Are Americans ready for “bloody cage fights on the White House’s South Lawn?” asked Jack Crosbie in Rolling Stone. On June 14, President Trump will celebrate both his 80th birthday and America’s 250th anniversary with a card of seven outdoor UFC fights at the People’s House. These mixed martial arts fights, in which kicks to the head, elbows to the face, punching prone fighters, and choke holds are all legal, are big in “the right-leaning manosphere”—and with Trump, who calls it “the greatest sport.” The president—who recently bought stock in UFC’s parent company—is pals with Dana White, the company’s CEO, who has openly allied the sport with Trump. The UFC is “allegedly footing the bill” for the spectacle, which will take place in a temporary arena that can hold some 4,000 fans, with up to 90,000 watching on a screen outside. The Pentagon has placed a casting call for brawny troops in short-sleeve uniforms to help fill the stands, so long as they “meet a certain physical standard.”

The kitschy “Las Vegas–style venue” highlights “just how extensively Trump has remade the White House grounds to his liking,” said Erkki Forster in The Daily Beast. A hulking steel arch that’s nine stories tall and decked out “in patriotic red, white, and blue graphics” has been raised over the stage and seating area. It looms over the torn-up construction site for Trump’s $400 million ballroom, where “the East Wing once stood.” Erecting this garish “monstrosity” is among Trump’s “worst insults” to Washington’s once-dignified architecture, said Zeeshan Aleem in MS.now. But his endorsement of brutality on White House grounds sends an even darker message than the aesthetic desecration: Violence can be glorious and patriotic.

Gladiatorial combat is just one way Trump has turned our national birthday into “a royalist celebration of himself,” said David Frum in The Atlantic. He’s “seeking to emblazon his face on coinage and currency,” displaying “his image on banners in downtown Washington,” repainting the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool a garish blue, and gilding bronze horse statues. The 250th celebration should’ve been “an easy layup, a gimme, a chance for a now-unpopular second-term president to reinvent himself as the leader of all of the American people.” But he’s unable to rise above his egomania, and has “made a pitiful shambles of what should have been a glorious moment.”

What’s happening to the river?

Running from the Rocky Mountains in Colorado to Mexico’s Gulf of California, the Colorado River is being pushed to the breaking point by years of drought and overuse. That dwindling flow is causing panic across the region because the river supplies water to more than 40 million people in seven Western states—Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. It also provides power to more than 25 million people through hydroelectric dams at the nation’s two largest reservoirs: Lake Powell (in Utah and Arizona) and Lake Mead (in Nevada and Arizona). Water levels at both are down about 75% from peak volumes; declining water levels at Lake Mead could potentially reduce the Hoover Dam’s power generating capacity by 40% as early as this fall. And the situation will likely worsen as climate change accelerates and further dries out the West, with recent studies suggesting the river will provide 10% to 45% less water by 2050. With an October deadline looming for the seven states to agree on a new Colorado River Compact—the plan that governs how water is distributed between them—regional officials are under pressure to strike a compromise on steep water cuts. “Maybe this is the first worldwide climate-change crisis that’s going to force really fundamental policy-level decisions to be made,” said Brad Udall of Colorado State University’s Colorado Water Center.

How did the situation get this bad? 

The entire Colorado River Basin has been in drought since 2000, with snow and rain down 7% from the 20th-century average. The snowpacks that feed the river hit their lowest level on record this year, with snow accumulations in Colorado’s high country peaking a month early in March and containing just half the average moisture. Even a rare May storm that dropped 30 inches of snow in parts of the Rockies offered little relief. But drought is just one of the basin’s problems. Struck in 1922 during an unusually wet period, the Colorado River Compact overestimated how much water the river could provide. Meanwhile, the demands for water keep rising as drought shrinks the flow. The semi-arid region’s population has exploded over the past century—the river served only 457,000 people in 1922—as has its agriculture sector, which now covers more than 5 million acres of farmland and accounts for 70% of all water use. Alfalfa grown for cattle feed swallows 26% of all water consumed in the basin, more than every city in the region combined. Former Upper Colorado River commissioner Anne Castle likens the demands on the river to “spending more money than you’re bringing in. You can pull on your savings, but your savings aren’t going to last forever.”

Are states willing to take less water?

In theory. But three years of talks on a new compact between the four upstream states—Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming —and the three downstream states of Arizona, California, and Nevada have yet to produce an agreement. The Lower Basin states recently proposed slashing their water allotments by about 20% annually and asked Upper Basin states to commit to permanent cuts to ensure water keeps flowing south. But Upper Basin states are wary of restrictions that would limit future development and stop them building new dams. “I see still a very large lack of skin in the game by the Upper Basin,” said Tom Buschatzke of the Arizona Department of Water Resources.

What’s the federal government doing? 

To avert potential water shortages, the Interior Department in April sent billions of gallons from Wyoming’s Flaming Gorge Reservoir into Lake Powell. Up to a third of the water in Flaming Gorge could be let out over the next year to ensure Powell’s dam keeps generating electricity. The Upper Basin states only reluctantly agreed to the Flaming Gorge drawdown, which could put many boat ramps out of action at the popular tourist destination and also hurt local fish populations. “Our consideration and approval are not taken lightly,” said Wyoming state engineer Brandon Gebhart, “and we wouldn’t be recommending this release except for the historically dire conditions.”

What happens if states can’t reach a deal?

The Bureau of Reclamation, which oversees water in the West, will step in and impose cuts. Buschatzke said a plan under consideration by the Trump administration would slash the Lower Basin’s allocation by up to 40%—almost as much water as flowed from 19 million people’s taps in Southern California last year. For now, any breakthrough in compact talks seems unlikely. If anything, the recent releases by the Interior Department have exacerbated tensions, with Upper Basin states complaining they’ve already been forced to use less than the 7.5 million acre-feet allotted by the compact because dry conditions have cut their water supply by 25%. “The Upper Basin is proud to be part of the solution,” said Colorado water commissioner Becky Mitchell. “But we cannot be the entire solution.”

Could taps actually run dry? 

It’s possible in some areas. The small desert town of Kearny, Ariz., gets its water from a reservoir on a Colorado tributary that’s only 2% full. Mayor Curtis Stacy has warned residents they could run out of water in July unless they take radical action now; he’s suggested washing clothes less often and showering together. Other towns and cities are rationing water just in case. Las Vegas, N.M., has barred restaurants from serving water to customers unless specifically requested. Denver and Aurora, Colo., have ordered cuts to outdoor watering. Climate change could force more communities to drastically reduce their water usage in coming years. “Just because we’re the first don’t mean we’ll be the last,” said Stacy. “We’re the canary in the copper mine.”

Is President Trump finally tired of winning? asked Shawn McCreesh in The New York Times. Asked in a Cabinet meeting two weeks ago if he feels pressure to end the Iran war before November’s elections, Trump airily replied, “I don’t care about the midterms.” In the context of Iran, Trump’s “posture of nonchalance” is defensible. Presidents shouldn’t let politics sway their thinking on matters of war. But GOP lawmakers are starting to wonder if Trump couldn’t care less about their party’s bleak electoral prospects. Republicans trail Democrats by 7.6% in the generic ballot, dragged down by Iran, high gas prices, Trump’s slumping approval rating (38% and falling), and the belief—shared by 77% of Americans, including most Republicans—that Trump’s policies have driven up the cost of living. Without a course correction, the GOP could lose both the House and Senate in November, a prospect suddenly more likely after Trump’s endorsement lifted Ken Paxton, the scandal-drenched MAGA loyalist, over incumbent Texas Sen. John Cornyn in last week’s primary. But instead of assuring cash-strapped Americans that he feels their pain, Trump spends his days constructing “pricey pet projects,” from his gilded White House ballroom to a 250-foot triumphal arch. These don’t seem like the actions of someone who’s especially bothered “about what’s coming after the summer.”

“Don’t be fooled,” said Frank Bruni, also in the Times. Trump’s ego won’t let him confess his midterm anxieties. But beneath the “bluster and makeup, he’s sweating.” Look at how hard he’s pressured red-state legislatures to redraw their electoral maps to gain a handful of seats in November, and how he’s “haranguing congressional Republicans” to pass new voting laws to depress Democratic turnout. And the electoral landscape this fall might not be as grim for Republicans as it looks now, said Mene Ukueberuwa in The Free Press. Progressives are pushing Democrats toward nominating class warriors like Maine’s Graham Platner and Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed, potentially alienating moderate voters in what would otherwise be “easily winnable races.”

I suspect Trump is relaxed about the midterms because “there might be political upside regardless of who wins,” said Abby McCloskey in Bloomberg. If the House and Senate turn blue, Trump will gain the scapegoat that his second term has lacked. He can blame “any and all shortcomings on Congress’s new Democratic majority.” And if empowered Democrats push left-wing legislation and try to impeach him, Trump will get to replay his favorite roles: “victim of the elite” and “protector against the progressive tide.” There’s a Jan. 6–size hole in such analyses, said Joel Mathis in his Substack newsletter. Trump’s indifference to the midterms more likely flows from the fact that he has plans in place—this time fully thought-out—to ignore or reverse the results “unless they are favorable to him.”

None of this explains why Trump suddenly cares so little about his popularity, said Paul Waldman in MS.now. Perhaps he’s contemplating his post-2029 legacy. He may be comfortable with being loathed by two-thirds of the country “so long as there are gigantic buildings with his name on them.” And his newfound indifference to approval ratings may be liberating. Trump has spent his life trying “to free himself of any and all constraints”—the law, civility, political norms, international alliances—“so he can do whatever he wants.” The interests of his party, and Americans, are just more things tying him down. “And he’s going to cut those cords.”

Manhasset

Architect Tim Maldonado designed this 1991 modern four-bedroom in North Hills, on the North Shore in Nassau County. Carved Parisian doors open to a home with flamed Canadian granite floors, a water feature at the base of a floating steel staircase, a living room with floor-to-ceiling windows, and a primary suite with a balcony.

On more than an acre, the landscaped property includes a guest cottage, pool and spa, patios, fig trees, and a garage. $5,500,000. Irene Rallis, Douglas Elliman, (516) 241-9848

Quogue

Built in 1967 and expanded in 1998, this shingled Hamptons five-bedroom is near shops and oceanside Dune Road. The vaulted living room features a floor-to-ceiling brick fireplace, wood floors, and sliders to a deck; the home also includes two kitchens, a den, a sitting room, a screened porch, and a loft.

The flat property has yards, mature trees, and space for a future pool and sports court. $4,850,000. Lauren Battista, Brown Harris Stevens/Luxury Portfolio International, (917) 744-9382

Southampton

About five minutes from town and the beach, this estate spans more than 2 acres. The original 1900 barn has been expanded into a five-bedroom, open-plan home with decks extending from both levels and a 25-foot-tall great room topped by a loft with wood railings.

Outside are a three-story art studio with an elevator, a heated pool and hot tub, a shed, a garage, a riverbed garden, and stone bridges. $7,395,000. Pat Garrity, The Corcoran Group—Southampton, (631) 903-5900

Water Island

In a small, secluded, largely car-free enclave within the Fire Island National Seashore, this 2015 oceanfront coastal modern compound designed by Scott Bromley has a one-bedroom main house and a four-bedroom guesthouse.

Both feature walls of windows, cedar and teak woods, ocean views, built-ins, a high-end kitchen, and decks; the larger building also includes a pool, an outdoor kitchen, and a bar. The Atlantic Ocean is steps away down a boardwalk. $6,250,000. Nathaniel Larson, Daniel Gale Sotheby’s International Realty, (631) 800-1301

Sag Harbor

Set in the converted 1881 Watchcase Factory Lofts, this 2016 two-bedroom penthouse condo is a block away from the village’s Main Street. The apartment has exposed brick walls, 10-foot ceiling beams of old-growth pine, oak floors, oversize windows, a fireplace, and a chef’s kitchen with Thermidor appliances and thick stone counters.

Outside are a roof terrace with a firepit, plus a community pool, gym, lounge, bar, and parking. $5,995,000. Jack Pearson, Compass, (516) 457-7111

Port Washington

Docked on Manhasset Bay, this 1986 houseboat is near Bat Walk Park and shops and dining in the town’s center. The two-bedroom features diagonal wood-clad walls, a step-up living room and kitchen area with a woodstove and granite counters, and a lower level with bedrooms, a bath, and laundry.

Outside are a balcony, a lower deck, and an upper deck with 360-degree water views. $299,999. Giedre Pogozelski and Elpis Hardiman, Douglas Elliman, (917) 335-0264

‘Backrooms’

Directed by Kane Parsons (R)

★★★

“Might social media, a force often credited with hastening the death of theatrical moviegoing, instead prove to be its salvation?” asked Justin Chang in The New Yorker. As the three-week-old horror film Obsession continues its surprising run, it has now been blocked from topping the box office chart by another made-on-the-cheap hit by a young director whose vision was also shaped by social media. Backrooms, created by 20-year-old Kane Parsons, is “an ingeniously contoured exercise in liminal horror” built around the notion of a nearly endless maze-like expanse of eerily bland office spaces. Though the film “ends on a disappointingly conventional note,” it establishes Parsons as “an undeniable talent.”

Given that his theatrical debut grew out of the huge audience he’d built on YouTube for short videos set in the same world, said Amy Nicholson in the Los Angeles Times, “Backrooms would be one of the year’s most significant releases even if the movie itself was merely fine.” Instead, “it’s a work of honest-to-goodness art,” an “uncannily mature” tale about how the self-serving narratives we tell ourselves block emotional growth. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays an embittered furniture store owner who discovers a passage into the mundane alt-space, eventually drawing two young employees and his therapist, played by fellow Oscar nominee Renate Reinsve, into also braving its potential dangers. Still, Backrooms is less straightforward horror than “a surrealist painting in motion.” It conjures “a deep-in-the-bones unease,” said Kyle Smith in The Wall Street Journal. And while the disappointing screenplay ensures the film isn’t “a fully explained wonder,” it remains “well worth the wander.”

‘Power Ballad’

Directed by John Carney (R)

★★

The latest music-filled comedy drama from the director of Once and Sing Street “should be breezy fun,” said Stephanie Zacharek in Time. Instead, “it left me feeling mildly depressed,” because its happy ending felt unearned after roughly 90 minutes about a nice-guy musician who has a song stolen from him by a pop star. Co-stars Paul Rudd and Nick Jonas “aren’t to blame here; it’s the story that lets them down,” and the wrong turns start with the pain we have to see Rudd’s underdog endure.

Beyond that, “you have to suspend quite a bit of disbelief to meet the film on its own terms,” said Christian Zilko in IndieWire. Rudd plays Rick, the middle-aged American leader of a Dublin-based wedding band who, after meeting a former boy-band member, winds up exchanging song sketches deep into the night. Months later, Rick is shocked, and begins spiraling, when one of his tunes becomes an uncredited global hit for his new celebrity soulmate. But while some key events in the story are “tough sells,” the characters’ actions convey emotional truths, and “the film builds toward the mature realization that sometimes it’s OK to miss out on our material dreams if we replace them with something better,” such as a rich family life. Still, the likable Rudd is “about all that tethers Power Ballad to something like life,” said Manohla Dargis in The New York Times. Director John Carney “keeps everything insistently light, gesturing at complexities rather than delving into them.”

‘Masters of the Universe’

Directed by Travis Knight (PG-13)

★★

“The creators of the new Masters of the Universe movie really, really want to let you know that they’re in on the joke,” said Frank Scheck in The Hollywood Reporter. The brains behind Mattel Studio’s first movie since Barbie know that only children and over-grown adolescents would care about He-Man and Skeletor, two 1980s toys turned cartoons, so they’ve packed the film with “so much campy, self-referential humor that you don’t know whether to laugh or cry.” There’s plenty of action, but even that feels “more dutiful than exhilarating, with nothing really seeming at stake.”

When the movie works, it’s “a rollicking under-dog space adventure,” said Clint Worthington in RogerEbert.com. Nicholas Galitzine plays He-Man, aka Prince Adam of Eternia, who, as an adolescent, was sent to Earth after his kingdom was conquered by Skeletor, played by Jared Leto as a purring diva. Fifteen years later, Adam is working a dreary HR job when a chance encounter sends him back home to reclaim the throne. Owing to all the wisecracking, however, the movie too often “feels like it’s ashamed of what it truly wants to be.” It’s “most enjoyable as a fish-out-of-water tale on either side of the planetary divide,” said Guy Lodge in Variety. Once we’re back on Eternia, though, “things get less spry,” and as the movie lurches from one fight scene to the next, it becomes “a nostalgia trip that never quite belongs to the present, and never rouses any cherished memory of the past.”

