My generation—which is to say, the pillbox generation—came of age during the 1990s. The number of adults who were taking five or more prescription drugs doubled in that decade; the use of medications for depression and cholesterol more than tripled. If pills had once been used from time to time to curb a headache or stifle an infection, now they were a daily ritual for tens of millions of Americans. Popping meds, whether by catapult or tweezers, became the norm.

Too loud.
Too loud.
Too loud.
If you were to scroll through my archive of texts with my children—from the start of the coronavirus pandemic, in 2020, to the end of last year—you would find that I sent 133 of these messages.
I discovered this a few weeks ago, sitting alone on the couch in my living room, when, on a whim, I searched for the phrase on my phone. My youngest daughter, age 19, has been the most frequent recipient of the text, though each of my three children appears in the archive.

Photographs by Maggie Shannon
In person, they did not seem quite real. Gathered on a blue carpet under bright lights, inside a $50 million Las Vegas venue that had been built just for them, the athletes of the Enhanced Games—colloquially known as the “doping Olympics”—looked like action figures. When they stood next to other people, the effect was different but no less uncanny; it was as if they’d been Photoshopped, blown up 25 percent compared with the rest of their species.

The Vatican, as one aphorism puts it, tends to “think in centuries.” But Pope Leo XIV seems intent on changing that, moving with remarkable speed to publish his first encyclical today, Magnifica Humanitas, “on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence.” Leo has managed to produce a major teaching document on AI while college students are still booing commencement speeches about how the technology will change the world.

Wheeling the old warriors
off the Honor Flight plane
with flags and banners,
people calling their names.
From Chosen to Kabul,
from Baghdad to Hue,
after all these years
today was their day.
Oh, the burden they carry,
I heard one woman say.
I wonder if our children
would serve today?
But not far off
another plane left,
with soldiers and sailors,
their solemn duty kept.
Nearby, a young wife,
two children at her side.
It’s the burden she carries
as the plane took flight.

For the past 18 months, Vladimir Putin’s efforts to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine have been led by a man with no diplomatic background or expertise. Kirill Dmitriev, a banker who is under sanctions for his role in financing the war, has been shuttling from Moscow to Florida to meet with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner in and around the exclusive island known as Billionaire Bunker.

Is America heading toward a national debt crisis? As an economic adviser to President Biden and an economist active in mainly Democratic policy circles since the late 1980s, I’ve spent most of my career dismissing arguments that any debt-ratio level signifies a “crisis.” I still think that’s true, even as our publicly held debt has reached 100 percent of our GDP. But I also now believe that if you’re not worried about this country’s fiscal outlook, you’re not paying enough attention.