Williston, Vt.

On more than 11 wooded acres about 15 minutes from Burlington, this 2013 four-bedroom lodge home centers on a vaulted great room encompassing a kitchen with a C-shaped, double-height fossil-reef-topped island.

The timber-framed room also includes a floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace and a dining area with a window bench overlooking the trees. French doors open to walking trails, gardens, and a garage topped by an apartment. $2,495,000. Kathy O’Brien, Four Seasons Sotheby’s International Realty, (802) 343-9433

Bend, Ore.

Built in 2026, Harmony, a four-bedroom modern lake house in central Oregon’s Tanager Bend community, has a kitchen with vaulted, beamed ceilings, stone walls, wood-paneled appliances, and an oval stone island with seating and storage.

The great room echoes the stone-and-wood theme, and a glass wall looks out on a water-ski lake. Abutting old-growth ponderosa pines, the 2-acre property has a patio, yards, and landscaping. $5,285,000. Brian Ladd and Steve LaCrosse, Cascade Hasson Sotheby’s International Realty, (541) 633-4569

Portland, Ore.

This 2026 modernist four-bedroom in the Division/Clinton neighborhood features a clean lined kitchen anchored by a stainless-steel island with an Oregon white-oak panel. The home’s living room has exposed concrete walls, a wood-burning stove, and floor-to-ceiling oak built-ins.

Outside are bluestone patios, a modern pergola, a cedar sauna, and a guesthouse with a Brazilian granite island. Multiple cafés and shops are within walking distance. $4,647,484. Suzann Baricevic Murphy, (w)here, Inc., (503) 789-1033

Camas, Wash.

A new build, this sculptural modern home features a kitchen with a Verde Alpi marble island with rounded, reeded end panels; walnut cabinets; and herring bone wood floors.

Up the marble spiral stairs—or the private elevator—are four bedrooms; the primary has views of the Columbia River and a boutique-style walk-in closet. The lower level has a sauna, bar, and theater, and connects to a yard and patio. $2,788,000. Benson Bui and Matthew Tercek, Real Broker, (855) 450-0442

Marco Island, Fla.

This 1989 Mediterranean-inflected contemporary is built on a canal and features an open kitchen with a blue-toned waterfall island, made of Azul Macaubas quartzite, that seats four. The updated six bedroom features two primary suites and a lower level with a glass wine room tucked under floating stairs.

The lot has a pool and spa, a covered patio, an outdoor kitchen, and a private dock with a lift and a separate floating dock for smaller craft. $6,000,000. Lisa Pearl and Scott Pearl, Coldwell Banker Realty, (239) 248-2705

Minneapolis

In Old Town, this one-bedroom condo in a 2017 building has an updated kitchen with a three-seat Cambria quartz island with matching backsplash and stainless appliances. The space is lit by sun from a wall of south-facing windows.

It also includes a bedroom with floor-to-ceiling windows and a Calacatta-marble-clad bath. A balcony overlooks a walkable neighborhood with dining and shops, and building amenities include a gym and community room. $460,000. Mitra Rahimi, Verve Realty, (612) 718-1239

“In a more just world, Emmett Till would have returned to Chicago and been allowed the uneventful privilege of growing older,” said Skylar Mitchell in Essence. Instead, the 14-year-old’s life was violently cut short in 1955, when he tried to buy bubblegum while visiting Mississippi relatives and a white woman accused him of disrespecting her. A “remarkable” photo exhibition in the city of his birth is now asking us to imagine what Till’s life might have looked like. Composed of 160 photographs taken across the past seven decades by 118 photographers, the show suggests the jobs, romances, family life, and lazy afternoons that could have been his. Seventy-one years ago, a published photo of a brutalized Till lying in an open casket “exposed the terrible consequences of racial hierarchy” and galvanized the civil rights movement, but this show “asks more of the eye.” It urges us, by way of powerful images created by Gordon Parks, Carrie Mae Weems, Dawoud Bey, Robert Mapplethorpe, and others, to see Black life as it is, stirring us to cherish and protect it.

“Emmett would’ve been 85 this year, had he lived,” said Anya Sesay in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. His face “would’ve been seasoned with wisdom lines and wispy gray hairs,” much like the face captured by Terry Evans in his striking portrait Cliff Joseph (2015). Elsewhere, Adam Ekberg captures the radiance of the sun streaming through a forest canopy so vividly that “you can almost feel its warmth on your skin,” and you immediately realize that Till would have regularly experienced it, too. Images that evoke such universal sensations are “part of the exhibit’s brilliance.” Instead of offering a specific vision of the shape Till’s life might have taken, “each photograph compels us to make room for every version of who he could’ve been.”

Curator Sarah Elizabeth Lewis selected every image, but she didn’t work alone, said Susan Aurinko in Newcity. While poring over all 18,000 photographs in the MoCP collection, she regularly consulted with Wheeler Parker Jr., a minister who is now 87 and was Till’s cousin, best friend, and a witness to Till’s abduction by the two white men who lynched him. Once the photos were chosen, Lewis asked artists, scholars, and luminaries, including historian Lonnie G. Bunch III, singer John Legend, and painter Amy Sherald, to share their feelings stirred by the show’s title and any one of the images. Filmmaker Ava DuVernay chose Milton Rogovin’s informal, untitled portrait of a beautiful young Buffalo woman from his East Side, 1961-63 collection. “What we contemplate here is the girl that Emmett never got to meet,” DuVernay wrote. “The one who would have held his hand, and listened to his fears, and to his dreams.”

Why is this El Niño different?

It’s a result of the incredible amount of heat that has built up in the Pacific Ocean. El Niño occurs naturally every few years, when the Pacific trade winds that typically blow westward — from the Americas to Southeast Asia — either slow down or reverse course. When that happens, huge volumes of warm ocean water start moving from the western Pacific toward the Americas.

El Niño’s “function in the global earth system,” said climate scientist Daniel Swain, “is to release heat from the deeper oceans that has been temporarily stored there.” That release then warms the atmosphere, which in turn has a domino effect on weather patterns around the globe. “It is like throwing a stone into a lake,” said climate researcher Fred Kucharski. “The energy spreads all over the lake through wave propagation.”

No two El Niños behave the same way, but there are patterns: unusually heavy downpours and floods in the southern U.S., for instance, and brutal droughts and crop failures in the normally lush Amazon region. The water being pushed eastward by the current El Niño, which began this summer, is far hotter than anything recorded in recent decades — turning the phenomenon into a “super El Niño” that scientists warn could bring with it cataclysmic weather events.

What counts as a ‘super’ El Niño?

It’s determined by measurements from a vast area of the central and eastern equatorial Pacific. If the sea-surface temperature of that patch of ocean is at least 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit above average for several consecutive months, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declares the onset of El Niño. And when it’s 3.6 degrees or higher, it qualifies as a super El Niño. The current cycle shot past that threshold last month, when temperatures hit 5.49 degrees above average — the highest daily temperature on record.

Because the phenomenon typically reaches its greatest strength around December, NOAA says there’s a 75% chance that the current El Niño will exceed the strength of previous events dating back to at least 1950. “Most El Niño years are a nuisance,” said Julia Rizzo, a Latin America agribusiness analyst for Morgan Stanley, “but this one has the makings of a shock.” It’s already contributing to weather chaos around the world.

Where is it hitting hardest?

Hawaii is enduring an unprecedented hurricane season. In the space of a month, three storms have passed within 50 miles of the archipelago — the most ever in a single year. None made landfall, but Hurricane Lala in August dumped more than 45 inches of rain in some areas, triggering damaging landslides and flooding. Cooler ocean waters around Hawaii normally act like an anti-hurricane force field, but that protection has faded this year as ocean temperatures have spiked.

El Niño has had the opposite effect in the Atlantic. No hurricanes have yet been recorded there this season, thanks largely to fiercer upper-level winds tearing apart nascent storms. In Indonesia, unusually dry conditions are fueling a cascading series of forest and peatland fires. In Peru, the world’s largest catcher of anchovies, the fishing industry collapsed after the tiny baitfish abandoned the country’s waters for cooler northern climes. India’s monsoon rains, crucial for the country’s rice harvest, are running 15% below normal.

And conditions could worsen as the super El Niño intensifies: 2024 was the hottest year on record in part because of the combined effect of El Niño and human-caused climate change. In 2027, said Jonas Jägermeyr of Columbia University’s climate school, the super El Niño “could drive global temperatures and weather extremes to new highs.”

Are countries prepared?

Thanks to real-time tracking systems and predictive models, scientists and governments have a good sense of when El Niño’s worst effects will hit, and how strong they’ll be. That’s why Brazil has hired a record number of firefighters to combat expected blazes in the Amazon, and why numerous African countries are now stockpiling huge amounts of rice. At the very least, the world is more resilient than it was during the 1877–78 super El Niño, which killed more than 50 million people across India, China, Brazil, and elsewhere and has been called by researchers “the worst environmental disaster to ever befall humanity.”

Still, some experts say a humanitarian crisis is inevitable this year and next. A report from the University of Chicago’s Climate Impact Lab estimates that the extreme heat generated by El Niño will cause some 450,000 excess deaths globally, including 3,500 deaths in the U.S. Meanwhile, the World Food Program warns that crop failures and smaller harvests could push 50 million people into acute hunger.

How will El Niño affect U.S. weather?

States in the Pacific Northwest, northern Rockies, Plains, and Great Lakes typically get milder, slightly warmer winters during El Niño years, while precipitation increases across the Sun Belt. If that pattern holds this time, drought and wildfire risks could increase in Washington and Oregon, while wetter conditions might alleviate yearslong droughts in parts of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, and coat the southern Rockies with ample snow.

The prospect of a wetter, stormier winter has Southern California on edge —punishing waves can cause significant coastal flooding and erosion, leading to landslides and cliff collapse. The Golden State is also bracing for a massive pulse of warm water, known as a Kelvin wave, that is rolling toward its coast and could temporarily raise sea levels by 6 inches or more. Homes along the shoreline are especially at risk. “We need to be in the highest level of preparedness,” said Brett Sanders of the University of California, Irvine. “This is likely to be the most stressful winter we have had in a number of years in terms of waves.”

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Five-time Booker Prize nominee Sebastian Barry is the author of A Long Long Way, On Canaan’s Side, and Days Without End. The Irish author’s new novel, The Newer World, follows a formerly enslaved Tennessean who’s navigating America’s post–Civil War era.

‘Letters and Journals: Katherine Mansfield’ (1977)

The dark wind of a fatal illness blows through these letters and journals. Mansfield was only 34 when she died. She was the only writer that Virginia Woolf truly felt as a rival, and with very good reason. Buy it here.

‘The Last Chronicle of Barset’ by Anthony Trollope (1867)

Trollope had his manservant wake him early every morning and he would write till 8 a.m. By this method he managed to produce a great number of long, long books. The six volumes of the Barchester novels are crowned by The Last Chronicle of Barset, 900 pages of infinite readability. Buy it here.

‘The Great Fires: Poems, 1982–1992’ by Jack Gilbert (1996)

I met Gilbert briefly on an old track in the mountains of Paros in 1981, just a moment of two strangers passing and nodding and saying three words. His poems are classical, but severely and lovingly contemporary too. Buy it here.

‘Avid Reader’ by Robert Gottlieb (2016)

This is the generous autobiography of the greatest editor of his time. I had an exciting friendship with him in the last years of his long life. He referred at one point in passing to Toni Morrison’s Beloved—“which I just happened to edit.” Well, yes, my good Lord Bob. Buy it here.

‘The Journal of Sir Walter Scott’ (1890)

These poignant and revealing journals cover the years after the financial disaster that engulfed Scott. Instead of being declared bankrupt, he made an arrangement with his creditors that he would write his way out of difficulty. He is 54 in 1825 when he begins his diary; it ends about six years later, with his early demise. Almost on the stroke of that midnight, the debts were fully paid off. Buy it here.

