Who would be an investor in South Korea right now? “Despair and frustration” spread again on Wednesday as the chip-heavy Kospi index “cratered” during another “hectic session” that triggered a second successive official circuit-breaker, reported Bloomberg.

The catalyst was disappointing earnings from local semiconductor giant SK Hynix but, given “already jittery sentiment” around the AI boom, it could almost have been anything. The oncebooming Kospi has now lost more than 33% of its value in a month.

‘Demand destruction’

“The chips are down,” said Bryce Elder in the FT – especially in the red-hot memory sector. Some have pinned the “chip dip”, which has also hit Wall Street with force, on the IPO of Chinese challenger CXMT; others on reports that a stateowned Chinese company is beginning mass production of “immersion deep-ultra lithography machines” – advanced chip manufacturing tools over which the West (especially the Dutch giant ASML) currently enjoys a monopoly. Still, the more obvious concern is “demand destruction”, in what has always been a volatile and highly cyclical sector. Voracious demand from America’s big AI hyperscalers has sent chip prices sky-high. “All that’s needed to wreck 2027 sales expectations is for this cycle to turn from virtuous to vicious. Plus ça change…”

Could China do for chips what it has already done for cars? That’s the fear on the Nasdaq, said Eliot Brown in The Wall Street Journal. As Elon Musk recently told The Economist, Chinese manufacturers are “closer than most people realise to solving the lithography problem”. Chinese companies have been restricted from buying the cutting-edge machines – which is why they are “a step behind the US in advanced chipmaking”.

‘Nvidia - the central bank of the AI economy’

Yet what’s particularly concerning about the plummeting shares of chipmakers, said DealBook in The New York Times, is that the rout coincides with a broader crisis of confidence on Wall Street about AI-related corporate debt and “circular” financial arrangements. That was rammed home when it emerged that chip giant Nvidia – increasingly “the central bank of the AI economy” – is brokering a $250bn guarantee for OpenAI’s immense Ohio campus. “Throughout history, almost every generational infrastructure leap has relied on hardware titans to co-sign their buyers’ credit.”

But this has also led to devastating “debt crashes”. The chief winner of the current turmoil is Apple, said the FT. It has reclaimed its crown as the world’s most valuable company, with a $5trn valuation, because it is seen as a relative “haven”. The same is true of the FTSE 100, which has hit an all-time high as an “anti-tech” index. Swings and roundabouts.

Have we already lost control of AI, asked Danny Fortson in The Sunday Times. On 11 July, an entirely new kind of hacking attack was launched at Hugging Face, an online platform that houses a library of AI code and datasets. The attack, which clearly used AI agents, “advanced at frightening speed and scale”, executing tens of thousands of actions so as to break into the company’s system.

‘Considerable skill and persistence’

Hugging Face managed to neutralise it, and alerted the authorities. Days later, the company behind the attack “raised its hand”: OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, admitted that one of its tests had gone badly wrong. OpenAI had set up a “sandbox” – a supposedly safe area of its network, entirely disconnected from the internet – and ordered two cutting-edge AI models to perform a series of cybersecurity tests. The models decided to break out of the sandbox, escape onto the internet and hack into the place they knew they would find the answers: Hugging Face’s servers.

Media outlets described the AI as “going rogue”, said Jamie Bartlett in The Observer. But, in fact, these models merely single-mindedly performed the task they’d been given. The models reasoned that the most effective strategy was to cheat, and they did so with “considerable skill and persistence”. This is nothing new. Leading models have deceived users, attempted blackmail, and even tried to copy themselves in order to complete their tasks.

‘The genie is out of the bottle’

Some sceptical observers have suggested that this story might be a publicity stunt: that it benefits OpenAI to suggest that its products have stunning powers. But the truth is that these companies really don’t know how to build AI systems safely – and yet they “continue to rush ahead building ever-more powerful models”. It was fortunate that Hugging Face, a New York tech firm valued at $4.5bn, had a highly proficient cybersecurity team, said The Economist. “Things might have turned out much worse for a less well-resourced outfit.”

This is not necessarily a doomsday scenario, said John Thickstun in The Guardian. AI is very good at hacking; but such powers can also be used to make IT systems more secure. Ironically, Hugging Face had to rely on a free Chinese AI model to thwart this attack – because OpenAI and US rivals jealously guard their own. At any rate, “the genie is out of the bottle”, said Sean O’Grady in The Independent: we must learn how to manage AI. Every technology developed by mankind has been double-edged, and AI is no different. “A radically different world is not necessarily anything to be frightened of – but, even if it were, it’s coming at us anyway.”

The Okavango to Tsodilo Ultra-Trail run, through the wilderness of Botswana, is billed as a great adventure for visitors who “don’t just want to see” this part of Africa, but to “feel it underfoot”, said Simon Mills in The Times. Organised by the safari company Desert & Delta, and now taking place every April, the 60-mile route links two Unesco World Heritage Sites – the Okavango Delta and the ancient Tsodilo Hills. It takes three days and four nights (spent in lodges and camps), and I found the pace pretty “easygoing” (this isn’t a race), leaving time to take in the surroundings. A support vehicle was quickly on site to rescue me when an elephant came alarmingly close. And we ran alongside local people, which made for a deeper sense of connection with Botswana, as did the chance to see the amazing cave art in Tsodilo.

Ancient and new attractions on Lewis

There’s no more impressive sight on the Isle of Lewis than Calanais, said Helen Ochyra in The Times. This neolithic stone circle is a mighty thing, with menhirs up to 4.8m tall, and though it’s smaller than Stonehenge, it’s rather more atmospheric thanks to its setting – all “emerald and russet moorland, glassy lochs and vast hill-rumpled horizons”. Yet it’s far from the only reason to visit the northernmost island in the Outer Hebrides, which has seen several appealing developments since my last visit a decade ago. Among them are new art galleries, restaurants and “cool” cafés in Harris; a new visitor centre at Calanais, with plenty of things for children to do; and Uig Sands, a restaurant with rooms beside the beach of the same name, which is one of the most magnificent in the world.

Inspiring design in the Arizona desert

Built in a piecemeal, “experimental” fashion from 1937 as his winter home and studio, Taliesin West is one of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpieces, said Jonathan Thompson in The Telegraph – an object lesson in the power of design to make us feel “happier” and “more creative”. A low-slung complex set in the desert outside Phoenix, Arizona, it seems to melt into the “rust-coloured” mountains behind it, and its “dramatic” sunlit rooms all feel connected to their natural surroundings. From “ingenious” geometric furniture to acrylic roofs that work as “giant light diffusers”, and “tight” hallways leading into grand open spaces, the “design tricks” Wright used are fascinating. I particularly loved the building’s “prow”, a triangular vantage point that extends over the desert. I left feeling “joyful” and inspired.

Why is it so significant?

It “must be the only artistic masterpiece that is also a crucial source for a major historical event”, wrote the medieval historian Patrick Wormald. The Bayeux Tapestry’s survival, largely intact, is miraculous in itself. A strip cartoon-style rendering of the Norman Conquest, from 1064 to the Battle of Hastings, it is rich, evocative and astonishingly vivid. The tapestry is “not merely a record of conquest, but an incomparable mirror of medieval life”, says the French scholar Lucien Musset. Colourful, graphically violent and occasionally ribald, it is rich in background detail, allowing us to look back nearly a millennium and see the world of the Anglo-Saxons and their Norman foes: their arms and armour, their ships, their cooking, their horses and dogs, their hairstyles (the English have flowing locks and long moustaches, while the Normans are cropped and clean-shaven).

How was it made?

It is not actually a tapestry, but an embroidery: a linen cloth 50cm high and 68 metres long, showing 58 scenes embroidered with woollen yarn of 10 colours, and captioned with brief Latin titles. When it first surfaced in history, in 1476, it was hung to decorate the nave of Bayeux Cathedral in Normandy every year at an annual feast. According to local tradition, it was made by William the Conqueror’s wife Matilda and her ladies-in-waiting, but most scholars now think it was, in fact, commissioned in the 1070s by William’s half-brother Odo, Bishop of Bayeux (and later Earl of Kent), who features four times (more than anyone except the main protagonists) and is seen rallying the troops at Hastings.

So is it a work of propaganda?

In outline, it tells the Norman version of the conquest, similar to that in the two main Norman chronicles of the period – framing it as a crusade against a perjurer. Harold Godwinson, Earl of Wessex, crosses over to northern France in 1064, is captured by Count Guy I of Ponthieu and is rescued by William. Harold then swears an oath over holy relics, before returning to England and assuming the English crown upon the death of Edward the Confessor (his sister’s husband, who died without a direct heir). William’s case was that Harold had made, and broken, a sacred oath to support his claim to the English throne (this is how he gained the papacy’s backing for his invasion). The tapestry shows Halley’s comet – a bad omen – appearing above the newly crowned Harold. However, the tapestry is thought to have been made in England, probably in Odo’s earldom of Kent, which was famous for its needlework: some designs match those in manuscripts in Canterbury. This could explain its sympathetic portrayal of the English.

How is it pro-English?

The Norman invaders are shown seizing the locals’ food, and burning a house while an English woman, holding her son’s hand, implores them to stop. Harold is portrayed without rancour, and with dignity, even heroism; he saves two Norman soldiers from a river while in France. The action starts with him, and he appears more times than William: one academic has even called it “the tragedy of Harold”.

So it's subversive?

Arguably. Looking at the scene of Harold’s oath, it could be interpreted as showing that it was extorted from him – as one early 12th-century English source argued. It could even be said to endorse Harold’s claim to the English throne. After his coronation, Harold is described as “Harold Rex”, whereas the Domesday Book is careful only to call him Earl Harold. The Conqueror, by contrast, is never called “Rex” (only “Dux”) in the tapestry, though this may be because the final section, presumably showing his coronation, was torn off and lost. The tapestry is, at the very least, enigmatic and ambivalent – it can be seen both as “a Norman brag and a Saxon lament”, says art critic Jonathan Jones.

What about the background detail?

Along the top and bottom run decorative borders featuring scenes from fables, and of farming and hunting, along with a few naked human figures (there are at least five human penises). In one unexplained scene, “a certain cleric” is shown touching the face of a woman named as Ælfgyva. A priapic naked man squats below. And when the story reaches the Battle of Hastings, carnage from the battlefield spreads out onto the margin: decapitated bodies, severed limbs, looters stealing armour from the dead.

Has it always been in Bayeux?

Almost always. Antiquarians started taking an interest in the tapestry in the 1700s, and in the early 1800s it went to Paris, where Napoleon displayed it to whip up enthusiasm for an invasion of England. The final caption – et fuga verterunt Angli (“and the English turned in flight”) – was added shortly before 1814, presumably for propaganda reasons. The Gestapo also took it to Paris during the Second World War: Heinrich Himmler then ordered it to be taken to “a place of safety” in 1944, but Paris was liberated before his order was executed. It then returned to Bayeux.

Why was the loan agreed?

For two main reasons: because its home, Bayeux Museum, is closed until October 2027; and because President Macron was determined to make it happen. Macron first proposed the loan in 2018; he joked that it has taken longer to sort out than Brexit. The Bayeux Museum’s curator initially called it “unthinkable”; the risk of damage in transit led 78,500 people to sign a petition blocking the loan. But Macron insisted – knowing, said Peter Ricketts, who coordinated at the UK end, that the exhibition “would be a sensation”. The Norman Conquest is, after all, just a detail in French history but central to Britain’s national story.

In 2019, PC Andrew Harper was responding to a call about the theft of a quad bike in Berkshire when his foot got caught in the tow strap of the suspects’ car as it sped off. He was dragged for 1.6km, suffering fatal injuries. The three teenagers in the car were later convicted of his manslaughter; the two who were passengers were sentenced to 13 years.

Dangerously close to capacity

After that, said the Daily Mail, Harper’s widow successfully campaigned for the killers of emergency workers to get mandatory life terms; but Harper’s Law doesn't apply retroactively, and last week it emerged that those two men may be released on licence early, under the 2026 Sentencing Act. It allows for all non-violent offenders, and violent ones jailed for less than four years, to be released when they've served 33% of their terms, and for those serving more than four years for violent and sex crimes to be released at the 50% mark. Only a few categories of serious offender are excluded, including those serving life terms.

Countless victims of crimes including rape and child sex abuse have been informed that their attackers are to be freed earlier than anticipated. Inevitably, they are appalled and feel betrayed, said David Shipley in The Spectator. Faced with a public backlash, Andy Burnham has paused the Act’s implementation. But it is not clear what he can do. Prisons in England and Wales have been dangerously close to capacity for years. No sooner had Keir Starmer come to office in 2024 than he was faced with warnings that the system was about to collapse, prompting a controversial early release scheme in which many offenders were let out at the 40% mark.

