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Molly Jong-Fast doesn’t regret her face-lift. The podcast host and contributing writer to Times Opinion got her plastic surgery done just after her 47th birthday. “The plastic surgeon pulled my skin taut and gave me cheekbones where I had never had them before,” she writes. “He made me better looking, and I don’t regret it. So I’m not going to perpetuate the lie that my new face came from drinking a lot of water or getting a lot of sleep. I’m going to talk about it — because it’s not fair that women are confronted with both unrealistic beauty standards and lies about how they’ve been achieved.”

She continues:

>What I did to my face isn’t that unusual; I’d argue that it’s actually the norm for women on TV these days. We’re all on screens more and more, whether we’re grown-ups taking Zoom meetings or young influencers who have to feed the TikTok beast. Many cosmetic treatments once given only to Hollywood stars and socialites are now available at strip malls. We might expect this country’s growing embrace of plastic surgery to lead to a culture where we celebrate women’s bodily autonomy and cast off the shame that follows those who change their faces or bodies. Instead, stigma about plastic surgery (especially the schadenfreude around bad plastic surgery) has continued to dominate our discourse.

>The most unobtrusive plastic surgery, the face-lifts we don’t really notice, the ones that lead to total transformation, are still prohibitively expensive and reserved for the rich and famous. In the 16th-century “Book of the Courtier,” Baldassare Castiglione writes about “sprezzatura,” the idea that a real courtier should make things look easy. It’s trying that’s the offense. You can be born beautiful, or you can be young, but these days, trying to be something you aren’t — and being convincing at it — feels like cheating the system. The fact that a certain class of women can make themselves into something that used to be possible only with lucky genes is what truly infuriates people. It’s not the surgery; it’s the inequality.

Read the full piece here, for free, even without a Times subscription.

“When something goes wrong with a building in New York, it shakes more than steel and concrete. It also shakes trust,” Nate Bliss, who worked on infrastructure policy in the Adams, de Blasio and Bloomberg administrations in New York, writes in a guest essay for Times Opinion.

“Life in a crowded city like New York depends on trust, not least in the stability of the massive towers around us and in the humans who build them,” Nate says. So when we experience something like two structural columns buckling in the 33-story former Pfizer headquarters under construction in midtown Manhattan, it makes sense that nearby buildings would evacuate and spectators would gather to gawk at what they suspected to be an impending collapse.

Nate continues:

>The industry can’t just say “nothing to see here” when something like the Pfizer mess happens so visibly. And unfortunately, mistakes do happen on job sites. Modern construction is governed by a complex system with many levels of scrutiny — and that system is strengthened by lessons from its failures, including the one at the Pfizer building. During my time at City Hall working for multiple administrations, on housing, economic development and infrastructure policy, I worked with public servants to consider regulatory reforms to protect public safety and build more housing. On construction sites, I got to see projects through a different lens: hundreds of skilled professionals, inspectors, engineers and tradespeople, whose daily work is devoted to building safely, on time and on budget.

>Those experiences leave me with a respect not only for the complexity of building in a city like New York but also for the remarkable number of people and systems whose job it is to prevent failures.

Read the full piece here, for free, even without a Times subscription.

As a boy, on camping trips not far from his home in Spokane, Wash., Timothy Egan came upon charred tree husks from the Big Burn of 1910. The legendary fire “ravaged an area about the size of Connecticut, more than three million acres, in a weekend, and still stands as the biggest wildfire in American history,” Timothy writes in a guest essay for Times Opinion. “The blaze of 1910 spared Spokane, the largest city between Minneapolis and Seattle. But the fires of 2026 did not. I watched, heartbroken and sleepless, from a smoke-choked vacation retreat in eastern Washington as my old boyhood stomping ground fell to spikes of wind-driven flame last weekend.”

Timothy continues:

>Globally, nearly every year of late is hotter than the one before, and these changes make wildfires worse. Extreme infernos have more than doubled in frequency and intensity this century. I hesitate to say “duh” because that sounds like cynical surrender.

>We are not powerless. “We shape our buildings,” said Churchill; “thereafter they shape us.” We need zoning and building codes for a hotter, drier world, which many cities have already put in place. For those who live in a fire zone, a sprinkler system on the roof, to match those in the ceiling of new buildings, might help.

>The polling on human-caused climate change tells us that while most Americans believe it is happening, only about half think it will significantly threaten their way of life. It’s too often an academic debate, or a shouting match between pundits, or met with a shrug. The mournful site of my old neighborhood, the blackened playgrounds, the chimneys standing alone in the graveyards of homes that held three generations of memories, ashes and embers falling like snow in 90-degree heat, tell me something more personal. Loss. And grief. And a sense of urgency.

Read the full piece here, for free, even without a Times subscription.

Americans have spent billions of dollars tracking themselves: their steps, their blood oxygen saturation, their sleep cycles, their glucose levels. Is any of this data making us healthier?

That’s the question the Times Opinion writer David Wallace-Wells poses to Dr. Rachael Bedard, an Opinion contributor and primary care doctor. In this episode of “The Opinions,” they explore what tracking ourselves, versus the population at large, can teach us and our doctors, and whether artificial intelligence might one day make sense of all of this data.

On the topic of A.I.-powered health analyses, David says:

>This is not the first time that we’ve been sold promises about what Big Data will do to us and how it will improve our lives. I think about 23andMe, which told us that we were going to not just learn about our ancestry, but also learn a lot about our health and getting it analyzed in some centralized way.

>And now, here we are a decade or two later, we all spit into those tubes, we got some information about where our families come from — which turns out not to be all that reliable — and the company went under. And did we actually learn anything about our health from that? And I understand that the future is big, and we shouldn’t always impose short timelines on promises and say, “If they said it was going to happen in five years and it didn’t happen by 10, that means it’s a hopeless cause.”

>But I do wonder, just in a really big picture, when we hear the A.I. leaders say casually that this is going to help us cure cancer, or that this will help us cure all disease, I think to myself, “How should we assess that claim in a world where data has improved medical treatment but not really solved anything quite yet?”

Watch, listen to or read the full conversation here, for free, even without a Times subscription.

"I’ve tracked more than half a dozen other personal injury lawsuits filed against major food manufacturers, all alleging ultraprocessed foods, engineered to drive addiction and marketed to children, caused chronic diseases in someone under the age of 18. I’ve followed these cases because I’ve become increasingly convinced that litigation may be our only path to a healthy food environment," Julia Belluz, a contributing New York Times Opinion writer covering health, nutrition and chronic illness.

She adds:

>It was only in delving into the history of public health litigation that I started to feel some optimism. Again and again, bands of clever lawyers interested in public health and social justice fought for protections that policymakers had failed to deliver, long after the harms of a product were established. Litigation forced substantive opioid regulation. It helped curtail the use of leaded paint and asbestos, and made driving safer. But the most thoroughly developed use of litigation for public health involves the cigarette.

Read the full essay, for free, even without a Times subscription.