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NASA finally has a new boss. After a year of back and forth, the U.S. Senate on Wednesday confirmed Jared Isaacman, a tech billionaire who has paid to go to space twice, to head the space agency.

His confirmation comes at a pivotal moment for NASA, which is under mounting pressure from both budget cuts and technical hurdles that together could scuttle its most ambitious missions. On the chopping block are an effort to return samples of Martian rock that have already been collected to Earth for study and the possible delay of NASA’s bid to return U.S. astronauts to the moon before the decade’s end.

Isaacman, age 42, was originally nominated to lead the agency in December 2024. President Donald Trump withdrew him from the running in May over apparent conflicts of interest—the tech entrepreneur had previously donated to Democratic lawmakers and associated with Trump’s out-of-favor former adviser, Elon Musk. But Trump renominated Isaacman in November.

Now that Isaacman has the job, his attention is likely to be fixed on getting NASA back on track to putting astronauts on the moon in 2028. U.S. lawmakers have told him repeatedly throughout his confirmation process that beating China to the moon is the top priority; Beijing plans to land its astronauts on the lunar surface by 2030.

Space scientists and former astronauts told Scientific American that they hoped Isaacman, having gone to space twice himself and participated in the first private spacewalk, would reinvigorate NASA after years of delays and setbacks to its moon and Mars exploration program. Isaacman seems committed to lighting a fire under NASA’s efforts to stay one step ahead of China. What remains far less clear, however, is how he will fare against the Trump administration’s push to shrink the agency’s budget, space race or no space race.

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Photo by Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post via Getty Images

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California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) led the mockery of the president’s comments ― which were heavy on baseless boasts and light on much else ― in a series of posts.

In one, the potential Democratic 2028 presidential candidate summed up “Trump tonight” with one word, “Me,” which he repeated many times.

Trump tonight:

Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me…

— Governor Gavin Newsom (@CAgovernor) December 18, 2025

Newson, whose said his online trolling of Trump in recent months is intended to shine a light on the president’s most ridiculous and divisive antics, also suggested the whole speech “could have been an email.”

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Jeffrey Epstein was a “terrific guy” and “a lot of fun to be with.” He and Donald J. Trump also had “no formal relationship.” They went to a lot of the same parties. But they “did not socialize together.” They were never really friends, just business acquaintances. Or “there was no relationship” at all. “I was not a fan of his, that I can tell you.”

For nearly a quarter-century, Mr. Trump and his representatives have offered shifting, often contradictory accounts of his relationship with Mr. Epstein, one sporadically captured by society photographers and in news clips before they fell out sometime in the mid-2000s. Closely scrutinized since Mr. Epstein died in a Manhattan jail cell during Mr. Trump’s first term, their friendship — and questions about what the president knew of Mr. Epstein’s abuses — now threatens to consume his second one.

The controversy has shaken Mr. Trump’s iron hold on his base like no other. Loyal supporters have demanded to know why the administration has not moved more quickly to unearth the convicted sex offender’s remaining secrets. In November, after resisting months of pressure to release more Epstein-related documents held by the federal government — and facing an almost unheard-of revolt among Republican lawmakers — Mr. Trump reversed himself, signing legislation that requires their release beginning this week.

Mr. Epstein had a talent for acquiring powerful friends, some of whom have become ensnared in the continuing scrutiny of his crimes. For months, Mr. Trump has labored furiously to shift himself out of the frame, dismissing questions about his relationship with Mr. Epstein as a “Democrat hoax” and imploring his supporters to ignore the matter entirely. An examination of their history by The New York Times has found no evidence implicating Mr. Trump in Mr. Epstein’s abuse and trafficking of minors.

But the two men’s relationship was both far closer and far more complex than the president now admits.

