2026-02-20 07:42:13
For more than a century, the size of the House of Representatives has been frozen at 435 seats; in that same period, the US population has tripled. This means that today, the average representative is responsible for more than 750,000 constituents. Scholars and politicians say this imbalance is why many Americans feel like Congress is disconnected from them.
So what if we…added more seats? That’s what Rep. Sean Casten (D-IL) is proposing in a new bill, because he believes it’s closer to what the country’s founders originally envisioned. While expanding Congress could make our ratio of voters to representatives smaller, it also raises a difficult question: Can a larger, more crowded legislature actually govern, or are we just adding more voices to the gridlock? Vox dives into the math, the history, and the potential future of a “bigger” American democracy.
Learn more about expanding the House of Representatives:
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This story was supported by a grant from Protect Democracy. Vox had full discretion over the content of this reporting.
2026-02-20 07:10:00
This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.
Welcome to The Logoff: As President Donald Trump forges ahead with his plans for a ballroom on the White House grounds, he’s stacking the deck in his favor.
What happened? On Thursday, the Commission of Fine Arts — one of two committees to have a say in the new construction — voted unanimously to approve Trump’s planned ballroom in place of the demolished East Wing. That vote comes after the committee added its newest member, Chamberlain Harris, just this morning; she is also a current White House aide and has no relevant architectural experience.
Next up is the National Capital Planning Commission, which could vote on the project early next month and is headed by Trump’s current White House staff secretary, Will Scharf.
What’s the context? In October, Trump suddenly demolished the historic East Wing of the White House. In its place, he plans to build a 90,000-square-foot ballroom, potentially dwarfing the 55,000-square-foot main residence of the White House (and substantially eclipsing the 15,000-square-foot East Wing). Construction has been ongoing at the site for months, but above-ground work has not yet begun.
Why does this matter? The ballroom is — for now — the most visible example of what the New York Times described Thursday as Trump’s “Pharaonic legacy-building” project, and the East Wing its biggest victim. That could change, though, as Trump eyes other projects across the area, including a potential 250-foot arch just across the Potomac River (about half again as high as Paris’s Arc de Triomphe); a to-be-determined renovation to the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, which Trump has attempted to brand with his own name; and a potential renovation to the golf course at East Potomac Park, which could obliterate both public park space and some of Washington, DC’s beloved and historic cherry trees.
Trump is also trying out another bit of redecorating: As of Thursday, a banner with his image now hangs from Justice Department headquarters in downtown Washington.
We only have a few days left of the Winter Olympics, but Vox’s premier unofficial Olympics pop-up newsletter is going to run (or ski, or skate) through the tape. Today’s fun fact, in honor of Alysa Liu winning gold in the women’s free skate — did you know there’s a group chat just for US Olympic gold medalists in figure skating? (Liu was already in it after winning gold in the team skate earlier in the month.)
Thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!
2026-02-20 06:15:39
Over the past few winters, where I live — in one of the country’s winter sport meccas — there have been a whole lot more people packing skins and stepping into the backcountry.
Trails once quiet, save for the sinuous whoosh of a lone ski line, are suddenly dotted with fresh tracks. Backcountry skiing — long a niche pursuit of hardcore alpinists and telemark nostalgists — has spilled into the mainstream.
And now, the world’s most elite athletes are bringing the culture to the grandest stage of all: Ski mountaineering — “skimo” — makes its Olympic debut at the 2026 Winter Games in Milan Cortina. It’s the first time in almost three decades that the Winter Olympics have added a new sport — one that grew up out of the same terrain that pulled so many of us away from ski lifts and into tree glades and untracked bowls.
At the Olympics, a select field of just 36 athletes — 18 men and 18 women — will compete today across three medal events: men’s sprint, women’s sprint, and a mixed-gender relay. Competitors will climb and descend steep alpine terrain on ultra-light gear that’s about as stripped down as a ski setup gets, racing up with “skins” on their skis and ripping down through technical passages in incredible, breathless bursts.
This surge in backcountry and skimo’s Olympic arrival feels like the pinnacle of an overlooked aspect of mountain culture that I’m intimately familiar with. But as more people fall for the draw of snow-covered landscapes and independent lines, climate change keeps chipping away at the very winters that make this lifestyle possible.
