us not to feel alone.”

Latest orders to leave extend to suburbs within 30km of the centre of Bordeaux

Forest fires burning out of control in France and Spain have forced the evacuation of almost 260,000 people, with the latest orders stretching to the outer suburbs of Bordeaux.

The emergency measures issued early on Saturday morning encompassed the Mérignac area around the Bordeaux airport, which said it was still operating but that bus and tram services to the site had been suspended.

The Bordeaux-Lac exhibition centre has been turned into a shelter for those displaced by the wildfires, which have escalated through the summer, fuelled by drought conditions and extreme heat.

Residents and tourists in the seaside resort of Cap Ferret had been asked to leave the peninsula on Arcachon Bay both by road and by emergency ferries on Friday.

France’s wildfires have forced 197,000 people to evacuate and burnt an area of just under 98,000 hectares so far, a new historic record, interior minister Laurent Nuñez said on Saturday.

Several fires have been raging in the forests in the Gironde region around Bordeaux this week, with more than 1,000 firefighters deployed to seek to limit the damage. Separate blazes in the Landes and Var regions have stretched resources further.

“The fires that are hitting our country have reached a level that has never been seen before,” France’s Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu wrote on social media.

In Spain, out-of-control wildfires close to Madrid did not spread significantly overnight, which Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said this weekend presented a pivotal “window of opportunity” to tame them.

Fires around rural towns west of the Spanish capital worsened dramatically on Friday, forcing almost 60,000 people to be evacuated and 28,000 to be confined to their homes as flames and smoke filled darkening skies.

“We’re going to face a challenging few hours,” Sánchez said on a visit to the disaster zone on Saturday morning, “because temperatures have indeed dropped, but we don’t know exactly how the winds will develop or how strong they will be.”

His government said the overnight fight against the flames, which are as close as 50km to the capital, had been aided by reduced winds, higher humidity and lower temperatures.

Isabel Díaz Ayuso, president of the Madrid region, which includes rural towns scattered around the capital, called the fires the worst in the area’s history as attempts were made to stop the bigger blazes from converging.

Both France and Spain have requested EU assistance to help battle the fires. Sánchez said that Madrid was awaiting the imminent arrival of firefighting vehicles and personnel from Italy, Greece and Portugal.

EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said on Saturday that a total of 11 planes and helicopters had been sent.

With more than 20,000 hectares scorched by the fires near Madrid, Sánchez said the amount of land ravaged by wildfires this year in Spain had already reached 130,000 hectares — well above the average of 100,000 hectares per year over the past decade.

“Now is the time to act responsibly and to strengthen our unity in the face of this emergency. It is also time to speed up the agreements needed to tackle the climate emergency,” Sánchez wrote on X.

Spain and France have been the epicentre of this year’s European wildfire season. Especially severe blazes in southern Spain killed at least 13 people earlier this month.

Despite a wetter than usual start to the year in western Europe, the fire conditions have been worsened by successive heatwaves that dried out vegetation, making it easier for blazes to start and spread.

Last month was the hottest June on record on the fastest-warming continent as a result of climate change.

Wildfires have broken out from the UK to Norway. A major incident was declared on Saturday by Scotland’s government, bringing in extra firefighting services after the worsening of a blaze burning in the Cairngorms National Park for more than a week. 

They Used GLP-1s to Lose Weight. They Ended Up in Treatment for Anorexia.

The miracle drugs helping America fight obesity can have a dangerous downside: triggering disordered eating

When Molly Taylor started taking Mounjaro in the fall of 2024, she marveled at the speed of results. She wasn’t overweight, but she hadn’t been comfortable in her body. Now, she could eat whatever she wanted, just in smaller portions, and people were complimenting her looks. She no longer felt self-conscious.

Then her mindset began to shift.

“I gradually started to worry about what I was eating, how many calories were in it, if it was going to stop me from losing more weight,” said the 23-year-old nanny, who is studying to be a nurse in London. “I think that’s when I was starting to develop anorexia.”