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Wearable ultrasound tracks high-risk pregnancies

A new wearable ultrasound patch could one day help detect pregnancy complications early on and prevent stillbirths. The UPatch, now a proof-of-concept device, continuously monitors fetuses in the womb and tracks blood flow. In a trial of 52 pregnant women, the UPatch found that one woman with preeclampsia, a serious type of high blood pressure, had extreme intrauterine growth restriction. Her baby was then delivered via caesarean to prevent a stillbirth, researchers reported in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

Paralympian could be first astronaut with disability in orbit

British Paralympic sprinter John McFall is set to make history as the first disabled astronaut in space. The 45-year-old surgeon is a member of the European Space Agency astronaut reserve and has been cleared to participate in a two-week mission to the Haven-1 commercial space station, set to launch as soon as next year. Among other tasks, The Guardian said, McFall will assess how the space environment affects modern prosthetic limbs, “which often rely on sensors and microprocessors to function properly.”

New method transforms ocean water into drinking water

A new desalination method offers a waste-free way to turn ocean water into drinking water without any chemical additives. Self-cleaning solar panels distill the water and separate out the salts, which can be used as table salt or to extract minerals like lithium. The researchers who designed the system at the University of Rochester’s Institute of Optics say it is scalable for use worldwide and tackles both clean drinking water scarcity and damage caused by mining minerals.

Patients helped by therapy donkeys at French psychiatric hospital

Therapy donkeys are helping to improve the emotional regulation and communication skills of patients at a French psychiatric hospital. As part of their treatment, patients with conditions like anxiety, schizophrenia and depression take the donkeys on walks, clean their hooves and give them hugs. This is “animal medicine,” one patient, Nathalie, told France 24. “It brings relief. You stop thinking about everything else.” Participants are paired with one donkey so they can form a bond.

“The era of ever-expanding workplace perks is ending,” said Tina Reed in Axios. With jobs harder to come by and workers’ negotiating leverage shrinking, “some employers are rolling back” the glowing enticements they started dangling a few years ago. And it’s “not just free kombucha and laundry” that are off the table—policies like “paid parental leave and retirement matches are on the chopping block” as well. Consulting giant Deloitte announced recently it is “reducing paid time off, halving parental leave, and eliminating a $50,000 reimbursement for family-planning services” for most of its employees, said Lauren Goode in Wired, citing the rising costs of keeping such benefits in place. Companies should know, however, that “plenty of research shows that diminishing employees’ quality of life and lowering their total wages” harms the bottom line.

Yet companies seem to feel that “no benefit is off-limits anymore,” said Steve Russolillo in Business Insider. It’s one thing for the “free food, on-site laundry, and gym subsidies” to go, but “I really thought certain benefits like paid time off and parental leave would be untouchable.” Clearly, “I was wrong.” Of course, it’s better to have benefits cut than to lose a job entirely. But the workers who survive downsizing efforts aren’t looking at a future full of perks. The Trump administration, however, wants one specific benefit to be more widely accessible, said Lauren Kaori Gurley in The Washington Post. The Labor Department proposed a new rule to make it easier for employers to offer in vitro fertilization (IVF) and other fertility benefits, and easier for workers to sign up for them. It wouldn’t “eliminate all costs for beneficiaries,” but it could reduce them.

Small businesses should take note of what Deloitte and other corporations are doing, said Suzanne Lucas in Inc. If “you’ve felt like you couldn’t compete with the big companies” as an entrepreneur, now is your chance. “Where you could never match Deloitte’s $50,000 IVF reimbursement or 16 weeks of paid parental leave,” you can offer other attractive perks, like remote work, four-day workweeks, and flexibility. It’s an opportunity to grab top-tier talent that was “out of your reach six months ago.”

At the same time, some perks were getting out of hand, said Pilita Clark in the Financial Times. The London law firm Slaughter and May, for instance, recently ended a policy from 2022 that allowed workers to bring their pets into the office. Seriously. Other benefits, like fertility procedures, won’t be widely missed—they are used by fewer than 1% of workers, according to benefits platform Heka. Employers are simply “waking up to the fact that what employees say they want differs from what they actually use.”

‘The Boys of Dungeon Lane’ by Paul McCartney

★★★★

Paul McCartney is “acting his age and defying it too, which is kind of the best of both worlds,” said Chris Willman in Variety. On his 20th solo album, the 83-year-old former Beatle keeps it “fresh and lively, and occasionally even fiery, but not by pretending that he’s a youngster.” Named after the area of Liverpool where McCartney spent part of his childhood, The Boys of Dungeon Lane is a nostalgia trip—“mostly in the flagrantly commercial, engaging, oft-rocking style of a 1970s Wings record.” He duets with Ringo Starr on one track, while another looks back on his “platonic crush on George Harrison.” The “ode to friendship from the Cute One to the Quiet One is so romantic, you could almost swoon.” McCartney’s sheer joy “comes through in every chord change,” said Simon Vozick-Levinson in Rolling Stone. From “moving acoustic ballads” to a “trippy” ode to hiking and magic mushrooms, the artist’s “life force remains undimmed.” What’s more, the “simple, elegant arrangements” are mostly played by the man himself: He understands that what we want from a new McCartney solo album “at this stage in his career is more McCartney.”

‘Blue Morpho’ by Ed O’Brien

★★★

The second solo release from Ed O’Brien “feels like a do-over” that was very much worth the effort, said Ryan Reed in A.V. Club. The Radiohead guitarist and backing vocalist’s 2020 debut, Earth, was “a sonically rich album” that never quite found its footing; here, he taps into what that record got right and runs with it. Blue Morpho finds O’Brien “relying less on lyrics, leaning more into psychedelic atmospheres,” and embracing prog-rock catharsis on the final track, the nearly 10-minute “Obrigado”—a “genuinely affecting head trip laced with jazzy keyboards.” O’Brien is “out of his cocoon and in dazzling flight,” said Andrew Trendell in NME. In a reflection of the Brazilian butterfly that inspired the album’s name, the orchestral title track “floods the record with color,” with the guitarist drifting above the cinematic orchestration with “all the cool Zen of an Oxford-born Beck or a reborn Nick Drake.” On the funky “Teachers,” O’Brien delivers for “fans of the smoky, jazzier corners of Amnesiac, albeit with a lot more druggy euphoria.” This is a savory treat, full of “the secret sauce that O’Brien has always added to the Radiohead recipe.”

‘Little Wide Open’ by Kevin Morby

★★★

This is an album that, “in the best way, can’t quite work out what it thinks,” said Alexis Petridis in The Guardian. On Kevin Morby’s eighth release, the Midwestern singer-songwriter is grappling with “the weird push and pull exerted by one’s hometown,” impending fatherhood, and introspection born of middle age. (On “Javelin,” he ponders: “Am I a has-been? Am I a husband?”) He’s aided by an impressive artistic lineup: The National’s Aaron Dessner produces, while Bon Iver lends his voice as a quasi–tornado siren and Lucinda Williams joins for a Springsteen-flavored monologue. Morby has delivered his “most cohesive, tuneful, and cleanly drawn” album yet, said Will Hermes in Pitchfork. It’s satisfying to watch an artist evolve steadily over the years and emerge as one of the “long-game players.” Here the folk-rock artist offers a “meditation on what happens when things aren’t falling apart” to arrive at “a balancing act of personal and universal that suggests an inverted Blood on the Tracks.” Set firmly in Middle America, Little Wide Open is the portrait of a musician becoming “more soulful, not less, as his sound grows more polished and inviting.”

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With I Hear a New World, Alan Moore continues his five-novel Long London fantasy series, which spans the second half of the 20th century. Below, the author of Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and From Hell recommends six books that have influenced his work.

‘Pariah Genius’ by Iain Sinclair (2024)

A favorite book that looms in the same territory as I Hear a New World, Pariah Genius is a fiction conjured from the life and death of Soho photographer John Deakin. It unfolds in a glistening underworld peopled by Deakin’s subjects and associates—Dylan Thomas, Francis Bacon—and delineated with the diamond focus of Sinclair’s consciousness-expanding prose. Buy it here.

‘Mother London’ by Michael Moorcock (1988)

An essential London novel, infused with a deep love of place. We view the war-wounded city through the eyes of memorable characters connected by those airraid shelter nights. Buy it here.

‘The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman’ by Angela Carter (1972)

Carter is another favorite London author, and although her later work includes tremendous novels that are situated in the capital, it’s in earlier books like this, with their unrestrained exoticism, their delirious sensuality, and their steaming orchid forest writing, that I find the new flavor of fantasy my current offerings are aiming for. Buy it here.

‘Gormenghast’ by Mervyn Peake (1950)

I first read Peake’s Gormenghast books at 14, and although bowled over by them, I’d not realized until I was reading my grandsons the trilogy just how much Peake’s berserk use of language, with its lyric seizures, has affected my own style. So, yes, I’m blaming him for my excesses. Buy it here.

‘One Last, Mad Embrace’ by Jack Trevor Story (1970)

Along with all the horror, history, and phantasmagoria of the Long London series, I wanted it to be grotesquely amusing, and my benchmark for wretchedly funny English literary comedy has always been Jack Trevor Story, who, in works like One Last, Mad Embrace, perfectly illustrates Ian Dury’s admonition that “a sense of humor is required amongst the bacon-rind.” Buy it here.

‘I Got References’ by Gerald Kersh (1939)

An honorary Londoner, the awesome Gerald Kersh deserves acknowledgment as an influence, for his shrewd grasp of how the city works, for his pitch perfect evocation of its aura, and, in I Got References, for introducing me to the astounding Ras Prince Monolulu. Buy it here.

‘An Inconvenient Widow: The Torment, Trial, and Triumph of Mary Todd Lincoln’ by Lois Romano

“No first lady has been more demonized than Mary Todd Lincoln,” said Amy S. Greenberg in The New York Times. Even before her husband’s 1865 assassination, the former Lexington, Ky., socialite was portrayed as unhinged and unworthy of both the White House and Abraham Lincoln’s love. With An Inconvenient Widow, former Washington Post reporter Lois Romano seeks to rehabilitate Mary Todd’s reputation—“an ambitious project,” given that there’s “a kernel of reality” even in the over-the-top depiction of the first lady in the Broadway comedy smash Oh, Mary! She was erratic, vain, and, even during a deeply depleting war, a compulsive spendthrift. Though Romano at times goes too far in defense of her subject, she’s right that the demonization of Mary has been wildly disproportionate. “Whatever her faults, and they were many, she deserved better, and Romano deserves praise for granting her, at long last, a measure of grace.”

Romano’s ambition here isn’t new, said Thomas Mallon in The New Yorker. “Measured rehabilitation of the first lady’s character has been the dominant mode of Mary Lincoln biography for more than 70 years.” But in the popular imagination, untruths persist that should be corrected. First, she was not a traitor. Born in 1818 into a slaveholding family, Mary evolved into a committed abolitionist and an im­placable Unionist who poured time into caring for wounded Union soldiers. Earlier, because she was well-educated and witty, she sometimes impressed reporters covering the 1860 presidential campaign even more than her husband did. But opinion turned against her when she began lavishly redecorating the White House, and the death of a second young son, in 1862, didn’t win her lasting sympathy. Her reputation was buried when Abraham’s former law partner, William Herndon, began spreading lies about her shortly after the assassination.

Though Herndon would object, Romano “offers a persuasive portrait of a loving, mutually supportive marriage,” said Melanie Kirkpatrick in The Wall Street Journal. The author also “emphasizes the impact of grief on Mary’s mental health.” Three of Mary’s four sons died by 18, and in the wake of her husband’s death, she struggled not just emotionally but also financially, having to fight for years for a congressional pension. Meanwhile, her politically ambitious surviving son, Robert, was so embarrassed by the negative press she attracted that he had her committed to a mental institution, a decision she had to fight to reverse. She died of a stroke in 1882, and while she “won’t go down in history as one of the most congenial first ladies,” Romano’s “exemplary” examination of her life may ensure she’ll be remembered for both her flaws and her merits.

‘Lady C: The Long, Sensational Life of Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ by Guy Cuthbertson

“Obscenity lacks staying power,” said Dan Piepenbring in Harper’s. Some 65 years after Lady Chatterley’s Lover was widely derided as a book that might hasten the collapse of Western civilization, even pornographers aren’t bothering to invoke Lady Chatterley’s name or riff on the extramarital romps she engaged in with her paraplegic husband’s brooding, sweaty gamekeeper. But the book’s history is worth revisiting, because for decades, “it set polite society on edge,” even triggering landmark obscenity trials in Japan, India, the U.K., and the U.S. more than a generation after it was first published. Though “the most corrupted among us have long abandoned Lady Chatterley’s Lover as a totem of smut,” D.H. Lawrence’s 1928 novel lives on as a cultural milestone.

“There was always a great deal of hypocrisy amid the furor surrounding the book,” said Tim Bouverie in Air Mail. From the moment Lawrence had the first edition privately printed in Italy, American and British authorities confiscated copies that had been smuggled across their borders and secretly read the novel for pleasure. Even editions in which the sex scenes and four-letter words had been expurgated sold well in the 1930s. Cuthbertson “consistently informs and amuses” as he surveys the jokes and parodies the novel inspired, and he’s “fascinating” on various readers’ political interpretations of the tale. The 1960 trial in London that unleashed the unexpurgated paperback edition was “one of the great comic episodes in British cultural history,” and Cuthbertson’s account adds fresh color.

Readers of the novel today might be less offended by the sex than by Lady Chatterley’s antisemitism and her lover’s homophobia, said Blake Morrison in The Guardian. But Cuthbertson doesn’t dwell on that ugliness or Kate Millet’s famous attack, in 1970’s Sexual Politics, on the phallocentrism of Lady Chatterley’s sexual awakening. Lawrence himself thought of his final book, completed two years before his death at 44, as a serious novel about the sacred nature of sex. Others justifiably found humor in the way he conveyed that idea. So credit Cuthbertson for keeping his story light. “After all the moralizing that went with the book, it’s the right way to go.”

“The era of the ‘10 blue links’ is over,” said Sarah Perez in TechCrunch. At its annual I/O conference two weeks ago, Google announced it is overhauling the search box in what the company described as “the biggest change to this entry point to the web in 25 years.” A new “intelligence search box” will respond to longer, more conversational queries and “drop users into AI-powered interactive experiences.” And soon, people will be able to dispatch “information agents” right from Google Search that can keep them abreast of changes for topics they’d otherwise have to search for, such as stock prices and clothing sales. “This shift means that ‘searching the web’ will increasingly be performed by AI agents rather than humans,” and links could soon “become an afterthought.”

Google was “all hype” for the unveiling of this tectonic development in front of an adoring crowd, said Tyler Lacoma in CNET. But for people in the real world, the news was “clear and disturbing.” The threat is existential “not just to developers, but to all online workers,” as well as small businesses who rely on search traffic to get customers. Google’s vision is that you no longer need to venture out onto the internet, said Katie Notopoulos in Business Insider. The internet will be “brought to you in a sanitized form by an intermediary.” That will totally ruin the experience. I love the internet and love searching around it for new things. These promised changes “give me an awful sinking feeling.”

But there are some genuinely great things about Google’s new AI-powered search bar, said Jason England in Tom’s Guide. It offers a “really nice, curated way to scythe your way through what is becoming an increasingly noisy internet.” You can easily plan a weekend, for instance, based on what Google “already knows about you,” letting it automatically “build a schedule that knows your tastes and availability.” I won’t miss the era of “10 blue links,” even if I worry about what happens to online sites once “a key referrer drops to zero.”

The problem is that Google seems to lack focus, said Dave Lee in Bloomberg. The company that was once criticized for “being too slow to ship AI products” has gone to “now not knowing when to slow down.” In addition to the new AI search tools, it announced new AI-powered Gmail features, updates to Google Pics (not to be confused with Google Photos) and Google Flow, and even a new pair of smart glasses. The slew of new technology is “dizzying” and could leave consumers overwhelmed and “more resistant as a result.” Google has the engineering expertise, capital, hardware, and customer base to win the AI race. But there is “such a thing as doing too much too quickly.”

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is under attack for the “unfathomable sin of having a diverse cast,” said Marlow Stern in Variety. Director Nolan has confirmed that Kenyan Mexican actress Lupita Nyong’o is playing Helen of Troy in his upcoming blockbuster film version of Homer’s epic. Critics of Nolan’s casting also claim, without confirmation, that trans actor Elliot Page is playing the warrior Achilles. Leading the anti-Odyssey charge is Elon Musk, the champion of “white-grievance campaigns,” who posted dozens of indignant screeds on X claiming Nolan had “desecrated” Homer’s story. He and other detractors “have not actually seen the film yet, mind you,” nor do they seem to care that Helen and Achilles are “fictional characters navigating a mythological fable” with a giant Cyclops and other monsters. For these “culture warriors,” a diverse Odyssey is an intolerable affront.

These detractors may whine about “accuracy,” said Peter A. Berry in Bloomberg, but they’re actually defending their “fantasy of the past.” Genetically Mediterranean, the ancient Greeks generally had darker hair and skin than the fair, blue-eyed Brad Pitt, who played Achilles in 2004’s Troy—a film that Musk extols. Homer described Helen as beautiful but without much detail, making any portrayal “an educated guess.” Whatever Homer imagined 2,700 years ago, said Rich Lowry in National Review, there’s “nothing inherently wrong with casting actors in roles that don’t match their ethnicity.” Liberals were equally misguided when they criticized Scarlett Johansson for saying she should be “allowed to play anyone” after starring as a traditionally Japanese character in 2017’s Ghost in the Shell. “What’s good for Lupita Nyong’o should be good for Scarlett Johansson, and vice versa.”