I first started skiing uphill six years ago, when many other people did — just as the pandemic hit. Obvious things were driving me away from traditional ski culture: the surprising cost of resort days and season passes, the drama of holiday weekend lift lines (or lift lines on any day, these days), and the soul-crushing traffic of traditional ski culture. Skiing had become, paradoxically, too crowded, too exclusive, and just had too much baggage for a lot of people.
Several years before that, I fell in love with cross-country skiing — let’s just say, the dorkier, clumsier version of touring in the woods. I discovered I could access some of the same hiking trails I loved in the warmer months, as well as snowed-over Forest Service access roads, and ski for miles and miles — often without seeing anyone — with my dogs and friends.
As I pushed into more variable terrain, I needed more capable equipment, and quickly found my way to backcountry skiing, too. And I’m not alone.
Across the US, backcountry skiing participation has soared. Industry data show that in the 2021–’22 winter season, participation in “alpine touring” — the technical discipline most synonymous with backcountry skiing — jumped impressively compared with previous years. Splitboarding, the snowboard equivalent, grew sharply as well. These gains were far stronger than growth in resort alpine skiing and snowboarding.
Backcountry’s popularity has been fueled by a complex mix: more affordable and capable gear, a growing culture of skill-sharing and safety education, and a collective craving for space and serenity that resorts can’t always provide. Trails and faces that once felt exclusive are now familiar to a generation that grew up with Instagram and started exploring their own hills during pandemic lockdowns.
But for all that momentum, it’s worth tackling the obvious question: What exactly is backcountry skiing — and what is skimo?
At its simplest, backcountry skiing is just skiing outside of controlled resort boundaries. There are no lifts, no groomed runs, and no snowmaking cannons. What draws people out of bounds is the promise of untouched snow, dynamic terrain, and a drive to “earn your turns” — climbing up so you can hit those wild, unserviced downhill runs.
Backcountry skiing also carries a reality that no Olympic spotlight can soften: It is inherently risky. Outside resort boundaries, there are no avalanche-controlled slopes, no ski patrol, no marked hazards. Skiers are responsible for reading terrain, assessing snowpack stability, checking weather patterns, and making conservative decisions in complex, shifting conditions. Avalanche education and companion rescue training isn’t optional — most experienced backcountry travelers take formal avalanche courses, practice rescue drills with beacons, probes, and shovels, and spend seasons learning how wind, temperature swings, and storm layers interact to create hidden instabilities.
The irony — and the tragedy — is that we’re falling in love with these wild places at the very moment the climate that sustains them is changing.
Even with lots of education, the margin for error is thin. Avalanches kill dozens of people in North America each winter, many of them experienced recreationists. Just this week, a massive slide in Lake Tahoe trapped 15 backcountry skiers; six were rescued, eight died, and one is still missing. The growth of backcountry participation has brought more education and awareness — but also more exposure. Every skin tour is, in some sense, a negotiation with uncertainty.
In skimo — or ski mountaineering — the Olympic format you’ll see this winter, athletes race uphill sections with lightweight skis and skins, sometimes transitioning on foot, before shedding those skins and skiing down as fast as possible. It’s part endurance sport, part technical descent, and rooted in a tradition that goes back to alpine military patrols in the early 20th century.
At the Olympics, skimo’s format is intense and immediate: sprint events that pack ascents and descents into a few minutes of fierce effort and a mixed relay that pits pairs of men and women against alpine terrain with speed and precision.
It’s a spectacle and a feat of human athleticism — but what I see is a beginning of an end.
The irony — and the tragedy — is that we’re falling in love with these wild places at the very moment the climate that sustains them is changing.
We know that climate change is not just an abstract threat. Already, it’s reshaping where and how we have winters at all and upending entire cultures and lifestyles in the process. Studies commissioned by climate institutes and the International Olympic Committee show that, under current emissions scenarios, the number of places in the world that can reliably host winter sports like skiing will shrink dramatically over the coming decades.