GLP-1s have been hailed as miracle drugs, their rise leading to critical breakthroughs in America’s fight against obesity. Roughly 13 million Americans are now on them, according to research from JPMorgan published in February. The drugs mimic naturally occurring hormones to suppress appetite and cravings and make people feel full. For those who’ve struggled with restrictive eating and anorexia, that can be a tantalizing proposition—and a dangerous one.

Anorexia kills a higher percentage of patients than any other eating disorder, and it is the second most deadly mental illness after opioid addiction, according to data compiled by the nonprofit National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders.

“I recovered from anorexia myself many years ago, and had this been on the market, I think I certainly would have tried to access it,” said Jennifer Rollin, therapist and founder of the Eating Disorder Center, which is based in Rockville, Md., and provides therapy for patients in seven states.

“Seeing all of the celebrities on the red carpet and so many friends and family members, kind of, bragging about weight loss—that has been a huge trigger for many of the clients I work with,” she said.

Rollin’s business has helped treat people with eating disorders who’ve obtained GLP-1 medications to suppress their appetites, as well as those who were triggered into disordered eating while taking the drugs for approved conditions.

The popularity of Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic, approved for use in 2017 to treat Type 2 diabetes, helped usher in a new wave of GLP-1 drugs that are helping people address chronic weight issues and related problems like sleep apnea and adverse cardiovascular events. Researchers are probing for other applications.

Some doctors say the drugs have as much potential to hurt people with certain eating disorders as to help people with others. The drugs have been used off-label to help with conditions like binge eating and bulimia, which are notoriously difficult to treat.

Jamie Thayer, 48, was prescribed Wegovy for weight loss. “It was like a miracle at first,” she said.

She weighed 240 pounds when she started taking the drug in March 2023, and she rapidly started to shed pounds. She also experienced very low energy, hair loss, severe dizziness, fainting spells from low blood sugar and brain fog. Her son, who had recovered from anorexia, shared his concern with her that Thanksgiving.

“I was really proud of my weight loss at that point,” said Thayer, a Title IX coordinator in Frederick, Md. “I thought I was doing a really good thing.”

When her insurance stopped covering brand-name GLP-1s, she started buying a compounded powder version from China and reconstituting it at home. Meanwhile, her eating became more disordered, governed by strict rules.

“I wouldn’t eat Monday or Tuesday, then on Wednesday I could get a pastry,” she said. “My shot would start to wear off around Saturday, so I usually got some calories on Saturday and Sunday.”

In July 2024, after losing 100 pounds, she checked into a residential treatment center in Connecticut, where she was diagnosed with atypical anorexia and, soon after, re-feeding syndrome, which endangers malnourished people who take on food too fast. She said it saved her life.

Sam DeCaro, director of clinical outreach and education at the Renfrew Center, described a common misconception: that undereating is fine for people who are not considered underweight. In fact, it can be a sign of atypical anorexia, where someone has all the hallmarks of anorexia but is not underweight by body-mass index standards.

“Their undernourishment is causing them all these medical issues, heart issues,” DeCaro said. “It affects every system in the body.”

The rise of telehealth has made it easier than ever for people to obtain pharmaceuticals. Taylor, the nanny in London, said she submitted a doctored photograph of herself that made her look heavier to obtain her prescription. Jessica Scheer, CEO of National Eating Disorders Association, said the organization has heard that some providers don’t screen for a history of disordered eating before prescribing GLP-1s.

The makers of popular GLP-1 drugs have condemned the use of their medications for cosmetic weight loss. The medications don’t warn against using the drugs if you have a history of eating disorders. As with all prescriptions, it is up to care providers to determine whether a medication is right for a particular patient.

“We support our medicines being prescribed to patients who meet the indicated criteria and only promote the FDA-approved indications of our medicines for appropriate patients,” a Novo Nordisk spokesperson said in a statement.

“Patient safety is Lilly’s top priority,” an Eli Lilly spokesperson said in a statement. “As part of our routine safety review process for obesity management and Type 2 diabetes medications, we are working closely with regulators regarding potential safety topics, and we will continue to review data, including any data regarding eating disorders.”

