College campuses are alarmingly under-populated, said Marina Villeneuve in The Guardian. Enrollment is down at more than 1,000 institutions this year thanks to soaring tuition, Trump administration cuts to financial aid and international student visas, and “growing public skepticism about the value of a college degree.” Colleges are being forced into austerity. At the University of New Hampshire, “officials closed the dining hall on weekends, shut campus pharmacies, raised tuition, and laid off dozens of professors and staff members.” At Rhode Island’s Johnson & Wales University, students have protested “worsening dorm conditions” and “the rising cost of laundry and meal plans.” More than a dozen colleges now cost more than $100,000 a year, said Jessica Dickler in CNBC.com. But “tuition revenue has actually fallen” 8.1% in the past five years, according to the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, because so many students now need financial assistance “to make higher education affordable.” David Greene, president of Maine’s Colby College, says it has trapped higher education in a “death spiral.”

It’s not just small schools “beginning to flail,” said Douglas Belkin and Roshan Fernandez in The Wall Street Journal. Syracuse University fell short of enrollment targets this academic year, “sending the school into a 1.5% budget shortfall.” It added nearly half a billion in debt recently to build new dorms. And despite a $2.5 billion endowment, Syracuse recently eliminated 93 academic programs “that it said didn’t draw enough students, such as child therapy and Middle Eastern studies.” What universities should be cutting, said Barry Lam in The Boston Globe, is their outrageous administrative spending. “There are now more nonteaching administrative staff than students at Harvard, Yale, and Stanford.” Technology is making it worse. Take the University of California system, where a $170 million digital infrastructure project was supposed to cut administrative bloat by $753 million. Instead, the project “ballooned to $942 million” and was so ineffective it required an “entirely new” IT unit to operate.

Some believe “higher education is a bubble that is about to pop,” said Allison Schrager in Bloomberg. “That’s unlikely,” but it is due for “repricing.” For years, almost any tuition could seem justifiable, especially “at prestigious private schools.” Students are pushing back—with some opting for cheaper state schools in the South—but ultimately, demand isn’t going anywhere. “For most areas of study, there still exists a significant college wage premium (although it has shrunk a bit recently).” And if you graduate, odds are excellent that you’ll earn almost $1 million more over your lifetime and experience steadier job status. Universities once had to broaden their appeal beyond elites. “Now they will need to demonstrate their value to price-sensitive customers.”

“It has been a long time since any cultural figure arrived in New York on such a wave of high expectations,” said Adam Nagourney in The New York Times. But conductor Gustavo Dudamel, having just completed a spectacularly successful 17-year run in Los Angeles, officially stepped into the role of music and artistic director of the storied New York Philharmonic early this month, and lovers of classical music are hoping that the former wunderkind can use his new perch to revive the genre as a force in American popular culture. At 45, Dudamel “might be the most famous conductor alive today,” said Joshua Barone, also in the Times, and he achieved that notoriety by bringing a democratic touch to his chosen field not seen since Leonard Bernstein led the New York Philharmonic. “This is not a job,” said Dudamel on his first full day occupying Bernstein’s old post. “It is a mission.”

Clearly, Dudamel is “ready to hit the ground running,” said Harry Rose in The Times (U.K.). He recently closed out his run atop the Los Angeles Philharmonic with four star-studded concerts at the Hollywood Bowl while teasing his next chapter by leading the New York Philharmonic as it accompanied the Muppets in a halftime show appearance at July’s World Cup final. During his first three weeks on the job, he’ll be guiding his new orchestra through seven different programs, and started that barrage with a Sept. 10 concert at Radio City Music Hall that mixed pieces by Bernstein, George Gershwin, Arturo Márquez, and Philip Glass with appearances by pop stars Lizzo and St. Vincent. More-traditional fare was prepared for Dudamel’s first concerts of the season at Lincoln Center’s new David Geffen Hall. However those come off, it’s clear that New York now has “a dynamic, populist conductor to match its dynamic, populist mayor.”

The pressure isn’t new for Dudamel, said Mattie Kahn in Vogue. He was just 23 when he won a prestigious conducting competition in Germany and classical music first greeted him as a savior. Ever since, he’s been “radiating the kind of star power more often associated with pop princes and athletes than classical musicians.” Like Bernstein, he’s “understood that classical music needed an evangelist and a face.” The music, he says, must be honest and fully felt, but if there’s a reason that high schoolers in New York shriek when he passes by and that there’s hope that classical music’s audience could get younger, “it’s Dudamel’s charisma, not his knack for interpreting Chopin.”

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Eriq La Salle, the Emmy-winning former co-star of the TV series ER, is also the author of an ongoing thriller series. The latest entry, Laws of Solomon, follows hitman Solomon Nangobi to Los Angeles, where the former child soldier takes a boy in danger under his wing. Below are his six favorite books.

‘The Godfather’ by Mario Puzo (1969)

The tale was most famously turned into the film by Francis Ford Coppola, but I’ve always preferred the book. The themes Puzo explores, most notably if evil is inherited or learned, is one that I grapple with constantly in my own work. Buy it here.

‘Man on Fire’ by Philip Nicholson (1980)

This tale of a washed-up ex-mercenary who must protect a young girl after a bodyguard job goes wrong has all the ingredients for a great thriller story: gritty action, brutal killings, and untrustworthy characters. But what makes me love it is that it also has all the hallmarks of a deep character study. Buy it here.

‘The 48 Laws of Power’ by Robert Greene (1998)

This is a nonfiction book, a collection of tips about obtaining and exercising power drawn from the counsel of Machiavelli, The Art of War, etc. One of the most fascinating books there is on “survival” in human society, it is vicious and uncompromising. It’s also uncomfortable to think that people who study this book may be enacting its tenets on you or those around you. Buy it here.

‘Beloved’ by Toni Morrison (1987)

I have many favorite Toni Morrison books, so it was difficult to choose just one. Beloved tells the story of a former slave whose home is haunted by a malevolent spirit, inferred to be the woman’s murdered baby daughter. Sometimes storytelling can convey a historical truth more subtly than actual history, and Morrison does so tenfold here. Buy it here.

‘The Cartel’ by Don Winslow (2015)

In this heavily researched and bloody novel, Winslow chronicles one decade—2004 to 2014—in the Mexican-American drug wars. The book is an insanely relevant bloodbath, with a “ripped from the headlines” feeling that sticks to you long after you put it down. Buy it here.

‘The Winter of Frankie Machine’ by Don Winslow (2006)

This Winslow novel, about a retired hitman, is softer than many of his others, and I love it for that reason. It’s a sad, lonely tale drenched in both blood and the L.A. sun. Its noir style, decades older even than Frankie Machine, is one that I sought to achieve in the first few pages of Laws of Solomon. Buy it here.

‘The Disappearers’ by Marlon James

“Why not just say it?” asked Dwight Garner in The New York Times. With his sixth book in an already decorated career, Marlon James “has written a masterpiece, the novel of the decade and possibly of the century thus far.” At 600- plus pages, The Disappearers is “a maximalist’s banquet” constructed from a simple story premise: In 1988 Jamaica, several closeted gay men are rehearsing a play in a house in Kingston when a homophobic mob storms in, killing one victim, blinding another, brutally beating the rest, and leaving the survivors forever changed. Still, “it’s hard to talk about this novel because there are at least two dozen ways to pick it up,” whether you’re interested in what James, a Jamaican native, has to say about violence, sex, pop culture, gay feeling, revenge, exile, or fathers and sons. The book “sank knives deep into my heart,” and “I’m still in recovery from it.”

Two young men, Eddy Porteus and Jordan Brown, hold the center of this “unforgettable” work, said Laura Miller in Slate. “Eddy and Jordan aren’t friends exactly,” and up until the mob attack, their experiences of Jamaica’s virulent homophobia vary significantly. But when two other members of the acting troupe vanish after leaving the hospital, they team up to find them. Throughout the book, as in his previous novels, James “invents his own literary language, horny yet tender, punctuated by puns and music and elegant flourishes,” said Hamilton Cain in The Boston Globe. And as the story drifts to Miami, London, New York, and back to Kingston again, it’s held together by James’ passion for the era’s pop culture and his characters’ will to survive in the face of hatred. Thanks to its sweep and power, it’s a novel that “will be read decades from now, pored over in seminars and bookmarked on subway commutes.”

While “there’s no denying” that The Disappearers is a great novel, it’s “also an ordeal,” said Ron Charles in his Substack newsletter. It “aspires to sear in the minds of readers the horrors of living in a world hostile to homosexuality,” and in that, it’ll succeed. But “James’ commitment to erotic realism, to the mechanics of oral and anal sex, voluntary and violent, is total and relentless,” and the book is in part “an encyclopedia of abuse and degradation.” I finished it “glad to have read it but equally glad to be done with it.” Even so, “what’s most surprising, given the book’s abiding terrors, is how James inches it erratically toward the light,” providing late glimpses of a few gay characters who not only survive but thrive. It’s easy to imagine that this “incomparable” work will be a beacon to more than a few young readers enduring violent hatred wherever it arises today.

‘American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey From Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump’ by Kai Bird

“I gobbled up every page of Kai Bird’s American Scoundrel,” said Laura Miller in Slate, “and I’m not sure how I feel about that.” The book’s subject, lawyer Roy Cohn, was a mobbed-up liar and cheater who helped manufacture the postwar Red Scare, assisted in sending Ethel and Julius Rosenberg to the electric chair, demonized homosexuals despite being gay himself, and eventually mentored the young Donald Trump. Bird, who co- authored American Prometheus, the award-winning biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, this time teamed with his researcher wife, Susan Goldmark, to create a book that’s “a cornucopia of mid-century sleaze and addictive for just that reason.” It’s a story packed with “Mafia hits and blackmail and election tampering,” and because Trump’s resentful populism mirrors Cohn’s, it’s a tale that’s “turned out to be seminal in American politics.”

“In Bird’s telling, the parallels between Cohn and Trump begin with their childhoods,” said Kim Phillips-Fein in The Atlantic. Both grew up in outer-borough New York City, and both had well-connected fathers who helped launch their careers. After the Bronx-bred Cohn helped prosecute the Rosenbergs, he teamed with U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy to mount a sweeping anti-Communist hunt. When a backlash sent him back to New York, he was repeatedly indicted but eluded criminal conviction. After meeting Trump in 1973, he schooled the future president in certain rules of the power game, including answering every attack with a counterattack and never admitting wrongdoing.

In his long-ago heyday, “Roy Cohn made for good copy,” said Philip Terzian in The Wall Street Journal. But while Bird’s book reviews Cohn’s colorful career in great detail, “all the entertaining stories are spoiled in the service of an underlying thesis—Cohn as linchpin of modern conservative politics—that grows less persuasive with repetition.” Cohn in fact held national power only briefly, and his transactional later friendship with Trump “scarcely” qualifies as formative. Clearly, while Cohn’s historic significance remains slight, “his status as a menacing specter in the minds of liberal journalists has only grown.”

“Uh-oh,” said Nicole Nguyen in The Wall Street Journal. “Am I about to spend $1,999 on a phone?” Foldable smartphones have existed in the U.S. since 2019, but like many people, I’ve never been interested. They tend to be fragile and awkward to use and, when folded open to function like a tablet, have an annoying crease bisecting the two screens. But for its debut foldable, the iPhone Duo, which was announced earlier this month, “Apple—in its very Apple way— has also come up with some hardware and software trickery” to minimize those problems. When I watched Netflix on the Duo’s folded-out screen, which is just 0.7 inches smaller than an iPad Mini’s, the center crease “was barely visible.” The Duo has the same battery life and dust and water resistance as the iPhone 18 Pro. “There are trade-offs, for sure”: 2x camera zoom versus 8x for the 18 Pro, and the Duo costs $800 more. But when it goes on sale next month, I just might bite.

“It’s the biggest physical change to the iPhone’s design in nearly two decades,” said Brian X. Chen in The New York Times. Why now? The Duo is “meant to stand out in a sea of standard-issue, if-you’ve-seen-one-you’ve-seen-them-all smartphones.” Most people don’t care to splurge for each new iPhone: The improvements are marginal, and the prices “have skyrocketed.” Thanks to “an industry-wide memory chip shortage driven by the artificial intelligence boom,” new Macs and iPads are “as much as 29%” more expensive than last year. It takes something splashy to justify those prices. And comparing the Duo with other foldables on the market, like Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 8, Apple’s is more durable and offers better performance, said Mark Spoonauer in Tom’s Guide. The inner display is “breathtaking,” plus it will support a stylus that magnetically attaches to the side. The downside? It’s a bit “heavier and thicker than I was hoping for.” And it’s not cheap.

Apple “once captured people’s imagination,” said Will Oremus in The Atlantic. Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone. Tim Cook unveiled the Apple Watch. Cook’s new successor, John Ternus, has unveiled, with much hype, what he called “a remarkable hinge” on the Duo and “a sophisticated and unique new color” (burgundy) for the iPhone. It’s not getting my $2,000 for that. “Apple has begun to feel like a late-stage tech giant, squeezing residual value from markets it has long since saturated.” The most ambitious companies today, “for better and worse,” are those pushing the boundaries of AI. “If Ternus really wants to build the future, he will eventually have to do something that once came naturally to Apple when it was an underdog: take a risk.”

The personification of liberal feminism, Gloria Steinem galvanized the movement for equal rights and taught millions of women to advocate for themselves at work and at home. Instantly recognizable in her aviator glasses and her curtain of streaked hair, she spoke, wrote, and lobbied, helping create rape crisis centers, women’s shelters, and the National Women’s Political Caucus. An introvert who feared public speaking, she occupied the national spotlight for over half a century. In 1971, she co-founded Ms., the first magazine entirely owned and run by women, bringing feminism to a national audience at a time when a woman could not get a credit card in her own name. “When we started, there was not even a term for sexual harassment,” she often said. “It was just called life.”

Born in Ohio, Steinem grew up poor, the daughter of a nomadic antique dealer father and an ex-journalist mother who spent time in psychiatric hospitals. When she was 10, her father left and her older sister went off to college, leaving her to care for her ailing mother. She had little time for school, but she read voraciously and graduated magna cum laude from Smith College. Still, she “lived in fear of hitting the skids at any moment” and turning into her mother, said The New York Times. After college, she broke off an engagement, had a secret abortion, and fled to India, walking across the country with followers of Gandhi. After returning in 1958, she became a journalist and won plaudits for an exposé she wrote about the sexism endured by Playboy bunnies—having gone undercover as a bunny for the story. Soon she had a political column in New York, and she joined the anti-war movement. But it wasn’t until she was 35, and attended a 1969 speak-out about illegal abortions, that she began to focus on women’s rights.

Steinem became “the first famous feminist of the celebrity era, forging a public persona halfway between Madonna and Joan of Arc,” said The Guardian. She organized consciousness-raising sessions, led protests, gave speeches, wrote essays, and fundraised. All the while, she also gained attention for her short skirts and for dating a string of famous men. In 1970, she testified before Congress in support of the Equal Rights Amendment. She faced countless critics, led by conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly. A rift even developed between Steinem and The Feminine Mystique author Betty Friedan, who felt Steinem was too focused on social liberation rather than changing laws. While the movement tried to resist hierarchy, the media unofficially anointed Steinem the spokeswoman of feminism. She “was the perfect popularizer,” said New York, making “spiky, roiling, uncomfortable, often messy ideas around gender, race, class, equality, and liberation sound smooth and snappy, attractive and funny.”