Projections indicate that by the mid-2050s, a large share of existing Winter Olympic sites may not meet the temperature and snow-reliability requirements for competition, and the pool of viable hosts could narrow to just a fraction of today’s list.
If you haven’t already figured, this story isn’t just about a new Olympic sport. It’s about the ache of loving something that you know is doomed.
For years, skinning up a quiet road or tree glade through the woods was a way — the way — I most connected to the natural world and found balance in myself. It made me love winters. In the places in western Colorado where I’ve been lucky to live, skiing has carved out space to enjoy hours and hours of sun and solitude and brisk air.
Now, I’m writing this nine months pregnant with my first, a girl, watching another unseasonably warm February unfold in southwestern Colorado (for my FOMO at least, it’s a good winter to be pregnant!). The ridgelines that have steadied me for years look patchy — browner, more exposed than they should with the thin amount of snow covered we’ve received so far. I’m thinking not only about the winters that shaped me, but about the ones my daughter will inherit.
Skimo’s Olympic debut is — for me, and a lot of people in my community who similarly love pushing into side and backcountry terrain — a spotlight shining on something I love at the very moment it’s becoming harder to hold onto.
At the 2026 Milan Cortina Games, artificial snow has become an essential part of staging the event. Entire landscapes in northern Italy have been scaffolded with machines to cover competition slopes as natural snowfall proves unreliable — a technological workaround that consumes significant water and energy and underscores how tenuous winter conditions have become.
In the Western US, where I live, communities that have long depended on consistent snowpack for tourism, water storage, and local economies are confronting record warm winters and snow droughts. Snow surveys in Colorado, Utah, and Oregon have shown historically low snowpack in recent seasons, with far-reaching implications for water supplies, wildfire risk, and outdoor recreation economies.
The ski industry remains big business — for now. North America alone welcomed more than 61 million lift visitors in the 2024–2025 season, and resorts continue to invest hundreds of millions in summer counter-programming (think alpine slides, zip lines, mountain biking runs) and infrastructure like new lifts and snowmaking systems. But these investments are a hedge against a future that is already proving to be increasingly variable. Resorts are doubling down on snowmaking and comfort amenities while wild snow becomes less predictable. These adaptations may buy time but don’t guarantee winters as we’ve known them.
In backcountry terrain, the stakes are even more visceral. There are no snowguns and no groomers — just skin tracks leading up, and hopes of pow turns on the way down. It’s profoundly human in scale, and it’s the reason the sport feels like a return to something elemental. Yet that very purity is vulnerable to a warming climate that is shortening snow seasons, elevating rain-on-snow events that cause rapid melting of existing snowpack, and threatening ecosystems that winter sports depend on.
I write this from southwestern Colorado, the mountains that have shaped so many of my winters and so much of who I am. If I weren’t nine months pregnant right now, I’d be out touring the southern San Juan range with friends, skinning up to ridgelines I’ve leaned on for solace and joy.
But in February, when we should be cutting tracks deep into fresh snow, we saw many days in the 60s.
Winter won’t disappear overnight. But every warm winter, every snow drought, and every ski resort increasingly reliant on machines is part of a larger story about the fragility of the season we love. As backcountry skiing continues to grow — and as skimo earns its place on the Olympic stage — that growth should make us joyful and uneasy, both.
The future of this sport isn’t just about human endurance and passion. It’s about the climate that makes snow possible in the first place — and the choices we make now, so that we and future generations can still climb above treeline and ski back down into wonder.
Update, February 19, 5:15 pm: This story has been updated to include new information about the Castle Peak avalanche in Tahoe.
2026-02-20 05:25:15
The US military is in the midst of its largest build-up of forces in the Middle East in decades, in preparation for some sort of military action in Iran. Military officials say strikes could come as early as this weekend and some US personnel are being evacuated from the region.
Diplomacy isn’t officially over yet. Talks were held in Geneva, Switzerland, this week between the Trump administration’s representatives — all-purpose foreign envoy Steve Witkoff and President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner — and senior Iranian officials in hopes of striking a deal that will address US concerns about the country’s nuclear program, among other issues, and provide Iran with sanctions relief.
