nytopinion

It’s the holidays, and while we may not want to hear this right now, the way we eat desperately needs to change. When we think of what is at the stem of unhealthy eating in America, our mind might automatically land on a “single culprit”: ultraprocessed foods, writes Nicola Guess, a dietitian and researcher at @oxford_uni. “Experts estimate diet is a bigger contributor globally to early death than smoking. In America, nearly half the adult population has Type 2 diabetes or pre-diabetes,” Nicole adds. “The focus on ultraprocessed foods has been a distraction from what we already know about nutrition, and we should have acted on it decades ago,” To read the full essay, click the link in our bio. | 🎨 Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman #nytopinion

How much would you be willing to pay for guacamole? Under Donald Trump’s proposed tariffs, “farms and related businesses would be most directly hit, but the impact would be felt at kitchen tables around the country,” writes the economist Rebecca Patterson. “The quality and supply of grocery-store staples would suffer and prices would probably rise, something consumers have little appetite for after the pandemic-era inflation spike.” That means the cost for everyday foods — including the avocados that go into your favorite dip — will be affected. Click the link in our bio to read more. | 🎨 @saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaam #nytopinion

It's an hour before sunrise in New Orleans, and Markitha Sinegal is fighting with her boyfriend again. They're both 20 years old, living separately at their mothers' houses while raising their 9-month-old twin daughters together. The girls are in the room as their parents argue, as his mother tries to de-escalate the situation, as Markitha packs to leave — and as she falls to the floor, breathing raggedly, having been shot in the back. "I made a mistake!" her boyfriend cries. He takes Markitha's car and flees. She dies just before dawn on the day before what would have been her first Mother's Day. Markitha is just one of many mothers who have died by homicide while pregnant or soon after giving birth. Maternal mortality has been rising for the past two decades, Sara Chodosh says — not least due to pregnancy-associated homicides, as they're referred to by epidemiologists and health researchers. "Like the stories of the other mothers who died at the hands of their partners," @sarachodoshviz writes, the story of Markitha's death "began long before her boyfriend pulled the trigger. To understand how she died — and how to prevent more deaths of young mothers like her — we have to understand how she came to be in that bedroom in the first place." Read more at the link in our bio. | 🎨 @angelicaalzona #nytopinion

“Recently, a Los Angeles judge delayed a hearing for Erik and Lyle Menendez in their bid to be resentenced for the murder of their parents 35 years ago,” writes Rachel Louise Snyder, a contributing Opinion writer who has written extensively about domestic abuse. While the case has seen renewed interest lately, “unfortunately for the brothers, social advocacy rarely corresponds to judicial change,” Rachel writes. “Many people have noted that we know much more about domestic and sexual violence today than we did in the 1990s. This is true. We know how devastating abuse can be and how trauma lasts a lifetime. What remains unclear is whether the judiciary has absorbed enough of this understanding to decide that the Menendez brothers have suffered enough and deserve a different kind of future.” Click the link in our bio to read more. | 🎨 Matt Bollinger #nytopinion

As human food consumption increases, we'd better get used to a new landscape of agriculture and farming that accommodates higher yields. “It’s true that if we ate less meat and grew fewer biofuels, we would reduce agriculture’s hunger for land. But the reality is we show no signs of doing that — meat consumption is only projected to rise in the coming years,” writes Michael Grunwald, a journalist and the author of the forthcoming book “We Are Eating the Earth.” The solution? “What the world really needs is a vibe shift. Most people who don’t farm don’t think much about agriculture, and we’ve fallen into a trap of assuming there’s virtuous agriculture and evil agriculture, just like clean energy and dirty energy.” Click the link in our bio to read more. | 🎨 @saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaam 📷 wwing, Fotoforce, Clara Bastian, DaydreamsGirl and Mercedes Rancaño Otero, via Getty Images # #nytopinion