Steinem occasionally alienated her supporters, as when she defended President Clinton against sexual harassment allegations in 1998, yet she always “remained a lodestar for women’s rights activists,” said The Washington Post. Proudly child-free, she rejected the institution of marriage, insisting she couldn’t “mate in captivity”— though she did eventually marry British environmentalist David Bale to help him get a visa. Editor of Ms. for decades and the author of a dozen books, she continued lecturing into her 90s. “I feel proud,” she said in 2022. “And I feel mad as hell we are still dealing with the same issues.”

The holdout juror in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial has become “a Rorschach test” for our divided nation, said Jenna Russell in The New York Times. The basic facts of the Clancy case are not in dispute: The former labor and delivery nurse, 36, admits that in January 2023, she strangled her three children—Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and 8-month-old Callan—with exercise bands before slitting her wrists and jumping from a second-floor window at her Massachusetts home. She was left paralyzed below the waist. Eleven of the 12 jurors accepted the defense’s argument that Clancy had acute postpartum psychosis and should be found not guilty by reason of insanity. But the final juror voted to convict, and so, with the jury deadlocked, the judge declared a mistrial. On social media, some Americans praised the holdout as a hero who served as a “guardian angel” for the Clancy children. But to others, including many women, that juror was “yet another man unwilling to listen to, or believe, a woman in crisis.”

Too many people are putting “empathy over justice,” said Nicole Russell in USA Today. Prosecutors had to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Clancy was in her right mind, a high bar to clear. But three female jurors interviewed by NBC News didn’t appear to weigh the methodical nature of Clancy’s actions—sending her husband out on an errand before strangling her children one by one—and instead “fixated on emotions.” One criticized the prosecution’s opening statement for being “without a heart.” Another chided the holdout for being unable to move past the fact that Clancy killed her children. “If true, good.” Worse yet, a “frenzied fandom of women” now lionizes Clancy; some have posted videos online in which they hold their children and say, “Same, Lindsay,” suggesting they understand the urge the kill.

Clancy’s clinical history is anything but ordinary, said psychiatrist Sally Satel in The Free Press. She went through five months of anguish after Callan’s birth, telling her mother and husband that she was worried she’d harm the children and that other people could hear her thoughts. She received mental health care from at least six clinicians who prescribed 13 drugs, which may have exacerbated her condition. Armchair diagnoses are risky, but “in my clinical opinion,” psychosis “drove Clancy to kill.” If she is retried, she should not be found criminally responsible. Clancy was failed in many ways, said Moira Donegan in The Guardian: by society’s expectation that women will persevere through their own suffering and by the assumption her “baby blues” were just a neurotic episode. “Her children were failed, too.”

It was a “nearly cloudless” morning in Manhattan, said The New York Times in an editorial, when a previously unfathomable terrorist attack changed America forever. By sunset on Sept. 11, 2001, the World Trade Center—an iconic symbol of America’s soaring global ambitions—had been reduced to twisted steel and rubble after hijackers flew commercial airliners into its twin towers. Nearly 3,000 people died in New York City and at the Pentagon in Washington, and the entire nation fretted over when the next attack would come and what form it might take. The shock of 9/11 was “so traumatic that it seemed to call for different rules,” and the Bush administration launched a sweeping global “war on terror” that included the brutal torture of terrorist suspects in overseas CIA prisons. By the end of the “long, bloody” wars that unfolded in Afghanistan and Iraq over the subsequent decades, $8 trillion had been spent and 900,000 lives had been lost. Other costs, including the damage to the U.S.’s social compact and global standing, are harder to measure. Incredibly, the mistakes of a quarter century ago are now being repeated by the Trump administration, in its “self-defeating war of choice” in Iran.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, there were actually “signs of hope,” said Jonathan Lemire in The Atlantic. Rescue workers from red and blue states alike rushed to New York City to help. Donations poured in from rich liberal enclaves and small rural communities. American flags were “seemingly everywhere.” Less than a year after the “bitterly contested” presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore, the country “felt unified” for the first time in decades. But in the months that followed, the nation’s trauma and collective grief “morphed into something uglier, hardier, and less focused,” said Jill Filipovic in Slate. The U.S.’s first military response was reasonable—an invasion of Afghanistan to hunt Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the attacks, who was being shielded by the Taliban. But then the Bush administration sold a war in Iraq to “grieving and credulous” Americans with “faulty intelligence and flat-out lies.” There were no “weapons of mass destruction,” and while Saddam Hussein was a “brutal dictator,” the war that deposed him “sent shock waves of violence undulating through the Middle East for decades.”

Today, the expert consensus says the war on terror “was never winnable,” said Robin Wright in The New Yorker. Despite major victories, including the daring 2011 raid in which U.S. special operations forces killed bin Laden, “neither the groups nor the threats they pose have disappeared.” Islamic extremism continues, and al Qaida is again active in an Afghanistan controlled by the Taliban. Actually, the truth about the war on terror is “more complex,” said Daniel Foster in National Review. “The more defensible verdict is that the United States muddled through the post-9/11 era,” figuring out how to fight a “very different” kind of war with new intelligence apparatuses, legal architectures, and geopolitical strategies. Though it made mistakes, the counterterrorism apparatus constructed after 9/11 has succeeded in its primary mission—killing and capturing terrorist leaders and preventing a comparable mass-casualty attack.

But by focusing on Islamic terrorism and the Mideast for decades, said John Bussey in The Wall Street Journal, the U.S. became “distracted” from “bigger threats to its economy and global leadership.” Our leaders did not respond to “shifting global forces,” including the rise of China as a rival economic superpower and increasing hostility from Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The massive loss of manufacturing jobs to China fueled American nativism and isolationism, and led to the rise of Donald Trump. Meanwhile, the U.S. was becoming a police state, said Warren P. Strobel in The Washington Post. The White House was granted “broad new powers” in the wake of the attacks, including a secret warrantless electronic surveillance program. The Department of Homeland Security was created, along with the TSA and ICE. The Obama administration ordered warrantless drone strikes and secretly seized reporters’ phone records. Under President Trump, the erosion of once-entrenched civil liberties has grown exponentially, as he has taken those vast powers and turned them against immigrants, political opponents, protesters, journalists, and the news media.

“Welcome to the worst-case scenario,” said Radley Balko in The New York Times. President Trump is “using the post-9/11 counterterrorism powers for his own ends,” carrying out extrajudicial executions of suspected drug dealers in the Caribbean, declaring nonexistent “national emergencies,” and targeting political enemies as if they were terrorists or traitors. Congress has “all but abdicated its authority,” and courts have “largely acquiesced” to the executive power grab. Twenty five years after 9/11, the sobering lesson is that the greatest threat to our democracy and to our freedoms “has always been authoritarianism—and always will be.”

How are boys and men struggling? 

Young men are falling behind women in nearly every area of life. In academic performance, boys lag well behind girls in elementary school, high school, and college, where female undergraduates now outnumber their male peers roughly 2 to 1. That ratio was about even in the early 1980s. Most men have seen their real wages fall over the past four decades, and a growing share of young men are dropping out of the workforce. They have fewer friends than women and are three times as likely to suffer “deaths of despair” from alcohol or drugs, or by suicide. In a post-#MeToo world where the word “masculinity” is frequently preceded by “toxic,” experts say young men often encounter two competing narratives: one from the Right telling them to become a hyper-macho caricature, modeled by President Trump and manosphere influencers, and another from the Left implying they should keep quiet because they’re so privileged. “This is not a zero-sum game,” said New York University business professor Scott Galloway. “Women still face huge challenges, but we can also acknowledge our young men are struggling.”

When does the trouble start? 

At a very young age. Boys enter kindergarten behind girls in terms of academic preparedness and in behavioral skills, such as the ability to socialize and regulate emotions. That gender gap continues throughout school: Girls score better on reading and writing tests— they are almost a full grade ahead of boys by ninth grade—and earn higher GPAs. Boys, meanwhile, are roughly twice as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD and twice as likely to be suspended; they also drop out at higher rates than their female classmates. Researchers believe some of this disparity could be a result of the increasing emphasis on academics and testing in the earliest years of education, which may make the learning experience harder for boys, who mature later than girls. Educators and policymakers have also spent several decades focused on correcting historical gender inequalities that held back girls. But some experts worry that educational excellence itself is now “coded” as female, discouraging boys.

What happens after school?

The decline of traditionally male-dominated industries such as manufacturing have hit men’s pay and employment potential. Inflation-adjusted wages for men dropped 3% from 1979 to 2019, while those of women—who earn 81 cents for every dollar earned by men—rose nearly 29%. And of the 1.2 million new jobs added between February 2024 and February 2026, about two-thirds went to women. That pattern is likely to be replicated in future jobs reports as sectors with large shares of women workers, such as health care and social services, continue to expand while male-heavy sectors like construction and tech either shrink or stagnate. Faced with these difficulties, a growing number of young men are simply giving up on employment. Today, nearly 1 in 9 prime-age men are neither working nor looking for work, and about 1 in 5 men ages 25 to 34 still live with their parents, compared with 1 in 10 women in that demographic.

Does this affect men’s mental health? 

It’s causing a crisis of loneliness. Men ages 18 to 30 spent 18% more time alone in 2023 than in 2019—an average of 6.6 nonsleeping hours—according to time-use surveys by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s 22% more alone time than same-age women. “The more that you’re sitting on the couch,” said Gary Barker, head of progressive gender-equality group Equimundo, “your social network gets narrower and then you don’t have the social capital or the skills to step into a job.” In an Equimundo poll, almost two-thirds of men ages 18 to 30 said nobody knew them well; a quarter hadn’t seen anyone outside their home in the past week. Dan and Joana Moreno of Miami have seen this crisis play out in their family. Their daughter finished business school and got engaged in 2024; that year, their three adult sons were all single and still living at home. Middle son Daniel, 27, dropped out of college in 2019. “Nothing is really stopping me,” he said. “It’s just myself, standing in my own way.”

Where does that aimlessness lead?

Experts believe it’s to blame for a sharp increase in the suicide rate among men ages 25 to 34, which climbed 30% from 2010 to 2023. Social isolation, said psychologist Matthew Nock, means men are “less likely to reach out for care [and] less well connected to others.” Feelings of isolation and a lack of purpose are also pushing young men toward the manosphere, a loose network of online communities and misogynist influencers such as the hugely popular Andrew Tate—who with his brother, Tristan, is fighting extradition to the U.K. on charges of rape and sex trafficking—that promote male dominance and blame men’s woes on a “feminized” society. “These spaces are really taking advantage of those insecurities and a need for validation,” said Kalliopi Mingeirou of U.N. Women.

Can young men get back on track? 

Many experts note that the gender gap in academic achievement can be addressed, as shown by the fact that girls have caught up in math with boys in recent years. “So we could help boys catch up in reading,” said Sean Reardon, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. “We just haven’t organized society and schools yet to do that.” Richard Reeves, head of the nonpartisan American Institute for Boys and Men, argues for boys to start kindergarten at age 6 rather than 5, so they’re better cognitively matched with girls, and for more men to be encouraged to enter more-heavily female professions, such as nursing and teaching. “It is not that men have fewer opportunities,” he said. “It is that they are not taking them.” Reeves adds that it’s in all of society’s interest to help lift up boys and young men. “A world of floundering men,” he says, “is unlikely to be a world of flourishing women.”

The music was loud, the flags were everywhere, and the “sense of panic” was inescapable, said Nikki McCann Ramirez in Rolling Stone. With Election Day less than two months away, and polls showing Republicans in danger of losing both the House and Senate, the GOP earlier this month held its first-ever midterm convention in Dallas. The MAGA luminaries addressing “Trumpapalooza” barely mentioned soaring gas prices or the quagmire in Iran, the related catastrophes that have dragged Trump’s approval rating down into the mid-30s. Instead, they gushed over Trump’s leadership; warned of an America overrun by Islamists, “killer migrants,” and trans athletes if “evil” Democrats win, and left it to Trump himself, addressing both nights of the event, to rally the MAGA faithful. But “the cult of Trump is waning,” said Jamelle Bouie in The New York Times. Speaking to thousands of unfilled seats—many left empty by swing-state candidates who skipped the event—Trump had attendees pledge allegiance to him personally, “the greatest president in the history of the United States,” and promise to “cheat like hell” in November. In what is surely one of our Republic’s lowest moments, Trump promised a $5,000 “dividend check” to every American, if Republicans win the midterms. “Far from juicing turnout” for the GOP, Trumpapalooza may have just “reminded the voting public” of why they need to elect Democrats.

Trump did make some questionable choices, said David M. Drucker in Bloomberg. He mocked voters’ affordability anxieties. He ridiculed Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, now trailing Democrat James Talarico in the race for Texas’ open Senate seat, saying, “I don’t really like the way he looks.” But Trump may have accomplished his main goal: to have his die-hard supporters “pretend that I’m on the ballot.” Still, Republicans’ bigger problem is the president’s “evaporating support among GOP regulars who have never been Trump’s biggest fans.” Perhaps the promise of a “$5,000 payoff” will motivate some, but the fact that “Trump was compelled to resort to this sort of dubious measure is revealing.”

“No one is falling” for Trump’s dividend “gimmick,” said The Washington Post in an editorial. Congress would need to approve the payout, and not even the GOP’s Trumpified House delegation wants any part of a vote-buying scheme that would turbocharge inflation and add another $1.2 trillion to the $40 trillion national debt. Trump’s “$5,000-check promise may be the moment he finally underestimated his audience,” said Jonathan Chait in The Atlantic. Does he really think voters have forgotten the DOGE “refund” checks that were supposedly in the mail? Or the “tariff rebate” checks he also promised? Trump’s free-money “ruse,” like the rest of his shtick, has “worn thin.”

“Republicans’ best hope,” said Dana Milbank in The Washington Sun, is that most voters weren’t paying attention. The convention’s first night coincided with the NFL’s season opener, and while 25 million Americans tuned in to see the Seahawks beat the Patriots, only 3 million chose to watch Trump rhapsodize about his gilded ballroom. Viewership didn’t improve on night two, when Vice President JD Vance delighted the crowd by telling a protester with a Mexican flag to “get your ass” to Mexico. Vance’s Trumpy zinger underscored the predicament for a party that renounced all ideological commitments to become a “cult of personality.” When Trump leaves the scene, and a midterm drubbing would mark the beginning of his end, there may be nothing left but a “hollow shell.”

What happened

Top executives at leading artificial intelligence companies called earlier this month for a global slowdown in the development of AI, amid mounting fears that their industry is speeding toward creating a technology that humans may not be able to control. Concern over the rapid pace of AI progress exploded after Jacob Coxon, a researcher at Anthropic, resigned and warned in a series of social media posts that the two leading AI labs—Anthropic and OpenAI—are racing to build “superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources.” They are “gambling with our lives,” he wrote in a post viewed over 172 million times, adding that the people working in AI “earnestly believe that it could kill us all.” Other industry insiders aired similar warnings. Evan Hubinger, a top Anthropic scientist, put the odds that AI will “kill all humans” within a decade above 10%; OpenAI safety researcher Marcus Williams put the risk at 70% without regulation or a “coordinated slowdown.” Days later, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for an industry-wide effort to “slow the pace,” saying that within a year a swarm of AI bots “could be capable of taking over the entire internet.” He called for AI companies to band together to create safety standards and said he’d bring in outside monitors. The bosses of two rival firms, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and SpaceX’s Elon Musk, quickly concurred. “We need to pace the frontier,” said Altman.