Early this week, there seemed to be some diplomatic progress, when Iran and the United States said they had agreed on “guiding principles” for ongoing nuclear talks, and the Iranians are reportedly preparing a response to US demands by the end of the month, but some US officials, talking to Axios’s Barak Ravid, have dismissed the talks as a “nothingburger” and have put the chance of war at 90 percent. (There’s an ongoing debate on next steps within the administration, so these comments can also be read as strategic messaging by the hawks in Trump’s orbit.)
Trump does not appear to have made a final decision about whether to take military action and what form it would take, suggesting on Thursday that he would make up his mind in the next 10 days. As is often the case with this administration, the range of possible actions is wide, but for the moment, the military build-up is moving much faster than the diplomatic track and an attack of some kind seems likely. (Trump’s 10-day deadline should also be taken with a grain of salt: Last June, Trump said he would give Iranian nuclear talks two weeks, then ordered airstrikes on the country four days later.)
If war does come again, we don’t know exactly what it will look like, but all indications are it will be a larger and more extensive campaign than what we saw last summer, or than most Americans are probably prepared for. And at the moment, both sides seem dangerously confident they would prevail.
Here are a few key questions to keep in mind for the days ahead:
Trump first threatened new military action against Iran in January, promising “help is on the way” when protests over economic conditions broke out throughout the country and were brutally repressed by Iran’s theocratic regime. Trump ultimately held off at the time at the urging of regional allies, as well as some of his own advisers, when it became clear that the US military — at the time engaged in major operations around Venezuela — didn’t have sufficient assets in the region to deter Iranian counterattacks.
Analysts suggest this is enough firepower for an engagement lasting multiple weeks, not just a few hours or days.
That is no longer the case. The United States has deployed two aircraft carrier strike groups to the region, each with three destroyer escorts, as well as half a dozen other surface ships and — almost certainly — nuclear submarines whose locations are not disclosed. Dozens of aircraft, including F-22 and F-16 fighters jets and surveillance planes, have been deployed around the Middle East as well — the greatest concentration of airpower in the region since the build-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It has also worked to replenish air defense batteries that were depleted by Iranian missile and drone strikes during June’s “12-day war.”
In short, analysts suggest this is enough firepower for an engagement lasting multiple weeks, not just a few hours or days.
This is something of a moving target. Trump’s threat to Iran in January was in response to the massacre of protesters. But the protests have now largely subsided, and it’s too late to rescue the thousands who were massacred.
The main discussions concern Iran’s nuclear program. Though this program was severely degraded by US airstrikes in June, (Trump proclaimed it “obliterated”) the Trump administration is calling for Iran to abandon nuclear enrichment entirely, the process that can be used to create material for weapons. Iran, which maintains that its nuclear program is peaceful, is insisting on its right to enrich, though it has indicated a willingness to make some concessions, such as diluting its stock of near-weapons grade enriched uranium.
The United States has also sought to expand the talks to encompass issues including Iran’s ballistic missile program and its support for regional proxy groups like Hezbollah and the Houthis. Iran has been extremely resistant to this. For all the focus on nuclear weapons, Iran’s ballistic missiles may end up being the crux of this crisis: They’re a particular concern for Israel, which is in range of them. But Iran also views them as a core component of its ability to defend itself.
Some of the impasse between the two sides is due to core disagreements, but some is political style. Observers say the Iranians seem to be seeking a painstakingly negotiated, highly technical agreement along the lines of the 2015 JCPOA it reached with the Obama administration, which Trump later pulled out of. Whereas Trump is looking for a quick and declarative political win.
Then, of course, there’s the question of whether the United States seeks not to make a deal with the Islamic Republic, but to eliminate it. Trump said last week that regime change in Iran is “the best thing that could happen.” Many Iranians would surely agree, though the president did not elaborate on what he envisioned replacing the regime.
Americans may assume that war, if it comes, would look something like June’s “Operation Midnight Hammer,” a relatively brief series of strikes that was resolved quickly. That will probably not be the case.
The June war was a primarily Israeli operation, with the US joining in to attack three Iranian nuclear facilities a week in, when it was already clear that the Israelis were having military success and Iran’s retaliation was limited.