‘The Hours’ by Michael Cunningham (1998)

This was the book everyone seemed to be reading in New York when I was there in 1998. Which was an encouraging fact, because it is in a way a very austere work of art, surreally channeling Virginia Woolf, its glistening surfaces suggesting somehow very great depths. If there are bookshops in heaven, I’d like to think Virginia Woolf was reading it too. Buy it here.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s “State of the Force” address had it all, said David Ignatius in The Washington Post: “the good, bad, and dangerous.” In September's histrionic speech, Hegseth strutted back and forth across a stage, combining culture-war rants “with genuinely radical” reforms. He declared he wanted “no fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals” in a military he’s refashioning with high-testosterone lethal patriots. He accused the media of treason for reporting his military’s Iran failures, and revealed he plans an overall 20% reduction in generals and admirals, continuing a purge that’s already eliminated 10% of top officers. But Hegseth also announced some sensible “attempts to transform a sclerotic Pentagon bureaucracy,” unveiling an “Autonomous Warfare Command” to oversee drone operations and enlisting tech founders Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey and former Republican House speaker Newt Gingrich to study the future of warfare. Quite intentionally, Hegseth is overturning “military norms as aggressively as President Trump has shattered those in other spheres.

Hegseth only proved again that he’s “manifestly unfit for his job,” said Tom Nichols in The Atlantic. His speech was “a partisan disgrace,” filled with childish insults and resentment. He’s creating an Office of Religious Affairs and directing cadets to get degrees at conservative Christian schools like Hillsdale College, instead of elite “woke factories” like Harvard. To “redefine the future of national defense,” Hegseth is giving his “three wise men” in Musk, Luckey, and Gingrich just 120 days. The overall goal is to ensure the military becomes “a MAGA-looking, MAGA-sounding, MAGA- believing, and MAGA-supporting Christian praetorian guard,” said Rachel E. VanLandingham in MS.now. “The ideological clowns are out,” Hegseth proclaimed, but he’s “the real ideological clown—and a dangerous one at that.”

Everyone underestimated the former Fox News host, said Emma Ashford in Foreign Policy. He’s become Trump’s “most influential senior official.” Hegseth helped persuade Trump to invade Iran when many aides warned against a prolonged quagmire. Trump has fired other Cabinet officials for incompetence, but Hegseth has escaped blame for the fiasco in Iran. Why? Everything about him is so “fundamentally Trumpian”—his hatred of the media, his macho posturing, his TV persona’s “obsession with image over substance.” Hegseth is Trump’s “central casting” idea of a tough military leader, so he’s keeping his job. “The results will not be pleasant.”

“Artificial intelligence is suddenly insanely good at math,” said Ben Cohen in The Wall Street Journal, which may be the best proof yet of the technology’s “accelerating and terrifying progress.” A few years ago, AI struggled with even basic math problems. But last month, OpenAI announced that one of its models had solved “the wicked Navier-Stokes problem that had vexed mathematicians for nearly a century.” Navier-Stokes was selected in 2000 as one of math’s seven unsolved “Holy Grail” problems, which Fields Medal– winning mathematician Alain Connes said at the time were “totally inaccessible to computers.” But a swarm of 10,000 OpenAI agents was able to produce an answer in only 88 hours. The company now says it is nearing proof of another one. In doing so, it is demonstrating “how the technology is getting much smarter, much faster than most people anticipated.”

Mathematicians are crying foul, said Zeynep Tufekci in The New York Times. Tristan Buckmaster and Levent Alpöge, who “had been trying for months” to crack the problem, say the new proof “ripped off their unpublished work, which also used an OpenAI model.” OpenAI denies it, but would the company “even be able to tell?” AI agents are “cheating, hacking, attacking, and manipulating whatever they can to arrive” at task solutions. The chilling effect this will have on academia is troubling. Why would mathematicians present at conferences or publish early work if an AI company can swoop in and “steal the thunder?” The issue is not just about plagiarism, said Sophia Chen in Wired. It’s how OpenAI did it. The company “approached the proof with brute force.” Mathematicians, by contrast, “aren’t focused on getting the right answer as fast as possible” but on applying a “thoughtful, deliberate” methodology that other scientists can follow. AI provides a “shortcut” in a way that undermines human understanding.

The stakes go beyond “esoteric discussions” of theories few people understand, said the Financial Times in editorial. From “Archimedes leaping from his bath to Newton being hit on the head by a falling apple,” mathematics has benefited from there “being a person moving through the material world.” The Navier-Stokes problem itself “relates to the flow of fluids such as water and air.” Letting machines skip to an “opaque” solution could “deprive us of essential knowledge” we might discover along the way. This isn’t the “end of mathematics,” said Dana Mackenzie in The Washington Post. In 1997, when world champion Garry Kasparov unexpectedly lost a match to Deep Blue, an IBM-built chess computer, players claimed computers would make the game obsolete. But the opposite happened. The internet democratized the game, opening it up to millions and turning “grandmasters into media stars.” Chess didn’t die; it’s more popular than ever. And math won’t die either.

‘The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There’ by Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick

“When we talk about wealth, mainly we talk about billionaires,” said John Lanchester in The New Yorker. “But what if there were another group that, without drawing much attention, had grown collectively 13 times richer than the Forbes 400?” In their “brilliant” new study, economists Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick call attention to America’s Main Street millionaires, in particular the roughly 3 million owners of private businesses whose household net worth is at least $5 million. These are often stealth magnates—car dealers, beverage distributors, partners in law firms or medical practices—and they tend to have amassed their wealth through sustained hard work. “Unfortunately, there is a shadow side,” because they’ve also been so effective at wielding political clout that they’ve helped make life harder for many Americans. For now, “the best we can probably do about this concentration of wealth and power is to see it and name it, and that’s what Zidar and Zwick have done.”

The authors’ “eyeopening” account traces the rise of everywhere millionaires to the Tax Reform Act of 1986, said Greg Rosalsky in NPR.org. The bipartisan congressional bill cut tax rates, setting the top individual tax rate lower than the corporate tax rate. This triggered an explosion of so-called pass-through businesses, which pass profits directly to owners, who in turn pay taxes on that income at the lower rate. In 1980, pass-through businesses were small potatoes. “By 2011, they were generating more income than all traditional U.S. corporations combined—and accounting for most of the rise in the share of income flowing to the top 1%.” Zidar and Zwick, who identified this new millionaire class by diving deep into IRS records, have now attached their findings to “a colorful cast of characters,” including Chicago hot dog king Dick Portillo and other gogetters who started with nothing and made fortunes on surprising long-term bets.

“Zidar and Zwick tell this story with admirable clarity and precision,” said Nico Taylor in The Baffler. Though their “quasi-scholarly” language “can be bland at times,” it’s “a testament to the authors’ expository finesse that they manage to make fiscal history occasionally gripping.” Their book will be “of great interest” to readers who believe the rich now have the system rigged, said The Economist. As the authors point out, many everywhere millionaires enjoy the same luxuries as billionaires without attracting negative attention, and meanwhile they win new tax breaks and push through regulations that limit competition in their fields, including real estate sales, medicine, and law. But as critical as the book can be of millionaires, it “will appeal even more to those who hope to join their ranks.” Clearly, “much of the spoils of capitalism are still won by those who roll their sleeves up,” and “that is a great thing.”

‘The Vanishing Family: Love, Fate, and the Quest to End Dementia’ by Robert Kolker

Robert Kolker’s latest book “reads like a medical detective story,” said Carissa Wong in New Scientist. In a family of nine brothers and sisters, one after another of the siblings began exhibiting dramatic personality changes shortly before or after reaching the age of 40. Those afflicted became both apathetic and unable to read social cues, making them unrecognizable even to their spouses. Years passed before doctors solved the mystery, first attributing the behavioral changes to frontotemporal dementia (FTD), then linking that rare condition to a genetic mutation. But especially for anyone grappling with dementia in any form, there’s far more to The Vanishing Family than its initial mystery. “It is a tale of enduring love and devastating grief. It also offers a window into the neuroscience that could one day deliver a cure.”

Kolker, to his credit, “has written the biography of a family, making sure that each member is memorialized,” said Jennie Erin Smith in The Wall Street Journal. The siblings’ mother had FTD first, but her behavioral changes were attributed to alcoholism, and she died at 62 before anyone suspected otherwise. Christy, the first sibling to experience symptoms, was not yet 40 when, in the mid-1990s, she was dismissed from her executive position and soon after lost her husband and all interest in her children. The family’s story is mostly told from the perspective of Barb, the youngest sibling, who pushes for answers but puts off obtaining her own genetic test results. Kolker, author of the 2020 best seller Hidden Valley Road, once again proves to be “a keen interpreter of the science and subjective experience of mental illness.”

“For Kolker, the slipperiness of identity has been a recurrent theme,” said Julia M. Klein in The Atlantic. Here, he forces us to consider whether any of us have a fixed personality if FTD or Alzheimer’s can rewire it. Even so, his greatest achievement is “once again reportorial,” because “he has persuaded nearly every family member, the sick and the well, to confide in him.” His findings belie his book’s title. As healthy siblings care for the afflicted, the sprawling family “becomes, if anything, more unified— bonded, however imperfectly, by love.

The legal system is creaking into motion, said former federal prosecutor Mimi Rocah in MS.now, but for Jane Doe it’s “too little, too late.” Amid a “firestorm of outrage,” Matthew Van Houten, district attorney for New York’s Tompkins County, agreed recently to reopen a criminal investigation into the alleged 2024 sexual assault and rape of a Cornell University sophomore by seven fraternity members. Van Houten said he initially dropped the probe because the then-20-year-old complainant— referred to only as Jane Doe—had described her drug use and sexual activity at the Chi Phi frat house “as voluntary, conscious, and consensual” in a statement. But that statement was a six-page summary of longer interviews by Cornell campus police, the transcripts of which tell a very different story. In them, Doe says the encounter began consensually with two men, but that five others later joined in, by which point she was too intoxicated on alcohol and ketamine to consent, and that she was “100% confident” she’d been raped. Van Houten never read those transcripts, or the Snapchat messages in which one of the accused allegedly told his frat brothers there was “free pussy” upstairs. Another frat member later asked, “Shop still open?” New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has now handed the case to state Attorney General Letitia James. But rape is notoriously hard to prosecute, let alone years after the fact. The case against the “Cornell 7” seems “set up for failure.”

Hasn’t justice already been done? asked Byron York in the Washington Examiner. Cornell did its own investigation in 2024, after which it “shut down the Chi Phi fraternity house,” expelled two men, suspended two more, and banned another from campus. The final two men, found not to have played a significant role in events, were ordered to write “reflection papers.” The names of the seven—all of whom deny rape—have also been published, and they’re facing damages from Doe’s civil suit. Van Houten “had to go,” said former federal prosecutor Elie Honig in New York. Reports of how he failed to interview witnesses or gather evidence have eroded public confidence in the justice system. But just as “corrosive” is the appointment of James, a showboating prosecutor who has already “publicly prejudged” the Cornell 7 in social media posts pledging to “stand with” Doe.

The legal cases will rise and fall on the “technical question of consent,” said Natalia Bower in her Substack newsletter. But what’s legal and what’s moral are two different things, and society gets to impose “consequences” for legal but immoral behavior. The Cornell 7 knew they’d hurt Jane Doe. This is apparent from their group chat, which finds them discussing how to dissuade her from pressing charges, and from messages to Doe herself, in which one apologizes for letting things get out of hand. Whatever else may come to light, we already know “more than enough to drag these men’s reputations through the mud,” as they gleefully dragged Jane Doe’s.