The filmmaker @fayetsakas often finds herself bombarded with advice and products for self-improvement — a deluge of elusive promises tethered to consumer goods — whenever she browses social media. She first came across Peyton and Lyla, two preteen sisters and influencers who hawk fashion and beauty products to tens of thousands of online fans around the world on Instagram two years ago.With their parents’ permission, Faye began filming the sisters’ daily lives as influencers, and in the Op-Doc, “Christmas, Every Day,” they shift between performance and reality. In a time of immense wealth disparity, influencer culture has created a more fantastical kind of American dream. (Perhaps that’s why nearly one-third of preteens say becoming an influencer is a career goal.) Seeing the field’s potential for a steady income — not to mention the prestige of an ever-growing follower count — some parents encourage it. Faye sought to go behind the scenes of this new creator economy with curiosity and a focus on the girls’ experiences, aiming to allow viewers to come to their own conclusions. Click the link in our bio to watch the full film. | 🎥 @fayetsakas #opdocs #nytopinion #influencers

It is a good thing that men are taking up more traditionally female jobs, including nursing, argues Jessica Grose, an @nytopinion writer. “There can be ample social benefits for men taking up these roles beyond just economic security,” says @jessgrosewrites. “If more men return to female-dominated professions, they may bring better pay and more prestige with them, and they may also make the idea of men as caregivers more palatable and encouraged.” Click the link in our bio to read more. | 🎨 @squinkyelo #nytopinion

The idea that the government should be run like a business is a popular one. “It’s also a terrible one,” writes Ray Fisman, a professor of economics at Boston University. “Businesses and government do fundamentally different jobs, and efforts at remaking government with an eye to cost-cutting can end in disaster. That’s because a lot of what the government does is hard to quantify and involves complicated tasks that inevitably require bureaucratic coordination and, yes, inefficiency.” Yes, let’s try to make the government work more efficiently, Fisman says. “But that’s different from cutting the government down to size, and it’s certainly not the same as simply running it like a business.” | 🎨 by Sam Drew #nytopinion

The country is getting redder — and it has nothing to do with the border or immigration or tariffs. Americans are leaving blue states in droves in search of more affordable places to live. Because the country’s electoral college votes are determined by state population, this is bad news for Democrats. If this trend continues, by the next presidential election, the party could be at a disadvantage. | 🎥 Binyamin Appelbaum and Adam Westbrook #nytopinion

“Motherhood has a branding problem,” writes Katrina Onstad, a podcast producer and novelist. In her essay about “Nightbitch,” a dark comedy out just last week, Onstad says that the film could have offered “a primal scream for this moment of maternal ambivalence, a stark confessional delivered with a healthy dash of ‘The Substance’ shock value.” Instead, “Nightbitch” does “something more surprising, more difficult and certainly rarer than laying bare the horrors of motherhood: It beautifully depicts the joy of parenting a young child.” Have you seen “Nightbitch”? Click the link in our bio to read more, and then let us know what you thought about the essay and the film in the comments below. | 🎨 by Sam Whitney #nytopinion

“For as long as the world feels vast and ever expanding, there is no pressing need to replenish or refresh our pool of friends,” writes @charlesmblow, an @nytopinion columnist. But as we move into our latter years and friends begin to fall away — they relocate, they die, they transition into phases of their own lives that leave little room for us — our resistance to new friends starts to feel silly and shallow.” As we become adults, Charles says, we become more closed off. But as we grow older, we learn to once again become more open. "Of course, opening oneself up to new friends at any age is not without risk, but it’s risk worth taking," writes Charles. Have you made good friends later in life? Let us know in the comments, and read the full column in the link in our bio. | 🎨 @njovn #nytopinion

"Technology is making many jobs miserable for both workers and consumers, at a moment when artificial intelligence continues its unregulated incursion into our lives," Jessica Grose writes. "The pro-tech argument I often hear in my reporting on education and mental health therapy is that it's better than nothing for people who would otherwise not have access to services. Which is to say: Emotional support through a chatbot is better than no support at all, and A.I. tutoring is better than no tutoring at all. Too many people accept these arguments as true without considering the social cost of cutting out everyday human interaction and the financial and environmental cost of the technology itself. A.I. chatbots don't come free." Read more from @jessgrosewrites at the link in our bio. | 🎨 @squinkyelo #nytopinion