James' World 2

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Arguing a point has never changed my mind. As a philosopher, that’s a brazen thing to say. It’s pig-headed, closed-minded, and stubborn. But, it’s also very human. Of course, I’ve changed my beliefs over the years. I would have to have been an especially enlightened 10-year-old to have been right about everything from the get-go, talking in Confucian aphorisms over a bowl of cereal.

What I mean is that I have never changed my mind in the heated throes of a point-scoring debate. I’ve never paused midsentence to say, “Oh, yeah, you’re right” or “How could I have been so wrong?” I get too riled up. I feel my heart race and my blood starts to flow. I’m a philosophical bull seeing red.

It turns out that I’m not alone. While the supposed “backfire effect” — the idea that people tend to double-down on false beliefs when someone tries to correct them — is almost certainly exaggerated, it’s fair to say that who, when, and how someone says something are almost always more important than what they say. Our beliefs are formed adjacent to “the facts” but rarely depend on them.

So, what are we to do about those who hold radical beliefs? How can we help people who are ideologically extreme in a way that doesn’t involve locking them away or putting them on a watch list?

This is what I spoke to the political neuroscientist Leor Zmigrod about in our Mini Philosophy interview, where she explains that there are traditionally two “deradicalization” techniques. One is often the “official” program of many countries. But for Zmigrod, the other works better.

The moderate way

One of the most common approaches to deradicalization involves diluting a radical belief in steps. It’s a technique used in Saudi Arabia’s Munasaha (“counselling”) program and Western “EXIT” programs, beginning with Norway in 1997.

It works by getting the person talking — usually to someone they already trust, and, crucially, someone from inside their own world. “If it’s a religious fanaticism, bring in a more moderate preacher,” Zmigrod said. “If it’s a political fanaticism, you bring in someone they might consider as part of their group, but on a less extreme version of that doctrine.” It has to be someone who speaks the language, shares the references, and can’t be locked out as “the enemy.” These moderates then, gently and over many conversations, try to “pull [the extremist] away from the edges and towards a more mainstream, more peaceful view.”

EXIT programs like this can be effective. But they don’t fix the person’s underlying rigidity. They don’t turn a closed mind into an open one or break down the barricades. The idea that there’s an “us” and a “them” is part of the problem. Arguably, it’s the only problem. Any person who sees their ideology as pure or righteous and the enemy as corrupted or unrighteous can be motivated to do terrible things.

So, this technique helps with the immediate issue — violent, criminal, murderous extremism. But it doesn’t resolve the underlying cognitive habits.

The better way

If softening the edges isn’t enough, what’s the alternative? According to Zmigrod, the most effective move has nothing to do with the content of ideology at all.

“One of the best ways is actually to have them in contact with the people that they’ve dehumanized,” she told me. “Because once you have contact between groups and between individuals, you suddenly remember the other person’s humanity.”

In other words, you put the person in the same room as the very people they’ve been taught to hate. You get them to talk to the “enemy.” You get them working towards some shared task.

“Getting people who’ve been on opposite sides to do something creative together,” she said, “is a really effective way of reducing people’s prejudices against each other. It works better than just tackling the other person’s ideologies.”

Rigid ideologies will often feature a caricature of the enemy. The immigrant. The believer. The lefty. The other. It’s a stereotype that feeds on disconnect and lives only in the imagination.

The best way to banish the terrible, invented fears of the mind is to get outside. Meet reality. When you do, you often find it’s hard to hold on to your caricatures. Actual human beings are funnier, kinder, and more complicated than the invented image ever portrayed them.

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Credit: William Holbrook Beard / Public Domain / Artvee

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Hmmmm … Thanks to the idiotic Trump Administration, we are about to enter another nuclear arms race!

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When President Dwight D. Eisenhower went to the United Nations in 1953 to offer countries nuclear technology and know-how in return for a promise to use them peacefully, the policy went by a memorable shorthand, “Atoms for Peace.” Seven decades later, it could go by a less idealistic name: nuclear hedging.

President Trump’s civil nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia, announced this week, reflects a volatile world in which America’s allies are seeking nuclear capabilities to hedge against predatory neighbors, harmful energy disruptions and the shrinking security umbrella of the United States. It also reflects a White House, hungry for lucrative deals for American companies, that is willing to loosen nonproliferation standards for a favored partner in a dangerous region.