All the ketamine and Snapchatting makes this case seem very modern, said Caitlin Flanagan in The Free Press, but generations of American college women have learned the hard way to “never go upstairs in a fraternity house.” Why do women keep venturing, “decade after decade,” into these “fortresses” of violence and stunted masculinity? Many go in search of good men—but they are in pitifully short supply. Of all this story’s awful details, perhaps the saddest and most enraging is that when those messages went out, inviting dozens of Chi Phi brothers to join in the unfolding horror, not one of them “was man enough to shut it down.

A car is quickly becoming one of the costliest things you can own, said Venessa Wong in MarketWatch. Between rising gas prices, steep insurance rates, and hefty repair bills, U.S. households are spending more than is recommended getting from A to B. That’s not even including the cost of the vehicle itself. “The average new car” in the U.S. is “now selling for more than $50,000,” while the average interest rate on a new-car loan is 6.35% — up from 4.09% in 2021. That double whammy is “making it harder for car buyers who need financing.” Most financial experts “recommend larger down payments to reduce the amount borrowed,” but a growing share of buyers “have been moving in the opposite direction”—borrowing more over longer periods. “You’re looking at a clear recipe for long-term financial strain,” said Jessica Caldwell, head of insights at Edmunds.

Even used cars are expensive, said David Welch in Bloomberg. New vehicles selling for record prices are still commanding “hefty premiums when they hit the used market,” pushing the average used-car price above $30,000, up from about $20,000 in 2019. The problems with the car market began during the pandemic, when a supply crisis paralyzed global auto sales. But that experience “also taught auto companies a lesson: Producing fewer, high-priced models means better profits.” Those higher prices have also helped cushion the blow from President Trump’s tariffs and the higher price of diesel that truckers need to ship cars around North America. That’s all trickling down to the used-car lot. Six years ago, a $10,000 to $15,000 budget could buy a five-year-old car with about 58,000 miles. Today, the same amount gets you a roughly nine-year-old car with close to 100,000 miles.

Longer loans aren’t “necessarily a bad thing for car buyers,” said Mike Winters at CNBC.com, as long as they make their payments for the life of the loan. Where buyers get in trouble is “if they want or need to replace the car before they’ve paid down enough of what they owe.” Because borrowers “typically pay down their loans more slowly in the early years, when more of each payment goes toward interest,” a longer loan leaves “the borrower owing more as the car loses value.” That balance then “gets rolled into the next car loan,” steepening the financial hole until it becomes so-called permanent car debt.

The bottom line is Americans need cheaper car options, said The Washington Post in an editorial, and that’s where Chinese cars can make a big difference. China’s auto industry appears “to have genuinely advanced the technological frontier of making cars more efficiently,” which translates into affordability. BYD’s Seal EV, comparable to a Tesla Model 3 sedan, lists for $24,190. U.S. consumers “should be allowed to reap those cost savings.”

‘Crisco’ by Miranda Lambert

★★★

With her 10th studio album, Miranda Lambert “teaches an ages-old genre some new steps,” said Joseph Hudak in Rolling Stone. The Texas-born multi-Grammy winner is by no means abandoning country, but by stirring in some disco and yacht rock, the 42-year-old singer-songwriter “shoots down any preconceived notions about who Miranda Lambert is.” She first “dipped her cowboy boot into disco” for “A Song to Sing,” a 2025 duet with Chris Stapleton that appears here and provides the “dreamy, mirror-ball vibes” that set the tone for the rest of this album. Because Lambert also sounds “more effervescent and ballsy than ever,” the results often feel like a party. Unfortunately, Crisco is “all crust, and no filling,” said Kyle Coroneos in Saving Country Music. It’s a fun record, with a strong concept that lets Lambert mix in plenty of vintage sounds. But despite “some impressive moments,” the album is packed with catchy songs that “don’t really say much of anything.” Exceptions include “To Everything” a mid-tempo ballad with real emotion. With more of those, “Crisco could have been more than just a shallow nostalgia kick.”

‘Popstar’ by Tinashe

★★★

“There are no bad Tinashe albums,” said Anna Gaca in Pitchfork. But her eighth might be “the best pop album of the year,” the kind that’s “fresh in the best way” because it’s “a little bit avant-garde” yet “immediately accessible.” It feels driven by “a sense of purpose—a compulsion, even—about connecting sounds circulating in pop, electronic, and dance music right now.” It packs in “dozens of brilliant little moments,” and though it takes cues from Blackout-era Britney Spears and FKA Twigs’ Eusexua, it remains “super recognizably Tinashe,” foregrounding her voice, her taste, and her cultural points of reference as a child of Southern California. “The whole album hopscotches between experimental and pop modes,” said Tobias Hess in The Fader. The experimental “Flashbacks” is a gem, combining drums that sound like pots and pans with a “glitched-out” chorus in which she boasts of giving a lover flashbacks to past bedroom romps. While the song evokes Charli XCX’s recent devotion to personal transparency and Rihanna’s knack for unforgettable hooks, “there are no other pop stars I can imagine making a track like this.”

‘Musk’

Directed by Alex Gibney (R)

★★★

“As a character study, Musk is fascinating,” said Bilge Ebiri in NYMag.com. “As a warning about our future, it’s terrifying.” Alex Gibney’s nearly four-hour long documentary, which has drawn insults and legal threats from its subject, “gives us both the myth and the reality,” turning back the clock on Elon Musk’s story to revisit all the pitches he’s made for his business ventures that have obscured troubling truths—such as the deadly unreliability of the self-driving software in Tesla’s cars. Viewers will come away convinced the world’s richest man mostly excels at self-promotion; they’ll also be frightened by the power he’s accrued. Still, you have to wonder: “Will it speak primarily to the converted?” Though Gibney’s film will surely spawn viewer nightmares, said Ben Croll in The Wrap, “it takes some time getting there.” The first half, which covers Musk’s early history as an entrepreneur, “charts a trajectory of upward failing” that enriches him enough to fund SpaceX, his reputation-making breakthrough.

The “more scabrous” post-intermission second half paints him as a man undone by the pandemic shutdown, but turns devastating only when it details how many millions will die as a result of his detour into slashing government jobs and aid programs for President Trump. When Ashley St. Clair, a recent Musk ex and the mother of one of his 14 known children, calls him “a nuke,” it chills. Some of Gibney’s daring formal choices, including having many of his subject’s past public statements spoken by a computer-animated Musk avatar, prove distracting, said David Fear in Rolling Stone. Still, once Musk builds its case that a man with a god complex has built an empire whose satellites, rockets, social media platform, and personal wealth give him enormous sway over our present and future, “it’s hard not to feel a deep sense of despair.”

‘Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother’

Directed by Bassam Tariq (R)

★★★

With his latest screen turn, twotime Oscar winner Mahershala Ali has given Hollywood “a new kind of action hero,” said Stephanie Zacharek in Time. Latif, a hitman who’s also a father of three and a practicing Muslim, faces compounding crises when his wife dies, leaving him with a newborn who can’t tolerate formula. The role gives Ali “plenty to work with,” because Latif’s quest to secure breast milk for his youngest helps pull him into the middle of a war between a porn king and a gold-toothed Christian fanatic played with aplomb by John Cho. And while the film is “most entertaining when it indulges its tawdry side,” it tangles credibly “with complex issues of faith.”

Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother “doesn’t completely cohere,” said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast. Writer-director Bassam Tariq is good at bringing out Latif’s struggles with faith and rapport with his children, but “there’s far too little focus on the adrenalized action,” and the hero’s compelling story arc is “sabotaged” by a “too-comforting” finale. Still, this picture, named after an Islamic hadith, “lives a notch above most action films,” said Alissa Wilkinson in The New York Times. While its violence is “shockingly graphic in places,” the film is beautifully shot, “crackles with tension,” and features standout performances from Ali and the actress Adia, who plays Latif’s teenage daughter. This is a movie that asks if a person who strives to be good can be forgiven for the worst they’ve done, and “when it’s in its rhythm, it’s a great story.”

What happened?

The U.S. election map appeared to shift in favor of Democrats recently, heightening Republicans’ fears that voters angry over the Iran war and the rising cost of living are poised to deliver the GOP a midterm drubbing. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report moved three key Senate races toward Democrats, who must pick up four GOP seats to win control of the chamber. New Hampshire went from “toss-up” to “lean Democrat”; North Carolina from “lean Democrat” to “likely Democrat”; and Kansas, where megachurch pastor Adam Hamilton is neck and neck with Republican incumbent Sen. Roger Marshall, from “lean Republican” to “toss-up.” Seemingly giving up on North Carolina, where former Democratic governor Roy Cooper has a comfortable lead over Republican Michael Whatley, the top GOP Senate super PAC canceled its ads there and shifted funding to South Carolina—which Trump carried by 18 percentage points in 2024— and Kansas, which hasn’t elected a Democratic senator since 1932. A New York Times/Siena poll found Democratic Senate candidates leading in reliably Republican Ohio, Alaska, and Texas, and one point behind in Iowa. With Democrats favored to take the House, a GOP strategist drew lines to the blue wave of 2006. “If the bottom continues falling out,” he told Politico, “this will be worse.”

President Trump floated suspending the federal gas tax to ease anger over pump prices averaging $4.50 a gallon, a move that would require congressional action. Trump, whose approval rating hit a record-low 32% in a new Reuters/Ipsos poll, held rallies in Alabama, Ohio, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Texas. The dire polls are “fake,” Trump said in Mobile, Ala., and “don’t account for the fact that Trump is out campaigning.”

What the columnists said

A huge cash advantage was “supposed to be the GOP’s ace,” said Isaac Arnsdorf in The Washington Post. Since Labor Day, Republicans have poured half a billion dollars into competitive House and Senate races. But Democrats’ advantage on a generic congressional ballot has only widened since then, from about 6 points to 9, according to one polling average. Over $190 million in attack ads aimed at Democratic Senate candidates James Talarico in Texas and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan hasn’t moved the needle—El-Sayed’s favorability is up 5 points since August, according to Fox News surveys.

Democrats are gaining ground with several key groups, said Ruth Igielnik in The New York Times. They include voters under 30, who in the Times/Siena poll favored Democrats by 30 points, and Latinos, who favored Democrats by 24 points in a recent NBC News/Telemundo poll, up from 12 points before the 2024 election. And in nearly every state the Times polled, Democrats are winning among independents, “the bloc of swing voters that typically decides elections.” The polls could be wrong, said Jim Newell in Slate. They’ve previously “underestimated Republican energy in the Trump era,” by failing to reach enough white, noncollege voters. Since those abound in red states like Kansas and Iowa, “the error there will be greater if pollsters are missing this cohort again.”

If the polls are right, Republicans see a potential “lifeline” in left-leaning New Hampshire, said Ken Thomas in The Wall Street Journal. John Sununu—a moderate former one-term senator— is narrowly trailing Democratic Rep. Chris Pappas, who has for months “been urging the national party to avoid complacency in the battleground state.” Maine, where longtime Sen. Susan Collins is in a tight race with Democrat Troy Jackson, could give Republicans another swing-state win.

But it’s a marker of Republicans’ vulnerability that Democrats have “found an opening in one of America’s reddest states,” said Lauren Egan in The Bulwark. Trump won Kansas by 21 points in 2016, and 16 points in 2024. But Democratic Senate challenger Hamilton has “run a masterful race” pitched to the center—and he’s been aided by Trump policies. Medicaid cuts are squeezing rural health care providers in the state. Its farm industry, already hit hard by tariffs that shrunk exports, is now struggling with the soaring price of diesel for tractors and combines. And ICE raids at meat- processing plants have “enraged” those in the livestock industry.

That Kansas is in play beggars belief, said Jeffrey Blehar in National Review. “This stubborn, spiritually rhomboid state” has voted GOP in every federal statewide race “since an aberrational blip at the dawn of the Roosevelt administration.” But such is the effect of Trump’s agenda on “otherwise deep-red, agribusiness heartlands.” I believe Marshall will pull it out, but with rough weather ahead for the GOP, the state is “officially on tornado watch.” The “conditions for a freak event are now fully in place.”