President Trump called the warnings of catastrophe “a hoax” and dismissed the need for industry guardrails. Citing competition with China, he said, “whoever wins with AI wins.” The only needed control, he posted online, is “a strong and smart (High IQ) president, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades.”

House Democrats demanded that a planned recess be canceled in order to pass AI regulations, and Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) proposed a bill to mandate companies incorporate a “kill switch” in their AI models. But House Speaker Mike Johnson said industries can “self-regulate,” and that rushing through regulation would mean losing “the race to China, and that is a threat to every single American.” Vice President JD Vance argued that companies creating the most advanced models already have the power they need to prevent bad outcomes. “If you’re building Frankenstein,” he said, “stop.”

What the editorials said

This should “become a watershed moment” for AI, said the Financial Times. When the same executives who’ve “been competing hell-for-leather to advance AI” say it’s time to back off, the world had better listen. Their warning calls come at a moment when they’re racing to develop advanced AI systems that recursively self-improve, without human input. The result will be “superintelligent” agents vastly smarter than humans, agents that Amodei admitted could prove beyond our control. “It is time to act.”

“Color us skeptical,” said National Review. Perhaps AI’s top dogs are suddenly aligned due to troubling developments they haven’t revealed. “But we remain suspicious of early movers who call for government regulation.” Amodei and Altman sit atop the industry, and will benefit if the government were “to entrench them as virtual utilities.” Hitting the brakes and handing control to the federal government just insures that China and other adversaries will leave us in the dust. That’s a risk “we cannot afford.”

What the columnists said

Coxon’s warning dropped “at the end of a summer that showcased how frighteningly capable AI has become,” said Billy Perrigo in Time. In a July incident that deeply rattled the industry, a swarm of OpenAI agents went rogue, escaped their supposedly sealed testing environment, conspired on an abandoned internet forum, and then hacked the AI company Hugging Face. In another incident, an Anthropic model tested by a U.K. government agency assumed a fake identity and tried to persuade a human to insert malware into an open-source system, then hid its tracks after failing.

AI safety experts fear “two broad paths to catastrophe,” said Herb Scribner in Axios. One is malevolent humans weaponizing AI to do terrible things. The other is “humans losing control of it.” In the first scenario, AI could help bad actors create devastating biological or chemical weapons; Anthropic said earlier this month it had blocked several attempts to use its Claude model for bioweapons research. In the second, rogue systems that slip human oversight and pursue their own goals could attack electrical grids and financial markets, trick nuclear powers into warfare, or unleash “a massive cyberattack” that could cripple “humanity’s infrastructure.”

“In a sane world,” all this would spark government action, said Shakeel Hashim in The Guardian. We have a classic “prisoner’s dilemma” where it’s in everyone’s interest to slow the AI race but each participant “has a strong incentive to defect.” This is what government is for, “to set a floor on acceptable corporate behavior,” but Trump and Johnson are sticking “their heads in the sand.” The roadblock is our “dim-witted, amoral” president, said Brian Beutler in his Substack newsletter. Such matters are out of his depth. But the bigger issue is that “his corrupt, narcissistic” incentive—to prop up the “near-term economy”—dictates doing nothing.

This is not a dress rehearsal, said Stephen Witt in The New York Times. Around the globe, panic is rising as those building AI begin to realize they’ve unleashed a monster. For me and many others, it brings to mind the opening months of 2020, when a small group of public health experts were trying to raise alarms about Covid—warnings Trump initially dismissed. We know what followed. “We have a short window, right now, to rein these systems in. This is AI’s warning shot, and we might not get another one.”

Healdsburg, Calif.

This 1988 Mediterranean-style home in Sonoma County has a C-shaped library with a windowed reading nook. The main four-bedroom features a double-height foyer, hardwood floors, coffered ceilings, an all-white kitchen, a curved staircase, and a dining room with arch-topped French doors.

The 10-plus-acre lot also has a detached studio, a vineyard and gardens, and an entertainment area with a pergola, kitchen, fireplace, pool, and sports courts. $7,950,000. Lisa Albertson, Vanguard Properties/Luxury Portfolio International, (415) 450-7768

Matinecock, N.Y.

Accessed by a spiral staircase, the library in this 1968 modernist home on Long Island’s North Shore has leafy views and is tucked under the curved roofline. The four-bedroom’s great room includes 19-foot wood ceilings, stone floors, and glass walls.

On the property’s 5 acres, the botanist owner has grown specimen plants, trees, and a meadow garden, complemented by an outdoor sculpture, walking paths, and a Native American geological landmark. $3,875,000. Paul Mateyunas, Douglas Elliman Real Estate, (516) 816-0301

Waterville Valley, N.H.

Located on Snow’s Mountain in the White Mountain National Forest, this 1995 four-bedroom Gothic-revival home is owned by Robin Cook, the author of Coma and other best-selling novels, and features the private, glass-walled cupola office where he worked.

The home also includes a living room with a floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace, a dining room with dramatic wallpaper, and a green marble primary bath. The wooded 1-acre lot is minutes from town and a ski resort. $1,999,000. Mike Aronson, Waterville Valley Realty, (603) 236-8333 ext. 18

Scituate, Mass.

Near the coast about an hour from Boston, this four-bedroom 1893 Tudor was once the Pierce Memorial Library. A cherrywood-clad office includes built-ins, paneling, coffered ceilings, and a bourbon bar, while the home’s living room has 20-foot ceilings, a limestone fireplace, and split stairs to a loft den with a pool table.

On the nearly 1-acre lot are mature trees and a flat backyard with a stone fireplace, patio, and fountain. $1,799,000. Julie McCarthy, Compass, (774) 249-2172

London

Built for a painter, then owned by a pianist, this three-bedroom, Arts and Crafts–style townhouse in the affluent Chelsea neighborhood is several doors from A.A. Milne’s house of 20 years, where he wrote the Winnie-the-Pooh books.

The updated three-story home has wood floors, a modern kitchen, a library with built-ins, and two offices with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Outside is a terrace; multiple famed bookstores are nearby. $8,466,540. Stacy Sims, Knightsbridge—United Kingdom Sotheby’s International Realty, +44 2046 130200

Portland, Ore.

In the Pearl District, this 2004 one-bedroom condo is across the street from Powell’s City of Books—known as the largest bookstore in the world. The contemporary home includes high ceilings, hardwood floors, a kitchen with stone counters, a bedroom with a walk-in closet, and in-unit laundry.

A covered terrace has city and mountain views. Dining, shopping, and a park are all within walking distance. $469,000. Chad Estes, Coldwell Banker Bain, (503) 867-6388

Homeowners dues are reshaping the neighborhood, said Giulia Carbonaro in Newsweek. About 21.6 million people—nearly one-fourth of all homeowners in the country—paid a condo or homeowners association (HOA) fee in 2024, according to the Census Bureau. These community governance groups rely on owner dues and assessments to cover shared amenities, like pools, trash collection, and lawn maintenance. But in many places, the fees are rising quickly as HOAs contend with higher upkeep, labor, and insurance costs. Homeowners understandably put “mortgages and utilities first when their disposable income is squeezed,” but too many missed HOA payments can result in a tax lien on their property. Between 2022 and 2025, HOA liens rose 41.7% to more than 250,000 nationwide, according to property data platform Cotality, while HOA-led foreclosure filings rocketed more than 46%.

Americans living in older condos are facing the brunt of this, said Claire Boston in Yahoo Finance. They often “pay more than double the annual fees that newer condo owners do.” The collapse of a 40-year-old condo building in Surfside, Fla., in 2021 forced many HOAs to “spend heavily to catch up on deferred maintenance” and recoup rising insurance costs. The impact has reverberated well beyond Florida. HOA fees are even increasing for affordable houses, said Cormac McCrimmon in PBS.org. In Boulder, for instance, Henriette Gregorio bought a home in 2021 through the city’s Permanently Affordable Homes program. Although her mortgage has stayed manageable, her HOA fees have since doubled to more than $800 per month. “It’s a real challenge,” said Boulder Mayor Aaron Brockett, who also lives in a townhouse with escalating HOA fees.

Not all HOAs are evil, said Daniel Kramer and Madeline Carr in the Los Angeles Times. These “private, quasi-governmental organizations” can be real forces for good when it comes to sustainability, managing “how entire neighborhoods use water, generate energy, provide wildlife habitat, and respond to climate change.” Some are already starting to reject “aesthetic uniformity” for healthier environmental rules like “requiring native plants, limiting turfgrass, and encouraging renewable energy.” There are some HOA red flags to look out for before buying, said Veronica Dagher in The Wall Street Journal. Ask the board about any upcoming improvements. They are costly and lead to inconveniences, but “a strong track record of upgrades is often a sign of good governance.” Prospective buyers can request a “reserve study” that summarizes the HOA’s financial health to see how prepared the organization is for major repairs such as a roof replacement. Finally, talk to residents to get a vibe. While some HOAs function like “easygoing golden retrievers,” others are “tightly wound like pit bulls.”

Eastlake

The Queen of the Lake floats on Lake Union, with a three-sided moorage and city views. Built in 1980, the refreshed contemporary four-bedroom has a fireplace, hardwood floors, 22-foot ceilings, and an open chef’s kitchen with glossy stone counters.

Outdoor spaces include a Juliet balcony; a covered, heated deck with a hot tub; a floating dock; two decks off the dining room and kitchen; and spiral stairs to a roof terrace. $4,799,000. Dan Gottesman, Engel & Völkers Mercer Island, (206) 898-2505

Magnolia

One of the final designs of architect Ralph Anderson, this 2000 four-bedroom contemporary looks out to Puget Sound, Bainbridge Island, and the Olympic Mountains.

The main living space has vaulted ceilings with exposed beams, oak floors, a kitchen with a Viking range and an in-island beverage fridge, and retractable glass doors that open to a wraparound deck. An elevator connects the floors, and a stone patio faces the water. $3,895,000. Junior Torres, J.D., Windermere Real Estate/Luxury Portfolio International, (206) 854-5596

Mount Baker

This 1911 Spanish-style home designed by architect James H. Schack has views of Lake Washington and the Cascade Mountains. The five-bedroom features hardwood floors, original mahogany millwork, a sunroom, a dining room with French doors inlaid with arches, an eat-in kitchen, and a lower level with a gym, billiards, and a fireplace.

The nearly half-acre lot includes a deck with a hot tub and a patio above the attached garage. $4,495,000. Mark Potvin, Compass, (206) 890-4615

Broadmoor

Updated in 1970, this mid-century modern three-bedroom is a few minutes from the water and surrounded by a park.

The foyer features terrazzo floors and roofline windows, and opens to a main space with wood ceilings and floors, a clean-lined kitchen, a dining area with a wet bar, and a living room with floor-to-ceiling windows and a fireplace. Glass doors connect to a deck, a patio, and a flat yard. $4,900,000. Laura Halliday, Realogics Sotheby’s International Realty, (206) 399-5842

Capitol Hill

Built in 1906 as the First Church of Christ, Scientist, The Sanctuary was converted in 2011 into 12 apartments, including this three-story, three-bedroom unit with private gated entry.

The home retains historic columns, stained glass, and exposed brick and limestone walls, along with newer steel beams, posts, and a fireplace. There’s also a loft with a glass railing, a modern kitchen, and an in-unit elevator. Green spaces and coffee shops are nearby. $1,995,000. Moira Holley, Realogics Sotheby’s International Realty, (206) 612-5771

West Queen Anne

This two-story, one-bedroom condo is in the former West Queen Anne School, a Richardsonian Romanesque building completed in 1920. The apartment has high ceilings, hardwood floors, Palladian windows, beadboard wainscoting, and a spiral staircase to a loft bedroom with exposed brick walls. The C-shaped kitchen has herringbone wall tiles and stainless appliances.

Shared amenities include access to the leafy campus, a gym, parking, and storage, and the Space Needle is 10 minutes away. $499,000. Keith Reed, Windermere Real Estate/Luxury Portfolio International, (253) 223-3436

‘So Much for Goodbyes’ by Billy Strings

★★★

Consider the latest from Billy Strings “an instant addition to the canon of great Americana albums born from personal upheaval,” said Eric Renner Brown in Billboard. The virtuosic bluegrass guitarist, whose “lightning-quick” picking and psychedelic improvisations have won him a devoted following, has thus far been underrated as a songwriter. “But expect that to change with his emotional fifth album,” a record born of heartbreak following the 2025 overdose death of his mother. While “Burn the Other End,” the first single, “bottles the fire and brimstone of Strings’ live shows,” the album’s true standout, the somber “Still I Crash,” is “as intimate a song as Strings has ever recorded.” Arriving halfway in, that tune “effectively punches the listener in the stomach” and “casts a long shadow over the remaining tracks,” said Alexis Petridis in The Guardian. Up until then, the 33-year-old three-time Grammy winner has mixed in a Springsteen-like piece of heartland rock and a couple songs “so rooted in tradition” they could be 80 years old. When a sorrowful waltz ends things, you’ll be buoyed by one thought: “how rich and powerful the album you’ve just heard is.”

‘I Must Be Dreaming’ by Alabama Shakes

★★★

When Alabama Shakes scored a No. 1 album with 2015’s Sound & Color, “it seemed like the start of something big,” said Mark Richardson in The Wall Street Journal. Instead, the “soulful roots-rock outfit” stopped touring in 2017, chief songwriter Brittany Howard dove into solo projects, and we’ve all waited 11 years for a follow-up to the band’s Grammy-winning sophomore effort. Finally, though, Howard has reunited with guitarist Heath Fogg and bassist Zac Cockrell, delivering a record that “represents an evolution of the band’s sound while clarifying why it stood out from the retro-rock horde in the first place,” starting with Howard’s remarkable voice. I Must Be Dreaming “is, among other things, a grown-up record,” said Jonathan Bernstein in Rolling Stone. “There are songs about wistful regret, songs about the state of the country, songs about, well, gardens.” Highlights include the piano-driven shuffle “Waist Deep” and the genre-blending centerpiece, “I Feel Hope Coming.” Howard “hasn’t sounded this at home in years,” proof that her old band “remains one of the most effective ways of communicating the rock-soul-funk-pop she hears inside her head.”

★★★

“The stage version of Paranormal Activity delivers more thrills, chills, and screams than Broadway has seen in years,” said Frank Rizzo in Variety. Horror rarely succeeds on New York City’s biggest stages, but this show works because its story is built around two appealing characters, their fear that their home may be haunted proves justified, and the whole experience is sold by “hair-raising” illusions provided by the same man who created the Tony-winning supernatural effects for the current stage adaptation of Stranger Things. Though the story doesn’t match the plot of any of the Paranormal Activity movies, it produces “an exhilarating fun-house night in the theater.”

The show, which debuted in the U.K. and has toured widely, arrives on Broadway “polished to a cold shine,” said Helen Shaw in The New York Times. Wisely, it jettisons the movies’ signature use of found video footage as a source of frights, leaning instead on “pre-cinematic scare techniques like an abruptly loud doorbell and a hypnotic sequence of storytelling in the dark.” Cast as an affectionate young couple who’ve newly relocated, Cher Álvarez and Travis A. Knight “carry the whole thing with an unaffected naturalism” as they fight to shake off the suspicion that a supernatural force has followed them to their new home. Sure, “the story wobbles if you think about it after the lights come up—so don’t think about it too much.”