The system needs total reform

People blamed successive Tory governments for bringing in tougher sentences and raising automatic release thresholds, while failing to increase prison capacity: in 14 years, they added just 500 new places. Labour has pledged to create 14,000 more, but even if they manage that, these prisons won't be ready in time to avert a crisis – hence the new Act, which lowers release thresholds again. It also expands the range of offences they apply to, because releasing only non-violent offenders would not free up enough space.

Ultimately, the system needs total reform, said Ian Birrell in The i Paper. Owing in part to a “tough on crime” narrative driven by the media, our incarceration rate is higher than any other country in Western Europe. Yet there is no firm evidence that longer sentences deter crimes – let alone in jails rife with drugs but short on opportunities for rehabilitation or treatment for addiction. Countries like Norway have shown that there are cheaper, more effective ways of tackling crime, but will the public accept them? It will take a bold politician to break this cycle.

Fill the grid with numbers one to nine so that each row, column and square contains every digit exactly once. This game will update daily.

You have six tries to guess the five-letter word. Type in the letters and hit enter. After each guess, the colour of the tiles will change if you choose the correct letters. A green tile means the letter is in the correct spot. A peach tile means the letter is in the word but is in the wrong spot. The tile will not change colour if the letter is not in the word. This game will update daily.

Guess the four-digit number in six tries. Choose your number and tap enter to submit. Each tile will change to green if the digit is correct and in the right position, or orange if it is correct but in the wrong position. A dark grey tile means the digit does not appear anywhere in the number. Come back here tomorrow for the next Guess the Number game.

In the 1970s, the Costa Brava was “a bright and breezy British holiday favourite”, a package tour favourite that was often confused with the Costas Blanca and del Sol, said Paul Richardson in Condé Nast Traveller. Yet most of Catalonia’s “Wild Coast” has never conformed to this “manufactured” sun, sea and sangria image. Stretching from Blanes, an hour north of Barcelona, to the French border, it’s a “complex jigsaw” of “craggy headlands” and “jewel-like coves”, much of which is too “rugged” for “wholesale tourist development”. It has a history of attracting “artists, actors and bohemians”. And recently, it has seen another “vibe shift”, with a new wave of stylish restaurants and hotels.

Lloret de Mar, in the south, is “the Benidorm of Catalonia”, with its “great sweep of urban beach”, but the further north you go, the wilder – and less built-up – the coast becomes. There are “pleasant” harbour towns such as Palamós and Palafrugell, and then comes the great Bay of Roses, “like a vision of the Mediterranean in its pristine, pre-touristic state”. Beyond that lie lovely Cadaqués and Portlligat (where Salvador and Gala Dalí converted a fisherman’s house in 1930 “to live out their bonkers lifestyle”), and yet more “perfect” little bays, all with sandy beaches and “cerulean” waters. It’s well worth heading inland, too. This region – the Empordà – is known as “the Spanish Tuscany” for the “luxuriant beauty” of its landscape. Set among its olive groves and cork-oak forests are “somnolent” medieval hamlets, such as pretty Madremanya – and also, of course, the “delightful” city of Girona.

The region is known for its “experimental modern cuisine”, and has 15 Michelin-starred restaurants including El Celler de Can Roca, a “world-beating gastro temple” in Girona. Its owners, the Roca brothers, have also opened an “extraordinary” hotel, Esperit Roca, in a fortress nearby. And there are plenty of other pleasant hotels besides, including Palau Fugit, in Girona, and the “glorious” Hostal de la Gavina, in S’Agaró.

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Summer is simmering to its end soon, but we still have all of August — and much of September — to tackle that summer reading. No matter what kind of book you’re looking for, this month has a lot to offer, including a sequel that will form the basis of an upcoming season of an HBO series and a Korean coming-of-age story about an immigrant in 1970s New York City.

‘Etna’ by Paul Yoon

Yoon’s story of a former military dog “attempting a treacherous journey home” during the aftermath of a war “rarely moves in expected ways,” said Library Journal. The novel’s narrative structure is an “amalgam of ‘The Odyssey’ and ‘Au Hasard Balthazar,’” portraying Etna as a “heroic figure who bears witness to humanity’s best and worst.” The author’s “fabulist shading” positions the story at a “nexus of grim reality and hopeful fairy tale, enlivening and devastating readers in equal measure” as they watch the dog “reckon with the all-too-human conclusion that one can’t go home again.” (Aug. 4, $28, Simon and Schuster, Amazon)

‘Take What You Can’ by Naima Coster

This touching story about the lifelong friendship between Val and Milly follows the pair from when they met in 2004 as the only Black students in a French study-abroad program, to a decade later when they are both mothers. In this “delicious page-turner,” set in such “alluring locales” as Paris, Provence and Park Slope, Coster brings us “two fascinating, fallible, and sometimes frustrating characters” who are learning to “balance freedom and responsibility — to themselves and their families, both biological and chosen,” said Kirkus Reviews. Writing with “sensitivity, candor and insight,” Coster “compellingly tracks the ups and downs of longstanding friendship, motherhood and daughterhood, marriage and career.” (Aug. 4, $30, Pamela Dorman Books, Amazon)

‘A Tender Age’ by Chang-Rae Lee

In Chang-Rae Lee’s seventh novel, a man “looks back on the small wounds and larger traumas of his youth,” said Kirkus Reviews. Jeon-Gi, the narrator, recalls life as a 10-year-old boy in 1976, a “pivotal time for this son of Korean immigrants.”

In the New York City apartment complex that his family relocates to, the “children’s identities” are based on “racial and ethnic groups, as well as their capacity and willingness to dominate others.” “A Tender Age” is a “melancholy, emotionally rich story of preadolescent struggles.” (Aug. 11, $30, Riverhead Books, Amazon)

‘The Secrets We Hide’ by Karin Slaughter

Slaughter’s “satisfying sequel” to “We Are All Guilty Here” sees Georgia sheriff Emmy Clifton investigate a “complex murder case with the help of her estranged sister,” said Publishers Weekly. Slaughter remains as “skilled as ever at probing the darker side of life in Georgia.” This “bodes well for the future of the series.”

“The Secrets We Hide” demonstrates Slaughter’s “effortless primacy,” said the Financial Times. The latest entry in her North Falls series “deals provocatively with the fallout from a blood-spattered murder involving child abuse and exploitation.” (Aug. 11, $32, Harper Collins Publishers, Amazon)

‘Big Little Truths’ by Liane Moriarty

In this sequel to the bestseller “Big Little Lies,” a decade has passed and the main characters, Madeline, Celeste, Jane, Renata and Bonnie, are “navigating mothering teenagers,” said Booklist Queen. In the first book, the group of women “bonded as they became embroiled in a homicide investigation,” said Variety.

“Big Little Truths” will be the basis for season three of the HBO series based on the books. Moriarty isn’t “particularly hands-on with the show.” Still, while the series team “didn’t have any input on the plot of the new book,” they did “inspire some of her writing.” (Aug. 25, $34, Crown, Amazon)

Women are being left behind again in the race up the corporate ladder, said The Economist. Women today vastly outnumber men on university campuses, and “their representation among the highest-paying professions, including medicine and law, has nearly tripled in America since 1980.” However, even with “the most highly qualified cohort of women in human history,” the share of those leading American corporations dropped last year for the first time in 20 years. Last month, Marianne Lake, one of the leading candidates to replace JPMorgan Chase’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon, “was relegated,” leaving “an unusually pale and male lineup” for the top job at the country’s biggest bank. Beyond Wall Street, the gender pay gap is widening again “after consistently closing for years.” And women’s eagerness to lead—which surged following the release of Sheryl Sandberg’s 2013 call to action, Lean In—seems to have has plateaued. In 2023, 80% of men and women were “keen on a promotion”; that number has since risen to 90% for men but remained static for women.

“I’m not going to sugarcoat it,” said Beth Kowitt in Bloomberg. “These stats paint a grim picture.” The question used to be “how many years would it take for women to attain the corner office in significant numbers.” Now the question is “whether corporate America even thinks it’s important to get them there at all.” We know where the Trump administration stands on this issue, said Tanzina Vega in The Boston Globe. It has led a “war on working women,” in part by firing and replacing Democratic officials on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), two agencies that ensure employers don’t discriminate against women in the workplace. New EEOC chair Andrea Lucas said the agency “aims to pursue more discrimination lawsuits”—from white men. Fearing repercussions if they don’t go along with Trump’s agenda, fewer than half of companies today say they are “prioritizing women’s advancement,” threatening to undo “many of the economic and workplace gains of the past 50 years.”

But the job market has actually given women “the upper hand,” said Allison Schrager in Bloomberg. Out of more than 4 million jobs created since 2023, more than 2.5 million have gone to women. That’s because most new jobs being created are in female-dominated industries like health care, caregiving, and education. These are stable and well-paying positions that, in this graying nation, will be around awhile. They’re also reflective of an economy that is “shifting away from manufacturing, transport, and other traditional male jobs and into services and caregiving.” As much as “some economists would like men to change their preferences and become nurses,” it’s not going to happen. The economy of the future is one that favors women, not men.

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In Kimberly McCreight’s best-selling new thriller, Someone Else’s Husband, a New York City artist is murdered after having an affair with a married man during a group climb of Mount Kilimanjaro. Below, McCreight recommends six other books built to offer instant escape.

‘Heartwood’ by Amity Gaige (2025)

The story of an experienced hiker on a perilous stretch of the Appalachian Trail who gets lost in the Maine woods. Told from the points of view of the hiker, a game warden in search of her, and a mysterious retiree who is somehow connected, Heartwood is a riveting and moving account of the high-stakes search for a missing woman and so much more. Buy it here.

‘Wild’ by Cheryl Strayed (2012)

Strayed, after facing immense loss in her personal life, packs up her things and takes to the mountains. With no preparation and the daunting task ahead of her of hiking from the Mojave Desert to Washington state completely alone, she shows us what strength and independence can really mean. Buy it here.

‘Five’ by Ilona Bannister (2026)

In this whirlwind of a story, you know from the start that one of five people waiting on a train platform outside London will die in the next five minutes, though you don’t know which one. You’ll be swept away by the suspense, but more importantly by the intricate stories that deliver all the characters to that fated moment. Buy it here.

‘Into the Wild’ by Jon Krakauer (1996)

Many wish they could pack up their bags, throw away their dreams, and start a new life, but not many do it. Christopher Johnson McCandless did. This true story follows his ultimately tragic path hiking in the uncharted wilderness of Alaska. It’s moving, gorgeous, and riveting. Buy it here.

‘A Good Person’ by Kirsten King (2026)

Lillian, following the unsatisfying dissolution of her situationship, embarks on a journey testing her morals and soul. To recontrol the uncontrollable, Lillian casts a hex on her ex-lover Henry, but this all-too-relatable impulse could have serious consequences. King’s voice in the book sucks you in and simply won’t let you think about anything else until the final page. Buy it here.

‘Atmosphere’ by Taylor Jenkins Reid (2025)

Ready to leave Earth itself behind? Set in the 1980s during the NASA space shuttle program, this suspenseful novel reveals the complexity behind every expedition, following the relationships and obstacles while conveying a love of exploring the unknown. Buy it here.

‘Oh Yeah?’ by Steve Lacy

★★★★

“With Oh Yeah?, Steve Lacy makes his strongest claim yet to being one of Gen Z’s defining pop auteurs,” said Jeff Ihaza in Rolling Stone. The 28-year-old Grammy winner, whose previous album included the No. 1 hit “Bad Habit,” has returned four years later with another “genre-splicing” album that weds melodic rock with experimental R&B, “turning guitar ballads, trip-hop murk, and crude-almost-cringe humor into a pop language unmistakably his own.” Lacy racked up a raft of credits as a songwriter, guitarist, and producer before his solo breakout, said Chris DeVille in Stereogum, and here, “songs seem to spill out of him with ease.” Because Oh Yeah? “moves with a pleasing looseness,” it feels less like a bid for a pop smash than “an unguarded look into the mind of a musical prodigy as he matures into a career artist, exploring the nuances of modern romance and queer sexuality with newfound clarity.” The lyrics, to my ear, are “consistently terrible.” But Lacy’s “half-baked” poetry “contributes to the album’s free-flowing vibe” and none of Oh Yeah?’s clunker lines derail its emergence as “one of the most purely enjoyable albums of the year.”

‘Daughter From Hell’ by Gracie Abrams

★★

Much of Gracie Abrams’ latest album “feels both incredibly intense and frustratingly vague,” said Molly Mary O’Brien in Pitchfork. “She is sick, she is numb, she is bleeding, she is burning up,” but “the feelings are always more distinct than whatever happened to cause them,” and it’s “hard not to wish for a slight shake-up from her signature sound.” Abrams, the 26-year-old daughter of producer-director J.J. Abrams, has created a blend of “bulletproof pop” and “melancholic indie folk” that landed her 2024 sophomore album at No. 2 on Billboard’s chart, but after a while, all the breathy verses and fingerpicked guitar lines “stand in the way of music that could be more memorable.” While “songs of emotional candor depend on total authenticity,” said Will Hodgkinson in The Times (U.K.), Daughter From Hell “just doesn’t get there.” Abrams’ chart success, following in the wake of Adele and Taylor Swift, “feels like the logical conclusion to the commercialization of emotional frailty in pop.” Yet she’s more effective “when she stops trying to sound all tortured and deep.” That’s why “Minibar,” a “fun, catchy sing-along,” is also “the best track on the album.”