Saudi Arabia’s deal could eventually allow it to enrich fuel for nuclear reactors and limit the sites that international inspectors could visit to ensure its peaceful intent. Both of those concessions, unheard-of in recent American civil nuclear agreements, will feed fears that the Saudis could pivot to a nuclear weapons program.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto Saudi leader, has made no secret of that possibility. If Iran obtains a nuclear bomb, he has warned, the Saudis will follow suit.

Mr. Trump sought to allay such concerns on Thursday, declaring that the agreement was limited to civil uses of nuclear technology. But given the checkered history of such deals, and the lack of specifics about this one, his comments were unlikely to quell concerns about a new global arms race.

“We’re back in an era of nuclear hedging,” said Vipin Narang, a professor of nuclear security and political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “You’ve got a lot of nervous countries facing a deteriorating security situation who are unsure they can rely on their formal or informal protectors.”

“We’re going to see a cascade of states looking for the capacity to pursue a military program” that could yield a weapon, said Professor Narang, who worked on nuclear policy in the Pentagon during the Biden administration.

Gary Samore, a professor of politics at Brandeis University who advised on arms control negotiations in the Obama and Clinton administrations, said those countries were sometimes referred to as “friendly proliferators.”

Not all, or even any, of them will ultimately pursue a bomb, the experts said. The last country to enter the club of nuclear-armed states was North Korea in 2006. But it does suggest a risky new period, in which the global nuclear market could become more freewheeling and less rulebound. Nuclear buyers, rattled by the shift in the global posture of the United States, are likely to make greater demands, while rival sellers, like Russia and China, could seize on the Saudi precedent to grant them.

“It’s very connected to the damage Trump has done to credibility of the U.S. as a guarantor of security,” Mr. Samore said.

In countries such as Germany and Poland, South Korea and Japan, governments without nuclear weapons are debating the need to pursue them. South Korea, menaced by the nuclear-armed North, has initiated a plan to develop a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines, with the support of the United States.

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A French nuclear submarine. France has expanded its nuclear deterrence to cover some allies as the United States has pulled back on European security. Credit…Pool photo by Yoan Valat

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Elementary school students might memorize their times tables for single-digit numbers, but memorization won’t cut it when the teacher asks for three-digit multiplication. This requires an algorithm: students are taught to stack one number atop another and multiply each digit of the bottom number by each digit of the top one. For millennia, mathematicians believed this to be the fastest multiplication method, until a 23-year-old made a shocking discovery in 1960, which led to a mystery that remains unsolved to this day.

This mystery is critical to anyone who partakes in the digital world because multiplication is a foundational operation for computers. Encryption, robotics, artificial intelligence, audio processing, and pretty much everything else we task silicon chips with involves multiplication, sometimes of huge numbers many times over. At this scale, even a simple operation becomes a bottleneck, and any extra efficiency has global economic consequences.

To understand the nature of that bottleneck, observe how the grade-school algorithm handles growth. When you multiply two two-digit numbers, you perform four single-digit multiplications. If you bump that up to a three-digit pair of numbers, you do nine single-digit multiplications. The workload scales with the square of the number of digits (n², where n is the number of digits in the numbers being multiplied). When analyzing an algorithm like this, computer scientists don’t measure speed in seconds, because that depends on the hardware.

Instead, they count the computational steps. They also ignore minor bookkeeping details, such as the time it takes to carry a one when multiplying. When numbers get large enough, those lower-level operations cease to matter, entirely eclipsed by the more intensive operations involved. Computer scientists denote the number of steps using what’s called Big O notation: the grade-school algorithm, for example, takes O(n²) steps, which is read as “order n squared.” Broadly speaking, if the numbers are twice as long, the algorithm takes four times as much computational work to execute. If the numbers are a thousand times as long, it takes a million (1,000 squared) times as much work.

Since antiquity, mathematicians have suspected that O(n²) was an inherent speed limit for multiplication. The celebrated Soviet math professor Andrey Kolmogorov posed the O(n²) speed limit as a formal conjecture and mentioned it during a 1960 seminar at Moscow State University. Whenever mathematicians propose a conjecture, they are planting a flag of sorts and waiting for others to either prove or disprove them. It took just a week for Anatoly Karatsuba, then a 23-year-old student in the audience, to return and prove Kolmogorov wrong. Kolmogorov was stunned. The result was published in the prestigious Proceedings of the USSR Academy of Sciences, but amusingly, Karatsuba didn’t write it. Kolmogorov wrote the formal proof himself and submitted it for publication with Karatsuba listed as the lead author. Karatsuba only found out about the paper when he received the reprints in the mail.