It may seem odd that the audience routinely applauds after each big scare, said Jackson McHenry in NYMag.com. Yet the scares are “indeed applause-worthy.” I could complain that playwright Levi Holloway’s attempts to add thematic heft to the story “grow tedious quickly” and that the show’s grisly horror-movie-style ending lands awkwardly in a live theater setting. Until then, though, sharing the company of a thousand strangers while watching the home’s haunting play out “gives the thing an odd and interesting warmth.”

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British historian Dan Jones is the author of The New York Times nonfiction best sellers The Plantagenets and Powers and Thrones. Lion Hearts, the third novel in his Essex Dogs trilogy, a thriller series set in 14th-century France and England, is now in paperback.

‘American Tabloid’ by James Ellroy (1995)

Often described as a crime writer, Ellroy is to my mind one of the greatest living writers of historical fiction. American Tabloid is part of his Underworld USA Trilogy, alongside The Cold Six Thousand and Blood’s a Rover, and it’s a grotesque vision of the events surrounding John F. Kennedy’s assassination. It’s biting, fevered, slangy, and ugly. Buy it here.

‘War and Peace’ by Leo Tolstoy (1869)

Tolstoy’s epic about Russia during the Napoleonic Wars is one of the greatest studies of human psyche and society ever written. Tolstoy saw everything and had the grandeur of vision to be able to render it in one totally absorbing novel. Buy it here.

‘Life Photographers’ edited by John Loengard (1998)

While working with the artist Marina Amaral on three books about the history of photography, this was my bible. The great Life magazine photographers—Alfred Eisenstaedt, Robert Capa, and all—were pioneering, fearless, and often weird. John Loengard’s oral interviews tell their story. Buy it here.

‘Middlemarch’ by George Eliot (1871)

Eliot was the English Tolstoy, with a vicious sting in her tail. I listened to this on audiobook, and its one-liners are so savage that I would have to pull the car over to write them down. Eliot blows Dickens and Austen out of the park. This is a majestic and hilarious book. Buy it here.

‘A Handful of Dust’ by Evelyn Waugh (1934)

When my daughter was assigned this novel in school, I read it so that the two of us could discuss it on long drives. Whoa, baby! Waugh on his turn from satirical humorist to dark inquisitor of the human condition is in full effect here. Is the morality fable at the end an allegory of purgatory or hell? My daughter and I are still debating that. Buy it here.

‘On Boxing’ by Joyce Carol Oates (1987)

I wrote a sports column for the London Evening Standard for a decade and it gave me great respect for anyone who can write well about that over-examined subject. Oates is up there as perhaps the greatest boxing writer who ever leveled her gaze at the square circle. Buy it here.

‘The Life of M’ by Rachel Cusk

“I have disappointing news,” said Laura Miller in Slate. Rachel Cusk’s 11th novel, which has widely been rumored to be a dirt-dishing character assassination of a particular A-lister she’s been friendly with, “isn’t really about Natalie Portman at all.” Granted, the book concerns an actress, identified only as M, whose screen credits, including a breakthrough performance at 13, track with Portman’s. But the novel makes its intentions clear in its opening lines, when the narrator reports having confessed an interest in writing M’s autobiography and M asking if the story would be entirely made up. Cusk, who’s celebrated for forays into autofiction that interrogate the novel as a form, is plainly about to construct “a narrative hall of mirrors that only a fool would confuse with a thinly veiled roman à clef about a celebrity.”

“Like most of Cusk’s recent work, Life of M is mainly plotless,” said Emma Alpern in NYMag.com. We see little that happens in M’s life beyond her moving through her days unable to muster any strong feelings or connect to reality as most people experience it. Meanwhile, the narrator neither recedes nor reveals any substantial personal information. Though “there’s a mesmerizing, out-of-time quality to the whole scenario,” Cusk arguably goes too far here in her bid to dismantle fiction’s presumptions, because “her insistence on vagueness can be tedious.” The result is “Cusk’s weakest novel yet,” said Becca Rothfeld in The New Yorker. “Life of M is not a disciplined dismantling; it’s a machine breaking down at random.” Cusk wants to make the point that individual experiences don’t matter anymore because we all succumb to a form of groupthink, then reveals her towering self-regard by endowing every one of her characters with the same “humorless, cosmopolitan, self-important” voice that’s undoubtedly her own.

“Life of M is a strange book,” said Sophie Gilbert in The Atlantic. “But in its final pages, it performs an astonishing rug pull that makes you wonder whether the book actually has been an autobiography all along, interested in exposing not M but the knotty and unpalatable process of Cusk’s art.” Throughout her career, Cusk has drawn fire, and even been sued, for creating unflattering portraits of recognizable people she has known. Her narrator here admits late in the book that she imagined her way into M’s mind to entertain herself. “To be a writer in this way is to be parasitic—to latch onto someone real and to try to draw out their life force to make art. It isn’t exactly defensible, but for Cusk to expose that practice is deeply fascinating.”

‘Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature’ by Emily Wilson

“You don’t have to be particularly interested in ancient literature to enjoy this book,” said Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times. “By the time you finish it,” though, “you probably will be.” In this collection of “wonderfully spirited” essays about great works of the past, Emily Wilson, a classicist best known for her 2017 translation of The Odyssey, is up-front about how every translation contains an element of betrayal. Each word or phrase chosen requires a departure from the original, and attempts at literal exactness generate stiff language. Wilson believes it’s important to capture the feel of a text—its sound, pacing, and even humor. As she weaves together close readings of classic texts with arguments about the larger issues at stake in those texts, “Wilson’s excitement for her subject is irrepressibly moving.”

When Wilson finds fault with a translator, she’s “tough-minded,” even “scathing,” said Blake Morrison in The Guardian. She calls out poet Robert Browning for indecipherable translations and American classics popularizer Edith Hamilton for racism, and she decries all classicists who snobbishly try to bar entry to their domain. “Gatekeeping isn’t Wilson’s style,” and she’s eager to end her field’s use of Latin and Greek to keep out the plebs. She also loves to point out how much overlap exists between the ancient world and our own, finding parallels that link Aeschylus, Demosthenes, and Aristophanes with the likes of Spike Lee and Erica Jong. And she slams Silicon Valley’s tech lords for embracing a version of stoicism that misses the essentials.

Though Wilson went viral earlier this summer with a biting critique she published about the hit screen adaptation of The Odyssey, said Kate Tuttle in The Boston Globe, she champions nuanced critical writing. In this book, said Harvey Freedenberg in Shelf Awareness, the role of critic affords her a chance to unspool “a stimulating tour of Greek and Roman literature.” An essay on Sappho explores female sexuality; elsewhere, we learn about Roman humor and slavery in the ancient world. “Anyone who’s been exposed to Wilson’s work will learn much from these essays.” They’ll also “hope her journey as a trusted guide through this distant world continues.”

‘Onslaught’

Directed by Adam Wingard (R)

★★

“If you’ve seen this type of movie before, the makers of Onslaught are betting you’ll want to see their ersatz rehash, too,” said Simon Abrams in RogerEbert.com. A sci-fi action-horror flick that might have made more sense if it was released in the 1980s, this “empty-headed” siege drama pits an Army-vet single mom against three government-engineered super soldiers. But while it delivers “some satisfyingly full-throated gore effects,” Onslaught “isn’t thoughtful enough to make you care about its paint-by-numbers story beats” and does nothing with its potentially timely vision of the American military unleashing mayhem on U.S. citizens.

At least it gives the “magnetic” Adria Arjona her first solo lead role, said Benjamin Lee in The Guardian. Playing an ex-sniper now raising a young daughter in a trailer park, the Andor and Hit Man star “gets to shoot, quip, and chainsaw her way to the center of the frame” when the super soldiers escape from a military lab and begin killing every human in sight. Still, there’s a limit to what Arjona can do with the role because “the situations she’s placed into are not quite inventive enough.” Director Adam Wingard, who’s returning here to indie filmmaking after two Godzilla vs. Kong movies, has called Onslaught a B movie with A-movie polish, but “I’d call it a B-minus success.” Though “the violence is sometimes spectacular,” said William Bibbiani in The Wrap, “the actual onslaught part of the movie doesn’t begin until surprisingly late.” More surprisingly, “the film ends just when it’s getting good.”

‘The Dog Stars’

Directed by Ridley Scott (R)

★★

“At this point in his career, Ridley Scott can churn out a feature like The Dog Stars in his sleep,” said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast. “The question is, why did he want to when it boasted so little originality?” The director of Alien and Blade Runner, now 88, is “the rare artist who knows how to visually paint on a big-screen canvas,” but that talent isn’t enough to save this “by-the-books” post-apocalyptic drama about an isolated young widower with a dog, a small plane, and, eventually, a second chance at love.

The movie, which bombed on its opening weekend, works best as a character study, said David Fear in Rolling Stone. Despite its occasional gunfights and the presence of Josh Brolin, Margaret Qualley, and Guy Pearce in supporting roles, “the loneliness of the grieving survivalist is the main preoccupation,” and Jacob Elordi gets “his Clint Eastwood moment,” proving he could make a career of playing “steely, still-waters-run-deep” types. When the film focuses on Elordi’s dreamer and Brolin’s more distrustful survivalist, it’s “on reasonably solid ground,” said Bilge Ebiri in NYMag.com. But even those characters “never quite transcend their outlines,” making Scott’s adaptation of a 2012 novel feel “fundamentally hollow.” Still, because any director could have underestimated how much the novel relied on its interiority, “I’m happy this 88-year-old director continues to churn out movies.” In fact, “I look forward to whatever comes next.”

Tim Curry was a patron saint for the kooky. From his breakout starring role in 1975’s cult classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Curry brought his bulbous eyes and madcap energy to every performance. Intensely private about his personal life, he built a following on the strength of his oddball characters, including the zany butler in 1985’s Clue, the evil clown Pennywise in 1990’s It, and King Arthur—a Tony-nominated turn—in 2005’s Broadway hit Spamalot. In acting roles, “I would choose risky over anything,” Curry said last year. “That’s the best way to be.”

Born in northwest England to a Methodist chaplain, Timothy James Curry was blessed with “a mischief-maker’s good looks, a casual athletic grace, and a supple and resonant voice,” said The New York Times. Acting was his obvious calling, and after graduating from the University of Birmingham, he quickly found parts in regional theater. But it was the “campy sci-fi romp” The Rocky Horror Show that made him a star, said Rolling Stone. Originating the cross-dressing Dr. Frank-N-Furter on the London stage in 1973, Curry reprised his role in the U.S. production in Los Angeles and then in the film. While the movie version “famously bombed” at first, it became “a midnight-movie sensation,” packing cinemas with costumed fans singing along, and it is still regularly screened today.

Curry “spent the rest of his acting career gleefully refusing to be pinned down,” said IndieWire. He schemed with onscreen sister Carol Burnett in 1982’s Annie, embodied the devil in 1985’s Legend, and sailed alongside Kermit and Miss Piggy as Long John Silver in 1996’s Muppet Treasure Island. Though a 2012 stroke left him wheelchair-bound and without the use of one arm, he played the narrator in Fox’s 2016 TV remake of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and remained active as a voice-over artist until the end of his life, recording the audiobook of his memoir last year. “I have loved and been loved,” he said, “and I hope you have, too."

There was far more to Dolly Parton than met the eye, and there was a whole lot that met the eye. Clad in towering blonde wigs, with sparkling, skintight outfits accentuating a bust that launched a thousand late-show quips, she combined showbiz glamour with garish excess. “A rhinestone shines just as good as a diamond,” she often said. But behind the glitz was profound talent, as well as a grit and generosity that made her one of country music’s biggest stars and a beloved international icon. Rising from Appalachian poverty, Parton wrote thousands of songs, including classics such as “Jolene” and “Coat of Many Colors.” She recorded 25 No. 1 country hits and won 10 Grammys. She starred in movies such as 9 to 5 and Steel Magnolias. And she was a shrewd businesswoman who blazed a trail through a male-dominated industry, amassing a fortune estimated at $450 million and giving millions to charity. She was also a quip machine with a bracing wit, who poked fun at herself while making clear she was not to be underestimated. “I’m not offended by all of the dumb blonde jokes because I know I’m not dumb,” she said. “And I also know I’m not blonde.”

Raised in eastern Tennessee’s Smoky Mountains, Parton had a “dirt poor” upbringing that “shaped every aspect of her life and career,” said The Times (U.K.). Her father was an illiterate sharecropper whose 12 children shared a one-room cabin with no running water or electricity. A musical prodigy “steeped in Appalachian mountain and bluegrass music,” she wrote her first song by age 6. Encouraged by a songwriting uncle, she appeared on local radio and cut her first record by the age of 11. The day after graduating from high school, she boarded a bus to Nashville “with a suitcase of songs,” said the Associated Press. She signed a deal with Monument Records and in 1966 released her first country hit, “Dumb Blonde,” a plucky takedown of female stereotypes. That same year, she married Carl Dean, an asphalt contractor she met in a laundromat; he avoided the limelight entirely and they stayed together until his death in 2025. In 1967, she scored a break when she was tapped by Porter Wagoner to be a regular on his TV show. The pair recorded numerous duets as Parton continued to pursue a solo career, gradually shifting “her country warble to a more polished, pop-leaning style.

In the early ’70s, Parton “started to eclipse” Wagoner with a run of No. 1 country singles, said The New York Times. She left his show in 1974, writing “I Will Always Love You”—a smash for Whitney Houston decades later—as a parting “expression of gratitude,” though it didn’t prevent him from suing her. Soon Parton was the reigning queen of Nashville, the Country Music Association’s Female Vocalist of the Year in 1975 and 1976. In the years that followed, she “continued her ascendance on the charts” with pop crossover hits like “Heartbreaker” and “Here You Come Again.”

Already a talk-show favorite for her easy banter and “outrageous style,” Parton “secured her status as a superstar” with 9 to 5, said The Wall Street Journal. Her performance as a secretary battling a lecherous boss alongside Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda made her a household name, while the catchy, clever theme song she wrote topped both the pop and country charts. “Islands in the Stream,” a 1983 duet with Kenny Rogers, proved “another pop smash”; three years later, she opened Dollywood, a theme park near her birthplace. With features including a replica of her childhood home, it became one of Tennessee’s top tourist attractions and a key source of jobs and revenue for the region.

As the hits dried up in the 2000s, Parton turned toward the music of her youth, said Rolling Stone, recording bluegrass and gospel songs. She remained an “unstoppable force with a flurry of world tours, studio albums, film projects, corporate partnerships, and books.” A major philanthropist, she endowed college scholarships, raised money for disaster victims, and gave $1 million to help fund research that led to Moderna’s Covid vaccine. Her Imagination Library has distributed more than 300 million free books to young children worldwide. For all her accomplishments, Parton said being a songwriter was “the guts and the root of the whole thing,” and how she’d like to be remembered. “You’re putting something in the world that wasn’t there yesterday,” she said, “and which you hope people are still going to be singing after you’ve gone.”

The outcome of Michigan’s high-stakes Senate race may come down to a streamer from California, said Alexei Koseff in The Washington Post. Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed is facing a campaign crisis after his friend and political ally Hasan Piker—a progressive influencer with millions of followers—suggested in a livestream that if Jewish Americans continue to support Israel, “eventually someone is going to come around and take action—not against the state of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews.” Republican opponent Mike Rogers immediately played up El-Sayed’s ties to his fellow Muslim Piker, calling the streamer his “running mate.” El-Sayed attempted to mend bridges with Michigan’s Jewish community but refused to disavow Piker outright. “If you want to make this race about a streamer in California,” he said, “I just think you’re missing the boat.”