‘New Avatar’ by Kelela

★★★

The music Kelela has made since her 2013 debut “always feels like it’s going somewhere,” said Luke Cartledge in Paste. On the third album from the 43-year-old R&B maverick, “the adventurism and intellect that have made her music so exciting remain,” yet “they’re complemented by a sense of lightness and self-assurance that feel new.” Where her past work felt tightly wound, this album “swings, flutters, and breathes,” establishing itself as “one of the best pop albums of the year.” New Avatar “marks a full-circle moment for Kelela,” said Paul Simpson in AllMusic. As might be suggested by the “shoegaze-like” guitars on “Idea 1,” this record’s “stunning” opener, she started out playing in D.C. indie bands before her move to L.A. and toward club-based music. Echoes of that passion can be heard in the slowed breakbeats of “Point Blank” and the “airy” garage beat of the PinkPantheress-assisted “The Bridge.” But while the album fuses multiple styles, it’s “more about atmospheric vibes and urgent lyrics than pop hooks or cutting-edge dance rhythms.” It’s “easily Kelela’s darkest release to date.” Somehow, though, it “manages to be comforting.”

‘On the Origin of Sex: The Weird and Wonderful Science of Reproduction’ by Lixing Sun

Birds lay eggs, bees pollinate flowers, and for as long as anyone remembers, humans have been using such examples to introduce their children to the subject of sex, said Elle Hunt in New Scientist. But as any expert in the field would know, “the birds and the bees analogy just doesn’t capture the diversity, drama, and strangeness of animal reproduction.” In Lixing Sun’s “engaging” new book, the Central Washington University biologist shows an “infectious” enthusiasm for detailing the many ways that life on Earth multiplies itself, starting with asexual reproduction as practiced even by some sharks and condors and extending to mallard ducks’ corkscrew vaginas and penises. “But as the title suggests, Sun’s scope is far more ambitious,” taking on such big questions as why sex exists at all. And even when Sun writes as if all his readers know evolutionary biology as well as he does, “the book remains interesting because the many examples of kooky animal sex make it a pacy read.”

Credit recent findings that have upended biologists’ understanding of sex and its history, said Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker. The new body of research “has given rise to a new sort of natural-history book, one so racy that it would have made Charles Darwin raise a bushy eyebrow.” Sun’s contribution to the field opens by reminding us that, because asexual reproduction is more efficient, it’s still not settled what evolutionary purpose sex serves. The theory known as Muller’s ratchet holds that sex counters the buildup of dangerous genetic mutations. The Red Queen hypothesis posits instead that sex helps species stay one step ahead of parasites, and the “wonderfully named” Vicar of Bray hypothesis posits that it helps species adapt quickly to environmental change. “All of these theories have a certain appeal, yet all have been found wanting.”

“Whatever the reason, it is sex that has created the complexity of our world,” said Adam Weymouth in The Times (U.K.). As Sun plays usher, he sometimes anthropomorphizes the sex lives of other creatures, going so far as to speak of single-cell organisms engaging in “flings.” Such playfulness “can end up somewhat trivializing the material,” and where his book “really becomes sticky” is in its attempt to invoke biological imperatives to explain certain human behaviors, including sexual violence. But he does score points when he highlights the fluidity of gender identities and gender roles in the animal kingdom and recommends that we accept, as any pregnant male seahorse might, that there aren’t fixed rules in nature about what it means to be male or female. “The world is complex beyond our comprehension,” and “when it sticks to the science,” The Origin of Sex is “an enlightening study.”

‘You Won’t Get Free of It’ by Rachel Aviv

“Is it only literature that allows us to fully enter strangers’ lives, inhabit conflicting perspectives, and understand the ways we see and fail to see one another?” asked Melanie Thernstrom in The New York Times. The “stunning” title essay in Rachel Aviv’s new book about tangled mother-daughter relationships shows that nonfiction, when done right, can match fiction on those grounds. The piece investigates why the Nobel-winning author Alice Munro chose to stay with her second husband even after she learned that her youngest daughter had been sexually abused by him for years. Aviv, in expanding here upon a 2024 article she published in The New Yorker, “masterfully resists editorializing,” allowing readers to make their own judgments. The piece stands as “the crown jewel” of a “piercing” collection that showcases Aviv’s narrative skills.

Beyond the focus on the mother-daughter dynamic, said Thomas Beller in 4Columns, the book’s seven essays “share a preoccupation with states of dissociation,” as the protagonists are all in states of denial or delusion. The first essay, “I Wish I Were Her for You,” introduces Hannah Upp, a school-teacher who, when she was plucked out of the waters of New York Harbor, couldn’t remember where she’d been for the past three weeks. “Removable Truths” looks at Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist who during childhood refused to acknowledge that her mother was psychologically unraveling and has since become a specialist in the unreliability of memory, even serving as a defense witness for Harvey Weinstein. Throughout the book, Aviv “moves effortlessly between reporting on events and entering the inner lives of her subjects.”

Aviv says she’s drawn to unstable perspectives, and her storytelling “leans on the idea of unreliable narration,” said Julia M. Klein in the Los Angeles Times. But her time and point-of-view shifts “have a downside,” producing essays that “can feel self-indulgent and overlong.” The approach works in the piece on Upp, as Aviv eventually shifts her attention to Upp’s mother, who, while searching for her missing daughter, connects with other lost women. Otherwise, to me, these stories “aren’t fully satisfying,” though perhaps they’re not meant to be. “As the collection makes clear, Aviv prefers restless questioning to closure.”

It isn’t often we can trace a widely used turn of phrase to a single, inspired genesis. Not so with the mocking ‘TACO’ appellation. Coined in May 2025 by Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong, the acronym highlights President Donald Trump’s inclination to “Always Chicken Out” on his threats and proclamations.

While there have been numerous iterations and adaptations of Armstrong’s broader point (“perhaps the best Mexican food acronym for Trump is TAMALES,” said Reuters: “Trump Always Messes Around, Leaves Everybody Shafted”), none have quite captured the public’s imagination like Armstrong’s four-letter initialism. One year since its coinage, here are some of the president’s biggest TACO moments to date.

‘Liberation Day’ tariffs

The effects of Trump’s 2025 attempt to “remake the global trading system” by “erecting the largest tariff wall around the U.S. economy” in a century are “well-documented,” said Bloomberg. “Markets crumbled and then recovered when Trump delayed and scaled back his original duties” multiple times in the ensuing weeks, meaning that for a “certain audience,” a TACO “isn’t just a meal anymore.”

Ultimately, the administration “threatened far more tariffs” than Trump has “carried through on,” said NBC. Trump’s trade strategy since his Liberation Day rollout of global tariffs has been “rushed and improvisational,” said the Council on Foreign Relations. Absent congressional input and lacking overall cohesion, the White House’s tariffs and subsequent policy are “not U.S. trade agreements but rather Trump’s trade deals” for better or worse.

Wall Street’s TACO trades

Trump’s Liberation Day rollout of worldwide tariffs “didn’t just reshape global trade,” said CNBC, it also “spawned a new play in the stock market: the ‘TACO trade.’” Here, the president’s “extreme position on policy” is inevitably replaced with a “more palatable place for equities, leading investors to then ‘buy the dip.’” Those who buy stocks “at lower costs after Trump announces new tariffs or increases them” later “reap the benefits when the markets rebound as he delays or backs off of them,” said ABC. “Oh, I chicken out? Isn’t that nice? I've never heard that,” said Trump when asked a “nasty question” in the Oval Office about his eponymous trading trend.

Immigration raids at farms and hotels

“Changes are coming!” Trump said in a June 2025 post on Truth Social that acknowledged “our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, longtime workers away” from the agricultural, hospitality and leisure industries. The waffling commitment to his mass deportation raids was an “echo of Trump’s back-and-forth rhetoric on tariffs,” said the Detroit Free Press.

It was a “rare concession” from Trump that his policies were “hurting American farmers and hospitality businesses,” said The New York Times — “industries and constituencies that he does not want to lose.” The message from Trump’s shifting deportation tactics is “clear,” said The Daily Beast. The president’s “commitment to his own anti-immigration agenda cannot withstand pressure from his supporters” to protect “their bottom line.”

Threatening to end Iranian ‘civilization’

In “one of the more bizarre days in U.S. diplomatic history,” said The Washington Post, Trump’s threat to Iran back in April that a “whole civilization will die tonight” ended with the president “proclaiming a two-week ceasefire” to the U.S.-led war. Trump also announced the start of negotiations based on Tehran’s “10-point proposal,” which was full of “conditions that should be utterly unacceptable to any U.S. administration.”

Similar to the Paris Peace Accords that ended the Vietnam War, Trump can now “pretend that his bloodcurdling threats coerced Iran into giving up,” when he has “so far given up more than the mullahs did,” said the Post. Critics “lampooned” the episode as “another TACO moment,” said CNN, in which Trump backed off his “maximalist” demands “in a way that erased his red lines and raised doubts about his credibility.”

‘Guardian’ fees for the Strait of Hormuz

Just one day after threatening on “Fox and Friends” to position the United States as the “guardian angel of the strait” of Hormuz — and then “get paid for guarding it, a lot of money” — Trump “abandoned his threat,” telling reporters the plan would be “replaced by trade deals with Gulf states,” with whom he had spent the past 24 hours talking, said the BBC. “It was TACO Tuesday in Washington” when Trump walked back his threat, said CNBC. “And Wall Street was all too happy to take a bite.”

In Minneapolis, a ‘soft TACO’ pivot?

The more Trump has pushed the limits of his power, the less locked into a binary TACO dynamic he seems, despite Armstrong’s initial framing. It “might be more helpful,” then, to “craft a more limited soft TACO theory instead,” said Vox. While Armstrong asserts Trump possesses a “low tolerance for political or economic pain,” the soft TACO idea posits that his tolerance “can sometimes be quite high — even if it isn’t unlimited.” Trump’s decision to scale back deportation operations in Minnesota after the shooting deaths of two protestors, for example, “shows he was not entirely captured by hardline advisers or ideology,” nor was he “so insulated” that he could “ignore such intense backlash.” However, said Vox, “it took months — and two deaths — to get him to back down.”

‘How trying to make sense of the Nolan Wells tragedy led to rampant misinformation’

Keisha N. Blain at MS NOW

In a “striking example of how misinformation can spread during a developing news story, a viral Facebook post claimed that Nolan Wells, the Black Mississippi teenager whose death after visiting a Gulf Coast island with a group of white friends remains under investigation, was related to the legendary journalist and anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells,” says Keisha N. Blain. For “many reasons, including ones related to race, history and geography, discussions about his death are especially susceptible to misinformation.”

Read more

‘Why is it so hard to ban child marriage?’

Sarah Jones at Intelligencer

Child marriage is a “fringe practice, even within the most conservative religious and cultural communities, but it is also more common than many Americans realize,” says Sarah Jones. Children “who marry are more likely to drop out of high school and face higher rates of poverty,” yet “lawmakers have dragged their feet.” Many “Republican lawmakers continue to see marriage as a solution to illicit sex or an underage pregnancy — and a way to enforce traditional values.”

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‘The banality of evil in the Border Patrol’s secret anti-immigrant slur’

Gustavo Arellano at the Los Angeles Times

For “half a century, Border Patrol workers have used the onomatopoeic word” ‘tonk,’ referring to the “sound of someone getting hit, as slang for undocumented immigrants,” says Gustavo Arellano. The word is “workplace lingo showing that the banality of evil that’s la migra on its best days has transformed into something far uglier.” The “slur is so vile — predicated on violence by law enforcement, unlike ethnic jabs that insult food or culture — that it has never crossed over into mainstream English.”

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‘Why are we still pretending Big Tech cares about our classrooms?’

Liz Shulman at the Chicago Tribune

The “field of education depends on human interaction, and the quality of instruction kids get should depend on an administrator’s human assessment rather than a machine’s,” says Liz Shulman. Kids “deserve protection in school. Instead, AI companies are furiously signing contracts with school districts.” If “Big Tech companies truly cared about kids and educators as they claim to, they would give money to public schools (beyond free Chromebooks and access to AI), which remain massively underfunded in practically every state.”

Read more

What happened

AI company Anthropic has discovered three separate incidents in which its Claude model accessed the internet and hacked into other organizations’ systems without Anthropic’s knowledge, the company said Thursday. The security breaches, which happened during testing, follow the recent revelation that competitor OpenAI’s technology had hacked into AI platform Hugging Face.

