While exploring the diet app Noom recently, I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to be losing weight or healing my inner child. The program encourages you to banish “thought distortions” such as labeling foods “good” or “bad.” It assures you that slipups don’t mean failure, and nudges you to practice “joyful movement.” For the first week, all Noom asks you to do is “simply believe.”

And if this psychological approach fails, there’s always Ozempic.

Noom and the dieting stalwart WeightWatchers have both recently added services that will allow their customers to obtain Ozempic and other blockbuster new GLP-1 obesity drugs, such as Wegovy and Mounjaro. This spring, Noom launched Noom Med, which pairs its behavior-change program with prescriptions for various weight-loss drugs, the GLP-1s among them. Noom Med will connect its users with doctors who prescribe the drugs—though it won’t cover their often-gargantuan monthly cost. And WeightWatchers recently acquired Sequence, an online provider of the obesity drugs. People who sign up get a free WeightWatchers membership thrown in.

[Read: The latest diet trend is not dieting]

The move marks the latest reinvention of the diet industry—an acknowledgment that, for some people, joyful movement will never be enough, counting calories is insufficient, and drugs like Ozempic can be a crucial tool in achieving good health.

It also reflects the diet world’s awkward, enduring reality: Many obese people do want to lose weight, but the desire to be slimmer has become a little gauche. We are supposed to love our body, even as we fight like hell to reshape it. To Adrienne Bitar, a Cornell historian of the diet industry, this turn shows that although the weight-loss world has periodically dabbled in fuzzy concepts like “wellness,” “at the end of the day, most people just really want to lose weight.” Why not let them?

Americans go on yo-yo diets, but we also have a yo-yo relationship to dieting. For the past century or so, the weight-loss industry has bounced between moralizing, shaming, and tepid body positivity, depending on the sentiment of the times. Early eating reformers, such as the cracker namesake Sylvester Graham, thought that eating better could literally make a person better, more virtuous. Gluttony, Graham and others believed, led to sins like violence and masturbation, as Susan Yager describes in her book The Hundred Year Diet. “Treat your stomach like a well-governed child,” Graham advised.

During World War I, eating less was considered patriotic, a way of freeing up precious caloric resources for American troops fighting abroad. Later, doctors and psychologists came to the (wrong) conclusion that overweight people were lazy, and society adjudicated heaviness a “disgrace,” in the words of Lulu Hunt Peters, an early diet-book author. Dieting organizations ruthlessly shamed people into losing weight. In the early ’50s, one such “support” group held public weigh-ins and forced members who’d gained weight to stand in a “pig line,” where they would sing a song that included the lyric “We are plump little pigs who ate too much, fat, fat, fat.”

WeightWatchers began in the 1960s, when a housewife named Jean Nidetch invited six friends to her house to talk about their weight struggles. Nidetch eventually lost 72 pounds, and she established group support as a pillar of her new program. Still, she remained preoccupied with the “weight” part of WeightWatchers, urging members to carry photos of their former, heavier selves. Yager quotes her as saying, “I pray that I’ll never forget where I came from.”

But in recent years, dieting has gone the way of the Livestrong bracelet. Magazines stopped using phrases such as bikini body on their covers. Lean Cuisine offered a browser extension that blocked the word diet from web pages. A Dove commercial reminded everyone that size-10 women use soap. It used to be moral to diet; now it was moral to not diet. “Americans are just simply not dieting anymore,” a Nestle USA executive told one news outlet in 2016.

In 2018, WeightWatchers dropped “weight,” literally, and rebranded itself as WW, with a new focus on “wellness.” The company stopped requiring members to have a weight-loss goal, and cut “before and after” photos from its ads. Its expanded set of goals for subscribers included “developing a positive mindset.” At the time, then-CEO Mindy Grossman said, “The world doesn’t need another diet,” and “Healthy is the new skinny.”