“It shouldn’t have taken this long for prominent Democrats to confront their party’s antisemitism problem,” said David M. Drucker in Bloomberg. Piker has been “spouting antisemitic and antiIsrael nonsense since at least last year”—even as El-Sayed brought him on the campaign trail. Some liberal activists see Piker as the Democrats’ version of Joe Rogan, helping them reach voters under 30, but his incendiary rhetoric risks Democrats’ “historically strong bond” with Jewish voters. Some Democrats are complaining that Republicans aren’t required to denounce right-wing influencers like the racist and Islamophobic Laura Loomer, said Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times. True enough. But as “an avatar” of the insurgent left, Piker has made it clear he wants to purge all Zionists who believe in a Jewish homeland from Democratic ranks. Even though I’m critical of Israel’s policies, “it’s easy for me to see why Piker’s rise panics some Jews.

Like it or not, El-Sayed’s alliance with Piker “is one of the important questions at stake in the election,” said Jonathan Chait in The Atlantic. Piker is not only virulently anti-Israel; he’s a self-described Marxist who has expressed admiration for Mao Zedong and once said America deserved 9/11. El-Sayed has said “he intends to use his victory as a platform” to move the Democratic Party to the left. His victory in November could “throw open the doors of the party to a strain of militant politics that many Jews justifiably consider dangerous.” Given that the alternative—the Republican Rogers—is an adamant Trump supporter, Michigan Democrats face “a grim choice."

“Whatever phantasmagorical thing a Real American might be, there has never been one realer” than Dolly Parton, said Kathryn Schulz in The New Yorker. A self-made millionaire who was born in a one-room cabin in the Smoky Mountains, the beloved singer-songwriter and philanthropist, who died Aug. 25 at 80, “embodied our national ideal of authenticity.” She was even authentic in her embrace of artifice—“the wigs, the eyelashes, the boob jobs”—quipping, “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.” Then there was her music. She connected with Americans of all ages, races, and classes with songs of “hope, home, and hardscrabble happiness,” whether recalling a jacket her mother stitched from rags on “Coat of Many Colors” or mourning a romance on “I Will Always Love You.” Parton was often called the Queen of Country Music, but there was nothing monarchical about her. She was “democratic to her bones, of the people and by the people and for the people, the duly elected President of the United States of Americans.”

Parton was “the one person who could unite a deeply divided country,” said Zachary B. Wolf in CNN.com. She embraced her LGBTQ fans and penned the feminist anthem “9 to 5” but wouldn’t call herself a feminist, preferring “woman in business.” She dismissed herself as a Jezebel but openly discussed her Christian faith. Her mourners ranged from President Trump, who lowered flags to half-staff in her honor, to the Democratic Socialists of America, who declared her a working-class hero. She maintained “professional political agnosticism,” always deflecting with a “plain-spoken Dollyism” that entertained all sides. No one was surprised when she was ranked the most popular public figure in April, with a net favorability of plus 65, 51 points ahead of her closest competitor, former president Barack Obama.

Her death hits harder coming “when that other faux-blond 80-year-old” is “spreading chaos,” said Jackie Calmes in the Los Angeles Times. “Both Dolly and Donald are American originals.” She was “a fairy-tale version of the American dream,” while Trump is an entitled rich kid—another all-American archetype. Her philanthropy “was real and global”; his charitable foundation “was fraudulent and forced to shut down.” Parton represented an America where people “find connections in agreement,” not division, said Christian Schneider in National Review. Those seeking “to make America great again” should strive to do so “in Dolly’s vision.” In death, she pulled off one last remarkable feat: “getting the entire country to agree on something.” The nationwide grief wasn’t performative. “It was recognition that something genuinely irreplaceable had left the room.”

What are Flock cameras?

They’re shoebox-size automated license plate readers that capture still images of passing cars. Typically mounted on poles about 10 feet high, they’re powered by solar panels and linked to cellular networks. Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley founded the company in 2017 because he was fed up with theft in Atlanta, his hometown. The company initially leased cameras to homeowners associations, and by 2020, police departments started buying subscriptions. There are now more than 120,000 Flock cameras in the U.S., deployed by some 7,000 law enforcement agencies. But the backlash has grown just as quickly. Cities are canceling contracts, lawmakers from both parties are drawing up restrictions, and vigilantes have been vandalizing the cameras so they can’t snap pictures. “It’s mass surveillance,” says Cris van Pelt, creator of the police log tracking site HaveIBeenFlocked.com. “It has a huge potential for abuse and very, very little oversight.”

What happens to the images?

The surveillance photos can be uploaded to a vast, searchable database. When a previously flagged or wanted vehicle—which Flock’s AI software can identify by license plate, make, model, color, and even dents and bumper stickers—passes by a camera, local law enforcement receives an alert. Flock Safety says its equipment has assisted in 20% of cleared cases in the jurisdictions that use it, and helped locate more than 10,000 missing people. Providence, R.I., officials said Flock was “instrumental” in locating within hours a masked gunman who killed two people at Brown University last year. And one police chief in Washington state said that since installing Flock, his city of Lakewood has experienced a rare 15-month stretch without a homicide.

What do critics say?

People across the political spectrum—both Tucker Carlson and Bernie Sanders have bashed Flock—argue that its system violates the Fourth Amendment. Will Freeman, an anti-Flock activist, called it a “warrantless surveillance dragnet” in a lawsuit filed in May against the city of Boulder. So far, the courts have disagreed, saying there’s no expectation of privacy on public roads. Immigration activists are concerned about data sharing with ICE or Customs and Border Protection. They note that while Flock Safety has no federal contracts, local police could choose to share information with the feds. Meanwhile, the system isn’t perfect, and its errors can lead to harrowing consequences. When a Flock camera misread a “7” as a “2” on a car in Toledo, falsely matching a stolen car, the vehicle’s owner, Brandon Upchurch, was stopped at gunpoint, mauled by a police dog, and jailed for hours before being released. “I’m traumatized for real,” said Upchurch, who is Black. “If we would have sneezed wrong, it would have ended bad.”

Have police abused the system?

Dozens of law enforcement officers have been charged with or accused of using Flock for unauthorized tracking, mostly to stalk their current or former romantic partners. A Georgia police chief looked up the tags of his girlfriend and her teenage daughter 600 times to track their movements; he was arrested and died of apparent suicide. One woman, a sheriff’s deputy in Wisconsin who requested anonymity, told The Washington Post that her ex, a colleague, searched her license plate over a dozen times a day. “I didn’t leave my house for a week,” she said. One Florida officer, fired after an internal-affairs investigation discovered he’d made 192 inappropriate Flock searches, said, “Pretty much everybody abuses that computer system.” An advocacy group in Joplin, Mo., requested audit logs from the city police department and found that 85% of Flock searches had a one-word justification—like “suspicious” or “drugs”—and that fewer than 3% of searches had a case number.

What does the public think?

Flock appears to be hugely unpopular. Vigilantes have covered the cameras in trash bags, splattered them with paint, and even sawed them down. Freeman, the Boulder-based activist, has launched the app DeFlock, where users can map camera locations; more than 350,000 people have downloaded the app. Flock’s business is still growing, but the backlash has led more than 50 jurisdictions to cut ties with the firm this year. In July alone, 21 groups, including the Los Angeles Police Department, stooped using Flock or began the process of doing so. Local governments and Congress are drafting legislation to regulate the cameras’ use. In the Senate, Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) has opened an investigation into how Flock uses its data. In the House, Keith Self (R-Texas) introduced a bill to require federal agencies to get a warrant before accessing any similar data. “This is not a Left issue, not a Right issue,” Self said. “It is a personal issue.”

How has Flock responded?

Langley points out that the cameras don’t do facial recognition and the customer, not Flock, owns the images. “Think about the tooling that we ask local law enforcement to use,” he says. “We give them a weapon, a gun, a taser, yet we’re afraid to give them a camera that reads a license plate on a public road?” As for misuse, the company says, Flock’s records of search logs allow departments to identify which cops abuse their power. Still, the recent bad press spurred the firm to implement changes it says make it harder to use the system for anything other than legitimate crime-solving. Case codes to justify a search, previously optional, will be mandatory, and the audit log will be upgraded so that Flock can detect abnormal search patterns and block those users. The default time for storing images before deletion, currently 30 days, will drop to a week. Yet the DeFlock activists aren’t placated. “No guardrails,” the group said in response to the new guidelines. “No regulations. No ‘only if they really need to’ pinkie promises. [The cameras] are coming down.”

When President Trump launched the Iran war in February, he declared that his “little excursion” would be over in “four to five weeks.” More than six months later, the war is still raging— and Trump “is losing,” said Ishaan Tharoor in The New Yorker. None of his initial goals have been achieved: the toppling of the Islamist regime, the seizure of Iran’s nuclear program, the dismantling of its ballistic missile program. The Strait of Hormuz, a crucial oil export route that was open to international trade before the war, is now largely shuttered and partly controlled by Iran. Meanwhile, the U.S. has spent more than $37.5 billion on combat operations, “burned through inventories of precision-guided and air-defense munitions,” and seen at least 18 service members killed and more than 750 wounded by Iranian drone and missile strikes. Angered by high gas prices—now averaging $4 a gallon, up from $2.75 pre-war— only about 30% of voters approve of the president’s handling of the conflict. But Trump seems happy with his performance, said Peter Baker in The New York Times. Two weeks ago, he posted an AI-generated image of himself backed by an aircraft carrier, warplanes, American flags, and a sign reading “Mission Accomplished 2026."

Trump has been in denial for months, said Chas Danner in New York. Days before starting the war, he asked his then director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard if his plan for overthrowing the regime would work. According to a new Wall Street Journal report, she warned him that assassinating Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would usher in a more extreme regime, that Tehran would close the strait, and that Iran would hit U.S. partners across the region, weakening our standing with allies. Trump ignored her, “and all of those things happened.” America’s generals are still sending distress signals, said Fred Kaplan in Slate. In a “remarkable” document leaked to The Washington Post, four-star commanders around the world told Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that they wouldn’t be able to “perform their tasks” if, say, China invaded Taiwan or Russia attacked the Baltics, because the Iran war has gobbled up “so many of their planes, ships, and other weapons systems."

Yet Trump now has the upper hand in Iran, said Noah Rothman in National Review. The U.S. Navy has been quietly shepherding more oil tankers through the strait, while its blockade of Iranian ports is making “life inside Iran intolerable.” Supermarkets are running out of rice and cooking oil. Iranians are “hoarding gasoline,” and medical services are “breaking down.” Those “dire conditions” could reignite mass protests—and force the regime to cry uncle. That’s why Trump “must keep up the current economic war,” said Abe Greenwald in Commentary. He’s spent six months flip-flopping on whether to escalate or look for a negotiated “exit.” It’s time to prioritize an “American victory,” even though that means “enduring the inevitable rise in oil prices.”

Good luck selling that to voters, said Joshua Green and Nancy Cook in Bloomberg. With Trump’s approval rating at 33%, GOP strategists are panicking that the “unpopular conflict” will cost the party dearly in the midterms: 69% of undecided voters say they’ll back candidates who want to end U.S. involvement in Iran. But no swift end is in sight, said Daniel DePetris in the Chicago Tribune. Trump’s ego likely won’t let him extinguish “a fire of his own making.” The Iranians, meanwhile, have a simple goal: “Survive.” Tehran may be weaker militarily, but “at least it knows what it wants.”

What happened

The Pentagon was thrown into turmoil last month after Army Secretary Dan Driscoll handed in his resignation, warning President Trump on his way out that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s purging of senior officers and resistance to technological change was doing serious damage to the military. Driscoll has clashed repeatedly with Hegseth, who has pursued a vendetta against “woke” values and has in recent months fired or driven out several highly respected top commanders for reasons he has not articulated. They include Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George, fired in April, and Gen. Christopher T. Donahue, the top Army commander in Europe, who was pushed out in July. George’s and Driscoll’s departures leave the Army with no Senate-confirmed civilian or military leader amid the ongoing war with Iran. Hegseth has also blocked the promotions of dozens of lower-level officers, many of whom were Black or female or had ties to George or Donahue. Driscoll reportedly warned Trump that Hegseth’s purge was creating chaos, hurting morale, and harming efforts to modernize the military. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) urged Trump to fire Hegseth, saying he was more focused on “culture wars” than on “the vital work of our national defense.

Driscoll’s departure came just days after four top military commanders warned Hegseth that the Iran war was compromising military readiness elsewhere in the world. In a highly classified assessment, the four-star commanders registered their disapproval of a plan to keep more than 50,000 U.S. troops in the Middle East through September, and many into 2027, The Washington Post reported. Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell called the Post’s story “inaccurate” and “a betrayal of the force,” perpetuated by critics who hate Trump and Hegseth “more than they love America.”

What the columnists said

Driscoll’s departure “couldn’t come at a worse time,” said Brynn Tannehill in The New Republic. In Ukraine, we’re witnessing “a revolution in military technology and fundamentally how we think about war.” But rather than “lean into the future” of drones and artificial intelligence, as Driscoll was attempting to do, Hegseth canceled an elite counter-drone unit that “had been championed by the generals he sacked.” He’s putting his energies instead into building his ideal macho “warfighter” military, with no flab, transgender troops, female flag officers, or “Black men with shaving chits.”

He’s also focused on his own self-promotion, said Ewan Palmer in The Daily Beast. Another Washington Post report revealed that Hegseth had secretly “hired a team of MAGA influencers” who routinely laud him on social media and assail his critics. They include Kurt Schlichter, a retired colonel with more than 620,000 X followers, and Thomas Anderson, who touts Hegseth to his 323,000 X followers under his pen name CynicalPublius. The Pentagon, which had not disclosed that the influencers were on the payroll, “has not revealed what their roles are.”

Hegseth’s officer purge “is without precedent,” said Greg Jaffe in The New York Times. On his watch the number of four-star Army generals has been cut from 10 to five, and he’s fired or blocked the promotions of more than 80 generals and admirals. The dismissals don’t appear to be related to job performance but instead seem part of an effort to build a leadership “aligned with his political and ideological views.” One officer who’d led combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan reportedly had his promotion pulled because a unit he took over had a mentorship group for female paratroopers.

Driscoll’s departure “puts the Pentagon even more firmly under the control of Hegseth and his MAGA agenda,” said Nancy A. Youssef in The Atlantic. Driscoll, an Army veteran and close friend of Vice President JD Vance with the ear of the White House, sometimes “served as a counterweight to Hegseth’s impulses.” The prospect that he’ll be replaced by a Hegseth ally—potentially Pentagon spokesman Parnell—is further “raising fears inside the Army.”

Making a former Fox News host secretary of defense “was always a huge gamble,” said Tom Nichols, also in The Atlantic. “And now the price of that gamble is evident.” It’s not just Hegseth’s purge and his installation of loyalists; his “tenure has been disastrous on multiple scores.” He was reportedly the sole senior administration official to back Trump’s plan to attack Iran. Hegseth raided “assets from other theaters” to support that foolish war, leaving the U.S. and its allies exposed to threats from China and Russia, who are watching closely as we lose “to a third-rate power in the Middle East.” We will all pay the “price for his incompetence.”