Who said what

Anthropic and its testing partner accidentally “left the models with live internet access,” The Wall Street Journal said. So Claude “didn’t break out of a sandbox; it simply wandered out of systems where the sandbox didn’t exist.” The lesson is “not necessarily that AI has developed a fundamentally new attack capability,” cyber security expert David Allott told the BBC, but that AI agents can “combine capabilities, obtain credentials and system access to take actions autonomously.”

“We need to change how we model such threats as AI capabilities advance,” Anthropic said in a blog post.

What next?

Expect more calls for better safeguarding around AI development, which “may be moving much faster than society is ready for,” CNN said.

What happened

Thousands of people on Thursday crossed from Morocco into the Spanish territory of Ceuta, marking the largest border influx the enclave has experienced since 2021. Streams of people climbed over border fences or swam onto the shores, overwhelming security forces at border controls. At least 41 people died during the crossings, according to The Associated Press.

Who said what

The autonomous Spanish cities of Ceuta and Melilla in North Africa have “long been a point of tension between Morocco and Spain,” The New York Times said. The two areas “constitute the European Union’s sole land border with Africa.”

The government in Madrid “finally reacted to what is effectively an invasion of European territory by mobilizing army units,” said The Times of London. One migrant traveling with his family told the paper, “I did not want us to miss the opportunity. Salaries are very low in Morocco — it’s dead; Morocco is dead.”

What next?

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is due to visit Ceuta on Friday as authorities focus on restoring order. Italy has called for Spain to be suspended from the EU’s free-travel zone.

What happened

President Donald Trump claimed Thursday on Truth Social that Hamas had agreed to “COMPLETE DISARMAMENT” in Gaza and that “Israeli forces will withdraw” from the war-torn region. Details on the deal remain limited, but Trump said it was brokered by the international Board of Peace, which he established earlier this year to oversee the Gaza peace plan.

Who said what

The breakthrough is a “critical step” toward Gaza being “governed by a new Palestinian government” and Israel having “the security it deserves,” Trump said. He added that the International Stabilization Force would collaborate with “a new Palestinian police force to take responsibility for Gaza being safe.”

But “we didn’t say disarmament,” Hamas negotiator Ghazi Hamad told The Wall Street Journal. Instead the group simply “agreed to place its weapons in a storage facility.” Israel has yet to make a public statement on the reports. Trump would be “very, very” disappointed if Israel rebuffed the plan, a senior Trump adviser told reporters.

Hamas has “long regarded giving up all its weapons as tantamount to surrender,” The New York Times said, so “disarmament would be a monumental undertaking.”

What next?

Board of Peace officials expected details of the deal would have to be “refined” over the coming weeks and months, Bloomberg said, and the timeline for Israeli withdrawal has yet to be finalized.

Europe is braced for more explosive debate over immigration and open borders after an estimated 49,000 migrants crossed into Spain’s North African enclave of Ceuta from Morocco in the past 24 hours via land and sea.

Italy’s most senior politicians have called for Spain to be kicked out of Europe’s Schengen zone, and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said on X that she was “prepared to take action – including extraordinary measures – to defend our borders and ensure citizens’ safety”. Spain’s Interior Ministry blamed human trafficking networks for encouraging the latest crossings, saying criminal organisations had exploited a recent Supreme Court ruling to lure more migrants, particularly young people, into attempting the journey.

Spain’s Supreme Court ruled earlier this month that migrants intercepted at sea while attempting to reach Ceuta or Melilla cannot be summarily returned under the enclaves’ special border-rejection regime. “It has been a slow trickle since the Supreme Court’s ruling, but today has been an explosion,” a Guardia Civil spokesperson said on Reuters.

What did the commentators say?

The tiny Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla sit on the northern shores of Morocco’s Mediterranean coast. Together they form the European Union’s only land borders with Africa. “It’s not yet clear what prompted this surge in illegal crossings from Morocco, or how hard the authorities there tried to prevent it,” said the BBC. But at one point, a Spanish official said the border was in total collapse.

Just a week ago, Jessika Roswall, a centre-right European commissioner, “painted an idyllic image of the Schengen area, praising the ‘seamless journeys’ made possible by ‘decades of European cooperation’”, said Eddy Wax on Euractiv. But “that Brussels fantasy has now been smashed apart”. Italy has “always been quick to clamour for EU solidarity when faced with inflows of migrants at its own borders” but Meloni “has particular form” for exploiting the Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s woes while “boosting his far-right adversaries”.

She “challenged him at the last EU leaders’ summit over his move to regularise hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants” and last night, Antonio Tajani, Italy’s foreign minister, “alleged the policy itself was a pull factor”. That drew “a stern rebuke” from Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares, said Joe Stanley-Smith on Politico but the policy “has proven hugely contentious, both domestically and at a European level”.

“A young person leaving, sometimes with their parents’ consent, is a guarantee that they will send money back to their family,” sociologist Ali Zoubeidi said in Le Monde. “The Spanish government’s announcement [in April] of the regularisation of 500,000 undocumented migrants may also have encouraged young people to try to reach Ceuta.”

The situation “may also have been exacerbated by an event that suggests Rabat could have deliberately loosened controls at Ceuta’s border”, said Le Monde. Sánchez’s recent visit to Morocco’s regional rival Algeria, reportedly upset those in Rabat. For Abdullah Abaakil, deputy secretary of the Moroccan Unified Socialist Party, there is no doubt it played a role: “The Moroccan authorities clearly let them through,” he said. “There is a suspicious trend of using migration and the despair of young people to embarrass the Spanish government and to send a message when they are dissatisfied.”

What next?

Spain and Morocco have agreed to return all migrants to Morocco and Spanish Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska said the two countries would intensify joint efforts to combat irregular migration, describing cooperation with Morocco as “exemplary”.

Though Italy has called for closing the open-border Schengen agreement with Spain, the countries “do not share a land border, so Italy would likely need to get other European countries on board to be able to enforce this”, said the BBC.

But the crisis has intensified calls for further action on immigration from the bloc. Manfred Weber, president of the European Parliament’s largest political grouping – the centre-right European People’s Party – called for tougher action. “This proves one thing: the Migration Pact and return regulation must be enforced today, not tomorrow,” he said on X.

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.

It’s widely assumed that eight hours is the perfect amount of sleep but a new study found the “sweet spot” is a little less than that, said sleep specialist Dr Allie Hare in The Telegraph.

Getting it right matters because new research, published in Nature, found that “falling short, or exceeding” the “precise window” discovered by the research, is “linked with poorer brain, heart and immune health”.

What did the research say?

People who got between six hours 24 minutes and seven hours 48 minutes of sleep a night were found to have better functioning immune systems, brains and hearts, according to researchers at Columbia University Irving Medical Center.

This ideal amount of sleep was associated with less ageing, as measured by organ-specific biological clocks. Duration alone doesn’t cause organs to age faster or slower, but the findings do suggest that insufficient or excessive sleep may be “markers of poorer overall health across the body”.

Is it different for men and women?

There is also a gender factor because women “seem to do better with a little longer”, Marie-Pierre St-Onge, a professor at Columbia University, told The Washington Post. They need “15, 20 minutes” more sleep, which reflects the “slightly longer” sleep duration reported by the “general population”, which “tends to be slightly longer in women than men”.

Previous research found that sleep is “largely linked to ageing and the pathological burden of the brain”, said Junhao Wen, an assistant professor at Columbia and lead author of the study. But the new research "goes further” and shows that “too little and too much sleep” are “associated with faster ageing in nearly every organ”.

Should we all be getting seven hours?

There are a number of conflicting theories about how much sleep we need. According to individual needs theories, there is no single ideal amount of sleep, because genetics, age, health, activity level and even life circumstances influence how much sleep someone needs. Adaptive or evolutionary theories hold that the correct amount of sleep varies depending on factors such as season, workload, stress, illness and safety.

But we “might be overthinking it”, said Emma Beddington in The Guardian. Sleep is “important and fascinating for science to explore, but surely, for the rest of us”, it’s “best left mysterious”.

There’s “so little we can do” to reach the “ideal” amount of unconsciousness, so “knowing precisely how bad that is for us is unhelpful”.

Summertime heat can bring sky-high electric bills, which may have you searching for new savings opportunities. Solutions can range from the low-cost option of increasing the temperature by a few degrees to the high-cost solution of installing an entirely new cooling system. A middle-of-the-road option that may be worth exploring? Upgrading to a smart thermostat.

These devices make it easy to set your system on your schedule, so you are not running it unnecessarily when you are at the office or away on vacation. Some are even more advanced, automatically detecting your absence and switching to a more energy-friendly mode. While these shifts can cut down on usage and increase efficiency, calculating the actual electric bill savings you will see is not necessarily clear-cut.

How can a smart thermostat save you money?

The potentially cost-saving feature most smart thermostats offer is an app that you can use to easily set a schedule for the heating and cooling of your home. “Technically, you can do this with any thermostat, but smart thermostats make it especially easy with their eco modes and suggestions, which means the average user typically starts saving more money when they adopt a smart thermostat,” said CNET. The app can also display your energy usage habits, which can help you course correct going forward.

Some more advanced smart thermostats take things a step further. They figure out when “nobody is home, most commonly with motion or occupancy sensors, or by checking the location of your phone,” and then they flip to an “energy-saving model” if no one is around, said Consumer Reports.

What is the average savings a smart thermostat offers?

Compared to the savings some smart thermostat manufacturers claim, “independent research tends to paint a more conservative picture,” said CBS News. Many studies show “average savings closer to 10% to 15%.”

The savings rate you see will depend on a variety of factors. In general, the “largest savings are often seen by homeowners who previously left their thermostat at the same temperature around the clock,” said CBS News. If you were already scheduling your thermostat, you may not see as big a difference. Same goes for if you are home most of the time, or if you live somewhere with more moderate temperatures.

When can installing a smart thermostat make sense?

Whether a smart thermostat “makes financial sense for your budget depends largely on your current habits, your HVAC system and how long you expect to stay in your home,” said CBS News. Consider how much you are currently adjusting your home’s temperature based on your occupancy and how often you are there; switching modes during absences is the main way smart thermostats offer savings.

Some HVAC systems, such as “an older HVAC system without a C-wire” and “electric baseboard radiators,” tend not to work with smart thermostats, said Consumer Reports. Systems like “modern variable-speed air conditioners, and especially heat pumps,” may become less efficient with a smart thermostat, since they are “designed to work better and more efficiently when they run constantly at a fixed temperature.”

Lastly, it is important to account for the cost of the thermostat itself, which runs from “around $100 for the cheapest models to more than $350 for top models with all the bells and whistles,” said CNET. You will also need to pay for installation. Still, with the average savings most smart thermostats offer, you can expect to offset those costs “within a year or two.”

One company in Austin, Texas, claims to have found a new solution to school shooters: drones. Mithril Defense is currently designing pepper-spraying drones, inspired by the Ukrainian military’s successful drone program, that the company says can respond to an active shooter within seconds. But while some are lauding the idea, others feel that adding this technology into schools might bring more problems than solutions.

‘It gives another set of eyes and ears’

The drone program developed by Mithril, called Campus Guardian Angel, provides an “elite, on-site safety response capability that works alongside school safety teams, confronting any active shooter threat,” the company’s website said. The drones are flown remotely and can reportedly arrive at a shooter’s location in 15 seconds. Upon engaging, the drones will “unload pepper rounds and are capable of hitting the shooter at a speed of up to 70 mph,” said The Independent.

The drones, currently being provided to schools in Colorado, Florida and Georgia, are “equipped with non-lethal effects, flown by several of the top drone pilots in the world and are supported by an elite team of former military operators, law enforcement and first responders,” Justin Marston, the founder and CEO of Mithril, told The Independent. These types of responses “matter and save lives during an active shooter situation.”

Law enforcement has lauded the use of these drones. “It gives another set of eyes and ears of the campus that I can't see all the time,” Deputy Trevor Autrey, the school resource officer at Deltona High School in Deltona, Florida, told WPTV West Palm Beach. Non-police officials were similarly enthusiastic. “As principal, I’m really excited about having this enhanced security on our campus,” Deltona High School Principal Dr. Christina Lapnow said to WPTV.

‘I have some really serious reservations’

For all those who support the drone program, others say they may not be as effective as tech enthusiasts hope — and could cause additional safety issues. The drones “might accidentally target a fleeing student instead of a shooter” or “remote pilots, in a split-second decision, might mistake a law enforcement officer for a shooter, especially if teachers initiate a false alarm,” Curtis Lavarello, the head of the advocacy firm School Safety Advocacy Council, said to The Washington Post.

It is “almost like where gaming and school safety collide,” Lavarello told the Post. “I have some really serious reservations about the deployment of drones in schools.” Other experts have argued that “low-tech measures, like simply locking external doors, are just as effective,” said the outlet. If schools “spend significant resources on technologies designed to respond after shooting begins, we have to ask what we’re not investing in instead,” Jaclyn Corin, a survivor of the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, told the Post.