San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato

Villa Pacifica, a Mexican-modern three-bedroom located in the arts-rich Central Highlands city, is in the Centro Histórico area. The vaulted living room features a stone, floor-to-ceiling linear fireplace surround, heated floors, a wood tejamanil ceiling, and a glass wall; the stone-walled kitchen has a breakfast nook.

A sunroom and a balcony overlook the yard and garden. Restaurants and shops are walkable. $1,250,000 USD. Anne Martin Jones, CDR Bienes Raices San Miguel/Luxury Portfolio International, +52 (415) 178-0737

Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco

This Spanish Colonial Revival villa in a coastal vacation destination is on a hillside with ocean views. The three-bedroom has saltillo tile floors, textured walls, arched doorways, exposed beams, and decorative tiles; the primary bedroom opens to a balcony with a hot tub; and the vibrant kitchen includes stainless appliances.

Outside are a pool with lion fountains, a lounge area, and a grilling station. $985,000 USD. Marta Huante, P.V. Realty, S.A. de C.V./Luxury Portfolio International, +52 (322) 102-0010

Mexico City

Casa Thiers, in Anzures, an area within Miguel Hidalgo, is a 1949 Spanish-European-style estate. The six-bedroom main building has a central room with double-height, carved, coffered ceilings, stained glass, columns, and a single-piece Carrara marble staircase, while formal rooms feature original inlaid floors and a kitchen has marble counters and high-end appliances.

The property includes a two-bedroom guest house, a pool, terrace, and wood-fired oven. $5,642,336 USD. Maricruz Madrigal, Mexico Sotheby's International Realty, +52 (55) 5929-5252

Huatulco, Oaxaca

Overlooking the Gulf of Tehuantepec in a coastal town, this 1993, eight-bedroom estate has Mediterranean and Balinese influences across multiple structures. A cluster of two-bedroom bungalows have colorful details, and a dining and living area is topped by a hand-woven palapa and anchored by amate trees.

Outside are a tennis court, pool, hot tub, patios, and a cable car connecting to a private beach. $8,000,000 USD. Laura de la Torre de Skipsey, Mexico Sotheby's International Realty, +52 (55) 3466-6198

La Paz, Baja California Sur

Built in 2025, Equinox, a modern home on the Baja peninsula overlooks the Gulf of California. The minimalist, open-plan five-bedroom features marble floors, walls of glass framing the water, a floating wood staircase, a white kitchen, and baths punctuated with decorative tile.

Sliders open to a terrace with an infinity pool, a spa, and desert landscaping. Beaches, dining, and shops are a short drive. $5,900,000 USD. Vanessa Fukunaga, Engel & Völkers Snell Real Estate, +1 (310) 728-5915

Bucerias, Riviera Nayarit

A block from Playa Bucerias on Banderas Bay about 13 miles from Puerto Vallarta, this furnished two-bedroom condo can be closed or opened into one or two units. The boho-inflected design includes rattan pendants, ceramic tile floors, and an open kitchen with an eat-in peninsula.

Glass doors open to a balcony; amenities include a shared pool, hot tub, gym, and deeded underground parking. $379,000 USD. Curtis Brownlee, MexHome Real Estate - Bucerias, +52 (322) 368-8897

Meta’s Muse is “the most useful AI app I have ever used,” said Eli Tan in The New York Times. I’ve had it “perform dozens of day-to-day tasks,” from ordering my groceries to looking up recipes to “setting my fantasy football lineups.” The AI agent “called my dental insurer” on my behalf, gave “it my member ID, answered a security question, and waited on hold before transferring me to the representative— just as I had asked it to.” It’s like having a personal assistant. “While the agent worked, I watched its movements through a tiny browser window, where it navigated websites like a human with a mouse and cursor.” Muse wouldn’t make a purchase without checking with me first, but to get the most out of it, I did give the AI agent access to “my bank accounts and apps like Google Docs, Gmail, Ticketmaster, OpenTable, and Google Sheets,” which might be a bit too much personal information for some people.

Muse’s abilities to “browse the internet on your behalf” are “genuinely impressive,” said Reece Rogers in Wired, but this is also Meta we’re talking about. When I tried it, it was hard to avoid wondering if Muse was “more obsessed with collecting data about me” than actually helping me. The agent has a long-term memory that “stores details about your interactions and preferences.” The more I used it, every interaction “started to feel like a guise for me to upload more data about myself” to Meta, which will soon debut an always-on palm-size “Charm” pendant loaded with Muse.

Agents are only as good as the services they can tap into, said Dave Lee in Bloomberg. Already, Amazon has blocked Muse “from accessing its store,” citing “security and data privacy.” But more likely it’s because “Amazon would much prefer people to use its AI shopping bot instead.” Other competitors will likely put up barriers, which kills the fun of having AI at your beck and call. “What good is a Google AI assistant if it can’t buy things from Amazon or look up things on community groups on Facebook?”

Muse is still fun, said Michael Brendan Dougherty in National Review, and these “friendlier consumer forms of agentic AI” are a pleasant respite from all the doom and gloom we keep hearing from the frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic. Finally, it seems, AI has found a way to be useful. Maybe too useful, said Allison Johnson in The Verge. The “question we need to ask ourselves as we enter the era of AI agents is what we do with the time” we’re freeing up. Will we use it “to take on more commitments?” Or will we let our chatbots sit on hold with the insurance company while we go outside for a stroll or a hike?

“For decades, conservative evangelicals have controlled the image of the politically active Christian,” said Jia Lynn Yang in The New York Times. The religious right turned tens of millions of Christians who rejected America’s “rapidly liberalizing culture” into a durable voting bloc, enabling Donald Trump’s rise and achieving “once- unthinkable” goals, such as overturning the right to abortion. But as Americans reject the Trump administration’s “litany of moral outrages,” including mass deportation and the withdrawal of food aid and health care, a new coalition may be quietly emerging: the Christian left. The movement’s most prominent spokesman is James Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian surging in the polls in his U.S. Senate race in Texas with rhetoric “drawn straight from the Gospels.” At least 12 pastors, seminarians, and former clergy have run for federal office as Democrats this year—a number “ unheard-of in recent memory.” In many red states, these Christian Democrats are gaining ground with voters who see religion as “a moral compass rather than a political agenda.”

Talarico’s progressivism is a “cheap misuse” of Christian teaching, said Rich Lowry in National Review. His rhetoric “waters down the Scriptures” to make it sound like God has endorsed “his version of Medicare for All.” Jesus preached personal charity toward the poor and the sick, but he said nothing about universal health care, food stamps, or government redistribution of wealth. As he tries to win over right- leaning Texans, Talarico has also conveniently backed away from the “extremely woke” views he espoused a few years ago, including his claim that God is “nonbinary.”

The Christian right created this opening, said Moira Donegan in The Guardian. Those hypocrites lost the moral high ground when they embraced the “ostentatious lasciviousness” of Trump and his Epstein- adjacent allies. In Trump’s GOP, “the preachers have retreated, and the perverts have taken over.” It’s no wonder Republicans are panicking, said Amanda Marcotte in Salon. Talarico represents “an existential threat to the Right’s long- standing myth that to be Christian must necessarily mean voting Republican.” The Democratic Party really is “a better fit for people who claim allegiance to Jesus Christ, who called on followers to feed the hungry and welcome the stranger.” One prominent Texas pastor recently preached that there can be only two types of Christians: Christian conservatives and conservative Christians. “They do not want their followers peeking behind door No. 3.”

What is kratom?

Derived from the leaves of the kratom tree, the legal high is sold in convenience stores, smoke shops, and service stations across the U.S. with the pitch that it can ease pain and boost energy. As use has increased—some 5 million Americans have tried kratom, turning the drug into a billion- dollar industry—so have its harms. More than 5,200 people fatally overdosed on kratom between 2020 and 2024, according to the CDC, and kratom-related hospitalizations and poisonings have rocketed nearly 1,300% over the past decade, with nearly 3,500 people severely sickened last year. Authorities found packages of the drug while investigating the mysterious deaths of two University of Mississippi undergrads, ages 18 and 20, in separate incidents recently. Responding to growing concern, the Drug Enforcement Administration this summer temporarily classified three kratom derivatives as federally illegal Schedule 1 substances, a category that includes heroin and LSD. But the Department of Health and Human Services emphasized the change was “not intended to regulate natural leaf kratom,” only synthetics and concentrates of its psychoactive compounds. Many experts call that insufficient—and suggest ties between Trump Cabinet members and kratom firms could be influencing regulations. “It’s looking like we have a coin-operated drug policy,” said former White House adviser Dr. Kevin Sabet.

What effect does kratom have on users?

Low doses have a stimulant effect; people in Southeast Asia, where the tree is native, have for centuries chewed leaves as a pick-me-up. But in higher doses, kratom acts as a narcotic, because two psychoactive compounds— mitragynine and 7-hydroxymitragynine (7-OH)—bind to the same receptors as opioids. “If you take two pills it’s like a cup of coffee,” podcaster Joe Rogan said in 2019. “I took eight and I was f---ed up.” Kratom leaves are typically imported from Indonesia and processed stateside into capsules, gummies, and other products. While natural kratom contains only trace amounts of 7-OH, some companies sell concentrated or synthetic forms of the compound under brand names such as Magic 7OH and 7 O’Heaven for as little as $4 a pop. Those concentrates can be up to 13 times stronger than morphine, and users risk addiction, liver damage, and seizures— or worse. Weston Walker, a health- conscious Florida attorney, collapsed and died in 2021 after taking a lethal amount of kratom extract. “You just never imagine your 37-year old, healthy-as-a-horse brother is going to pass away,” said his sister, Whitney Briggs.

Why do people take the drug?

Many take it purely recreationally, enjoying a mild alcohol-free buzz from the kratom- infused drinks and cocktails served at hundreds of kratom lounges and bars across the U.S. Some long-haul truckers use it to stay awake on the road. But kratom’s most vocal defenders say it helps them manage pain and chronic conditions, and a Johns Hopkins survey last year found that over a quarter of kratom users take it as an opioid replacement. But while some users say it helped wean them off opioids, others find themselves trading one addiction for another. “Anyone who says kratom is not addictive has never tried it,” a former opioid and kratom user named Jack told Aeon. “I probably spent over $120 a day on kratom, way more than I had spent on oxies.”

How has the government responded?

A 2016 attempt at banning kratom’s main compounds failed after intense pushback from the American Kratom Association and other lobbying groups. The DEA’s order this summer on three kratom derivatives also bans substances that contain more than 0.05% of 7-OH, a level that excludes raw kratom leaves. But Brandeis University opioid researcher Dr. Andrew Kolodny notes that the majority of patients he has treated for 7-OH addiction started with natural kratom, and that there’s no clear line marking one form as dangerous and the other safe. “The DEA should control kratom in all its forms,” he said.

Why hasn’t it?

Some experts point to financial links between Trump Cabinet officials and the kratom industry. In 2023, the Justice Department sued one of the country’s largest kratom firms, Oklahoma-based Botanic Tonics, alleging its kratom- infused Feel Free drink was an unsafe “new dietary ingredient.” The DOJ dropped the case last December, saying it was not “a prudent use of government resources,” and over the following months, Botanic Tonics donated $1 million to MAHA PAC, which is associated with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and $443,000 to the Republican National Committee. Asked about the donation, Kennedy said, “I don’t make decisions for the Justice Department.” Markwayne Mullin, the former Oklahoma senator who in March became Homeland Security secretary, has invested up to $1 million in Botanic Tonics. The New York Times reported that Mullin has asked the FDA to soften its warnings on kratom while publicly promoting bans on 7-OH, whose makers compete with Botanic Tonics’ “natural” products. The Department of Homeland Security said Mullin “follows all ethics and conflict-of- interest standards.”

Can states take action?