Even so, WeightWatchers and other diet programs worked by modifying behavior, with the goal, spoken or otherwise, of losing weight. (The company now goes by both names.) Noom has a strong focus on psychology; the app includes many articles about stress triggers, mindless eating, and “behavior chains.” “You are not your thoughts, but the observer of your thoughts,” the app told me at one point. It also, however, encourages users to weigh in every day, log their food, and stick to a daily calorie goal. And even as it de-emphasized “weight,” WeightWatchers still offered workout plans and its “points” system of tracking food’s nutritional value. Meetings were renamed “workshops,” but they still happened.

GLP-1s work much better than any of these strategies; they take whatever behavioral modification you’re doing and supercharge it. Being aware of the concept of mindless eating is one thing, but with a GLP-1 you won’t be as tempted to mindlessly eat. The GLP-1 drug Mounjaro can help people lose 22.5 percent of their body weight—approaching the amount someone would lose with bariatric surgery. (And people overwhelmingly prefer the medications to surgery.) With Wegovy, it’s 15 percent—still a life-changing number for the 42 percent of Americans who are obese. Compare that with diet and exercise, which generally lead to less than 5 percent weight loss, according to Scott Kahan, the director of the National Center for Weight and Wellness, or 7 percent if you add in a guided program like Noom. Some people’s bodies cling to extra fat; research has shown that when obese people begin an intense exercise program, their resting metabolic rate declines—making it even harder to lose weight. Obese people have often tried everything, and “then these drugs come along … like, go for it, man,” Lara Dugas, an associate professor at Loyola University Chicago and an author of that study, told me. “You take that help.”

[Read: Goodbye, Ozempic]

The advent of these drugs raises the question of whether there’s any point for obese people to frantically diet and exercise with no end in sight. “The behavioral approach to weight loss has been under pressure for a few years now,” says Alex Fuhrman, an analyst at Craig-Hallum Capital Group who covers WeightWatchers. These companies, seeing the upsurge of Ozempic, want “a horse in the race themselves.”

Both WeightWatchers and Noom seem to be acknowledging that diet and exercise alone—the mainstays of their programs in the recent past—just don’t work for some people. Executives from the organizations told me they see obesity as a chronic medical condition that sometimes requires ongoing pharmaceutical treatment. “Way back in the ’60s and ’70s, our thinking was people were bad; they ate too much. They don’t exercise, they develop obesity, and then everything else goes haywire,” Noom’s chief medical officer, Linda Anegawa, told me. “We now have learned that, actually, there are certain individuals who, for example, are genetically predisposed to have insulin resistance.” This can lead to abnormal fat storage and a dysregulated appetite—which can be helped with GLP-1s.

To WeightWatchers CEO Sima Sistani, the drugs might be a solution for obese people who couldn’t lose weight on the program, or who kept regaining it. “There are people who joined this program and lapsed from our program because it didn’t work for them,” Sistani told me. “And we have to be honest about that. And we now know better. So we should do better.”

To qualify for GLP-1s through either Noom Med or Sequence, a person has to be obese, with a BMI higher than 30, or overweight with a qualifying health condition, such as diabetes. Customers are screened by doctors to ensure that they meet the criteria. Sequence costs $99 a month, and Noom Med costs about $120, but neither rate includes the cost of the drugs, which can top $1,000 a month without insurance.

To my surprise, weight-loss doctors told me that this merging of diet apps and injectable pharmaceuticals could be a good thing. Kahan cautions that the drugs don’t work well for many people. But services like Noom Med may help obese people who live in remote areas or can’t reach a specialist. “We’ve increased the ranks of obesity-medicine doctors, but still, the majority of Americans don’t have access to one,” he said. “Done well, these virtual-care programs could potentially be extremely valuable.”

Though medications like Ozempic and Wegovy help people feel fuller and think about food less, the person taking them does have to consume fewer calories in order to lose weight. And that’s where a program such as Noom or WeightWatchers can be helpful. Something like the Noom app, which includes quizzes about which foods are healthiest (grapes or raisins? It’s grapes), may allow people on GLP-1s to maintain a lower weight in perpetuity. What leads to the most dramatic weight loss is a combination of obesity drugs and healthier habits. And dramatic weight loss is, after all, a goal for many people.

