“For years, Democrats have debated whether the progressive politics that surged around 2020 went too far,” said Pilar Melendez and Allan Smith in NBCNews.com. Now Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, borrowing a phrase from New York councilman Chi Ossé, has officially admitted it did: “Woke 1,” she said last week, “was crazy.” Wokeness has become a shorthand for a series of former progressive priorities: defunding the police, self-flagellating admissions of guilt about privilege, and the adoption of stilted academic terms like “Latinx” to prove your elevated consciousness. Those who failed these tests could be attacked on social media and “canceled.” Donald Trump returned to power amid a backlash against wokeness, said Astead Herndon in Vox, so Democrats are backing away from previous woke stances. In this election cycle, they hope “to reintroduce themselves after workshopping their ideas over the last five years.”

Sorry, but the only lesson Democrats seem to have learned is that “some policies are so toxic politically as to deny them office,” said Kimberley A. Strassel in The Wall Street Journal. AOC and her cohort can chuckle about the extremist positions they held, but there’s nothing funny about those whose lives were forever damaged by the Woke 1 era. Just ask the Americans “who lost jobs or friends, or who were otherwise canceled” for violating far-left orthodoxy. Some dissenters were branded Nazis, fascists, or xenophobes for wanting a secure border. Woke Democratic prosecutors released violent criminals to commit new crimes. “Is this the part where we laugh with AOC?”

“I think we can all agree that there were some embarrassing excesses” in the Woke 1 era, said Arwa Mahdawi in The Guardian. “But just take a minute and look around.” Roe has been toppled, immigrants are being snatched off the street by masked thugs, and Trump is amassing billions in corrupt riches. Progressives shouldn’t play into Republican hands by apologizing for Woke 1 “instead of focusing on the dire state of the country right now.” Besides, Americans aren’t angry at woke anymore, said Luke Winkie in Slate. Today their fury is directed at masked ICE thugs, tech oligarchs, data centers, inflation, and incompetent public officials. Democrats have an opportunity to carve out a “more practical, forward-looking wokeness,” focusing on fairness, human rights, and empathy, without the guilt and pedantic, scolding tone. “A better world is still possible, so long as we’re not too annoying about it.”

Karoline Leavitt “has served President Trump well,” said David Gardner in The Daily Beast. Unfortunately for the rest of us, the 29-year-old White House press secretary, who last week announced she was stepping down to look after her two young children, did so by defending him “with all the wide-eyed devotion of a member of a religious cult.” During her 20-month tenure, “the worst press secretary in modern times” routinely attacked reporters as biased lefty hacks, hotly defended Trump’s sharing of a social media video that portrayed the Obamas as apes, claimed the Democratic Party’s constituency was “Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals,” and called Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring a “hoax.” One of Trump’s most fiercely loyal aides, “she drank the Kool-Aid. The whole bottle.” Trump wanted to keep her, but he might have inadvertently driven her out, said Margaret Hartmann in New York. During her recent nine-week maternity leave, Trump reportedly “kept pestering her about when she was coming back,” making it clear to the burned-out Leavitt that she had to choose between her family and the very needy president.

Leavitt leaves behind “a press operation reimagined for the MAGA media landscape,” said Kara Voght and Meridith McGraw in The Wall Street Journal. During her tenure, the White House booted many mainstream journalists out of the press pool so it could seed it with pro-Trump podcasters and influencers. Leavitt knew she could count on “softballs” from Trump sycophants, said Bill Goodykoontz in The Arizona Republic, such as a question from a representative of MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s streaming channel about how Trump managed to look “healthier than ever before.” She even ousted the Associated Press for refusing to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. Leavitt’s predecessors were all spin doctors, but no one before had used the position “not just to defend their boss” but to deny what he said even when it was on video.

Why even try to fill the job after Leavitt’s “reign of error?” said Rex Huppke in USA Today. No one can replace this smiling, fake flunky who wore “incongruous” crucifixes while dutifully spewing “half-baked lies and insults.” Trump can save taxpayers $200,000 by eliminating the press secretary job and doing his own propaganda. “Cut out the distributor and serve me my fascism fresh, thank you very much.”

President Trump has again offered the world a “profile in cowardice,” said Michael Daly in The Daily Beast. Earlier this month, The Washington Post revealed that when Trump departed a NATO summit in Ankara in July, his security team pulled a stunt to protect him from a purported Iranian plot to target Air Force One. Trump boarded the plane along with numerous reporters, aides, and Cabinet members, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio. But then he was whisked away through a rear door in a catering cart and flown to England on a military jet. Upon arrival, he reversed his steps to covertly reboard Air Force One and rejoin the staff and reporters he had callously turned “into unwitting decoys.” Other presidents have pulled stunts to dodge a threat, said Ian Prasad Philbrick in Slate, such as when Bill Clinton secretly took an unmarked plane from India to Pakistan in 2000. But none used aides and press as “bait.” And those schemes were explained to press members off the record beforehand and then revealed to the public quickly afterward, not “hidden from the public until reporters exposed it” weeks later.

The Secret Service has one job, said Jim Geraghty in National Review: protect the president. There’s nothing “wrong or unethical about misleading the public” to serve that end. As for the outraged reporters: The president is a target, and traveling with him carries risk. There are questions about the seriousness of the threat, a supposed plot to target Trump with a shoulder-fired missile, which was flagged by Israel and dismissed by U.S. intelligence. But the Secret Service can’t just say, “Eh, it’s probably nothing” and take a chance. Certainly not when the threat is Iran, which “puts up billboards and murals of Trump lying in a coffin or drowning in a sea of blood,” said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. Iran’s assassination efforts “are long-standing and help explain why the U.S. is fighting”—for Trump, it’s personal.

It’s no mystery why the White House kept the ruse secret even after “the danger had passed,” said Mohamad Bazzi in The Guardian. The image of the president huddled in a catering cart is “a stark contrast” to his attempts to project “strength and dominance.” It also “encapsulates Trump’s failure in his war on Iran.” He claims we’ve obliterated Iran’s military capability and terror threat, but the Secret Service feared it could reach into our ally’s airspace and threaten his life. Our “strongman” president just bared his weakness to the world “as he hid from the consequences of his own actions.”

How big is China’s EV industry?

Chinese automakers last year made nearly 16 million electric vehicles, a whopping 75% of all EVs sold globally. The U.S. produced only 5%. More than half of new cars sold in China are now EVs—here it’s about 10%— and those vehicles are in heavy demand around the world: Tariffs of up to 127.5% have kept them out of the U.S., but 80% of EVs sold in Latin America are Chinese, as are 75% in Southeast Asia, and 57% in Australia. It’s a staggering turnaround for China, which in 2000 made only 2 million cars a year, all of them gas-powered. Today, Chinese EVs impress with their affordability—budget models run as low as $7,800, compared with $29,000 for a Chevrolet Bolt in the U.S.—reliability, battery range, and luxury features that come as standard, such as massage chairs, big screens, and built-in refrigerators. With every major nation except the U.S. shifting from gas- to battery-powered cars, a move that’s been accelerated by the Iran war driving up oil prices, China’s dominance is expected to grow. “We’ve reached a genuinely existential moment” for U.S. automakers, said Stephen Ezell of the Washington-based Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

How did China become an EV power? 

It began in 2001, when Beijing realized EVs would help it “solve multiple problems at the same time,” said China-based auto analyst Bill Russo: “energy security, environmental pollution concerns, and industrial competitiveness.” It pumped more than $230 billion into the EV sector over 15 years, funding new automakers and new battery and charging technologies. Beijing also offered EV buyers rebates and tax incentives, constructed the world’s largest network of public charging stations, and helped automakers build vertically integrated supply chains. BYD, which overtook Tesla last year as the world’s top EV producer, mines its own lithium, makes its own batteries and semiconductors, and even exports cars on its own ships. Recognizing the challenge, President Barack Obama in 2009 launched a $2.4 billion grant program to boost EV development in the U.S.; a $465 million loan helped Tesla get its breakout Model S to market. Under President Joe Biden, the federal government put $7.5 billion toward charging networks and offered billions more in incentives for buyers and automakers. Many of those efforts were scrapped following President Trump’s return to the White House last year.

What did Trump do?

Calling climate change a “con job,” Trump signed into law a GOP mega-bill that nixed a $7,500 tax credit for new EV buyers. His administration has dismantled clean-air regulations and fuel economy standards that spurred carmakers to move toward EVs; it has also challenged states’ authority to set their own tougher standards. “You’re not going to be forced to make all those cars,” Trump said last year, while signing a law aimed at killing rules from California, which would phase out the sale of new gas-only cars by 2035. EV sales had already stalled in the U.S. before those actions, with potential buyers discouraged by high prices and concerns over range and charging access. But the withdrawal of federal support caused the market to slump, with new EV sales plunging 27% year over year in the first three months of 2026.

How have U.S. automakers responded?

Starting in December, the so-called Big Three—Ford, GM, and Stellantis, owner of Chrysler and Jeep—announced more than $52 billion in write-downs on EV-related losses, and set about what GM called a “strategic realignment.” The companies canceled planned EV models; stopped production of current ones, such as Ford’s F-150 Lightning pickup; and repurposed their battery plants for other uses, including making batteries for data centers. The retreat has alarmed industry analysts, who say U.S. automakers are dooming themselves to irrelevance by doubling down on gas-guzzlers.

What’s at stake? 

The U.S. auto industry generates $1.2 trillion each year, nearly 5% of GDP, and directly employs some 7.4 million Americans. It indirectly supports millions more jobs. To safeguard the industry, Republican and Democratic lawmakers have rallied behind legislation that would ban companies with more than 15% Chinese ownership from selling cars in the U.S. “We are not competing on a level playing field when China subsidizes its manufacturers” and “uses slave labor,” said Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.). Some analysts call protectionism a losing cause. They suspect public demand for Chinese cars will ultimately prove too great, especially as they proliferate in Mexico and Canada, which in January began letting in up to 49,000 Chinese EVs annually. That same month, Trump expressed openness to letting Chinese firms make cars here so long as they use American workers and inputs. Proponents say that approach would light a fire under U.S. carmakers and build their knowledge and capabilities while driving up consumer demand for EVs.

Are U.S. carmakers ready for that? 

Not yet. Some are developing smaller, cheaper EVs they hope will challenge Beijing’s offerings; Ford is rolling out a $30,000 midsize pickup EV next year. The Detroit giant is also trying to grow its EV skills by partnering with Chinese firm Geely on models for the European market, while attempting to strengthen its operations here at home. Ford is pitching the Trump administration on a plan that would let Chinese automakers into the U.S. only through joint ventures in which an American firm would hold the controlling stake. That setup would mirror the deals Beijing struck decades ago with Western automakers eager to enter the Chinese market. Ford CEO Jim Farley, who in 2024 said he’d been driving a “fantastic” Xiaomi SU7 sedan for six months, believes U.S. firms have no choice but to learn from China. “You don’t become fit like the rest of the Chinese,” he said, “you aren’t going to be around much longer.”

“Sports are supposed to be a diversion,” said Candace Buckner in The Athletic, but the Women’s National Basketball Association suddenly feels “less like a sport and more like a societal powder keg.” When the Indiana Fever in 2024 drafted Caitlin Clark, the leading scorer in NCAA history—male or female—the league’s audience exploded, but so did the culture war nastiness. Clips of the straight, white Clark being clobbered by Black opponents, in a league where 25% to 35% of players are publicly LGBTQ+, became a staple of rightwing social media. Then, this summer, Clark’s teammate Sophie Cunningham became her on-court “bodyguard” and a social media phenomenon in her own right. Cunningham recently told ESPN that society should “protect young girls” from playing sports or sharing lockers with “biological men,” and the already toxic “cesspool” of WNBA discourse became instantly more poisonous. Pro- and anti-trans activists held dueling rallies outside Fever games. But now two burly ex-NBA players, Enes Kanter Freedom (6-foot-10 and 250 pounds) and Royce White (6-foot-8 and 270 pounds) have “mockingly” threatened that if the league doesn’t ban male-born players, they’ll declare themselves women and enter next year’s WNBA draft. With attendance and TV viewership at record highs, this “should have been a history-making season for the WNBA,” said Rachel Bachman in The Wall Street Journal. Instead, the season has “spiraled into absolute chaos,” amid racial resentment, feuds, and on-court physical fights.

Kanter and White are “attention-starved” trolls who can safely be ignored, said Mike Wise in MS.now. The WNBA has never had a male-born player, and with about 3 out of 4 Americans agreeing with Cunningham, probably never will. Cunningham isn’t a troll, said Kase Wickman in Vanity Fair. But the blonde, beautiful social media star likes to seek attention, as she demonstrated with her viral “pointing” meme after a scuffle with a Black player in June, which gained her throngs of new followers and lucrative endorsement deals. By coming out against trans players, Cunningham became “MAGA’s favorite women’s basketball player.”

Don’t blame Cunningham, said Joe Nocera in The Free Press. The league could have avoided its “trans mess” just by following the lead of the Olympics or the Women’s Tennis Association, whose rulebooks now clarify that “woman” means “biological woman.” Because that would anger its progressive and LGBTQ+ fan base, however, WNBA executives are responding to the firestorm with meek, meaningless calls for “inclusivity.” Their cowardice also explains why the league’s “race issue isn’t going away.” When the Chicago Sky’s DiJonai Carrington blamed “white privilege” last week, after being ejected for a flagrant foul on Cunningham, the league stayed silent. Unless it can “develop a spine,” the WNBA will remain a “piñata in the culture wars.”

The good news, said Helen Lewis in The Atlantic, is that all this drama is a by-product of the league’s astonishing success. Since Clark arrived, TV viewership has doubled and TV revenues have quadrupled to $200 million. Players’ salaries have soared. “Any emergent sports league” has growing pains, said Will Leitch in The Washington Post. The WNBA can survive the culture wars so long as the quality of the product—the actual basketball—remains high. If you haven’t seen a game lately, the players’ skills are better than ever, and the WNBA’s “product is magnificent.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman believes that we have reached the singularity, an inflection point at which humankind can no longer keep up with how quickly artificial intelligence improves itself. And he’s not the only tech mogul who thinks so.

A few weeks before Altman, Elon Musk said in an X post that the singularity had arrived, while Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis claimed in a speech at a company conference in May that humanity was standing at the “foothills of the singularity.” These claims have awoken a chorus of skeptics, including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who recently dismissed discourse around the singularity and AI gaining consciousness as speculative and “made up.”

‘Advancing unusually fast’

A true AI singularity would “force hard choices” about who “controls increasingly autonomous systems, how benefits are distributed, and where human authority must remain final,” said tech executive Robert J. Szczerba at Forbes. The current state of AI “already warrants those questions.” Business owners should know what “their systems can do without supervision today” and what “evidence would show autonomy increasing faster than their controls.”

Altman may be right that a “gentler singularity is already underway,” with AI “steadily reshaping work and research,” said Szczerba. Still, there’s “no evidence that machines have entered a runaway cycle beyond human control.” AI is “advancing unusually fast,” and that “deserves serious attention.” But it does not mean “we have passed a point of no return.”

When it comes to what’s more intelligent — humans or AI — the “question does not compute,” said Kai Riemer and Sandra Peter, professors at the University of Sydney professors, at The Conversation. There’s “no single ladder that humans and machines are climbing.” AI already “vastly exceeds us at some tasks while being “hopeless at others any child can do.” But because the “systems talk like us, we fall for an illusion.”