Karatsuba’s genius was realizing that you can trade expensive, time-consuming multiplications for cheap, fast additions. Adding two n-digit numbers takes only O(n) time because it entails a single sweep through the digits rather than a complete sweep through the top number for every digit of the bottom number, as in multiplication. To see how Karatsuba traded multiplication for addition, let’s look at a small example. The method would be overly complicated for such a simple problem, but it saves a meaningful amount of time when numbers get larger.

First, we split both numbers into their tens and ones digits. Assign a = 1 and b = 2 (for 12), and c = 3 and d = 4 (for 34). Algebraically, we can rewrite 12 × 34 as (10a + b) × (10c + d).

Expanding this gives 100(ac) + 10(ad + bc) + (bd).

To solve the equation in the traditional way, one must perform four distinct multiplications: ac = 3, ad = 4, bc = 6 and bd = 8, which is exactly what the grade-school stacking method entails. (Note that we don’t count the multiplications by 100 or by 10 because those only involve plopping zeroes at the ends of numbers.) Karatsuba noticed a brilliant algebraic trick. Once you compute the first and last terms, ac and bd, you can figure out that pesky middle term (ad + bc) with one more multiplication step rather than two. You don’t need to calculate ad and bc individually:

(ad + bc) = ((a + b) × (c + d)) – ac – bd,

Or with our concrete numbers:

((1 × 4) + (2 × 3)) = ((1 + 2) × (3 + 4)) – 3 – 8 = 10.

Pause to notice the weirdness in the equation above. It suggests that to multiply 12 × 34 quickly, you should add the 1 and the 2 in 12 and the 3 and the 4 in 34. This is hardly a natural thing to do. No wonder it took so long for someone to figure it out. It ends up reducing the workload, however: because we’ve already computed ac and bd, the right-hand side only contains one more multiplication, plus some additions and subtractions.

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The sun rises behind the skyline of midtown Manhattan and the Empire State Building in New York City on March 10, 2026, as seen from Union City, New Jersey. Gary Hershorn—Getty Images

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Hmmmm … The Trump administration lies constantly!

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President Trump went to war with Iran in part to force compliance with two longstanding American demands: Tehran must stop enriching nuclear fuel for at least two decades, and it must allow international inspectors to go anywhere and see anything to verify the country is not producing a bomb.

On Wednesday, Mr. Trump took the reverse approach to Saudi Arabia, its close ally in the region. To seal a deal for Westinghouse and other American companies to seize a big piece of the business in building two nuclear reactors on Saudi territory — and more to come — it opened the door to allowing the kingdom to begin enriching its own nuclear fuel after two years.

And it gave in to the kingdom’s demand that it not have to abide by an inspection agreement that applies to more than 140 other countries. Those rules, the Saudis said, are just too intrusive.

Now Mr. Trump will have to make the case to Congress, and to allies throughout the Middle East, that in loosening the nuclear standards for one close ally, he is not ushering in a new age of proliferation, especially in a region of the world already on fire. If the daily missile exchanges with Iran finally give way to resumed negotiations, there is no question Iran will seize on the concessions made to Riyadh and insist on the same.

Already on Wednesday, administration officials were arguing that there was nothing to worry about, and that the United States will be so engaged in Saudi Arabia’s nuclear future that there is no way the kingdom could divert its nuclear fuel and know-how to a secret bomb program.

They may prove right. But nuclear history is littered with examples of countries that pledged to obey the rules, and surreptitiously raced for a bomb.

Iran’s first research reactor was provided by the United States to the shah of Iran, complete with weapons-grade uranium — technology that fell into the hands of the mullahs who took over the country in 1979. India’s first nuclear test used plutonium from a heavy-water reactor that had been a gift from the Canadian government in the 1950s. Pakistan stole its centrifuge designs from a European firm that hired A.Q. Khan, now celebrated as the father of the Pakistani bomb. Taiwan and South Korea, stalwart American allies, had secret bomb programs of their own until American intelligence agencies discovered them and quashed the efforts.

Mr. Trump has many reasons to solidify the American relationship with Saudi Arabia these days. He can argue that if the United States does not provide the country with its best reactors and nuclear technology, Russia or China will. At a time when tensions have flared with the Saudis — for a while Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman prohibited the United States from launching attacks on Iran from U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia — anything that draws the Saudis deeper into the American technology stack makes sense to the White House.