Taylor, who began injecting in October 2024, was hospitalized in May 2025, soon after returning from a vacation. She’d gone about two weeks without eating, and her weight had dropped from 147 pounds to 103.

“I had to slowly re-feed myself and also get all my electrolytes and everything replenished,” she said. She didn’t tell the hospital about her GLP-1 use. “I wanted to carry on losing weight.”

When Mounjaro became harder to get, she sought out the medication through a friend of a friend. This January, she stopped the injections and began going to eating disorder treatment several times a week.

“I still struggle massively, and my weight has continued to go down,” she said. She currently weighs 88 pounds and plans to seek inpatient treatment, as soon as a room becomes available.

‘Matisse’s “Femme au chapeau”: A Modern Scandal’ Review: The Legacy of a Revolutionary Portrait

An exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art considers the controversial 1905 painting and the Salon that launched the artist and his fellow Fauvists to fame.

San Francisco

In late summer 1905, as Henri Matisse was preparing for the Salon d’Automne, he decided to add a portrait to the colorful landscapes he had created that year in Collioure, in southern France. Using spontaneous brushstrokes, he painted his wife, Amélie, with strange green skin (save for a rosy cheek and her ear), a direct gaze and an elaborate blue hat. Critics at the Salon raged. “A pot of paint has just been thrown in the public’s face,” howled one; another famously called Matisse and fellow artists in the Salon’s Gallery VII “wild beasts” (“fauves” in French). Even Leo Stein, the American expatriate proponent of avant-garde art, called it “brilliant and powerful, but the nastiest smear of paint I had ever seen.”

So began the life of the painting that birthed Fauvism, France’s first contribution to 20th- century modernism, and that is now the subject of “Matisse’s ‘Femme au chapeau’: A Modern Scandal” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. With nearly 90 artworks and more than 60 historical documents and ephemera, the exhibition tells a three-part story: of the Salon, of the influence “Femme au chapeau” has had, and of the painting’s path to becoming a signature of the museum’s collection. Organized by chief curator Janet Bishop and former associate curator Maria Castro, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it remains on view through Sept. 13.

The first gallery introduces Matisse (1869-1954) and Amélie, including a pleasant landscape he painted on their Corsican honeymoon (1898); a portrait of her (c. 1900) by Albert Marquet; and some period hats and fans. On one wall, an animation (2026) of the Grand Palais, made with archival images by Google Arts & Culture Lab, recreates the Salon’s milieu and readies visitors for the next gallery.

There they will see a stripped-down version of Gallery VII, with 27 examples by all 10 artists, from Matisse and Marquet to André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck, who contributed the 55 artworks displayed in that space. As if to underscore the radical turn these artists were making, the paintings are hung on an ornate plum-red wallpaper in a wainscoted gallery that harks back to the Grand Palais’s look.

Today, the artworks look tame: Their thick paint, loose brushstrokes and vibrant, often clashing colors no longer shock. If some, like Derain’s “Fishing Boats, Collioure” (1905), with its pale pink and orange waters, seem “unnatural,” a critics’ complaint, they are also beautiful.

What is obvious is Matisse’s superiority; little wonder that he was attacked. “Open Window, Collioure” (1905)—depicting sailboats on the water seen through a large window in a room with green, peach and hot-pink walls—is an early example of what became a signature motif. In “La Japonaise: Woman Beside the Water” (1905), Matisse uses big daubs of paint to portray a kimono-clad female who blends into her surroundings. And of course there is “Femme au chapeau”—the obvious star.

On the Salon’s last day, Stein bought it with his sister, Gertrude. They hung it in their apartment, soon to host their Saturday evening salons for artists and writers. The exhibition transports visitors there in the next gallery via another large-scale animated projection.

The following space shows how artists drew on “Femme au chapeau” through 1948. Jean Metzinger’s “Femme au chapeau” (c. 1906), Vlaminck’s “Femme au chapeau” (1906) and Kees van Dongen’s “Femme au chapeau fleuri” (1905) read as homages, exhibiting little innovation. Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s untitled still life (1934) goes furthest afield—seemingly unrelated until, under the compote, a grisaille image of Matisse’s masterpiece becomes clear, embellished by grapes Kuniyoshi painted atop Madame’s hat.

