CBS Sunday Morning explores tick epidemic, jazz history and artistic resilience

On Sunday mornings, millions of Americans settle in with coffee and the familiar rhythm of CBS News Sunday Morning—a program that has spent decades finding the stories beneath the headlines, the people behind the innovations, the weight of loss. This week's broadcast, hosted by Steve Hartman in place of the usual Jane Pauley, moves through a landscape of urgent health threats, artistic resilience, and quiet grief.

The episode opens with a crisis that has been building all summer. Emergency rooms across the country are seeing a sharp spike in tick bite cases, and the reason goes beyond the simple sting of an insect. A lone star tick—small enough to miss, common enough to encounter on any walk through tall grass—carries something that can remake a person's body chemistry in a single bite. Alpha-gal syndrome, as it's called, turns the human immune system against red meat itself. People who contract it find themselves violently allergic to beef, pork, lamb—foods they may have eaten their entire lives. Correspondent David Pogue travels to Martha's Vineyard, where residents are grappling with what amounts to a public health emergency, and speaks with experts from the University of Rhode Island and Tufts University about prevention and the mechanics of how a tick bite becomes a lifetime dietary sentence.

The broadcast then shifts to art and creation. In Sandyston, New Jersey, artist Ricky Boscarino has spent more than three decades transforming his home and 8.5 acres of land into something he calls Luna Parc—a sprawling, eclectic gallery of sculptures, ceramics, mosaics, and objects that defy easy categorization. Correspondent Serena Altschul visits this quirky sanctuary to explore how one person's vision can turn a private property into a public work of imagination.

Another story reaches back to 1958, when photographer Art Kane gathered some of jazz's greatest living legends on a brownstone stoop in Harlem and captured what would become one of the most iconic group portraits in American cultural history. Correspondent Mo Rocca examines Kane's photograph and its legacy through conversations with the photographer's son, Jonathan, and with legendary bassist Ron Carter, who played alongside nearly all of the musicians in that famous frame on a hot August day nearly seven decades ago.

Then there is the story of Robert Lang, a physicist who once designed lasers for NASA and became a master of origami—the art of folding paper into intricate, mathematically precise forms. In 2025, the Altadena wildfire destroyed his house and a lifetime of his folded creations. Rather than accept that loss as final, Lang began to rebuild. The origami community, moved by his determination, joined in the effort to recreate what fire had taken. Correspondent Tracy Smith reports on this act of artistic resilience and the exhibition now showing his work at the Mingei International Museum in San Diego.

The program also visits Casa Verdi in Milan, a retirement home founded by composer Giuseppe Verdi himself—a place where aging musicians who struggled to find fortune during their careers can live out their years surrounded by peers who understand the life they've lived. Residents there don't simply retire; they continue to teach, to mentor young musicians, to pass on what they know. Correspondent Chris Livesay explores this sanctuary for artists.

But the broadcast carries heavier weight as well. Steve Hartman, who created the Oscar-winning short documentary "All the Empty Rooms," sits with Jesse and Mollie Merkel to talk about their son, Fletcher, who was eight years old when a gunman opened fire randomly into Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis last August. Fletcher was one of two students killed. Hartman has documented the bedrooms these children left behind—spaces frozen in time, ordinary rooms that have become monuments to lives cut short. The conversation with Fletcher's parents centers on the sacred space their son's bedroom has become, a place where grief lives alongside memory.

The episode also includes a conversation with country music superstar Kenny Chesney, who has recently published a memoir called "Heart Life Music," and reflects on his journey from Knoxville, Tennessee, to the head of what he calls No Shoes Nation. Botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and author of the bestselling "Braiding Sweetgrass," discusses the importance of honoring both Western science and indigenous knowledge in our relationship with the natural world. And the program remembers pitcher Tommy John, who died on August 15 at age 83—the man whose innovative surgery in the 1970s became so successful that the procedure now bears his name and has extended the careers of countless athletes since.

Beginning September 28, CBS News Sunday Morning will launch a new collaboration bringing conversations with major newsmakers in arts, politics, and culture to a live stage, with streaming available online. The program continues to evolve, but its mission remains constant: to slow down, to look closely, to find the human story in crisis and creation alike.