When we believe that machines are “in the process of catching up with us,” it’s easy to assume a “mind at work when these systems output intelligent-sounding text,” said The Conversation. This is considered “anthropomorphic seduction,” which makes a cybersecurity issue such as the Hugging Face hack “sound like an awakening.” (An autonomous AI agent powered by OpenAI technology went rogue last month and hacked the prominent startup’s database of AI models.) In the end, that incident “points to a gross failure of security governance on OpenAI’s behalf,” not an “emerging superintelligence.”

‘Not actually there yet’

It may be impossible to know exactly when we have crossed into the singularity. It’s comparable to falling into a black hole — at some point, whoever falls in will “glide over the hole’s event horizon,” which means they are “henceforth forever separated from the rest of the universe,” said Nick Bostrom, a philosopher who founded the former Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, to Business Insider. Yet from their perspective, “everything still seems the same as before.”

AI is showing the “first stirrings” of recursive self-improvement, but it lacks the capability for continual learning, said Bostrom. Using current AIs is like “working with a brilliant and extremely well-educated recruit,” but it’s “always their first day at the job.”

Altman, as is “often the case, is simply aping Elon,” said scientist Gary Marcus at Substack. The CEOs making these claims shouldn’t be taken seriously because “none of them has actually defined what they mean.”

“No matter how you slice it, we just are not actually there yet,” said Marcus. If we were, we “wouldn’t be once again seeing” the Klarna Effect, which is the “AI hype two-step” in which “employers boast of using AI to reduce headcount only to quietly rehire humans.”

We haven’t reached the “age of abundance that Peter Diamandis and Elon Musk keep insisting is a natural consequence of AI,” said Marcus. Nor have we reached a point where “technological growth accelerates beyond human control.” We can still “perfectly well shut this stuff off if we want to,” and it’s “mainly because of greed that we don’t.”

It’s doubtful there will be a “single magic moment that our descendants think of as the singularity,” said Marcus. If there is, it’s “not one that’s going to happen in this decade.”

‘If only the MAGA “Nixonmaxxers” fully understood the 37th president’

Lee Huebner at The Washington Post

“‘Nixonmaxxing’ young conservatives seem intent on repairing the disgraced former president’s reputation,” considering him a “victim of Washington machinations,” says Lee Huebner. Nixon’s “pugilistic style” clearly appeals to the “populist right,” and his “antiestablishment sensibility is shared by Trump.” But there is a “fundamental difference between the two men.” MAGA “denies election results and works to undermine confidence in America’s electoral system,” while Nixon notably “refused to join Republicans who were urging him to deny election results and defy court rulings.”

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‘An economic D-Day is coming for Iran’

Scott Bessent at the Financial Times

“President Donald Trump and the overwhelming might of our military have significantly dismantled Iran’s military capabilities and weakened its nuclear program,” says U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent. Now begins the “single greatest financial offensive ever marshaled against an adversary.” The “regime’s final refuge lies in the self-deception of fearful nations that still believe accommodating aggression can secure a durable peace,” but “our objective is to sever every economic lifeline that sustains the tyrannical regime until Tehran stands alone.”

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‘The gun lobby’s most cynical move yet’

Sari Horwitz at The Atlantic

A study by Stanford University researchers this year found that “after fatal school shootings, pro-gun political-action committees dramatically increased their contributions to their preferred U.S. House candidates in the districts where the shootings occurred,” says Sari Horwitz. “These shifts in spending” were observed “only when children were killed.” The study shows how “pro-gun PACs work to undermine anti-gun feelings in communities suffering from trauma” and is a “compelling reminder of how far the gun lobby will go.”

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‘We stopped family separation once. We must stop this, too.’

Rosa DeLauro at Newsweek

The “second Trump administration is again targeting children as it pursues its radical anti-immigration agenda,” says Rosa DeLauro. The “contract between the federal government and the Acacia Center for Justice” recently “lapsed after the administration refused to extend the agreement,” leaving more than “20,000 migrant children” without “legal representation.” But depriving kids of “adequate legal services is not targeting the ‘worst of the worst.’” These “frightened” children “will be forced to stand before an immigration judge to plead their own case.”

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What happened

Chinese robots ran faster and jumped higher than human record-holders this weekend, at the opening of the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing. One humanoid ran the 100-meter sprint in 9.39 seconds, surpassing Usain Bolt’s 9.58-second world record, while another covered 400 meters in 38.15 seconds, smashing Wayde van Niekerk’s 43.03-second record. Both robots were made by Beijing’s X-Humanoid, as was a third that reached 2.88 meters in the standing high jump, besting Javier Sotomayor’s 2.45 meters.

Who said what

The five-day Olympics-like event is a “spectacle demonstrating China’s rapid progress in advanced robotics,” The Associated Press said. China “makes the majority of the world’s humanoid robots,” but they are “still mostly used for demonstrations, performances and research — at least for now.” The sprinting performances were a “sharp improvement” over last year, Reuters said, though “braking was an issue, as the machines slammed into ​a thick mat” after the finish line and had to be carried off on stretchers.

What next?

More than 2,000 humanoid robots are competing in 30 sporting events including soccer, table tennis and boxing. There are also 21 “scenario-based contests” like “EV charging, restaurant work” and “industrial assembly,” Reuters said, and the “real test” is whether the humanoids can “handle packaging ‌and warehouse operations while reliably performing precision tasks” that evaluate “their ability to work like humans in less flashy jobs.”

What happened

House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.) and Jared Kushner, a top outside adviser to his father-in-law, President Donald Trump, “met privately in recent weeks” and “discussed potential areas of common ground,” The New York Times reported Sunday.

The meeting “shows the depth of Republican Party angst over losing their congressional majority,” The Associated Press said, and White House efforts to “stem any potential political fallout” on Trump if Democrats “wrest majority control” in November.

Who said what

Kushner and Jeffries “discussed housing, immigration and the high cost of living,” the Times said, all issues where compromise “seems remote.” The Trump GOP’s “my-way-or-the-highway approach to governing” has “failed the American people,” Jeffries said Sunday, and the “question is whether Republicans will join us” in “fighting for an affordable America.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) “bristled” Sunday when asked about the meeting, the AP said. “I don’t know what that’s about,” but Kushner “hedges his bets” and isn’t “directly involved” in “day-to-day” White House operations, he said on Fox News. “I’m telling you, we’re going to defy history and hold this majority.”

What next?

Trump has “mostly steered around Congress in his second term, trampling its powers and prerogatives” with “little pushback from GOP leaders,” the Times said. “All that is likely to change if Democrats control either chamber,” the AP said.

For every traveler who wants to kick back and relax on their vacation, there’s another who refuses to sit still. These seven hotels and experiences are for the active voyager who is never too far from their golf clubs, knows where all the best tennis courts are and is always game for a new sport.

Play padel at Adare Manor, Ireland

Pickleball had its moment, and now it’s padel’s time to shine. A mix of tennis and squash, this racket sport is growing in popularity, and Adare Manor has the perfect spot to learn the game or hone your skills.

The Padel Club houses two custom-built padel courts, with instructors on hand to teach newbies and a selection of racquets to borrow. Once the ancestral home of the Earls of Dunraven, the grand Adare Manor sits in a “secluded” area, and its many activities on top of padel, like fishing and falconry, are “fit for Irish nobility,” said Forbes.

Hit it out of the park at the rooftop batting cages at ‘Alohilani Resort, Oahu

It’s all swings, no misses when you have a view like this. The rooftop at ‘Alohilani Resort is part of the property’s fitness hub, and guests can gaze out at Waikiki Beach and feel the Pacific Ocean breeze while practicing their hitting in the batting cages. An open-air TRX gym and red clay tennis courts are also located on the recreation deck, which often hosts yoga classes and other wellness events.

Pick up polo at Coworth Park, England

It’s “hard to imagine a more pleasant setting” than Coworth Park, tucked away in the Berkshire countryside, said The Telegraph. There’s a lovely meadow filled with wildflowers, lake with swans and polo fields where you can take customized lessons through the Guards Polo Academy. Learn to properly swing a mallet and glide across the field, or for the more confident rider, enjoy a day out playing with polo club members.

Get your heart pumping at Miraval Arizona, Tucson

At Miraval Arizona, you’re encouraged to take a flying leap and go out on a limb — safely, of course. While on the property’s Challenge Course you can also swing through the air, climb up a giant ladder, cross a tightrope and elevated platforms and zipline.

The course “encourages you to step out of your comfort zone, both physically and mentally” and is “designed for personal growth,” said Condé Nast Traveler. The Sonoran Desert spreads out around you, a “stunning backdrop” to your adventure.

Hang 10 at Nobu Ryokan Malibu, California

The Pacific Ocean is your playground when staying at Nobu Ryokan Malibu. The 16-room property is right on Carbon Beach, and through its new surfing program, guests can ride the waves on a custom surfboard during a private lesson from Malibu Fit Concierge. Afterward, put on your best bathing suit for a two-hour water photo session with celebrity photographer (and former competitive surfer) Steven Lippman.

Try wing foiling at Oil Nut Bay, British Virgin Islands

Water sports are a big deal at Oil Nut Bay. This beautiful property provides “pure laidback luxury,” and that extends to its activities, said Travel and Leisure. Tubing, waterskiing, wakeboarding, snorkeling, kayaking, paddleboarding, kiteboarding and Hobie Cat sailing are all offered (with instructors and experienced drivers), plus two more unusual options: wing foiling and Seabobbing. Wing foiling is developed from windsurfing and kitesurfing, while a Seabob is an electric underwater scooter.

Explore the trails at Río Perdido, Costa Rica

The outdoors is your gym at Río Perdido. Hike, run, do yoga or take a peaceful stroll on the property’s 1,500 acres.

Guests have access to a vast network of solid rock trails for mountain biking that twist and turn through dry forest and a thermal canyon, and can spike their adrenaline by whitewater rafting on the Tenorio River. This proves to be “both intense and exhilarating if the rapids are strong,” said Condé Nast Traveler. Wind down in the property’s naturally heated thermal river and mineral pools, covered by a canopy of lush tropical foliage.

What happened

President Donald Trump’s 50% tariffs on $20 billion in Canadian imports took effect Saturday after negotiations collapsed. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said U.S. negotiators “asked too much and offered too little,” and Ottawa would roll out “dollar for dollar” retaliatory tariffs starting Sept. 8. Trump’s latest tariffs cover about 5% of Canadian imports, ranging from wine, dairy and hockey sticks to overcoats and some Christmas ornaments.

Who said what

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said Canada rejected the “best treatment” of any major U.S. trading partner. The U.S. terms were “uneconomic” and “unfair,” Carney said, and “unacceptable” last-minute demands would have restricted Canada’s ability to strike trade deals with other countries, among other infringements on sovereignty. “Canada wants the benefits of being a State, without being one!!!” Trump said Sunday on social media.

The “dumbest trade war in history” just “got dumber,” The Wall Street Journal said in an editorial. Trump is taxing an “array of consumer goods” a “mere 10 weeks before midterm elections,” when his approval rating is already “frigid” in part because voters believe he is “waging blunderbuss wars without a strategy, and on trade they’re right.”

What next?

Unlike some of the other laws Trump has used to impose tariffs, the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act used here “does not appear to impose a time limit on the duties,” CNN said. “We should be prepared to duke it out for two years,” until Trump leaves office, Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew said, and “then hopefully, sanity will return.”

Baros Maldives is the grande dame of resorts in the archipelagic country. A tiny island located near the capital Malé, it’s been open since 1973, one year after the first hotel appeared in the Maldives. It channels many years of experience to provide flawless service as well as one of the most easily accessible house reefs teaming with colourful fish.

Why stay here?

It takes 25 minutes by speedboat to get to Baros from Malé – no waiting around for a seaplane transfer after you land. The atmosphere is low-key but looks-wise the island is a showstopper – it’s surrounded by a beautiful aquamarine lagoon with stunning beaches and vibrant marine life.

You can walk around the whole island in 10 minutes. It was peaceful and quiet during my visit. I didn’t see any children even though it’s not explicitly an adults-only resort (kids over eight are welcome).

The most impressive thing about the resort is the house reef, with abundant fish, just a few metres from the beach. I saw colourful schools of fish flashing neon as they whizzed past me, a stingray bobbing along and a small shipwreck on the seabed, with coral nurseries threaded through the withered remains. Night snorkelling is also available and you’ll often see people floating on by, illuminated by their torches in the darkness, as you eat dinner on the terrace at one of the restaurants.

Beach and overwater villas are styled like traditional cottages, while the interiors are decorated in greys and beiges with colourful patterned rugs. The terraces come with a large outdoor sofa, sunbeds and an infinity pool for guests to do laps as they gaze out into the startlingly blue sea. The look is understated rustic chic that is simple and unobtrusive.

Eating and drinking

Lime Restaurant is located by the pool with sea views. At the breakfast buffet you’ll find plates of freshly cut fruit, sushi, several types of Maldivian curries, dumplings, cold cuts, salads, cereal and pastries galore. There’s also a fantastic à la carte menu, which includes eggs benedict, a chia mousse açai bowl and a Japanese breakfast set, which comes with grilled salmon and miso soup.

For lunch, there are two options – Sails Bar on the beach or Cayenne, the grill restaurant overlooking the sea. They both serve the same menu at lunch. At Cayenne, I ate delicious tiger prawn skewers covered in olive oil and punchy garlic with the tastiest chargrilled flatbread. I returned for dinner one night and enjoyed a perfectly grilled whole lobster with steamed vegetables and their zingy signature salad with mixed leaves, avocado, plump mangosteen and hazelnuts.

The Lighthouse is a fine dining restaurant that serves up French cuisine with an Asian twist – the bar upstairs is also the perfect spot to watch the sunset. I ate a tender wagyu steak with a tasty peppercorn sauce, crisp potatoes and artichokes. Around me, other guests opted to have dishes cooked at their table. I saw a lobster bisque being flambéed from a cart – this is classy dining with dramatic flair.

Things to do

It’s hard to beat a sunset cruise. As I floated along on their traditional boat Nooma, I enjoyed non-alcoholic champagne and canapés. The roof is padded so you can sit down comfortably while taking in the views. Watching the sky turn orange and pink while surrounded by the sea was really peaceful. Dolphin-watching and sunrise fishing trips as well as other excursions are also on offer.

Baros has a piano deck – a wooden platform shaped like a piano – that sits in the middle of the sea, where it’s the dreamiest shade of aquamarine. It’s only reachable by a short speedboat trip and once there you can eat a sunrise breakfast or have a romantic dinner during the sunset. It’s an intimate and novel destination for a cosy meal with an endless expanse of the sea cocooning you.

The verdict

Even though it’s close to Malé, Baros is incredibly tranquil. This is the resort to come to if you want to while away your days watching sea chickens scuttling across the sand or herons flying on to your pool in the early hours. Many of the guests are repeat visitors who come back year after year and it’s easy to see why – this intimate island is an oasis of calm.

Ann was a guest of Baros Maldives

The UK will continue to support Ukraine despite the “outrageous threats” made by Russia, said Andy Burnham in Kyiv on the 35th anniversary of the nation’s independence.

On his visit to Ukraine, his first overseas trip as prime minister, Burnham will also be giving his hosts blueprints for building long-range missiles, which can strike “around 150 miles (241km) into Russia”, said the BBC.

Last week, following reports that drones made by British companies were being used to attack targets within Russia, Moscow’s embassy in London said that the UK’s “actions will inevitably carry consequences for which it will have to answer”.

“Blustering” threats have been directed at the UK before, said Owen Matthews in The Independent. But now, with Russia growing “restless” amid a fast-evolving geopolitical landscape, the UK is antagonising Vladimir Putin more obviously than ever before.

What did the commentators say?

The relationship between the two countries has “already sunk close to rock-bottom”, said Jonathan Singh and Will Hazell in The i Paper. Moscow withdrew its ambassador to the UK last month, reflecting a deepening trend with both nations of “reducing staffing in their respective embassies and expelling each other’s diplomats”.