“Rest assured, these agreements uphold the highest standards of nuclear safety and nonproliferation,” Chris Wright, the secretary of energy, said in a statement on Wednesday announcing the deal, “while relying on the world’s best nuclear technology and scientists, designed right here in the United States.”

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President Trump with Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, at the White House last year. Credit…Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times

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New, never-before-seen images provide a glimpse into the secretive lives of a clouded leopard species found in the dense rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra

The Sunda clouded leopard stalks the dense rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra in search of bearded pigs and mouse deer to prey on. Its tawny coat, accented by dark, cloud-shaped spots, blends into its surroundings. Beyond such basics, however, much remains unknown about these elusive big cats, sometimes called “ghosts of the forest,” including how long they live and how they spend their time.

But a new set of images and data, captured between 2007 and 2023 in three reserves in the state of Sabah in Malaysian Borneo, reveal a never-before-seen glimpse into their secretive lives.

A recent study in Biotropica analyzing the 15 years of photos and other data observed 52 adult individuals, including 30 males and 22 females, helping to answer some of the questions about the species.

What really surprised the researchers was “how difficult it is to get females in front of the lens,” says the study’s lead author Katharina Kasper, a biologist with the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research.

That’s because females, it turns out, spend much of their time in the trees—much more time than males do. “Their physique hints at this, as their bodies are usually more slender and they have fluffier tails that help them balance,” Kasper says of the females. “Resident males, by contrast, spend much time circling and re-marking their territories [with urine], hence we capture them more often.”

The study, which was conducted by Kasper, as well as researchers from the global wild cat conservation organization Panthera and the Sabah Forestry Department, observed a single female over many years and determined that these cats may live up to 8.5 years in the wild—a new record for the species. (Although there are not enough members of this species in zoos to have solid numbers, a close relative, the mainland clouded leopard, lived to 20 years of age in a zoo, which aligns with the general trend of captive cats living about twice as long as wild ones.)

Kasper says the study has already helped the group tweak its research efforts to look at what factors influence the disturbance and survival of Sunda clouded leopards. In turn, this will help guide conservation efforts for this species, which is classified as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature—one step up from endangered.

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A clouded leopard species

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NEED TO KNOW

• Six men have been indicted for the alleged murder of influencer Ariela “La Langosta” last summer

• The 33-year-old content creator — whose full name was Ariela Mejia-Polanco — was found shot dead in her car on the Cross County Parkway in Westchester County, N.Y., on the morning of Aug. 17, 2025

• The six members of Bad Boys 7, a subset of the Trinitarios street gang, have all been charged with attempted carjacking resulting in death and could face the maximum sentence of life in prison or the death penalty if convicted

Six men have been indicted for the alleged murder of influencer Ariela “La Langosta” last summer.

The 33-year-old content creator — whose full name is Ariela Mejia-Polanco — was found shot dead in her car on the Cross County Parkway in Westchester County, N.Y., on the morning of Aug. 17, 2025.

The United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York announced on Monday, July 20, that it had charged 11 members of Bad Boys 7, a subset of the Trinitarios street gang, for a series of violent crimes between September 2023 and September 2025. Six of the 11 were charged for the alleged murder of Mejia-Polanco.

“Either the highways of this county belong to the criminal gangs, or they belong to the public,” said Westchester County DA Susan Cacace in a press release. “We can never allow our streets to be overtaken by organized criminal activity, and I thank all of our interagency partners for working in tandem to ensure this remains a durable promise.”According to the attorney’s office, six members of BB7 allegedly “attempted to commit an armed carjacking” of Mejia-Polanco’s vehicle as she drove from Manhattan to Westchester on Aug. 17, shooting and killing her during a high-speed pursuit.

The six men — Justin Martha, Michael Mercedes Marte, Jose Peralta Gomez, Manuel Abad Rivas, Wilfren Carbuccia and Jelin Portes Guaba — have all been charged with attempted carjacking resulting in death and could face the maximum sentence of life in prison or the death penalty if convicted.

The internet personality, who maintained a following of over 556,000 on Instagram, was known on the platform for her fashion and modeling content, in addition to her public friendship with rapper Tekashi 6ix9ine. She was survived by two young daughters.

Following the news of Mejia-Polanco’s death, 6ix9ine shared a series of posts to his Instagram Stories, remembering the late internet personality as the “queen of New York.”Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.

“NY won’t ever be the same,” he added. “I loved you.”