This time around, the United States would be in the driver’s seat from the start, though Israel would almost certainly be involved. And reporting suggests the administration has a more extensive operation in mind.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the options Trump has been presented with by military briefers include a “campaign to kill scores of Iranian political and military leaders, with the goal of overthrowing the government…as well as an air attack that would be limited to striking targets including nuclear and ballistic-missile facilities.” Both types of campaigns could potentially last for weeks. Of course, the reality could well turn out quite different: Ahead of the US intervention in Venezuela, few predicted that the United States would simply capture the country’s president while leaving most of its regime in place.
In June, Iranian retaliation against US forces in the Middle East was limited and telegraphed in advance. That may not be the case this time, as Iran’s leaders may feel they’re in an existential fight for survival that requires a stronger response.
Though its nuclear program may be in shambles, the regime has worked diligently since last summer to reconstitute its ballistic missile deterrent, meaning retaliatory strikes against US bases, as well as Israel and US allies in the Gulf are likely. How much damage it is really capable of inflicting is an open question, though Israel was reportedly running dangerously low on interceptors by the end of the 12-day war and may have sustained more casualties if the conflict had lasted longer. Iran also last week conducted exercises that temporarily shut down the Strait of Hormuz, a key oil chokepoint through which 31 percent of the world’s sea-born crude flows.
Trump has clearly grown more confident about using military force, but Iran’s calculation may be that he has little tolerance for a long, drawn-out, messy conflict. In Trump’s more than five years as president, one thing we have not yet seen is how he would respond to a conflict with a significant number of US casualties.
Though the Israeli government was reportedly concerned in January about the state of their air defenses, they now appear to fully support military action and are highly skeptical that a satisfactory diplomatic deal can be reached. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, deeply unpopular heading into elections later this year, would no doubt much rather keep the public focused on the destruction of Iran’s nuclear and missile programs than the swirling questions about his handling of the October 7 attacks.
As for other regional countries, the picture is more mixed. During the Obama administration and Trump’s first term, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and other Gulf states pushed for a maximally hawkish position on Iran. Today, while they would no doubt prefer an end to the Islamic Republic, they’re less enthusiastic about war, due to concerns about Iranian retaliation as well as the regional destabilization that could result from a collapse of the Iranian regime. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have said they will not allow the United States to use their airspace for an attack on Iran, though that may not spare them from Iranian retaliation.
The UK is also reportedly preventing the US from using its airbases for an attack on Iran, including the strategically located base at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, prompting an angry outburst from Trump early this week.
As for Iran’s few allies, it conducted joint naval drills with Russia’s military this week, but it’s hard to imagine Moscow doing much to come to Tehran’s aid if war begins.
The administration is very unlikely to ask Congress for an authorization to use military force against Iran, or to present a detailed legal rationale for doing so. Given that Iran’s nuclear program is, according to the administration’s own assessments, nowhere close to producing a weapon, and given that the United States is not in range of Iranian missiles, it would be hard to make the case that it constitutes the type of imminent threat that would allow the president to order military action without congressional authorization.
Past administrations, including Trump’s after Midnight Hammer, have argued that military operations that are limited in scope and duration don’t constitute “war” in the constitutional sense and don’t require authorization. Many legal scholars don’t buy that, but even if you do, it would get harder to justify it if the war turns out to be the kind of expansive operation reportedly under discussion.
In Congress, Reps. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Thomas Massie (R-KY) are planning to move next week to force a vote on a resolution that would require the administration to seek congressional authorization, but previous efforts to do this under the Trump administration have not been successful. In all likelihood, congressional oversight of the president’s ability to wage war is about to be further watered down.
In fairness to Trump, in each of his previous military engagements, dating back to the strike that killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani in his first term, he has been able to defy critics who warned he was risking a dangerous quagmire. But if he is really contemplating an operation as extensive as what has been reported in recent days, or pursuing the overthrow of the Iranian state itself, this suggests he may be growing confident to the point he’s considering just the sort of war he has lambasted previous presidents for getting involved with.