“Most Britons have little grasp of just how much their country is hated in Moscow,” said former diplomat Andy Pryce on the Centre for European Policy Analysis. In “Kremlin demonology”, it is “Britain that wears the Devil’s face”.

But curiously, Russian media outlets also “mock the UK, at some length”. Britain may be the “organising hand behind Russian failure, especially in Ukraine”, but its “army is too small, its navy overstretched” and its economy is “exhausted”. But this contradiction in propaganda is not a “flaw”: it presents the UK as “large enough to hate and weak enough to be worth threatening”.

But Britain has long been on the receiving end of “regular, blood-curdling warnings” from Russia, said Matthews in The Independent. Supplying Storm Shadow missiles and more recently “BAE-made Nyan drones” to Ukraine is the latest provocation for the “Kremlin’s attack dogs”. Putin believes Britain can be “kicked about with impunity” whereas his “complicated on-again, off-again relationship” with the Trump administration tells of very different priorities.

There were arson attacks in 2024 in Leyton and Birmingham that were both thought to be orchestrated by Moscow. A thwarted attempt by a “gang of dim-bulb Eastern European crooks” to assassinate journalists and activists, and the arson attacks on Keir Starmer’s former home also point the finger at Russia. The success of this “aggravated hooliganism” has been somewhat limited, but one thing is clear: Britain is becoming “extremely vulnerable and unprepared for attack”, whatever form it will now take.

Now is “as good an opportunity as any for the Kremlin to make a political point”, said Dan Sabbagh in The Guardian. Any effort to “undermine public confidence” in the UK, with Parliament in recess and “less domestic political news to crowd out the embassy’s remarks”, is vital for Putin’s agenda. As its economy suffers, and with Moscow being in range of Ukrainian drones, Russia is more vulnerable than ever. What would be concerning is if, now that it feels cornered, Russia’s “brinkmanship” spirals out of control.

What next?

Russia is unlikely to launch direct missile or armed drone strikes on the UK, said David Blair and Roland Oliphant in The Telegraph. Their first port of call would be to “intensify the existing campaign of sabotage, drone incursions and cyberattacks”. Disruptive incidents – like the recent drone attack in Leipzig – cyber attacks and sending drones to “loiter” near airports will all become more regular. Attacking British military targets in Ukraine, whether personnel or equipment, would also be a “straightforward way of retaliating” against the UK.

But, more broadly, Nato has a “deterrence problem”, said Katia Glod in Prospect. The alliance has “formidable mechanisms” to prevent a full-scale armed attack on its member states, but Russia can “operate precisely where those mechanisms become less automatic”, effectively in a “grey zone” where it knows there won’t be a response.

Deterrence will work only if the Kremlin believes there will be proportionate “consequences”. Nato, therefore, needs to “make activity below the Article 5 threshold more costly” to its adversaries, providing stronger protection of military logistics, communication, better counterintelligence and “graduated responses to hostile activity”. The objective should be to deny Moscow the “freedom to operate below the threshold of war”. Nato must “balance between avoiding an unnecessary war with Russia and ensuring that fear of one does not become a weapon Russia can use against us”.

A government minister has urged social media companies to “step up” and remove “content that celebrates dangerous driving”, after recent fatal collisions caused by young people driving on the wrong side of the road.

Seven people died in the early hours of Saturday morning when a Volkswagen Passat, containing five young men, sped the wrong way down the A66 near Middlesbrough and crashed into a police armed response vehicle. Last weekend, five teenagers were killed when their BMW, heading the wrong way down the M9 near Dublin, hit another car head-on, seriously injuring three women and a child.

“What makes this reckless behaviour even more appalling is that, in some cases, it is being done for social media likes,” said Justin Kelly, head of the Irish police force.

How big a problem is it?

One of the young men killed in the Passat seems to have previously shared TikTok videos of himself in a car chase with the police. And other social media accounts linked to the car’s passengers “appeared to show men in balaclavas on motorbikes and previous police chases set to rap music,” said The Times. Hundreds of videos “shot in the UK” are being “posted online to encourage young drivers to act recklessly for kudos”, according to the paper’s social media analysis.

The crash in Ireland has drawn attention to the activities of the “Lucky Dip” gang, whose members steal cars for thrills and upload footage of their joyriding “for validation and popularity”, said The Telegraph. Irish authorities have warned that they, and groups like them, are “trying to outdo each other” with videos of ever more dangerous driving.

Why are they doing it?

For excitement and for admiration from their peers. Showing off with risk-taking behaviour is nothing new, Mary Aiken, a professor of forensic cyberpsychology at the University of East London, told The Guardian, but social media “is psychologically immersive and could amplify a predisposition to taking risks and ignoring consequences”.

While they are driving, she said, they are “simultaneously filming and capturing content for posting later or live streaming. They have one foot in the real world and one foot in cyberspace. They’re thinking about the likes; they’re thinking about kudos.”

Is TikTok to blame?

The “macabre” video trend “has astonished and outraged” Ireland, and prompted debate not only about policing and criminal justice but also about social media regulation, said The Guardian.

UK defence minister Luke Pollard this morning warned social media companies that they have a decision to make. “They’ve argued against regulations, saying they can police themselves. Well, this is the perfect opportunity to demonstrate it.” The government can use powers in the Online Safety Act to compel them to take this content down but, if they took steps not to allow “their algorithm to share this type of content” to begin with, then “I think we’d be in a better place”.

Ireland’s media regulator said it has asked TikTok for a “full account” of what measures it has taken over risky and reckless driving content on its platform. TikTok has said it monitors content, and removes videos and accounts that break its rules.

TikTok has declined an invitation to appear before an Irish parliament’s media committee, partly because it was the only social-media company to be asked to do so. “We all know” it’s those boys who “are responsible for what happened”, said Alan Kelly, chair of the media committee, but the platform they used was TikTok. And we “want to have assurances, not only that they’ll be reactive and take down such content, but that also they’ll proactively make sure that it doesn’t go up. Because they have the AI tools to prevent this from happening, and they need to show that they’re going to do that.”

Almost 500 people have been arrested on suspicion of starting wildfires in France this summer as countries across Europe continue to “tackle ferocious blazes”, said The Guardian.

More than a thousand people were forced to flee from a Croatian holiday resort last week, while hundreds more were evacuated from villages in western Germany and southwest France. Stranded holidaymakers were picked up from beaches “threatened by flames” in Greece, and the army rescued “historic relics” in Spain. In Belgium’s Liège province, residents were asked to leave their homes as the biggest fire in the country’s history burned through the High Fens nature reserve.

By 16 August, fire and rescue services in England and Wales had been called to 1,132 wildfires this year, according to the National Fire Chiefs Council – that’s more than the record-breaking 1,017 for the whole of last year.

The recent heatwaves have led to a rise in blazes but how they start and if they are set deliberately then why does this happen, are keenly debated questions.

‘No common picture’

Almost all UK wildfires are started by people, said a 2024 report by the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology. A separate report by the Forestry Commission the previous year found that 97% of all wildfires are “related to some form of human action”, whether “deliberate” or “accidental”.

Nearly nine out of 10 forest fires in France are started by humans and some people “do so deliberately”, with the perpetrators “often difficult to identify”, said Le Monde. Although climate change “fuels the droughts, heatwaves, and winds that turn forests into tinderboxes, it is humans who set them alight”, said Euractiv.

In Portugal, which is known as the EU’s “most flammable country”, arson accounts for around a fifth of wildfires. In France, the authorities have calculated that nine out of 10 fires have a human origin, with 30% started deliberately. But the causes of fires elsewhere in the Mediterranean are “often not established, let alone investigated” so the “lack of reliable data” makes it “harder to design social and policy interventions to prevent fires”.

In Spain, some landowners set fires to move livestock around, and blazes can result from property disputes and acts of revenge. Arson “is not always random destruction”.

Europe may have “built advanced systems to detect wildfires and coordinate emergency response”, said Euronews, but there’s “no common picture of who starts deliberate fires or why”, because arson “remains a fragmented national matter”.

‘Fire is powerful, beautiful’

A man charged with starting a wildfire in Spokane, Washington, this month had planned the crime for weeks and even researched when the weather would be best for igniting it, said police. The suspect said “fire is powerful, beautiful, and that things that go through fire experience a kind of rebirth”, said The Associated Press.

In California, a suspect “spent days obsessing about arson” before heading to a clearing in Pacific Palisades late on New Year’s Eve, where he allegedly started a fire with a lighter, said the Los Angeles Times.

Although firefighters “quickly put out” that fire, investigators believe that the “embers continued to smoulder underground” and reignited to become one of California’s “most devastating” wildfires. It “consumed more than 6,500 structures” and left 12 people dead and billions of dollars’ worth of damage.

We’re used to puréeing watermelons with sugar syrup and freezing it into granita. Or at barbecues, plugging their “emerald-rinded posteriors” with “an upturned bottle of vodka” for a boozy treat, said Ravinder Bhogal in the Financial Times. But more and more people are now pairing watermelon’s “refreshing flesh” with salty, herby, even hot flavours to unlock vibrant new levels in savoury dishes. Here are some of our favourite deliciously unusual watermelon combos.

Peanut and Watermelon Chaat

Chaats are crunchy, spicy fried snacks, often served as appetizers throughout South Asia. “Every chaat has a little bit of sweetness, a little bit of tartness, a little heat, and a little crunch,” said chef Vishwesh Bhatt in Food & Wine. He flavours his peanut-based chaat with chilli, cayenne, chaat masala, thinly sliced cucumber, red onion, radishes, mint, basil, coriander, lime juice and “the fleeting succulent sweetness of watermelon”.

Sour watermelon and monkfish curry

For a “bold, new” take, I combine watermelon with “dashes of umami fish sauce, blistering chillies and mouth-puckering tamarind”, said Bhogal in the FT. In a monkfish curry, watermelon chunks bring “bright, pleasing bursts of sweetness” to temper the spiciness of the sauce. “Serve with sticky rice, topped with plenty of fresh Thai basil.”

Spiced pork belly with quick-pickled watermelon

Watermelon pickled with grapefruit, lime, chilli and fish sauce makes a “chunky salsa” so tempting you’ll want to eat it “straight out of the bowl”, said Diana Henry in The Telegraph. But, paired with “punchy” pork belly, marinaded in chillies, lime, ginger and garlic, it makes a “delicious sweet-meets-savoury main”.

Watermelon and tomato salad with spicy feta sauce

Chef Ana Sortun has given a much-loved Mediterranean classic a spicy twist, said Adam Dolge Food & Wine. Sprinkling charred jalapeño onto the simple chopped melon and tomato base adds a “subtle smokiness and gentle heat”, and the creamy feta sauce brings a “tangy, savoury richness” that strikes a “pleasing balance with the sweet fruit”.

Watermelon rind pickles

“Don’t toss out that watermelon rind,“ says Jodie Kautzmann in Food & Wine. With ginger, allspice, black peppercorns, bay leaves and lemon peel, you can turn it into “crunchy, tangy” pickles that are “perfect for adding to a charcuterie board” or “chopping into a relish for burgers and hot dogs”.

After spending years building audiences and influencer careers showcasing traditional gender roles, some of the earliest so-called tradwives are now denouncing the category, including those who say they never claimed the label for themselves in the first place. While this could be seen as a shift away from conservative influencers, a new crop of teenage tradwives is already waiting to prove that notion wrong.

Influencers dropping the label

Despite having built much of her more than 12 million followers on TikTok through an “outlandish portrayal of domestic perfection,” model and influencer Nara Smith made waves after she “vehemently disavowed” the tradwife label during a recent interview with the “Call Her Daddy” podcast, Jessica Grose said at The New York Times. Viewers of Smith’s content were “stuck in this narrative” about traditional gender roles that she didn’t create on purpose, Smith said on the podcast. They used her as the “poster child for the tradwife movement,” which was “very bizarre.”

She is not the only popular so-called trad wife who has veered clear of the terminology. Earlier this year, Estee Williams, another tradwife influencer with hundreds of thousands of followers, announced on TikTok that she would be stepping back from making that kind of content to “focus fully” on her family. In June, Ballerina Farm’s Hannah Neeleman, who is rumored to be the inspiration behind the popular thriller book “Yesteryear,” admitted that she “steers clear of conversations around tradwives,” said Vanity Fair.

For some, the sudden shift can be tied to tradwives being regarded as MAGA-coded. It is no longer “considered cool” to be “tacitly embracing the Trumpian vision,” Grose said. It is “not cute anymore” to be “spending hours making Skittles from scratch” when so many people “can’t even afford haircuts and toilet paper.” Beyond the “superficial politics” of content like Smith’s, there is evidence that “one-note influencers are having trouble retaining their audience” because what used to “get them brand deals and followers has become stale.”

Next generation is here

The first-gen trad wives’ “renunciation” has had “little impact on their progeny,” who “studied them for years” and “viewed their content as a portrait of a viable future,” said Vanity Fair. Now there is a new cohort of “young — often teenage — married influencers.” They have gone viral in the last few months by “mimicking the content formula perfected by their tradwife forebears.”

The new generation cooks, cleans and “fights disaffected former tradwives” who tell them to “stash emergency money away from their husbands,” said Vanity Fair. These teens, typically between the ages of 17 and 21, “present their life as a balm to generational ennui.” In some ways, they are proof that what felt like an “overhyped, postpandemic symbol of an ascending conservative culture” has become an “enduring content category that nearly guarantees virality,” one now “taken over by ever-younger creators.”

The new wave of “young creators making stay-at-home content” appears more than ready to “accept the homemaker label,” Isabel Bekele said at Dazed. The young women “film themselves performing domestic tasks” and post the same “ragebait-esque provocations” with an attitude that “demonstrates an awareness of how their content might be received.”

The lifestyle choices of “teen tradwives” are “certainly not reflective of the country as a whole,” especially as Gen Z women are still “going to college and entering the workforce at a higher rate than their male counterparts,” said Bekele. Still, the fact that these videos “exist and are gaining traction at all” feels indicative of the “current cultural dissonance in America,” where conversations around “work, gender and labor” have changed in line with “women’s lived realities.”

Nara Smith may not be a tradwife, but that “doesn’t mean that the movement is going anywhere,” said Bekele — whether that’s due to the country’s “shift to the right,” the internet’s “obsession with hate-watching,” the algorithm’s “tendency to reward extreme content” or all of the above. With or without the first-era influencers, “tradwives will continue to exist.” Considering the limited options young women have today, “maybe it isn’t that shocking that this romanticization of the past will still be in our future.”

The city of Dakhla, on a “peninsula where the Sahara meets the Atlantic”, is advertised to holidaymakers as “Morocco’s hidden gem”, said the BBC. But tourists flying to this part of Western Sahara might not know they’ll “be landing in one of the world’s longest ongoing territorial disputes”.

A former Spanish colony, Western Sahara was annexed by Morocco in 1975. Since then, it has been the subject of a dispute between Morocco and its indigenous Sahrawi people, led by the Polisario Front and its government-in-exile in Algeria. Now classified by the United Nations as a “non-self-governing territory”, around 80% of the country is occupied and administered by Morocco, with an earthen strip separating that area from a Sahrawi-controlled portion in the east. Numerous UN-brokered talks to resolve Western Sahara’s future have failed.

‘Tomorrow’s Dubai’

Morocco has been pouring considerable resources into Western Sahara. Since 2015, it has spent £7 billion trying to “level it up”, said The Spectator. There are now water desalination plants, 620 miles of motorways, and plans for eight “green hydrogen plants” and a “centrepiece” £1 billion Dakhla Atlantic Port. This “massive undertaking” is still under construction but, when finished, “35 million tons of goods are expected to pass through every year”.