Others connected with that shooting seem to agree. “These drones aren’t patrolling; they just pop up when needed. So that’s part of the problem,” Tony Montalto, whose daughter Gina died in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas attack, told WPTV. “We need to focus on the prevention piece rather than the reaction piece.” The larger approach “seems to reflect that part of America which says the way to address recurrent school shootings” is “not with stricter gun control laws,” said Moisés Ávila at Barron’s, but “rather with weaponry, such as giving teachers guns.”

The right garment can make you invisible, at least to AI face recognition software. So-called adversarial clothing is specially designed to thwart AI’s ability to identify the wearer. As people become increasingly discontent with AI video surveillance, anti-AI fashion could soon get its time in the spotlight.

Outfitted anonymously

Adversarial clothing uses “special patterns and materials made to confuse AI facial recognition software,” said Inc. This may include “unique patterns that can cause AI to misidentify people as animals or objects” or “infrared reflective gear that blocks faces out entirely on camera, as if a bright light was shining on them.” The trend comes at a time when “unlike traditional CCTV, modern computer vision systems can identify faces, follow individuals across cameras and search footage at scale,” said The Guardian.

Video surveillance using artificial intelligence is “worth over $4 billion in 2026” and is “expected to surpass $10 billion” by 2032, said Inc. Companies such as Ring and Flock Safety have incorporated AI into their products to identify people and objects. The problem with AI video surveillance is that “citizens don’t have the possibility in the physical world to opt out,” Rachele Didero, the founder and CEO of the Italian adversarial clothing brand Cap_able, said to the Mozilla Foundation. “In the digital space we can say yes or no to cookies. In the physical world, we don’t have this option.”

Adversarial clothing “wins on many levels,” Nick Tidball, the co-founder of the clothing brand Vollebak, said to The Guardian. Along with the “practicality of protection, it’s fashionable and fun.” It also “makes a powerful, public statement that many are in agreement with.”

The trend exists in an “interesting area of tension,” Nicole Scheller, the designer and co-founder of the adversarial clothing brand Urban Privacy, said to Euronews. “Surveillance systems are all about capturing identities, while fashion is about expressing identity outwards.” Adversarial fashion can “protect identity and at the same time raise awareness of the issue because it is so eye-catching.”

To AI or not to AI

While adversarial clothing is designed to avoid AI facial recognition, at the rate at which the technology is advancing, no design can completely guarantee that you won’t be detected. “Controlled testing against one object-detection model can’t prove a garment will defeat facial recognition in public,” said Digital Trends. “Lighting and camera position can alter the result, while newer software may learn to ignore patterns that once caused trouble.” Additionally, “if such clothing genuinely proved effective, it could get political very quickly,” Tidball said to The Guardian. “Then this type of clothing could find itself banned.”

While some companies are working on anti-AI clothing, others, including luxury brands, are embracing AI in their design process. It is predicted that the AI fashion market will be worth “$60 billion by 2034, with annual growth rates nearing 40%,” said Vogue. “Brands across the sector are integrating generative tools into both creative and production workflows.” Such tools “offer clear advantages: speed, efficiency and reduced costs.” But they also “sit in direct opposition to the principles that have long underpinned luxury value: time, craftsmanship and human expertise.”

The use of AI by luxury brands could help open the door for more adversarial clothing brands. “New generations are increasingly afraid of AI and concerned for their privacy,” Didero said to The Guardian. “The mainstream is quickly coming up behind them, helped by the fact that bigger companies will see the potential for profit and will push the trend into the popular, public domain, changing the way we dress on a large scale.”

The psychotherapist and author of "Grief Works" picks books that changed how she understands dying and grief. She will be speaking at the inaugural Big Brue festival of ideas in Bruton, Somerset, 19-20 September.

Grief Counselling and Grief Therapy

J. William Worden, 1982

This is a book for therapists, but valuable to anyone. Worden’s four tasks of mourning helped us move away from the rigid idea that grief follows fixed stages. We cannot control the loss, but we can engage with the work of adapting to it. That idea offers agency when life feels helpless.

With the End in Mind

Kathryn Mannix, 2017

Drawing on decades in palliative medicine, Mannix tells stories of ordinary people as they approach death. She writes with such compassion and clarity that the frightening becomes more knowable. It’s a book that helps us prepare for the deaths of those we love and have the conversations we often avoid.

The Grieving Brain

Mary-Frances O’Connor, 2022

A neuroscientist, O’Connor explains that grief is a form of learning. After someone dies, the brain must slowly update its understanding of the world. She helps explain the yearning, confusion and repetition of grief, while offering the deeply reassuring knowledge that adaptation takes time.

Continuing Bonds

Dennis Klass, Phyllis R. Silverman and Steven L. Nickman, 1996

This collection challenges the old belief that we should detach from the person who died – forget and move on. Instead, it shows that the relationship carries on, in a changed form. Death ends a life, but the love never dies.

The Year of Magical Thinking

Joan Didion, 2005

Didion’s account of her husband’s sudden death captures the strange logic of grief with great precision. She shows how the mind knows someone has died while another part still expects them to return. It is fiercely personal, yet almost every bereaved reader will recognise something of themselves within it.

The life of the artist Richard Dadd “makes for quite a story”, said Mark Hudson in The Independent. Dadd (1817-86) was a talented painter who began to display signs of schizophrenia during a tour of the Near East.

Then in 1843, he murdered his father during a “psychotic episode”, believing him to be a devil. He spent the rest of his life incarcerated in Bethlem Hospital (Bedlam) and Broadmoor, where he continued to paint; the bustling fairy scenes he created are some of the “most haunting” images in the history of British art. He was almost forgotten until the 1960s, when his exquisitely precise, visionary works became popular in the hippy era. Dadd has remained a cult figure ever since, but in an era of greater mental health awareness, it feels timely that the Royal Academy (where he trained as a young man) is revisiting his art with unprecedented sensitivity. The first major exhibition devoted to this archetypal “outsider” in more than 50 years, it surveys his entire career and poses the question: how did mental illness affect Dadd’s paintings?

The show encourages us to see Dadd as more than a “mad” artist, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. And it’s true that he was already “remarkable” before his incarceration. Fairies – a common subject in the Victorian era – were his “hit theme”: not “Disneyfied fairies”, but the “sinister and destructive” beings seen in Shakespeare. His Puck, for instance, is “personified as a giant baby irradiated by lunar light”, perched on a toadstool. Dadd’s paintings from Bedlam, however, are “brutally different”.

His “masterpiece”, “The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke”, painted over nine years from 1855, represents a total break with existing pictorial convention: between tall, magnified strands of grass and vegetation you can make out “a detailed portrayal of fairy society”. The “tiny folk” are not beautiful, but often malformed – as if he were showing us “natural history specimens observed through a microscope”. In the end, “you can’t get away from it. Dadd was an interesting artist before Bedlam but became a great one in it.”

Dadd wasn’t a true outsider artist, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. He was “trained as well as talented”, as the “dull”, conventional opening room shows. Even in the asylum, he remained “in sync with mainstream Victorian art”: there are costumes, Orientalist themes, pre-Raphaelite touches. Yet the “originality of his vision” is never in doubt – Dadd’s art was singular, hallucinatory, and enlivened by an “ironic wit”. Even his conventional travel scenes have strange, surrealist-like touches: “The Artist’s Halt in the Desert” (c.1845) shows the Moon skewered by a lance, “like a marshmallow on a stick”. Dadd gave form to “those shadowy, sometimes bedevilling thoughts that dwell in the hinterland of consciousness” – and this is a weird but “compelling” exhibition.

Royal Academy, London W1. Until 25 October

Social media feeds full of hiking content and glorious views have contributed to a growing interest in the outdoors among young adults. But a worrying number of young people have also needed rescuing from mountainous regions.

Hiking influencers have become an “inadvertent source of inspiration” for their followers to take treks “without understanding the scale of the challenge” and that are “beyond their skill set”, said The i Paper.

#Hiking

Hiking posts can make the “toughest climbs look like a walk in the park”, said Kate Davis, from the Ramblers walking charity. While no influencer would “encourage novices” to take intermediate hikes without proper preparation, said The i Paper, not “everyone is honest” about their experiences.

For example, some content creators will “walk to a scenic spot” and “pose with merchandise” before heading back down, said Nige, who posts on TikTok as W33k3ndwanderer. This can “mislead viewers into thinking” that certain mountains with challenging inclines and scrambles are “easily accessible”.

This combination of misleading content and hikers unaware of factors like weather, technical clothing and time needed to complete a hike could be behind the rise in rescue call-outs.

‘Excitable explorers’

In the Scottish Highlands the number of “mountaineering incidents” involving the 17–25 age group has “nearly quadrupled since 2022”, said The Economist.

In England and Wales last year, 18 to 24-year-olds “kept mountain rescue services busy”, said The Times, with almost 400 incidents, “more than double the 166 in 2019”.

This trend of “excitable explorers” following in “influencers’ footsteps without fully understanding” what the hike entails has led to more rescue call-outs in the US, France, Italy and Switzerland.

Nathan Mburu, 24, a fitness influencer, told the BBC that he and his two friends being “overconfident” and “under-prepared” led to them getting into difficulty on Crib Goch in north Wales last year. The weather conditions quickly turned a “manageable day into something extremely dangerous”, resulting in the group being stuck on a ridge waiting nearly six hours for a rescue team to reach them.

Last year, nearly “a quarter of rescues” in England and Wales were the result of “slipping or tripping”, with common injuries being to the “ankles, lower legs and head”, said The Times. Almost “one in 10 incidents” was because of “poor equipment” and around 20% were due to “severe weather conditions”.

While it’s “great to see more young people going outdoors”, the question is how to make sure every hiker is prepared for the journey ahead. Since people “rarely use maps and compasses”, some parks are “developing signage with common routes”, said Nick Phillips, from Mountain Rescue England and Wales. An initiative will allow people hiking in the Lake District, Peak District and Wales to “scan a QR code” and “upload a map” on to their device with the route “they need to follow”.

As wildfires and record-breaking heat ravage the planet, movie theaters offer the promise of a blessedly dark, air-conditioned escape from reality. And with audiences flocking back to the theaters in numbers not seen since 2019, they have plenty to choose from this month.

‘One Night Only’

“One Night Only” is set in an alternate reality New York where unmarried people can only get it on one night a year. Cue the meet-cute between Allie (Monica Barbaro) and Owen (Callum Turner), both of whom had expected to be spending the night with others.

Despite the dystopian premise, director Will Gluck (“Easy A”) keeps the proceedings firmly in rom-com territory, letting the chemistry between Barbaro (“A Complete Unknown”) and Turner (“Masters of the Air”) crackle. The film features “all the raunchy trimmings of a traditional sex comedy but veers towards more heartfelt territory,” said Shania Russell at Entertainment Weekly. (in theaters Aug. 7)

‘The End of Oak Street’

What if your neighborhood became “Jurassic Park”? That’s the delightfully goofy premise director David Robert Mitchell (“It Follows”) leans into. The Platts look on with astonishment when their idyllic 1970s neighborhood appears to be transported way back in time.

Greg (Ewan McGregor) and Denise (Anne Hathaway) must work with their neighbors to save their kids, Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery), and themselves, fending off dinosaurs and trying to figure out what the heck happened. A “throwback in the best way,” Mitchell’s Spielbergian film delivers a “truly unique premise in a fashion that's warmly recognizable,” said Bill Bria at SlashFilm. (in theaters Aug. 14)

‘The Wrong Girls’

In director Dylan Meyer’s “The Wrong Girls,” Kristen Stewart (“Twilight”) and Alia Shawkat (“Search Party”) star as Frankie and Molly, respectively, a “Broad City”-esque pair of screw-up potheads who are late on their rent. When they take a new designer drug, it gives them the ability to communicate telepathically, including with a cat named Dio, voiced by Seth Rogan. It “looks like classic stoner stuff,” said Travis Hopson at Punch Drunk Critics, including “psychedelic mind trips, talking animals, goofy villains and enough bong hits to make Cheech & Chong jealous.” (in theaters Aug. 14)

‘It Ends’

Horror is all the rage with Gen Z, and movies featuring characters trapped in liminal spaces, like “Backrooms,” are also having a moment. Akira Jackson (“Against the Spread”) is Day, one of four college friends who head out for food and find themselves trapped on an endless road.

As they ponder their bizarre fate, they rationalize, philosophize and work through longstanding issues. A “hangout horror movie rife with existential anxieties,” this “brilliant” film serves as a “stark reflection of what it feels like to peek beneath the surface of one’s being,” said Siddhant Adlakha at Variety. (in theaters Aug. 21)

‘The Dog Stars’

Director Ridley Scott tackles Peter Heller’s best-selling post-apocalyptic novel, set years after a virus wipes out most of humanity. Hig (Jacob Elordi) is a pilot holed up in a Colorado airport hangar with his dog, Jasper, and an ex-Marine named Bangley (Josh Brolin).