Both sides now appear dangerously confident about their prospects heading into a conflict: The United States in its ability to inflict damage on Iran at will without significant blowback; Iran in its ability to make the conflict so painful for the United States that it can inflict a strategic defeat rather than hastening its own demise after a year that has left it severely weakened, economically, politically, and militarily
The confidence on both sides may end up getting a lot of people killed.
2026-02-20 05:00:00
Statins are one of modern medicine’s miracles. For every 10,000 people who take these cholesterol-lowering drugs, 1,000 will avoid major cardiovascular events. When you consider that cardiovascular disease is America’s top killer, and 92 million Americans are currently taking a statin, thousands of lives every year are being saved. There are essentially no other prescription drugs that offer such tremendous, obvious value.
So, why is the internet doing its best to convince you otherwise?
The idea that statins are just a profit-pushing venture for Big Pharma, a conspiracy made infamous by the 2012 film Statin Nation, is everywhere on YouTube and social media feeds today. In the United Kingdom, an estimated 200,000 people went off statins amid all the negative press coverage in the wake of the film’s release. And the backlash has only grown in the years since.
In the past decade, a growing number of terminally online doctors, non-credentialed influencers, and patients have blamed statins for a litany of health problems: depression, kidney failure, and — perhaps most perversely for a drug developed to prevent heart attacks — weight gain. US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has added fuel to that fire, citing statins as another example of America’s health care system overmedicating its people with vaguely dangerous consequences.
These days, you don’t have to look far to find patients reporting they gained weight after starting one of these cholesterol-lowering drugs. Doctors with large TikTok followings will tell you that you should hate statins. Even when some social media clinicians encourage their followers to ignore the myths and take them if they would personally benefit, many of the commenters will parrot conspiracy-laden talking points. We live in the era of GLP-1s, and weight is the wellness influencer’s No. 1 enemy.
For the past decade or more, people’s sentiments about statins on social media have grown significantly more skeptical, with the percentage of posts expressing doubts increasing from 26 percent to 40 percent. A person exposed to doubts about statins on Instagram or TikTok is less likely to take the drugs. Less than half of Americans who are eligible for a statin are actually taking one; the high costs of US health care certainly play a role in the low uptake, but it is fair to assume the statin backlash is an important factor, too. Researchers have compared the anti-statin influence to vaccine skepticism — two effective medical interventions undermined by misinformation.
But no, statins are not making you fat. Or depressed. Or hurting your kidneys.
Our political wellness landscape has shifted: new leaders, shady science, contradictory advice, broken trust, and overwhelming systems. How is anyone supposed to make sense of it all? Vox’s senior correspondent Dylan Scott has been on the health beat for a long time, and every week, he’ll wade into sticky debates, answer fair questions, and contextualize what’s happening in American health care policy. Sign up here.
A recent paper provided the strongest evidence yet in statins’ favor. Most of the claims about negative side effects have been anecdotal or based on observational studies that cannot show causation. An international group of researchers examined randomized clinical trial data and found that statins were not actually associated with most of the side effects for which they are blamed.
But even those findings were met by skepticism from the social media doctor crowd. The statin backlash is a microcosm of how dangerous health care myths take root and become so deeply embedded that they are difficult, if not impossible, to eradicate.
The new study, published in The Lancet, was massive.
The authors collected data from more than 120,000 patients participating in 19 different trials, following people for four-plus years, on average, after they began taking statin drugs. Crucially, this allowed them to properly randomize people, as they were in the trials, to isolate the health effects of both being on a statin and not.
And as this kaleidoscope of a graphic shows, almost none of the side effects they tracked meaningfully increased for people who took a statin compared to those who did not. (Here’s a tip if you want to check out the dozens of side effects they studied: Only the dots on the outer ring are statistically significant.)
Whatever side effects statins do cause, they are still worth taking for their enormous lifesaving potential.
That’s not to say there were no side effects.
The research noted there were notable increases in abnormal liver readings and changes in urine among statin-taking patients. But the actual health implications of those events are not well understood, though more research is warranted. The liver findings in particular were not that surprising; many prescription drugs put at least some strain on your liver, whose job it is to process the medication.