With an IPO for SpaceX looming, “you’d think Musk wouldn’t have the time or energy for this nonsense,” said Arwa Mahdawi in The Guardian. But the world’s richest man spends an “extraordinary” amount of time posting anti-immigrant rhetoric and “white genocide” conspiracies. On 26 of 31 days in January, he shared racially charged posts with his 240 million followers on X. Musk’s “whiny” race panic has become “boring,” said John DeVore in MS.now, and has zero impact beyond his reactionary base. The Odyssey is “already the most buzzed-about movie of the summer,” with brisk advance ticket sales. Musk is “losing the culture war; he just doesn’t know it yet.”

Across the nation, Democrats are waging a “war on wealth,” said the Washington Examiner in an editorial. In March, state lawmakers in Democratic-run Washington slapped a 9.9% levy on incomes over $1 million; Maine Democrats followed suit in April with a 2% surcharge. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is currently seeking a tax on second homes worth $5 million or more. And in November, Californians will vote on a referendum that could gouge billionaires with a one-time 5% levy; Minnesota, Hawaii, and Illinois are considering similar wealth taxes. It’s a short-sighted policy spearheaded by Democrats who wrongly “see billionaires not as engines of economic growth but as villains who should be punished.” And it belies the fact that the very rich “are paying their fair share, and arguably more.” The top 1% of earners take in about 20% of all income—but pay about 40% of federal income taxes.

That’s true of high-salary workers, said Nathaniel Meyersohn in CNN.com. But billionaires’ wealth often comes from the growing value of their stock holdings, and capital gains taxes—paid when stock is sold—are lower than income taxes. From 2014 to 2018, ProPublica found, the nation’s top 25 billionaires’ wealth rose by $401 billion, while their federal income tax rate was a mere 3.4%. But state wealth taxes “may backfire” if wealthy residents flee to lower-tax red states. It’s already happening, said Jonathan Turley in the New York Post. Wealth builders are bolting from Seattle, where they face both tax hikes and “hostility” from socialist mayor Katie Wilson, who casts them as “social parasites.” Seattle-based Starbucks, whose co-founder Howard Schultz blasted Wilson for “socialist rhetoric” that “vilifies employers,” is planning a $100 million headquarters in business-friendly Nashville.

To understand why wealth taxes make sense, look to California, said Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman in The New York Times. Over the past three years alone, its billionaires’ collective wealth rocketed by 144%, to over $2 trillion. But from 2019 to 2025, they paid, on average, only 0.26% of their wealth annually in state income taxes. Meanwhile, the state faces a budget gap worsened by the Trump administration’s cuts to Medicaid, and cities are cutting services. A one-time 5% tax on the “ultrarich”—who have “benefited from the state’s infrastructure, universities,” and business networks—would raise nearly $100 billion. It’s high time they “contribute in modest proportion to their gains,” and in November, “California’s voters should show the nation the way forward.”

Now we know what they were hiding, said Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times. Back in January 2025, Ken Martin, chair of the Democratic National Committee, promised that by “spring” the DNC would release an analysis of Kamala Harris’ defeat in the 2024 election. Spring came and went, and in December Martin announced he was shelving the “autopsy” because “to dwell on the past” would be a “distraction.” Two weeks ago, the text finally leaked, and Martin released the autopsy himself, pre-apologizing that it “does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards.” On that, at least, Martin told the truth. Missing whole sections and riddled with typos and fact errors, the report’s most striking feature is its “utter lack of substance.” Nowhere in 192 pages of platitudes and wonkery will you find the words “Israel” or “Gaza,” while inflation and immigration—likely the biggest factors in Donald Trump’s re-election—are mentioned only in passing. The report is even silent on the catastrophic error of letting Joe Biden run for a second term at 81, which left Harris—nominated without a primary after Biden imploded—only 107 days to campaign. Commissioned as a plan to win back the White House in 2028, all this “ridiculous” document tells us about the Democratic Party’s future is that “Martin should be replaced.”

For all its flaws, the DNC autopsy gets some big things right, said Rich Lowry in National Review. Candidate Harris really should have done more to distance herself from Biden, as the report maintains, and make an “affirmative case” for her own presidency. Instead, she focused on Trump’s “unfitness,” as if voters weren’t already acquainted with him, while letting Trump define her as an “out of touch” California lefty—most notably in that devastating “She’s for they/them” ad. Democrats lost because their cultural extremism turned off working-class voters in swing states, said Evan Barker in The Free Press. Perhaps Martin and the authors of this report didn’t want to anger the Democrats’ progressive base with the “ugly truth”: The party’s Biden-era embrace of far-left insanity on trans and gender issues, policing, immigration, and race “has tainted the entire Democratic brand.”

Actually, Democrats “don’t need an autopsy” to teach them that lesson, said Andrew Prokop in Vox. Since their disastrous defeat by Trump, there’s been “a vibe shift” in the party. Its candidates are displaying a “laser focus on affordability,” and “quietly backing away” from “peak woke” positions. With this effort to be “more solicitous of the median voter,” Democratic candidates—moderates and progressives alike—have already racked up a string of wins in state and special congressional elections. Renewing the party’s brand will take time, said Ed Kilgore in New York, and Democrats have time. Trump’s cratering popularity should win them the House—at least—in November. They can then start choosing a message, and a candidate, for 2028. Democrats were also in the wilderness in 1992 and 2008 — until Bill Clinton and Barack Obama emerged.

Count on Democrats to screw this up again, said Ramesh Ponnuru in The Washington Post. They could offer a moderate immigration policy that includes strong border enforcement, but they’ll misinterpret their midterms success as proof they should run progressives who want to abolish ICE and offer other “boutique left-wing views.” The DNC autopsy could have been quite simple: Modern Democrats always “misread America.”

Block Island, R.I.

On the west side of the island in the Grace’s Cove area, this 2003 shingle-style, 2-acre estate features a pool with an aqua-and-navy-tiled edge and spa, a stone patio surround, and ocean views. The updated five-bedroom includes tongue-and-groove wainscoting, hardwood floors, an all-white updated kitchen, and glass doors throughout that frame the water.

Decks, a pergola, a fitness cottage, and yards complete the lot. Dining and shops are about a 10-minute drive. $6,950,000. Rosemary Tobin, Lila Delman Real Estate/Compass, (401) 741-1825

North Miami Beach, Fla.

The pool at this 2026 modern seven-bedroom includes a spa, a seating shelf, and water views. Located along Little Arch Creek with access to Biscayne Bay, the two-story home has pale wood built-ins, a leafy atrium, a kitchen with a Wolf range, and a primary suite with three closets and sliders to a pink outdoor tub.

Also outside are decks, a kitchen, a lounge area, and a boat lift. $7,950,000. Zulu Zuluaga and Sergio Giraldo, Coldwell Banker Realty, (850) 803-1383

Pasadena, Calif.

This 1976 mid-century-modern-style home in the South Arroyo neighborhood features a heated infinity-edge pool with a waterfall, next to decks and a yard. Inside the four-bedroom are vaulted 15-foot ceilings, ebony-tone flooring, roofline windows, a folding glass wall, a kitchen with high-end appliances and Carrera marble counters, and a primary suite with a fireplace.

The property includes a covered outdoor kitchen and a gas firepit. $3,899,888. Georges Rouveyrol, Sotheby’s International Realty—Los Feliz Brokerage, (626) 676-5368

Turks and Caicos

Villa Palmera, a 2012 Caribbean Colonial on the north shore of the island of Providenciales, has a pool with a bathing shelf overlooking turquoise sea. The six-bedroom hillside home’s double-height living room has dual staircases and water views, and the bedrooms offer deck access.

A lower level includes a billiards room. The property features pergolas, decks, and stairs down to a private white-sand beach near a thriving reef. $6,900,000. Nina Siegenthaler, Turks & Caicos Sotheby’s International Realty, (649) 946-4474

Kilauea, Hawaii

On Kauai’s North Shore, this Balinese-style four-bedroom at the foot of Mount Namahana has a saltwater pool and spa clad in greenstone tiles adjacent to an ipe wood deck.

The home’s airy great room has exposed beams, skylights, and an eat-in chef’s kitchen; breezeways connect the bedroom suites. Spread over 3.5 acres are a lanai, a cottage, a garage, and tropical landscaping. Town and the beach are about 10 minutes away. $7,650,000. Neal Norman, Hawai’i Life, (808) 651-1777

Naples, Fla.

This 2003 three-bedroom condo in a gated community includes access to a community swimming pool next to a lake. The Mediterranean-inspired building faces south and has a sunroom, a living room with custom curtains and valance, tile floors, and an open kitchen with granite counters.

Amenities include pickleball, clay tennis courts, and access to a clubhouse. Vanderbilt Beach, on the Gulf coast, is about a 20-minute drive. $450,000. Lynlee Dusek, John R. Wood Properties/Christie’s International Real Estate, (239) 287-4911

It’s never been easier to start your own business, said Jim VandeHei in Axios. “Anyone with a strong idea” can “model and prep a new business in a weekend.” When “Mike Allen, Roy Schwartz, and I started Axios in 2017, it took months to sketch it out, mock up designs, and scrub legal obstacles.” Artificial intelligence now can do that “in hours.” Describe your ideal setup to Claude or ChatGPT and it will immediately produce “an LLC or S Corp breakdown, a filing checklist, and a draft operating agreement.” Paste in the concept and it will conduct the market research, including “the existing players, pricing, and complaints.” AI will build the spreadsheets and forecasts, generate a logo and website, and email pitches. It will even help fine-tune your product, changing “how it looks or works in minutes.” The excuse for not starting a business was always the cost of capital. There’s no excuse anymore.

Age shouldn’t be an obstacle to entrepreneurship either, said Daniel Akst in The Wall Street Journal. At 67, “I retired from a career in business journalism only to start a small publishing enterprise of my own.” Launching a startup “in retirement may sound like an oxymoron,” but the work “can be more of a feature than a bug.” You can decide for yourself “whether to keep things small or build a modest empire,” becoming only “as busy as you want to be.” Some of my retired friends “now find themselves bored or underoccupied.” That’s something you won’t experience as a startup founder. And for young people feeling increasingly unloved in this job market, “the new promise is ownership,” said Arielle Pardes in The Guardian. Gen Z founders say launching a startup gives them “a sense of control” they couldn’t otherwise get from a corporate career. Some are also turning to entrepreneurship “in the form of side hustles or backup plans.” AI makes up “for the skills they don’t yet have, offering tools and platforms they can put to use, and allowing them to do more things at once.”

It’s now conceivable that a one- or two-person team can run a $1 billion business, said Erin Griffith in The New York Times. With today’s AI, entrepreneurs can “expand their startups to an enormous scale at breathtaking speed” while needing very few actual workers. Take the case of Medvi, a telehealth provider of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, which was started in 2024 by Matthew Gallagher and his younger brother. Gallagher, 41, “used AIto write the code for the software that powers his company, produce the website copy, generate the images and videos for ads, and handle customer service.” With the help of only “some contractors,” Medvi booked $401 million in sales in 2025 and is on track to do $1.8 billion this year. But the efficiency has a downside. “I kind of want to hire people,” Gallagher said. “I’m lonely.”

“Drake is looking to chart dominance to turn the page on one of the most infamous rap battles in music history,” said Ethan Millman in The Hollywood Reporter. Two weeks ago, the Canadian singer-rapper surprised even his fans when he released not one but three albums in a single day, bidding to become the first artist since Michael Jackson to simultaneously hold the first three slots on Billboard’s album chart. It’s impossible not to read the move as Drake’s response to his decisive loss to Kendrick Lamar in a 2024 rap beef that culminated with Lamar enlisting an entire Super Bowl halftime audience to join him in slurring Drake as a pedophile. Drake has sued over the accusation while now daring to tie himself to Jackson, even creating an album cover that shows a hand wearing one of the crystal-covered gloves that once belonged to the deceased accused pedophile. None of this fully makes sense, except that the album rollout is pushback, and whenever people debate who this century’s greatest rapper is, the argument for Drake “goes down to his pure commercial dominance.”

Drake’s three-album onslaught “does more than attempt a comeback,” said Jeff Ihaza in Rolling Stone. “It takes on the Herculean task of reframing the argument entirely.” On the tracks “Ran to Atlanta” and “2 Hard 4 the Radio,” both on the lead album, Iceman, the 39-year-old adopts Atlanta and West Coast sounds so effectively that he upends Lamar’s authenticity diss: that a mixed-race, middle-class rapper from Toronto had no business in the game. Meanwhile, Drake reignites at least a dozen beefs, comparing Lamar to Muggsy Bogues, the shortest NBA player ever, and lashing out at Jay-Z, A$AP Rocky, Dr. Dre, DJ Khaled, and even LeBron James. Across the record’s 69 minutes, though, “the bickering feels tedious.” Better is Habibti, an 11-song album that “finds Drake in romantic territory, embracing the R&B lover boy that audiences first came to love.” Meanwhile, the groove-centric Maid of Honour is “his strongest work since More Life,” released in 2017. From “Hoe Phase” on, Maid of Honour finds Drake “engaging deeply with niche Black regional sounds” and converting those sounds into so many bangers that the borrowing he’s been slagged for is “reframed as a form of cultural fluency.”

“Say what you want about Drake, but music needs someone like him right now,” said Steffanee Wang in The Fader. “A hateable target is one way to look at it; more generously, Drake’s an incredible showman.” No matter how high he ranks among the most streamed artists in the world—third behind Bad Bunny and Taylor Swift—he always acts as if he’s an underdog who needs to go nuclear when he releases solo music. And the strategy works. “Maybe it’s not Drake we wanted, but it’s Drake we got,” and “at least the public is talking for once, together, like we used to.”

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Manil Suri’s new memoir, A Room in Bombay, describes his coming of age in a single room that he shared with his parents before his move to the U.S. at age 20. Below, the author of the award-winning novel The Death of Vishnu recommends six books set in Indian cities.

‘The Heart is a Shifting Sea’ by Elizabeth Flock (2018)

With surprisingly candid reportage, Flock tracks the lives of three middle-class couples as they navigate life in a newly globalized Mumbai. Each couple finds that the notion of love, so romanticized in Bollywood movies, must be forged into something more practical if they are to survive the city’s myriad challenges. Buy it here.

‘Chapal Rani, the Last Queen of Bengal’ by Sandip Roy (2026)

A fascinating account of Chapal Bhaduri, one of the last iconic female impersonators in Kolkata. In a series of interviews, Chapal takes us from memories of his mother through the rise and fall of his career. A must for understanding how attitudes toward gender and sexuality have evolved in India’s larger cities. Buy it here.

‘The Sari Shop’ by Rupa Bajwa (2004)

Bajwa transports you into the heart of Amritsar, with its glitzy bazaars, dusty slums, and plush mansions. The story she weaves, about the widening gap between India’s classes, is ultimately devastating. Sadly, such stories still play out repeatedly in every corner of the country. Buy it here.

‘Ghachar Ghochar’ by Vivek Shanbhag (2017)

India has deep literary traditions in several regional languages, and this delicious novella, translated from Kannada, is a perfect amuse-bouche. The narrator’s family has moved to an affluent part of Bengaluru, and their attempts to head off meddling outsiders are at times subtle, at times pugnacious, but always hilarious. Buy it here.

‘Land Where I Flee’ by Prajwal Parajuly (2013)

Amma’s grandkids travel to remote and hilly Gangtok (a city “infested with stairs”) to celebrate her 84th birthday. Everyone has an acid tongue and brims with spiteful resentment. The resulting snark-fest makes this one of the funniest Indian novels I’ve ever read. Buy it here.

‘The Painter of Signs’ by R.K. Narayan (1976)

This classic work by one of the founding fathers of Indian fiction is set, like most of his novels, in the unhurried fictional town of Malgudi. Narayan’s bittersweet love story about a hapless painter’s crush on an emotionally distant social worker has lost none of its humor, relevance, or unconventionality. Buy it here.

‘This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History’ by Beverly Gage

“In one obvious respect, This Land Is Your Land is perfectly timed,” said Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times. Our country’s looming semiquincentennial inspired historian Beverly Gage to embark on the “companionable” national tour she chronicles here. In 2023 and 2024, the Pulitzer Prize– winning author visited roughly 300 historical sites associated with particular events, choosing to focus on just 13, which she presents in chronological order. Because Gage avoids venerating or condemning her countrymen for past deeds, “what comes through is how complicated and just plain weird a lot of American history is.” The sites she visits are “often marked by contradiction,” which Gage “highlights to powerful effect.” And while her accounts of past events are never divisive, “as a historian, she knows that none of the attempts to fulfill the Declaration’s promise of freedom and equality has ever come easily.”