At one point, Sistani used the phrase weight health, and I asked her whether “Healthy is the new skinny” was still the company’s ethos. “I think the word diet and diet culture and where it went wrong was a preoccupation with thinness,” Sistani said. She appreciates the concept of body positivity, she told me. But she also seemed clear-eyed about obesity’s downsides: that it shortens a person’s life span, for example, and increases the risk of cancer and other maladies. “Within that framework is still the opportunity to talk about well-being, and How do I live? How do I achieve longevity? How do I have a strong, healthy life? Your weight is going to be a part of that.”

The yo-yo has snapped back, and we’ve conceded that dieting people don’t want to be moral, patriotic, or shamed. They just want to lose weight. That desire has always been value-neutral. But now it’s more attainable.

Americans’ shopping habits have made us reliant on delivery workers—and helped UPS’s business boom. Now UPS workers are threatening to strike to get a piece of that success.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

When will the Southwest become unlivable? Learn a foreign language before it’s too late. The Republican lab-leak circus makes one important point.

Five of the most beautiful words to see in my inbox are Your package is coming today, courtesy of UPS. The missive means that something I ordered online—recently: three tie-dyed shirts in different colors, 100 personalized matchbooks for a party—is on its way, and that a classic brown truck will be rolling down my street soon. Like many Americans, I depend on the United Parcel Service and its reliable service, and I welcome digital updates about the status of my stuff.

Lately, I have been thinking more about the human dimension of package delivery, too, and about the hundreds of thousands of workers who make up UPS. Amazon has conditioned many of us to expect speedy, free delivery, and as a result, all package companies are facing intense competitive pressures. As the only union-represented major players among private companies in the delivery game, UPS workers are fighting to make strides for their cohort.

Come August, hundreds of thousands of UPS workers could walk off the job: 97 percent of UPS’s Teamsters have voted to authorize a strike if the union can’t come to an agreement with management by the time their current contract expires, on July 31. The two sides can still align on a contract in the next few weeks. But the possibility of a strike is real—and it would have major repercussions for the workers, the company, and the economy writ large. “UPS is one of the largest players in the delivery business. The nature of a strike would be to shut it down entirely,” Alex Colvin, the dean of the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell, told me.

Even as Amazon, FedEx, and DHL have competed with UPS for curb space and market share in recent years, UPS’s business has boomed. Americans’ online-shopping habits have helped the company’s revenue skyrocket: In 2022, according to company earnings, UPS took in more than $100 billion for the first time. The company’s more than 300,000 union workers, represented by the Teamsters through the largest private-sector union agreement in the country, want a slice of that success. And they are ready to walk out to try to get it. “UPS is so clutch for so many other businesses,” Suresh Naidu, an economics professor at Columbia, told me, so any disruptions could have “a multiplier effect.”

The Teamsters have said that 95 percent of the issues in their negotiations are "out of the way." A major sticking point now regards the fate of part-time workers, who represent much of the unit. The union is working to get better pay for them. Unlike full-time drivers, who can make about $40 an hour, the part-timers—many of whom are package handlers—make an average of $20 an hour, a company spokesperson told me. Asked about the unresolved issues at the negotiating table, the spokesperson for UPS said, “We’re focused on economic issues, especially pay for part-time workers.” He also noted that part-time workers are eligible to receive a pension and health insurance with no premium.

Over the Fourth of July weekend, negotiations broke down. Now each side is blaming the other. A spokesperson for the Teamsters told me that two days ago, there were no more bargaining sessions scheduled.

UPS has had a productive relationship with the Teamsters for nearly 100 years, and as the company grew, so did its unionized workforce. The company’s workers have gone on strike before, most recently in 1997, in what was then the largest American labor action in decades. At the time, 185,000 workers picketed for 15 days and ultimately declared victory. A lot has changed since then—including what customers expect. Colvin said that while the last UPS strike was certainly disruptive, “I would expect [a strike] to have a bigger impact today across the country.”

