As GLP-1s drive the current protein craze, a supplement once only taken by powerlifters is now so popular US producers are struggling to keep up

For generations, the Meives family made cheese. Tony Meives’s grandfather, a Swiss immigrant, and his father both ran small cheese factories in Wisconsin, in the heart of America’s dairyland. “I worked in the cheese factory my whole life,” Meives says. “I have four world-class cheesemakers in my family.” But when it came time to inherit the family business, Meives found there was more money in the industrial runoff that his grandfather would have once thrown away. Today, the 39-year-old bodybuilder and gym owner runs a company that sells whey protein powder, the watery byproduct of cheesemaking that was once considered waste. “Twenty years ago, the only people who took whey were bodybuilders,” he says. “Over the past five years, the market has really opened up to each and every type of person you can probably think of.”

When Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary, declared late last month, that “the war on protein is over”, he sounded a bit like one of those Japanese soldiers of second world war lore, who spent years hunkering in the jungles of south-east Asia, oblivious to the fact that hostilities had long ceased. Perhaps there was a time when advice leaned more towards a diet based around fruit, vegetables and carbohydrates – but by May 2026, the war on protein was surely over. Protein had won.

In response to AI’s hyperrealism, artists and creatives are gravitating toward the homespun and imperfect

Earlier this year, a group of film-makers, commercial directors and AI industry influencers gathered in New York City for the Runway AI Summit – a daylong hype-fest, trumping up the potential of this new technology. During one talk, Rob Wrubel, co-founder and managing partner at San Francisco ad firm Silverside, talked up his work on the Coca-Cola company’s AI-generated 2025 Holiday Caravan ad. “What’s incredible about AI,” Wrubel said, “is that you can go from script to production is just two weeks!”

What Wrubel failed to mention was that the ad – with its computerized polar bears and fake-looking trundling delivery trucks – was widely despised by pretty much anyone who saw it. Indeed, the public distaste for the campaign became its own news story, spawning headlines like “People really don’t like Coke’s AI holiday commercial” and “Coca-Cola’s New AI Holiday Ad is a Sloppy Eyesore”. It may indeed have been quickly conceived – and it looked like it. Reached for comment about the backlash, Wrubel admits: “The conversation around the ad became almost as important as the ad itself because it surfaced questions the entire creative industry is wrestling with right now.”

‘Zombie filler’, or using cadaver tissue that’s been sterilized and branded as Alloclae, is the latest cosmetic surgery rage. Is it safe?

The residential block at 655 Park Avenue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side is so storied it has its own Wikipedia entry. It has housed luminaries from bestselling romance author Danielle Steel to esteemed yachtsmen and the 20th-century heir William Kissam Vanderbilt II. A more recent resident, on the ground floor, is Alpha Male Plastic Surgery, a clinic offering a broad menu of elective procedures catering to the needs of the modern man.

On a coffee table in the waiting room, fanned-out brochures tout facelifts, non-surgical penile implants, and Tesamorelin – an FDA-approved peptide injection targeting stubborn visceral belly fat. Flatscreen monitors mounted behind the front desk shuffle through ads for a “Full Male Model Makeover”, proprietary procedures like BodyBanking® and the 360 TorsoTuck®, and for the gym rat who habitually skips leg day, even “Amazing New Calves”.

Acolytes of the far-right activist urged employers to fire his critics. Now those who were terminated are suing and claiming their right to free speech

Julie Strebe, a 55-year-old sheriff’s deputy in the small Bible belt town of Salem, Missouri, was on a date with her husband at a Buffalo Wild Wings when her husband slid his phone across the table. On Facebook, people were demanding Strebe’s immediate termination, calling her a “wacko” with “extreme mental health issues”.

It was the afternoon of 13 September 2025, just a few days after Charlie Kirk had been killed by a sniper’s bullet on a college campus. Shortly after his assassination, Strebe had posted on her personal Facebook page: “Empathy is not owed to oppressors.” In comments underneath, she did not mince words. She called Kirk a racist, a sexist, an antisemite and the kind of person who wants to see gay people, like her own son, stoned to death. “I don’t feel bad,” she says, months later, speaking from her home. “I refuse to feel bad for this man, and the hateful things he stood for.”