To anyone expecting an old-fashioned American road trip, with all the minor misadventures such journeys entail, “you’ll be disappointed,” said Ceci Browning in The Times (U.K.). As a guide to the story of the nation as told by its historic sites, though, “it’s pretty great.” Gage begins her tour in Philadelphia at the Museum of the American Revolution, which, she notices, lavishes more attention on George Washington’s tent than the thousands of soldiers he camped alongside. At Washington’s Mount Vernon home, barely a mention is made in the main tour of the people he enslaved. Gage admires the National Women’s Hall of Fame, in Seneca Falls, N.Y., but points out that it’s housed not in a majestic building but in a former sock factory. Does she end up making sense of the American story? “She certainly shows that ‘sense’ of any kind is getting harder and harder to come by” as the sites of many important events either venerate or condemn, simplifying history to make it easier for tourists to absorb.

Though Gage is “an accomplished historian and capable writer,” said Charles Lane in The Wall Street Journal, her “warts-and-all look at the American past dwells, a bit predictably, on the warts.” When the time comes to cover World War II, for example, she takes readers to the remnants of a Japanese internment camp and the atomic bomb testing site in Los Alamos, N.M. “If Gage wanted some celebratory leaven,” she’d have had plenty of options, including, say, the many sites in Dayton, Ohio, devoted to the Wright Brothers. But credit Gage for finding a fresh way to tell a history of the U.S., said Edmund Fawcett in the Financial Times. And while she does her best to stay hopeful, it’s clearly a struggle, given the dour mood of the nation amid its 250th year.

‘Beyond Inheritance: Our Ever-Mutating Cells and a New Understanding of Health’ by Roxanne Khamsi

“People tend to assume that the genes we inherit from our parents are a fixed blueprint for our growth and development,” said Jerome Groopman in The New Yorker. But medical researchers are increasingly interested in the ways our DNA is forever changing, and in Beyond Inheritance, science journalist Roxanne Khamsi “provides a useful guide to this body of research and its far-reaching implications.” Advances in DNA sequencing have revealed that of the 30 trillion cells in the human body, about 4 million are replaced every second, requiring 4 million copies of a code that’s many billions of letters long. Eventually, errors slip in, errors that accumulate. These can be harmful, producing cancer, while some have real benefits.

Still, Khamsi’s “disquieting” book vividly reveals the battle that our cells are forever waging against one another, said David A. Shaywitz in The Wall Street Journal. Cancers begin with a single mutant cell whose offspring compete for dominance while acquiring additional mutations that can render them resistant to medication. As even healthy-seeming people age, they accumulate mutant blood cells that have a growth advantage over healthy cells. This makes many seniors far more susceptible to blood cancers, heart attacks, and strokes. Mutant cells in the aging brain, meanwhile, appear to contribute to cognitive decline. At times, Khamsi “seems almost apologetic for the dismal message she carries,” but, from birth, a process is unfolding within us that will kill us if nothing else does sooner.

“It isn’t all bad news,” said Michael Le Page in New Scientist. Khamsi’s “most astonishing chapter” describes how mutations sometimes correct inherited conditions, including the rare immunological disorder associated with babies who must live in protective bubbles. Still, “helpful mutations are the exception rather than the rule,” and there’s apparently no escaping the damaging ones. Khamsi “doesn’t go on to draw what seems the obvious conclusion: that the only way to dramatically extend lifespans is to redesign the human genome to massively reduce the mutation rate.” While the resulting new beings may look like us, however, they’ll “no longer be human.”

The “AI slopification of music” is here, said Ece Yildirim in Gizmodo. It’s gotten so difficult to decipher which songs are human-made and which are synthetically produced by artificial intelligence that Spotify, the world’s largest audio-streaming service, announced recently it’s going to append a “verification badge” on trusted artists’ pages. It stopped short, however, of an AI ban. That would have hurt outfits like the Velvet Sundown—an indie band that garnered millions of streams on Spotify last summer. Fans later learned that the group was “completely AI-generated,” including a phony album cover featuring the smiling faces of four fake members. Another music streaming platform, Deezer, reported recently that “44% of its daily uploads were AI-generated songs,” and an “overwhelming majority of people couldn’t tell AI-generated music apart from songs written and performed by actual humans.” Humans have been making music for 35,000 years. But AI could be about to end our run.

Billboard allowing fake artists on its charts isn’t helping, said Peter A. Berry in Bloomberg. For 113 years, the music and entertainment brand has served as an “institutional gatekeeper,” and its rankings were always a “competition between human beings and the limits they naturally possess.” But in November, Billboard opened its hallowed charts to nonhumans for the first time, allowing streams of songs by AI performers like country music act Breaking Rust and R&B singer Xania Monet to count alongside Taylor Swift and Beyoncé. If Billboard wants to create a separate chart for AI creations, fine. But humans shouldn’t be “competing against machines” that can “generate abilities that aren’t naturally there.”

“The flood of AI music shows no signs of abating,” said Terrence O’Brien in The Verge, and it won’t as long as platforms keep allowing it. “In survey after survey, public opinion toward AI music is pretty unfavorable,” with people most worried about synthetic artists degrading the music. But “companies are hesitant to penalize AI use in part because they expect it to become a standard tool in the industry” as more artists start to incorporate it into their creative processes in some form.

Eventually, it will be impossible to separate music-based AI use, said Nathan Brackett in Rolling Stone. Because “behind closed doors,” AI tools are “creeping into the workflows of top producers, songwriters, and artists.” Mikey Shulman, CEO of AI music creation platform Suno, compares it to Ozempic: “Everybody is on it, and nobody wants to talk about it.” Most musicians aren’t using AI to generate entire songs from scratch. But producers will, for example, “make funk and soul samples out of AI, rather than license original music or hire musicians.” And that means “for every task that AI streamlines, there might be someone” who used to fill that role “who isn’t paid anymore.”

The New York Times has accused Israeli prison guards and soldiers of systematic sexual abuse of Palestinians, said Rachel O’Donoghue in National Review—but its “shocking” allegations aren’t credible. In a report two weeks ago, Times columnist Nicholas Kristof purported to document widespread rape of Palestinian prisoners by Israeli jailers, which he claims is condoned by the Israeli government. His describes men raped with batons and carrots and the sexual abuse of children, and “adds a grotesque flourish:” the rape of prisoners by dogs trained for that purpose. This shoddy report relies on “dubious sourcing.” Most of the 14 victims cited aren’t named; the two he does name have changed the stories they’ve told. Kristof repeatedly cites claims by a Geneva-based human rights group with ties to Hamas and “a history of promoting inflammatory and unfounded allegations against Israel.” Given how canine biology works, the dog-rape claim “doesn’t pass the most basic smell test,” said Douglas Murray in the New York Post. So why would the Times print it, except to portray Israelis as “absolute monsters”?

This “backlash” to the ugly truth is utterly predictable, said Yuli Novak in The Guardian. Pro-Israel voices assailed the Times, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to sue over the “blood libel.” But Kristof’s report is hardly unique: The torture and rape of Palestinians has long been reported by dozens of former detainees and documented by my own Israeli human rights group. As with its brutal policies in Gaza and the West Bank, Israel’s detention system is built “on the denial of Palestinian humanity.” In assessing the credibility of Kristof’s report, said Andrew Sullivan in his Substack newsletter, it’s important to remember the horrors Americans inflicted at Abu Ghraib—including using dogs to sexually humiliate naked Iraqis. When enemies come to see each other as subhuman, “the darkness is deep.”

After Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of Israelis, it was the Palestinians and their defenders who adamantly denied horrific reports of rape and sexual torture, said Emily Tamkin in The Forward. A new investigation has documented that Hamas’ sexual assault of Israelis was “widespread.” Why do “we automatically believe that yes, this side carries out sexual violence, but no, that side doesn’t?” When you dismiss any allegations that go “against the side you root for,” you’re “not just denying the alleged victims their humanity. You risk robbing yourself of your own humanity, too.”

The nation just got “a preview of what American theocracy would look like,” said Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons in MS.now. Thousands of people gathered on the National Mall last week for Rededicate 250, a White House–backed and taxpayer-funded prayer event that featured “a who’s who of religious-right figures,” including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and evangelical preacher Franklin Graham, who blasted America as “sick with sin, transgenderism, same-sex marriage.” The kickoff for a series of events celebrating America’s 250th anniversary, the rally framed the U.S.’s founding as an explicitly Christian project. It’s the most aggressive attack on the Constitution’s guarantee of religious freedom “that the Christian nationalist movement has yet attempted on American soil.” And it’s one based on a lie: The U.S. was founded 250 years ago as a secular democracy, not a theocracy. “We cannot rededicate something to God when the nation was never dedicated to one narrow religious movement.”

President Trump, who was busy playing golf, appeared in a prerecorded video reading from the biblical book of Chronicles, said Sarah Posner in Talking Points Memo. Still, his supporters spent the day “trying to turn the anniversary of our independence from a king into a spectacle of worship of their wannabe king.” Evangelical podcaster Eric Metaxas even claimed in his speech that God had “raised up” Trump to build a White House ballroom. But Rededicate 250 made it clear that not all Christians are welcome under Trump’s tent, said Amanda Marcotte in Salon. Sure, there was “a smattering of token Catholics” among the speakers—and even one rabbi. But the event was dominated by white, far-right evangelicals. “Promoting voices like these sends a message loud and clear: The rest of you don’t matter.”

Such brazen displays of Christian nationalism could push us into “a vicious cycle,” said Andrew Egger in The Bulwark. The “charlatans” who spoke at Rededicate 250 are increasingly the only “Christians” encountered by irreligious types on the Left. And the more those on the religious right tie Christianity to MAGA, the less they can be surprised “if their political opponents turn out to be hostile not only to MAGA but to Christianity itself.” For those believers who years ago made peace with Trump on the “spurious argument” that only he stood between them and “a political movement hostile to their faith, I worry that they may meet their destiny on the road they took to avoid it.”

What is a third-country deportation?

It’s the removal of a migrant or asylum seeker to a country with which he or she has no legal or personal ties. While only about 17,500 of the more than 800,000 people deported so far during President Trump’s second term have been sent to third countries, those removals are a key part of his immigration agenda. His administration has brokered transfer deals with at least 33 nations—most of them poor and corruptly run—and has paid at least $44 million to those countries in connection with the deportation agreements.

The Department of Homeland Security argues the policy is needed to remove migrants who are “so uniquely barbaric that their own countries won’t take them back.” But most third-country deportees have no criminal record, and most have been granted some form of legal relief that bars the government from shipping them home, where they may face torture, persecution, or death. Some migrants have been removed suddenly from detention centers and flown to countries in Africa, Latin America, or Central Asia with abysmal human rights records. “They took us, they put us on a plane, and they chained us by our hands and feet,” said one Colombian deportee, who didn’t know until mid-flight that his destination was the Democratic Republic of Congo, an active war zone. The U.S., said Nicole Waddersheim of the nonprofit Human Rights Watch, “is doing enforced disappearances.”

Where are deportees being sent?

About 90% have been transferred to Mexico under a Biden-era agreement that let federal agents at the southern border turn back migrants during the 2021–23 immigration surge. But Trump has tried to speed up the pace of deportations by shipping migrants to any country that will take them. In February 2025, 200 people— including 81 children—from countries including Iran, Afghanistan, Angola, and China were flown on two planes to Costa Rica; many of those deported had tried to claim asylum in the U.S. Weeks later, Homeland Security shipped 261 mostly Venezuelan men to the brutal CECOT prison in El Salvador; many reported being tortured and sexually assaulted at the facility. The administration paid El Salvador more than $4 million to hold the men, whom it accused on scant evidence of being gang members. After four months at CECOT, the Venezuelans were sent to their home country. The administration then began looking farther afield for third-country destinations, striking deals with countries including Eswatini, Equatorial Guinea, Rwanda, and South Sudan.

Is this policy legal?

That’s being contested in federal court. The Immigration and Nationality Act outlines a procedure for third-country deportations, and in June 2025 the Supreme Court ruled the administration could deport migrants to countries other than their own without giving them a “meaningful opportunity” to raise fear-based claims of torture. The following month, Immigration and Customs Enforcement said officers could “immediately” begin sending migrants to “alternative” countries, with as little as six hours’ notice. Other courts, though, have rejected the agency’s legal justifications for specific removals: A U.S. district judge last week ordered the Trump administration to return to the U.S. a 55-year-old Colombian asylum seeker with diabetes, hyperlipidemia, and hypothyroidism who was deported to Congo—even after the country refused to accept her because it couldn’t provide sufficient medical care. The plaintiff “meets the standard for irreparable harm,” said Judge Richard Leon, “up to and including death.”

What conditions do deportees face in third countries?

Some have described landing in tropical locations without receiving the appropriate vaccinations and then being locked up by local authorities. Those sent to Eswatini, Africa’s only absolute monarchy, were immediately ferried to a moldy, bug-infested maximum-security facility where, one Laotian migrant told his lawyer, he felt “like a caged animal.” At least two of 26 migrants sent to Cameroon contracted malaria, and journalists who have tried to contact them have had their phones and laptops confiscated. In Equatorial Guinea, deportees are held under armed guard at a remote hotel; some have contracted typhoid fever. Weeks after 11 deportees arrived in Ghana, 10 were driven to its border with Togo and told to cross over on foot. That was especially terrifying for two of the female deportees.

Why was that?

Because they were Togolese and had fled to the U.S. to escape the threat of genital mutilation and forced marriage. “In this country, nobody can help me,” said one of the women, who is now in hiding in Togo. U.S. law prohibits asylum seekers from being sent to their home country if their “life or freedom would be threatened.” But there’s no legal mechanism to stop a migrant from being deported to a third country, which then transfers them home. In November, 50 humanitarian parole recipients from Ukraine were flown to Poland and then escorted across the border to their wartorn homeland. One man on the plane “was a 36-year-old who came to America as a child 20 years ago,” said a deportee. “He hardly speaks any Ukrainian.”

Are more deportations in the works?

The Trump administration is drawing up plans to send 1,100 Afghan nationals currently housed at a U.S. military base in Qatar to Congo. The group includes former interpreters and special forces that fought alongside U.S. troops. Here in the U.S., more than 24,000 migrants have received third-country removal orders and are awaiting deportation. “It is a country I don’t know, I have no family there, I don’t speak their language,” said Bolivian asylum seeker José Yugar-Cruz, 37, who is set to be deported to Congo. “I keep thinking it’s a nightmare that I will wake up from.”

“He came, he saw, he left without much to show for it,” said David Smith in The Guardian. Throughout his state visit to Beijing two weeks ago, President Trump slathered compliments on Xi Jinping, praising China’s president-for-life as a “great leader” who is “very tall.” But Trump’s flattery got him nowhere. After 43 hours, he flew home having secured only the “vague outlines” of a few commercial deals, no agreement to slow the AI arms race, and no help on Iran, which China could pressure to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. In fairness, Trump did extract a promise from Xi to send him seeds from some rosebushes he admired.

Trump reciprocated with a far more valuable gift, said The Economist: doubt over U.S. support for Taiwan. Despite a Reagan-era commitment to never negotiate with China over arms sales to the island nation — which Beijing considers a rogue province — Trump said he was delaying approval of a $14 billion weapons sale to Taiwan, calling it a “good negotiating chip” in talks with Beijing. As for America’s long-standing posture of strategic ambiguity on whether U.S. forces would defend Taiwan from a Chinese attack, Trump told reporters on the flight home: “The last thing we need right now is a war that’s 9,500 miles away.”

“Not so fast,” said Gerard Baker in The Wall Street Journal. Trump says a lot of things, particularly in the “afterglow” of a state visit. But Secretary of State Marco Rubio quickly clarified that our Taiwan policy is “unchanged,” and U.S. law requires Washington to give Taiwan the means to defend itself. But the change in China’s posture was unmistakable. An emboldened Xi warned of looming “clashes and even conflicts” over Taiwan and cautioned Trump to avoid the “Thucydides trap,” whereby a declining power’s fear of a rising one draws both into war. Once the classical reference was explained to our president, Trump insisted Xi had been slighting America’s decline under “Sleepy Joe Biden.” But Xi’s meaning was plain, as is China’s new “confidence.”

It’s easy to overlearn the lessons of history, said Lydia Polgreen in The New York Times. In his chronicle of the Peloponnesian War (431–404 B.C.), the ancient Greek historian Thucydides charts the violence that erupted when Athens — an ambitious power much like Xi’s China — “challenged the pre-eminence of Sparta.” That scenario has repeated throughout history, “with the ambition and aggression of the challenger almost always ending in bloodshed.” But the current threat to the U.S.-led global order is not China so much as the chaos Trump has unleashed with his bullying of allies, his self-sabotaging tariffs, and his epic miscalculation in Iran. “America is overthrowing America.”

Xi should check his hubris, said Ross Douthat, also in the Times. For the record, Sparta defeated upstart Athens in the Peloponnesian War, and the post-Covid U.S. economy has actually outpaced China’s in recent years. Longer term, China’s “crashing” birth rate — now one child per woman and falling — will make it “incredibly difficult” to sustain economic growth. As for the Thucydides trap, “China shouldn’t worry,” said Paul Krugman in his Substack newsletter. America is declining, but we’re not about to “lash out at a rising China” while we’re led by a self-absorbed, “pathetic” president whose main message to Americans, upon returning home, was that Xi has nice ballrooms and therefore he deserves one, too. If you want classical analogies, “think of America right now as the Roman Empire under Caligula, although Caligula didn’t do anything like as much damage.”