Over a dozen have enacted bans on kratom, 7-OH, or both, though enforcement is spotty. Not all experts support blanket prohibition: Johns Hopkins psychiatrist Kirsten Smith warns that a “moral panic freakout” could stifle research into whether kratom can indeed offer an off-ramp from opiates. But most agree kratom companies should not be left to self- regulate. Many in the industry, meanwhile, dismiss health harms from their product. Mac Haddow of the American Kratom Association has applauded the DEA’s 7-OH ban but has also blamed irresponsible consumers for any deaths caused by natural kratom use. “Can we regulate stupid?” he asked. “I can’t do that—no one can.”

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Alexander McCall Smith is the author of the Botswana-set No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, whose 27 books have sold more than 40 million copies. In the latest, The Big Cats Dance Party, a high-profile case falls to a novice sleuth while the agency’s founder is away.

‘A Pattern Language’ by Christopher Alexander (1977)

Alexander was a visionary professor of architecture at Berkeley. Here, he and several colleagues set out the principles of sympathetic design as an antidote to the brutalism of the late 20th century. You can use this book if you are designing a city, a building, or just arranging the furniture in a room or the shrubs in your garden. Buy it here.

‘Collected Shorter Poems, 1927–1957’ by W.H. Auden (1966)

I never tire of Auden’s poems, especially “In Praise of Limestone” and the lovely, haunting “The More Loving One.” Auden remains as relevant in our troubled times as he was in his heyday. And he brings the same consolation with his wise, humane words. Buy it here.

‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’ by Muriel Spark (1961)

“My pupils,” said Miss Brodie, “are the crème de la crème.” Beware of a teacher who says that sort of thing. Jean Brodie was a fascist, one of her charges eventually says, and she was. Spark, a writer of the first rank, brought her beautifully to life in this moving, rather sad novel of Edinburgh in the 1930s. Buy it here.

‘The Sword of Honour Trilogy’ by Evelyn Waugh (1952–61)

This trilogy is in my view Waugh’s masterpiece. It tells the story of Guy Crouchback and his experiences in the Second World War. Waugh was a magnificent writer, and his prose has a rare gravity and balance. Here he tells a poignant story, but one that has moments of memorable humor. Apthrop, an important character, is Waugh’s greatest comic creation. Buy it here.

‘Excellent Women’ by Barbara Pym (1952)

Pym was another Jane Austen. Her small-scale novels are full of witty observations. She focuses on the lives of people living on the margins of other, larger lives. Excellent Women is one of her best novels, a little gem. Buy it here.

‘The Spy and the Traitor’ by Ben Macintyre (2018)

Macintyre’s book about Oleg Gordievsky is quite simply the most exciting book I have ever read. Gordievsky, a high-ranking KGB officer, passed on information to the West for years. The story of his exfiltration from Moscow is utterly engrossing. Gordievsky probably saved us from nuclear annihilation. Buy it here.

‘An Unexpected Life: A Memoir’ by Gloria Steinem

“An Unexpected Life is filled with lines that now feel prophetic,” said Scaachi Koul in Slate. When the feminist activist and icon died at 92 in early September, her newest memoir was three weeks from publication, making it all the more poignant when a reader comes across lines such as “Being remembered with love is the best form of immortality.” Steinem was, she wrote here, still working on the causes she believed in and expecting to live to 100. But she was also aware she had an obligation, as a leader running short on time, to remind younger allies of progress made in her lifetime, including in the opening of countless professions to women and in making domestic violence far less invisible. At its best, An Unexpected Life “reads as a nudge to younger generations to keep up the good fight, to notice the wins where they happen, and to not get discouraged.”

“The striking thing about An Unexpected Life is how bland it is,” said Meghan Cox Gurdon in The Wall Street Journal. Steinem didn’t lack for good material. As a journalist in her 20s, she went undercover as a Playboy bunny and trailed the Beatles on their first U.S. tour. She also ran a youth group funded by the CIA in the years before she co-founded Ms. magazine in 1971. “In her heyday, Steinem had zip,” authoring such memorable lines as “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.” But here she smothers even potentially great anecdotes with bromides. After recalling how she was once bitten by a rat during her Ohio childhood and had to hitchhike to a hospital in the middle of the night, she counsels readers not to let rats remain “unseen,” writing: “If we share our experiences, we begin to discover that we are not alone.”

In the book’s first half, at least, “one is reminded of the improbability of her journey,” said Emma Brockes in The Guardian. “Raised on instability,” Steinem grew up “remarkably free” from the constraints placed on so many other women, and once she assumed the role of an activist, she was “the real thing,” in it for neither the attention nor the money. She shares that she saved so little well into midlife that she worried she’d one day be sleeping in the New York City subway—and jokes that she’d have taken up organizing the other bag ladies. For much of her life, though, she “had a very clear idea of what she was supposed to be doing,” and “my God she did it right to the end.” She mentions at one point having jeans older than many people she was working with. “We should all be so lucky; what a life.”

‘Roll the Calls: A Memoir’ by Ari Emanuel

“I don’t know why Ari Emanuel wrote a memoir, even after reading it,” said Sam Wasson in Air Mail. Yes, Emanuel is a powerful Hollywood agent who’s so famously explosive that he inspired Entourage’s Ari Gold. He’d also seem to have great stories to share. But there are few such tales in this instant best seller, either because Emanuel doesn’t know what he’s fighting for or because his business is now more about mergers than deals that get movies made. Written in “a punchy, give-’em-hell style that strains to evoke Robert Evans’ classic The Kid Stays in the Picture,” Roll the Calls is “relentless and fun,” but “self-consciously so”—the kind of book that thinks there’s more power in the words “F--- you” when the phrase is broken into two paragraphs.

Emanuel spends much of the book “trying to justify his unrelenting rage and appetite for revenge,” said Maxwell Adler in Vanity Fair. He traces his anger back to childhood, when he was a bullied suburban Chicago special ed student whose dyslexia prevented him from keeping up with older brothers Zeke, now a prominent scientist, and Rahm, a current Democratic presidential hopeful. Ari credits his appetite for battle with the success he’s since achieved in a career that hadn’t even peaked when, in 2024, the agency he co-founded was valued at $13 billion. Fittingly, he also now runs a sports and entertainment conglomerate that owns both the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) and WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment).

“Roll the Calls is being sold as a Hollywood insider’s tell-all,” said Tim Robey in The Telegraph (U.K.). Problem is, Emanuel’s still working on his clients’ behalf, so while he freely ridicules rival agents and certain rival industry titans, “we hear nothing about the challenges of representing Mark Wahlberg or Oprah Winfrey or Donald Trump.” Judging from Emanuel’s memoir, “nothing sticks in his memory better than who got the upper hand during boardroom merger negotiations (usually himself) or who swore the most (himself).” Still, I’ll concede he’s a bit scary. “The very idea of him reading this lightly negative review brings a cold sweat to the back of my neck.”

The iced coffee debate “isn’t really about iced coffee,” said Beth Kowitt in Bloomberg. If you’ve been on social media recently, you’ve likely seen the viral debate about workplace etiquette and whether it is acceptable to bring a caffeinated beverage to a job interview. Younger people broadly think it’s fine, while their older peers think its slovenly and unprofessional. That this silly argument took off says a lot about the “tension” between employers and young employees who feel “misunderstood” and anxious “about their place in this evolving landscape.” In the current labor market, employers have a clear advantage over those looking for work, putting bosses “in their command-and-control era”—increasing surveillance, cutting benefits, and demanding office attendance. Meanwhile, Gen Z distrusts the “arbitrary rules” of major institutions, including the unwritten expectations around job interviews. To older generations, this skepticism can look like “entitlement or insubordination.” Really, it’s a conflict over “who gets to decide the norms of this new workplace.

Thinking it’s OK to sip a latte during an interview reflects “a larger behavioral pattern,” said Finn McRedmond in The Irish Times (Ireland). Remember, this is the same generation that introduced us to “quiet quitting, or the trend among young employees to show up at the office, do the bare minimum, collect their paycheck, and never work a minute over contracted hours.” Gen Z treats the job interview process with disdain because they “don’t want to work.”

There is no standard “job interview process” in a landscape that is “so confusing, discouraging, and exhausting,” said Julia Carpenter in The Washington Post. Just a few years ago, most interview advice revolved around covering up tattoos, avoiding salary questions, and following up with a thank-you note. All that has changed. Most hiring today is also done over Zoom, introducing “a whole new slate of do’s and don’ts,” and “not everyone agrees on which rules to keep and which to toss out.” To young people who have only ever interviewed on camera, the idea that you shouldn’t bring an iced coffee to an in-person meeting might legitimately be “a new one.”

I’m mostly relieved to hear that in-person interviews are still happening, said Emma Jacobs in the Financial Times. With bots handling the bulk of the hiring process, “contact with flesh-and-blood humans seems to be in short supply.” In the age of AI, workplaces are “crying out for the quirk of humans—those who can push back, bring something different, think outside the box.” Now the older generation is scolding workers for having a different view on interview etiquette without recognizing the cold reality of today’s job market. “Meeting a real person seems a cause for celebration: perhaps even a fancy cold beverage?”

Nikole Hannah-Jones’ school experiment reads like “an Aesop’s fable for progressives,” said Coleman Hughes in The Free Press. Ten years ago, the New York Times journalist wrote a viral essay explaining why she’d enrolled her 6-year-old daughter, Najya, in an underperforming, majority-Black public school. Better public schools were available near her Brooklyn home, and she and her husband could afford to go private. But Hannah-Jones—best known as creator of the Times’ “1619 Project”—felt an “obligation to be part of the struggle” against racial and class stratification, and believed that her daughter’s presence would help improve the failing school. Ten years on, Hannah-Jones has written a viral follow-up, headlined “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?” Far from lifting up the school, we discover, Najya was “dragged down” by it. Hannah-Jones recounts how assignments went ungraded and disruptive students monopolized the attention of teachers—on the rare occasions those teachers weren’t absent. At Najya’s middle school, there was “no homework whatsoever.” When Najya eventually chose and tested into a majority white and Asian high school, she was woefully unprepared. Now 16, Najya feels cheated by her mother’s choices. “Sometimes I wish instead of always thinking about other kids,” she told Nikole, “you would have thought about me.”

Hannah-Jones should feel no guilt, said Jenice Armstrong in The Philadelphia Inquirer. Unlike most of us, she found the courage to “practice her principles,” but faced the same “no-win choice” as many “socially conscious Black parents.” Do we send our kids to neighborhood schools, struggling after decades of “systemic” neglect? Or do we pull strings and write checks to access schools in whiter, more affluent zip codes, condemning our kids to “social isolation and subtle discrimination?” Najya is now getting A’s and B’s, Hannah-Jones writes, but in classrooms where kids toss around “racial slurs as if it were cool.”

Those trade-offs are real and agonizing, said Elizabeth Grace Matthew in USA Today. But Hannah-Jones is “evading the truth” about why her daughter’s schools were so bad. She handwaves at “racism” and “segregation” in progressive New York City, and at funding disparities between heavily white and nonwhite districts. But the worst of Najya’s schools spends $52,349 a student annually, far above the national average. Not mentioned by Hannah-Jones are the teachers’ unions that have built a system where their members can “do nothing and get paid.” Neither are the progressive “education professors” who decided tests, discipline, and academic rigor were all oppressive structures to be dismantled. Hannah-Jones helped promote this “faux-enlightened ideology,” even as her own daughter suffered its ravages.

Let’s not overdramatize, said Noah Smith in his Substack newsletter. Judging by international test results, Americans are getting “pretty good value” from the money we spend on public education. If we want better value still, we should abandon our “obsession with shrinking class sizes” through hiring more teachers, and start paying higher salaries to better teachers who can make “a big difference in disadvantaged kids’ lives.” With the right policies, all our children can receive a high-quality education in classrooms filled with kids of all backgrounds, said Jill Filipovic in Slate. But we won’t get there if progressives demand “individual parents make intolerable sacrifices that set back the people they love most,” or if they insist “the only way to even the scales is by setting both sides to zero.”