Here’s what you need to understand about the study: Whatever side effects statins do cause, they are still worth taking for their enormous lifesaving potential. Even if you do put on a little weight while on a statin, your chances of having a heart attack are still greatly reduced.
“Unreliable information about adverse effects of statin therapy hampers patients’ and clinicians’ ability to make properly informed decisions…with potentially life-threatening health consequences,” the authors wrote. “These findings reinforce previous conclusions that any risks associated with statin therapy are greatly outweighed by their cardiovascular benefits.”
Case closed, right? Well, hold on.
Despite providing the most persuasive evidence yet that statins don’t have this long list of undesirable effects, The Lancet study was met with skepticism by several high-profile health influencers. One of them, a “metabolic health enthusiast,” argued that the analysis did show a small increase in weight gain, even if it didn’t rise to the level of statistical significance according to the study’s authors. So, the claim still holds.
It was in reading these responses that I realized how difficult it would be to dislodge the old tropes about statins and gaining weight. Usually, scientists worry about their peers contorting their analysis to make small changes seem larger than they are. Now, we’re worrying about a paper not imbuing importance on a statistically insignificant change across such a large sample size?
More than any wonky discussion about statistical p-values, however, here was evidence that more evidence wouldn’t change some people’s minds. Myth had become reality.
And that brought me back to the original 2014 study that has provided the empirical basis for the claims about statins and weight gain.
The 2014 paper was an observational study, not a randomized one. The authors looked at national survey data and tracked the caloric intake and body-mass indices of people who were on statins around 2000 and people who were on them around 2010. And they did find that, in 2010, people taking statins were eating more and weighed more than people in 2000. They weren’t all the same people, which is what you would need to confidently claim that statins were causing the weight gain.
Those findings have been so consistently misinterpreted for years that even this new countervailing research may struggle to overcome the misinformation.
The authors themselves didn’t postulate that statins are causing weight gain. Their theories instead suggested people taking statins may be less diligent about their diets, or their doctors may even focus more on making sure patients take their medicine instead of emphasizing the importance of pairing a good diet with the medication.
It was an argument for refining how doctors advise their patients on statins to make sure they continue eating a heart-healthy diet even after they starts taking a statin. It was not smoking-gun evidence that statins are causing people to put on pounds.
But when combined with the conspiracy-laden Statin Nation narrative, that nuance was lost.
A story of greedy pharmaceutical companies pushing unnecessary treatment while causing their patients to gain weight instead of lose it has proven seductive in a health information ecosystem where more and more Americans distrust traditional medical authorities and increasingly fixate on their weight.
And now, we have Kennedy pushing Americans to eat more foods like red meat that are associated with cardiovascular disease while discouraging them from taking statins. These drugs are now caught in a uniquely American health care paradox, much like vaccines and antidepressants: They’re both highly effective and highly distrusted.
2026-02-20 04:50:00
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, younger brother of King Charles III and a former British royal prince, was arrested Thursday morning in the UK over suspicions that he shared confidential information with the notorious sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein. The latest batch of Epstein files appears to show Mountbatten-Windsor, at the time serving as an official British trade envoy, forwarding confidential emails to Epstein.
Mountbatten-Windsor was stripped of his royal titles last year in the midst of a mounting scandal over his association with Epstein, including accusations of sexual assault. His arrest is unprecedented in the UK, which has never before arrested the brother of a sitting monarch. In a statement, King Charles described his brother’s arrest as “the full, fair, and proper process” of the law at work, adding that law enforcement has his “full and wholehearted support and cooperation.”
The arrest of a former prince and member of the royal family — one who has still never faced legal consequences for his alleged abuse of a teenage girl — holds enormous symbolic importance in the public’s ongoing pushback against Epstein’s cadre of wealthy, powerful men. At the same time, as someone far down the line of succession and not particularly close to the king, Mountbatten-Windsor is, as royal family members go, expendable. Tracking his downfall offers us a precise illustration of exactly how much power you need to stay immune to the criminal justice system — and what happens as your power and relevance slips away.