Beginning in the late 1980s, the two men forged a bond intense enough to leave others who knew them with the impression that they were each other’s closest friend, The Times found. Mr. Epstein was then a little-known financier who cultivated mystery around the scope and source of his self-made wealth. Mr. Trump, six years older, was a real estate scion who relished publicity and exaggerated his successes. Neither man drank or did drugs. They pursued women in a game of ego and dominance. Female bodies were currency.

Over nearly two decades, as Mr. Trump cut a swath through the party circuits of New York and Florida, Mr. Epstein was perhaps his most reliable wingman. During the 1990s and early 2000s, they prowled Mr. Epstein’s Manhattan mansion and Mr. Trump’s Plaza Hotel, at least one of Mr. Trump’s Atlantic City casinos, and both their Palm Beach homes. They visited each other’s offices and spoke often by phone, according to other former Epstein employees and women who spent time in his homes.

With other men, Mr. Epstein might discuss tax shelters, international affairs, or neuroscience. With Mr. Trump, he talked about sex.

“I just think it was trophy hunting,” Stacey Williams, who rose to fame as a star of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit editions during the 1990s, said in an interview with The Times. In social media posts and interviews with news outlets in recent years, Ms. Williams has described how Mr. Trump groped her in 1993 at Trump Tower while Mr. Epstein — whom she was then dating — watched. “I think Jeffrey liked that he had this Sports Illustrated model who had this name, and that Trump was pursuing me,” she said. Mr. Trump has denied her account.

To shed light on their friendship, The Times interviewed more than 30 former Epstein employees, victims of his abuse, and others who crossed paths with the two men over the years. The Times also obtained new documents that illuminate their relationship and scoured court documents and other public records.

Many of the people interviewed by The Times asked to share their stories anonymously, saying they feared for their safety at the hands of supporters of Mr. Trump, a president who has deployed the might of the federal government to target and punish his political opponents. Some Epstein victims have already received death threats for demanding a full accounting of the government’s investigations, according to a statement released by more than two dozen of them last month.

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More than four million U.S. children under age 19 lacked health insurance in 2024. The uninsured rate peaked at 6.1 percent—the highest level in the past decade, according to a recent analysis by the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families, a health policy research organization. That marks a nearly 20 percent increase in the number of uninsured children nationwide since 2022.

Being uninsured creates gaps in medical care. And these gaps don’t just interfere with routine pediatric care; they also disrupt treatments for serious illnesses such as pediatric cancers, for which early detection is often a matter of life and death.

“When you dn’t have insurance, you’re likely to delay care,” says Kimberly Johnson, a pediatric cancer epidemiologist and a professor at Washington University in St. Louis. “In the case of cancer, that can delay diagnosis, and the cancer can become more advanced, which then is associated with a worse prognosis.”

The spike in the number of uninsured children is a direct upshot of Americans’ fragmented health care system. This patchwork of public insurance, private insurance and other employer plans creates a shaky environment for families whose income or job status changes, says Derek Brown, a health economist and a professor at Washington University in St. Louis. These life shifts may force parents to repeatedly lose and re-enroll in insurance, threatening the health of their children.

Many uninsured children are eligible for Medicaid (the government insurance program for people with limited income) or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (a joint federal-state program that provides matching federal funds for states to help insure children) but aren’t enrolled, says Joan Alker, a research professor at the Georgetown McCourt School of Public Policy. People may not know they are eligible, and individuals who are undocumented may fear deportation. “Especially in today’s climate, there are families where the child is a citizen and the parent is an immigrant, and they’re fearful of interacting with government,” Alker says. But such fears can only explain a small proportion of those who are uninsured, she notes.

More children are losing insurance because of bureaucratic red tape. In a process informally referred to as “Medicaid unwinding,” states have resumed Medicaid eligibility checks after a period of continuous coverage during the COVID pandemic. Some people who were eligible previously have been disenrolled not as a result of disqualification but simply because of bureaucratic mistakes.