King Mohammed VI’s “development plan” for the country he refers to as Morocco’s “Southern Provinces” includes “metamorphosing” Western Sahara’s coastline into a hub for business and tourism. Christopher Nolan filmed several scenes for “The Odyssey” on the “otherworldly” White Dune, just outside Dakhla, and it’s hoped many will want “to follow Odysseus’ footsteps and flock” to this city on the up: “think of it as tomorrow’s Dubai”.

Western Sahara also has plenty of natural resources that Morocco could exploit. Surveys have pointed to “promising deposits for gold, silver and iron” in the region, said Bloomberg.

‘International consensus’ shift

Nolan’s decision to film in Western Sahara was bound to “revive debate” over this “half-century-old territorial dispute”, said Bloomberg. Morocco’s annexation has created “one of the world’s most enduring yet overlooked refugee crises”, said Metro. For the past 50 years, the indigenous Sahrawi people have been “forced to live under occupation or go into exile”: 173,000 Sahrawi refugees live in camps in Algeria, in the “harshest part of the desert”. Each camp is named after a city in Western Sahara, but “many have never set foot” in these places “where their parents or grandparents were born”.

In recent years, international consensus has shifted and consolidated in favour of Morocco’s “autonomy plan” for Western Sahara. Spain has endorsed the plan and both France and the US have recognised Morocco’s sovereignty over the region. In October, the UN Security Council approved a resolution that gave the “strongest backing yet” to Moroccan control, “while making no mention of the independence referendum” sought by the Polisaro Front, said Bloomberg.

Last month, Donald Trump thanked Moroccan authorities for naming a highway after him, said Al Jazeera. The gesture has not been confirmed by Rabat but “would be far from surprising”, since the US has provided “crucial support” in bringing Morocco “closer to securing greater control” over the Western Sahara. In recent weeks, the US Department of Commerce announced it would fund “the early stages of an ammonium project” in the region, adding “a new economic dimension” to the long-running, “competing claims over the territory”.

Boothbay, Maine

Three Flags, a 2021 contemporary shingle-style home on Midcoast Maine’s Linekin Bay, has a waterfront porch for dining and lounging, with a wood-burning fireplace and motorized screens.

The five-bedroom’s vaulted great room features wide-plank oak floors, a staircase with helical white-oak rails, illuminated built-ins, a wall of sliders, and a central lofted catwalk. On almost 4 acres, the lot includes a private dock and mooring. $7,850,000. John Scribner, LandVest Christie’s International Real Estate, (207) 749-5148

St. Helena, Calif.

This restored 1940s two-bedroom cottage on the 76-acre Durham Ranch in Napa Valley has a screened porch that overlooks a pool. Styled by designer Ken Fulk, the home includes reclaimed-fence-board cabinets, bluestone floors, a stacked-stone fireplace, and board-and-batten walls.

The former cattle ranch features a party barn, two year-round tent cabins, and a “cowboy shack,” plus oak trees and seasonal streams. $4,500,000. Hillary Ryan, Sotheby’s International Realty—St. Helena Brokerage, (707) 312-2105

Downers Grove, Ill.

Acorn Glade, a 2017 modern passive house designed by Tom Bassett-Dilley Architects, has a wood-frame screened porch overlooking a garden, plus a second-story screened sleeping porch. The open-plan four-bedroom features polished concrete floors, built-ins with pale wood, and windows placed to maximize energy efficiency.

Outside are a rooftop garden, a fenced backyard, and stone paths. Green spaces, a golf course, and transportation options are nearby. $1,050,000. Elaine Pagels, Berkshire, (630) 601-8558

Asheville, N.C.

In the Ramble Biltmore Forest community, this 2013 four-bedroom contemporary has a Phantom-screened porch with stone floors, a pizza oven, a grill, and dining and lounge areas. Inside the home are ebonized bamboo floors, high ceilings, a marble floor-to-ceiling fireplace, and a chef’s kitchen with Brazilian granite counters.

The nearly 1-acre lot includes a firepit sculpture and hot tub, plus access to a gym, pickleball, and a pool. $3,999,999. Josh Smith, Howard Hanna Beverly-Hanks Real Estate/Luxury Portfolio International, (828) 606-0974

Woodstock, N.Y.

Once the home of assemblage artist Lenny Kislin, this 1971 rustic-modern three-bedroom has a roomy porch with walls of screens and high ceilings, surrounded by mature landscaping. The home features wood floors and a sunken living room anchored by a stone fireplace, and Kislin’s designs are integrated throughout.

On nearly 2 wooded acres crossed by the Sawkill Creek, the property includes a studio, pool, courtyard, and tree house. $1,495,000. Kathyrn Johnson, William Pitt Sotheby’s International Realty, (917) 826-7050

White Lake, N.Y.

Built in 1935, this four-bedroom Catskills bungalow on White Lake has a screened porch with water views and space for alfresco dining. The furnished home has color-drenched bedrooms, a refreshed modern farmhouse kitchen, and updated baths. The vaulted great room features exposed trusses and a fireplace.

Outside are a deck, firepit, and lake access; dining is walkable, cultural venues are a short drive, and New York City is about 2 hours away. $449,000. Eddie Rabon, Compass, (412) 414-2309

‘The End of Oak Street’

Directed by David Robert Mitchell (PG-13)

★★★

“I can’t fathom how The End of Oak Street actually exists,” said Alison Willmore in NYMag.com. The movie is, after all, “a perfect example of what the big studios should be doing right now: making original spectacles, ideally ones in which Anne Hathaway fires a rifle at a velociraptor.” Hathaway plays a suburban mom whose neighborhood is suddenly and mysteriously transported from 1982 to prehistoric times, putting family and neighbors at the mercy of hungry dinosaurs. The movie marks the big-budget debut of It Follows director David Robert Mitchell, and “the glee he takes in the carnage he inflicts on this stretch of suburbia is infectious.”

Mitchell “doesn’t have any loftier ambitions for The End of Oak Street than spinning a tale of familial bonding through dino fighting,” said Keith Phipps in The Reveal. “That’s mostly OK,” especially because the four actors playing the Platts, including Ewan McGregor as the dad, “establish a believable family dynamic” as they overcome dysfunction to pursue survival. But given the rote marital woes and shortage of thrilling set pieces, Oak Street turns out to be “one of those movies that’s good enough to make it hard not to wish it was just a little better.” Whatever its flaws, it’s “easily the best homage-slash-ripoff of a Spielberg movie in ages,” said David Fear in Rolling Stone. Unsurprisingly, “Hathaway is the linchpin, pirouetting from exasperation to affection to hysteria to steeliness in a way that would inspire a fist bump from The Odyssey’s Penelope.” The Oscar winner is “in a serious groove right now.” We and Mitchell are lucky to have her.

‘The Rivals of Amziah King’

Directed by Andrew Patterson (R)

★★★

Matthew McConaughey has appeared in only two movies since 2019, and you can see why the 56-year-old star signed on for this one, said Owen Gleiberman in Variety. The role of a gregarious, bluegrass-playing beekeeper “fits his scraggly aging-bad-boy redneck charm like a glove”; at the same time, the film itself is “different from anything he’s ever done,” although different “in ways both good and not as good,” with a second half that betrays the promise of the first. The movie “intentionally never settles on one particular tone,” said Ryan Lattanzio in IndieWire. As McConaughey’s Amziah King is pulled into the investigation of a honey heist and reconnects with a young Choctaw woman who once was his foster child, director Andrew Patterson “cross-pollinates a bluegrass musical, a beekeeping drama, a Native American Western, and a winding Mark Twain journey up a river.”

The daughter figure, played by newcomer Angelina LookingGlass, assumes lead duties once the title character falls. “There’s too much movie,” in short, “but isn’t that better than none at all?” It helps that Kurt Russell plays the villainous businessman who instigates the mid-story shift, said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast. Even so, this picture belongs to its headliner, who delivers “a performance so great it looms over everything—and serves as a reminder that when he’s really cooking, McConaughey is much more than just alright.”

With tourists starting to be deterred by the frequent heatwaves and soaring prices in the Mediterranean, Lithuania has been growing in popularity as a beach-holiday destination. It is generally cooler and more affordable than the Med, and it doesn’t lack for natural beauty, said Sarah Rodrigues in The Guardian.

On a recent trip, I visited the beach resort of Palanga, “kitsch” and “rowdy” in parts, but I loved its 19th-century Tiškeviciai Palace and “uncrowded” sections of white-sand beaches, where the sea is shallow for a long way out (making them perfect for families). And the Curonian Spit – a forested sandbar more than 60 miles long – is magnificently “untamed”.

I stayed there at the “basic, comfortable” Hotel Nidus, cycled along some of the spit’s wild trails, climbed the 220-metre-high Vecekrugas Dune, and particularly enjoyed eating smoked fish with fresh tomatoes and drinking cold beer at one of the lagoon-side shacks in the village of Preila.

New York’s real Little Italy

There aren’t many Italians living in Manhattan’s Little Italy these days, just a lot of “mediocre” Italian restaurants, aimed at tourists. For the real deal, New Yorkers will tell you to head to Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, said David Farley in The Telegraph – accessible on the B train. A century ago, this low-rise street was known as “the Italian colony” for its community of Italian labourers, and it is still packed with restaurants, delis and bakeries selling produce from the old country. Don’t miss the pinolate biscuits in the 108-year-old Madonia Bakery, or Pace’s Italian Market, which has 100 varieties of Italian cheese. But you should explore the side streets too. They are full of Balkan and Mexican stores and restaurants, the fruits of a new cycle of immigration that began decades ago: “This is America”, after all.

Luxury boltholes in the wild Algarve

Known as the Costa Vicentina, the southernmost stretch of Portugal’s west coast is famed for its towering cliffs and “pristine” surfing beaches. Much of it lies within a protected natural park, but a couple of boutique hotels have recently opened on the site of old farms, said Amelia Duggan in The Times – ideal for travellers who “prefer their wilderness to come with a high thread count”. Set about five miles back from the sea near the medieval town of Aljezur, the Vale Palheiro Earth Resort nestles in an “emerald” valley, its “vast” villas built with rammed earth. And further north, closer to the sea near the village of Odeceixe sits Amaria, a “white farmhouse complex”. Its suites have a “pared-back, contemporary aesthetic”, with walls of glass, “diaphanous” drapes and freestanding baths.

I’ve never liked camping, riding or group travel, so I wasn’t an obvious candidate for a group camping and riding trip in Kyrgyzstan, said Rachel Johnson in The Sunday Times.

I hadn’t reckoned, however, with the “adventuress and entrepreneur” Alexandra Tolstoy, a distant cousin of Leo, who has spent years guiding visitors through this landlocked Central Asian country on horseback (past guests have included the actor Dominic West, the “pie magnate” Charlie Bigham and the late satirist P.J. O’Rourke).

She’s a “natural saleswoman” who made the prospect sound “irresistible” – and thus it was that I found myself on a Turkish Airlines flight to Bishkek in May, to join her and some “yummy mummies from the Cotswolds and Chilterns” for a six-day, 120-mile trek among the “jagged”, snow-capped peaks of the Tian Shan, or Celestial Mountains.

We were accompanied by five Kyrgyz horsemen and a support team who moved our camp daily, packing our tents and the two “plastic thrones that served as our khazis” into former Soviet army trucks and transporting them along sheep tracks. A cook prepared “slap-up” breakfasts, lunches of plov (rice with “gobbets” of lamb) and good dinners (including freshly baked cakes), and I soon found I was enjoying myself – even falling “in love” with riding, camping (“you sleep so well in a snug tent by a rushing river”) and the “nomadic life”.

What helped most, of course, was the “indescribable” beauty of the surroundings – a mountain range that rises above 7,000 metres, and is “Edenic” in the late spring, its green valleys alive with wildflowers. We rode through walnut forests, skirted villages where boys on donkeys herded sheep, and watched a game of kok boru – polo with a goat carcass for a ball (the “tenderised” flesh is then cooked). But honestly, there were “too many highlights to list”, from swimming in “swirling” rivers to galloping beside magnificent lakes to siestas in verdant glens.

The Ultimate Travel Company has a 10-night trip from £7,215pp, excluding flights.

In the summer of 1976, there was a record-breaking heatwave, inflation and youth unemployment were worryingly high, a Labour prime minister had recently resigned – and a new subculture known as “punk” was spreading rapidly among the young.

Its seed was the Sex Pistols, a band formed only the previous winter, who wouldn’t release their first single, “Anarchy in the UK”, until 26 November. But their early gigs inspired the formation of The Clash, The Damned, Buzzcocks and many other punk bands.

Plenty of adults were appalled, but punk had a powerful influence on fashion, filmmaking and graphic design as well as rock music – well beyond punk itself. Members of the tiny audiences at two shows the Pistols played that summer – in Manchester in June and July – went on to found The Fall, Joy Division, The Smiths, Simply Red and the Creation and Factory record labels.

What even is a punk?

In Shakespeare’s time, the word meant a prostitute. In American-English it became a put-down for an inept youngster and/or petty criminal, as in 1971’s “Dirty Harry”: “Well, do ya, punk?” At around the same time, US music critics were starting to use the term “punk rock” for the amateurish, shouty garage rock bands that appeared in the 1960s. It was also applied to various New York acts – the Ramones, the New York Dolls, Richard Hell – who experimented with outlandish outfits, back-to-basics songwriting, and themes of teenage alienation. But “punk rock” didn’t become a media phenomenon until it crossed the Atlantic.

Why did it take off in Britain?

Britain, at the time, had a hyperactive music press and an entertainment industry with an appetite for eccentricity and theatricality. As American record companies had long understood, these made London an ideal launchpad for pop-culture trends. (The Ramones, who drew crowds of about 150 in New York, were astonished to find themselves in front of thousands of people when they played in Camden Town in July 1976.) The Sex Pistols crystalised punk into an easily imitated package, striking every pop musician who encountered them as “shock troops from the future”, as one critic put it. “It just blew all the other rubbish away,” said Joe Strummer, who joined The Clash after seeing the Pistols play in April. They were the hottest band in London by March 1976, and by 2 December they were household names in the UK.

How did they manage that?

John Lydon (aka “Johnny Rotten”), Steve Jones, Paul Cook and Glen Matlock were bolshy, in their late teens or early 20s, and from deprived backgrounds. (Jones, the guitarist, was functionally illiterate until his 40s.) Lydon, the singer, was smart, gobby and gleefully provocative, which endeared him to the band’s manager, Malcolm McLaren, a fashion designer who’d briefly managed the New York Dolls. Armed with a look provided by McLaren and his then-girlfriend, Vivienne Westwood – ripped clothes, safety pins, bondage gear, spiky, dyed hair – they swiftly outraged respectable opinion. People had used rude words on television before, but never in such uncouth tones as Lydon and Jones in a regional ITV interview on 1 December 1976. The next morning they were on the front page of every newspaper (“The FILTH and the FURY!” splashed the Daily Mirror).

Was that really groundbreaking?

The Pistols’ cartoon-yob image was an important part of their confrontational, anti-establishment appeal: spitting, pogoing, fighting and vandalism were rife at punk gigs. Their raw, confrontational attitude and do-it-yourself musicianship were a reaction against expensively produced “progressive” outfits such as Pink Floyd, “hippies” and over-dressed stadium rockers such as Elton John. “Up to that point, we’d all been singing about bowling along California highways,” one Northern Irish rocker recalled of punk’s impact.