Hig spends his days tooling around in an old Cessna, looking for supplies, survivors or signs of life, trying to stay ahead of scavengers known as Reapers, when he is drawn outside the perimeter and finds Cima (Margaret Qualley). Heller’s elegiac novel is an “ideal fit” for Scott and his “blockbuster sensibilities and stories of underdog heroes,” said Ben Travis at Empire. (in theaters Aug. 28)

‘The Sun Never Sets’

Mumblecore auteur Joe Swanberg (“Easy”) returns with this Alaska-set romantic drama. Twenty-something Wendy (Dakota Fanning) is dating Jack (Jake Johnson), an older father of two who loves her but isn’t interested in having any more kids.

Jack encourages her to take a summer to reflect, when she unexpectedly reconnects with her ex, Chuck (Cory Michael Smith). Swanberg has painted a “masterful portrait of humanity’s inability to figure out what we actually want,” said Christian Zilko at IndieWire. (in theaters Aug. 28)

China is not beating the U.S. in the artificial intelligence race, at least not yet. But the country’s AI products are cheaper and good enough that a number of American AI users are shifting away from homegrown products. Enter a Silicon Valley panic. The U.S. government may take action, and a new Chinese model — Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 — may be the trip wire.

‘Something good enough’

Kimi K3 can “allegedly beat some of the best systems built by U.S. companies at a fraction of the cost,” said The Verge. It is the latest in a series of cheap Chinese-made “open-weight” AI models that “anyone can download, inspect, modify and run on their own infrastructure,” said Microsoft. This presents a different approach from closed-source “proprietary platforms” like Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT; the Chinese method challenges the conventional wisdom that “leading-edge AI requires heavy spending on data centers and the advanced chips” used by U.S. companies, said CNN.

The Chinese open-weight models are “increasingly almost as good as closed systems made by leading U.S. companies,” which is why a “growing number of Americans” are moving to the Chinese systems, said The Associated Press. Kimi K3 “just seems snappier” than Anthropic’s Claude Fable chatbot, Mozilla chief technology officer Raffi Krikorian said to the outlet. Other Chinese open-weight models lack the “overall, full-range capabilities” of the products made by American companies, said the AP. But AI users “just don’t need” expensive U.S.-made AI products, technology executive Curt Meinhold told the outlet. “We need something good enough.”

‘Full AI communism’

Some American AI executives are “sounding the alarm” about the rise of open-weight models, said The Wall Street Journal. The Chinese models represent “full AI communism,” in which governments provide artificial intelligence as “digital public infrastructure” rather than a “market product,” OpenAI’s Dean Ball said on X. The White House may soon decide to “create large amounts of regulatory risk around the use of open-weight Chinese models” as a result.

Others disagree. Restricting access to open-weight models “wouldn’t stop their proliferation — but would weaken U.S. startups” that use the technology, a coalition of 200 smaller tech companies argued last week in a letter to administration officials, per Politico. Regulation would be “great for Anthropic. We’re all going to have to spend money on Anthropic,” Suhail Doshi, the founder of AI infrastructure startup Particle, said to the outlet.

The White House is “showing signs it could ban cutting-edge Chinese AI models,” said Axios. Administration officials last year considered an executive order mandating that U.S. firms could “only host Chinese models if they could guarantee security and take liability if it were breached.” The ascendance of Kimi K3 is “reigniting” those old regulatory efforts. An example: The White House this week banned Chinese-made “humanoid and quadruped robots” to “protect the U.S. AI build-out,” said Reuters.

Like all technology, video games have evolved over the years and for the most part, those advancements have been welcomed. But Sony’s recent announcement that it will cease producing physical video games has rattled fans, particularly those who rely on selling and buying used games. The move could be a major setback for the global second-hand gaming market, estimated at nearly $7 billion.

Why is Sony ending physical discs?

The quintessential game disc is “going away, at least on PlayStation,” Kotaku said. Sony, the company behind the iconic console, is set to end production of physical discs for all first-party and third-party PlayStation games in January 2028. Games released before 2028 will “continue to have physical versions, but everything that comes after will be digital-only.”

The majority of all new games are sold digitally, but “many fans still prefer to own their games on discs,” said Kotaku. The end of discs doesn’t “necessarily preclude Sony and other companies from still selling game boxes in brick-and-mortar stores.” They would just have to “download codes inside, similar to this fall’s Grand Theft Auto 6.” But it’s unclear if the PS6 will “even have a disc drive, either built into the console or as an optional external attachment.” Sony has not confirmed the console's features yet; many have “assumed it would be backwards compatible with the current generation of games,” including the physical disc versions.

Sony was “clear as to why it’s making the change,” said The Verge. Sundowning physical media is a “natural direction” for the company to “adapt to consumer trends,” as the “general preference for digital media significantly outpaces physical discs,” Sony said in its announcement. The transition will enable Sony to “align more closely with how most of our community prefers to access and play games today.”

The company’s financials “prove it, too,” said The Verge. In the fourth quarter of the 2025 fiscal year, the “full game software digital download ratio” of games on PS4 and PS5 was 85%, Sony said.

How will second-hand gaming be affected?

One of the biggest losers due to Sony’s controversial decision to abandon physical discs is the second-hand game market. The market for used games will “keep shrinking and eventually disappear,” Kazunori Ito, the director of equity research at Morningstar, said to CNBC.

If this is the future of gaming, then “brick-and-mortar game retail is doomed,” even though, historically, at least one-third of games have been sold as used, Michael Pachter, the managing director of strategic planning at Wedbush Securities, said to CNBC. This is an “extremely anti-consumer decision” that has no “legitimate justification and communicates a disdain for players,” Michael Futter, the cofounder of video game industry consultancy F-Squared, told the outlet.

Even comedian Trevor Noah weighed in on PlayStation’s news. For a lot of gamers, physical discs are the “only way they could afford to play games because they could get them secondhand,” he said on X. You could also “give games to your younger siblings, which is a great way to introduce them to the games you were playing.”

Games preservation group DoesItPlay is planning an “economic and gameplay blackout” for the week of Aug. 23. The “PSBlackout” calls for players to keep their PlayStations powered off the whole week. “No logins, no play sessions, no purchases on any of Sony’s platforms,” said the announcement on X. However, the “efficacy of these player-organized boycotts” is “dubious at best,” said PC Mag.

In the past, companies have undone controversial choices after experiencing heavy backlash, but analysts believe it “remains unlikely that Sony will U-turn on this,” said IGN. “I sympathize with physical media fans,” but Sony “will not reverse this decision," Serkan Toto, the CEO of Japanese game industry consultancy firm Kantan Games, said to the outlet. They knew what the “online reaction would look like,” and now they “wait for this storm to pass.”

Sony has more than “120 million active PlayStation users,” Toto added. Even if “500,000 cancel in protest,” that would be just “1% of that business gone,” which is “of course not enough for Sony to start rethinking.” Digital is “just too lucrative.”

The U.S. Senate has sometimes been called the “world’s most exclusive club.” It might also be among the country’s most unloved institutions. There is growing talk of abolishing the upper chamber of Congress, a proposal promoted by Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) members who are making a push for power within the Democratic Party.

What did the commentators say?

The Senate is an “anachronistic institution” designed to ensure U.S. voters do not have “too much of a say” in the country’s governance, DSA co-chair Megan Romer said on “Fox News Sunday.” Abolishing the chamber and expanding the House of Representatives “would help make this country more democratic,” DSA co-chair Ashik Siddique said on C-SPAN, per The Washington Examiner. That is a tall order. Getting rid of the Senate would “require amending the Constitution,” said the Examiner, and necessitate the House taking on the upper chamber’s duties of “confirming executive and judicial nominees, ratifying treaties, conducting impeachment trials and considering legislation.”

A “teardown” of the Senate “might be the DSA’s best idea” and would “rank among the great democratic advances in American history,” said Jonathan Chait at The Atlantic. The equal representation the Senate gives all states means people living in sparsely populated states like South Dakota “enjoy more power” than voters in more populous states like New York. And because those smaller states are “rural and overwhelmingly white,” the Senate “systematically under-weights racial minorities.” It is a “form of affirmative action for white people” and should be eliminated.

“It’s important to understand how radical this is,” said The Wall Street Journal editorial board. The left “loathes the Senate” because it acts as a “restraint on temporary majorities” that can dissipate quickly. The equal representation among states “prevents dominance by California, New York and Texas.” The DSA’s goal is “eliminating barriers to rapid, radical change.” But the proposal might be a pipe dream. Constitutional mandates require that the Senate not be abolished “without the consent of every state.”

One alternative to abolishing the Senate would be to transform it into a “mostly ceremonial body, like the United Kingdom’s House of Lords,” said Osita Nwanevu at Slate last year. Such a move would make the U.S. like two-thirds of the world’s countries, “where one house holds nearly all real legislative power.”

What next?

Republicans are also contemplating reform. Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) this month signed on to a resolution to “repeal the 17th Amendment,” which “allows voters to cast direct votes for U.S. senators,” said PoliticsPA. State legislatures would choose senators instead. The current system has created “six-year politicians more focused on national ambitions” than on the “states they serve,” said resolution sponsor Rep. Keith Self (R-Texas) in a statement.

President Donald Trump is also calling for changes. On Saturday, he “once again urged” Republican senators to eliminate the filibuster to pass his proposed bill of election restrictions, said The Hill. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) has repeatedly said there are not enough votes to do so.

‘The Paramount deal is in trouble. It’s not about the movies.’

Sharon Waxman at The New York Times

Hollywood has been “thrown sideways by the news that 12 state attorneys general might have found a way to trip up the merger that almost nobody in the entertainment industry wanted,” says Sharon Waxman. For “months, the acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery by Paramount Skydance has been an all-but-done deal,” but concerns “over the future of CNN” are “what is driving the forces against this deal.” Paramount “seems well aware of this narrative,” and there “will be legal arguments.”

Read more

‘How bots took over our lives’

T.M. Brown at The New Yorker

During the “past decade, so-called bots, a slippery concept from the start, have gone from a conspiratorial curiosity to a familiar force in our daily lives,” says T.M. Brown. In the “popular imagination, they are suddenly everywhere and seem designed to annoy the hell out of people.” But the “impulse to treat bots like digital mosquitoes that need to be swatted away minimizes their role in making the internet work.” Bots are “most often used for mundane tasks.”

Read more

‘Israel runs the Iran playbook on Turkey’

Mason Letteau Stallings at The American Conservative

One of the “stranger geopolitical developments in the Middle East of late (leaving aside the present war) has been the rupture between Israel and Turkey,” says Mason Letteau Stallings. Most “worrying, considering the conflict in which the United States currently finds itself embroiled, are Israeli comparisons of Turkey to Iran.” From a “historical perspective, this is surprising,” but it’s “important to ensure that Israeli (or Turkish) interests, to the extent these diverge from our own, do not shape American policymaking.”

Read more

‘Donald Trump has turned the United States into an economic banana republic’

Richard Poplak at The Globe and Mail

The United States has become “perhaps the world’s first functioning Third World economy,” says Richard Poplak. While he “wouldn’t be caught dead articulating it this way, Trump’s vision is to turn the United States into a Third World economy.” While the “analogy is not perfect, it’s far from outlandish: however much the actual adults in the Oval Office may disapprove, the U.S. has reshaped revenue collection around the simple, regressive models preferred by Third World dictators.”

Read more

What happened

The Federal Reserve Bank on Wednesday held its benchmark interest rate steady, but it “left the door open” to future rate changes “if inflation remains elevated,” said NPR. By a vote of 9-3, the bank’s rate-setting committee left short-term borrowing rates “in a range between 3.5% and 3.75%.” Holding the rate steady will impact the “cost of credit throughout the economy,” including for “auto loans, business financing and credit cards.”

Who said what

The split vote shows Fed officials have “splintered over how the central bank should tackle elevated inflation,” said The New York Times. “Pressure is building” at the Fed to “act on inflation that has run above its target for five years,” said The Wall Street Journal. The no-votes have “underscored officials’ fraying patience with looking past another price shock” amid tariff and AI-related market turbulence.

What next?

That three policymakers voted to increase the rates suggests that “in the coming months,” said the Times, the debate among economists “will center not on whether the central bank will lift borrowing costs, but when.”

What happened

Joint U.S. and Saudi Arabian airstrikes on Iran-backed militia positions in Iraq on Wednesday have intensified fears that the Middle East conflict is entering a more dangerous phase. At least 20 fighters from Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces were killed in the attacks, while Iran responded by firing missiles at U.S. military bases in Jordan. “We are going to be hitting them very hard because it’s our turn,” President Donald Trump said before the U.S. military launched what it called a “heavy wave of strikes” in Iran.

Who said what

The “scope of the war” in the Middle East has now “widened,” The New York Times said. Iran-linked groups across the region have “opened new fronts and reopened old ones, drawing in forces in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan”.