These gaps in insurance coverage will result in more children getting sicker and dying. A 2020 national study in the International Journal of Epidemiology of more than 58,000 children and adolescents under age 20 with cancer found that those who were uninsured faced a sharply higher risk of dying within five years than those with private insurance across most cancer types. Eleven percent of the uninsured study participants received no cancer-directed treatment compared with 6.7 percent of those who were privately insured. Children and adolescents without insurance also had 31 percent higher odds of being diagnosed at a later stage of cancer and were 32 percent more likely to die in the five years after diagnosis than those with private insurance—living about two months less on average.

In the study, those on Medicaid also had a higher risk of dying than those on private insurance, suggesting that other differences between the groups could explain the former’s higher mortality rate, such as family income level.

Because different types of cancer grow differently, however, insurance gaps don’t harm every child in the same way. For certain types, the earlier they were found, the higher survival rates tended to be. For example, in tumors of the reproductive organs, the study found that about 40 percent of the survival difference between the privately insured and the uninsured was explained by catching the disease at a later stage, whereas for brain and spinal tumors, timing of diagnosis made little difference no matter what insurance they had—likely because the latter type of cancer tends to be less treatable in general.

Even if kids have insurance some of the time, going on and off Medicaid can jeopardize cancer treatment. In a 2024 study in Pediatric Blood & Cancer that looked at more than 30,000 children and adolescents under age 20 who were diagnosed with cancer between 2006 and 2013, Johnson, Brown and their colleagues found that those who were intermittently insured by Medicaid during the assessment period had double the odds of being diagnosed at a later stage when cancer had metastasized and faced an increased risk of cancer death compared with their continuously insured and non-Medicaid-insured peers—most of whom had private insurance.

The five-year survival gap was widest among children and adolescents with soft-tissue cancers and liver tumors, for whom losing Medicaid coverage could interrupt lifesaving treatment; nerve-cell cancers were the only cancers that didn’t follow this trend. People with other types of cancers, such as leukemia, a form of blood cancer, also benefited from continuous insurance. Leukemia symptoms are often urgent enough to send children to the emergency room, leading to faster diagnosis, unlike many quiet-progressing solid tumors, whose symptoms parents may not recognize as urgent.

“As a country, we’re long overdue to move to a system where no baby leaves the hospital without [insurance] coverage, just the same way they shouldn’t leave the hospital without a car seat,” Alker says. The Trump administration is phasing out a policy that has allowed some states to cover children continuously until age six despite any family’s changes in circumstances.

The situation isn’t hopeless, experts say. Paperwork errors could be fixed, and legislators could make new guarantees to stop children from losing insurance. In addition, hospital and clinical social workers should help people stay connected with Medicaid enrollment supports and guide them through some of common pitfalls and challenges, Brown says. For caregivers of children with cancer, it’s especially important to make sure each state’s Medicaid enrollment process is accessible, which requires clear websites and adequate staffing, he says.

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Eve Lu

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You may not have heard of orthorexia, but you’ve probably seen it. It’s an eating disorder that’s characterized as an obsession with only consuming “healthy” foods—and it’s on the rise, says Sadi Fox, PhD, a licensed psychotherapist who specializes in eating disorders.

We all have that friend who talks a little too much about things like “clean eating,” or that random food group they’re entirely avoiding in pursuit of better health. Think: carbs, sugar, gluten (provided they don’t have an allergy). The problem? Orthorexia can result in nutritional deficiencies, mental health challenges, and social isolation. It can also be a “slippery slope” for other disordered behaviors, Fox says.

Still, the signs of orthorexia can be very difficult to identify. Since eating healthy is generally perceived as a good thing, people with orthorexia might be praised for their disorder, not know they have a problem, and not end up getting the help they need—which is the case for some patients who work with Fox. “A lot of people are just like, ‘Whoa, I didn’t even realize how deep [into my eating disorder] I was,’” she says.