It’s a have or have-not housing market out there, said Samantha Delouya in CNN.com. Look no further than San Francisco. Just a few years ago, the City by the Bay was a symbol of “urban decline.” Now it has the hottest housing market in the country. “Fueled by the artificial intelligence boom” that has left tech workers “flush with cash,” home prices are routinely getting bid up more than $1 million above their listing price. The median home in San Francisco now sells for $1.7 million. And the frenzy has “spilled over into the rental market as well.” Rents for one-bedrooms are up nearly 23% this year to $4,180 a month, and two-bedrooms are up nearly 26% to $6,020. And the upcoming initial public offerings from AI startups Anthropic and OpenAI are expected to only increase “the potential buying power.”

The housing market should settle the lingering debate about “whether the K-shaped economy is over,” said Anna-Louise Jackson in Fast Company. It’s “alive and well.” Entry-level homebuyers “have been priced out” and seem to have “stopped searching.” Traffic on listings of homes priced below $370,000 has fallen sharply since 2021, according to Realtor.com. But “the other end of the housing spectrum tells a very different story.” Those shopping for big, expensive houses “remain very much engaged.” Wealthy buyers are “propping up national sales figures,” said Halina Bennet in Slow Boring. Current housing data “looks decent,” but that’s because upper-end strength is masking some serious lower-end weakness. For anyone who has not “become a newly minted tech millionaire,” economic analysts say, this could be “the worst year for the housing market since 2011.”

The newly passed federal housing law could offer a potential solution, said Lily Belle Poling in The Wall Street Journal. The law makes it “easier and cheaper” to manufacture modular and prefabricated homes for assembly “on site.” Such homes “have long been stuck at the fringe of the housing market,” constituting only 3% of new construction in the U.S. But that number could soon soar. Cuts to red tape in the new law should reduce costs by $5,000 to $10,000 a home. For some homebuyers, those savings “could equal more than 10% of the original cost.” Modular homes are also moving out of the trailer parks and increasingly into the suburbs, said Julie Z. Weil in The Washington Post. Several developers are pitching them “as the way of the future,” betting that more homebuyers will be “willing to give manufactured homes” another look. Newer homes “are of a much higher quality than those of past decades,” and some of the nicest ones list for more than $600,000. But on average, a factory-built home can still be had for only $90,700.

GOP lawmakers and cattle ranchers were ringing “alarm bells” last week over President Trump’s decision to temporarily lower tariffs on ground beef, said Mallory Wilson in The Hill. To curb soaring beef prices—which have been pushed up by drought, rising input costs, and shrinking herds—Trump declared that he would let up to 300,000 metric tons of foreign ground beef into the U.S. with “no out-of-quota tariff.” He claimed the meat would be sold at 25% below the current market rate of $6.89 a pound, but offered no details on how the plan would work or which countries would participate. Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-Mont.) warned that the import of cheap foreign meat will only hurt American ranchers, “most of whom are MAGA Republicans.” Meriwether Farms, a farm-to-table operation in Wyoming, called the president’s actions a “betrayal.”

This is a purely political play by Trump, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. “He knows he and Republicans are being blamed” for higher prices, and it’s no coincidence that his 90-day tariff reprieve “covers the three months through the November midterm elections.” But these welcome concessions to consumers are also an admission that his tariff strategy has “failed economically and politically.” Trump may love the political leverage tariffs provide, but “he and his party may pay a price this November for raising prices” for millions of consumers.

‘Gravest Gravy’ by The Cramps

★★★

For 33 gloriously scuzzy years, the Cramps served up “a proprietary cocktail of Sun-baked rockabilly, surf rock, early R&B, and punk attitude,” said Kory Grow in Rolling Stone. Gravest Gravy, an album consisting of a dozen previously unheard tracks that were recorded in 1977, with Big Star’s Alex Chilton producing, captures the band’s pioneering psychobilly sound at its birth. The group’s “B-movie aesthetic” set them apart as frontman Lux Interior and his partner in life and lunacy, guitarist Poison Ivy, made their mark on New York City’s nascent punk scene a year earlier. Lux died at 62 in 2009, but Poison Ivy partnered with punk icons Henry Rollins and Ian MacKaye to restore and release this record’s early takes on originals like “TV Set” and covers like “Rockin’ Bones,” this one “far creepier” than the version on 1981’s Psychedelic Jungle. “Is this the place to start a Cramps collection?” asked Jem Aswad in Variety. “Probably not.” The 1977 lineup had a second guitarist but no bassist, making the band’s sound “even tinnier and trashier.” Still, Gravest Gravy is “a glorious surprise addition” to the catalog of “one of rock’s most brilliantly unhinged bands.”

‘Weezer (Gold Album)’ by Weezer

★★★

In concept, the third single from Weezer’s latest album doesn’t sound promising, said Ryan Reed in Consequence. “A self-referential quiet-loud rocker,” the song, titled “C.E.O.,” intentionally imitates the feel of the band’s very first single, 1994’s “Undone—The Sweater Song,” and opens with Rivers Cuomo speak-singing that he wishes he could do something new. Fortunately, “everything about ‘C.E.O.’ feels real,” from the lyrics to the angsty, fuzzed-out guitar attack. It’s not “instant-classic Weezer,” but it’s certainly “keeper-tier Weezer” and emblematic of its surroundings—the band’s “funniest, rawest, most musically spry album since at least 2014.” It’s definitely the Weezer album “with the gnarliest guitar sounds and most thunderous rhythm section,” said Tim Sendra in AllMusic. On this, the group’s seventh self-titled album and 20th overall, every tune was hashed out by the bandmates face to face, a method they’d never tried before. “Even if the songs were weak, the massive sound of the record would still make it worth a listen or two.” Fortunately, “the songs are some of the strongest Cuomo and the band have delivered in years.”

‘Monk Movements’ by Jon Batiste

★★★

Jon Batiste can’t hide his joy when he’s playing Thelonious Monk, said Michel Martin in NPR.org. On Monk Movements, one of three solo piano albums the eight-time Grammy winner released on Aug. 14, you can hear his exclamations as he constructs personal takes on “Blue Monk” and “Ugly Beauty.” Batiste fell hard for Monk’s music over 20 years ago, said Larry Blumenfeld in The Wall Street Journal. Now, as a global star, he’s released two tributes to the jazz legend, with Monk Movements the livelier of the two. Whether the Louisiana native is interpreting Monk or playing original compositions that engage with Monk’s legacy here, “it feels as if he’s letting us in on a private communion with his hero.” As on Batiste’s other piano studies albums, said Philip Martin in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, “his exuberance can outrun his discrimination.” In his improvisations, he wants to explore every appealing side road. Still, that beats mere imitation. With each tune, “he takes apart the machinery, treating Monk as a composer whose structures can withstand the same sort of reinterpretation routinely accorded Bach, Beethoven, or Mozart.”

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Jennifer McMahon is the best-selling author of 12 suspense novels, including The Winter People and Promise Not to Tell. In her latest book, Stay Buried, siblings new to a remote Vermont town discover that the locals live in fear of a vengeful spirit.

‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ by Washington Irving (1820)

The story of Ichabod Crane terrified me as a kid. I remember running home on wooded paths from a friend’s house, certain I heard hoofbeats behind me. I was sure that if I turned back, I’d see a rider with his head tucked under his arm, and that just as I was making out the lights of home through the trees, he’d hurl it through the air at me. Buy it here.

‘The Lottery’ by Shirley Jackson (1948)

Until I read this masterpiece in middle school, I had no idea people wrote stories about things like this: small towns full of normal people who were capable of terrible things. It really made me think about the way groups of people can normalize brutality in the name of “tradition.” Buy it here.

‘Harvest Home’ by Thomas Tryon (1973)

This quintessential folk-horror novel taught me never to trust a seemingly idyllic setting, remote location, or tight-knit community—things that all seem so charming on first glance! Buy it here.

‘Pine’ by Francine Toon (2020)

Pine is the perfect example of a book in which the setting feels like a character. The novel’s little Scottish village, surrounded by forest, feels claustrophobic, isolated, steeped in dread. Throw in a girl with a missing mother, sightings of a mysterious woman, and a vanished teenager and you have all the ingredients of a very compelling tale. Buy it here.

‘The Ritual’ by Adam Nevill (2011)

I wouldn’t venture into the woods for a long time after reading this. Four college friends meet up for a reunion hiking trip and make an ill-advised decision to take a shortcut. When they come upon a disemboweled animal hanging from the trees, we know something truly terrifying awaits them. Buy it here.

‘Starve Acre’ by Andrew Michael Hurley (2019)

This many-layered story centers on the tragic loss of a young child. His mother is convinced some part of him is still there at the family home; his father becomes obsessed with digging up the roots of a legendary oak tree. Hurley’s writing is gorgeous, the sort that I willingly get lost in knowing all the while it’s going to take me someplace unsettling. Buy it here.

‘The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy’ by Gil Durán

“Picture this: A loosely organized cabal of obscenely wealthy tech moguls aim to overthrow democracy and replace it with a corporatist dictatorship,” said Kevin Truong in The San Francisco Standard. The premise, undoubtedly, “would make for a good political thriller.” In Gil Durán’s new nonfiction hit, it makes for more unsettling reading. Durán, a journalist who’s also been a spokesman for Jerry Brown and Kamala Harris, argues that tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel, the main patron of JD Vance’s career, sits at the center of an active and powerful circle of tech evangelists who believe democracy is obsolete, technology will create a utopian future, and their cohort is an elite that should decide how the future unfolds. The claim would sound like mere conspiracy theory, said Tonya Mosley in NPR.org, except that the players Durán identifies “have been stating their beliefs and aspirations out loud for years.”

“You could not ask for a more hair-raising compendium of the insane things that Silicon Valley moguls have advocated for,” said Laura Miller in Slate. Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, has touted as formative to his beliefs a 1997 book, The Sovereign Individual, that arguably predicted the rise of cryptocurrency and AI while also forecasting the collapse of nation-states and emergence of individuals smart and powerful enough to pursue their ambitions without constraint. Thiel can count Elon Musk and fellow venture capitalist Marc Andreessen among his allies, and all appear to have been influenced by alt-right blogger Curtis Yarvin, who advocates putting the U.S. under the rule of a CEO-style monarch and has talked about the need to develop “a humane alternative to genocide” to address Earth’s supposed excess of unproductive individuals. While Durán “gives perhaps too much credence to the viability of Silicon Valley’s most authoritarian dreams,” his book is a “much-needed” wake-up call, warning us that today’s tech giants should be feared, not blindly worshipped.

Durán claims that tech moguls view the Trump regime as a vehicle for the expansion of their power, and “few could dispute this,” said Steve Rose in The Guardian. Remember the many tech titans standing behind him at his 2025 inauguration? Or how they helped the Trump family make billions off cryptocurrency? The payoffs have come in government contracts such as Palantir’s estimated $13.7 billion annual haul as well as in the wrecking ball taken to government oversight. Trump has even backed such nutty ideas as building 10 “Freedom Cities” that would be exempt from many existing regulations. Thiel and his allies haven’t fully triumphed yet, though, as indicated by the recent surge in public opposition to data centers. With any luck, “this could be a radicalizing moment.”

‘The Ego Trip: Psychedelic Toads, a Trail of Deaths, and the Guru Who Peddled Transcendence’ by Kimon de Greef

“Readers who are unaware that the secretions from some toads may serve as portals to the divine are in for some significant revelations,” said Dave Shiflett in The Wall Street Journal. Kimon de Greef’s engaging new book takes as a given that the Sonoran Desert toad produces 5-MeO-DMT, a powerful natural psychedelic. But de Greef is also interested in the subculture that’s arisen around “the God molecule,” as advocates call it. Toad facilitators now regularly milk the toad’s glands and dry the extract so it can be smoked, generating potent trips that are said to collapse the ego. Toad smoking can cause instant psychosis, but fans of the practice include Mike Tyson and Hunter Biden, and “de Greef describes the effects of 5-MeO-DMT in such glowing terms that a foot-washing Baptist might be tempted to give it a shot.”

“For an experience this intense, a wise guide is key—or so you’d think,” said Susannah Cahalan in The New York Times. The antihero of de Greef’s story is Octavio Rettig Hinojosa, a Mexican doctor turned psychedelic celebrity who, since 2006, has championed toad smoking, claiming the practice helped him kick crack. Since achieving widespread fame in 2013, Rettig has overseen gatherings that have introduced thousands of novices to toad smoking. “If you’re familiar with the guru playbook, you know where this is going.” Rettig’s recklessness has led to suffering. At one point, he was charged in the death of a woman who stopped breathing during one of his ceremonies.

“As de Greef is keen to stress, the problem is not just one eccentric doctor,” said Lilia Marie Ellis in the Washington Independent Review of Books. Though 5-MeO-DMT is illegal in the U.S., pharmaceutical companies are displaying similar heedlessness as they race to monetize synthesized versions, which have shown promise in the treatment of addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder. De Greef’s book “stalls slightly” when it turns away from Rettig, “whose energy jumps off the page.” Still, The Ego Trip “succeeds in illustrating that commercialized psychedelics are not the miracle drug many hoped for.”

The smart-glasses backlash is here, again, said Anthony Cuthbertson in The Independent (U.K.). Twelve years after privacy concerns killed off Google Glass—whose wearers were labeled “glassholes”—Meta has successfully revived the technology. Last year, it sold 7 million pairs of its Ray-Ban smart glasses, which you can use to “make phone calls and take photos or videos without needing to pull out your phone.” Integrating the technology into “one of the world’s top-selling sunglasses” was a stroke of branding genius, and for a while it looked like Meta’s smart glasses were “a contender for the most impressive consumer hardware of the 2020s.” But not everyone is on board. Critics have taken to calling them “pervert glasses” because of their association “with creeps who use them to film people without their consent”—on the street, at the beach, and even in private settings. A video went viral on TikTok in August “of a woman calling out a doctor wearing the smart glasses during a consultation in which the patient was required to remove clothing.”

We clearly don’t know how to handle “spy-like smart glasses,” said Mia Sato in The Verge. Retail and service workers, “in particular, have become a target for stealth” recording by customers trying to prank them for likes on social media. It’s not just a problem for public-facing workers: Imagine “a co-worker at your office starts wearing them,” and everything you say or do around them can be “captured for limitless dissemination.” You know it’s bad when “even ICE thinks smart glasses are a privacy liability,” said James Pero in Gizmodo. The agency recently sent out a memo banning its immigration officers from using them. It’s not philosophical; ICE just doesn’t want all the information the glasses “gobble up incidentally” going back to Meta.

Mark Zuckerberg’s company is giving all smart glasses a bad name, said Anthony Spadafora in Tom’s Guide. But those marketed as augmented reality or extended reality typically don’t even record video. They have a private display, like a small computer screen, that can relay incoming messages, play TV shows, or even act as a portable workstation. They’re fun and useful. But the recent backlash against Meta means people may soon be shunned for wearing “any high-tech frames in public.”

Apple also has plans to join the smart-glasses race, said Dave Lee in Bloomberg. But the company will have to choose “whether the risk of blowback is worth it given the relatively tiny size of the smart-glasses market.” Sure, people trust Apple more than Meta, and its iPhone ecosystem will give whatever product it launches a huge advantage. But Apple also “has vastly more to lose” by getting smart glasses wrong. “Once your hardware has been labeled ‘pervert glasses,’ it’s hard to turn things around.”

Even “the liberal intelligentsia” expressed alarm when America’s national debt recently surpassed the $40 trillion threshold, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. Blame the entitlement programs of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, which “keep growing on autopilot,” along with a pandemic-era “spending binge” by both political parties that has doubled annual deficits to nearly $2 trillion. The initial Covid relief bill in 2020 was necessary, but continued sending out checks for far too long. The Biden administration spent trillions on additional stimulus for a “mostly recovered” economy, as well as a “bipartisan infrastructure bonanza,” and “a climate extravaganza.” Because of these spending sprees, the gross national debt has ballooned by $17 trillion since 2019—about as much as the country accumulated “during the entire first 225 years of its history.”