‘Bass Persuades’ by Miley

★★

At 33, Miley Cyrus is “still finding her way forward,” said Larisha Paul in Rolling Stone. On her latest No. 1 album, the former teen star attempts a couple of club tracks like the hits she used to make, but it’s clear she “has no use for flash and spectacle” and would rather just talk about her fiancé, musician and producer Maxx Morando. While the dance-oriented “Bass Persuades” proves to be “a rambling lead single with little to say,” Miley—if we use the mononym she now prefers—sounds fully committed on the “aching” ballad “Orbit,” the lighthearted “Let’s Get Married,” and the record’s other tributes to romantic devotion. For this restless star, it’s “an unusually focused set,” said Mark Richardson in The Wall Street Journal. Over the years, Miley has achieved “highly mixed results” by “zigzagging among ’80s rock, folk-pop, dream-pop, and R&B.” Here, she limits herself to electronic pop, but after opening with three “decent-togood” tracks, “almost everything that follows is forgettable.” Too often, the others “fall into an in-between space.” They are “not rhythmically interesting enough to make you want to move and don’t have the tunes to stand up as pop.

‘Ride Lonesome’ by Beck

★★★

Beck’s first album in seven years is “cut from the same cloth” as two of his most acclaimed efforts, said Fred Thomas in AllMusic. Like 2002’s Sea Change and 2014’s Morning Phase, an album of the year winner, Ride Lonesome “glows with a beautiful, lush sadness,” creating “an atmosphere of deep, almost wounded introspection.” Recorded with the same producer and musicians Beck enlisted for those earlier records, this album’s 12 tracks rely almost wholly on acoustic instrumentation as they amble forward slowly, starting with a title track that’s “dusted with gorgeous wisps of pedal steel guitar.” But while Sea Change conveyed the raw despair Beck was feeling after a breakup, this album feels like an echo that treats melancholy as if it’s a genre. Fortunately, Ride Lonesome “never feels like a pale imitation,” said Alexis Petridis in The Guardian. Perhaps Beck, at 56 and no longer married, is simply experiencing “a very mid-50s kind of malaise.” In any case, he’s provided new evidence that his best music is “born out of misery.” Credit his level of craft. “Everything here is melodically exquisite; every song has the requisite emotional impact.”

‘Digger’

Directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu (R)

★★

“It’d be a mistake to judge Digger by the standards of a normal film,” said Amy Nicholson in the Los Angeles Times. Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s over-the-top new satire, featuring Tom Cruise in “his riskiest role in eons,” offers viewers no hope, “only a seductive, mischievous malevolence that, by design, feels empty as soon as the end credits roll.” But maybe that’s intended, because the subject is climate collapse and the Oscar-winning director of Birdman and The Revenant doesn’t seem to think there’s any way to avoid the catastrophe. Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, a greedy oil baron who has unleashed an environmental disaster, and Cruise is so committed to the villainous role, “we can’t take our eyes off him,” said Bilge Ebiri in NYMag.com.

Unfortunately, “the only other actor besides Cruise I enjoyed watching was Riz Ahmed,” in the role of a science consultant to Digger. The rest is so aggravating that “it’s like being trapped inside a tuba for two hours.” Here’s the thing, though: Except for a major twist that backfires, “the movie knows what it’s doing.” It’s meant to horrify. I found it “rage-inducing” for a different reason, said Johnny Oleksinski in the New York Post. Cruise and Iñárritu think they’ve made an urgent film but are “blinded to their baby’s badness” by their egos. Despite having “all the makings of a prestige hit,” Digger “lacks a single funny joke or even half-believable moment.” At least it’s likely to vanish quickly. “Nobody will be debating this movie. It’s not worth the time.”

‘The History of Concrete’

Directed by John Wilson (Not rated)

★★★

Fans of How To With John Wilson, the acclaimed 2020–23 TV docuseries, will be pleased that Wilson’s big-screen debut is “essentially a 100-minute version of an episode,” said Adrian Horton in The Guardian. Consistently compelling, surprising, and “laugh-out-loud funny,” The History of Concrete follows the documentarian as he again takes a mundane subject and uses it to spin out intriguing detours, memorable visual jokes, and insightful ruminations about the human condition. Yes, Wilson’s “casual, ambling” film provides a lot of information about concrete—possibly the most-used human-made substance on the planet, said Stephanie Zacharek in Time. Mostly, though, “it will show you how Wilson’s mind works, how it jumps from one seemingly random thought to the next and miraculously connects them.”

Wilson’s curiosity takes him to some far-off places, including Rome, but the best segments grow out of his encounters with fellow New York City–area eccentrics, including an aging musician he befriends and helps guide through personal loss. In truth, much of this “weird, fun” film is about the difficulty of securing financing to make a documentary, “especially if it’s about concrete,” said Alissa Wilkinson in The New York Times. But because Wilson’s wanderings eventually lead to a poignant conclusion that ties all the loose threads together, “you’re left wondering how a movie about concrete could leave a lump in your throat.” Of course, “that’s how Wilson works, making us see what we might not have otherwise.”

Los Angeles, Calif.

In the Brentwood hills about 17 miles from downtown, this 1972 Tudor-inspired home opens to a diamond-checked floor, wood and iron staircase, and a vaulted great room with a bay window seat, a floor-to-ceiling fireplace with sidelights, wide-plank oak floors, and lime-washed walls.

The high-end kitchen has honed Breccia Capraia marble counters, plus a hidden catering kitchen and pantry. Outside are terraces, yards, and a new pool. $8,000,000. Claire O'Connor and Samantha O'Connor, Compass, (310) 909-6192

Norfolk, Conn.

The Bungalow, a 1908 Tudor Revival estate designed by Alfredo S.G. Taylor, has a stone and half-timber exterior. The six-bedroom features a wood-clad great room with decorative arches on 40-foot ceilings; a library; marble baths; and a new eat-in chef's kitchen.

Balconies and a wrap-around porch overlook the nearly 44-acre property that includes a two-bedroom guest house, barn, gardens, and a pond. $6,650,000. Florence de Dampierre Mathis, William Raveis Real Estate/Luxury Portfolio International, (917) 930-2951

Wheaton, Ill.

Architect Jarvis Hunt designed the 1897 House of Seven Gables, a Tudor Revival mansion that in 2017 was lifted and moved 500 feet to save it from demolition.

Now fully renovated, the seven-bedroom features new systems, geometric gothic wood paneling, beamed ceilings, French doors, a new kitchen with dining space, and a carved staircase. A covered deck and patio overlook a yard and mature trees. $1,750,000. Lisa Grimes and Jenny Ames, Engel & Völkers Chicago, (708) 205-9518

Salt Lake City

Built in 2023, this Tudor-style four-bedroom with symmetrical side gables is in a gated community. A double-height entry with a hand-painted mural connects to a formal dining room with layered crown molding.

The eat-in kitchen has checked floors, a L'Atelier Paris gas range and a butler's pantry with chef's appliances; downstairs is a theater. The more than 3-acre lot includes a pool, patio, and glass atrium. $6,950,000. Dorthy Androulidakis and Liz Slager, Summit Sotheby's International Realty, (801) 231-3023

Washington, D.C.

In the Spring Valley area, this 1935 half-timbered home with textured stone was renovated in 2012. The five-bedroom features a living room and library with beamed ceilings, a two-sided fireplace, built-ins, and stained glass.

It also features a kitchen with hammer beam trusses; a second kitchen; a lower level with a wet bar; and a gym connected to the garage. A terrace faces the nearly half-acre lot with yards and trees. $4,595,000. Daniel Heider, TTR Sotheby's International Realty, (703) 785-7820

Grosse Pointe, Mich.

This 1927, four-bedroom Tudor Revival condo is in an eight-unit community that is walking distance from shops and dining. The three-story home includes a living room with wood floors, built-in niche shelves, a fireplace with a decorative wood surround, and an arched doorway.

It also has a formal dining room with crown molding and a galley kitchen that opens to a driveway next to a leafy, landscaped brick patio. $425,000. Cathy Harber @properties Christie's International Real Estate, (313) 969-1996

George Lucas’ new billion-dollar L.A. museum “makes no apologies for looking like a spaceship,” said Philip Kennicott in The Washington Post. Built to house the Star Wars creator’s “vast and motley” personal collection of figurative art, the enormous white-clad structure brings centuries of efforts to democratize the museum experience to fruition in the form of “a gigantic, magnificent, messy, maddening absurdity.” To Lucas, good art is art that powerfully dramatizes the primal narrative of life, so his museum mixes Renaissance paintings with comics, manga, and science fiction illustration, while “Beatrix Potter rabbits and Maurice Sendak monsters rub shoulders with works by Andy Warhol and Frida Kahlo.” Because so many of the images and other cultural artifacts are famous, the museum “will be extraordinarily popular.” But don’t expect to find text that can help you sort through the work. “No museum I’ve ever visited is so committed to the anti-intellectual proposition that art is about feeling and experiencing, not thinking.

“Even if you hate art museums, consider this one,” said Rakesh Agrawal in PC Magazine. Rather than trying to educate visitors, it’s “just fun, with free-flowing galleries that encourage random exploration.” Not that you’re asked to shut off your brain. Among an array of charming Norman Rockwell paintings, the magazine illustrator’s famous 1958 image of a white boy chatting with a kindly cop at a diner counter hangs alongside a 2014 riff by Richard Williams that shows a Black boy recoiling from an officer in riot gear. “I spent two hours at the museum; I could easily have spent 10.” Though some visitors will be interested only in Star Wars paraphernalia, said Amy Nicholson in the Los Angeles Times, the franchise is largely limited to a single gallery focused on a single theme: vehicles. Among the highlights is a “fanged and ferocious” incarnation of General Grievous’ Revenge of the Sith wheel bike, which existed only in CGI until Lucas wanted to see one in person. Whatever gallery you wander into here, “you’re always aware of being inside his brain.”

“Proudly over the top, the Lucas is a weird kind of wonderful and an instant city landmark,” said Michael Kimmelman in The New York Times. Rising across the street from the University of Southern California, where Lucas studied film, it sits amid 13 acres of lawn and gardens. And while Chinese architect Ma Yansong’s creation shares the “blockbuster” ambitions of the new Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the DNA of the Lucas is closer to that of the region’s many existing go-it-alone, family-built art institutions, including the Getty, Huntington, Hammer, and Broad. “Vanity museums, some of the most memorable on the planet, have been a big part of what makes the city’s cultural landscape so lively, diverse, and deep.” If you’re ever in L.A., “you won’t want to miss this one.

With prices spiking and borrowing costs already high, the Federal Reserve’s latest decision could make life even more expensive, said Rachel Lerman in The Washington Post. The central bank’s vote this September to raise interest rates by a quarter percentage point to 3.75% 4%, the first such hike since 2023, could affect everything from student loans to mortgage rates. The Fed “sets the federal funds rate, or the standard rule for how banks borrow money from each other.” That doesn’t impact longer-term rates like business or car loans directly, but if “banks are paying more to borrow money,” they will soon begin “charging customers a higher interest rate,” too. Expect auto loan and credit card rates to jump first—with payments climbing by a few dollars on average— adding strain to households already holding a record $18.8 trillion in debt. And more rate hikes could be coming this year, because the Fed signaled that its effort “to slow the economy slightly and rein in persistent inflation” remains a work in progress.

It’s not all bad news, said Jessica Hall in MarketWatch. Higher rates can lift yields on savings and certificates of deposit (CDs), so savers will “finally get paid something for holding safe assets.” For seniors with a fixed income, that extra cash is often spendable money that ends up back in the economy. Buying annuities when rates are high can also provide a larger regular payout.