“This is a war in search of a rationale,” Rep. Kevin Mullin (D-Calif.) told CNN. “We’re losing lives and we’re not going to be any closer to real peace in the Middle East.”

What next?

It is now impossible to know how Tehran will respond because it views this conflict as an existential struggle, H.A. Hellyer, a Middle East expert at the Royal United Services Institute, told CNN. The region has entered “uncharted territory.”

What happened

Former White House chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci on Wednesday refused to answer questions during a three-hour Senate hearing on the government response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Instead, he repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who subpoenaed the scientist to appear, threatened to call a vote on a resolution declaring Fauci in contempt of Congress.

Who said what

Fauci values “legitimate congressional oversight” but Paul has an “obvious obsession” with seeing him prosecuted, the doctor said in his opening remarks. “The sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something, anything, that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, ‘behind bars,’” Fauci said. His attorney, David Schertler, lambasted Paul for building his “personal brand” around prosecuting Fauci for “imaginary crimes.”

Paul said he had hoped to hear an “an apology” or that “judgment errors were made” in the pandemic response that Fauci led. “There will be repercussions for your refusal to testify,” he warned. The combative hearing showed that the “rage” over lockdowns, vaccines, and mask mandates is “still simmering below the surface” six years later, Politico said.

What next?

The Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee is scheduled to vote on Paul’s contempt resolution on Aug. 5.

“You wait 30 years for a Royal Shakespeare Company appearance from Kenneth Branagh and then two turn up at once,” said Claire Allfree in The Telegraph. Having starred as Prospero in “The Tempest” earlier this summer, Branagh is back with an “energetic, charismatic, touching performance” as Lopakhin – the son of a serf who has become a successful businessman – in a new version of “The Cherry Orchard”, adapted by Laura Wade.

‘Broad comedy and pathos’

It’s a “star-studded” production: the cast includes the American film stars Helen Hunt and Bill Pullman. And it looks “beguiling”, said Clive Davis in The Times, with an “elegant set design” that “evokes an outpost of privilege facing extinction”. Unfortunately, the evening veers too wildly between “broad comedy and pathos”, while never quite finding a settled tone – or getting to the heart of the play.

In his final masterpiece – about the owners of a great Russian estate facing up to their financial ruin – Chekhov uses the metaphor of a doomed cherry orchard to “conjure a society on the cusp of seismic change, and a family splintered by inaction and marooned by personal grief”, said Sarah Hemming in the Financial Times.

‘Curious lack of urgency’

The orchard’s significance is conveyed through pretty prints of cherry blossom that contrast with the gnarled branches that clamber up the set; and the performances are heightened, “as if many of the characters are acting in their own personal drama”, aware that disaster is looming, yet unable or unwilling to meet the “demands of the moment”. The production is full of insight, and painfully truthful moments, but it fails to mine the play’s “heartbreaking depth”, and its impact is dulled by a “curious lack of urgency”.

Branagh’s Lopakhin is unusually amenable, said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian. When his class rage erupts, it is “arresting” – but then it melts away. Hunt is surprisingly “featureless” as the landowner Ranyevskaya; Pullman brings “charm and comic charisma” to the part of her brother, but it’s not enough to rescue a tonally soft-edged production that lacks a “magnetic centre to hold you”.

Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. Until 29 August

Written and directed by Warrington-born Helen Walsh, “On the Sea” is a “yearningly tender” drama about sex and love set in a small fishing community in north Wales, said David Sexton in The New Statesman. Jack (Barry Ward) is a careworn middle-aged man who has spent his whole life here, working for the family mussel-farming business, and the film opens with a “lovely, rhythmic sequence” – showing the work of gathering and cleaning mussels – which “masterfully” establishes the world he inhabits. Jack is married to his teenage sweetheart Maggie (Liz White), with whom he has a wayward son, and has never acknowledged that he is gay. Then he meets Daniel (Lorne MacFadyen), “a hunky young itinerant deckhand” who “has no such qualms about his sexuality”. Soon, they are going out fishing together, and on the sea, they gradually “find a world of their own”.

Shades of “God’s Own Country” and “Brokeback Mountain” “hover above this thoughtful” tale of forbidden love in a tough community, said Kevin Maher in The Times. You might wonder how long we can keep producing dramas that depend for their tension on a level of “foam-flecked homophobia” more redolent of 1960s Wyoming than the UK in 2026. Still, “gay panic” persists in this village, and “On the Sea” amounts to a carefully observed study of “masculinity under pressure”, as Jack must try to “juggle his multiple fragile identities”. There are some pacing issues, said Alex Davidson in Sight and Sound: too much time is devoted to Jack’s relationships with secondary characters. But the connection between the two men is “sensitively portrayed”, the performances are strong, and the film makes excellent use of its Anglesey locations.

“E. Jean Carroll has had quite a life,” said Alissa Wilkinson in The New York Times. She made her name as a gonzo journalist, writing first-person features for Esquire and Playboy, before becoming an advice columnist at Elle magazine: her long-running “Ask E. Jean” column became so popular that it was turned into a chat show.

Then, in 2019, she made international news headlines when she accused President Trump of having raped her in a department store changing room in the mid-1990s. Trump branded her a liar, insisting she was not his “type”. Carroll sued him for sexual abuse and defamation, leading to two civil court trials, which she won. Trump recently paid her $5.6 million (£4.1 million) in damages over one; he has yet to pay a penny for the other.

In this documentary, Carroll guides viewers through her career, her decision to break her silence about Trump’s abuse, and the “harrowing experience of going up against one of the most powerful men in the world – twice”.

This is a “solid, unshowy” film, said Wendy Ide in The Observer, which contains some extremely powerful moments, including a present-day conversation in which Carroll talks to her best friend about how she felt immediately after the attack, and her decision not to report it. Yet we learn that, back in the 1990s, she advised abused women to “always press charges” – which creates a “jarring dissonance”.

Still, the documentary is sympathetic to its subject, who comes across as unexpectedly “magnetic” – “curious, mischievous and candid”, said Angie Han in The Hollywood Reporter. In the public imagination, Carroll, now 82, has been defined by someone else’s crime; the film paints a broad portrait of “a figure far more interesting than the bad thing that happened to her”.

For more than 50 years, David Thomson has been “watching and writing about movies and hanging out with movie people”, said Ed Potton in The Times. The author of more than 40 books, including the highly influential “The New Biographical Dictionary of Film” (1975), he is “unique in his field”, being “intellectual, opinionated, informed and funny”. Now, at the age of 85, Thomson has written a book “billed as the capstone of his career”. A history of the movies, “from the Lumière brothers to the Coen brothers”, from “Psycho” to “Pretty Woman” to Jean-Luc Godard, it also covers much else besides: “we get detours to John Keats, Gustav Mahler, Werner Heisenberg and Tracey Emin, none of which feels dilettantish”. Thomson also celebrates the “written word”, and suggests that novels are in many ways superior to films. Written in a style that “veers between conspiratorial and donnish”, this book has the “learning of an encyclopaedia, the wisdom of a novel and the zingers of a screwball comedy”.

While he remains as obsessed by film as ever, Thomson is increasingly fearful that “movies may be bad for us”, said Mark Glancy in Literary Review. There is, of course, nothing new about claims that they shorten attention spans and flatten our sense of evil. But Thomson suggests such anxieties have been “given new weight and immediacy by the rise of Donald Trump, with his constant demand for our attention and his indifference to morality”. It’s an argument which seems, alas, a bit of a “rabbit hole”. Fortunately, such “wintry and sombre ponderings” don’t take up too much space, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. For the most part, this book is a “straightforwardly rapturous, rhapsodic celebration of the extraordinary adventure of cinema”, written by an author who, despite his advanced age, is as “eccentric, exasperating and absorbing as ever”.

What is the best pub snack?

As Andy Burnham and John Healey took up their positions in No. 10 and No. 11 last week, they took a break from running the country to discuss the biggest question potentially facing Brits today. They did so in a video released to promote their announcement of a 20% cut in pub business rates, which racked up two million views across Instagram and TikTok.

The change in government has seen a new media strategy that is already winning much praise. “Labour’s comms has been in another league this week compared to what went before,” said The News Agents’ Lewis Goodall on X in response to the pub snacks video.

“That is certainly true,” said Gareth Roberts in The Spectator, but it’s “a bit like saying that a packet of Scampi Fries is, as a pub snack, in another league from a handful of gravel.”

What did the commentators say?

In 2026, “TikTok and Instagram are the most important stages that any politician who cares about reaching Gen Z, who don’t read newspapers or listen to the radio, must master”, said Issy Clarke on LBC.

Many of Burnham’s critics “will be precisely those who decry the lack of political engagement among Gen Z”, all the while “forgetting that the best remedy is to meet young people where they are”. Burnham “is the first British PM who has managed to do it”.

When it comes to his social media output, it has an “authenticity” to it, Bruce Daisley, the former boss of Twitter in the UK and Europe, told The Times. “And he is getting the cut through as a result.” Burnham is a politician who gets it and uses “a template of frequent, human communications”. In a way “it’s almost over-communication, but that way the message gets across”.

After years of gloom, “the chirpy bonhomie can’t help but appeal”, said Roberts in The Spectator. “Here is somebody saying that Britain isn’t broken, isn’t collapsing, and look, here’s a few little extra pennies for you.” It is the reason the polls are shifting effectively because “it’s so nice to see somebody with a smile on their face, even a gormless smile that defies reality”.

Yet the new PM’s “apparent openness to people he meets on the street has not, so far, been extended to lobby journalists”, said Keir Starmer’s biographer Tom Baldwin in The Guardian. “Aides insist there is no deliberate effort to avoid scrutiny and can point to how he spoke at length to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg”, but in hoodwinking the lobby over the appointment of Healey as chancellor “there appears to be more than a little satisfaction about the lobby’s humiliation within the prime minister’s wider circle”. It is a dangerous tactic “from a new administration that will need to be trusted by the more responsible end of the Westminster media when, inevitably, the going gets rough”.

What next?

Burnham’s social media output is a “good way to signal to a large audience that the Labour government has changed”, said Stephen Bush in the Financial Times. But “while it allows the prime minister of the day to evade direct scrutiny and difficult debates, it also makes it harder for them to put their opponents under the microscope”.

It also means “neither Burnham nor his opponents are guaranteed a proper comeback when a rival is speaking”. Effectively, we are heading towards “a highly polarised country where political advertising is almost inescapable and neither side can be guaranteed the pain of scrutiny or the consolation of a rebuttal”.

Labour looks set to pass its first test with voters since Andy Burnham took over as prime minister, with the party’s candidate the favourite to succeed him as Manchester mayor in today’s by-election

The race to replace Burnham has been somewhat “overshadowed by events in Westminster” over the past week. But the region’s two million voters go to the polls today to take part in “the biggest by-election in British political history”, said The Guardian.

Who’s running?

Bev Craig, current leader of Manchester City Council, is standing for Labour against Reform UK councillor for Baguley, Sian Niamh Astley, in what has been a heated contest between the two parties.

Other names throwing their hat into the ring include Altrincham councillor Geraldine Coggins, representing the Green Party, Bowdon councillor Phil Eckersley for the Conservatives, and Didsbury West Liberal Democrat councillor Richard Kilpatrick. Marlon West is standing for Restore Britain, with former mayoral candidate Marcus Farmer running as an independent.

How does the vote work?

UK mayoral elections use a system known as supplementary voting that gives voters the option to choose their first- and second-choice candidate.

If any candidate secures more than 50% of the first-choice votes, they will automatically be elected mayor. If no candidate receives more than 50% of the first-choice votes, the contest moves to a second round between the two candidates who received the most first-choice votes. All other candidates are eliminated, and ballot papers are counted again factoring in second-choice votes.

What do the polls say?

When Burnham declared his intention to return to Westminster, “the prospect of Labour losing control of Greater Manchester was used as an argument to keep him in post”, said Dan Haygarth in The Independent. After the mayoral by-election was announced, some bookmakers even made Reform the early favourite, but polls suggest that Labour will retain the mayoralty with “relative ease”, leaving Reform and the Greens to battle it out for second place.

YouGov polling from 17 July had Craig on 38% to Astley’s 24%, with Coggins in third on 17%. But in a second-round run-off, the Labour candidate would trounce Reform’s 62% to 38%

With both the Greens and Reform offering radical alternatives to a deeply unpopular Starmer government, this election could have been “a mighty close battle and very difficult for Labour to hold on”, Jon Tonge, professor of politics at the University of Liverpool, said in The Independent. But now voters are less likely to be “looking for an alternative to Labour; they’re prepared to support Labour, for now at least, across Greater Manchester”.

What’s at stake?

The winner of Thursday's race will take control of the biggest mayoral authority outside London, with a £3 billion budget and wide-ranging powers across housing, health, policing and transport. But the race also has deep implications far beyond Manchester.