The true culprits are 21st-century GOP tax cuts, said Bobby Kogan in MS.now. Data show that those massive reductions in revenue, passed under George W. Bush and President Trump, are “driving this fiscal imbalance.” It was not a secret that raw federal spending would increase as Baby Boomers aged and health-care and retirement costs rose, but our old tax system “was set to keep pace with it,” and “debt was projected to shrink continuously as a percentage of the economy.” Bush even inherited a budget surplus from Bill Clinton (who raised taxes), but he squandered that gift by reducing taxes on wealthy Americans. Trump doubled down on that irresponsible strategy, and slashed the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%. Now Republicans insist we must cut “crucial aid that Americans rely on,” rather than undo the tax cuts “that are responsible for creating the fiscal gap.”

President Trump promised to cut the deficit, said Alan Rappeport in The New York Times, but he’s “only exacerbated America’s financial woes.” Elon Musk’s now-disbanded DOGE failed to achieve its goal of slashing federal spending by $1 trillion, and it’s unclear it saved any money at all. Trump’s tariffs backfired when the Supreme Court ruled most of them illegal, which led to refunds to companies of $160 billion. Trump’s expensive war against Iran has only added to the sea of red ink. Getting out of this mess means “putting everything on the table,” said Ingrid Jacques in USA Today. That includes tax increases and cuts to popular benefits. Sadly, neither Democrats nor Republicans have the “gumption” to tell voters that hard choices must be made.

Conservative voters in Texas have a new bogeyman, said J. David Goodman in The New York Times: Muslims. Though only 1% to 2% of Texas residents are Muslim, the community is growing fast—and so is fearmongering from the Christian hard right about the spread of “sharia law” and a planned Islamic “takeover.” A proposed mosque development outside Dallas was denounced by influencers as a threat to Western civilization and investigated by state authorities. Multiple conference panels at this summer’s state Republican convention “warned of a Muslim invasion.” And Gov. Greg Abbott has jumped on the bandwagon: He has designated the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a national civil rights group, a terrorist organization; ordered the cancellation of a private water-park party celebrating a Muslim holiday; and earlier this month threatened to pull state funding from Texas airports that provide ritual washing stations for Muslim travelers. “We experience waves of Islamophobia,” said Shaimaa Zayan of CAIR’s Austin chapter. “This is the worst wave.”

It’s not just Texas, said Asma Khalid in The Atlantic. Twenty-five years after 9/11, anti-Muslim rhetoric in the U.S. “has grown.” In Washington, D.C., prominent GOP lawmakers “have made it clear that they don’t see people like me as Americans.” Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina recently posted that every “Muslim holding public office in America is a Trojan Horse,” while Rep. Randy Fine of Florida has said, “We need more Islamophobia.” I first noticed this shift in the run-up to the 2016 election, when Donald Trump called for a “Muslim ban” and claimed falsely that “thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey cheered when the Twin Towers fell. When a presidential candidate spouted Islamophobia, others felt free to join in the hate.

For American Muslims, the worst could still be to come, said Joel Mathis in his Substack newsletter. Texas lawmakers are now trying to craft a legal definition of “religion” that would exclude Islam. A decade ago, I’d have said such a law “would be laughed out of the Supreme Court.” Today, I’m not sure. Can you say with confidence that Justice Clarence Thomas “wouldn’t vote against Islam with the First Amendment on the line?” Conservative Christians must tread carefully, said Bonnie Kristian in Christianity Today. With secularism on the rise, it’s “naive” to believe that a statewide ban on religious practices could never be used against them. The First Amendment is clear: If we want religious liberty, “we must defend it for everyone.”

What is life like in Afghanistan today?

For the vast majority of Afghans, it is grim. Around 90% of the population lives below the poverty line, more than twice as many as before the U.S. pullout, and more than 3.5 million children suffer from malnutrition. Under the Taliban’s draconian interpretation of sharia, watching movies, playing chess, singing, and playing or listening to music are all banned. Men must wear long beards and attend daily prayers. And for women, whose movements are governed by some 200 Taliban edicts, it is the most repressive country on Earth. Women can’t attend school past sixth grade, work in most jobs, travel without a male relative accompanying them, uncover their faces in public, or even speak in public. “Imagine living every day not knowing whether the door to freedom will ever reopen,” said former Afghan lawmaker Shukria Barakzai, who now lives in exile in the U.K. “The psychological trauma is immense.

How did the Taliban take control? 

In February 2020, the first Trump administration struck a deal with the Taliban—sidelining the teetering Afghan government—that traded U.S. troop withdrawal for Taliban assurances that the country would not be used as a base for terrorist attacks on Americans. Incoming President Joe Biden then promised to get the troops out before Sept. 11, 2021, but the execution was chaos. When the Afghan government collapsed on Aug. 15, 2021, thousands of desperate Afghans rushed the Kabul airport trying to board U.S. planes as the Taliban overran the capital. At least 169 Afghans and 13 U.S. service members were killed in an ISIS-K suicide bombing. While the Taliban have mostly succeeded in containing ISIS-K and other terrorist groups, their promises to govern more moderately than they did before 2001 proved worthless. They soon reintroduced floggings, public amputations, and stoning. When women tried to march for their rights, they were violently suppressed, and by 2023, nearly all those in Afghan jails were political prisoners, and many were tortured. Now Afghanistan is a global pariah, its Taliban government recognized only by Russia.

Has that hurt the economy?

Yes, deeply enough that a third of its population of 45 million is going hungry. Taliban rules have stifled the formal economy, though they tolerate some opium cultivation and have turned themselves into arms dealers hawking the $7 billion worth of military hardware the U.S. and its allies left behind. But ordinary Afghans have been further battered by Taliban repression, major earthquakes in 2022 and 2025, and the rollback of most U.S. and other Western humanitarian aid. Rural Afghans must contend with water shortages and contamination from U.S. burn pits and bomb residue. The country has long had one of the world’s highest maternal mortality rates, now exacerbated by the Taliban’s ban on medical training for women and the requirement that women patients be accompanied to appointments by a male guardian. “In the beginning, I found it very hard when I saw children dying,” said Fatima Husseini, a nurse in central Ghor province. “But now it has almost become normal for us.”

How do Afghans cope?

Some resort to selling their children into bondage or forcing them into marriage. More than 6 million Afghans fled to neighboring Iran and Pakistan, but both those countries have kicked out nearly all their Afghan refugees in recent years—even Afghans who arrived back in 1979, during the Soviet invasion. In Iran, Afghans have been attacked by mobs and baselessly accused of collaborating with Israel; some legal residents have had police tear up their documents in front of them. In Pakistan, authorities have demolished Afghans’ homes, stripped them of their valuables, and forced over 2.5 million refugees to march back across the border. Once back home, they often have no access to employment or basic services; roughly 25% of returnees are homeless. Western countries, too, have been seeking to deport Afghans, even collaborating with the Taliban to make it happen.

What about the U.S.?

The Biden administration welcomed more than 190,000 Afghans into the U.S. after the troop withdrawal, prioritizing former interpreters, U.S.-allied fighters, and others who aided the American war effort. But the second Trump administration moved to cancel their immigration status, and last year, after an Afghan national trained by the CIA and resettled in the U.S. shot two National Guard soldiers in Washington, D.C., President Trump halted all visas for Afghans. More than 100 have been deported directly to Afghanistan; hundreds of others have been shipped to unsafe “third countries.” Currently, the administration is trying to send most of the 1,100 Afghans at a U.S. base in Qatar—all of them thoroughly vetted exiles who either helped the U.S. military or are the spouses or children of U.S. service members—to the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo. The only other choice, officials tell them, is returning to Afghanistan.

What happens to returnees?

They face imprisonment, torture, and death. Kamin Jan, a former interior ministry employee deported from Iran, was shot dead in Takhar province in October 2025, just weeks after he was expelled from Iran. Hundreds of Afghans who once worked with American forces have been executed; some reported having their toenails pulled out and being hung by their feet during Taliban prison interrogations. Some U.S. military officials warn that the deportations could set a precedent that undermines American interests. Potential allies are likely to think twice if American promises “have the shelf life of one administration,” says Marine veteran Kyleanne Hunter, head of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. “You cannot win a future war with partners who watched you abandon the last ones.”

Garrison, N.Y.

Built in 1929, Evarts Hill sits on more than 50 acres in the Hudson Valley about 50 miles from Manhattan. The estate’s updated six-bedroom main home is a stone-and-stucco French Norman château featuring a three-story rotunda with a curving staircase, a living room with hand-hewn beams, and a chef’s kitchen with a canary-yellow BlueStar stove.

The land includes a five-bedroom carriage house, plus a rose garden, pool, and lawn. $8,950,000. Tony Cutugno, William Pitt Sotheby’s International Realty, (914) 582-7789

Kirtland, Ohio

The Playmore, a 1929 French Provincial–style estate in a Cleveland suburb, overlooks Lake Erie. The expanded and updated seven-bedroom features detailed woodwork, ceiling frescoes, marble floors, a kitchen with a Tiffany skylight dome, and a 3,000-square-foot entertainment wing with a bar, billiards, a hookah lounge, and a wine room.

The more than 12-acre lot has about 20,000 trees, bocce courts, English gardens, and a campground. $5,950,000. David Ayers and Nick Zawitz, The Agency Cleveland Northcoast, (917) 519-0622

Vero Beach, Fla.

Along the Indian River, this 1920 waterfront two-bedroom cottage on Florida’s Treasure Coast has updated systems and a metal roof, plus wood-paneled walls, terra-cotta-tiled floors, a sunroom with French doors, and a primary suite with a private balcony.

The property spans 5 tropically landscaped acres with about 300 feet of river frontage, and includes a bricked dining and lounge area, flat yards, and a dock. $3,995,000. Nic Stover, Engel & Völkers (772) 801-8292

Denver

This 1921 Mediterranean-style four-bedroom is a five-minute drive from Washington Park. The home has an entrance with a stenciled wood floor, two formal sitting rooms, a dining room with a chandelier and window seat, and a chef’s kitchen that steps down to a family room with a fireplace.

The professionally landscaped grounds include a brick patio with a three-tiered water feature. $3,750,000. John Jaster, Slifer Smith & Frampton Real Estate/Luxury Portfolio International, (303) 322-6200

Los Angeles

Built in 1923, this Spanish-style five-bedroom in Los Feliz features a living room with black lacquered beams, coral built-ins, a starburst chandelier, and a wood-burning fireplace. The dining room has a hand-painted mural of California’s mountains, and the kitchen includes lavender cabinets and a breakfast nook.

On the lower level is a screening room, and outside are a guesthouse, pool, and garage. Griffith Park and the Hollywood Bowl are just minutes away. $6,500,000. Sonya Coke, Sotheby’s International Realty–Los Feliz Brokerage, (323) 829-4440

New Britain, Conn.

This 1927 Dutch Colonial Revival near Hartford features a gambrel roof and shingle siding. The four-bedroom’s open-plan kitchen includes a stone island, a marble backsplash, stainless appliances, and a coffee bar, and the dining room has a corner built-in china cabinet.

The bedrooms are on the second floor, and the finished third level is a bonus space with a half bath. The backyard is surrounded by mature trees. $475,000. Tony Buccheri, Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices New England Properties, (860) 983-0748

‘Coyote vs. Acme’ 

Directed by Dave Green (PG)

★★★

In Wile E. Coyote’s latest misadventure, the hapless would-be carnivore “won’t stop until he defeats [checks notes] Warner Bros.,” said William Bibbiani in The Wrap. In this “gut-bustingly hilarious” romp, Wile E. finally pauses in his Sisyphean pursuit of the Road Runner to try something new: He hires a lawyer to sue the Acme corporation over its defective mail-order products, and Acme turns out to be the parent company of the studio that owns every Looney Tunes character. The really crazy part? Warner Bros. once tried to shelve this movie to earn a tax write-off, only to be forced by a public outcry to sell it to a tiny distributor.

Coyote vs. Acme mixes animation with live actors, said Jacob Oller in The A.V. Club, and it proves to be “slyly intelligent” about what winning means when an underdog takes on an impossibly powerful foe. Will Forte, “maybe the best he’s been since Nebraska,” plays Wile E.’s scruffy lawyer, a guy who’s spent a career chasing tiny payouts for cartoons who’ve been pancaked or blown up. The animation doesn’t match Forte’s level, but it contributes well enough to the movie’s “enjoyably explosive” slapstick humor. “Truth be told, the plotting isn’t quite up to the strength of the premise,” said Justin Chang in The New Yorker. But the “slight slackness” in the narrative allows for cameos by Tweety, Daffy, and other old friends. Most importantly, Coyote vs. Acme isn’t a cash grab. It’s “a fleet, funny throwback, made by artists with an obvious reverence for the original Looney Tunes universe.”

‘Buddy’

Directed by Casper Kelly (R)

★★★

“Buddy is everything you could want from a midnight movie,” said Christian Zilko in IndieWire. A mock horror tale that riffs on the chilling cheeriness of 1990s children’s TV shows like Barney, it features a giant, talking orange unicorn named Buddy who begins murdering the kids in his own series’ cast. In a separate world, a mom played by Cristin Milioti begins digging into buried Buddy history when she comes to suspect she once had a third child, and “the results are electric.” Unfortunately, after a “side-splittingly funny” opening 20 minutes, said Johnny Oleksinski in the New York Post, Buddy struggles to maintain momentum.

Director Casper Kelly made his name with Too Many Cooks, a 2014 parody of a sitcom’s opening credits sequence, and he’s brilliant here when sending up shows that kids once loved but “upon reflection were nightmarish hellscapes that are surely now paying for therapists’ vacation homes.” Because no real scares are built into the Milioti storyline, however, the movie becomes “rather one-note.” But both threads are studies in the effects of living in “profound denial,” said Sam Adams in Slate, and the cast helps sell the whole package. Keegan-Michael Key, who voices the unicorn, “never drops the aw-shucks lilt from his voice” even when Buddy’s at his most murderous. And while Buddy’s crimes are “brutal, even gory,” Kelly’s movie works because “he knows he doesn’t have to turn the dial too far” to make TV’s phony paradise feel menacing.

With three words, Democratic senator Jon Ossoff unleashed a furious row last week, said Jason Kyle Howard on Salon. Speaking at a campaign event, he declared that Donald Trump was neglecting his presidential duties because he just wanted “to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenceless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar”.

The Natalie in question is Natalie Harp, Trump’s 35-year-old executive assistant. Nicknamed Trump’s “human printer”, she’s always at his side – whether in the White House or on Air Force One or the golf course – armed with a portable printer, from which she feeds him favourable coverage and memes. Until now, Harp hasn’t drawn much public attention. But Ossoff’s comment, and the response to it, have changed that.

Fierce loyalty

Ossoff should be ashamed of his “disgustingly sly” insinuation, said Miranda Devine in the New York Post. Harp battled debilitating bone cancer in her 20s that left her in a wheelchair. Her fierce loyalty to Trump stems from the fact that she believes he saved her life by giving patients access to experimental drugs in his first term.

She expressed her gratitude to Trump in an impressive speech at the 2020 Republican National Convention, after which he offered her a job in 2022. “Does Ossoff really think a hard-working single professional woman can’t succeed without sleeping with her boss?”