Many found it intensely liberating: female-fronted bands such as Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Slits and X-Ray Spex got a leg-up from the movement. Jamie Reid’s iconic cut-out designs for the Sex Pistols’ record covers, with their “ransom note” lettering, inspired countless posters and fanzines, helping to democratise graphic design. Vivienne Westwood became one of the UK’s leading fashion designers.

How authentic was punk really?

McLaren, who’d been to art school, liked to say that the Pistols were “my sculpture, my painting, my little artful dodgers” – an artwork inspired by the French situationists, who aimed to shock people out of their complacency with unexpected spectacles. Lydon rejected this furiously, but McLaren certainly did mould the band. He chose their name (probably), selected band members and planned their media stunts; and they did record their only album, “Never Mind the Bollocks”, in a state-of-the-art studio with a producer who’d played keyboards on The Beatles’ “White Album”. While The Clash later made it big in America, sales figures for 1976 suggest that punk was largely a hipster and media preoccupation. No punk single made the year’s UK top 50; Abba, Rod Stewart and Demis Roussos dominated the album charts.

What became of the first punks?

The Sex Pistols reached new heights of controversy by releasing “God Save the Queen” (“She ain’t no human bein’”) during the Silver Jubilee in 1977, then broke up in chaotic circumstances the following January. The Clash’s original line-up soldiered on until 1982, by which time punk rock had mutated into post-punk and new wave. Countless noisy American guitar bands with an outsider ethos have been inspired by punk, and more purist scenes still exist across the Americas, Europe, Asia and Australia. More importantly, whenever someone with no training or credentials picks up a guitar, a brush or a pen, the spirit of punk lives on.

Just a couple of years ago, Anthropic was an underdog in the AI race. Now the San Francisco start-up, co-founded by CEO Dario Amodei, is preparing to float in October “at a valuation of $2 trillion or more”, said George Hammond in the Financial Times – “a dizzying figure that would eclipse SpaceX and make the AI lab’s debut the largest-ever initial public offering”.

Booming demand

Anthropic’s growth has been astonishing even by Silicon Valley standards. Valued at around $965 billion in May, when it eclipsed arch-rival OpenAI for the first time, investors reckon the $2 trillion price tag is justified by booming demand for the Claude maker’s advanced AI models and coding tools – especially from business. Annualised revenue is expected to rise more than ten times this year to around £100-120 billion.

The usual suspects – Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase – are working on the listing, said Bloomberg. If it proceeds as scheduled, Anthropic will debut not just before OpenAI, but also before DeepSeek – the Chinese AI firm that has been grabbing increasing market share.

‘Tough’ questions

Growing Chinese competition is just one of the “tough investor questions” Anthropic will have to field, said The Wall Street Journal. Others include “tensions with the Trump administration” – which forced it to briefly pull leading models Fable 5 and Mythos 5 – and “a growing backlash” against data centres. Additionally, Anthropic faces animus in Silicon Valley, where many CEOs are “nervous about its power over the AI ecosystem”.

The recent sell-off in SpaceX’s shares after an early pop has also “reminded investors of how turbulent moving from private to public markets can be”. Still, for the moment, Anthropic is lifting “Wall Street’s animal spirits”, said Due Diligence in the FT. Come autumn, the street will be buzzing.

Sweet figs and salty prosciutto make an irresistible pairing, said food writer and cookbook author Sue Quinn. And it’s even better combined with the tang of blue cheese and the crunch of nutty pangrattato in this light but luxurious appetiser.

Ingredients (serves 4)

• 80g creamy blue cheese
• 4 ripe figs, halved lengthwise
• 4 slices prosciutto, halved lengthwise
• 1 tbsp runny honey, plus extra for serving
• 1 small handful of basil leaves, torn

For the pangrattato

• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 30g fresh breadcrumbs (not too fine; ideally sourdough)
• 20g chopped hazelnuts or walnuts
• 1 small garlic clove, minced finely
• grated zest of 1⁄2 a lemon

Method

• Preheat the oven to 200°C. Place a small spoonful or slice of blue cheese on the cut side of each fig half. Wrap each with a strip of prosciutto, and arrange them snugly in a baking dish.
• Drizzle with the honey and roast until the cheese has melted and the figs are soft – about 10 minutes.
• Meanwhile, make the pangrattato. Warm the olive oil in a small skillet, add the breadcrumbs, nuts and garlic and fry over a medium-high heat, stirring until crisp and golden. Stir in the lemon zest and set aside.
• Transfer the roasted figs to a serving plate, pour over the juices from the dish, and scatter with the pangrattato. Top with torn basil leaves.
• Serve straightaway, with an extra drizzle of honey, if desired.

Taken from Cheese Please by Sue Quinn.

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A “tectonic shift” has taken place in the geopolitics of the Middle East, said Ilker Sezer in Türkiye Today (Istanbul). On 7 August, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan formed “the holy grail of military alliances”, with the three Sunni Muslim nations vowing that “an armed attack against any one of the three states shall be regarded as an attack against them all”. That clause of the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, named after the holy city where the treaty was signed, is the “Islamic equivalent of Nato’s Article 5”.

Three-pronged advantage

Hitherto, Saudi Arabia had been wary of entering into any kind of multilateral pact: it had previously opted for bilateral deals like the one it reached with Pakistan in September, while continuing to rely on the US for its security. But the Iran war, during which Riyadh’s territory has been attacked by both Tehran and its regional proxies, has altered its thinking.

The new alliance has a three-pronged advantage: it will benefit from Saudi Arabia’s financial might; from Turkey’s formidable army (the second largest in Nato) and arms industry; and from Pakistan’s battle-tested military and nuclear arsenal, the only one in the Muslim world. Together, these powerful resources are bound to affect “the strategic calculus of every adversary”.

Still, though highly symbolic, it’s “a thousand leagues away from being a new Nato”, said The Times. There’ll be “no integrated command structure, no joint doctrine, no integrated air defence network and no joint operational commands”. And no budget either. The pact simply provides a framework for closer military and political cooperation: it’s an attempt by the trio to free themselves from their “vassal-like dependence on the American security umbrella”. Such hedging makes sense in an increasingly volatile region in which the US has been unable, or unwilling, to protect its allies.

Washington doesn’t seem overly concerned by the arrangement for now, said Umair Jamal on The Diplomat (Washington DC). It maintains close relations with all of them, and has long been keen for other nations to assume more responsibility in the Middle East. But in the long term, the US could lose leverage as a result of it, “particularly with respect to arms sales, negotiation of military-basing rights and the management of regional crises”. The effect will be all the greater if Egypt, Jordan and some additional Gulf states also jump on board.

‘Third pole’

With US influence receding in the Middle East, Iran and Israel have looked set to exert more control over the region, said Khalid Al-Jaber on Al Jazeera (Doha). That’s where this pact comes in: to counter Iranian and Israeli dominance, Riyadh, Ankara and Islamabad seek “to build a third pole” to ensure neither achieves hegemony. And one key step in that direction will be the co-development of Turkish and Pakistani weapons systems, including advanced drones and armoured vehicles, on Saudi soil.

For Israel, this alliance marks a dangerous “turning point”, said Oshrit Birvadker in Israel Hayom (Tel Aviv). Turkey has morphed from an ally into a “major threat to Israel, no less significant than Iran”, while Saudi Arabia has pivoted from its intention to join the Abraham Accords to recognise Israel.

The alliance’s first test could well be in Yemen, said Mohammed Nail Abdulqader on Responsible Statecraft (Washington DC). The Houthis, an Iran-aligned group battling the Riyadh-backed Yemeni government, have recently renewed hostilities with Saudi Arabia following the collapse of a 2022 ceasefire. As part of a maritime blockade against Riyadh, they have fired missiles at a refinery in the Saudi city of Jazan and attacked vessels in the Red Sea.

A major future attack by the Houthis could test the “grey area” that has not been publicly defined by the Mecca accord. If the alliance’s response is weak, the Houthis may become emboldened; if it’s too strong, there’s the risk of a wider conflagration. Carving a middle path between these two extremes will be mightily hard. But that’s the only way to build a “credible deterrence without opening the door to a new war”.

Is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – better known as AOC – preparing to run for the presidency? That is the question being asked in Washington. Last week, the left-wing Democrat revealed on Instagram that she was freezing her eggs to “feel more in control” – which fuelled speculation about her political ambitions. Hours later, she gave an interview in which she refused to rule out making a White House run in 2028.

Youth in revolt

If she does go for the Democrat nomination, said Dace Potas in USA Today, she’ll have every chance of success. The democratic socialist Bernie Sanders proved to be a serious contender a decade ago, and today, the political climate is “even more receptive to his brand of populist anger”. AOC, the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, is well placed to capitalise on the moment. With strong name recognition and almost 30 million social media followers to help fund her campaign, she’d have a headstart on most of her likely rivals.

What might count against her is her youth, said Henry Olsen in The Washington Post. Were she to win the election, she’d enter the White House at the age of 39, four years younger than the youngest-ever elected president, JFK. On the other hand, AOC may never get a better chance to bid for the top job, so, if she’s keen, she should take it. American history is littered with would-be candidates – Walter Mondale, Mario Cuomo, Chris Christie – who hesitated and missed their moment. Of course, winning the Democrat nomination would be the easy bit. “The general election would be a different story.”

Woke 2

AOC carries a lot of baggage, said David Harsanyi in the Washington Examiner. In the Covid era, she joined in the talk of defunding the police and the clamour to cancel any public figure deemed to have transgressed progressive pieties about race and systemic oppression. Asked last week about some of the more extreme positions she and other left-wingers had taken, she tried to laugh it all off, saying “Woke 1 was crazy”. Granted, everyone should be allowed to change their views “as they learn and grow”, but AOC needs to explain exactly how her thinking has evolved and what her vision of Woke 2 is.

She owes voters more than just an “oops”, agreed Charles C.W. Cooke in National Review. Were the tables turned, she wouldn’t let a Republican politician get away with it. If AOC wants to win the trust of American voters, “she’ll have to do better than this”.

The nest isn’t as empty as it used to be, said Noam Scheiber in The New York Times. Sending a kid off to college usually meant an end to cohabiting with them under the same roof. Not anymore. Today, nearly half of adults under 30 are still living at home, according to the Federal Reserve, a level not seen since the pandemic. The prevalence of “boomerang kids” reflects a number of trouble spots in the economy, including the soaring cost of living, out-of-control home prices, and “persistent weakness in the job market for recent graduates.” Many young people are moving back with their parents to look for jobs “from the relative comfort” of home, where meals are guaranteed and rent is paid for. It’s becoming so common that the stigma is disappearing: People who live at home after graduating are perceived less as “rudderless” and more as “driven-but-thwarted.”

For parents, it can be a financial hit to let a grown son or daughter move in, said Jeff Green in Bloomberg. Most parents want to do all they can to help their child. But such caregiving isn’t free. Financial planners estimate it can add up to “roughly $1,500 a month, or $18,000 a year,” when you add up all the extra groceries, utilities, and other expenditures, which cuts into retirement savings. They recommend establishing “clear expectations along with a timeline and exit plan.” That could include charging increasing rent until it reaches market rate—at which point young adults may prefer to move out and share an apartment with roommates. There’s a difference between “providing a safety net and enabling financial immaturity,” said Michelle Singletary in The Washington Post. There needs to be accountability. If adult children are home because “they’re carrying massive student loans,” make sure you “monitor their progress reducing the debt.” If they’re unemployed or can’t contribute financially, there are other ways to ensure they can help, “such as cooking, cleaning, or maintaining the property.”

Having a boomerang kid is “probably less dire” than it seems, said Jay Caspian Kang in The New Yorker. There has actually been a “steady increase in young people living at home over the past 25 years.” Some of this is cultural—black, Asian, and Latino families usually have higher rates of intergenerational living—and some of it is social: “People are getting married later in life,” and thus not leaving the nest for love. “In reality, most young people are likely doing OK.” But it’s also “likely they’re not doing as well as they had hoped.” That’s why “the narrative of the downwardly mobile young person” has become so persuasive—as a rallying cry for the Left, and a cry for help from Mom and Dad.

If you need cash and happen to own your home, the equity you have built up there can be a good place to look for it. There are a variety of ways you can tap into those funds, one of which is a cash-out refinance.

This particular option has become “increasingly popular” in recent years. “These loans are up 13% year-over-year and are expected to account for more than 40% of all mortgage refinancings in 2026,” said The Wall Street Journal, citing the Federal Housing Finance Agency. But just because cash-out refinancing is growing in popularity does not mean it’s always a good idea or the right fit for everyone.

What is a cash-out refinance?

Cash-out refinancing lets “homeowners convert part of their home equity into cash by replacing their current mortgage with a larger one,” with the “difference between the two loans paid out in cash,” said Investopedia. This distinguishes it from a typical refinance, where the new loan is for an equal amount, leaving no leftover funds.

Typically, lenders set an 80% loan-to-value (LTV) ratio, which means “you can borrow up to 80% of your home’s value — minus your outstanding mortgage balance,” said LendingTree. There are often not many restrictions on how you can use the funds, whether that is home repairs or renovations, debt consolidation or a major cost, like college tuition. Keep in mind that this is a secured loan, with your home serving as collateral. It is also necessary to meet eligibility requirements to qualify.

What are the pros and cons of cash-out refinancing?

A cash-out refinance gives you access to cash, typically at a lower interest rate compared to options like credit cards or unsecured loans. Plus, if your financial profile and credit have improved since you took out your original mortgage, you could qualify for better terms.

A better rate is not a guarantee, however. If interest rates have “risen since your original mortgage, you’ll pay more on the new loan even with a credit score of 740 or higher,” said Bankrate. And “since the new mortgage is larger, that higher rate applies to more debt.” The larger balance will also often mean higher monthly payments, with your home on the line if you cannot make them. In addition, you can usually expect to pay closing costs and fees when you refinance.

When can a cash-out refinance make sense?

A big part of the decision comes down to the numbers. You will want to figure out whether you even have enough home equity to qualify — lenders will likely require at least 20% — and how much closing costs and fees will cut into the loan amount you receive. It’s also vital to consider whether the new monthly payment is feasible for your budget.

Your plan for the funds is a deciding factor as well. While some uses, like “funding a renovation that adds resale value or paying off high-interest debt,” can make sense, “if you’re covering a vacation, a car or other discretionary spending, you’re trading long-term home equity for short-term spending, and the math rarely works in your favor,” said Bankrate.

Westerns are often thought to glorify the violence and vigilantism of the 19th-century towns on the expanding American border. But the best films of the genre, including these eight superb entries, generally interrogate rather than reinforce that mythology.

‘My Darling Clementine’ (1946)

Director John Ford’s classic — perhaps better known to modern audiences by way of 1993’s retelling of the same story in the excellent “Tombstone” — is well worth revisiting. Henry Fonda stars as Wyatt Earp, one of three brothers en route to California when they encounter Old Man Clanton and his sons.

While Wyatt goes into the rough-and-tumble town of Tombstone, the Clantons murder his brother James. Wyatt then takes the open job of marshal in Tombstone and sets his sights on revenge — and on Clementine Carter (Cathy Downs), the ex-fiancee of local gambler Doc Holliday (Victor Mature). The movie’s themes of transition from lawlessness into civilization on the frontier are explored with “elegance, poignancy and dexterous economy,” and the film builds its world by “eschewing clear-cut character rivalries in favor of more complex emotional and social configurations,” said Matthew Connolly at Slant Magazine. (Prime Video)

‘High Noon’ (1952)

Gary Cooper is Marshal Will Kane, who receives word that Frank Miller (Ian MacDonald), an outlaw he banished to prison, is coming back on the noon train with his gang to exact revenge. Kane’s wife, Amy (Grace Kelly), begs him to reconsider, but he feels duty-bound to show up.

