The Long Read

This week: a happiness economist who followed the numbers into despair, a family's account of the first real advance against pancreatic cancer in decades, and an opinion piece on what a misdiagnosis shows about the limits of diagnostic certainty.

How a close look at the American Dream turned a top happiness expert into a specialist in despair

Carol Graham built a career on measuring happiness, and this profile follows her as the data leads her somewhere she did not expect to go. Her work on despair, particularly among poorer Americans in a very rich country, complicates the assumption that wealth and well-being rise together. She explains, in her own cadence, why being poor in a wealthy nation may be harder than being poor in a poor one: the yardstick is always visible, and so is the distance from it. The piece gives the reader a human researcher rather than a set of charts, someone whose questions changed because the answers refused to cooperate. Read it slowly, and set it beside the week's other reflections on why so many Americans feel sour in an economy that looks strong on paper.

Fortune · 15 min read

I used to work on happiness…

One family's story of a life-extending medicine for pancreatic cancer

The approval of daraxonrasib is described as the biggest advance in decades against a notoriously hard cancer, and this piece declines to tell that story through trial endpoints alone. It stays with a single family, with the arithmetic of added months and what a household does with them. Pancreatic cancer has long been a diagnosis around which hope was rationed, which makes a genuine therapeutic step feel both enormous and fragile. The piece holds both feelings at once, without triumphalism or false comfort. Most drug-approval coverage counts milestones; this piece counts mornings.

STAT · 15 min read

Christina Applegate puts a face on one of the most consequential challenges in neurology

Five years after being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, Christina Applegate revealed this week that she had been misdiagnosed. This opinion piece uses her disclosure as an entry point into a harder question: why does MS misdiagnosis happen at all? The argument centers on the structure of diagnosis itself, where overlapping symptoms, imperfect imaging, and the pressure to name something can harden a provisional answer into a settled one. Certainty in medicine is often a matter of degree, and a label can shape years of treatment and identity before anyone thinks to revisit it. The writing is measured and generous, and it leaves the reader thinking about every diagnosis they have ever accepted without question.

STAT · 15 min read