In her 2022 opus The Palace Papers, royal watcher Tina Brown writes that “there is no doubting” that the late Queen Elizabeth II had an “especially soft spot for Andrew,” her third child. While Mountbatten-Windsor has always been scandal-prone, fond of shady real estate deals and palling around with many wealthy men of dubious character, Elizabeth installed him in the lavish Royal Lodge, with 99 acres of land and a swimming pool. Unlike other members of the royal family, famously including Prince Harry, Andrew paid no rent for his housing.
As Andrew’s scandals grew more serious, Elizabeth did not waver. In a 2015 affidavit, Virginia Giuffre accused Mountbatten-Windsor of sexually assaulting her when she was 17. She provided a damning photo as proof: a picture of her at 17 with Mountbatten-Windsor’s arm around her. Reportedly, Elizabeth sent for her son and demanded he explain himself. After he assured her that the story was made up and that the photo was doctored, Elizabeth decided not only to believe him, but also to throw her full support behind him. The same year, she made him a Knight of the Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order — what Brown describes as “her highest gong.” The British press dropped the story for years.
Then the burgeoning Me Too movement put Epstein back in the spotlight, and brought Mountbatten-Windsor with him. In 2019, Mountbatten-Windsor stumbled through a notorious BBC interview with the journalist Emily Maitlis in an attempt to clear his name. He succeeded only in making himself look incredibly guilty. “The Duke of York claimed on Saturday night that he could not have had sex with a teenage girl in the London home of British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell because he was at home after attending a children’s party at Pizza Express in Woking,” the Guardian reported the next day, going on to describe the alibi as “startling.”
The public response to the interview was so negative that Mountbatten-Windsor was finally forced to step back from his duties as a public royal. Elizabeth, however, wasn’t ready to give up on him yet. “Mother and son held onto the belief that, after the passage of time, Andrew could be returned to the fold with a reduced role rather than full banishment,” Brown writes in The Palace Papers.
As the queen faded, so did Mountbatten-Windsor’s ability to outrun his scandals. In January 2022, Mountbatten-Windsor settled a lawsuit with Giuffre out of court and, “with the Queen’s approval and agreement,” was stripped of his military titles and agreed to stop using his prestigious HRH honorific. Later that year, Elizabeth died. Charles took the throne, and he apparently did not agree with his mother about the advisability of keeping his brother around. The king has also long been vocal in his belief that the royal family should make its public image less sprawling, with fewer balcony photo ops featuring distant cousins and great-aunts, and fewer minor royals who require expensive upkeep and get involved in embarrassing peccadilloes.
Last April, after more than a decade of publicly fighting Epstein and his associates, and with few legal victories to show for it, Virginia Giuffre died by suicide. In October, her memoir was posthumously published, featuring a detailed account of multiple alleged assaults at Andrew’s hands when Giuffre was 17 years old. Shortly afterward, Charles stripped Mountbatten-Windsor of his royal titles and moved him from the Royal Lodge to an unnamed cottage on the king’s private estate of Sandringham. Now, as the declassified Epstein files make their way to the public eye, Charles is cooperating with law enforcement on his brother’s arrest.
In the British royal family, all power flows from the crown itself. The closer you are to the crown, the better off you are. Mountbatten-Windsor is currently eighth in line to the throne, which is not a strong position. When his mother was queen, he benefited from her favor, but the current monarch does not appear to have any special soft spot for him.
Last November, Brown reported that Charles was attempting to be careful with Mountbatten-Windsor’s demotion, as a matter of national security. “If Charles were not to pay his brother’s bills and ensure a certain level of comfort, Andrew would have only his secrets to sell,” Brown wrote on her Substack, Fresh Hell. It now appears that Mountbatten-Windsor sold his secrets to his pedophile friend a long time ago. He has no currency left with which to operate. In the meantime, Virginia Giuffre is dead, and a number of Epstein’s surviving victims were recently outed by the US Department of Justice, which published their unredacted names and nude photos. Of all the powerful people complicit in the abuse of these women, will any who aren’t considered expendable by their institutions ever face justice?
Correction, February 19, 2026, 4:50 pm ET: A previous version of this post misstated the birth order of Elizabeth II’s children.