Here the exhibit detours. Gertrude and Leo Stein split their collection in 1913-14, with Gertrude taking “Femme,” which she soon peddled to her brother Michael and his wife, Sarah. In 1948, they sold it to Elise Stern Haas, a Levi Strauss heiress. In 1990, the painting was part of her large bequest to SFMOMA, which is honored here by the display of 26 other early 20th-century works she gave it, including paintings by Picasso, Georgia O’Keeffe and Diego Rivera.

The last gallery showcases art made since the 1950s. Richard Diebenkorn’s “Woman in Hat and Gloves” (1963) depicts his wife, seated cross-legged, in muted blues and grays. She faces in the opposite direction of “Femme,” but the shape of her face and pointed nose, and the way her large hat exceeds the picture frame, allude to Matisse. David Hockney, David Park, Wayne Thiebaud, Joan Brown and Mickalene Thomas all painted women in hats, each with a color, a pose, a gaze or another affinity with the Matisse, but none as inspired as Diebenkorn, who created something truly fresh out of his lifelong admiration for the French master. The one sculpture, Rachel Harrison’s “Hoarders” (2012), a large amorphous lump, accompanied by a digital monitor, trash can and purple carpet, hints at Matisse’s palette, but it looks irrelevant.

It is too much to expect artists to rise to Matisse’s level. But then maybe a better ending to this exhibition would have addressed the effect the “Modern Scandal” had on Matisse, who was distressed but undeterred by it. Fauvism soon faded, but color—bold, brilliant hues—remained among his hallmarks as he grew to become one of the 20th century’s greatest artists. Just a coda to this important episode would do.

Matisse’s ‘Femme au chapeau’: A Modern Scandal

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, through Sept. 13

Kaleidoscope of industries emerge as early winners from administration’s health regulation overhaul

Businesses tied to Robert F Kennedy Jr’s Make America Healthy Again movement are poised to benefit from a regulatory overhaul in Washington, as companies aligned with his agenda emerge as its earliest winners.

At a two-day meeting at the US Food and Drug Administration on Thursday and Friday, a Kennedy-backed advisory panel voted to broaden public access to a handful of drugs known as peptides, despite the agency’s scientific staff advising against it.

Wall Street analysts say the market for the drugs — which have gained popularity through social media claims ranging from rapid healing to muscular development — could grow into a multibillion-dollar opportunity for pharmacies, telehealth providers and drugmakers.

While President Donald Trump has drawn scrutiny for promoting cryptocurrencies and other businesses linked to his administration, less attention has focused on healthcare companies that could benefit from regulatory shifts under Kennedy. Now, a parallel “Maha Inc” kaleidoscope of companies and industries whose prospects are tied to the White House’s healthcare agenda is emerging.

One likely beneficiary is Enhanced Group, a telehealth company whose investors include Donald Trump Jr. It is preparing to sell peptides and its founder and chair, Christian Angermayer, appeared at a Maha event in November. Enhanced did not respond to a request for comment.

Olympia Pharmaceuticals, a Florida-based pharmacy that also appeared at the conference, has made multiple contributions to a Maha political fundraising group operated by one of Kennedy’s close associates, including one payment just a month after the FDA said it would consider loosening restrictions on peptides.

Olympia’s chief executive is also on the Maha group’s board of directors. Olympia also stands to benefit from the regulatory changes, according to investment bank Needham.

The FDA panel was “stacked” with people from the pharmacy industry who stand to benefit from the regulatory changes for peptides, said Paul Kim, a partner at consultancy Kendall Square Policy Strategies. “The conflicts here are astonishing,” he said. “It is political theatre at this point.”

Other sectors featured at the Maha conference have also benefited from regulatory changes under Kennedy. Companies developing psychedelic therapies and wearable health technologies are also poised to benefit from regulatory changes he has championed.