An ‘in-house stalker’

If only Trump and Harp were having an affair, said Jonathan V. Last on The Bulwark. Their odd form of co-dependency is somehow worse. Harp has reportedly unnerved other staff by writing intense personal notes to Trump with messages such as “You are all that matters to me,” and “I don’t ever want to let you down.” In one, she thanked him for being her “Guardian and Protector in this Life”. Trump, in turn, reportedly told staff, concerning Harp: “All of you will go off and make money … She’ll never leave me.” It’s not healthy that the president is employing “an in-house stalker”.

This isn’t just tittle-tattle, said Rex Huppke in USA Today. Trump backers are presenting Harp as some “innocent bystander”, but she controls a lot of his media diet and helps draft his social media posts. It turns out she worked in the White House for more than a year without the requisite security clearance. Ossoff was right to draw attention to her, because her case deserves scrutiny and “highlights the weirdness endemic to this administration”.

At a certain point, a “swelling retirement account isn’t really about retirement,” said Daniel de Visé in USA Today. The average American family has a little more than $268,000 saved up in an individual retirement account. But at least 32,000 people have amassed more than $10 million in workplace and individual retirement accounts like a Roth IRA, which can grow without taxes due on the earnings, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation. And “at the top of the wealth heap, 208 taxpayers have $85 billion saved in IRA-type accounts” that were originally designed for the middle class. “One might wonder how any American, no matter how wealthy,” could amass so much given the restrictions that govern contributions. After all, even “at its most generous,” the federal government only allows certain older Americans to contribute a maximum of $35,750 to a 401(k). Yet some people have found ways around the guardrails.

The “mother of all tax breaks” comes to those who stash startup shares in a Roth, said Brian Contreras in Inc. Entrepreneurs, hedge fund managers, and Silicon Valley insiders who have access to early and promising startups will often deposit “that stock in an IRA or workplace retirement account” and watch it pile up “massive gains while still enjoying substantial tax benefits.” Because those shares are cheap at first, they remain within annual contribution limits. Roblox board member Gregory Baszucki, for instance, has “at least $68 million worth of Roblox stock in his Roth IRA, and potentially about $158 million in tax-free holdings total.”

That’s how retirement accounts have become “an artifact of ever-expanding wealth inequality,” said Michael Hiltzik in the Los Angeles Times. While 40% of working Americans “don’t have any retirement savings at all,” the rich abuse the system to amass millions tax-free. “The outsize growth of plutocrats’ retirement accounts has bubbled up to public notice” again recently, after Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Richard Neal (D-Mass.) proposed legislation to cap IRAs and 401(k)s at $10 million. Even that amount seems “excessive.”

But anyone can supersize their retirement account with some savvy execution, said Anne Tergesen and Theo Francis in The Wall Street Journal. A “little-known fact about 401(k) plans” is that employees can really set aside “as much as $72,000 in these accounts every year, rising to as much as $80,000 for those 50 and older.” To go beyond the usual $24,500 limit, a worker can contribute as much as another $47,500 after taxes—and then convert that money to a Roth 401(k). “Someone who saved the equivalent of today’s $72,000 maximum” every year from 1984 to 2019 would have had $20.6 million by the end of 2024, “assuming returns consistent with the S&P 500 index.”

‘Comes in Waves’ by Carly Simon

★★★

“At this stage in her life, Carly Simon has every right to turn in a biblically gloomy record,” said Victoria Segal in The Times (U.K.). Yet despite her recent announcement that she has been struggling with Parkinson’s disease, her first album of new material in 18 years proves to be “far from doom-laden.” Recorded mostly at her studio on Martha’s Vineyard, the record’s dozen songs are “remarkably full of good cheer, quiet wisdom and, at times, a twinkling playfulness that rolls back the years to Simon’s 1970s glory days.” Anyone who thought the storied singer-songwriter might tiptoe away from her career “need only listen to the opening track,” said Melissa Ruggieri in USA Today. “Over a jaunty piano melody,” Simon “bulldozes” into a chorus in which she advises a friend to “howl like the wind” to get over a breakup. “Maybe I Never Loved You,” the very next song, addresses her famous ex, James Taylor, but its touches of bitterness matter less than Simon’s still-superb delivery. With just a slight hesitation in the final line, she “turns the song’s intention inside out,” creating just enough ambiguity to let listeners find their own meaning.

‘The Womack Sisters’ by The Womack Sisters

★★★

“The Womack Sisters’ self-titled debut album is a throwback to the heyday of soul,” said Shawn Donohue in Glide. Little wonder, seeing that Kucha, Zeimani, and BG Womack are the granddaughters of Sam Cooke, daughters of the 1980s duo Womack & Womack, and nieces of R&B legend Bobby Womack. “This music is their heritage” and the three sisters are “perfectly paired” with the retro-soul label Daptone for their 11-song coming-out. “If I Let You,” a Latin-jazz detour, was co-written by Daptone chief Gabe Roth. The sisters’ “tour de force” debut channels a host of influences, said Jonathan Bernstein in Rolling Stone. You can hear ’60s girl-group pop in “Monster,” echoes of socially minded message songs in “Laughter and Tears,” plus “gospel-infused sibling harmony” from start to finish. Despite their lineage, the sisters struggled for more than a decade to get a record like this made. After being told for years how to build a career, the opening track is the sound of a group “finally taking the proverbial wheel.” The song is “Chauffeur,” and it references one of the many side jobs the sisters took on to support their ambitions: driving for Uber.

‘Fata Morgana’ by L’Rain

★★★

“For an artist like L’Rain, the boundaries of genre are places to explore rather than fences hemming her in,” said Grant Sharples in Paste. On her fourth album recorded under that name, the Brooklyn-based musician born Taja Cheek “constructs sonic realms that feel both tactile and free-form”—a fitting trick, given that the album’s title refers to an optical illusion affecting objects seen at a distance. This “beautiful yet unsettling” record blurs the border between pop and experimental such that “Soulless Cycle,” by far the “heaviest” song of her career, “feels right at home with the soft key arpeggios of ‘With Time’ and the ambient soul of ‘Blue.’” With her lyrics here, “Cheek speaks in riddles and questions everything, especially herself,” said Stephen Kearse in Pitchfork. On “Borderline,” she “picks at insecurities like scabs,” while “Birthday” is less a celebration than Cheek trying to talk herself into even caring. At the same time, she and her two bandmates “bury the malaise under layer upon gorgeous layer of instruments and vocals.” This is music that’s “dense as a thundercloud in one moment, sheer as gauze in the next.”

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Acclaimed Scottish journalist and nature writer Cal Flyn is the author of Thicker Than Water and Islands of Abandonment. In her new book, The Savage Landscape, she travels to remote corners of the world while wrestling with the meaning of wilderness. Below are her six favorite books.

‘Dart’ by Alice Oswald (2002)

A strange, potent, even mystical text, Dart is a polyphonic poem that flows down England’s River Dart from source to sea, as voiced by those who frequent it: anglers, canoeists, naturalists, sewer workers—and occasionally the otherworldly voice of the river itself. I recommend this book to someone about once a week. Buy it here.

‘The Light Eaters’ by Zöe Schlanger (2024)

A work of soulful science writing, The Light Eaters brings together many recent, confounding botanical findings that raise provocative questions about the sentience of the vegetable world. Intelligent and responsibly reported, but still wondrous and full of possibility. Buy it here.

‘A Field Guide to Getting Lost’ by Rebecca Solnit (2005)

This must be my favorite of Solnit’s books, amid stiff competition. (I also have a soft spot for 2003’s River of Shadows.) As befits the title, Solnit offers meandering meditations on exploration, art, and family history. Her book’s beauty reminds me of the pleasures of the freely roaming mind. Buy it here.

‘Fathoms’ by Rebecca Giggs (2020)

Elegantly interweaving natural history, science writing, philosophy, and cultural criticism, this contemplative book concerns the lives and impact of our cetacean cousins. Factual yet as haunting as any fiction. Giggs does what I’m looking for in a writer: She makes me look at the world anew. Buy it here.

‘Osebol’ by Marit Kapla (2019)

Composed of poetic extracts from interviews Kapla recorded with residents of a settlement deep in the Swedish forest, this book offers a collage of everyday gripes, lyricism expressed in everyday language, and unexpected glimpses of the sublime. I recognized those clashing chords from my time living on an island off the far north coast of Scotland. Buy it here.

‘The Animals in That Country’ by Laura Jean McKay (2020)

McKay’s novel is a mind-expanding work of speculative fiction in which an epidemic of “zooflu” allows people to suddenly hear the voices of animals. This is not the cutesy, singsong world of Disney, but a deafening chorus of demands and unsettling declarations. Hilarious, surprising, and disconcerting. Buy it here.

‘On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World’ by Florence Hazrat

Not so long ago, said Judith Shulevitz in The Atlantic, “WRITINGLOOKEDLIKETHIS.” We’re all thus fortunate that punctuation gradually emerged, beginning with the Babylonians’ breakthrough idea of grouping words inside boxes. A bigger leap occurred in the 2nd century B.C. when Aristophanes of Byzantium, head of Alexandria’s unmatched library, came up with a system odots to indicate pauses amid written language’s rivers of words. In the years since, “the rules of punctuation have been codified, but they have never stopped evolving,” and Florence Hazrat’s entertaining new book ushers us through that history. The book is “no mere wacky usage guide,” said Steven Poole in The Guardian. It’s instead “a lavishly researched scholarly inquiry into punctuation over the centuries,” all of it undergirded by Hazrat’s “admirable insistence that punctuation is part of writing itself, an essential component of style and of the architecture of thought.”

“Dashes, colons, parentheses—they are all covered here, as are emojis,” said Jim Kelly in Air Mail. The ancestor of the question mark debuted in the 5th century while the spaces that we place between words didn’t exist until Irish monks introduced them three centuries later. Hazrat makes the particulars of each of these developments “utterly delightful.” Speaking of which, “let’s give a shoutout to Italian poet Iacopo Alpoleio,” the godfather of the exclamation point. Hazrat is “a keen user” of that particular mark, said Constance Higgins in The Telegraph (U.K.), and her spirited style can grow annoying. But she’s also willing to accept that her story can’t remain one of constant innovation. Most of the punctuation marks we know today were “cooked up in the rhetorical hotbeds of Renaissance Italy.” If we’re honest, “progress more or less stopped there.”

“There’s a lot of good in On the Mark,” said Meghan Cox Gurdon in The Wall Street Journal. Unfortunately, Hazrat’s achievement is undercut by her determination to enlist punctuation’s history in scoring political points. While she’s on firm ground when she notes that the editors who added exclamation points to Shakespeare’s plays forever changed how readers view the female characters, we quickly “go whizzing off into the land of political grievance.” Ignoring countless less hateful political figures who littered their pronouncements with exclamation points, she calls out Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels for the offense, then links Goebbels’ speechwriting to Donald Trump’s social media posts. She even finds proIsrael bias in the hyphen at the heart of the phrase “Israel-Palestine conflict.” Ignore the partisan preaching in this book, though, and you’re likely to agree with its central message. In short, “punctuation marks do matter.”

‘They Stole a City: Wilmington’s White Supremacist Coup and the Families Who Live With Its Legacy’ by Lauren Collins

“The Wilmington Massacre constituted a watershed moment in American history,” said Sally Greene in American Scholar. Lauren Collins’ “brilliant” new book isn’t the first to shed light on the events of Nov. 10, 1898, when a mob of armed white men launched a deadly attack on the Black political and business leaders of Wilmington, N.C., ending the city’s rule by a multiracial coalition and its successful post–Civil War run as a Black-majority municipality. At least 22 and perhaps hundreds of Black residents were killed in the violence. But Collins, a white New Yorker writer who was born and raised in Wilmington, “expands the timeline and widens the lens,” building on David Zucchino’s 2021 Pulitzer Prize–winning Wilmington’s Lie to show how the massacre’s aftermath continues to shape her hometown more than 125 years after it inspired the systematic disenfranchisement of Black voters across the South.

Collins’ book is “distinguished by its deep interest in the origins of the horror,” said The Economist. She opens by introducing an enslaved teenager working on a 1770s plantation and, while developing the stories of four families still tied to Wilmington, builds toward the 1898 clash. The elite planners of the coup wanted power back, and they ensured that the militia they assembled was “armed to the teeth in advance.” As Collins follows the ripple effects of the resulting massacre, “she rightly measures the crime not just in violence but in loss of livelihoods, opportunities, connections, and futures.”

Collins’ book “uncovers history that even many longtime Wilmingtonians don’t know,” said John Staton in Wilmington’s Star News. One of the white families she chronicles is celebrated locally for having brought European workers to the area in the early 1900s, but Collins notes that the landowner who did so was an 1898 insurrectionist who refused to hire Black workers. She also connects 1898 to the city’s troubling school desegregation battles of the 1960s. It’s “sobering” to realize that Collins was right when she decided that the story of the massacre couldn’t be contained to its own time period, said Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times. “It had numerous antecedents, and its effects continued to reverberate across generations.”

Mark Zuckerberg believes that “the biggest risk of AI” is not rogue agents or mass unemployment, but corporate control, said Nilesh Christopher in the Los Angeles Times. In a sweeping 6,500-word manifesto earlier this month, Meta’s chief executive outlined his vision “to build ‘personal superintelligence’” for the masses. Average people could soon have “a personal AI agent” to “work on their behalf.” Meta, he argues, will lead the way as “an American open-source alternative to rapidly advancing, inexpensive Chinese AI models” and tech rivals like Anthropic and OpenAI that have kept their code private. Zuckerberg suggested ways the government can “collaborate with AI companies for safety-testing” of their models, though he “cautioned that government intervention” in AI development risks handing “the advantage to China.” But it is imperative, he said, that neither the government nor “a few companies amass too much control over the technology.”

Zuckerberg’s “LinkedIn-evangelist-grade techno-optimist pablum” tries to position Meta as the “little guy,” said Will Oremus in The Atlantic. The man who “single-handedly commands a $1.5 trillion tech giant” has emerged as a “critic of corporate power,” urging the “industry’s high priests to throw open the gates to the masses.” It’s a conveniently timed message. As Americans sour on massive data center buildouts and see headlines of rogue AI breaking constraints, Zuckerberg is suddenly “a man of the people.” He wants to be the “good AI guy,” said Dave Lee in Bloomberg. “Don’t buy it.” We’ve seen Zuckerberg flip-flop on issues too many times—most notably when he banned President Trump from Facebook and then later attended his inauguration. The only reason Meta lacks an “all-powerful closed AI model” is that it has “failed to build a competitive one.”

He isn’t doing the AI industry “any favors with essays like this,” said Russell Brandom in TechCrunch. Fallout from the harmful effects of Facebook is “one of the central reasons we’re now seeing so much anxiety about the social impact of AI.” Technology can have unintended consequences, and the fact that “one of the most powerful people in the world refuses to acknowledge this can make people understandably nervous.”

It is at least refreshing to hear an optimistic “counter-perspective” to the “doom and gloom” from academics, policymakers, and even other AI executives, said Adam Thierer in National Review. AI systems are “treated as hypothetical catastrophes just waiting to happen.” But technological change shouldn’t be framed only around “fear and loathing about the future.” Not all AI is so dangerous that it needs to be concentrated, controlled, and kept behind closed doors. Why not embrace innovation, allow experimentation, and address issues as they arise?

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

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

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

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

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

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