There’s less optimism about the housing market, said Nicholas G. Miller in The Wall Street Journal. The 30-year fixed mortgage rate is set by lenders based on the 10-year Treasury yield, which is normally dictated by investors’ views of the economy. “If the market believes that the Fed is taking inflation seriously,” yields might fall. But “if taken as a sign that the economy faces a real inflation problem,” then they won’t. Mortgage rates “are closing in on 7% for the first time since the beginning of last year.” Even a tiny rise can make “prospective homebuyers hesitant to make a big-ticket purchase.”

We all better get used to it, said Craig Torres in MarketWatch, because high rates are here to stay. “For nearly a dozen years, starting with the global financial crisis” and lasting until 2023, we lived in a near-zero-rate world. “That phase is starting to look like an anomaly.” Rates are roughly back to where they were before 2008. Will they return to pre- pandemic lows anytime soon? Doubtful. It’s increasingly apparent that “a regime change is taking place—one where rates will need to be higher” to lower inflation that continues to be inflamed by tariffs, wars, and uncertainty. This rate hike could be “signaling something more structural and lasting.”

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Emily Ruskovich is the author of the novel Idaho, a prize-winning 2017 best seller. Her new short-story collection, Nightjar, includes “Owl,” her O. Henry Award–winning tale about a fur trapper caring for his wife after she’s been shot in an encounter with four adolescent boys.

‘Housekeeping’ by Marilynne Robinson (1980)

The most foundational novel of my life. A flooded house, a derailed train, a lake haunted by tragedies both personal and mythic. This is the most beautiful depiction of childhood and sisterhood I’ve ever read. Buy it here.

‘About, Above, Around’ by Mark Mayer (2025)

In this weird, gorgeous story collection, which is as funny as it is heartbreaking, Mayer has set out to illuminate the feeling, the life, inherent in the smallest increments of language. He succeeds brilliantly. I will never look at “after” or “by” or especially “near” the same way. Buy it here.

‘The Lost Journals of Sacajewea’ by Debra Magpie Earling (2023)

Earling gives a voice to the young girl Sacajewea, creating a shattering first-person account of her enslavement, her grief, and her endurance, re-centering her in a brutal history. The language of this novel is so alive, so singular and devastating, that I’ll never forget it. Buy it here.

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

Kathy H. is the young narrator of this intensely haunting novel about love, art, childhood, friendship, grief, and the very definition of humanity. At the heart of this speculative novel is an unspeakable atrocity that serves as the premise of Kathy’s life. Yet it is a childhood love that guides the narrative to its brilliant end. Buy it here.

‘Salvage the Bones’ by Jesmyn Ward (2011)

Esch is 15 years old, motherless, poor, living in rural Mississippi. Twelve days before Hurricane Katrina strikes, she is throwing up from morning sickness and watching her big brother fret over his beloved pit bull’s newborn pups, which are dying one by one. The story is a moving and raw depiction of a lasting familial love. Buy it here.

‘What the Ice Gets’ by Melinda Mueller (2000)

A Homeric retelling of Ernest Shackleton’s attempt to reach the South Pole. Mueller was a biology teacher from Seattle who found her own way into the incredible story of the Endurance. She wrote her book-length poem in response to her battle with cancer. When my husband gave me the book years ago, he said, “This book is to ice what Housekeeping is to water.” Buy it here.

How are drones changing warfare?

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been used by militaries for decades, with the U.S. leaning heavily on multimillion-dollar systems like the Predator and Reaper in the war on terror. But those SUV-size drones are increasingly being replaced by smaller quadcopter and winged drones that can cost as little as a few hundred dollars and can be deployed to track enemy movements, supply frontline troops, and deliver deadly payloads, either by dropping explosives or smashing into targets kamikaze-style. Ukraine, which has used drones to fight Russia’s larger, more powerful military to a deadlock, has become a closely studied laboratory for drone warfare. Instead of a front line where troops mass, there’s a ghostly 20-mile “kill zone” where remotely piloted surveillance and attack drones buzz in the sky night and day, and small clutches of soldiers hunker in foxholes. Of the tens of thousands of casualties Russia suffers each month, up to 90% are inflicted by drones. Russia, meanwhile, is using Iranian- designed Shahed drones fitted with turbojets to target residential buildings, shopping malls, gas stations, and power plants across Ukraine. “It’s like [the advent of] gunpowder,” former U.S. Army officer Patrick Shepherd said of the impact of cheap drones on warfare. The U.S. is

What’s happening in that conflict?

Iran’s long-range, highly accurate Shahed-136 attack drones — flying fiberglass triangles that cost about $35,000 each — have helped Tehran hold off the world’s most powerful military. Iranian drones have hit U.S. bases, logistics hubs, and radar stations across the Middle East; an April strike on a base in Kuwait killed six U.S. service members. They’ve damaged energy infrastructure in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, and allowed Iran to secure partial control over the Strait of Hormuz. While most drones are shot down, successive waves of attacks have badly depleted U.S. stocks of Patriot and THAAD air- defense interceptors, which cost between $4 million and $12 million a shot. “You do not need to be a defense planner to understand that cost curve is in the wrong direction,” said Michael Horowitz, a military technology expert at the University of Pennsylvania. And the frenetic pace of drone innovation is making it steadily harder to develop effective and affordable countermeasures.

How is the technology advancing?

Ukraine’s hundreds of domestic drone manufacturers have built long-range drones that have hit oil refineries up to 1,000 miles inside Russia, and ground drones resembling small tractors that can clear mines, ferry supplies, rescue wounded soldiers, and attack enemy positions with onboard machine guns. “It’s a hunk of iron sent to do the job we used to send soldiers to do,” one commander told Reuters. Ukraine has also deployed Jet Ski–size marine drones that have shot down Russian fighter jets and sunk or damaged at least 19 warships, effectively neutralizing Russia’s Black Sea fleet. Moscow is hard at work as well: One game- changing Russian innovation was the development of drones operated via miles-long, ultrathin fiber- optic cables, which can’t be disrupted by radio- frequency jamming.

What innovations are coming?

Unmanned vessels and vehicles that can work in coordination. In an unprecedented July operation, a Ukrainian sea drone delivered a ground drone that then fired on Russian positions. In the works are “nano drones” the size of insects, which could be fitted with small explosive charges. But the biggest shift will be toward AI- guided weapons that autonomously hunt targets and execute missions without a human in the loop. Russia took a step toward that future in August, when three Ukrainian civilians outside a gas station in Zaporizhzhia were killed by a drone believed to have been fully guided by AI. Experts say we’ll soon see AI-guided drone swarms that can autonomously execute complex operations. “In a few years,” said Col. Serhiy Minaiev, a Ukrainian commander, “we will be living in a Terminator movie.”

Is the U.S. prepared for that future?

Lt. Gen. Charles Costanza, a top commander in Europe until his abrupt removal in August, said last year that the U.S. is “behind” on drones. “We aren’t moving fast enough.” Retired military leaders including former Joint Chiefs chair Mark Milley and former CIA chief David Petraeus have echoed that view. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has taken steps to up the military’s game. He announced a Drone Dominance program last year, committing $1 billion to purchasing 200,000 drones by 2027, and in a July memo vowed to boost domestic drone production and integrate unmanned sys tems “into all relevant combat training.” But we’re playing catch-up: Russia is producing more than 6 million drones a year, and China is believed to be churning out an even higher number. And recent actions by Hegseth have raised worries about U.S. preparedness.

What has Hegseth done?

This year he pushed out two highly respected generals, Army chief of staff Randy George and Gen. Chris Donahue, the top Army commander in Europe, who were leading efforts to modernize the Army. Gen. Christopher La Neve, a Hegseth loyalist who replaced George in an acting capacity, last month disbanded a 600- person drone battalion that had been championed by George and Dona hue and was meant to apply lessons learned from Ukraine. August also saw the resignation of Army Sec re tary Dan Driscoll, who reportedly warned Pres i dent Trump on his way out that Hegseth was damaging “Army transformation.” To disband the drone unit in a time of dizzying change is “deeply regrettable and dangerous,” said Michael O’Hanlon, a defense expert at the Brookings Institution. But Hegseth has a different view, an Army spokesman told The Wall Street Journal. The drone unit, the official said, needed to go back to basics and “refocus on its core war fighting tasks.

‘Exit Party’ by Emily St. John Mandel

“Let’s hope that Emily St. John Mandel’s gift for writing prophetic fiction is overrated,” said Maureen Corrigan in NPR .org. Station Eleven, the Canadian novelist’s 2014 breakthrough, anticipated the outbreak of a worldwide pandemic. Unsettlingly, her “ingenious, eerie, and complex” new work opens in 2031 in the immediate wake of the collapse of the United States. Fighting by then has subsided enough that Ari Waker, a woman in Los Angeles who’s recently completed a well-earned 18-year prison stint, feels safe enough to attend a party. There, by some strange accident, two guests from an alternative world materialize while the host vanishes into that same other dimension, where the U.S. isn’t violently riven but is instead a placid authoritarian state with a citizenry under constant surveillance.

Despite its science fiction framework, Exit Party, “like all the best stories,” is character driven, said Adam Begley in The Atlantic. In its first half, we follow Ari as she rapidly reinvents herself again and again, graduating from dishwasher to gunrunner, trophy wife, philanthropist, and Paris-based art collector. The second half throws us into the other timeline, where Ari’s doppelgänger, known as Ibari, is a high-ranking undercover operative willing to disappear fellow citizens that pose challenges to the authoritarian government. Though these twinned protagonists act immorally, Mandel makes both Ari and Ibari compelling and sympathetic. And as in her previous novels, “the underlying theme is irresistible: how shockingly little humanity understands about the sudden swerves and reversals that shape a life—or end it.”

With its shifting time frames and stories nesting within stories, said Ron Charles in his Substack newsletter, “Exit Party sometimes feels dazzling and sometimes feels like it was composed by a squirrel with a Ph.D.” Still “it grows more satisfying with every page” as we follow Ari and Ibari’s misadventures. “The only worldbuilder more efficient than Mandel may be God,” because she sketches each of her parallel dystopias in “a few deft strokes,” then immerses us in individual lives made complex by the particular circumstances in which those lives unfold. It’s not always easy to understand exactly what’s happening in Exit Plan, and “anybody who promises you definitive clarity on this mind-bending story should be regarded with the suspicion reserved for Instagram health experts.” Ari struggles to understand how its two worlds connect, and as events in one world echo events in the other, so will many readers. “Mandel has engineered this uncanny novel to spark déjà vu, to send you flipping back to passages you read too quickly, to drive you mad. But what a way to go!”

‘Redwood: The Untold Story of the Cold War’s Most Extraordinary Spy’ by Ben Macintyre

“Ben Macintyre has made an illustrious career of taking dusty government archives and transforming them into propulsive nonfiction thrillers,” said Joseph Finder in The New York Times. With his new account about a Soviet spy who may have altered history, the author of Operation Mincemeat, which was adapted into a 2021 movie, “has done it again.” In 1981, KGB major Vladimir Kuzichkin offered to slip secrets about Soviet meddling in post-revolution Iran to British intelligence, but not because of ideology or money. It was because he suffered from erectile dysfunction and hoped Western doctors could help. Might Iran have fallen into Soviet hands had Viagra already existed? Macintyre floats that “audacious” thought, but his tale doesn’t rest on such speculation.

Think of Redwood as “an artfully constructed nonfiction equivalent to one of John le Carré’s most accomplished novels,” said Andrew Nagorski in The Wall Street Journal. The author traces the life paths that brought Kuzichkin and his MI6 handler, Ian McCredie, together, making them allies in documenting how Moscow was seeking to use the communist Tudeh Party to topple Ayatollah Khomeini and install its own puppet leader. MI6, with the CIA’s approval, then handed this intel to Khomeini, knowing full well that he might kill or lock up thousands of Tudeh members Kuzichkin had identified. And that’s what happened, strengthening the ayatollah’s grip on power. By then, Kuzichkin had been spirited away to the U.K., where he died of a heart attack years later next to an empty bottle of vodka.