Ikon New York — a Manhattan restaurant and lounge that previously confirmed to PEOPLE that she had been “at work” at the establishment the night before her death — also shared a tribute for the internet personality on Instagram, writing on the platform, “Your joy, your humility, and the way you treated everyone with so much care always made you stand out.”

Thank you for giving so much love and support to our home, which also became yours,” the restaurant continued. “To Ariela’s family, we are here for anything you need. We still can’t believe it… you were our smile, our happiness. We love you, and we will miss you forever.”

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Ariela “La Langosta”Credit: Ariiela La Langosta/Instagram

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Is it possible that our esteemed 47th “Great Businessman”, “get coal miner’s jobs back” President, is a batshit crazy scam artist?  Are there bats in the belfry at the second white house, Mar-A-Largo?  Can we get a definitive answer, so already great America won’t  be the laughing stock of the world?

 I recently watched the Armageddon  movie and the USA lead the charge to solve the problem.   I want to know where do we go from here? This crazy man won’t shut up, look at what happened in the ‘House of Represenatives’. Do they want to gain power for themselves while destroying America. if we arn’t very careful  America will suffer a ‘Red Dawn’. check out the movie which could be our furture!

Beware America!

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Hmmmm … Really! This administration discarded a vibrant, well-thought-out plan!

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U.S. lawmakers and Israeli officials have expressed opposition to such a plan, to be announced Wednesday, fearing that the kingdom could use a civilian nuclear project to develop nuclear weapons. 

The Trump administration plans to announce Wednesday that it has reached a broad nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia that could lead to the country enriching its own fuel for nuclear reactors, U.S. officials said.

The accord is intended to further bind the United States with the Saudi government as the war with Iran strains the relationship. The Trump administration, according to officials, estimates it will provide billions of dollars for the U.S. nuclear industry — starting with Westinghouse, which designs many of the reactors sold abroad.

The Trump administration plans to formally sign and announce the agreement with the Saudis on Wednesday, said two U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy. It would announce the details to Congress soon afterward.

Although the agreement likely would have support among many Republicans, some U.S. lawmakers from both parties along with Israeli officials have expressed opposition to such a plan, fearing that the kingdom could use a civilian nuclear project to eventually develop nuclear weapons.

The accord has been under discussion for years, and during the Biden administration it was envisioned as part of a broader deal that would include Saudi diplomatic recognition of Israel. But after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel by Hamas, that prospect receded. President Trump separated the proposal for U.S.-Saudi civilian nuclear cooperation from any demand that Saudi Arabia recognize Israel.

The agreement will require review by Congress, which under the Atomic Energy Act has the power to vote a resolution of disapproval. But as a practical matter, the agreement would likely pass, because Congress would have to assemble a veto-proof majority to override Mr. Trump’s initiative.

Nonetheless, debate over the accord is likely to be fierce. To get the deal done with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the country’s 40-year-old de facto leader, Mr. Trump had to agree to terms that may limit international inspectors from going to any sites in the country that they think could be a pathway to diverting fuel to weapons projects.
And he agreed that, after a joint study with Saudi Arabia on the economics of producing nuclear fuel, the Saudis may be allowed to enrich uranium or reprocess plutonium on their soil.

The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday night that Mr. Trump had approved the agreement.

Prince Mohammed has vowed he would build nuclear weapons if Iran does so, even insisting in one interview he would do so “without a doubt.”

Iran has had a nuclear program that it says is intended for civilian use, though it has enriched uranium to near weapons-grade following Mr. Trump’s withdrawal in 2018 from an Obama-era nuclear deal. Mr. Trump then ordered U.S. forces to join with Israel to attack Iran’s nuclear sites in June 2025, and to start a war against Iran this February.

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President Trump shaking hands with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud at the White House last November. Credit…Kenny Holston/The New York Times

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More than one in 10 Americans takes a GLP-1 medication for weight loss. As more people take a GLP-1, or glucagonlike peptide 1, receptor agonist, such as Wegovy, so, too, do more older adults—and those numbers are set to skyrocket.

Last week the Trump administration launched the Medicare GLP-1 Bridge program, a new initiative that would set the cost of three weight-loss medications— Wegovy, the KwikPen version of Zepbound (tirzepatide) and Foundayo (orforglipron)—at $50 a month. That may be welcome news for the estimated 38.9 percent of adults aged 60 and up in the U.S. who are living with obesity. But it could also supercharge an ongoing and risky experiment in growing old on weight-loss drugs.