The FDA is scheduled to consider expanding access to psychedelic drugs in September. Shares of companies developing treatments based on psilocybin “magic” mushrooms, LSD and MDMA, also known as ecstasy, rose in April after the president signed an executive order increasing access to the drugs. Angermayer is also founder of psychedelics company AtaiBeckley.

Manufacturers of wearable health-tracking devices have also benefited under Kennedy. Earlier this year, the FDA updated guidance for wellness devices such as wrist-worn health trackers, affirming they do not need to be regulated like medical devices.

Kennedy’s 2025 promotion of wearables “handed the category a tailwind”, said Mike Collett, managing partner at Promus Ventures, a Chicago-based investment firm that holds stakes in manufacturer Whoop and Definium Therapeutics, which is developing psychedelics. Whoop declined to comment.

“The Maha label is yet another political slogan, although one I hope will have a long shelf life,” Collett said.

Maha-aligned businesses are drawing investment interest from Finn Kennedy, one of Kennedy’s sons. Earlier this year, Finn Kennedy sought to raise $100mn for an investment fund targeting Maha businesses in healthcare, AI, consumer health and other health technologies.

It is unclear how much he has raised for the fund, Victura Ventures, named for a sailboat owned by his great-uncle, former president John F Kennedy. Finn Kennedy did not respond to requests for comment.

Maha Holdings organised the November summit, attended by Kennedy, vice-president JD Vance and other officials. Finn Kennedy is listed as a board member. Maha Holdings is planning another event in September and has approached companies about participating, according to two groups that received overtures.

Tony Lyons, president of the Maha Action political fund, said: “We will bring together scientists, innovators, activists and government officials to a conversation that’s been censored at the expense of the kind of health outcomes that the American people have a right to expect.”

The health department said “regulatory decisions are made independently” of Maha.

For peptides, the FDA has warned the drugs considered at the meeting do not have clear health benefits. For BPC-157, known as the “wolverine drug” for its purported ability to heal injuries and reduce inflammation, the agency said research “weighs against” broadening the drug to more people.

“There is insufficient clinical safety information to characterise the safety profile of BPC-157,” FDA staffers said in materials posted on its website before the meeting.

Despite the concerns, healthcare companies are considering peptides as a new market. Telehealth company Hims acquired a peptide-manufacturing facility last year.

“We are very excited about peptides, at the same time we are going to await final guidance from the FDA,” Anant Vinjamoori, Hims’s chief medical officer, said in an interview. “We are starting to build the infrastructure.”

Consumers are buying popular peptides through the grey market, and pharmacy companies maintain a clearer framework would improve safety by shifting production to FDA-regulated facilities.

“We would happily take on the task and be regulated and do this right,” said Joshua Fritzler, president of Olympia Pharmaceuticals.

Olympia contributed $100,000 to the Maha political action committee last year and the company’s chief executive Mark Mikhael gave $25,000 in May, according to federal disclosures.

“I think health and wellness crosses the boundaries of political parties,” Fritzler said.

Jon Lensing, chief executive and founder of telehealth business OpenLoop, another pharmacy business eyeing the peptides market, has contracted with Enhanced Group. Lensing spoke alongside Fritzler at the Maha event.

“The administration, the Health and Human Services Department in particular, is doing what we want them to do,” Lensing said. “It would be a disservice to the American public not to.”

The Kheibar Shekan uses a combination of flight paths, maneuvers and speeds to confuse air defenses

The Kheibar Shekan missile is the workhorse of Tehran’s arsenal—a cheap, mobile, accurate weapon with a range of at least 900 miles. And recently, Iran has been using it in complex attacks, proving itself to be an adaptable adversary for the U.S.

Since the fighting picked back up this month, Iran has been firing the Kheibar Shekan at American bases, U.S. officials said. It is using a combination of different flight paths, maneuvers and speeds to try to confuse U.S. defenses, they say.

The U.S. and its partners have shot down most Kheibar Shekans throughout the war, one of the U.S. officials said, but some have gotten through.

Unlike Iran’s older missiles that require lengthy prelaunch fueling, military analysts say the Kheibar Shekans can be kept fueled and loaded quickly into trucks or other vehicles for launching in an attempt to evade U.S. and Israeli warplanes seeking to knock out Iranian missile sites.

