The Week: The Nancy Guthrie Disappearance

• Patriots lost the Super Bowl and the halftime show.

• The latest jobs report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) offers some good news: The U.S. economy added 130,000 jobs in January. Consequently, the national unemployment rate declined slightly from 4.4 to 4.3 percent. These figures represent a turnaround from 2025, in which only 181,000 jobs were created, on net, in the entire year. BLS had previously reported much greater employment gains for 2025 but revised them downward in subsequent months. This prompted Trump to fire the agency’s commissioner on the ground, for which no evidence was produced, that she was manipulating the data to dent his political standing. Now that the same procedures have found better jobs numbers, Trump is of course touting them as proof of his economic prowess. What the data truly reveal, however, is an economy whose composition is changing as the nation ages. The bulk of January’s employment gains were concentrated in health-care and social assistance organizations, such as hospitals, nursing homes, and residential care facilities. Such jobs are likely to be indirectly funded by government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. Meanwhile, employment in several sectors that are more reliant on private demand either declined or stayed flat. As the oldest Baby Boomers become octogenarians this year, and the youngest approach retirement age, we might just be getting the “care economy” that Biden failed to sell us not long ago.

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• Patriots lost the Super Bowl and the halftime show.

• The latest jobs report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) offers some good news: The U.S. economy added 130,000 jobs in January. Consequently, the national unemployment rate declined slightly from 4.4 to 4.3 percent. These figures represent a turnaround from 2025, in which only 181,000 jobs were created, on net, in the entire year. BLS had previously reported much greater employment gains for 2025 but revised them downward in subsequent months. This prompted Trump to fire the agency’s commissioner on the ground, for which no evidence was produced, that she was manipulating the data to dent his political standing. Now that the same procedures have found better jobs numbers, Trump is of course touting them as proof of his economic prowess. What the data truly reveal, however, is an economy whose composition is changing as the nation ages. The bulk of January’s employment gains were concentrated in health-care and social assistance organizations, such as hospitals, nursing homes, and residential care facilities. Such jobs are likely to be indirectly funded by government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. Meanwhile, employment in several sectors that are more reliant on private demand either declined or stayed flat. As the oldest Baby Boomers become octogenarians this year, and the youngest approach retirement age, we might just be getting the “care economy” that Biden failed to sell us not long ago.