For years, clinicians have had few good options to safely treat obesity in older adults. But while GLP-1s, long used to treat diabetes, are now approved for weight loss, the evidence supporting their use in the age-60-and-older population is limited. Someone in their 70s may benefit as much from weight loss as a person in their 30s but may respond very differently to these drugs’ side effects; we simply don’t have enough evidence yet to make informed conclusions, experts advise.

“Eligibility doesn’t mean benefit automatically,” says Ruchi Gaba, an associate professor of endocrinology at Baylor College of Medicine. “We have to individualize.” And within the 60-and-older group, there is huge variety: a healthy, active 68-year-old with obesity and sleep apnea is a very different patient than an 88-year-old who’s frail, has poor appetite and is at risk of falls, Gaba says.

Older adults are underrepresented in the clinical trials for GLP-1 drugs. Despite the high prevalence of obesity among this age group, only about one in 10 participants in early GLP-1 trials was age 65 or older, says Alissa Chen, a primary care physician and a researcher at the Yale School of Medicine, who specializes in obesity. Older adults are more heterogeneous than people in younger age groups in terms of chronic conditions and multiple medications, Chen says, which can pose challenges with both prescriptions and side effects.

“We need to be more critical about who we’re starting on these medications and thinking about all those chronic conditions and thinking about those medicines, thinking about the benefit there is to be gained,” she says. “We have to think about ‘What does weight loss get us in that age group?’”

GLP-1 drugs work by mimicking the glucagonlike peptide 1 hormone, which the body naturally releases after eating to signal satiety. The hormone stimulates insulin secretion, suppresses glucagon—preventing the hormone from causing the liver to release too much sugar into the bloodstream —and slows gastric emptying. These effects create a prolonged feeling of fullness that drives weight loss.

GLP-1s don’t tend to interact with other drugs directly, but their effects can create cascading risks, Gaba says. Slow gastric emptying can worsen constipation—a common complaint in older adults. It can also cause nausea and vomiting, which can lead to dehydration. In turn, dehydration can cause orthostatic hypotension and falls in people who also take medications for blood pressure. Diabetic patients taking a sulfonylurea, a class of medications that lower blood sugar, have heightened hypoglycemia risk on GLP-1s, Gaba says.

Lean muscle loss is another well-known side effect of GLP-1s. That could make older adults more at risk of serious injury if they fall. At the same time, older patients may respond to medications differently than their younger counterparts because of their body composition and reduced liver and kidney function.

Functional ability, rather than a number on a scale, should be the determining factor in whether to prescribe a GLP-1 or not, Chen says. “Success for a senior might mean being able to walk longer distances without knee pain or getting on the floor to play with their grandchildren,” she says. “If a senior loses weight but also loses significant muscle mass, is the treatment really a success?”

GLP-1s are meant for indefinite use—otherwise the weight returns. The new Trump administration Medicare program is temporary; it currently runs for just 18 months. But once someone starts taking one of these drugs, stopping is far from ideal, Chen says. “These are medications that should be taken for the long term.”

If a person is already eating well and exercising, Chen says, she’s often reticent to prescribe a drug that will make them lose more weight. “We know exercise is very good at keeping people healthy and helping them live long and improving cardiovascular fitness,” she says.

The purpose of weight loss is to do that same thing. But if a patient is already making choices that improve those things, “it’s questionable to me how much more weight loss will help them,” Chen adds.

For patients with other underlying conditions, there’s evidence that GLP1s can improve healthspan, which in turn may affect lifespan. In those older than age 65, however, lifestyle interventions remain the first line of obesity management.

Although GLP-1 drugs are often used as long-term maintenance therapy because stopping them commonly leads to weight regain, there is still limited data on their effects over a full lifespan in older adults, especially frail older adults. Analyses to date show that, in older adults, GLP-1 drugs are associated with fewer cardiovascular events and, in some studies, lower all-cause mortality. But there is no direct evidence that they extend lifespan.

Chen’s research shows that side effects can affect as many as 40 percent of people taking weight-loss drugs. Older adults tend to abandon treatment because of these effects. And when they do, they regain lost weight, which can worsen any underlying health conditions such as cardiovascular disease or type 2 diabetes.

Resistance exercises and higher protein intake could ensure some of that regained weight is in the form of muscle, not fat. But “if you’re not doing those things, you could be having higher adiposity after than you were before you ever started the medication,” Chen says.

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