What happened

President Trump’s retribution tour rolled on with two more rivals losing to Trump-endorsed challengers in primaries last week, further cementing his hold over the Republican Party. Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, an outspoken libertarian critic of Trump’s war in Iran and his handling of the Epstein files, lost by nearly 10 percentage points to former Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein. It was the most expensive House primary in history, drawing more than $32 million in ad spending. The president intensified his attacks on Massie in recent weeks, calling him “a moron” at the National Prayer Breakfast, and urging supporters to vote for his handpicked challenger. In Louisiana, voters swept out Sen. Bill Cassidy, who tried but failed to overcome his decision to vote to convict Trump in his 2021 impeachment trial. That “disloyalty,” Trump wrote on social media, “is now a part of legend.”

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) may be next on the chopping block after an emboldened Trump endorsed his primary challenger, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Trump called Cornyn “a good man,” but said he wasn’t “supportive of me when times were tough.” Brad Raffensperger, who defied Trump’s attempt to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results, also got trounced in his gubernatorial primary, finishing behind two pro-Trump candidates. In Pennsylvania, retired firefighter and union leader Bob Brooks—endorsed by both the Keystone State’s moderate Gov. Josh Shapiro and progressives like Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders—won a crowded Democratic congressional primary in a closely watched swing district.

What the columnists said

“Massie’s defeat may be the end of GOP dissent,” said Mary Ellen Klas in Bloomberg, at least among elected officials who still need to face voters. Massie voted with Trump 90% of the time. But he “dared to challenge the president over his abandoned campaign promises,” and he got crushed by Trump-faithful older voters. GOP lawmakers don’t answer to their constituents or even their own values anymore. The man in the Oval Office alone “commands absolute loyalty.”

Yet Trump has created a “conundrum,” said Shane Goldmacher in The New York Times. He seems “more keen to leverage his popularity with the MAGA base” to settle scores than “to repair his image among the independents his party will need” in November’s midterms. His approval ratings continue to crater, including in one New York Times/Siena survey that shows only 26% of independents support the job he’s doing.

The Paxton endorsement made “Chuck Schumer’s day,” said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. The well-respected Cornyn “has been a reliable vote” for Trump for years and has shown “four terms over” that he can beat Democrats in November. The scandal-ridden Paxton, on the other hand, has been impeached by his own party, been accused of bribery, and confessed to infidelity. It’s no surprise that polls show he’s locked in a “dead heat” with Democratic nominee James Talarico, who could help flip the Senate. If that happens, “Trump will deserve ‘COMPLETE AND TOTAL’ credit, as he likes to put it.”

What happened

In a move that stunned government ethics experts, the Trump administration last week rolled out a $1.8 billion fund to compensate supposed victims of Biden-era “lawfare” and barred the IRS from pursuing “any and all” pending tax claims against the president, his family, or his businesses. “This is one of the single most corrupt acts in American history,” said Donald Sherman of the non-partisan Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. The “anti-weaponization” fund, set at $1.776 billion in a nod to America’s founding, was created by the Justice Department to settle a $10 billion suit President Trump brought against the IRS for failing to stop the leak of his tax returns during his first term. Acting attorney general Todd Blanche said the fund will compensate people targeted under Biden for “political, personal, or ideological reasons,” and that Trump and his family will not receive payouts.

Blanche refused to rule out payment to rioters convicted of assaulting police in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Trump said he wasn’t involved in creating the fund, but that it would aid people who were “imprisoned wrongly” and who “turned out to be right.” Democrats assailed what they called a “slush fund” for Trump’s allies. It’s “nothing short of the sitting president of the United States looting from the Treasury for his own gain,” said Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.). Two police officers who clashed with rioters on Jan. 6 sued to block the fund, saying it would help “finance the insurrectionists and paramilitary groups that commit violence” in Trump’s name. Sen. John Thune, the top Senate Republican, said he was “not a big fan” of the fund and expected it to receive a “full vetting” from lawmakers.

What the columnists said

This is Trump’s “most brazen theft of taxpayer cash yet,” said Andrew Egger in The Bulwark. Everything about this “obscene” setup is designed to “short-circuit all outside accountability.” Blanche’s order says the U.S. has “no liability” for “misuse of the funds.” And the five-person panel Blanche will pick to run the fund will not only get to “keep secret how they’re making disbursement decisions, they can also keep a lid on who’s getting paid.” This is “emperor stuff” and grounds for impeachment under any Congress with “a shred of dignity.”

Trump’s IRS lawsuit was bad, said National Review in an editorial. But this “boondoggle” is even worse. It amounts to a new government program not authorized by Congress, created under the “fictional pretense” of settling a dubious lawsuit the presiding judge seemed poised to throw out. The disbursement of the money through the U.S. Judgment Fund—a pot of money used to settle lawsuits against the U.S.—“may be legal.” But there’s “nothing in the Constitution that requires Congress to passively let this sort of thing happen.”

The “most egregious part” is the dropping of all tax audits of Trump and his family, said Jamelle Bouie in The New York Times. It shields them from “any scrutiny of their business deals and financial arrangements,” and comes just after financial disclosures revealed that Trump bought and sold stocks worth at least $220 million—including in companies he’s promoted—in the first quarter of the year. The financial stakes for Trump are significant: In 2024, the Times reported Trump could face a more than $100 million tax liability.

This grift couldn’t be more blatant if Trump walked out of Fort Knox with a “shopping cart filled with gold bullion,” said David Rothkopf in the Daily Beast. And it’s just the cherry atop a vast “campaign of corruption.” He’s accepted a luxury jet from Qatar, solicited donations “to projects designed to glorify him,” doled out pardons to deep-pocketed donors, sold Trump watches and other “swag,” and engaged in shady crypto ventures that have tripled his wealth to an estimated $6.5 billion. “We are no longer a shining city on the hill. We are instead a stinking cesspool of corruption, a republic for the rapacious.”

Look beyond the pure corruption and you’ll see an even uglier message in this fund, said Jonathan Chait in The Atlantic. Trump has all but declared that he’s going to use this $1.8 billion to reward the insurrectionists who were punished for trying to violently overturn his 2020 election loss. He could have handed out that cash toward the end of his term, but he’s doing it now—as the midterms approach and his popularity plummets—“to communicate directly that loyal allies can expect lavish rewards.” As Republicans sit quietly or tut-tut from the sidelines, “his intentions grow only more naked.”

Pagosa Springs, Colo.

Elk Pointe Estate, a 2005 five-bedroom southern Colorado log house, is on a peninsula surrounded by Hidden Valley Lake. The living room features whole log beams, arched windows, and an antler chandelier; the kitchen has paneled appliances and a breakfast cove.

On more than 45 acres, the property includes patios with mountain views, a guesthouse, a dog run, a two-story barn, and a greenhouse dome. $8,950,000. Zach Morse, Legacy Properties West Sotheby’s International Realty, (970) 391-2600

Point Arena, Calif.

On the Mendocino coast, the 1990 Frog Song Farm features full log construction and visible corner joints. The two-bedroom’s dramatic double-height great room includes a log staircase and a conical fireplace with a round stone base.

The 30-plus-acre ocean-view property includes a two-bedroom guesthouse, a one-bedroom barn house, abundant gardens, a greenhouse, creeks, wooded trails, and a pond. $2,295,000. Tracy Wolfson, Engel & Völkers San Francisco, Mendocino Branch, (707) 272-5733

Bowen Island, British Columbia

Designed by Murray Arnott, this 1995 western red cedar log home is about an hour from Vancouver by ferry. The three-bedroom’s curved tower holds an open-plan living area with a rounded stone fireplace, angled windows that overlook the forest and Killarney Lake, and a rustic-modern kitchen with skylights; a carved staircase leads to a primary suite.

The 2.5-acre property features mature trees and is close to shops. $1,618,000. Mary Lynn Machado, Macdonald Realty Ltd./Luxury Portfolio International, (604) 220-7085

Pine Plains, N.Y.

This 170-acre estate designed by architect Lloyd Taft is anchored by a 1991 log-and-stone lodge near Millbrook. The six-bedroom’s vaulted great room has a floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace and French doors to a deck, with a billiards loft above.

The property includes three connected guest cabins, a triple-height sports barn, a pickleball court, a swimming hole, a football field, trails, and orchards—plus a party barn, bar, and courtyard. $7,750,000. George Langa, Houlihan Lawrence—Millbrook, (845)242-6314

Vail, Colo.

Built in 1997, this updated Swiss-chalet-style five-bedroom log home is less than 10 minutes from Vail Village. The great room’s pale logs with visible chinking contrast with ultra white floors and drywall. The modern kitchen has butcher-block counters and an arched wood dining nook, and the primary suite includes a three-sided fireplace and oxygenation to counter high altitude.

A new deck includes a barrel sauna, hot tub, and firepit. $5,675,000. Brad Cohn, Compass Vail, (970) 688-1409

Florida, Mass.

Located in the Berkshires outside the town of North Adams, this 2022 home is built with 8-inch logs and sits on 1.5 acres. The house features tongue-and-groove walls, wide-plank wood floors, an open kitchen with stainless appliances, and two main-level bedrooms and an expansive loft above.

The unfinished basement is renovation-ready. Yards and mature trees surround the home, while trails, the Deerfield River, and Mass MoCA are nearby. $349,000. Jeffrey Loholdt, Engel & Völkers Wellesley, (413) 652-7423

‘Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu’

Directed by Jon Favreau (PG-13)

★★

“It’s time to ask for more,” said Kate Erbland in IndieWire. While this first new Star Wars movie in seven years is “charming enough in the moment,” it’s “almost instantly forgettable,” a spin-off of a Star Wars TV series that’s little more than “three good-enough TV episodes smushed together.” Pedro Pascal is back as the masked bounty hunter who is the title character of Disney+’s The Mandalorian. Mando, as usual, is accompanied by the “still very cute” Grogu, aka Baby Yoda. But shouldn’t a Star Wars movie reach for more?

To me, “the film’s relative modesty comes as something of a relief,” said Johnny Oleksinski in the New York Post. “Freed from the burden of canonical responsibility,” it’s nothing but “flighty fun,” a “Western-y” space adventure in which Mando has been enlisted to rescue Jabba the Hutt’s son, Rotta, from captors as part of a larger mission to take out a baddie who’d been allied with the recently fallen Empire. Sigourney Weaver even makes an appearance. Granted, none of the many action sequences match the scale of those in the 2015–19 Star Wars movie trilogy. But the action scenes are exciting in their own right, helping to make this film “a likable-enough one-off.” Still, the Star Wars franchise “once led the culture with its imagery, swagger, and style,” said Mark Kennedy in the Associated Press. This entry feels merely formulaic, with little on the line except the outcome of a stray assignment for one bounty hunter. “You used to leave a new Star Wars movie on a cloud. Here, that galaxy is far, far away.”

‘I Love Boosters’

Directed by Boots Riley (R)

★★★

“If you’re wondering whether Boots Riley has toned down his brash satirical style, have no fear,” said Owen Gleiberman in Variety. The rapper turned director’s first film since 2018’s acclaimed Sorry to Bother You is “every bit as out there, maybe more so.” Keke Palmer plays Corvette, the leader of a three-woman gang of shoplifters who resell stolen high-end clothes and have targeted a billionaire designer played with comic flair by Demi Moore. But Riley unleashes wild departures from reality, and “you either go with it or you don’t.”

In the movie’s second half, “Riley turns the volume up on the surreal meter way past 11,” said Brian Tallerico in RogerEbert.com. After Corvette’s cause is taken up by a fourth booster who can teleport, this energetic send-up of fashion, capitalist exploitation, and cultural appropriation “goes to so many impossible, ridiculous places that Riley sometimes feels like he loses a grip on the messaging.” Still, “there’s something invigorating about seeing an artist like Riley given the freedom to just go for it.” Largely thanks to Palmer, the movie never fully falls apart, said Chase Hutchinson in The Wrap. “As always,” the One of Them Days star is “a captivating, comedic jolt of energy,” and she also provides “the emotional heft the film needs at key moments.” Riley, for all his comic flourishes, clearly roots for everybody who’s trying to survive in our cutthroat world and is helping others do the same. Though he traffics in spiky cynicism, “it’s a cynicism that is cut with a more earnest belief in people.”

‘Obsession’

Directed by Curry Barker (R)

★★★

This hit theatrical debut from 26-year-old Curry Barker is “the best kind of nightmare,” said Nick Schager in the Daily Beast. “Knotty, amusing, and absolutely unhinged,” Barker’s low-budget horror breakthrough uses a simple be-careful-what-you-wish-for premise to dramatize the destructive selfishness of a certain breed of male desire for female attention. Michael Johnston plays Bear, a meek young man who makes a wish using a novelty store item that turns Nikki, his longtime crush, into an obsessively devoted girlfriend—so devoted that she’s ready to kill to keep anyone from coming between her and her man.

In Act 3, “Barker puts the pedal to the metal, dishing out gore with the glee of a genre purist.” A fully satisfying exploration of the themes Barker raises “would take a far more gifted filmmaker,” said Bilge Ebiri in NYMag.com. “Still, Obsession carries us along,” primarily because Inde Navarrette, playing Nikki, “so beautifully switches between sickly sweet devotion and wailing, tormented lovesickness.” Barker, who got his start as a YouTube prankster, also sprinkles in weird humor, and he clears the bar that any horror flick must: “We wish we could leave the theater, but we feel we must see what happens next.” Navarrette, previously known mostly for TV roles, “delivers the kind of instant classic horror performance that will surely traumatize Gen Z for years,” said Katie Walsh in the Chicago Tribune. At least it’ll traumatize Gen Z men, who apparently find nothing more terrifying than an unpredictable woman.

Good news for college grads, who “are finally catching a break in this job market,” said Ray A. Smith and Te-Ping Chen in The Wall Street Journal. After years of difficult hiring prospects for those leaving the comfort of campus, recent data suggests the tide may be turning. Unemployment among 20-to-24-year-olds with degrees dropped to 5.3% in March, down from a decade high—excluding the pandemic’s early months—of 8.9% last fall. “A widely watched survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers” (NACE) recently showed that employers are expected “to boost new-graduate hires by 5.6% this spring,” well above the 1.6% expected. And another survey from ZipRecruiter found that “nearly a third of employers planned to hire a greater number of entry-level workers this year,” perhaps a sign that after years of cuts to the lowest rungs of the labor market, more businesses “feel the need to replenish their pipelines.”

Notably, 90% of the NACE survey respondents said hiring college grads was now “important to their success,” said Bruce Crumley in Inc. Businesses may be starting to learn a hard lesson after turning over their entry-level jobs to artificial intelligence that isn’t yet up to the task. “Many are now more inclined to use the tools to improve the performance of new hires in those positions rather than replace them.” Small businesses are leading the way with college grad hiring, said Sherin Shibu in Entrepreneur. Owners say they are “looking for recent graduates specifically for their digital fluency,” and hands-on roles, like field manager and service technician, are growing fast “as demand shifts toward work that’s harder to automate.”

There’s no shortage of available jobs for young people, said Jason Altmire in The Washington Post. There were 6.9 million job openings in February, even as 7.6 million Americans were filing for unemployment. What gives? Most of the openings were in trades that today’s young workers aren’t equipped to fill. “Placing the four-year degree on a pedestal for decades has limited the interests of students and misaligned workers and jobs, exacerbating workforce shortages across trade professions.” This problem will only worsen as older electricians, mechanics, welders, and many others retire. These jobs “keep the economy running.” Why can’t more young people do them?

Don’t blame the kids, said Ryu Spaeth in New York. They’ve been “cursed.” Not only was their high school experience “wrecked” by the coronavirus but now they’re entering the labor market during “AI’s job-killing, human-replacing revolution.” A school of thought holds that, “whatever challenges lie in the future, people will manage to adapt and flourish.” But let’s take some pity on those trying to start a career now.

‘It’s Been Awful’ by Isaiah Rashad

★★★

Isaiah Rashad’s new top-20 album is “as concise a statement about men in rap struggling with their sexuality as has ever been made,” said Mosi Reeves in Rolling Stone. Rashad, a longtime labelmate of SZA and Kendrick Lamar, was forced to grapple publicly with his bisexuality in 2022 when he appeared in sex tapes that were leaked not long after his previous album reached Billboard’s top 10. On this record, the Tennessee-raised songwriter and producer is as bracingly honest about his sexual fluidity as he is about his reliance on booze, pills, and powders. But he’s also “subtly pushing the art forward” as he puts his own stamp on “the muddy, melancholy Southern blues of mid-’90s rap.” While some listeners may find the weight of the 35-year-old’s confessions too heavy, said Luke Morgan Britton in NME, “it’s Rashad’s stark specificity that makes the lyrics cut through.” And when the music lands, as it “often does,” it “sounds like Southern rap filtered through a roof-down, summer-drive R&B haze.” That blend hasn’t made its creator a superstar yet. Starting now, “nobody should be sleeping on Isaiah Rashad any longer.”