This strong union history makes UPS both an outlier in the current delivery landscape and a leader when it comes to pay and benefits. Seventy percent of UPS’s workers in the U.S. are represented by unions (that includes the Teamsters, as well as other unions for employees such as machinists and pilots). Amazon, which started delivering its own packages after shipping delays in the 2013 holiday season, is largely not unionized—though its structure may make it vulnerable to labor action at key locations. Gig workers, who are largely independent contractors, are playing a greater role in package delivery, too.

Saying that workers are ready to go on strike can help the Teamsters gain leverage at the bargaining table. But it’s not the only tool the union has at its disposal. Colvin told me that because the union is negotiating a master contract for workers across the country, it has more bargaining leverage than it would in a series of smaller local contracts: UPS’s integrated, national delivery system is part of what makes it a great company, he said, but also means that it’s reliant on its wide network of workers. The tight labor market gives these workers further leverage, because UPS may struggle to find replacement workers during a strike, Naidu told me.

The outcome of these negotiations could have an effect on other workers in the industry, too, especially those  at other companies, like Amazon, who might be looking to unionize with the Teamsters. Colvin told me that a positive outcome for the UPS workers would “send a strong message to workers organizing at places like Amazon about union representation.”

American workers have lost a lot of ground in recent decades. As the country’s workforce has ballooned, its number of union workers has not kept pace. But workers, including many young people, are excited about unions right now. It’s hard to measure that energy beyond anecdotes, and it may take years for union density to rebuild. But public perception of unions is as positive as it’s been since the 1960s, Colvin told me, and the outcome of UPS’s negotiations may shape that further. Strikes have been happening and looming across industries, including in Hollywood and at Starbucks.

Americans’ reliance on fast shipping can be tough for workers: Many have to complete their delivery routes in extreme heat (at UPS last month, the union and the company came to a tentative agreement on new heat-safety measures that included adding air-conditioning to new trucks and fans to existing ones).. But our dependence on shipping may also give workers leverage at UPS. We need them. That’s great for the company, for the most part, and it could turn out to be great for the workers, too.

Related:

Surprise! You work for Amazon. If 15-minute-delivery apps sound too good to be true, that’s because they are. Today’s News The Secret Service wrapped its investigation into a small bag of cocaine found at the White House. The agency was unable to identify a suspect. Ukraine was not able to secure a timeline for membership to NATO, but received long-term assistance pledges from the United States and other G-7 countries. Multiple suspected tornadoes touched down in the Chicago area. Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf rounds up a second batch of reader responses to the Supreme Court’s affirmative-action decision.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid

By Jonathan Haidt

What would it have been like to live in Babel in the days after its destruction? … Let’s hold that dramatic image in our minds: people wandering amid the ruins, unable to communicate, condemned to mutual incomprehension.

The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Four ways to make grief more bearable The “Israel model” won’t work for Ukraine. 18 ideas, arguments, and practical tips to help you navigate the heat Culture Break

Watch. Joy Ride (out in theaters now) is part of a new crop of films reviving R-rated raunch at the theaters and upending tropes about women in filthy romps.

Listen. The AI doomers are trying to scare us. In a new episode of Radio Atlantic, Hanna Rosin talks to The Atlantic’s executive editor, Adrienne LaFrance, and staff writer Charlie Warzel about what should really concern us.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I recently learned some new information that led me to feel that a mea culpa is in order: To my surprise, apparently Taylor Swift did sign a sponsorship agreement with FTX! A couple of weeks ago in the Daily, I included in my P.S. the nugget that Taylor Swift had reportedly turned down the opportunity to partner with FTX, the now-bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange. This anecdote was widely reported after the lawyer Adam Moskowitz said as much on a podcast.

But last week, The New York Times reported a new twist: The tale turned out to be apocryphal. Moskowitz told the Times that he actually had no inside information about the talks. In reality, Swift’s team did sign an FTX agreement, and it was Sam Bankman-Fried’s team that pulled out. I maintain that Swift ended up dodging a decentralized bullet—just not for the reasons I thought.