He tries to rally support from the town’s citizens but finds that they would prefer to let him face the music alone, a plot machination widely regarded as a commentary on how Hollywood treated those blacklisted during the McCarthy era. Director Fred Zinnemann’s “unusually circumspect and politically loaded” film “stands out as the proto antiwestern, questioning the conventions of a genre long before doing so was in vogue,” said Scott Tobias at The Guardian. (MGM+)

‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’ (1962)

Part romantic triangle, part political parable about the underbelly of pushing the frontier westward, director John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” might be his finest work. Told in the form of an elaborate flashback, the narrative follows newly minted lawyer Ransom Stoddard (Jimmy Stewart) from his arrival in a freewheeling town in unincorporated territory through his deepening friendship with Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), their love of Hallie (Vera Miles) and his final confrontation with the nefarious Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin).

The give and take between the institutionalist Ransom and the take-matters-into-your-own-hands Tom mirrors long-running debates in American society about law and order and justice. The film is a “somber reflection on what was lost when education and morality” moved westward with the U.S. government and its “civilizing influences,” said Sight and Sound. (Prime Video)

‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ (1966)

Director Sergio Leone popularized a new subgenre of frontier cinema: the spaghetti Western, named as such in honor of the Italian filmmakers who dominated the format, including Leone himself. The final and best entry of Leone’s trilogy, “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” is an origin story for Clint Eastwood's sharp-witted antihero “Blondie.” It’s a preautomotive road movie, as Blondie, Angel Eyes (Lee Van Cleef) and Tuco (Eli Wallach) race across the Civil War-era American West in search of a trunk full of Confederate gold. Featuring characters “united by their greed and virtually shorn of any humanity,” it “makes a mockery of any conception of good and evil,” said John Naughton at Empire. (YouTube)

‘The Grey Fox’ (1982)

Much less well known than most films on this list, director Phillip Borsos’ “The Grey Fox” stars Richard Farnsworth as Bill Miner, a stagecoach bandit who heads to the Pacific Northwest in Canada to rob trains when he is released from prison after thirty years. He falls in love with a radical, Kate Flynn (Jackie Burroughs), as he tries to stay ahead of Detective Seavy (Gary Reineke).

Setting the film on the Canadian frontier rather than the American sets it apart from its peers, and the more languid pacing and character-driven plotting continue to distinguish it as a mannered classic. Featuring a “smorgasbord of wide shots of the Pacific Northwest,” the movie’s “slower pace works, challenging the audience to appreciate not only the nuanced performances of its actors” but also the “natural beauty,” said Thaddeus Buttrey at Loud and Clear. (Kino Film Collection)

‘Unforgiven’ (1992)

Clint Eastwood directed 40 films, but it is this riveting Western that will be remembered as his masterpiece. He also stars as Will Munny, a retired outlaw with a checkered past who is talked into pursuing one last bounty. He enlists his friend, Ned (Morgan Freeman), to help track down and kill the men who brutally scarred a prostitute named Delilah (Anna Thomson). To do so, he must go through Big Whiskey’s corrupt sheriff, Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman).

“Unforgiven” is full of both quotable quips and savage violence, in the process upending sentimental notions about the American frontier. A film that explores a “range of moral ambiguities and profound historical questions,” it also challenges the “history of the American West and furthermore Eastwood’s own role in defining the West in cinema,” said Brian Eggert at Deep Focus Review. (Prime Video)

‘The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford’ (2007)

Despite containing a plot summary in its title and a tepid reception when it was released, director Andrew Dominik’s meditative film manages to be both suspenseful and insightful. It narrates the last months of the notorious Jesse James (Brad Pitt), whose gang is riven by suspicion and rivalry. Robert Ford (Casey Affleck) is a young gunslinger who joins James’ gang along with his brother, Charley (Sam Rockwell), but grows resentful of the legendary outlaw. Offering a “kaleidoscope’s prismatic tunnel vision on the Old West,” this is an “immaculately conceived, perfectly cast epic” that “patiently and meditatively observes an outlaw’s obsolescence,” said Nick Rogers at Midwest Film Journal. (Prime Video)

‘True Grit’ (2010)

Once upon a time, the Hollywood landscape was littered with Westerns of varying quality, but today they are somewhat scarce, making gems like directors Joel and Ethan Coen’s remake of the 1969 original all the more notable. When her father is murdered by the bandit Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), 14-year-old Mattie (Hailee Steinfeld) hires U.S. Marshall Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) to track him down.

The hard-drinking, washed-out Cogburn is joined by LaBoeuf (Matt Damon), who is after Chaney for a different reason. It “adheres to many of the familiar touchstones of the Western genre, while remaining unmistakably Coenesque” and full of “all kinds of wonderful exchanges, unforgettable scenes and moments of weirdness,” said Ryan Lambie at Den of Geek. (Paramount+)

U.S. allies in Asia have long depended on the American military for their defense. But President Donald Trump in recent days has curtailed U.S. participation in joint exercises with South Korea and at the same time ordered the lone American aircraft carrier to depart for the Middle East. The question now is whether the United States remains dedicated to Asian security.

No more ‘pivot to Asia’

The Trump administration “promised a pivot from the Middle East to East Asia,” Matthew Petti said at Reason. The opposite is now happening, with the U.S. commitment in the Pacific “taking a back seat to the U.S. presence in the Middle East.” The war with Iran is “dominating both the long-term planning and day-to-day execution” of foreign policy in the Trump White House. This is not new: Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden also promised to redirect attention away from the Middle East and toward China but failed to do so. “The problem is deeper than the hubris of one president.”

Trump’s sudden decision to pull back from the South Korean drills “does not mean the U.S. alliance system in Asia is collapsing,” Retired Lt. Gen. Chun In-bum said in The Korea Times. The abruptness of Trump’s decision — and his linking it to his friendly relationship with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un — does however mean that Asian allies will “inevitably begin asking how much they can rely on U.S. commitments during a future crisis.” The answer to that question is vital as China becomes “increasingly assertive” and North Korea begins “cooperating more closely” with Russia. South Korea’s “survival and security are at stake.”

Asia’s ‘indispensable military power’

The stakes of Trump’s apparent pullback are high “not only for U.S. allies, but for the United States, too,” Sheila A. Smith said at the Council on Foreign Relations. A reduction in American fidelity to the Pacific could cause South Korea and Japan to seek nuclear weapons, while also ceding ground to U.S. rivals such as China and Russia. Another factor: Reported shortages of U.S. munitions in Iran have raised questions about whether the U.S. is even capable of “offering protection to its allies in Asia.” But the apparent trend of “deliberately weakening” longstanding American alliances will be “cause for celebration” in Beijing, Moscow and Pyongyang.

The United States is Asia’s “indispensable military power,” Craig Singleton said at The Washington Post. The American president’s unpredictability has already forced U.S. allies to begin “assuming greater responsibility for their own security.” Japan has begun its “largest postwar defense buildup” by signing agreements with Australia and the Philippines, India is expanding its military commitments and Taiwan is spending heavily to “harden its military, civil defense and critical infrastructure” against a Chinese invasion. That should fit Trump’s “American First” agenda, but the region still depends on “predictable American commitments and clear crisis planning.”

‘Baseball labor talks may look like a battle among millionaires, but it’s really about billionaires vs. peons’

Michael Hiltzik at the Los Angeles Times

“Is any labor dispute today caricatured more than the contract negotiations between Major League Baseball owners and their players?” says Michael Hiltzik. The “idea that the fans are clamoring to cancel the 2027 season” for a “rule change that would put more money in billionaires’ pockets doesn’t strike me as remotely plausible.” The “trope that the parties contesting the contract renewal are all millionaires battling over the same pie and sticking the fans with the cost” should be “put in context.”

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‘Five years on, Washington is failing Afghanistan again’

Priyali Sur and Hardin Lang at Foreign Policy

“Five years ago this month, Kabul fell to the Taliban,” and the “images from that week still define how many Americans think about Afghanistan,” say Priyali Sur and Hardin Lang. In the “following years, Washington has found new, quieter ways to fail Afghans,” and “this time, the failure has a body count that the Trump administration has so far refused to acknowledge.” Examining the “impact of the aid cuts on the ground” paints a “disturbing picture of a collapsing system.”

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‘Flock camera resistance is just the beginning. Let’s avoid a “1984” scenario.’

Farrah Hassen at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Government surveillance “isn’t new, but new wide-ranging technologies that can detect our faces and track our movements are making it ubiquitous,” says Farrah Hassen. While the “tools have changed, the purpose remains the same: to chill independent thought, free speech and dissent, bringing our country closer to the events in George Orwell’s dystopian novel ‘1984.’” Tech like “Flock cameras has brought the issue into communities across the country” and “led to wrongful arrests, profiling and countless other abuses.”

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‘The Muttur massacre in Sri Lanka remains, 20 years later, a prime example of impunity for attacks on humanitarians’

Hector Sharp and Lily Sparks at Le Monde

“Twenty years ago, on August 4, 2006, a team of 17 humanitarians working for Action Against Hunger in Muttur, Sri Lanka, were forced to kneel, before being shot in the back of the head,” say Hector Sharp and Lily Sparks. The massacre “became emblematic of the collapse of humanitarian protection.” It “remains a prime example of impunity: a defining failure of justice which is impossible to separate from the increase in attacks on humanitarians around the world.”

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With the Trump administration pushing back against a swath of DEI-related federal grants, some research related to major diseases, including Alzheimer’s, is being caught in the crossfire. The most recent round of grant axing resulted in two major universities losing millions in funding related to studying brain disease, and experts say it could put them at a large disadvantage.

What research is being impacted?

In 2025, the U.S. awarded 52% fewer grants related to Alzheimer’s research than in 2024, according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), with the number of grants falling from 369 to 177. The figure appears to be on track through 2026 as well, especially given the most recent cuts.

The newest funding slashes involve grant cancellations for “brain health and Alzheimer’s disease research at two leading research institutions, Emory University and the University of Pittsburgh,” said The Guardian. At least “three grants were canceled between the two institutions,” representing $15 million in funds that would’ve been used to study “how discrimination” — or racism — “affects long-term brain health.”

The topics “we’re measuring are scientifically valid concepts,” Andrea Rosso, an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh, told The Guardian. Black people are two times more likely to develop dementia, according to the Alzheimer’s Association. And while these studies “don’t actually measure structural racism,” they do “use that as a framing for why one population is at such high risk.”

The DEI-related funding cuts are also coming alongside additional efforts by the White House to overhaul how grants are awarded. Under newly proposed rules by the Trump administration, any “multiyear grant could be terminated at any point,” and the government “would not be allowed to fund any DEI-related activities or projects or groups that ‘deny the biological reality of sex or the sex binary in humans,’” said The Boston Globe.

What does this mean for Alzheimer’s patients?

Many are worried that cutting Alzheimer’s research under the guise of the anti-DEI movement could negatively impact patients, specifically those who are Black. One canceled grant at the University of Pittsburgh “studied how Alzheimer’s disease risk was affected in people who live in divested, predominantly African American neighborhoods,” said The Guardian. The research tracked “socially driven Alzheimer’s disease risk factors by collecting surveys, brain imaging and blood samples.” Another grant at Emory University that was slashed by the White House “studied the impact of racial discrimination on the white matter of the brain, in part surveying participants’ self-reported incidences of discrimination.”

Behind all of these killed studies are “people waiting for answers, for therapies, for relief, for hope,” said a pain researcher at Mass General Brigham, per the Globe. This comes as the Trump administration has “been open about wanting a smaller NIH,” said Vox, and originally “proposed cutting the agency’s budget for 2026 by 40%.”

Some researchers say they are considering taking their studies offshore if things do not change. “While I hope to improve the lives of the American people with my research, if I am not able to pursue this aspiration in the U.S., I would rather continue to do so outside of the country,” one Ph.D. student said in comments about the cuts, per the Globe.

The current state of affairs “demonstrates a lack of understanding of our outcomes versus our exposures,” Ann Cohen, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, said to The Guardian. “That’s epidemiology 101.”

What happened

Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) on Thursday vowed to halt all of President Donald Trump’s nominees until his administration eases a wetlands conservation policy aimed at protecting the breeding grounds of ducks and other waterfowl. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service last weekend said it would at least temporarily retain the Biden-era program, which bars farmers from draining land near protected federal conservation easements.

Who said what

“My farmers are furious and so am I,” Cramer said in a statement to The Hill. The Trump administration’s “blind defense of a Biden rule favored by environmental extremists” just “confounds me,” particularly when farmers are “hurting so badly” amid “rising fuel and fertilizer costs resulting from limited traffic in the Strait of Hormuz.” But “other Republicans and hunters staunchly oppose any changes that would allow farmers to drain wetlands” and potentially “cause steep declines in duck populations,” said E&E News. The Upper Midwest’s Prairie Pothole region “supports more than half of North America’s ducks,” said the Washington Examiner.

What next?

“There will be no pause in my aggression” on the issue, Cramer told E&E News. “I have put a hold on all nominees, period, of all agencies. So I hope Clarence Thomas stays healthy.” Such holds “don’t necessarily prevent confirmation” of a president’s picks, said The Hill, but “they can cause a significant setback.”

What happened

California state Sen. Aisha Wahab (D) on Thursday secured victory in the special election to serve out the remainder of former Rep. Eric Swalwell’s (D-Calif.) term in the House. With nearly all ballots counted from Tuesday’s vote, Wahab led fellow Democrat Melissa Hernandez 53% to 47%. Swalwell resigned in April after multiple women accused him of sexual assault and harassment. The FBI seized his phone and laptop at the San Francisco airport and searched his Washington, D.C., home last weekend as part of a federal investigation into sexual misconduct allegations, CNN and other news organizations reported.

Who said what

Wahab, a progressive who ran on housing affordability, will be the first Afghan American to serve in Congress. She was long “favored to win” the safely Democratic seat, the Los Angeles Times said, but the “race became more competitive” after the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC “spent millions on ads attacking her.”

What next?

Wahab and Hernandez will face each other again in November to compete for a full two-year term. In a statement, Hernandez, a public transit executive and former mayor of Dublin, California, said the next election “will be in the new district lines, adding 26,000 Dublin voters who didn’t have the chance to vote for me in August.”

What happened

Twenty migrants deported from the U.S. arrived in Liberia on Thursday, the first of 1,200 foreign nationals the West African country agreed to accept under a newly announced deal with the Trump administration. Most of the first migrants were from Venezuela, Cuba and elsewhere in Latin America, Liberian officials told Reuters.

The Trump administration on Thursday also sent its first deportation flight to Haiti since winning a court battle to lift Temporary Protected Status from more than 350,000 Haitians. The 161 deportees on board “included TPS holders” and people “not born in Haiti,” The Associated Press said, citing Haiti’s National Office of Migration. They were flown to the northern city of Cap-Haitien “because the main international airport in Port-au-Prince is considered too dangerous.”

Who said what

The Trump administration has secured third-country deals with an estimated 35 countries, including at least 12 in Africa. Many deportees are “asylum-seekers with U.S. court orders protecting them from being returned to their home countries because they could face persecution or torture,” the AP said. They often arrive in “countries they have never been to” and eventually are “left with little choice other than to return to the home countries they were fleeing from.” Five of the 20 detainees who arrived in Liberia “refused to deplane,” The New York Times said, and “had to be restrained for several minutes by American federal agents.”

What next?

Liberia said the deportees would be received “as guests” who could leave “when they so desire” or apply for asylum. Other African countries taking third-country nationals have “made similarly humanitarian-sounding assurances,” The American Prospect said, but many of the deportees “end up living on the streets,” and some “have been imprisoned indefinitely without charge.”