‘Train on the Island’ by Aldous Harding

★★★★

It’s “a fool’s errand” to try to locate the real Aldous Harding on any of her albums, said Jayson Greene in Pitchfork. On her new LP, a career best, the 35-year-old New Zealander “steps closer than ever to the camera lens without coming into focus” but only because she seems to present a new “I” on every song. Across four previous albums, “each a little deeper and stranger than the last,” Harding has been moving toward Train on the Island, an album of “warm and inviting” piano-and-guitar-driven music that’s also varied enough to serve as her ideal playground. Harding “cuts a divisive figure in the world of alt-rock,” said Alexis Petridis in The Guardian. Devotees find her cryptic lyrics and sometimes mannered vocals fascinating; skeptics find her too self-consciously weird. But “what isn’t really up for question is her skill as a songwriter.” Though the mood on this record “tends to the cozy and languorous,” the most striking thing about its 10 tunes is “how tightly written and, in their own understated way, punchy they are.” All that’s required to enjoy it is an appreciation of “utterly lovely” melodies set atop music “that’s subtle but never bland.”

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Philosopher Slavoj Zizek is the author of more than 50 books, including Liberal Fascisms, a new essay collection that explores authoritarianism packaged as freemarket capitalism. He credits the novels below with presenting catastrophe in ways that changed his thinking.

‘The Drowned World’ by J.G. Ballard (1962)

Ballard depicts a postapocalyptic future in which global warming has rendered much of the planet uninhabitable. In a flooded London, several characters take advantage of societal collapse to fulfill unconscious urges. The idea that a mega catastrophe could create an opportunity to experience jouissance—surrender to bliss—profoundly influenced me. Buy it here.

‘The Three-Body Problem’ by Liu Cixin (2008)

In Liu’s masterpiece, Earth is confronted with a planet whose unpredictable suns cause severe temperature shifts. I see it as Earth in the near future: Are we facing something for which the only appropriate term is “the end of nature”? Buy it here.

‘Never Let Me Go’ by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)

This is arguably the most depressing novel I’ve ever read, presenting a society in which human clones are created solely to produce a supply of healthy organs, a practice that requires a major shift in public morals. Is this not our situation today? We cope with new threats by reshaping our ethical principles. Buy it here.

‘I Who Have Never Known Men’ by Jacqueline Harpman (1995)

Perhaps even darker is this novel about a girl and 39 women held prisoner in a bunker. When the male guards flee, the captives emerge into a barren plain, and the girl, the last to survive, writes about her life. Existentially, I feel like the girl: Even in a crowd, I am totally alone. My words will probably never reach their addressee, someone who will read them properly. Buy it here.

‘The Ministry for the Future’ by Kim Stanley Robinson (2020)

Socialist realism at its most noble and convincing. In the near future, a global heat wave that begins in India kills millions and spreads around the world. But humans decide on cooperation and gradually cope with the threat. Buy it here.

‘Station Eleven’ by Emily St. John Mandel (2014)

An apocalyptic novel with a sort of happy ending. After an epidemic devastates humanity, one group, the Traveling Symphony, connects disparate survivors by performing Shakespeare. I accept that in our catastrophic predicament we need more than art to survive. Buy it here.

‘The Things We Never Say’ by Elizabeth Strout

“The Things We Never Say is classic Elizabeth Strout,” said Adam Begley in The Atlantic. There’s the usual New England setting, some family secrets, and an unhappy marriage. There are a few differences, though. We’re not in Maine, the Pulitzer Prize winner’s usual locale, but in coastal Massachusetts, where we’re following a protagonist very unlike Strout’s most famous creation, the brittle, blunt Olive Kittredge. Artie Dam is a 57-year-old married high-school history teacher who is widely beloved by his students. Still, Artie, “suffers from the most common ailment in Strout’s world: loneliness.” When we meet him, he’s even contemplating suicide. However, it’s not a mortal threat that carries the story; it’s Strout’s usual magic—“harpooning the reader with language as plain as a Congregational church and a cast of characters no more exotic than your neighbors.”

“Strout’s capacious empathy and rigorous attention to the nuances of human behavior and psychology are as evident as ever,” said Priscilla Gilman in The Boston Globe. A decade after a fatal tragedy that Artie had no part in but has believably infected his relationships with his wife and son, Artie feels his isolation growing when his friend Flossie, one of the only people he feels he can confide in, reveals she’s moving away. Unfortunately, “this is by far Strout’s bleakest book,” and it isn’t helped by also being her most political, as she has tied Artie’s despair in part to the imminent 2024 re-election of President Trump. Her story “seems to lose its bearings” because she tries to make it a parable for where America is headed. You can agree that Trump is ruining the country and still not want to hear the 2024 or 2025 details repeated here, said Maggie Shipstead in The New York Times. “On the other hand, there’s a poignancy to the way Strout sets Artie’s personal disillusionment against the backdrop of a larger grief.”

Despite the novel’s accretion of tragedies new or remembered, said Ron Charles in his Substack newsletter, “the story keeps ascending toward a sense of astonishment at the interior complexity of life.” Artie eventually expresses amazement at the hidden layers of every person he knows, including himself. Yet he remains a relative innocent for a man his age, unable to accept the griminess of the world as it is outside his classroom. Strout has said she loves him, and while “such affection would typically be deadly for a serious novel,” hers is “the love of a Protestant God who spares us no agony on the path to beatitude.” At the end of his journey, he finds no simple answers. Still, the universe “feels a little more comprehensible with a novel this good in it.”

‘Selling Opportunity: The Story of Mary Kay’ by Mary Lisa Gavenas

“Mary Kay Ash could move product, regardless of what the product was,” said Dan Piepenbring in Harper’s. Long before 1963, when she founded the successful cosmetics company that bears her name, the Texas native established herself as a champion in-person seller of ointments, mitten dusters, and a wide range of other products. Ash wanted housewives everywhere to chase autonomy with similar tenacity, and by the time she died at 83 in 2001, hundreds of thousands of Mary Kay “consultants” were signed up to sell the company’s beauty items from Houston to Beijing. Author Mary Lisa Gavenas acknowledges in her new biography of Ash that most such salespeople fail, but she brushes worry aside, proving “more concerned with Mary Kay’s singular place in the peddler pantheon.”

Nothing in Ash’s family background predicted the success she achieved, said Barbara Spindel in The Wall Street Journal. At age 10, she was already running a household because her father was an invalid and her mother needed to work. A mother of two herself by 19, Ash remained ambitious enough that she was quick to sign on with Stanley Home Products shortly after the direct-sales outfit opened its sales force to women. Over the subsequent two decades, doors remained closed to her, but she absorbed enough capitalist scripture to go solo at 45, eventually becoming the first female CEO of a company listed by the New York Stock Exchange. In Gavenas’ “enthralling” account of the growth years, the blond-wigged, aphorism-spouting Ash turns out to be “a vivid presence.”

There are three stories told here, said Mimi Swartz in Texas Monthly. Besides Ash’s biography, readers get a history of the limits put on women’s financial independence and the evolution of in-home sales parties into the multilevel marketing model Mary Kay still employs today. But while Gavenas “has a gift for storytelling,” her book says too little about how that model operates as a kind of pyramid scheme in which early participants reap rewards for recruiting other sales representatives while the latecomers often lose money and hope. Though it’s not Ash’s fault that men still outearn women, “maybe she didn’t do as much as legend would have it to rectify the situation.”

The Trump administration has “pulled a 180” on AI oversight, said Tina Nguyen in The Verge. For most of his second term, President Trump has been a vocal champion of the artificial intelligence industry. Heeding the advice of his AI czar, venture capitalist David Sacks, he repealed former president Joe Biden’s AI safety orders, lifted export controls on AI chips, and even threatened to sue states that tried to pass and enforce their own AI regulations.

Suddenly, though, the administration has changed its tune. The New York Times reported two weeks ago that the White House is considering an executive order that would create a working group to examine potential AI oversight procedures, including “a formal government review process” of new AI models before they’re released. That shift was the result of three big changes. First, the arrival of Anthropic’s powerful new Mythos model—which has superior hacking abilities—“spooked the national security apparatus.” Then other countries began to craft their own AI regulations. And finally, Sacks was pushed out of his czar role in March, “giving Silicon Valley one less mechanism to pitch an industry-friendly, ‘innovation-at-all-costs’ agenda to Trump.”

Trump tends to declare a “whole bunch of things to be stupid” only to later realize they were “important and structurally necessary,” said Mike Masnick in TechDirt. He criticized the Biden administration for working with OpenAI and Anthropic on policies such as “voluntary testing” of frontier models. That effort drew howls of protest from tech bros and VCs like Marc Andreessen, who later “went all in for Trump” in the election. Joke’s on them. Trump’s new plan is even more “stringent and compliance-oriented” than Biden’s. The administration should have taken AI fears seriously all along, said Casey Newton in Platformer. But it’s better late than never. “The models are getting more capable—and more dangerous.”

AI safety shouldn’t be a partisan issue, said Dean Ball and Ben Buchanan in The New York Times. There’s commonsense action that Congress can take immediately “to tighten controls on the critical technologies that China needs,” like AI chips. It should work to “safeguard kids’ safety through age limits and parental controls.” And there should be “appropriate guardrails on AI development,” beginning with mandatory audits of developers’ safety claims “by independent expert bodies overseen by the government.” But the U.S. under Trump will likely never lead the way on regulating AI, said Parmy Olson in Bloomberg. His proposed working group would include tech execs, letting them “write the rules meant to police them.” Abroad, however, regulation has sharper teeth. The London-based AI Security Institute is “the best-funded AI vetting agency in the world,” and the only government agency Anthropic trusted with Mythos. That’s the one to watch.

Ted Turner made television news a pervasive presence. Before he started the first 24-hour cable news channel, the Cable News Network, in 1980, Americans got their news from the three major networks’ 6:30 p.m. broadcasts. By 7 p.m., Turner said, “the news was over.” CNN upended that model, and it was just one of Turner’s achievements. He built the Atlanta-based Turner Broadcasting System into a juggernaut incorporating seven cable networks. A ferocious competitor, he owned three sports teams, including the Atlanta Braves, and skippered his yacht to a win in the 1977 America’s Cup. Along the way he piled up billions of dollars but later gave much of it to charity, and bought and conserved nearly 2 million acres of wildland.

Turner did none of this quietly. Headstrong and an incorrigible womanizer whose three wives included actress Jane Fonda, the “Mouth of the South” challenged rival Rupert Murdoch to a fistfight, called Christianity “a religion for losers,” and compared himself to Winston Churchill and Alexander the Great. “If only I had a little humility,” he once said, “I’d be perfect.”

Raised in Savannah, Ga., Robert Edward Turner III was shaped by his “complicated relationship with his father,” an abusive drunk who ran a billboard company, said The Wall Street Journal. Turner both feared him and sought his approval. After military school he attended Brown University, but he was suspended for bedding a woman in his dorm room; he left Brown and returned to work for his dad. When the elder Turner shot himself dead in the bathtub, Turner inherited the business at 24. He “buried his shock and grief in work,” said CNN.com. He bought up radio stations, then a struggling Atlanta TV station. He turned it around by acquiring the rights to Braves games, and as it became profitable “he started to think bigger.” Beaming the TV signal up to a satellite, he created what became TBS, “cable TV’s first superstation,” reaching 2 million subscribers with a lineup of sports, movies, and sitcoms.

Turner’s move into 24-hour news was seen as a “major gamble,” said The Washington Post, and CNN, which went live on June 1, 1980, had a rocky start. “Initially laughed off” due to its “lowbudget look” and technical snafus, it bled tens of millions of dollars in its first five years. But gradually it “upended the way news was consumed, riveting audiences” by covering stories such as the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall as they unfolded. CNN’s fortunes took a leap during the 1991 Gulf War, said the Associated Press. While most TV journalists fled Baghdad, CNN correspondents stayed put and captured vivid scenes, including anti-aircraft tracers lighting up the sky and reporters “flinching from the concussion of bombs.” CNN’s coverage won a Peabody Award, and in 1991 Turner was named Time’s man of the year.

As he notched business wins, Turner earned a reputation “for philandering, drunkenness, and public misconduct,” said The New York Times. His marriages were “rocked by open displays of infidelity,” and he “further tarnished his image by uttering ethnic and racial slurs.” But he “could nonetheless be a man of great charm.” Fonda, his wife from 1991 to 2001, called him “a 3D-stereophonic, Shakespearean-level sound-and-light show” and the public saw him as a lovable rogue. Turner continued to expand TBS, buying the Hanna-Barbera catalog and the MGM film library to create the Cartoon Network and Turner Classic Movies. But by the mid-1990s, he “appeared to have reached the limit of his empire-building ambitions.” In a move he later termed a terrible mistake, he sold TBS to Time Warner, giving up an operational role. When Time Warner made what would prove a disastrous merger with AOL in 2001, he resigned amid reports he’d been forced aside, said NBCNews.com. That “effectively marked the end of his reign as a media industry chief.”

In the ensuing years Turner threw himself into philanthropy and conservation, said The Telegraph (U.K.). He donated $1 billion to U.N. charities and “supported a range of environmental initiatives.” Buying land in a dozen states, he acquired the nation’s largest herd of bison and started the bison-focused chain Ted’s Montana Grill. In 2018, Turner revealed he had Lewy body dementia, a degenerative brain disorder. Despite his regrets over the Time Warner debacle, he looked back fondly on a career he said was guided less by a profit motive than a spirit of adventure. “Hardly anybody wins all the time,” he said in 2008. “I’ve won more than most.”

When faced with published reports calling you “an out-of-control drinker,” said Annabella Rosciglione in the Daily Beast, it’s best not to hand out “personalized, branded bottles of bourbon.”

Journalist Sarah Fitzpatrick two weeks ago followed up her recent article in The Atlantic on FBI Director Kash Patel’s reported binge drinking—which triggered him to file a $250 million defamation lawsuit—with a “bombshell” new revelation that he travels with bourbon bottles engraved with “Ka$h Patel” and an FBI badge. According to the article, Patel has distributed this “boozy merch” at such venues as the Milan Winter Olympics and an FBI training seminar taught by Ultimate Fighting Championship athletes. When one bottle mysteriously disappeared from the training seminar, a panicky Patel seemed to “lose his mind” and threatened to polygraph-test his staff to find the culprit. An FBI spokesman claimed that it’s common practice for directors to hand out gifts. But the bureau actually frowns on agents drinking, and when Fitzpatrick asked a former longtime official whether directors commonly handed out liquor, “he burst out laughing.”

Patel is again looking to punish The Atlantic journalist for her “deeply unflattering account,” said Ken Dilanian and Carol Leonnig in MS.now. Two insiders claim the FBI launched a criminal investigation of Fitzpatrick to find her sources—even though there’s no national security justification. Agency spokesman Ben Williamson denied Fitzpatrick is under investigation. But Patel has reportedly entered panic mode about his job. He has good reason for fear, said Nellie Bowles in The Free Press. President Trump is famously a teetotaler, and he may be running out of patience for a hard-partying subordinate who “seems to be taking his cues for the job from Bond movies and frat houses.”

The “frat boy” is likely safe for now, said Nick Catoggio in The Dispatch. The public seems largely indifferent to reports of gross mismanagement and chaos at the FBI, negating the need for a fall guy. And Patel has dutifully used the FBI to investigate the 2020 election and Trump’s enemies, producing “embarrassingly flimsy indictments” that prove only that he’s loyal. Patel embodies MAGA populism, proving that an “unfit, unprofessional, embarrassing yutz” is no improvement on his “deep state” predecessors. If and when Trump does finally fire this incompetent “chud” over an even greater embarrassment, it will “feel like a verdict on this entire administration.”

White spots on the moon. Black dots on an infrared sensor. A collection of eyewitness statements. “Congratulations,” said Newsweek in an editorial, “you’re pretty much caught up on the first batch of UFO files released by the Pentagon.” For months, President Trump has been teasing that the Defense Department holds “very interesting documents” on UFOs that would be released “very, very soon.” And two weeks ago, the Pentagon made good on that pledge, declassifying 162 documents, videos, and photos from “unresolved cases” in which the government couldn’t “make a definitive determination on the nature of the observed phenomena.” Those files, which date from 1947 to 2023, include dozens of testimonials from astronauts, federal agents, and civilians who claim to have seen strange objects in the sky— Gemini VII astronaut Frank Borman said he saw a “bogey” containing “hundreds of little particles” after reaching orbit in 1965. There’s also low-resolution images of flying blobs that could be balloons, drones, or other non-extraterrestrial objects. So does any of this prove aliens have been visiting Earth? “As things stand, the files say implicitly what officials won’t explicitly: No.”

This was always going to be anticlimactic, said astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson in The New York Times. For decades, we’ve had to listen to supposed whistleblowers tell us about “the crashed flying saucers, extraterrestrial bodies, and alien technology in our possession”—but always “hidden in undisclosed places.” And after a succession of ex-military pilots and government officials testified about their close encounters to Congress in 2023, 2024, and 2025, “what’s left to learn?” At this point, I just want one of these “alien insiders” to show me “an actual alien. Alive or dead or undead. Preferably alive. Is that too much to ask for?” The Pentagon has promised new document dumps on a rolling basis, and perhaps those releases will confirm “we are not alone,” said Will Rahn in The Free Press. But for now, we’re where we’ve always been: “guessing and groping for answers in the dark of the cosmos.”

