James' World 2

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When Juli comes home after work, her husband doesn’t regale her with stories about his photography business the way he once did. Instead, he proudly shows her a pill container emptied of the 20 supplements and medications he takes every day. Rather than griping about traffic, he tells her about his walk. When they go out to a favorite Mexican restaurant, he might opt for a side salad instead of tortilla chips with his quesadilla. “He’s actually consuming green food, which is new,” says Juli, who asked to be identified by only her first name to protect her husband’s privacy.

Over the past year, Juli’s husband has agreed to change his daily habits in hopes of halting the steady progression of Alzheimer’s disease, which he was diagnosed with in December 2023 at age 62. Juli and her husband are both self-employed, and their insurance plans didn’t cover the positron-emission tomography scans for disease tracking that a neurologist prescribed, which would have cost thousands of dollars. So they decided to spend that money on a doctor who promises that diet and lifestyle changes can treat Alzheimer’s. He recommended a keto diet, along with light cardio exercise and strength training. He also prescribed a bevy of supplements, such as creatine, which Juli’s husband takes alongside the memantine and donepezil prescribed by his neurologist. Juli doesn’t expect the diet and daily walks to cure her husband, but she hopes the healthy lifestyle will help manage and even improve his condition. It feels like common sense. “You stop eating fried food, you move your butt, and you feel better,” she says.

Increasingly, evidence suggests that addressing health problems such as vision and hearing loss, stress, poor diet, diabetes, obesity, high cholesterol, and high blood pressure can help slow or even prevent Alzheimer’s symptoms. It’s a tantalizingly simple solution to a complicated condition that has proved difficult to treat. For families like Juli’s that have been left with a grim diagnosis and few options, lifestyle changes bring a much-needed sense of hope and agency. But researchers worry about overpromising on the efficacy of these changes, especially for people already experiencing dementia symptoms. Evidence around the importance of different diets, exercises, and activities—when to start them and which to prioritize—is mixed, and only in a few high-quality studies have researchers examined large, diverse groups of people. It’s a promising but nascent field of research, one that scientists worry gives patients dangerous and heartbreaking hope for a cure that doesn’t exist.

“There are a lot of claims,” says Miia Kivipelto, a dementia researcher at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. She worries about expensive but unproven regimens that promise to reverse cognitive decline, restore and protect the brain, or significantly improve cognition for people with early-stage Alzheimer’s or other dementias. “Of course, people want to have hope,” she says. But she cautions against making promises that can’t be upheld. “It’s risk reduction,” she says. “That’s maybe what we can promise.”

Kivipelto led the Finnish Geriatric Intervention Study to Prevent Cognitive Impairment and Disability (FINGER), a trial that enrolled more than 1,200 residents of Finland between the ages of 60 and 77. Results were published in 2017. They showed that after two years, participants who were given nutritional advice, exercise regimens, and brain-training games had improved their executive function, processing speeds, and complex memory by about 83, 150, and 40 percent, respectively, compared with those who didn’t take those measures. Kivipelto has continued to follow that initial FINGER cohort and found that several years after the initial trial, their health in general continues to be better than that of their counterparts. The participants had a lower risk of stroke, had fewer medical emergency room visits, and needed less inpatient care. Now Kivipelto is running World Wide FINGERS, a global network of studies investigating the same interventions in different countries and populations.

It’s not clear whether these interventions prevent disease onset or simply delay it.

 

Similarly encouraging data have come from the Systematic Multi-Domain Alzheimer Risk Reduction Trial (SMARRT), a two-year randomized, controlled study. Researchers tested the effect of treating modifiable risk factors such as uncontrolled hypertension, social isolation, and physical inactivity with more than 170 septuagenarians and octogenarians at high risk for dementia. Participants chose a few interventions to prioritize out of eight options, such as improved physical fitness or social connection. After two years, no matter which intervention people opted for, those who received individualized treatments had reduced risk factors for dementia and a 74 percent greater increase in cognition compared with their counterparts in the control group.

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Luisa Jung

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Bahjat Madi, 34, from the southern Gaza city of Rafah, has been in Belgium since 2022 and has been a resident since 2024. He is witnessing the fallout firsthand: Mr. Madi’s father is still in Gaza, he said, struggling to get out.

“I want to do anything for my father to be alive,” said Mr. Madi, who is bringing a court case to get his father’s visa application accepted remotely.

His father is seeking a humanitarian visa but is required to apply at the consulate in Jerusalem, which is all but impossible for someone trapped in Gaza. If he can get the visa, he might eventually be added to an evacuation list. It is a long shot and could take years.

“I want to talk to myself at night and say, ‘I do my best,’” Mr. Madi said. “But it’s not enough.”