The Spectre, Rolls-Royce’s first electric car, launched in 2022 and is its bestselling model in Europe. The “Series II picks up where Series I left off”, said Matt Bird on Piston Heads: it is “Rolls’ most desirable car, made even more so”.

The two-door, four-seat coupe has 18% more range (up to 390 miles WLTP), 14% faster charging and a boost in power to 600hp, or 680hp for the Black Badge model. Combining “the best parts of the EV experience with the majesty and swagger of a Rolls-Royce really is a match made in heaven”.

The effortless nature of electric power is the perfect fit for a Rolls, said Will Dron in The Times. The extra weight of the battery isn’t a problem in such a hefty car; with “epic levels of brute force”, the dual-motor system can propel this “near-three-tonne lump” from 0-62mph in just 4.5secs (or 4.3 in the “potent” Black Badge version).

Putting your foot down feels “surreal” – there’s a “deceptive” sense of speed, as the cabin is so “ridiculously hushed” and the performance so smooth. “Deftly tuned”, “the steering feels light” and the chassis “beautifully pliant”. The Series II is “supremely comfortably sprung”, with a “dignified poise” even when it’s covering ground “disarmingly quickly”.

With a “truly sumptuous cabin”, the Spectre II feels “ultra luxurious without being fussy”, said Yousuf Ashraf in Evo. It’s far less digitised than most luxury cars, with a modest central screen and physical switches for major functions. A “5.5-metre blank canvas” for bespoke paint choices and trims, the Series II offers new options, including a blended two-tone paint scheme and fabric like a “Gucci bag with puffy quilting”. This update isn’t radical, but it “ticks pretty much every box”.

Every cancer has its individual mutations, and scientists have long harboured hopes of developing treatments that can be tailored specifically for each individual patient. And now early results from a final-stage trial of personalised cancer vaccines has the research world holding its breath.

US pharmaceutical companies Moderna and Merck have been testing a personalised mRNA vaccine on melanoma patients who had had surgery for their skin cancer. This week, the firms announced that, combined with an established immunotherapy drug, the vaccine had significantly increased the length of time the patients remained cancer-free. This is “a major success in a new field of cancer treatment” that has sent both companies’ shares “surging”, said Reuters.

The results mark “a landmark moment” for the treatment of melanoma, one of the deadliest types of skin cancer, said the study’s principal investigator Georgina Long, medical director of the non-profit Melanoma Institute Australia. This is also “a pivotal moment” for cancer research, said Moderna’s chief executive, Stéphane Bancel.

How does the vaccine work?

It’s made using mRNA technology – as, famously, were some Covid-19 vaccines. But, while the Covid vaccines were created as a standard formulation for everyone, this time it’s created individually for each patient.

To do that, researchers sequence the DNA of each patient’s tumour (by analysing samples after it’s been removed) and identify its unique mutations. They then “encode selected targets into strands of mRNA”, producing a vaccine designed to teach the recipient’s immune system “to recognise and attack any tumour cells that remain”, said The Times. The result is “a personalised anti-cancer jab” specific to the patient’s tumour, said the BBC.

What do we know about the results?

Very little. The phase 3 trial involved 1,137 high-risk patients with melanoma, who were randomly assigned to receive either the vaccine and the immunotherapy drug Keytruda, or just Keytruda, for about a year.

In a similar smaller trial in 2022, Moderna reported that participants who received the vaccine and Keytruda were 44% less likely to develop new tumours or die within three years, compared to those who only received Keytruda.

Moderna has said that these new trial results “demonstrate statistically significant and clinically meaningful improvements” in survival times for the vaccine group, and that there had been “no new safety concerns”. But we don’t know exactly how much the vaccine increased survival times.

The results have not been publicly released or peer-reviewed. More findings from the trial will be presented at a medical conference in October.

What could this mean?

“I think it’s fair to call this a breakthrough,” said Marco Gerlinger of the Barts Cancer Institute. These results have “much wider implications” than just for melanoma treatment, he told The Times. They are “proof of principle that personalised cancer vaccines work”,

The hope is that this personalised vaccine “will work for many other types of cancer”, said New Scientist. Moderna and Merck are already trialling similar personalised mRNA vaccines for types of bladder, kidney and lung cancer. BioNTech, “the other big mRNA company”, is also testing personalised cancer vaccines in human trials. Several of these early-stage trials have produced “promising results”.

If successful, these vaccines could prevent nearly 50,000 deaths in the US alone, Yale University estimated last year. “The positive hit here leads us ⁠into truly this next phase in immunotherapy,” Karen Knudsen of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy told Reuters. “This is an auspicious start – this is where things begin.”

What are the caveats?

Moderna and Merck have only released an interim analysis, not the full trial data. And experts “emphasise caution” until the dataset has been peer-reviewed, said the BBC.

The announcement gave Moderna’s shares “their biggest one-day jump on record”, said The Times, while Merck also rallied. But market moves are “imperfect indicators of real-world significance”, said the Financial Times. It’s “not quite the surprise clinical breakthrough” that the jump might imply. It’s “a big deal for Moderna” but, without all data, it’s “difficult to assess the magnitude, durability, and commercial relevance of benefit”.

Investors will be watching for the “next important steps”: “detailed clinical results, regulatory progress, and evidence that the technology works across other cancers”, a financial markets analyst told Sky News. Even then, they know that manufacturing personalised vaccines at scale is “expensive and complex”. One Reuters report suggested that each vaccine could cost about £147,000.

Football may not have come home this summer, but Harry and Meghan are on their way.

This “unexpected development” is even more surprising “when you recall all the things the Sussexes said in books, on Netflix, and to Oprah Winfrey about their unhappy life in Harry’s country of birth”, said ITV’s royal correspondent Chris Ship.

The couple will reportedly move into a private, non-royal residence outside London. One of the main reasons behind the surprise announcement, according to news.com.au is that Meghan has been offered a role in an upcoming TV project in the UK.

No further details have been forthcoming, leaving great speculation over the reasons for their return from California.

What did the commentators say?

This is the culmination of “Project Thaw”, said royal author Andrew Lownie in The Washington Post – the plan, involving King Charles, “to bring Harry back into the fold after years of estrangement following the couple’s ‘Megxit’ from Britain”. In that way “the news should not have caught everyone off guard” and “there have been signs for the past year that Harry was keen to set up his own alternative royal court in Britain”.

“Please say that the Prodigal Son and the Prodigal Daughter-in-Law have decided to return to Britain for the right reasons – to heal family rifts, rather than their finances,” said Harry Mount in The Independent. Experts have noted the couple “have now achieved six full tax years of non-UK residency – enough to manage the ‘temporary non-resident’ rules for capital gains tax”. Their return then “just happens to be ideally timed for their bank accounts, as well as for their children to start the new academic year in British schools”.

But the decision is an “admission of failure, whether Harry and Meghan are intellectually honest enough to admit it or not”, royal commentator Kinsey Schofield told Page Six. “They had America, Hollywood, enormous contracts, global name recognition and every conceivable advantage,” she said. “And six years later, they’re coming back. That is failure.”

But I am told this move is “not due to any problems in the US”, said the BBC’s senior royal correspondent Daniela Relph. Instead “it has been driven by the couple’s desire to spend time in Europe, nearer Harry’s family and wanting to educate their children in the UK”.

The theme that came up again and again “when I spoke to people close to Harry earlier this year” was homesickness dressed up as ambition, said Dan Wakeford on Celebrity Intelligence. “He doesn’t care about the appearance of wealth. He cares about the appearance of doing good work,” one source said, describing a man who missed his family, his friends and his old life. Another source told Wakeford on Celebrity Intelligence the couple were “wildly unhappy”.

While it is “great on a personal level” for Charles to have more private access to his younger son and grandchildren, it will “take a long time to establish a reasonable degree of trust”, Joe Little, managing editor of Majesty Magazine, told The Guardian. “People will still wonder: do Harry and Meghan have another media deal set up?”

What next?

Harry “has no plans to return as a working royal”, said royal editor Matt Wilkinson in The Sun. But sources admit some elements of their move back to the UK remain “up in the air”.

One such detail is the prospect of a Gallagher-brothers-style burying of the hatchet for Harry and Prince William. But it appears there will be no Knebworth equivalent for the royals quite yet with the former BBC royal correspondent Peter Hunt suggesting William would be “apoplectic” at the Sussexes’ return.

“In the long term, the return of the Sussexes to the UK opens up the prospect of two rival courts, William’s and Harry’s,” he said. “In the short term, Harry will be able to deepen his rapprochement with his father. And his presence back home will make it harder for his brother to duck a reconciliation.”

“Hi there. I have received your email. I have printed it off. I’m now using it to light flaming cocktails for the entire bar. Best, Lucy.”

That was an ‘amusing’ out-of-office reply from a British Airways holiday advert a couple of years ago, said Country Life, but there is more to the “philosophy” of these emails than just trying to be funny, said The Atlantic. They can be a “rote obligation or an opportunity to make a grand statement about work and life”.

For some, it is a “simple one-line email”, while others use it to “apologise profusely” for being away or “highlight their indignation at being tied to work or the internet in the first place”. Selecting the right tone requires adhering to a hidden etiquette of rules. And needless to say, ”transitioning between vacation and regular obligations can get complicated”.

‘Cry for help’

It can be frustrating to be hit with a “barrage” of out-of-office (OOO) responses to a group email you have sent, said the Financial Times. You may think your colleagues are “lazy good-for-nothings, slacking off while you toil through the long summer”, but their replies can tell you “so much more”.

Someone who says they will be “checking their emails intermittently” is almost certainly on holiday with their in-laws, and “wants to reply to your email within 17 minutes rather than the usual six”. Then there are those who are even more addicted to being permanently on call, claiming to have “no access to internet”. If they do get access, they say they will have smashed their phone, laptop and smartwatch and “thrown them into the ocean”. This is a blatant “cry for help”.

Then there are the jokey ones. “I am currently out of the office, trying to return home after a successful conquest involving a large wooden horse. It may take me some time.” This person has not checked their company policy and will “shortly be unemployed”.

I went through a phase of setting “funny” out of offices, said Sophia Money-Coutts in Country Life. But I “shudder with horror now” thinking about it. “Life’s too short; time is too precious to agonise” over what you write. “Straightforward is the way to go for everyone involved.”

That said, the “aggressive approach” is by far the worst. Some people not only declare they will be away, but that “all emails will be automatically deleted during that period”. How “irritating”. This would make more sense if they were on a sabbatical or maternity leave, but “it’s quite self-important if you’re only hopping to Mallorca for a week”. And setting an OOO saying you’re off for a “mere afternoon”? A “touch pompous”.

Keep it short, said Forbes. “Your OOO is not your Instagram. Skip the mojito emoji and ‘Off to South Beach, baby!’ Nobody wants your travelogue.”

Another big mistake is not fully shutting it off when you’re back. Doing so the night before logging back on is usually best. “Don’t be that person who leaves the OOO on until three people have reminded you to turn it off.”

‘Set expectations’ before you go

There are some clear “dos and don’ts” when it comes to out-of-office messages, said BBC. And getting it wrong can have “more serious consequences than you might think”.

The optimum reply is “polite and concise”, gives a “specific return date” and at least one other point of contact if appropriate, said the etiquette consultancy Debretts . “Virtue signalling” – or going into too much detail about your time off – is another big “no-no”: it can come across as boastful, “smug”, or that you’re “trying too hard”.

It’s not really about the out-of-office message at all, said Stylist. The most effective team members “set expectations before” they go, outlining how “online” they will be, if at all. This stops colleagues of whatever seniority “second-guessing whether they should follow up” or being confused over what “contactable in an emergency” actually means.

Even sharing good news – whether from your desk or on holiday – can be a detrimental form of “presenteeism”. This can throw someone else into work mode, confuse the boundaries you have set or subliminally pressurise others to follow your example.

Most importantly, it is vital to just “trust your team. We all like to think the place will fall apart without us, but this is a damaging view that will only stop you from fully enjoying your time off.” Planning ahead of time and handing things over properly removes most of the need for communicating while on holiday. Many people forget this but “really, most things can wait”.

Find out how closely you’ve been paying attention to the latest news and other global events by putting your knowledge to the test with our Quiz of The Week.

Is ADHD overdiagnosed? What can we learn from the case of Louai Abu Ridi? And, after Ariana Grande and Nicole Kidman, how should we approach conversations about what women look like?

Olly Mann and The Week delve behind the headlines and debate what really matters from the past seven days.

A podcast for curious, open-minded people, The Week Unwrapped delivers fresh perspectives on politics, culture, technology and business. It makes for a lively, enlightening discussion, ranging from the serious to the offbeat. Previous topics have included whether solar engineering could refreeze the Arctic, why funerals are going out of fashion, and what kind of art you can use to pay your tax bill.

You can subscribe to The Week Unwrapped wherever you get your podcasts:

• Spotify
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All the signs that summer is winding down are here — kids heading back to school, the days getting shorter and Halloween decorations taking over stores. Before giving in to fall’s arrival, celebrate the end of summer by going on a seaside escape. These six destinations offer one last beachy thrill.

Hampton Bays, New York

A weekend in the Hamptons is a summertime ritual for many New Yorkers. There are nearly two dozen hamlets and villages to spend time in, each with its own personality. Hampton Bays, part of the town of Southampton, is a relaxed option.

Set up shop on Ponquogue Beach or Meschutt Beach, and enjoy frolicking in the water and listening to the waves. Spend the night at Canoe Place Inn & Cottages, a “laid-back” waterfront property where the rooms are “well decorated and cozy” and the summer programing, like free outdoor yoga classes and concerts, “shines,” said Condé Nast Traveler.

Islamorada, Florida

South of Miami and north of Key West, Islamorada is the “perfect blend of Old Florida charm and salty barefoot luxury,” said Travel and Leisure. It’s known for excellent sport fishing, a vibrant arts enclave and the “state-of-the-art” Florida Keys History & Discovery Center. Learn about the area’s “complex” history through exhibitions on “Indigenous peoples, Spanish treasure fleets, Henry Flagler’s railway and the 1935 Labor Day hurricane.”

Kennebunkport, Maine

If you’re looking to experience “iconic” and “charming” New England, head to Kennebunkport, said Condé Nast Traveler. This historic town is filled with beaches and opportunities for kayaking, paddleboarding and lobster-boat cruising. Those who prefer to enjoy the water from land can walk around Dock Square, visit the Seashore Trolley Museum and hit up the Lobster Roll Trail for a taste of local seafood.

Pacific Grove, California

Spend any amount of time in Pacific Grove, and you’ll likely start daydreaming about living in this idyllic town. Victorian homes dot the landscape, and the views of Monterey Bay and its wildlife — otters, whales and seals — can’t be beat. Lovers Point Park is a great spot for swimming and picnicking, while Asilomar State Beach gets you close to tide pools.

Pacific Grove has a quaint downtown with cute shops like The Quill, a fabulous stationery and gift store, and beautiful boutique hotels. The historic Seven Gables Inn is right above the bay, and each charming room has windows you can open, letting in the sound of the waves.

Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina

With its surf, sand and “perfect spots to relax and watch the sunset,” this walkable town is a “beach lover’s heaven,” said Southern Living. Take the paved 2.5-mile Loop path to explore the area and soak up the scenic water views, or veer off for visits to Wrightsville Beach Park, the Wrightsville Beach Museum of History and Wrightsville Beach Arboretum. If the farmers’ market is happening, pick up some locally grown produce or handmade crafts.

Yachats, Oregon

Forget about racing around, trying to pack a ton of activities into your visit. Yachats is all about slowing down, connecting with nature and enjoying the scenery.