When it comes to this sneaky mental health condition, signs and symptoms may be hard to spot. Here’s what experts want you to know about orthorexia.

Meet the experts: Sadi Fox, PhD, is a psychotherapist specializing in eating disorders at Flourish Psychology, a Brooklyn-based private psychotherapy practice. Kelli Rugless, PsyD, is a clinical psychologist and eating disorder specialist at the virtual talk therapy practice Flourish Psychology. Emily Van Eck, RD, is a dietitian and intuitive eating counselor at Emily Van Eck Nutrition.

What is orthorexia?

Put simply, orthorexia is when eating healthy goes from a goal to an obsession, skewing what “healthy” even means in the process.

With orthorexia, a person becomes so focused on avoiding foods they think are harmful that they end up depriving their body of the nutrition it needs, says Kelli Rugless, PsyD, a clinical psychologist and eating disorder specialist at the private therapy practice Flourish Psychology. It’s important to note that the foods people avoid aren’t always based on good, accurate information. People with orthorexia might make choices based on different approaches they see on social media, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s backed by science, says Fox.

In reality, if you ask a nutritionist, cutting out entire groups of foods, no matter what they are, can result in a pretty unhealthy diet. Because their diets can become so restrictive, people who are orthorexic might lack key nutrients, not get sufficient calories for normal bodily functions, and have digestive issues like constipation, says Emily Van Eck, RD, a nutritionist who works with patients with eating disorders.

It’s not officially recognized in the DSM-5 (the handbook for diagnosing mental disorders), but orthorexia is an eating disorder that has risen significantly over the past few years, according to the experts who treat it. Without formal diagnostic criteria, it’s challenging to determine exactly how many people in the U.S. struggle with orthorexia, per the National Eating Disorders Association—but prevalence varies across countries and populations, ranging from 6.9% in the Italian population to 88.7% in Brazil, per a 2021 review in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. Other studies suggest orthorexia might be more common in Instagram users (49% prevalence) nutrition students (72% prevalence), and populations that exercise (55% prevalence). Plus, athletes and endurance athletes (runners especially) have higher symptom severity when it comes to orthorexia, according to a 2023 study in Eating and Weight Disorders-Studies on Anorexia, Bulimia and Obesity.

Beyond the physical complications that come with orthorexia, the eating disorder is also associated with mental and emotional challenges, including dealing with shame, guilt, fear, and social isolation when it comes to food, says Rugless. “Their relationship with food becomes obsessive,” says Rugless. They might avoid social situations where they can’t control what they eat. Plus, the stress that comes with an eating disorder can ruin your quality of life, says Van Eck.

Compared to eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia, in which a person’s primary motivation might be to change the look of their body, orthorexia typically starts with the goal to eat the healthiest foods possible, says Rugless. This goal doesn’t happen in a vacuum, though. “It’s diet culture’s newest attack,” says Fox. Media and social media’s support of things like “clean eating,” different harmful dietary practices, and general health misinformation may contribute to fears about “toxic” foods and could be supporting this uptick in orthorexia, per a 2023 study in Nutrients. Basically, social media is playing a role in the increase of this eating disorder, which can have serious consequences on someone’s health.

Signs And Symptoms Of Orthorexia

How can you tell if someone is simply eating healthy or dealing with an eating disorder? Look for rigidity, says Rugless. If a friend is dividing foods into black and white categories (like “good” and “bad”) and cutting out entire food groups aside from allergies or religious and cultural traditions, that’s a sign they could be dealing with something deeper. They also might avoid certain restaurants, bring their own food, or refuse to eat altogether if they can’t access a food they’re okay with. They may also spend a lot of time researching food or spending money on health foods they can’t afford, adds Fox.

People who struggle with orthorexia tend to focus on not eating anything “harmful,” “damaging,” or “bad,” Rugless says. Instead, they consume foods they believe are “pure,” or “clean.”