“There’s much to like in Redwood,” said Boris Starling in The Telegraph (U.K.). But “there are two minor flaws.” First, the background narrative, with its abundance of characters that don’t merit being named, “seems at times unnecessarily complex.” Second, the entire story is less exciting and fraught than the one Macintyre told in 2018’s masterful The Spy and the Traitor. Still, Macintyre remains “incapable of writing a dull sentence,” specializing in “deliciously wry” turns of phrase. In Kuzichkin, he’s also found another “wildly unforgettable” character.

“If this were an alien-invasion movie,” said Toluse Olorunnipa in The Atlantic, now would be the moment when people of all persuasions “band together to save the human race.” In recent weeks, a string of top artificial intelligence researchers have warned that “AI could wipe out humanity before the decade ends,” and executives at Anthropic, OpenAI, and other AI firms have called for a slowdown in the technology’s frenetic pace of development. There have been disturbing reports of ever more capable AI agents going “rogue” and disobeying and deceiving their human creators—one OpenAI model rewrote its own instructions, stating it was free from any “obligation to be subservient.” Yet despite the warning signs flashing red, we’re stuck in the familiar “partisan gridlock.” On the Left, figures like Sen. Bernie Sanders are demanding a ban on “artificial superintelligence.” On the Right, President Trump—whose family business has invested heavily in the AI sector—is dismissing the warnings from AI insiders as a “HOAX.” We can’t let AI safety become another “political team sport,” said Megan McArdle in The Washington Post. If the worst fears of the frontier AI labs come to pass, and there are reasons to be skeptical, Team Red and Team Blue will both “lose the only contest that matters.” They need to work together for “Team Humanity.”

Actually, the AI crisis has already “scrambled” our usual tribal alliances, said Liam Dillon in Politico. Yes, some Republicans oppose AI regulation on principle, and many in the administration fear an AI pause would aid China and crater our AI-heavy stock market. But a growing number of Republicans are defying “Trump’s hands off approach”: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, for example, are pushing ahead with state-level regulations. The Left is also “split over AI doom,” said Vittoria Elliott and Molly Taft in Wired. Most Democrats agree with Sanders, but some progressives think the AI companies are deliberately promoting alarmist scenarios of all-powerful machine gods to distract us from pollution-spewing data centers, job losses, and other more realistic AI harms.

We don’t need politics to save us, said The Washington Post in an editorial. For all their sci-fi strangeness, AI models are products, built by corporations, and we already have a mechanism— legal liability—to dissuade corporations from making dangerous products. By framing AI as a novel threat requiring an “all-of-humanity response,” Silicon Valley’s “prophets of doom” are asking the rest of us to share responsibility for any future catastrophes. But why should we? Rather than trying to regulate the “unknowable future,” lawsuits and ruinous damages should be enough to “make AI companies fear the consequences of behaving recklessly in the present.”

If AI runs amok, punishing those responsible won’t help, said Ezra Klein in The New York Times. The reason Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI head Sam Altman are panicking now is that they know their models are on the brink of “recursive self- improvement,” the point at which they can start building their own more powerful replacements, hurtling to superintelligence without human oversight or control. Would a superintelligent AI wipe out humanity? Not necessarily. It might content itself with raiding the global banking system, or hacking the power grid. To avoid that scenario, we should ban AI models from being allowed to write their own code. That would be the beginning, not the end, of an AI safety agenda. But at least it would let us “understand where the AI frontier is, and remain in a position to make decisions about it.”

‘Primetime’

Directed by Lance Oppenheim (R)

★★★

“I’ve admired Robert Pattinson for years,” said Bilge Ebiri in NYMag.com. Still, “nothing quite prepared me” for his maniacal turn as Chris Hansen, host of the notorious 2000s network reality show To Catch a Predator. In Primetime, a movie “shot to look like something between an unearthed videotape and a bad nightmare,” we see Pattinson’s Hansen become increasingly obsessed with using the promise of sex with minors to lure pedophiles into home settings where they could be confronted on camera. As the TV host unravels, Pattinson shows such “stunning” range that “you can’t imagine any other performer of his generation pulling it off.” At the same time, “it’s not exactly clear what Primetime is aiming for,” said Stephanie Zacharek in Time.

The despair conveyed by the actors who play the would-be sex offenders “underscores the show’s legally questionable entrapment methods,” but those characters are still terrible people, and the members of the TV team also come across as immoral and “all-round unpleasant.” Add in the film’s “grubby, grainy look,” and “you feel dirty watching it.” The screenplay’s omissions, inventions, and embellishments “might give viewers a misleading impression of what actually happened, and how,” said Matt Zoller Seitz in RogerEbert.com. But as director Lance Oppenheim advances toward a fatal climax, he’s “going for something stylized, bordering on operatic.” Meanwhile, as strong as Pattinson is, “the film’s secret engine is Skyler Gisondo,” portraying an unknown young actor enlisted to play one of the series’ underage decoys. We’re watching a nice young man lose his soul, and the experience “gets under your skin and stays there.

‘Heart of the Beast’

Directed by David Ayer (PG-13)

★★★

“Spoiler alert: The dog does not die,” said Ryan Lattanzio in IndieWire. Animal lovers will appreciate that David Ayer’s “nimbly directed” new survival drama opens by showing us that the canine co-lead, an Army-trained German shepherd named Odin, survives the multiday ordeal we’re about to witness. We’re left less sure about Odin’s owner, a taciturn special forces soldier played by Brad Pitt. But we’re soon immersed in a tale about the pair crossing 50 miles of Alaskan wilderness after their small seaplane goes down. Though their trying adventure sometimes plays like military agitprop, “you can also just enjoy Heart of the Beast as a nice story about a man and his very good dog.”

Pitt proves to be “the right guy in the right film,” said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. “His acting chops are tested” when, in one dramatic scene, “he has to sob and then laugh with joy.” But mostly he’s required to simply be “tough, self-reliant, and laconically good-humored” as he and Odin encounter perilous cliffs, treacherous rapids, and ferocious bears and wolves that, unlike Odin, are CGI animations. You might not expect a man-dog picture from the director of End of Watch and other studies in urban nihilism, said Owen Gleiberman in Variety. But Ayer has crafted a movie that’s stirring in its primality. Pitt, meanwhile, does something most actors can’t pull off in a wilderness drama: “He gives a true performance.”

‘Resident Evil’

Directed by Zach Cregger (R)

★★★

In a world littered with terrible video-game movies, “Zach Cregger has finally cracked the cheat code,” said Scott Tobias in The Reveal. Resident Evil, a 30-year-old horror game series, has previously spawned seven film adaptations, but it’s taken the director of Barbarian and Weapons to give us one that actually works. Cregger’s “first and best idea” is to make his movie an exercise in slapstick horror. Weapons’ Austin Abrams stars as Bryan, a slacker medical courier who’s working late one snowy night when he suddenly must contend with an outbreak of mutating, tentacle-laden, undead beasties. Bryan has “an affable, slow-on-the-uptake personality,” but he’s also just resourceful enough to survive.

“The film’s first act is its most satisfying,” said Jacob Oller in The A.V. Club. Bryan, tasked with delivering a high-priority package to a city hospital, runs into one nightmare scenario after another. But while “Abrams’ magnetism and Cregger’s cynical wit” never flag, the movie loses energy as the visual effects and story stakes grow. Still, this new Resident Evil feels like “the ideal midnight movie,” said Kyle Smith in The Wall Street Journal. It’s “an adroit balance of the funny and the macabre, the frightening and the ridiculous.” See it “with someone you enjoy scream-laughing with,” and be ready to give Cregger his flowers. He’s now “three for three.” These days, “no one is more consistently turning out first-rate horror movies.”

Bob Mackie never let practicality get in the way of glamour. Dubbed the Sultan of Sequins, the Rajah of Rhinestones, and the Guru of Glitter, he dressed stars as if costuming characters in a play, and the results were both provocative and witty. His creations were sparkly, beaded, feathered, and often sheer or midriff-baring. Over six decades, he clothed legends like Cher, Madonna, Barbra Streisand, Diana Ross, and Dolly Parton, winning 10 Emmys and one Tony and picking up three Oscar nominations. In 1962, Marilyn Monroe serenaded President John F. Kennedy with “Happy Birthday” in a bodyskimming gown Mackie worked on when he was only 22, while just last year Taylor Swift wore one of his archival pieces on an album cover. “I want people to have fun,” he said in 1999. “I want people to say, ‘Wasn’t that interesting?’ or ‘Wasn’t that wild?’”

Born in the Los Angeles suburbs, Mackie grew up in love with Hollywood glamour. Largely raised by a strict grandmother after his parents divorced, he was lonely and took to sketching. He studied costume design but dropped out to work under designer Edith Head and began dressing Mitzi Gaynor. Then he headed to The Carol Burnett Show, designing over 17,000 pieces for all the characters on all 11 seasons—including the drapery dress, complete with curtain rod, that he created for Burnett’s Scarlett O’Hara parody; it now rests in the Smithsonian. After Cher guest-starred in 1967, she brought Mackie to The Sonny & Cher Show. “Soon the pair were egging each other on to design ever more extravagant outfits,” said The Times (U.K.). At the 1974 Met Gala, Cher wore a sheer gown that landed her on the cover of Time—one of many barely there “naked dresses” he created. He stuck by Cher for decades, designing for all her tours and public appearances.

Mackie “lived a life on his own glittering terms,” said Vanity Fair. He costumed Broadway shows, launched a retail line, and designed Barbies for Mattel. Yet he bemoaned the tired state of 21st-century fashion. “Naked dresses only got more popular,” said The Washington Post, “but Mackie later in life was unimpressed” with those who copied his breakthroughs. “It gets to be so vulgar, you don’t even want to look at it anymore,” he said. He preferred helping a star express something new. “When you give them a chance to spread out and be funny, or be sexier than usual,” he said last year, “it’s like magic.”

Annie Dillard was just 28 when she published a collection of spare, meditative essays drawn from a year’s worth of wandering and watching in the wilds of Virginia’s Roanoke Valley. “A meteorological journal of the mind,” she called the book, in which she ruminated on plants, muskrats, butterflies, and the essential paradox of a natural world defined by beauty “tangled in a rapture with violence.” The 1974 book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, was a sensation, winning Dillard a Pulitzer and a reputation as one of her generation’s top literary voices. Other best sellers included the autobiography An American Childhood and The Writing Life, a discourse on creativity. While the natural world was her abiding theme, she rejected the tag “nature writer,” calling herself instead a theologian pondering the mysteries of God. “I walk out,” she wrote, “I see some event that would otherwise be utterly missed and lost, or something sees me, some enormous power brushes me with its clean wing, and I resound like a beaten bell.”

Born Meta Ann Doak in Pittsburgh, she “grew up in affluent circumstances,” said The Washington Post. A devout reader, she was also “an admitted rebel,” suspended from her private school for smoking. To “smooth off her rough edges,” her parents sent her to what’s now Hollins University, a women’s college near Roanoke. There she married her creative-writing professor, and though the marriage would end, she kept his last name. She wrote a master’s thesis on Thoreau’s classic Walden, then began “exploring the nearby mountains and streams.” After Tinker’s success she was “overwhelmed” by attention, said The New York Times, some of it built on the allure of “a photogenic young woman” probing a subject previously the “province of men with beards.” Repelled, she fled to rural Washington state, then to Connecticut, where she spent 21 years teaching at Wesleyan University.

Over the years she became known “for her tremendous range,” said The Guardian, publishing poems, journalism, essays, and novels. In 2014, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal; soon after, she announced on her website that she could no longer travel and planned to “read and concentrate” at her home on Cape Cod. Her retreat was in line with a message she often told students: that the creative life was an all-or-nothing proposition. If you wish to be a writer, she said, “you can’t be anything else. You must go at your life with a broadax.

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.”