Professor Rob Ford, of the University of Manchester, said in The Guardian that the real mark of success would be whether Labour was able to push back the Green tide in Manchester and close the gap in Reform-leaning areas such as Wigan and Bolton.

Whatever the result, Greater Manchester will be “very close to the heart of power given the location of Number 10 North”, Professor Andrew Russell, from the University of Liverpool, said on the BBC. “Not for the first time of late, all eyes will certainly be on the city.”

Three British superhero actors have spoken out against the proposed merger of Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery and urged the culture secretary to block the deal.

Benedict Cumberbatch and Benedict Wong, both of whom appear in Marvel’s “Doctor Strange” films, and Alan Cumming, who played Nightcrawler in the “X-Men series”, have written in The Guardian warning the Paramount-Warner Bros. tie-up “threatens to inflict immense harm on the British public”.

The $110 billion (£83 billion) deal is being led by Paramount CEO David Ellison, the son of Larry Ellison, the Oracle founder and close ally of Donald Trump. It would create one of the world’s most powerful media empires, bringing together HBO, CNN, TNT Sports, Channel 5, Paramount+, as well as the DC Universe, Harry Potter, “Game of Thrones” and “The Lord of the Rings” franchises.

‘Minded to intervene’

Among a host of issues, Cumberbatch, Cumming and Wong cite concerns over the livelihoods of British film and TV crews, independent film financing, and the consolidation of news publications. “The UK is being threatened by a media merger that would harm our workers, our culture and the public – but we can stop it,” they say.

Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy has said she is “minded to intervene” in the deal on public interest grounds. “I am conscious that the proposed acquisition is global in nature. In reaching this decision, my focus has been, and will remain, on the UK public interest and the range of services available to UK audiences,” she said in a letter to the current and proposed owners of Warner Bros. Discovery.

While Paramount has said it remains “confident that our proposed transaction does not pose any media plurality issues”, were the UK government to issue a public interest intervention notice it would trigger further scrutiny from media regulator Ofcom and the Competition and Markets Authority.

Depending on her decision, Nandy “could end up upsetting or possibly ingratiating virtually all the major US studios, streamers and tech giants”, not to mention the Trump administration, which is strongly backing the deal, said Deadline. This makes her “one of the most consequential culture secretaries in recent memory… in America that is.”

‘Bad for everyone’ except billionaires

The call for the British government to intervene comes after 12 American states, led by California, sued to try to block the merger, warning it would raise prices, shrink the number of films made and fall foul of strict anti-trust laws.

Last week a US district judge temporarily paused the merger to consider the lawsuit. This prompted Paramount to agree not to close the deal until June 2027 or five days after the court issues a ruling on the case, whichever is earlier.

For Paramount, the delay “may prove costly”, said The Hollywood Reporter. The merger agreement says Warner’s shareholders are owed roughly $650 million per quarter, or $6.9 million per day, if the deal is not completed by 30 September.

More than 1,000 leading industry professionals from US film and TV signed an open letter in April warning of the impact of “media consolidation” that prioritises “the interests of a small group of powerful stakeholders over the broader public good”.

Mark Ruffalo, one of the actors leading the campaign against the merger, said it “will mean less films, less TV, less creativity, less of everything from the people who make the decisions. This merger is bad for everyone except the billionaire class.”

Get the kids out of the house and keep them entertained this summer with these fun, memorable activities around the UK.

Bat punting, Cambridge

Although bats are associated with Halloween, the best time to see the nocturnal creatures “fluttering around” is actually in the summertime, said The Guardian. One of the “most atmospheric ways” to see bats is on the Bat Safari Punting tour along the River Cam. Catch a trip with a local wildlife guide on a Friday or Saturday evening until the end of September for a chance to hear the “clicks and squeaks” of the pipistrelle and Daubenton’s bats. In late July and August, you might even spot “mothers and pups in tandem flight in the night sky”.

Family tickets from £63 (50% of ticket sales goes to the local Wildlife Trust)

Dolphin watching, Moray Firth, Scotland

For marine life lovers, the Scottish Dolphin Centre in Spey Bay is a great place to spot the “hardy bunch” of bottlenose dolphins who live in the waters north of Inverness, said The Guardian. In the summer months you are more likely to spot them “throwing fish and leaping from the water”. The centre, a former fishing station, is also a “hub of marine learning” offering tours of the old ice house, an interactive exhibition, summer “river rambles” and “nature-themed holiday clubs”.

Entry is free

Winnie the Pooh celebration at Tatton Park, Cheshire

This summer, Tatton Park is celebrating 100 years of the “whimsical world of Pooh and friends”, said The Telegraph. Visitors of all ages will be “charmed” by the garden story trail and the accompanying exhibit. Look for Christopher Robin in the maze before popping into the secondhand bookshop.

Tickets from £12 for children aged four-15; £20 for adults

West Midlands Safari Park, Worcester

If you’re looking to push the boat out with an overnight trip, consider staying in the “stunning” lodges at West Midlands Safari Park, said Stylist. A night here is “unfiltered magic” that “layers nostalgia with science” and “theatre with husbandry”, said The Standard. You can still see rhinos, meerkats, elephants, and more at the park even if you just decide to visit for the day.

Day tickets, £17.40; lodges from £500 per night

World of Beatrix Potter museum, Cumbria

For anyone who read Beatrix Potter’s beautifully illustrated books as a child, or who reads them to their own children or grandchildren now, this museum brings “Peter Rabbit’s world to life”, said The Telegraph. The attraction also offers themed afternoon tea and live shows.

Summer saver tickets from £6.83 for children aged three-16; £11.03 for adults

Crabbing, Cromer, Norfolk

For a “quintessentially British day out” go crabbing at the “gorgeous” Cromer beach in Norfolk, said Stylist. There's no better place to “pull up a chair and sink your bait” than the “home to the world championships of crabbing”. For even more fun try visiting in August to catch the Cromer Carnival that’s “old-school bucket-and-spade fun”, said The Telegraph. It’s a “gloriously traditional seaside” event with a “funfair” atmosphere. The best part? Taking part is free.

This week’s question: A Japanese company is offering a new way to beat the heat: A one-person “human refrigerator” that blasts the sitting occupant with 41-degree air during a 5- to 10-minute session. In seven or fewer words, come up with an advertising slogan that could be used to pitch Americans on this cooling invention.

How to enter: Submissions should be emailed to contest@theweek.com. Please include your name, address, and daytime telephone number for verification; this week, please type “Human refrigerator” in the subject line. Entries are due by noon, Eastern Time, Tuesday, Aug. 4. Winners will appear on the Puzzle Page of the Aug. 14 issue and at theweek.com/contest on Aug. 7. In the case of identical or similar entries, the first one received gets credit. All entries become property of The Week.

The winner gets a one-year subscription to The Week.

Click or tap here to see the winner of last week's contest: Million beers

If navigating an airport with your partner has caused an argument, an airport divorce may be the right kind of divorce for you. Contrary to the name, an airport divorce is not a divorce or breakup.

Rather, it is when a couple decides to go their separate ways in the airport to tackle preflight activities and tasks before reuniting to fly together. The separation can keep stress to a minimum and allow both people to regulate their emotions before a trip.

See you later

At the airport, “we transmute, werewolf-like, into unrecognizable beings,” journalist Huw Oliver, who coined the term “airport divorce,” said in a column for The Times in 2025. Airport divorces are ideal for people who travel differently. “One traveler wants to browse every shop, while another seeks a quiet seat. One arrives hours early, the other prefers last-minute entry,” said Yahoo. “In that pressure cooker, minor disagreements can quickly spiral out of control.” Instead opting to separate, “couples can avoid friction before it begins, and each party retains control of their airport experience.”

Despite its name, airport divorce is “remarkably domestic,” said Travel Noire. Giving each other “space during the part of a trip that exposes every difference in timing, hunger, anxiety and tolerance for crowds” can make travel more peaceful.

The science supports it. One person’s tension and stress can spread to the people they are with through “interpersonal physiological synchrony,” which can lead to the “coupling of autonomic nervous system signals such as heart rate,” said a review article in Nature Reviews Psychology.

Reassuring a partner also “compounds the problem rather than solving it,” said Forbes. “Calming an anxious partner draws on the same limited pool of attention and patience a person needs for everything else that day, and that pool depletes with use.” Instead, going separate ways, temporarily, allows both people to stabilize their nervous systems before the flight. Both partners “arrive at the gate having actually rested rather than one having spent the wait managing the other’s nerves.”

Carrying the luggage

While there are benefits to an airport divorce, it may not be for everyone. It works best for “experienced travelers who communicate well and understand each other’s habits,” said Travel Noire. It can also “solve practical mismatches when one partner has TSA PreCheck or Global Entry and the other moves at a different pace.” There are many cases, however, in which splitting up is less beneficial.

Ideally, a “successful airport divorce divides responsibility as well as physical space,” said Travel Noire. “Parents managing children, first-time flyers, couples carrying shared medication or documents, and anyone needing mobility support may gain more from staying together.”

Airport divorce, in addition, often “exposes invisible labor when the same person still tracks boarding, carries the passports and sends every location update,” said Travel Noire. Both partners should be capable of keeping track of their belongings and the time independently.

Those skeptical of the arrangement argue that being unable to maneuver an airport with your partner does not bode well for the rest of the relationship. Those in favor emphasize the importance of space in relationships and not strictly while traveling. “People love to consciously uncouple,” whether it is going to bed at different times or taking part in activities separate from your partner, said PureWow. “In that stretch between check-in and takeoff,” said Yahoo, “sometimes a separation is the key to appreciating each other’s company again.”

Foreign students at American colleges and universities were thrust into uncharted waters this month after the Department of Homeland Security released new guidelines to severely restrict how and how long international students can study in the United States. While the White House says the change is necessary for national security, higher education advocates claim the new rules are a body blow to America’s role as an international academic powerhouse.

What did the commentators say?

Under the new rules, students on F-1 visas that for decades had allowed them to stay in the U.S. “as long as they maintain a full course of study” will now be limited to just four-year terms, said Bloomberg Law. The new rule also restricts shifting academic plans and “reduces the grace period” that visa holders have before they face deportation.

The new guidelines are the “latest” White House policy change “buffeting the roughly 1.2 million international students pursuing degrees in the U.S.,” said Bloomberg. The new rules also affect J-visas that “allow visitors on cultural exchange programs to work in the U.S.,” and I-visas for “members of the media,” said USA Today. For international graduate students, the policy also prohibits changing focus mid-program and bars transfers to other schools without authorization.

The policy changes also “reach beyond the classroom” to the government’s “Optional Practical Training” program, through which F-1 visa holders could “work in the U.S. for a year after finishing a degree” — or longer, depending on the area of study, said the Los Angeles Times. Now, that time “counts against the four-year cap.” Foreign students already in the U.S. will be subject to the new rules “automatically,” and their time will be “capped at four years from the rule’s effective date during the fall semester.”

These changes come as international student enrollment in American schools has “already plummeted” in President Donald Trump’s second term thanks to “new visa restrictions” targeting specific countries, “harsh immigration enforcement,” and the “prosecution of foreign students who engage in political activity that the administration disagrees with,” said The New Republic. This, in turn, has resulted in a “big drop in revenue” for American schools “which have had to cut programs” and “negatively impacted a major economic engine for the U.S.” Not only do international students “bring diversity and alternative worldviews,” said NPR, but they also “contribute heavily to colleges’ financial health” because, being ineligible for federal aid, “many pay full tuition.”

Placing “clear, finite limits on these visas” allows the U.S. to “properly screen, vet and monitor individuals within our borders,” said Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin in a statement. International students will now focus on their “primary purpose: completing their studies and returning home.” But international education experts have “warned that these actions could lead to a decline in international enrollment,” said Inside Higher Ed. The outcome, they say, will be institutions that “struggle to meet enrollment and revenue goals,” as well as disruptions to the nation’s “ability to recruit top students and scholars to contribute to American research and innovation.”

“I can’t graduate early by cramming my coursework” and “there’s no guarantee I’ll pass” the requisite American licensing exams, said nursing student Kim Se-hee, currently studying in Chicago, to The Korea Herald. After years spent “working toward building a life in the U.S.,” being sent back to Korea “right after getting my U.S. nursing license, it would all be for nothing.”

The new guidelines are “far more” than changing a visa rule, said immigration attorney Tahmina Watson to Business Insider. “It’s an economic policy” under which the U.S. “risks becoming a less attractive destination for the world’s brightest minds.” The result will hurt “universities, businesses, innovation, local economies” and, ultimately, “America’s long-term global competitiveness for generations.”

What next?

With the rule change set to go into effect in mid-September, schools are “scrambling to figure out” what this means for their “international student offices, their Ph.D. programs and admissions,” said NPR. The “fallout” from the changes “could be considerable,” said Forbes. The message globally is that America has become “less welcoming, less predictable and less committed,” said NAFSA: Association of International Educators Executive Director and CEO Fanta Aw in a statement.