Maybe we’re looking for answers in the wrong places, said astrophysicist Adam Frank in The Atlantic. Instead of hoping for great revelations from the government, we should consult the astrobiologists who right now are using powerful telescopes to search “for alien life where it lives, on alien worlds.” One day, “perhaps long after the current UFO-disclosure frenzy is over,” astronomers might present us with “hard evidence that life is either common or rare in the galaxy. That will be the only disclosure day history remembers.”

Are synthetic drugs new?

Lab-made or “designer” drugs have been around for decades. LSD is synthetic, and so is methamphetamine. But what’s new is the dizzying scale and variety of synthetic intoxicants and their increasing dominance of the drug market.

Traditionally, most illicit drugs have come from plants that are cultivated on a large scale, such as marijuana, opium and heroin from poppies, and cocaine from coca leaves. But those plant-based drugs are being supplanted—or adulterated—by synthetic stimulants, opioids, and cannabinoids made in clandestine labs that are far cheaper and easier for traffickers to produce and transport. They’re also far deadlier. Some 80,400 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2024, nearly 70% more than a decade earlier; synthetic opioids, mainly fentanyl, accounted for nearly 68% of those deaths. Fentanyl, which is 50 to 100 times more potent than heroin, is now giving way to even deadlier compounds such as the 10-times more powerful cychlorphine. In Knoxville, Tenn., a national cychlorphine hot spot, at least 50 overdoses involving the drug have been confirmed in the past six months. “This is the modern drug epidemic,” said Bob DuPont, U.S. drug czar under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. “It’s like nothing that’s happened in the world before—anywhere.”

How many synthetic drugs are there?

More than 1,460 new psychoactive substances have been recorded by the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime since 2013, tripling in just over a decade. And new compounds are popping up with staggering speed, leaving law enforcement scrambling to keep up. “Once a month or every other month, we’re encountering something that we’ve never seen before,” said Ed Sisco, a research chemist who tracks street drugs for the federal government. One reason traffickers keep inventing new drugs is to stay ahead of the law: the moment a compound is identified and made illegal, narcochemists—sometimes aided by artificial intelligence—tweak its molecular structure to get around the law. “Each time we get rid of one substance,” said forensic scientist Alex Krotulski, “they come up with something more potent.”

What are these new drugs?

They run the gamut. There are sedatives such as xylazine, street-named Tranq, an animal tranquilizer that can cause fleshrotting skin lesions and is frequently mixed with fentanyl. Last month, the CDC warned about the rise of medetomidine, or “Rhino tranq,” which is up to 200 times more potent and doesn’t respond to conventional overdose-reversal treatments like naloxone. There are hundreds of synthetic cannabinoids, such as K2 and Spice, sold at smoke shops and convenience stores across the U.S.; they can yield a weed-like high and can also cause agitation, delusions, seizures, kidney damage, and, in extreme cases, death. There are cathinones, stimulants modeled on MDMA that “hijack the dopamine system in the brain” and thus are “extremely addictive,” said Michael Baumann of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. “There’s a reason why chemists would design these.” Nitazenes are an even bigger category.

What are nitazenes?

Developed as painkillers in the 1950s, this family of synthetic opioids was never approved for clinical use because of its staggering potency. Some nitazenes are so powerful that under 2 milligrams—the equivalent of a few grains of sand—can kill a person by shutting down breathing. Since they surfaced in the U.S. in 2019, the drugs have caused at least 2,000 overdose deaths. The newest worry is a different class of synthetic opioids called orphines, which include cychlorphine. Joe Guy, sheriff in McMinn County, Tennessee, an hour south of Knoxville, notes one issue common among synthetic drugs: wildly varying potency that makes ingestion a crapshoot. “One pill, one hit, can literally end your life,” said Guy. And because traffickers often use cheap new synthetics to boost narcotics such as fentanyl and heroin, or even substitute them for various pills, drug consumers very often don’t even know what they are taking. Authorities in Arkansas last week confirmed the state’s first known cychlorphine death: an unidentified man who took what he thought was an oxycodone pill, which was actually laced with the more powerful orphine. “This is mass-produced deception,” said Ted Brown, head of the Arkansas Crime Laboratory.

Where are these drugs coming from?

The federal government pegs the primary source as Mexican cartels using chemicals sourced from China. Other synthetic drugs come directly from China and sometimes India, and are cut and sold by small domestic operators. Efforts have been made to stem the flow of raw materials, but with unintended consequences. When China tightened controls on chemicals used in fentanyl in 2019, narcochemists researched alternatives and revived production of nitazenes. Last summer, China banned nitazenes—which may have led to the sudden rise of cychlorphine.

Is there a better way to respond?

On the street level, there are calls for wider distribution of naloxone, and for educating young people about the dangers that may lurk inside a pain pill or a bag of synthetic cannabinoids. On the enforcement front, there are moves to increase global cooperation to disrupt supply chains, stem trafficking, and identify emerging threats. To that end, the Biden administration in July 2023 launched the 160-nation Global Coalition to Address Synthetic Drug Threats; China has not yet joined the group. But some experts emphasize that the era of synthetic drugs underlines the need to address the root factors that make users seek out drugs, given the futility of targeting a supply that’s constantly expanding and shifting. “Today is the most dangerous time in the history of the world to be using drugs,” said Andrew Monte, who runs the Rocky Mountain Poison Center. “That’s until tomorrow, when there’s a new drug.”

No one should panic, but this is “certainly a worrying chain of events,” said Tara C. Smith in MS.now. Two weeks ago, news broke that three people aboard the Dutch cruise ship MV Hondius had died of suspected hantavirus, a respiratory disease with no cure or vaccine. The Hondius was eventually allowed to dock in Tenerife, Spain. But before the pathogen was identified, some 30 passengers had disembarked and flown home to 12 countries, potentially seeding the planet with a virus that kills 38% of its victims. A six-week incubation period means we don’t yet know the extent of the outbreak. But at least eight other Hondius-linked infections have been confirmed, and 18 Americans are being monitored, two at containment facilities in Atlanta—one of those passengers is symptomatic—and 16 in Nebraska.

“I hope it’s fine,” said President Trump. But Trump also hoped it would be fine in February 2020, when passengers on another ship, the Diamond Princess, started dying from Covid-19. And back then, we were still part of the World Health Organization—Trump ordered the U.S. out last year—and conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wasn’t our health secretary. “We are in the hands of the madmen now,” said Charles P. Pierce in Esquire. “An outbreak of any disease more serious than Covid, and this country is in a world of hurt.”

This story is certainly “tragic,” said Lisa Jarvis in Bloomberg. The first two fatalities, a Dutch couple, were probably infected through exposure to rat droppings while bird-watching in Argentina. But “this likely isn’t the opening scene for a bigger, scarier movie.” The human-transmissible strain of hantavirus is not very infectious, requiring prolonged contact with someone already suffering symptoms. Standard public health measures have contained previous outbreaks, the worst being a 2018 outbreak in Epuyén, Argentina, in which 11 died. Experts say there’s little reason to fear the new cluster will “turn into anything bigger.”

Which experts? asked Zeynep Tufekci in The New York Times. Microbiologist Gustavo Palacios, who studied the Epuyén outbreak, is “baffled” by these reassurances. In Epuyén, a single guest at a birthday party infected five others in 90 minutes, and the widow of one victim infected 10 more people at his wake. These “super-spreader” events suggest the virus could spark a pandemic. We may have been spared in 2018 because Epuyén is an “isolated rural village in Patagonia.” The 2026 Hondius outbreak, by contrast, has already gone global and, as with the early days of Covid, global health leaders are erring on the side of reassurance rather than sharing, “accurately and loudly,” what little we know about this terrifying virus.

In the U.S., the response has been “sluggish,” said Apoorva Mandavilli, also in the Times. It took a week after WHO formally confirmed the hantavirus infections for the administration to hold its first briefing, and a month after the first death to set up a CDC task force. Hollowed out by Trump and Kennedy, our health agencies aren’t remotely ready for another pandemic, said Katrine Wallace in StatNews. Not so our post-Covid infrastructure of misinformation, that “network of influencers, conspiracy accounts, and partisan personalities.” They’re already spinning this outbreak as further proof that “scientists are corrupt, vaccines are the real threat” and hawking ivermectin from “the link in their bio.” It’s this new infrastructure, along with Trump’s vandalism of the old one, that will hurt us the most should another pandemic arrive. “And one will.”

What happened

Democrats were left scrambling last week after a back-to-back set of redistricting losses narrowed their odds of taking back the House in November, with the Supreme Court clearing the way for Alabama Republicans to redraw the state’s electoral map and Virginia’s high court throwing out a Democratic map designed to flip red House seats blue. The ruling by the Supreme Court’s conservative majority could allow the Alabama legislature to use a 2023 voting map that eliminates one of the state’s two majority-Black districts, both of which are currently held by Democrats. A lower court had blocked that map on the grounds that it violated Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which bars racial discrimination in voting. But the high court’s conservative justices said that decision should be reconsidered in light of last month’s Louisiana v. Callais, in which the court found the creation of majority-Black districts to be an “unconstitutional racial gerrymander.” In the Louisiana legislature, a Senate committee passed a congressional map that will eliminate one of two majority-Black districts, while in Tennessee, Gov. Bill Lee signed into law a new congressional map that carves up the state’s sole Democratic-held district, based in majority-Black Memphis. It’s “unbelievable how people seem to want to turn things backward,” said Barbara Love, a Black woman who lives outside Memphis.

In Virginia, the state’s top court reversed a new electoral map approved by voters in a ballot measure in April, which was designed to flip four Republican-held House seats. The court ruled 4-3 that Democratic lawmakers had violated a procedural mandate by rushing to pass the redistricting before November’s midterms. State Democrats said the ruling amounted to “judicial defiance” of voters’ will and appealed to the Supreme Court.

In a rare setback for President Trump, who has urged red-state legislatures to redraw maps, Republicans in South Carolina rejected a redistricting plan designed to eliminate the state’s sole Democratic-held House seat. State Senate Majority Leader A. Shane Massey said carving up the district, held for 34 years by influential Rep. James Clyburn, could backfire by diluting GOP support in other districts. He also warned that the current redistricting wars may anger voters. “Too many people in power,” Massey said, “just want to do whatever it takes to stay in power.”

What the editorials said

“America’s re-gerrymandering arms race is here,” said the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and you can thank President Trump. The seed was planted last year when Trump demanded Texas and other red states rip up their maps mid-decade to boost Republicans’ midterm edge, a practice previously “unheard of.” That left Democrats in California, Virginia, and elsewhere not only justified in following suit “but virtually obligated to.” Having state maps constantly redrawn to favor the party in power “is intolerable to democracy.” But that’s what we face until Congress steps in “to impose uniform redistricting standards.”

Pardon us while we “revel in” the “comeuppance of Virginia Democrats,” said National Review. With their “lavishly funded” referendum they rammed through an “absurdly lopsided” map that stood to boost their House-seat edge in the “purplish” state from 6-5 to 10-1. But state law dictates that any referendum to amend the constitution must be passed twice, with a general election in between. The first vote came late in October 2025, after some 1.3 million early ballots had already been cast for the November election. The high court’s ruling that Democrats violated the letter and spirit of the law “isn’t even a close call.”

What the columnists said

The blitz to disenfranchise Black Southern voters is “more than a tragedy for voting rights,” said Paul Waldman in Public Notice. It’s a virtual “revival of the Confederacy.” Even as aggrieved white Republicans have revived Confederate symbols, ended diversity initiatives, and otherwise tried to walk back the civil rights movement, progressives have held faith that their foes “were fighting a doomed rearguard action.” But it’s now clear that the Right never lost its own faith that with enough determination “the 1960s could be undone—and maybe some of the 1860s as well.”

Such “hooey” makes it sound like Republicans are demanding “literacy tests at voting precincts,” said Barton Swaim in The Wall Street Journal. What they’re combating, and what the Supreme Court “rightly ended,” is the practice of “packing” Black voters into districts designed “to advantage one party.” Democrats can “gussy it up with lofty talk” of “vote dilution,” but the “ugly fact” is that such districts divide voters according to skin color.

The GOP’s strong-arming “could backfire badly,” said Henry Olsen in The Washington Post. Yes, it will boost the party in the short term. But New York, Colorado, Maryland, and other blue states could well turn the tables and rub out Republican districts. Lawmakers in many of those states are constrained by legal and structural barriers that prevent mid-decade gerrymandering. But they can be undone, and Democrats will be under “enormous pressure” to “fight fire with fire.”

“This is getting dangerous,” said Jamelle Bouie in The New York Times. The redistricting rush will push American politics to an “even more dangerous place of high partisan tension and ideological Balkanization,” where the House “looks something like the Electoral College.” A system in which a party can eke out control of a state capitol and then redraw congressional maps to lock themselves in power is “not a democracy in any meaningful sense.” But that seems to be “where the United States is headed, if it’s not already there.”

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Ballet dancer with ALS performs again through digital avatar

A ballerina with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) danced again through a digital avatar powered by her brainwaves. At a live performance in Amsterdam, Breanna Olson wore an electroencephalogram headset that captured and “translated” her brain activity and “specific motor signals associated with imagining certain dance movements,” allowing her avatar to dance in real time, said the BBC. The headset’s creator, Dentsu Lab, said it aims to make this “new brainwave interface” accessible to everyone with ALS and other motor neuron diseases.

San Diego has excess water to sell to drier states

San Diego County has built up its water infrastructure to the point it can now sell excess capacity to nearby states. Following a long drought in the 1990s, the San Diego County Water Authority (SDCWA) built the massive Carlsbad Desalination Plant, expanded its reservoir and acquired rights to a Colorado River allocation. Today, with desalinated water to spare, SDCWA is negotiating a swap of its Colorado River rights to Arizona and Nevada, providing the “parched” states with an “unconventional lifeline,” said The Wall Street Journal.

Zambian reserve rewilds captive lions 

Two lions born in captivity are preparing for life in the wild on the vast Lolelunga Private Reserve in Zambia. The reserve partnered with Zambia’s ministries of tourism and parks and wildlife to relocate the 7-year-old lions from a small enclosure at a Tanzanian tourist attraction. The animals, a male and female, will now spend several months in the reserve’s acclimatization habitat, developing scavenging and hunting skills. Once ready, they will have the run of the reserve’s 74,000 acres.

Once-overlooked San Francisco bridge gets beautified

A neglected bridge in San Francisco’s Glen Park neighborhood was turned into a beautiful piece of infrastructure after residents banded together to cover it with tiles. Before its makeover, the crossing at Bosworth Street and Lippard Avenue was dirty and overgrown. About 100 volunteers from Glen Park Beautiful and the Create Peace Project and kids from Glen Park School spent months cleaning and painting the bridge, pulling out weeds and finally designing and installing the colorful mosaics.

Loomis, Calif.

This 2007 Tuscan-inspired estate near Folsom Lake features a cinema with two rows of seating, illuminated movie posters, a detailed coffered ceiling, and a built-in movie screen. The four-bedroom has high ceilings, hand-painted frescoes, arched windows, a wrought-iron staircase, a wine room, a bar, and a chef’s kitchen with stone stove surround.

About a half hour from Sacramento, the 5-acre property includes a guesthouse, a collector’s garage, a pond, patios, and gardens. $4,999,000. Nick Sadek, Nick Sadek Sotheby’s International Realty, (916) 966-4444

Houston

The Villa, a 1924 Mediterranean-inspired home in the Boulevard Oaks Historic District, includes a theater with dramatic frescoed walls, a tray ceiling, and a row of arched windows.

The updated four-bedroom has French oak floors, stained glass, paneled walls, a sunroom, a wine room, an elevator, and a primary bedroom with murals, high ceilings, and a walk-in closet. Rice University is walking distance, and museums and a zoo are nearby. $5,250,000. Nicole Lopez, Corcoran Genesis, (832) 549-5868

Bedford, N.Y.

The theater in this 1986 contemporary home in Westchester County features plush seating for 11, an aqua basket-weave carpet, a ceiling dotted with starry lights, and a spiral staircase to an art gallery. A double-height atrium with a barrel glass ceiling tops the great room and its wall of windows.

The 2.5-acre property has a pool, spa, and an outdoor kitchen, plus a sports court and a pond. $3,950,000. Brian Milton, Compass Greater New York, (914) 469-9889

Columbus, Ohio

In the Bexley area, this renovated 1927 eclectic Dutch Colonial–inspired home has a movie room with a large screen surrounded by velvet curtains, plus a fireplace, fabric-clad walls, and a glossy ceiling. The eight-bedroom includes marble floors, a curved entry staircase, arched doorways, a chef’s kosher kitchen with two islands, a gym, a playroom, and an elevator.