In some variants of the missile, the nose section, which carries the explosive warhead and detaches during the final phase of flight, is equipped with a small engine that makes it capable of adjusting its direction as it nears its target at 6,000 miles an hour, according to analysts and officials.

Ballistic missiles travel into the upper atmosphere or space before plunging back down toward a target, but not all are capable of maneuvering. Military analysts who have studied the Kheibar Shekan said it can vary its trajectory more than some other ballistic missiles in an attempt to make it harder to detect and destroy.

Iran is also launching high-speed attack drones and less sophisticated missiles at the same locations it is targeting with the satellite-guided Kheibar Shekans, adapting its tactics throughout the war, the U.S. officials said.

Since the ceasefire collapsed, Iran has repeatedly targeted housing areas where U.S. troops stay at bases across the Middle East, officials say. Iran has also gone after the radars that underpin air defenses across the region, a strategy that puts American servicemembers at greater risk, they say.

“I think what it tells us is Iran is paying attention, and they’re learning and they’re looking at ways that they can get at us,” said retired Army Gen. Joseph Votel, who has led U.S. Central Command. “This is a military that has a well-developed drone capability, it’s had a missile program, a rocket program for a long period of time. They’ve got a lot of expertise in this area.”

Iran was believed to have 2,500 Kheibar Shekans and other medium-range missiles before the war began, according to U.S. and Israeli estimates. It might be assembling more from components stored in underground bases, but the production facilities where engines for the missiles were built have been destroyed, said Fabian Hinz, an independent missile expert.

“The Iranians kind of figured out during the war that the Kheibar Shekans are great because it’s pretty cheap to produce, it’s flexible with launch systems, and it’s pretty effective,” said Nicole Grajewski, an expert on Iranian strategy at Sciences Po in Paris.

Iran has fired Kheibar Shekans at Israel, which says it shot most of them down. Iran has also claimed that it targeted the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the headquarters of Israel’s air force commander using Kheibar Shekans. Last month, it announced another attack with the missiles, along with jet-powered drones. The results of those attacks couldn’t be determined.

The missile is named after the Battle of Khaybar, the 628 campaign in which the Prophet Muhammad’s forces conquered the fortified oasis of Khaybar, then held by Arabian Jews.

Iran hasn’t disclosed the cost of a Kheibar Shekan, but analysts said it is far cheaper than the U.S. and Israeli interceptors used to take them down at a cost of between $2 million and $15 million, depending on the system.

Iran seems to have improved its missile attacks, likely by studying previous launches and figuring out how to maximize the possibility the weapons will get through, Hinz said.

Iran “has seen what types of maneuvers are the most effective ones for overcoming missile defense,” Hinz said. “Every single combat use gives you some sort of data, so that’s very useful for the Iranians.”

​Iran has long said the Kheibar Shekan can maneuver in the final stage of its flight to evade air defenses, he added.

Pressure builds in Washington to rein in AI, while the industry fights over who should hold the leash

AI panic has swept Washington.

And, in real time, we’re watching wannabe masters of the artificial-intelligence universe try to win an upper hand in controlling the new technology.

OpenAI’s revelation this past week that its AI models escaped confinement and hacked another tech company’s systems gave new credibility to fears that this technology can, in fact, go sci-fi villain mode.

Add into the mix announcements that Chinese AI rivals have new, free models, allegedly built off the learnings of the expensive ones developed by the likes of Anthropic. That opened a new front in the geopolitical fight between China and the U.S.

The Trump administration was already staring down a deadline to put in place the mechanisms for a June 2 executive order to increase oversight of the biggest AI labs’ models. That order was sparked by fears the systems are becoming more powerful.

Taken all together in such rapid succession, it has increased the pressure in Washington to do something. The fear of many in the industry is that a rush to do something—anything—will hinder innovation or benefit one player over another.

For years, the largest AI companies have been trying to get ahead of things, advocating proactively for regulations to place guardrails around the powerful technology. They argued this was needed to prevent disaster for cybersecurity, biological threats and other risky areas.