People are a bit moralistic about it,” says Fox. If you have a friend who feels particularly judgy about food—or even about what you eat—that also might be a sign of an unhealthy relationship with food.

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President Donald Trump on Monday blamed Rob Reiner’s outspoken opposition to the president for the actor-director’s killing, delivering the unsubstantiated claim in a shocking post that seemed intent on decrying his opponents even in the face of a tragedy.

The statement, even for Trump, was a shocking comment that came as police were still investigating the deaths of the director and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, as an apparent homicide. The couple were found dead at their home Sunday in Los Angeles. Investigators believe they suffered stab wounds and the couple’s son Nick Reiner was in police custody early Monday.

Trump has a long track record of inflammatory remarks, but his comments in a social media post were a drastic departure from the role presidents typically play in offering a message of consolation or tribute after the death of a public figure. His message drew criticism even from conservatives and his supporters and laid bare Trump’s unwillingness to rise above political grievance in moments of crisis.

Trump, in a post on his social media network, said Reiner and his wife were killed “reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.”

He said Reiner “was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness.”

The president did not mention his personal connection to Reiner’s wife, who was a photographer. Peter Osnos, the original publisher of “The Art of the Deal,” confirmed Monday that Michele Singer took the cover image of Trump’s 1987 bestseller.

Kentucky Republican Rep. Thomas Massie, who has bucked much of his party’s lockstep agreement with the president, criticized Trump for the comment.

“Regardless of how you felt about Rob Reiner, this is inappropriate and disrespectful discourse about a man who was just brutally murdered,” Massie wrote in a post on X. “I guess my elected GOP colleagues, the VP, and White House staff will just ignore it because they’re afraid? I challenge anyone to defend it.”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican whom Trump branded a “traitor” for disagreeing with him, responded to Trump’s message by saying, “This is a family tragedy, not about politics or political enemies.”

Republican Reps. Mike Lawler of New York and Stephanie Bice of Oklahoma, who are not known for pushing back on the White House, also criticized Trump’s message.

Reiner — a director of beloved films like “The Princess Bride” and “When Harry Met Sally” — was one of the most active Democrats in the film industry and regularly campaigned on behalf of liberal causes and hosted fundraisers. He was a vocal critic of Trump, calling him in a 2017 interview with Variety “mentally unfit” to be president and “the single-most unqualified human being to ever assume the presidency of the United States.”

The White House, which shared the president’s post, did not respond to a message about the criticism it was receiving and calls for Trump to take it down.

Speaking at the White House to reporters later Monday, Trump doubled down on his criticism of Reiner when he was asked if he stood by his post. Using the third person, Trump said Reiner “was a deranged person as far as Trump is concerned.”

“I was not a fan of Rob Reiner at all, in any way shape or form,” Trump said. “I thought he was very bad for our country.”

The unsympathetic message was the latest example of Trump’s unsparing prism through which he views those he perceives as enemies.

He made retribution against political enemies a prime focus of his campaign for the White House last year. And he has in the past made light of violence when it’s befallen those on the other side of the political aisle.

When Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, was attacked by an intruder looking for the former House speaker at the family’s San Francisco home in 2022 and beaten over the head with a hammer, Trump later mocked the attack.

That’s despite his comments after the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk earlier this year. Trump said Kirk’s killing was “the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree.”

His administration then sought consequences for people who were critical of Kirk or even celebrated his killing.

Jenna Ellis, who was one of Trump’s lawyers and worked on his efforts in 2020 to overturn the results of the presidential election, pointed out Trump’s double standard and called his post “NOT the appropriate response.”

“The Right uniformly condemned political and celebratory responses to Charlie Kirk’s death. This is a horrible example from Trump (and surprising considering the two attempts on his own life) and should be condemned by everyone with any decency,” Ellis said in a post on X.

When Trump spoke at Kirk’s memorial service, he used his remarks to underline how he views his adversaries.

“I hate my opponent,” the president said.

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