We’re traveling all around America’s heartland today: Meeting business owners along the Canadian border, watching war reenactors on the shores of Lake Erie and learning the Ohio history our AI economy might be doomed to repeat.

We’ll also look at why companies are declining to cover GLP-1s and look back at Dolly Parton’s remarkable career in business and philanthropy. Have a great weekend!  — Tony Wagner, newsletter editor

P.S. Thanks to everyone who wrote in last week with feedback on this newsletter. Please keep it coming! I read everything. And if you learned something, forward to a friend!

Akron, Ohio, used to be the “rubber capital of the world.”

Visit the history center downtown, and you’ll find a lot of mementos from the glory days, including a slab that looks like a granite cornerstone but feels like a pre-historic seat cushion.

"This is how rubber arrived in Akron," explained Dave Lieberth, president of the Akron History Center, pointing to the slab. "It's just the raw rubber from the plantations — packaged in South America."

Lieberth has spent decades documenting the flowering, collapse, and now rebirth of what was once the auto industry’s tire capital. The high point came in 1950, when half of all motor vehicle tires in the world were made in Akron.

But 1982 brought what Lieberth calls the Big Blowout.

"There was a two-week period in the early '80s when Firestone laid off 11,000 men and women in the Akron area," he said.

The dominant employers in Akron — Firestone, Goodrich, Goodyear, General Tire — were crushed by globalization and competition from non-union factories.

A new technology out of Europe, the steel-belted radial tire, also played a role. The factories in Akron were customized to make another kind: balloon-like, bias-ply tires.

"There were a lot of reasons to believe the radial tire was superior," Lieberth said. Radials could go 40,000 miles instead of 20,000. Tires that don't get replaced as often were a hard sell to Akron tire makers, but consumers loved them.

Leiberth once interviewed former B.F. Goodrich Company’s chairman, John Ong, who described his own company’s obstinance in the face of a changing market: "I had lived through and been part of the radial revolution in the '70s, and I had seen the lack of imagination on the part of my own company and our competitors in facing that threat.”

By 1982, employment in the tire industry had fallen by two-thirds from its peak. With so many solid jobs gone, incomes collapsed and Akron tax revenues fell into the tank. Lieberth said that, combined with poor city leadership, the austerity lasted two decades.

"Downtown really looked like a ghost town at one point," he said.

Governments raise money by mainly taxing labor, and when labor falls off, new tech could create new fiscal nightmares in the era of artificial intelligence.

Kristi Turner knows what it’s like to deal with changing policies around GLP-1 coverage. She is 48, lives in Indiana, is self-employed, and has been struggling with obesity since she was a teenager.

“I have lost 50 to 100 pounds probably five to ten times in my life, but there’s just been nothing that works for me long-term,” she said. That is, until recently. “I started on Zepbound back in May of 2024. Since then I’ve lost 203 pounds, I still have about 45 to go. I’m still working on it.”

Turner’s husband is a teacher, and initially, her Zepbound was covered by his insurance for just $25 per month out-of-pocket.

But in January 2025, with costs rising, the insurance plan’s pharmacy benefit manager terminated GLP-1 coverage for weight loss.

“I politely raised hell for about three or four months,” said Turner. “But I didn’t win.”

Turner now buys her Zepbound directly from the manufacturer, Eli Lilly, for $449 a month. It could cost twice that if she bought it at a pharmacy without insurance coverage.

Turner’s experience is common, said Paul Fronstin, director of health benefits research at the Employee Benefit Research Institute.

“Most employers are covering it, but not for weight loss,” he said.

According to the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans’ 2026 employer survey, more than 90% of employers cover GLP-1s for diabetes. But only 36% also cover them to treat obesity.

At Conneaut Township Park in the very northeastern corner of Ohio, hundreds of men and women emerge from tents in 1940s garb, grab literal rations for breakfast, march to the central flag pole, and then salute the daily flag raising at 0900 hours.

Among them is Betsy Bashore, wearing a women’s naval auxiliary uniform. She also happens to be the person who runs this whole event.

“We create one pivotal day in history, and that is the Normandy invasion,” she says.

The weekend attracts 1,200 reenactors and around 60,000 viewers. Hotels sell out for miles around. But it only costs $130,000 dollars to put on. It’s surprisingly cheap, considering the week-long rental of a 60-acre park, the porta-potties, the security and the shuttle service to parking lots.

It’s cheap because the reenactors are volunteers, and they own everything they’ve brought.

“I equate it to fishing,” Bashore said while sitting in the driver’s seat of a 1940s Jeep that she bought and restored herself. “You start out with a little rod and reel, and then you're mortgaging your house for a bass boat. It's the same kind of thing.”

The canvas tents the reenactors are sleeping in, their uniforms, their weapons, their blank ammunition — everything they have they bought. For the most dedicated and wealthy, equipment may include an 80-year-old boat, or a real military tank.

“The uniform itself can be anywhere from $750 to $2,500,” said Kyle Dorethy, who is sleeping in the German camp in Occupied France.

Bashore says veterans like Dorethy frequently like to be on the German side.

“Somebody has to play the bad guy,” Dorethy says.

Country music legend Dolly Parton died this week at 80. 

Parton was born in 1946 in a two-room cabin in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, one of 12 children. The family was so poor, Parton’s father had to pay the doctor who birthed her with a bag of corn meal.

In a career spanning seven decades, Parton wrote more than 3,000 songs, sold more than 100 million records, and won 10 Grammys over a career spanning seven decades. She expanded into acting and contributed two stone-cold classic original soundtrack songs — ”9 to 5” was a previous song of the week, and of course “I Will Always Love You,” written in the 1970s but immortalized by Whitney Houston in the 90s.

Parton’s theme park, Dollywood, attracts about 2 million tourists a year, making an estimated $1.8 billion economic impact on her home state. Parton was also a philanthropist, with her organizations gifting more than 332 million books and supporting health and educational causes. 

Marketplace’s Dylan Miettinen collected these numbers and way more on our site. Give it a read while listening to this week’s song. I’m not crying, are you crying?