For policymakers, the question is whether Europe will turn words of condemnation and concern into more powerful action. European public opinion has turned against the Israeli conduct of the war, but longstanding alliances and fraught political histories have kept nations like Germany and Italy from supporting major action.

“I haven’t seen any moment where such international momentum has built up in such a short time, so I think there’s a real opening,” said Kristina Kausch, deputy managing director for the German Marshall Fund South, a think tank focused on international relations. “But we will have to see what tangible commitments come, beyond the wording.”

“This is not only about Palestinians,” she added. “This is about whether the West, and Europe, can uphold international law and uphold multilateralism.”

Luxembourg announced last week that it would join Belgium, Britain, and a raft of other nations in recognizing a Palestinian state at the U.N. meeting in New York, a push spearheaded by President Emmanuel Macron of France that is meant to increase pressure on Israel. Last Tuesday, a United Nations commission investigating the war in Gaza said Israel was committing genocide against Palestinians, a topic poised to be prominent at the U.N. meeting. Israel calls such an accusation “distorted and false.”

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A rally in Brussels this month in support of Palestinians. European efforts to punish the Israeli government for its actions in Gaza have stalled amid opposition, notably from Germany.Credit…Marius Burgelman/Belga, via Agence France-Presse

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Since astronomers found the first planets outside our solar system in 1992 and the first planet around a sunlike star in 1995, scientists have sought the telltale glimmers, flickers, and wobbles that denote a distant world. Now, NASA has announced the number of confirmed exoplanets has cracked 6,000, reaching a total of 6,007.

The batch of 18 planets that bring us to this milestone are mostly rocky orbs between the size of Earth and Neptune—the most common type of planet found so far. Astronomers identified them with ground telescopes and NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which is currently orbiting Earth, and even by combing through data from the U.S. space agency’s Kepler space telescope, which hasn’t operated in seven years.

“Everywhere we look, we find planets,” says Jessie Christiansen, chief scientist of the NASA Exoplanets Institute at the California Institute of Technology. “Every time you turn on a new telescope and point it at stars, we find planets—and that’s amazing. That could have not been the case; it could have been that the solar system was a weird fluke.”

The first exoplanets were found mostly by the gravitational pull they exert on their host stars: that pull causes a star to wobble, and this movement can be observed visibly or (far more often) detected via a change in the wavelength of stellar light. With the Kepler mission’s launch in 2009, more and more exoplanets were discovered via the so-called transit method: a regular flicker in a star’s light that occurs when its planet happens to pass between it and a watching telescope. The TESS mission, which launched in 2018, surveys the entire sky for transiting exoplanets and brought the number up even higher: nearly half of the 1,000 exoplanets that have been confirmed since 2022 were spotted by TESS. Less commonly, planets can also be imaged directly (if they’re bright enough and orbit far enough from their stars) or detected through changes in how light curves around a star because of its planet’s gravity.

“For the last year, we’ve basically been rewriting our software under the hood to cope with thousands of planets coming in at once,” Christiansen says. She predicts that the tally will hit 10,000 planets within a few years—and that soon more finds will come from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission, which will release a batch of exoplanet data in 2026. NASA’s new Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which could launch as early as next year, is set to survey the entire sky for even more worlds, potentially bringing the total to 100,000 exoplanets within the next six to seven years, she estimates. “And that’s partly why we’re madly redesigning all of our software so that we can accommodate trying to jam in 100,000 planets into an archive that’s only held a few thousand until now,” Christiansen adds.

But discovering planets is not just a numbers game. At a certain point, scientists begin to care more about understanding planets than finding them—even as the database keeps growing. NASA’s current flagship observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope, doesn’t scan the sky for new planets; it follows up to try to glimpse evidence of particular planets’ atmospheres and compositions. And the major telescope NASA envisions after Roman, the Habitable Worlds Observatory, will search candidate planets for signs of life.

“We’re kind of evolving out of the stamp-collecting phase of exoplanets and into the physics phase,” Christiansen says. Researchers hope to learn about planet populations: How do they form? How do they evolve? How do they migrate? “When we have a big enough sample, you actually start to be able to identify the dominant physics that’s happening,” she says. You’re no longer just asking “what”; you’re asking “why”—“and that’s, for me, where it gets exciting.

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Hmmmm… Is the Gospel their Example?

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If you type “defense.gov” into a browser to check the status of America’s military might, you’ll be redirected to “war.gov.” The country’s ability to project force around the world is again under the control of the Department of War — sort of. The return to the old name was accomplished by presidential executive order and could be undone by the next White House resident. Until then, or unless a court nixes the change, the rebranding from “Defense” to “War” will continue at great expense. The Trump administration and its recent predecessors have done much of their work through decrees issued by chief executives who have little patience for the legislative process. On Sept. 5, President Trump ordered that “the Department of Defense and the Office of the Secretary of Defense may be referred to as the Department of War and the Office of the Secretary of War, respectively.” The Pentagon is now changing seals, signage, and letterhead, to comply. The odd “referred to” language in the order acknowledges that the Department of War and the Department of the Navy were rolled into the then-new Department of Defense by law in the late 1940s . It would take another act of Congress to revert to the old name. The president can’t undo legislation, but he can order executive branch employees to change the website and adopt a nickname.