The outdoor space includes a play structure, patio, pergola, and a circular drive. $4,595,000. Mike Carruthers, Coldwell Banker Realty, (614) 620-2640

Chicago

Built in 1907 and renovated in 2020, this six-bedroom townhome, a block away from the water in East Lakeview, has a lower-level media room with moodily painted walls, a built-in beverage fridge, and an adjoining bathroom.

The contemporary four-story building features high ceilings with decorative architectural discs, a kitchen with a marble island, and a primary suite with a deck. The back opens to a fenced yard, and Wrigley Field is about a 20-minute walk. $2,730,000. Lorenzo Sanchez, Engel & Völkers Chicago, (773) 419-1724

Sartell, Minn.

Outside the city of St. Cloud and about 90 minutes north of Minneapolis, this five-bedroom Colonial has a lower-level movie room outfitted with a projector and an oversize screen, carpeting, and space for a sectional.

The home has wood floors, an open plan with an eat-in kitchen island, a French door refrigerator, a window seat, and wood detailing throughout. The lot includes a screened porch, a front deck, a patio, lawn, and a three-car garage. $560,000. Matt Wieber, Agency North Real Estate, (320) 267-6373

‘Is God Is’

Directed by Aleshea Harris (R)

★★★★

“Every filmmaker has to start somewhere. Aleshea Harris is starting at the top,” said William Bibbiani in The Wrap. In adapting her own award-winning 2018 play, Harris has made “one of the most stunning first features in recent memory,” a “jarring and confident” thriller about adult twin sisters on a mission to find and kill their monstrous father. Racine and Anaia, played by Kara Young and Mallori Johnson, were scarred during childhood by the man credited here as Man, and they thought their mother had died in a fire he set. But she tasks them with exacting revenge, and they treat her words as Scripture. “Is God Is is Old Testament. It’s Greek tragedy. It’s gothic. It’s punk. It’s grotesque. It’s beautiful.”

Harris asked a lot of her actors, but “each of them understood the assignment,” said Odie Henderson in The Boston Globe. Young is a two-time Tony winner, and she and Johnson are “superb” as the volatile Racine and watchful Anaia, who during their cross-country hunt tangle with both of their father’s subsequent wives. Meanwhile, Sterling K. Brown “makes Man’s over-the-top wickedness terrifying.” For a revenge picture, Is God Is “doesn’t find quite the release one might expect,” said Guy Lodge in Variety. Even so, it’s a remarkable movie, both “wildly entertaining” and “viciously upsetting” as it dramatizes the deep, damaging effects of a society in which patriarchy and physical violence hold so much sway.

‘The Wizard of the Kremlin’

Directed by Olivier Assayas (R)

★★

Jude Law is so effective playing Vladimir Putin in The Wizard of the Kremlin that “there’s a choking sense of ominous tension whenever he’s onscreen,” said Wendy Ide in The Observer (U.K.). “Unfortunately, he’s not on camera nearly enough,” because Olivier Assayas’ new movie revisits Putin’s rise and quarter-century reign from the side angle of a fictional spin doctor’s role in events. And sure, the character is based on a real person. But he is played by Paul Dano, who’s “jarringly affected at best and genuinely terrible for much of the picture,” undermining its strengths.

Early on, “the story arc is morbidly compelling,” said Danny Leigh in the Financial Times. We’re watching the origin story of a 21st-century czar. But even though 20 minutes were cut from the movie before its theatrical release, “the rest turns out to be a long whistle-stop tour through a real-world timeline,” and to enjoy it, “you should ideally have first spent three decades in blissful ignorance.” When the ambitious work was screened for festival audiences in its original form last fall, Assayas endured some of the worst reviews of his career, said Bilge Ebiri in NYMag.com. Yet it “happens to be a great film.” Even at its initial length, “I found its thundering journey through recent Russian and world history enormously entertaining.” Dano is precisely as creepy as he should be. And in Law’s Putin, the movie “gives us a villain who is chilling and believable.”

‘The Sheep Detectives’

Directed by Kyle Balda (PG)

★★★

“Good detective films are rare. So are emotionally rich family films,” said Tim Grierson in The A.V. Club. “Which is why it’s tempting to overpraise The Sheep Detectives, a winning PG comedy that ably combines both genres.” But while some of its jokes fall flat and most of its human characters are “a bit daffy,” this modest new hit about a flock of sheep investigating the murder of their beloved shepherd, George, proves “quite affecting.” Because George, portrayed by Hugh Jackman, routinely read mysteries to his charges before his sudden demise, these sheep aren’t complete novices, said Wilson Chapman in IndieWire. They also don’t have many suspects to sort through, which may make the culprit too easy for adults to spot. Fortunately, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Chris O’Dowd voice Lily and Mopple, two of the most prominent CGI-animated sheep, and “the film derives a lot of its most successful humor from Lily and Mopple’s outside perspective of the human world they’re stumbling into.”

Happily, “what’s most special about The Sheep Detectives isn’t any one element,” said Alissa Wilkinson in The New York Times. “Instead, it’s the way the elements work together—humor, mystery, goofiness, and even sentimentality, all balanced beautifully.” Even in the way it addresses mortality, this is a movie that “treats each member of its audience with respect, no matter their age.” Films like this are rare these days. “Hollywood: Take note, please.”

‘Middle of Nowhere’ by Kacey Musgraves

★★★

“To describe Middle of Nowhere with a rustic cliché, Kacey Musgraves is going back to her roots,” said Molly Mary O’Brien in Pitchfork. After years of exploring a pop-country blend, the 37-year-old Texas native has assembled a set of new songs that come across like a survey of the past 50 years of country music. Where 2024’s Deeper Well found the singer-songwriter practicing meditation and consulting star charts, Nowhere gives us “Dry Spell,” a “sultry, funny, and pristinely constructed song about not having had sex in 335 days.” While “Loneliest Girl” and the title track show her getting more comfortable with being on her own, she has packed much of the album with guests, including Miranda Lambert on “Horses and Divorces,” and Willie Nelson on “Uncertain, TX.” Fittingly, Middle of Nowhere has an in-between feeling, like a meal at a nouveau farm-to-table restaurant, said Grant Sharples in Paste. “There’s something for everyone, and the food’s pretty good, but nothing really reinvents the wheel.” While it’s as polished as Golden Hour, Musgraves’ 2018 Album of the Year winner, it “lacks the ingenuity.”

 ‘In Times of Dragons’ by Tori Amos

★★★

On her 18th album, Tori Amos “sounds like she’s rediscovered her fire and purpose,” said Neil Z. Yeung in AllMusic. Yet another “piano-driven epic,” this “devastating” concept album finds the 62-year-old assuming the role of an alter ego on a journey after breaking free of her marriage to a Lizard Demon billionaire. The record opens with “ominous” piano and “pounding martial drums” as Amos, her voice roughened by age, sings about breaking free with the Demon’s goons on her trail. “An instant classic,” that song raises the curtain on more than an hour of “some of the most powerful, wounded, and moving music of her career.” Throughout, “Amos grapples with her legacy through the relationship her heroine has with her long-lost daughter,” a role sung by Amos’ daughter, Natashya Hawley, said Maura Johnston in Rolling Stone. At the outset, Amos’ alter ego is worried that her experiences might make a monster of her, but by the end “she’s learned to live with her scars, using them as a power source.” That proves “an apt metaphor for Amos’ career and the ways she’s blended the confessional and the mystical to often stunning effect.”

‘Diavola’ by Gabrielle Cavassa

★★★

Balancing tenderness and quiet intensity, Gabrielle Cavassa’s voice “has an unforced spellbinding quality that draws the listener in,” said Jim Hynes in Glide. On her first album for Blue Note, the 31-year-old jazz singer “inhabits each lyric of the song as if it belongs to her.” That’s true even when the lyrics are incredibly familiar, as on the California native’s “slightly swinging” rendition of Billy Eckstine’s “Prisoner of Love” or on “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head,” which she transforms with a “relaxed, slower-than-molasses tempo” that allows her to wring the essence out of every syllable. Compared with B.J. Thomas’ 1969 hit, Cavassa’s version is sweeter “but more contemplative,” said Will Coviello in NOLA.com. That track also features a gorgeous sax solo by Joshua Redman, who co-produced the album. Redman met Cavassa after his manager saw the award-winning singer perform at a New Orleans wedding. The album’s title track, co-written by Cavassa, is also its centerpiece. In Italian, a diavola is a dangerous, powerful woman, and likely a temptress. Cavassa inhabits the character’s vanity and flaws, turning the song into “a showpiece for her singing.”

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Ayelet Waldman is the author of the best-selling memoir Bad Mother and of the novels Daughter’s Keeper and Love and Other Impossible Pursuits. In A Perfect Hand, her novel to be published on May 19, a lady’s maid in 19th-century England falls for a valet. Below, Waldman shares her six favorite books about missed opportunities and remorse.

‘Persuasion’ by Jane Austen (1817)

Persuasion is my favorite of Jane Austen’s novels, though we have been informed sternly by no less a luminary than Nabokov that Mansfield Park is the “greatest,” whatever that means. Though Anne Elliot could be accused of being retiring and easily manipulated, there is an element of steel in her character that I love. Also, the book is about longing and regret, and in looking at this list I see that these are emotions I seem obsessed with. Buy it here.

‘Atonement’ by Ian McEwan (2001)

This is also a book about regret, and about shame. It is, like Persuasion, about the need to rewrite history, to expiate one’s mistakes. Buy it here.

‘Old Filth’ by Jane Gardam (2004)

Here’s another favorite, also permeated by regret! The hero (such as he is) looks back on a painful childhood and a life characterized in no small part by disappointment. Though he is a successful barrister and judge, Sir Edward Feathers’ nickname, derived from “Failed In London Try Hong Kong,” sums up his life: This book, though melancholic, is leavened by Gardam’s mordant wit. Buy it here.

‘Shakespeare’s Kitchen’ by Lore Segal (2007)

I’ve seen Shakespeare’s Kitchen described as an academic send-up, a comedy of manners, and it is, but Segal’s collection of interlocked stories is also a book about loneliness, told with subtle (and not so subtle) humor. Buy it here.

‘Sorrow and Bliss’ by Meg Mason (2020)

I would not have picked up Sorrow and Bliss but for the recommendation of author Ann Patchett. It is one of the funniest and one of the saddest books I’ve read in a long time. It’s about the way we defeat ourselves in love, and about the exhaustion of dealing with mental illness, something I can relate to all too well. Buy it here.

‘The Remains of the Day’ by Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)

How could a list of books about missed chances and self-defeat be complete without The Remains of the Day? Every time I reread this novel, I find myself in a frustrated (yet delighted) fury about how Stevens was so determined to sabotage any chance of happiness that he couldn’t even allow himself to imagine a future with Miss Kenton. Buy it here.

‘The Rolling Stones: The Biography’ by Bob Spitz

“Hundreds of books have been written about the Rolling Stones, but few sparkle quite like Bob Spitz’s,” said Marc Ballon in the Los Angeles Times. The author, who has previously written doorstop accounts of the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Led Zeppelin, tells the band’s story in full. We get the boys’ early days as a blues cover band, creative highs such as Exile on Main St., valleys such as 1986’s Dirty Work, the drug problems, the breakups, the makeups, and the disastrous 1969 concert at Altamont. Though Spitz “unearths little new information, he excels at presenting the Stones in glorious Technicolor” because he “homes in on telling details that give the band’s story a deep richness and poignancy.” The result is a “magisterial” work worthy of its 700 pages. “For anyone who loves or even likes the Stones, it’s indispensable.”

The tale begins with “one of the great origin stories, ranking up there with Steve Jobs inviting Steve Wozniak over to play with computers,” said David Kirby in The Wall Street Journal. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were the loosest of acquaintances when they ran into each other as 17-year-olds in 1961, Richards struck by Jagger’s armful of records. Thus was born one of rock’s most dynamic duos, soon to be joined by Brian Jones, Charlie Watts, Bill Wyman, and Ian Stewart, the last a piano player pushed off the band’s official roster because of his looks. Most would make it through several decades together, though Jones was dismissed from the band he co-founded shortly before his 1969 death, to be replaced by Mick Taylor, then Ronnie Wood. Revisiting their collective story with Spitz’s guidance is like seeing a familiar portrait anew. “The faces are the same, but the light is different, and suddenly you see shadows you never noticed, a new determination in one person’s eyes.”

“There’s a certain swagger in Spitz’s subtitling his chronicle of the band ‘The Biography,’” said Leah Greenblatt in The New York Times. But the author is a credible biographer of record, his takes on the music are “both forensic and poetic,” and “many small revelations and corrections emerge along the way.” His account is “diligent to a fault” as he strings together albums, addictions, court battles, and relationship dramas, and after devoting 600 pages to the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, he “suddenly leapfrogs over several decades in the final chapter, as if he just realized that his car is double-parked.” But he’s wise enough to position the Jagger-Richards partnership as the story’s central platonic love and enduring source of tension. And his epilogue, which finds the surviving Stones crushing yet another 2024 tour stop, “feels appropriately celebratory and bittersweet, like an Irish wake without the body.”

‘Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare’ by Katrina Manson

“Unpacking global policies on the use of AI by militaries—the potential benefits, pitfalls, and murky ethics—will fill books for decades to come,” said Matthew Sparkes in New Scientist. Katrina Manson’s new book does something simpler. It relates the fascinating story of the development of the Pentagon’s main AI initiative, Project Maven, launched in 2017 to take the work of consolidating and analyzing military intelligence data away from slow, mistake-prone humans and assign the work to AI. But backers of the project always intended to go further by having the AI program choose targets—as it does now—and eventually take them out autonomously. AI weapons need to be managed closely. Manson’s chilling story “suggests the reality is otherwise.”

At the center of the veteran reporter’s account stands Maven’s founder, Drew Cukor, said Fred Kaplan in The New York Times. Realizing in 2017 that AI would spread to the battlefield, the Marine intelligence officer vowed to help get the U.S. up to speed with China, which was off to a head start. After Google pulled out of the project when employees protested doing military work, Cukor turned to then-obscure Palantir to get Project Maven off the ground. But he knew that reducing the role of human decision-making in the so-called kill chain would spook Pentagon officials, so while courting them, he kept that part a secret, waiting until Maven proved its value. By 2022, it was being used by Ukraine to hold back Russia. A year later, Israel used it in its attacks on Gaza.

“Manson clearly comes to like Cukor, or at least begrudgingly admire him,” said Gideon Lewis-Kraus in The New Yorker. Maven’s catalyst wanted to reduce the number of war casualties that are caused by errors, which makes it “at least intermittently possible” to root for him as he battles hide-bound bureaucrats and agencies resistant to sharing data with nominal compatriots. But Cukor insists he trusted that Maven would never do more than assist human decision-making, and “Manson repeatedly points out that this was always somewhere between wishful thinking and deliberate obfuscation.” Today, machine-driven carnage isn’t coming; it’s here.

Graham Platner is the “brawler” that many Democrats have been longing for, said Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times. The 41-year-old oyster farmer two weeks ago won Maine’s Democratic Senate primary after the dismally polling Gov. Janet Mills dropped out. It was a remarkable victory, considering the “barrage of devastating opposition” aimed his way. Old social media posts were unearthed in which he declared himself a communist, called all cops “bastards,” and blasted rural whites as “racist” and “stupid.” In October, he revealed that, while drunk on leave as a 20-something Marine, he’d inadvertently gotten a Nazi-linked tattoo. His “insurgent campaign appeared doomed.” But Mainers kept packing his town halls. “A natural on the stump,” Platner won over crowds by speaking about the struggles of working people, the futility of the wars he’d fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the need for “a Democratic Party with New Deal–scale ambitions.” Maine Democrats understand Platner is a flawed candidate, but also understand that such scrappy fighters might be needed to “upend a system that they believe has failed them.”

Platner won because progressives reward antisemitism, said Philip Klein in National Review. It’s not just his now-covered SS skull-and-bones tattoo. He has sat for a friendly interview with an anti-semitic conspiracy theorist, called the U.S.-Israeli relationship “shameful,” and praised the tactics used by Hamas terrorists in a 2014 attack on Israelis. “Any of this would have once been a political death sentence”; now it’s “a ticket to success in the modern Democratic Party.” But the 78-year-old Mills’ “sleepy campaign didn’t offer any compelling alternative” to Platner, said Carine Hajjar in The Washington Post. The last thing voters wanted after watching President Joe Biden flop in 2024 was a septuagenarian freshman in Congress. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer should never have pressured Mills into this race. He failed to realize “the imprimatur of the establishment is on the outs”—as are any moral standards for candidates.

Look, Platner isn’t “even close” to my ideal Senate candidate, said Frank Bruni in The New York Times. But if I lived in Maine, I’d vote for him in November simply because he isn’t Sen. Susan Collins, the self-declared moderate Republican who’s “shown herself to be an undependable check on Trump.” In Senate and House races across the country this year, Democrats and independents will have to decide which they fear more: A Democratic candidate who’s more progressive than they are and who may have a tarnished biography, or two more years of “an unimpeded, full-throttle Trump.” Either way, a “reckoning is at hand.”