Welcome back to the Weekend Press! This week, Tanner Nau drinks with America’s first “chief MAHA officer.” Suzy Weiss weighs in on the woman who dumped a friend for going on Wegovy. Judea Pearl remembers living through Israel’s earliest days. And more!

But first: The trouble with celebrating sickness . . .

It’s hard to pinpoint the moment when being ill became cool. But sometime in the mid-2010s, it became normal to scroll past black-and-white pictures with long captions about chronic fatigue or generalized anxiety, and with hashtags like #invisibleillness and #healingjourney. In real life, you’d hear the casual shorthand of “I’m so OCD” and “everyone’s a little bit ADHD.”

In 2019, the investigative journalist Christina Buttons “began encountering stories along a similar theme: women discovering, later in life, that they were autistic.” The internet was full of pieces with titles like “The Invisible Women with Autism” or “What My Adult Autism Diagnosis Finally Explained.”

Throughout her life, she’d struggled socially, become easily overwhelmed, and fidgeted—and when she came across these stories, something clicked into place. She went to the doctor, and got an autism diagnosis.

“Suddenly, every aspect of my life, every little inadequacy or abnormality that had once tormented me, had a medical explanation,” she writes today.

At the time, she was living alone and working remotely, but a couple years later, she became a journalist—and realized that “not only was I competent at socializing, I was good at it, and I improved the more I did it.” She realized having intense interests wasn’t necessarily a symptom. And she began to question the whole idea that she was ill.

The high priestess of the very online millennial women who turned illness into identity is Lena Dunham, who just released a wildly bestselling memoir, Famesick.

While working on Girls, the show that made her famous, Dunham was at war with her own body, suffering from endometriosis or shingles or impetigo, and struggling with an addiction to the anxiety medicine Klonopin. She documented it all on Instagram, posting nude photos to mark the anniversary of her hysterectomy or announcing she’d been diagnosed with something called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.

But, writes Kat Rosenfield today, what Dunham’s new book reveals is that real, genuine illness is not aspirational—not a label you should seek—and not in any way romantic. “It made her a person who disappointed people, or clung to them, or betrayed them,” writes Kat. “It made her a person whose boyfriend told her, ‘You are making it hard for me to love you.’ ” Her story is a cautionary tale for anyone who desires a diagnosis. Be careful what you wish for.

Two Drinks with . . . Steak ‘n Shake’s Chief MAHA Officer

Tanner Nau

The burger joint Steak ’n Shake hired American fast food’s first “chief MAHA officer” this week. For the last year, Michael Boes has been a senior adviser at the Department of Health and Human Services, but now his job is to make junk food healthy again. “We’re going back to what fast food used to be in America,” he said when he sat down with Tanner Nau on Wednesday. Drinking Liquid Death, he explained how a “South Park” episode inspired the flipping of the food pyramid, and swore ice cream is going to become a “superfood.” Read full story

What’s So Bad About Fame?

Suzy Weiss

“My instinct when I find out that a friend is on a certain drug, unless the drug is heroin, is to have no reaction whatsoever,” writes Suzy Weiss. “That’s not the case for Sophia Ortega, who penned an essay for ‘New York’ magazine on how, upon finding out that her friend was using Wegovy, she promptly cut the friend out of her life.” In her column, Suzy introduces the latest episode of her podcast, in which she speaks to Claudia Oshry—co-host of “The Toast”—about their shared love of GLP-1s, Ortega’s absurd judginess, and the weirdness of internet fame. Read full story

How ‘City on a Hill’ Became ‘America First’

Lydia Dugdale

When President Donald Trump first ran for office, his campaign revolved around one promise: “America First.” Now, that slogan has taken over our culture and become a crucial bone of contention within the GOP, but long before the country heard it, there was another phrase that defined our role on the world’s stage: “city on a hill.” In today’s Things Worth Remembering, Lydia Dugdale revisits the 400-year-old sermon that established an ethical vision of American exceptionalism. Read full story

Ancient Wisdom: I Was There when Modern Israel Was Born

Judea Pearl

Judea Pearl is not a Holocaust survivor. Born in Mandatory Palestine in 1936, he is a “New Jew,” a man who grew up as the State of Israel was born and took shape. “New children began arriving in our classrooms—refugees from Europe,” he writes. “And we, the ‘New Jews,’ were cruel to them, because they were not like us.” Only later did he come to understand what those children had endured, and what it would take to create and preserve the world’s only Jewish state. Don’t miss his remarkable life story. Read full story