Of course, the next president could undo all of that just as easily — and expensively.

President Trump did much the same when he insisted that he’s outlawed burning the American flag via executive order. “You burn a flag, you get one year in jail,” he claimed in the Oval Office.

But the president has little power to make laws — especially those that clash with First Amendment protections. And the U.S. Supreme Court has made it clear that burning the flag is a protected form of expression . So, the executive order really only specifies that, if “an instance of American Flag desecration may violate an applicable State or local law, such as open burning restrictions, disorderly conduct laws, or destruction of property laws,” local authorities should be notified so they can pursue a prosecution.

This administration issues a lot of executive orders. On Sept. 6, the White House boasted that “No president has signed 200 Executive Orders this quickly since President Franklin D. Roosevelt.”

That’s a familiar message. In 2021, NPR noted that “In his first two weeks in office, President Biden has signed nearly as many executive orders as Franklin Roosevelt signed in his entire first month.”

Before that, The Washington Post acknowledged then-President Barack Obama’s similar flurry of executive actions. Some “have the force of law — unless they are repealed by another president.”

How can a note from the president of a republic have the force of law? It’s because executive orders, memoranda, and other actions are basically memos from the boss to employees of the executive branch. Modern laws are usually written so vaguely that details are left to be filled in by the agencies responsible for enforcement. Those agencies lie within the executive branch, and the president can direct his employees to reinterpret statutes so that what was once considered perfectly legal is now interpreted as a crime or vice versa. On hot-button issues like guns or the environment, that means business as usual can become a felony by order of a new president. And then it can be perfectly legal again four years later, with no change in the law — only in how it’s interpreted according to presidential decree.

There’s a lot of power inherent in turning people into felons on a whim. And there are votes to be gained by promising new interpretations of old laws.

“The last three presidents in particular have strengthened the powers of the office through an array of strategies,” Harvard Law School’s Erin Peterson  wrote  in 2019. “One approach that attracts particular attention — because it allows a president to act unilaterally, rather than work closely with Congress — is the issuing of executive orders.”

But what is done with a stroke of the pen can often be undone just as easily. On March 14, President Trump issued an executive order rescinding 19 of his predecessor’s actions . “This is in addition to the nearly 80 executive actions President Trump rescinded on Day One,” the White House commented. Then-President Biden did the same during his presidency sandwiched by Trump’s terms. The arbitrary nature of executive actions and their vulnerability to reversal once bothered the current president.

“I don’t like executive orders,” Trump  told Face the Nation’s John Dickerson in 2015 when Barack Obama was in office. “That is not what the country was based on.” He added, “So now (President Obama) goes around signing executive orders all over the place, which at some point they are going to be rescinded or they’re going to be rescinded by the courts.”

Since then, though, President Trump has gained a taste for ruling by decree. That started during his first term but really took off during the second. Not that unilateral actions from on-high go unchallenged. So far, BallotPedia counts almost 40 executive orders, memoranda, and proclamations regarding trade and tariffs. Those are headed to the Supreme Court after lower courts found the president exceeded his authority. Trump’s deployment of National Guard Troops to Los Angeles was  described  by U.S. District Court Judge Charles Breyer as “a serious violation of the Posse Comitatus Act.”

Former President Joe Biden also got pushback from the courts — repeatedly, when it came to forgiving student loans . So did Obama before him when he tried to enact immigration policy on his own say-so. U.S. presidents sometimes seem to forget that their efforts to turn the country into an elective monarchy may be gaining traction but haven’t yet fully succeeded. The courts have been pretty good at reminding them about the facts of constitutional life.

It would be helpful if Congress would also remember that it has a role to play. Our lawmakers appear to have become so accustomed to being bypassed that they’ve forgotten their jobs involve more than fulminating in front of television cameras and calling each other names. Congress is almost vestigial.

Maybe lawmakers could weigh in on what to call our military establishment. If they decide one way or the other, they could save a lot of wasted stationery and spare the country a good amount of expense.

If that helps to revive the legislative branch so that it asserts its prerogatives, slaps down the White House, and starts writing laws that aren’t so subject to presidential interpretation, so much the better.

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President Donald Trump holds up a signed executive order requiring the Justice Department to investigate instances of flag burning, in the Oval Office of the White House, Monday, Aug. 25, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

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