Weekend Longforms: Remote work, peptides, medical debt, AI scribes, and deaths from heat.

July 3, 2026

A. Is remote work bad for business, or are bosses who demand workers return to the office narcissists?

Is calling employees back from full time remote work a good idea? The New York Times ran three articles on remote work last month.

In the first, labor economists Emma Harrington and Natalia Emanuel report that working remotely was associated with less creative output, more loneliness and more mental health concerns among those who did not live with family. In the second, organizational psychologist Adam Grant, and Marissa Shandell and Courtney Elliott report that “ordering people back to the office full time is a power and status move. It’s a signature strategy of leaders who exhibit narcissistic qualities.” In the third, Claire Cain Miller writes that remote work has helped a generation of working parents.

B. The peptide gold rush is coming

Amanda Mull, Madison Muller and Ashleigh Furlong write in Bloomberg Businessweek (gift link) about the multibillion-dollar peptide industry, which is seeking to sell injectable medications that are of questionable purity and have not been fully tested on humans. The Food and Drug Administration has created an advisory panel to examine this issue, and many of its members have business interests in peptide sales. I’ve previously highlighted an article on this by Dhruv Khullar in the New Yorker and a Science Vs. podcast.

C. Medical debt plagues many Americans

The Tradeoffs podcast’s Dan Gorenstein interviews economist Neale Mahoney about policy efforts to decrease the toll of medical debt, especially as millions lose their insurance. He reports that “the average consumer facing collections in 2020 had more medical debt than all other sources of debt — credit cards, phone, utilities — combined. The podcast doesn’t explicitly mention employers, but a Commonwealth Fund in 2024 showed that 23% of working-age adults were underinsured. Here’s a previous post on the problem of underinsurance.

D. How does AI scribing change a doctor’s thinking?

Helen Ouyang, an emergency room physician, writes in this week’s New York Times Magazine (gift link) that using an artificial intelligence scribe helps her create well-organized patient notes, but worries that not having to synthesize her thoughts in a note that she types herself changes the way she thinks. The AI scribe decreases the cognitive load on her, but she worries that the extra mental work she did to create notes herself made her a better clinician.

E. Heat deaths are preventable

The temperatures on much of the East Coast are expected to reach triple digits this holiday weekend, and extreme heat caused over 1,000 deaths in Europe last month. Physician, epidemiologist and journalist Celine Gounder writes on Substack that heat deaths are preventable. Most who have died in the US indoors from heat have not had air conditioning (or not had it turned on). She also notes that the Occupational Health and Safety Administration has been loosening its rules meant to protect outdoor workers from heat injury.

I hope you are able to stay cool and please stay safe this holiday weekend.
I’ll be back in your feed on July 6.

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Views expressed in Employer Coverage are purely my own. Scroll down for animal photo.

Animal photo:

A baby leatherback turtle walking toward the ocean in Rio Mar, Puerto Rico last week.