The best place to do this is at Cape Perpetua, where the forest meets the sea. Go for a hike through the giant spruces or stay at the overlook and stare at the Pacific. Nearby is Thor’s Well, a collapsed sea cave also known as the Drainpipe of the Pacific. Take caution when walking around here; the rocks can be slippery and waves have swept people out to sea.

‘After honeymooners crash in a helicopter, tourist choppers give us pause’

Chicago Tribune editorial board

Helicopters are often “vital tools,” and “there are many diligent, safety-conscious operators of helicopters that serve tourists,” says the Chicago Tribune editorial board. But recent crashes are “enough to give us pause about getting on one, especially if there is another choice of transportation to a popular destination.” It’s a “timely reminder there are lots of ways in these final weeks of summer of making it to a secluded vacation place: by boat, car, minibus, train or even a sturdier plane.”

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‘Death stalks the Irish pub’

Jude Webber at the Financial Times

Death is “revered in Ireland more than it is feared — unless it’s the pub that’s dying,” says Jude Webber. From a “peak of more than 8,600 in 2005, the number of public houses has shrunk by a quarter in two decades,” and some fear a “terminal decline of one of Ireland’s best-loved institutions, especially in rural areas.” The “slow extinction of the Irish pub itself, with its cosy snugs, live music and warm welcome, is cause for increasing alarm.”

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‘Humanitarianism is not collapsing. It is being traded and compromised.’

Amitabh Behar at Al Jazeera

As we “mark World Humanitarian Day, we must reflect on the state of humanitarianism,” says Amitabh Behar. Humanitarianism “has always been framed upon the collective assumption that there are lines that should never be crossed.” For a “generation, we had binding international agreements that treated the act of protecting a child in need of food or a medic treating the sick and wounded as a fundamental legal right,” but “today, the consensus and meaning behind these laws are gone.”

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‘A fake poll made real news. What does that say about political polling?’

Ren LaForme, Angela Fu, Amaris Castillo and Phoenix Chapital at the Poynter Institute

Polling “has always presented journalists with a tricky proposition,” say Ren LaForme, Angela Fu, Amaris Castillo and Phoenix Chapital. There is “something irresistible about them,” but “polls are estimates, not predictions.” Their “usefulness depends heavily on who conducted them, who they surveyed and how.” As a fake poll by “Median Strategies demonstrated, the appearance of a methodology, a sample size and a margin of error can make invented numbers look a lot like real ones.”

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Mark Walter promised a bright future when he bought the Los Angeles Lakers last year. That future is already passed. Walter flipped the team to new owners this month, netting a reported $2.5 billion profit. Dollar signs have always dominated the big leagues, but sports ownership is increasingly reserved for corporations, private equity and superrich investors. Where does that leave fans?

‘Highly sticky consumer base’

Jerry Buss and his children ran the Lakers as the “NBA’s version of a mom-and-pop shop” for decades before last year’s sale to Walter, Benjamin Wilhelm and Samuel Agini said at the Financial Times. The days when a local businessman would buy and run a team as a sort of community trust are over. Instead, the “shock sale” of the Lakers demonstrates how pro teams are “no longer treated as vanity assets but legitimate investment vehicles.”

The new generation of sports owners look like Bob Iger, the former Disney CEO who now co-owns the Lakers. They are “billionaire financiers” who see professional sports as a business sector “resistant to potential disruption from AI” and have access to “deep pools of capital,” said the Financial Times.

Sports are good business thanks to a “highly sticky consumer base” of die-hard fans and “contractual revenue streams” for broadcast rights that produce massive revenues, MAI Capital Management’s Kurt Nye said to Investment News. Pro teams are thus selling at “prices that would have seemed implausible a decade ago,” said the outlet. The NFL’s Seattle Seahawks sold for $9.612 billion in July, while the Chicago Bulls were valued at $6.45 billion when Walmart heir Lukas Walton bought a 10% stake in June. Those sky-high valuations now make franchises “legitimate portfolio planning territory” for the highest-dollar investors.

It can be messy territory. The Buss family announced this week it is selling its remaining minority stake in the Lakers, said The Athletic. But that sale is opposed by Jeanie Buss, who led the franchise in recent years. The “bitter dispute” between Buss and her siblings could end up in court.

Fans ‘pay through the nose’

Team owners are “flush and want to be even flusher,” Mike Lupica said at the New York Daily News. The “sure thing” profits from ownership come in part because owners like Walter and the Knicks’ James Dolan “charge vulgar amounts for ticket prices” for the fans who keep the enterprise going. Many Knicks fans could not afford tickets to Madison Square Garden during the team’s recent championship run. Fans pay “through the nose” while team owners keep winning big money “whether their teams win or not.”

The Lakers sale is “exactly why we need publicly owned sports teams,” Dave Zirin said at The Nation. Team owners have long had “zero regard” for communities where their franchises “have taken root.” But franchises belonged to their communities “spiritually, psychologically, personally” before they became “just another asset” in private equity portfolios. When sports billionaires buy our teams they are “buying our joy.”

Government borrowing is getting more expensive. Bond yields — the amount the government pays investors to borrow their money — this week hit their highest rate since the financial crisis of 2007, as investors demonstrated their nervousness about the U.S. economy with a massive bond sell-off. The market turmoil could spread, raising borrowing costs for consumers and businesses.

What did the commentators say?

Bond investors are “mainly concerned about two things,” said NPR. The first is that persistent inflation, driven in part by the war with Iran, is eroding the value of the bonds they hold. The second is the federal government’s longstanding and bipartisan “habit of spending more money than it collects in taxes.” The U.S. federal debt hit a “record-shattering” $40 trillion this week. Most observers do not believe the government will “find itself unable to pay back investors,” but investors are increasingly “worried.” This week’s bond jitters are their way of “sounding alarm bells” about the American economy.

Government bonds are also “under pressure from a wave of new corporate debt,” said CNN. Companies like Alphabet and Meta are borrowing massive amounts of money to fund their build-out of artificial intelligence networks, and those corporate bonds are “competing with government bonds for investors’ attention.” That creates less demand and forces higher yields for the government bonds. Big Tech and big government are “competing for the same pool of buyers at the same moment governments need those buyers most,” deVere Group’s Nigel Green said in a note, per CNN.

The return to pre-2008 rates for bond yields “isn’t cause for panic,” The Wall Street Journal said in an editorial. It might sound frightening to hear that “rates are higher than they’ve been in nearly 20 years,” but in truth the low rates of that era were “abnormal.” The rising rates will create “new budgetary stresses” for the federal government: Servicing the debt now costs $1 trillion a year, making it the “second- or third-largest line item in the federal budget.” The government can no longer borrow “as if near-zero interest rates would last forever.”

“America is about to get more expensive,” Wharton School’s Mohamed A. El-Erian said at The New York Times. The pain is likely to spread to “sectors that are traditionally sensitive to interest rates” such as the home and auto markets, which will “sideline even more prospective first-time home buyers” and raise the cost of transportation. That in turn will feed an “affordability crisis that already sits atop voter anxieties” ahead of the midterm elections.

What next?

Bond markets calmed briefly on Wednesday after the Treasury Department announced it would “more than double the size of its government debt repurchases,” said CNBC. But that relief will probably be “short-lived,” said the Journal, because the buyback program does not address the fundamental concerns about “high levels of debt and government spending.” As of Thursday morning, yield rates were once again on the rise.

By the time he won the Literature Nobel in 2010, Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian novelist who died last year aged 89, had come to be regarded as the “Julio Iglesias of contemporary fiction”, said Nicholas Shakespeare in The Spectator.

For six decades he’d “defined headlines”: a global celebrity, owing not least to his “turbulent private life”, the winner of “numerous literary prizes” (some awarded “for mere famousness”, in the words of a critic). As Gerald Martin puts it in this biography, Llosa was a “literary adventurer, politician, diplomat and warrior” in one.

Politically, he had shifted from communist student to “reverential supporter of Thatcher and Reagan” – and come close to Peru’s presidency. Personally, he was an iron-willed, selfish man motivated by resentment and revenge.

It all began with “a whopping lie”, said Maya Jaggi in The New Statesman. Born in 1936, the Nobel laureate spent his first 10 years living with his mother and her snobby family, believing that his father, a merchant seaman, was dead; then, aged 11, he was told that his father was not only alive, but coming to live with them.

Ernesto Vargas proved to be a tyrant who beat his “spoiled son”. Thus, as Martin puts it, “10 ostensibly idyllic years without a father” were followed by 10 brutal years with one. His subsequent experiences – at a cadet school in Lima, a spell as a reporter on a crime beat – would feed his “brilliant early novels”; later, his decision to elope, aged 19, with his uncle’s sister-in-law inspired his 1977 novel “Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter”. Portrayed here as a cynical love rat, he dumped Julia to marry his cousin Patricia, 10 years his junior and “practically his sister”.

Martin believes that his “sadistic and often pornographic” fantasies about his “Lima Lolita” fuelled his 1966 novel “The Green House”. Fifty years on, he abruptly left Patricia for the socialite Isabel Preysler (Iglesias’ ex).

Martin – also the biographer of Gabriel García Márquez, with whom Llosa spectacularly fell out – has written a “genuinely critical life”, said Pratinav Anil in The Guardian. He “restores the women whom Llosa reduced to literary raw material”, and argues the writer was never really a socialist, so much as beguiled by a socialist he met at college (Lea Barba).

The book has flaws, said Ian Thomson in Literary Review. There are too many exclamation marks and the writing “can be breathy”. Still, it is a “considerable achievement”: “gossipy, erudite and deeply researched”, it will be the “last word on the man who wanted to be the most famous writer in the Hispanic world since Cervantes”.

When taking out student loans, most borrowers are aware of two options: federal student loans and private loans. But amid new limits on federal loans for graduate students in particular, the availability of a third option — state-backed student loans — is becoming increasingly widespread.

While technically “states have had their own student loan offerings for decades,” a number of them have “recently moved to expand their loan offerings in anticipation of the added restrictions on federal borrowing,” said CNBC. These loans do not necessarily offer the same protections as federal loans. Still, they may be an alternative to private loans worth considering.

What are state student loan programs?

State student loan programs are offered by select states as opposed to the federal government or a private lender, and they are often overseen by a state’s department of postsecondary education. As of July, “at least 16 states offer state-run loan programs for students pursuing a postsecondary degree or credential,” said the National Conference of State Legislatures, a bipartisan organization that serves the legislators and staff of all 50 states.

In general, state-backed loan programs “have similar requirements and benefits to federal loans: low, fixed interest rates and flexible repayment plans,” said SoFi. Specifics, however, vary by state, among other factors. For instance, “interest rates on state education loans vary by state, and can also depend on the degree program and borrower qualifications, such as income and credit score,” said CNBC. Eligibility requirements and borrowing limits can also vary.

How do state student loans compare to federal loans?

It’s “important that borrowers understand state student loan programs are excluded from federal relief options and protections,” Tiara Moultrie, a fellow at The Century Foundation, a left-leaning think tank, said to CNBC. This includes federal repayment plan options like income-driven repayment and Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF), though some states do offer their own alternatives.

Further, while interest rates can be comparable to federal loans, they can also be a good bit higher. Interest rates on “some state student loans can exceed 10%,” according to a July analysis by The Century Foundation, whereas the “U.S. Department of Education’s Direct Unsubsidized Loans for graduate and professional students currently come with a flat interest rate of 8.07%,” said CNBC. But the opposite can also be true: “The interest rate for a borrower with a co-signer and a 10-year repayment term, for instance, is 6%” in Minnesota’s SELF Grad Loan program, said The New York Times.

Another major difference is in the qualification process. Federal direct subsidized loans do not have credit score requirements, but state loans may. Debt-to-income ratio and financial history could also be taken into consideration.

Who can use state loan programs?

State residency may or may not be a factor in eligibility, depending on the specific program. For example, “Minnesota’s program is open to students who are either residents of the state or out-of-state students attending a participating in-state college or university,” while “Connecticut’s program is available to Connecticut residents, or residents of seven other states (Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont) who are attending an eligible Connecticut institution,” said the Times. Additionally, approval usually takes into consideration factors like “credit score, annual income, credit history, debt-to-income ratio and whether a borrower is attending a qualifying institution,” said The Century Foundation.

‘Lost Weekend’ by Phoebe Bridgers

★★★★

“Phoebe in mourning, or Phoebe madly in love?” asked Chris Willman in Variety. With Phoebe Bridgers’ first album in six years, listeners don’t have to choose, because the alt-rock darling and recent four-time Grammy winner gives us some of both, plus more. As she reflects on the 2023 death of her father, her breakup with actor Paul Mescal, and her current infatuation with comedian-musician Bo Burnham, Lost Weekend proves “alternately spooky, hilarious, mysterious, and sneakily moving.” And though this may go without saying about any record made by Bridgers in the wake of her breakout with the supergroup Boygenius, “it’s not to be missed.” Bridgers remains “one of the most compelling songwriters in music today,” said Angie Martoccio in Rolling Stone. She’s been listening to a lot of ambient music lately, and “you can hear how that,” along with Radiohead, “shaped Lost Weekend.” But she also throws in “Haunted,” a “country-tinged beauty,” as well as “Bobby,” a rocking tribute to Burnham that “basks in dizzying euphoria.” On Punisher, Bridgers’ last LP, numbness was a theme. Here, “she feels it all, encountering every spectrum of emotion.”

‘No Me Arrepiento de Sentir Tanto’ by Karol G

★★★

“No Me Arrepiento is Karol G’s version of a concept album, one stitched together by heartbreak,” said Pedro Camacho in Consequence. The 35-year-old reggaeton star is exercising the power she has won by now drawing stadium-size crowds across the U.S. Why not ask Drake to sing in Spanish for the breezy “Ahí” or bring in Bruno Mars to duet in English on “Still”? And why not explore all the emotions stirred by a late 2025 breakup with fellow Colombian pop star Feid? “The lyrics are at times contradictory, shifting sharply between nostalgia and resentment from one song to another.” The music is a roller-coaster ride too, as La Bichota, as she calls herself, “moves effortlessly from stripped-back ballads to glossy R&B, atmospheric alt-pop, acoustic confessionals, and good old-fashioned perreo,” her signature reggaeton subgenre. Where last year’s Tropicoqueta “envisioned a Latina-led utopia as a tropic floral paradise,” said Andrea Flores in the Los Angeles Times, this album leans into sorrow and plays best when listened to alone. “So light up that candle, lock the doors, and bring the tissues if you have to. Just don’t be ashamed to feel all the feels.”

‘Blue Island’ by Ravyn Lenae

★★★

“Labels feel especially restrictive when applied to an artist like Ravyn Lenae,” said Cassidy Sollazzo in Paste. The 27-year-old Chicago native “has always treated both identity and genre as fluid, often shape-shifting between R&B, synth-wave dance pop, and self-baring folk.” A year after her bouncy single “Love Me Not” became a Top 10 hit and inspired online chatter that she wasn’t Black enough, she’s doubled down with her new album, “weaving between indie-rock angst and 1980s power ballads, with pit stops in psychedelic funk and trappy electronic abstractions.” She also happily lists the Cranberries alongside Santigold and Tracy Chapman as influences. “There’s palpable glee in the album’s sudden stylistic shifts,” said Alexis Petridis in The Guardian. The “sparkly alt-rock” of “In & Out” rubs up against “’90s R&B-infused” tracks like “Babygirl,” which features the rapper Doechii. “Potential” begins as a pretty, up-tempo pop ballad, then “unexpectedly erupts into a squall of guitar noise.” But Blue Island isn’t jarring, “partly because of the unifying power of Lenae’s lovely soprano” and also because the writing is “buffed to a state of pop perfection.”