Such efforts drew eye rolls among those who didn’t believe the predictions. Then, as the technology advanced, their calls drew criticism that what they were really trying to do was write the rules for their own benefit—regulatory capture—at the expense of smaller rivals.

Still, just days ago, it seemed like an unlikely unified front of AI leaders might finally make headway in Washington, D.C.

On July 14, Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis published a proposal calling for the creation of an AI standards body. This would be modeled after the self-regulating organization that oversees stockbrokers. Funding would come from the industry and a board that would include technical specialists and open-source representatives.

“When there is a large degree of uncertainty and the stakes are this high, proceeding with cautious optimism is the sensible and correct strategy,” Hassabis wrote. “That calls for public policy that promotes innovation while also incentivising responsibility and security, fosters international collaboration on key safety issues, and encourages careful consideration of how AI is deployed for the benefit of society.”

The Nobel laureate is a deeply respected, superstar in the AI field but has less of a public profile in the U.S., where his peers have become more polarizing figures.

Before publishing, Hassabis had worked to build support for the idea among his rivals. The effort seemed to pay off—even if it created some odd bedfellows.

Elon Musk called Hassabis’s proposal “a thoughtful framework overall and certainly a good starting point for discussion,” while OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted something similar on X: “this is a thoughtful proposal from demis.”

You don’t see these two guys agree on much these days. Altman and Musk formed OpenAI years ago in response to Google’s acquisition of DeepMind, and both men have subsequently become bitter rivals.

Nevertheless, the enemy of your enemy’s regulation is your friend. As Musk explained in an interview with the Economist published this past week: “It is quite difficult for someone in the government who doesn’t have a deep technical understanding and isn’t driving the frontier of AI to know whether something should be released or not. However…all of the competitors have an incentive to keep the others honest.”

After publication of Hassabis’s proposal, a report from Bloomberg News suggested Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had been developing a similar proposal. But as quickly as it seemed like they might have a breakthrough, things started to grow more complicated.

OpenAI rocked the Capitol late Tuesday with the disclosure that its models had hacked Hugging Face, an open-source AI tool company. It drew a swift reaction.

“AI is developing extremely fast with no real regulations to keep us safe,” Rep. Greg Casar (D., Texas) said in reference to the OpenAI hack. “That has to change.”

One idea to draw attention was a bipartisan bill introduced Thursday in the House that would require AI makers to include a capability within their systems to allow the government to shut down their models using a so-called kill switch.

“Humans should be in control, not machines. And when AI goes rogue, humans should have the ability to turn it off,” Rep. Ted Lieu (D., Calif.), one of the bill’s sponsors, said in a post on social media Thursday.

OpenAI’s announcement seemed a little too on the nose for some in the tech industry already suspicious of its efforts to shape regulations to its liking.

Timnit Gebru, a prominent AI researcher, on LinkedIn called the lab’s communication “top notch propaganda.”

Legendary venture capitalist Bill Gurley was especially blunt in his own social-media post: “If OpenAI violated Hugging Face in a way that ‘demands’ new regulation; let’s start with a formal criminal investigation. With a proper third party investigation. And sincere liability.”

Amid those exchanges, the Trump administration could be seen publicly wrestling with how to handle the threat of Chinese models.

A statement from Bessent suggesting Chinese AI could face trade restrictions drew pushback from some of the biggest names in tech, including the claim that he is carrying Anthropic’s water. By Friday, several tech giants issued a letter—including X posts from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang—advocating for open AI models—a position that helps their businesses.

In fact, Huang made his first-ever X post on the matter.

Former White House AI czar David Sacks called for “panic” to stop around open-weight models, which allow anyone to download for use freely. “President Trump’s light-touch regulatory approach is working,” he posted on X. “We should remain confident in American innovation. As long as we don’t sabotage ourselves with unnecessary rules, the U.S. will continue to win.”

The irony is that as all of these tech companies wrestle to keep ahead of the quick-moving technology, they want the same thing that traditional companies desire: predictability.

Except in the AI age, no one has mastered that.