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Here's what's on the menu today:
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The Atlantic
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Ross Anderson
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For the first time in half a century, four astronauts left Earth's orbit bound for the moon, and most Americans barely noticed. Andersen reports from the crowds gathered on a Florida bridge to watch the Artemis II launch, capturing the strange dissonance of a genuinely historic event that feels like a rerun. The mission won't land anyone on the moon, the rocket is already obsolete, and Trump's chaotic geopolitics have made the old Apollo-era dream of a unified humanity look naive. The crowd cheered anyway.
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The New York Times
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Jeneen Interlandi
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Forty-three current and former CDC employees describe what happened after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took over the Department of Health and Human Services. Mass firings, vaccine recommendations changed without scientific review, a gunman's attack on headquarters that Trump never condemned, a director fired for refusing to rubber-stamp policy changes, researchers walking out en masse as colleagues saluted them. The agency that once eliminated measles in the U.S. is now presiding over its largest outbreak since 2000.
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The New Yorker
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Charles Bethea
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From a $3,000 weekend in the Virginia woods to a father-son boot camp next door to a state prison, Bethea embeds with the camps promising to transform ordinary men into something harder and better. What he finds is more complicated than the marketing: veterans crying in mud pits, a widower carrying guilt over an infant daughter, a man admitting he can't be intimate with his wife. The alpha-male industry is cashing in on real pain, and occasionally, despite itself, doing something useful with it.
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Frank Lloyd Wright believed that ordinary Americans deserved to live surrounded by beauty, and he spent 70 years proving it could be done. Deming traces the arc from the Prairie houses to Fallingwater, through the Taliesin murders, three marriages, and the quasi-monastic Fellowship he ran for decades. The essay pushes back against both hagiography and easy condemnation, arguing that Wright's contradictions, his ego, his leaky roofs, his cult of personality, are inseparable from the democratic vision that made the buildings matter.
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How One Wellness Brand Is Helping America Sleep Better
You know the importance of sleep, but actually getting enough is easier said than done. One wellness brand decided to study the problem and whether CBD could help.
CBD users have long reported feeling calmer and sleeping better, whether taking the compound by itself or with related hemp-derived compounds like CBN and THC. But rumor isn’t research, so CBDistillery conducted two sleep studies: a 2021 study into CBD and CBN, and a 2023 study with technology app Releaf into CBD, CBN and THC.
Study participants who took CBD and CBN reported falling asleep easier and sleeping an hour longer per night, on average. Study participants who took THC as well as CBD and CBN reported improved quality of sleep and waking up more refreshed the next morning.