— Lora

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

When I was born, my parents planted a tree for me—a corkscrew willow—alongside a stream that cut through the yard of our home in Ithaca, New York. That tree, once a sapling, grew to 30 feet tall. I remember climbing up the trunk at 8 years old and then sliding down its gangly limbs, trying to avoid a plunge into the rocky stream. Later, in my 30s, I witnessed a slow war of attrition between the tree and the brook as the streambed ate away at the bank where the corkscrew willow had set down its roots.

Memory is fickle. It defines who we are and who we think we are. It helps us create coherent narratives of our incoherent lives. And then our memories fade. I retain other, painful memories of my childhood and of my mother. But as she got old and I got older, I realized that some memories need to be squeezed, like oranges, until only the love remains.

Last summer, I drove from my home in Vermont to visit my parents at their retirement community in Ithaca. They had both lived there for years, but had recently moved to separate rooms. Both of them suffered from dementia; I didn’t know if they ever spoke to each other anymore. I hadn’t seen them in a year, and I wasn’t entirely looking forward to it.

My mom, then 92, had progressively lost most of her memory over the previous half decade. At the beginning, there was an upside to her dementia. She became less anxious, expressing less dismay about my taking a plane, for example. As time outpaced her memory, she no longer recalled the 2015 death of her oldest son. Eventually, she grew into a part-time fantasist, innocently inventing a past—such as her graduation from Cornell University—that had never occurred.

When I caught up with her that late-summer afternoon in the memory-care unit’s cafeteria, she was dining by herself. At that stage, she slept more than 20 hours a day, so I was fortunate to find her awake. Unexpectedly, her brown hair was rising straight up, resembling that of a cartoon character who had stuck her finger in an electrical socket. Her expression looked pinched, almost contorted. In earlier years at the retirement home, she had pitied the memory-care residents.

As I sat down, my mom asked me where I’d come from and, hearing of the six-hour drive from Vermont, marveled at how far I had traveled.

“Which neighborhood do you live in here?” she asked. “Owasco, Cayuga, or Seneca?”

It dawned on me that she thought I was someone else. My mother was making conversation with me as if I, 60 and still working as a professor, were a fellow retiree.

Like a boxer, I started adjusting my approach to the discussion. Our shared past wasn’t going to make it to the table. She was having a rough day, and so was I.

[Jeffrey Ruoff: Between Not Wanting to Live and Not Wanting to Die]

In a simultaneous tug-of-war with the dining staff, my mom called out numerous times for her dessert, a bowl of vanilla ice cream. A caregiver tried to coax her into eating more of her omelet. My mother became insistent about dessert. After several rounds, they agreed that she would have one more mouthful of egg. When the server turned away, she spat the food back onto her plate. Shouts of “Ice cream!” again filled the cafeteria.

Suddenly, my mom turned to me and blurted out, “Where are your parents?”

I had no reply. It was a question one might ask of a child—a lost child, one whose parents are missing.

My mom possessed a curdling scream that reverberated throughout our childhood home. The very memory of it still chills me. And her threat—“Just wait until your father gets home!”—led to thrashings my dad didn’t even know the rationale for. Whipping us with a belt or another object was just one of his fatherly duties.

One day in the fall of 1962, my mom took me and my oldest brother down to Stewart Park, on the southern end of Cayuga Lake. He was 8 years and I was 7 months old. Comfortably tucked inside my stroller, I was fast asleep as early-autumn leaves fell. My mother told my brother that she was going on a quick errand—code for a trip to the ladies’ room—and instructed him to keep an eye on me.

Once she was out of sight, he wandered away and climbed a weeping-willow tree. When my mom returned, the carriage and I were missing.

After scrambling frantically for a dime, she called the police from a nearby payphone. Nobody blamed my brother, because he was only 8. No one faulted my mom for absent parenting. Abductions are pretty rare in Ithaca, and it was a different time.

Several hours later, the police spied an elderly woman pushing my stroller. Apparently, the police told my parents, she had no children of her own and held no greater ambitions for me than a stroll in the park. Charges were not filed.

I was too young to recall this incident myself, but “the caper of Stewart Park” was told and retold by my family over the years, at the dining-room table or when one of us wandered too far from my mom at the grocery store. Gradually, the story attained the stickiness of memory.

I now possess vivid, seemingly firsthand impressions of that fall day. As a joke, my older brothers embellished the story, claiming that the lady had swapped me with another baby. This twist worked for me because I already felt like the family’s odd one out.

I visited my father on that same trip last year. He recalled my name, but our exchange circled around one question—“Where do you live?”—raised and answered many times. It was kind of him to ask. I didn’t know if he understood that his wife of 68 years was moving into the final stage of her life.

It took time to forget a lifetime.

Once her bowl of ice cream arrived, my mom, ignoring me, picked it up and walked back to her room across the hall, quickly shutting the door behind her. Uncertain of what to do, I followed her into the room, where the seven Christmas stockings she had made by hand when we were kids hung from the walls.

She ate only a few spoonfuls of the ice cream, placed the dish on her side table, and then climbed into bed, fully dressed. She looked at me with some consternation and announced that she was going to sleep. I approached to kiss her goodbye, but as I put my hand on her arm, she looked wary of the stranger in her bedroom. Not wanting to unnerve either of us any longer, I backed away and left.

I’m becoming forgetful too. Time is not on my side. Stories slink away before I have the chance to share them. Family and friends recall my work-related trips or even my past relationships better than I do. I write things down: “buy milk”; “make appt w/ neurologist for cognitive eval.” I have outlived my corkscrew willow. In its 40s, the tree collapsed as the ground underneath surrendered to the flowing stream. I am my mother’s son.

A couple of months after my trip to Ithaca, my mom had a stroke. She was taken by helicopter to the hospital, where she was operated on to relieve a blood clot in her brain.

During my visit there, my mom, tucked into a mottled gray-green hospital gown, couldn’t be awakened. But her monitoring machines were quiet—no beeping—and the atmosphere was peaceful. I sat and silently read Don Quixote—“There is no memory that time does not erase.”

Soon it became clear that my mom would not recover. She had trouble speaking and swallowing. A permanent feeding tube would have to be installed. Physical therapy would be challenging at her age. She had signed a “do not resuscitate” order, and with her quality of life so compromised, my brothers and I decided to pursue hospice care. She returned to the assisted-living facility. From then on, she consumed only ice chips.

My mom slept most of this time but had moments of clarity while awake. One morning, she popped out of sleep and was especially alert. She was unable to speak, but the look in her eyes suggested that she recognized both me and the brother I was with. We removed our masks so she could see us more easily. Underneath, I wore a COVID-style salt-and-pepper beard, the newness of which lit up her face.

“I forgot how to shave,” I told her.

My mom laughed. Like a comedian connecting with his audience, I felt a rush that she understood—that there was still a mother-son relationship. Among the snarl of tubes and wires, I found her hand.

A few days later, one of my brothers showed her a 1970s studio portrait of the family—the five boys and our dad in corduroy suits, she in her finest dress with a corsage—which she grabbed and pressed to her chest, saying, “That’s all of them!”

She had answered her own query, “Where are your parents?” There she was. There I was.

As my mom’s health declined, her pain relieved by medication, she became unresponsive. As she lay dying, my brother played her Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème, featuring Luciano Pavarotti, her favorite singer. We drafted her obituary.

While my mom was still in hospice, I went on a long-anticipated vacation to visit close friends in Italy. After hiking in the Alps, we returned to Milan. As we were gathered around their dining table, my brother texted, “Just got the call. Mom died around 2:30 p.m.”

I cried. My Italian friends, whom I’ve known for 41 years, were stuck between their desire to comfort me and their inability to comprehend why I was with them instead of with her. For the family-centric Italians, I had violated a taboo. We stared in silence at the osso buco.

For whom should I have acted differently? For my mother? For me? For you?

Until my own past escapes me, here is what I’ll remember. I lost and found my mom. From her laughter, and our laughter together, I knew that my mom loved me, I knew that she knew that I loved her, and, perhaps most important, I knew that I knew that I loved her.