Abdul El-Sayed has issued a “call for Democratic unity,” said Toluse Olorunnipa and Elaine Godfrey in The Atlantic. That’s a new message for Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee, a charismatic left-wing populist who earlier this month edged the establishment-backed Haley Stevens in a bitterly contested primary. During the campaign, El-Sayed—a former public health official who’s aligned with Sen. Bernie Sanders—denounced the Democratic Party’s brand as “so bullshit.” Since then, he’s started making amends, and Stevens has endorsed him. El-Sayed will need moderate votes to defeat the Republican nominee, former Rep. Mike Rogers, in a crucial November race that could determine if Democrats gain control of the Senate. El-Sayed, who beat Stevens by only a point, advocates Medicare for all, ending unconditional military aid to Israel, and getting “money out of politics.” He hasn’t shown any signs of moderating his stances, even though his primary support in a purple state came mainly from highly educated whites and college students, not the working class or Black voters.

Republicans have already chosen their campaign strategy—“anti-Muslim bigotry,” said Paul Waldman in Public Notice. Republicans all refer to El-Sayed by his full name, Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, as a way to make him “sound alien and threatening.” President Trump calls El-Sayed “a jihadist” and posted a photo of himself with Melania and El-Sayed with his wife, American-born psychiatrist Dr. Sarah Jukaku, to call attention to her hijab. It’s unwise for Republicans to focus so heavily on El-Sayed’s religion or to call him a radical socialist, said Abe Greenwald in Commentary. “When a candidate makes his opponent’s unfitness the central message of his campaign, he also makes the race all about his opponent.” Rogers needs to make a case for himself.

El-Sayed will do plenty of self-damage, said Dace Potas in USA Today. He still “holds the same arrogant attitude” he did during the primary, and he won’t ditch his pal Hasan Piker, an “antisemitic Twitch streamer” and far-left bomb thrower. El-Sayed won’t reach for “an ideological middle ground,” said Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times, because he doesn’t believe any reasonable person can disagree with his positions. He’s absolutely certain that “there’s a hidden reservoir of voters hungry for progressive populist policies” among the working class. In November, El-Sayed and other left-wing populists “may get a hard lesson on the necessity of pragmatism.”

“Is Ariana Grande’s body any of our business?” asked Monica Hesse in The Washington Post. Facing a deluge of commentary about her apparent weight loss, the 33-year-old pop star and actress recently announced that she’s stepping away from public life after her current tour concludes. Her “emaciated” appearance in a new music video for her song “Petal” escalated years of speculation that she has an eating disorder. The camera shows sunken cheeks, a protruding clavicle, arms that look like “sinew on bone,” and spindly legs. A former child actress and superstar, she has “defined beauty standards” for young women for years. But Grande has experienced trauma even beyond the pressure cooker of youthful stardom: A suicide bomber killed 22 fans at one of her concerts in 2017. Should we explain to kids and teens that “this is a body born of deprivation?” Do we tell them that “most women’s bodies will not naturally look like this unless something is very wrong?”

“The images of Grande really are alarming,” said Emma Camp in The Wall Street Journal, but “all this concern starts to feel like rubbernecking.” Grande’s early celebrity and her various “romantic entanglements” have made her a hate object for some online critics, and her skeletal frame enables them to portray her as a bad role model while enjoying “the thrill of watching someone self-immolate.” But “sharing another scary screenshot” of her bony body “won’t stop others from starving themselves”—and indeed, the public attention “might encourage those with eating disorders to keep going.”

As someone who suffered from an eating disorder, said Emma Madden in The Guardian, I can tell you “there’s no right answer” about how to respond to Grande’s worrisome weight loss. The body positivity movement preached “don’t comment on women’s bodies” in reaction to “misogynistic tabloid treatment of celebrities in the aughts,” but perhaps that was “an overcorrection.” Eating disorders “thrive in secrecy and denial,” so we shouldn’t ignore “visible suffering.” Grande maintains she’s healthy, said Scaachi Koul in Slate, but it’s hard to avoid comparisons to Karen Carpenter, the 1970s pop singer who died of anorexia at 32. In this Ozempic/Wegovy era, our culture is strongly pushing women “toward winnowing,” and Grande is “seemingly suggesting the same” by example. We’re left with “an unsavory choice”: “the complicity of silence or the complicity of judgment.”

The man whose “best-known culinary accomplishment is maintaining ‘a freezer full’ of roadkill” wants to teach you to cook, said Emily Heil in The Washington Post. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently debuted The Real Food Show, a government-funded YouTube series intended to help Americans “make healthful meals at home on a modest budget.” In the first episode, Kennedy and celebrity chef Andrew Gruel whip up crispy salmon cakes with a white bean, apple, and arugula salad. I followed the recipe and the dish was “quite good.” But actual cooking is not the main focus of the show. Kennedy and Gruel spend far more time ranting about the evils of seed oils and the Biden administration’s “war” on saturated fats than providing “meaningful culinary instruction.” Under Kennedy’s “grim glare,” making a meal becomes “an exercise in airing grievances against the government and a food system hell-bent on keeping people addicted to processed foods.” When he finally samples the finished meal, all he can muster is a muttered “amazing,” a politician’s thumbs-up, and a “pained grimace.”

Kennedy’s fish cakes are supposed to be budget-friendly, said River Page in The Free Press, but it’s clear he has no idea “what it is like to go grocery shopping as a broke person.” I spent nearly $100 buying the ingredients for four servings—including such luxuries as avocado mayo and nutritional yeast—that RFK Jr. claimed would cost a mere $20. This show is less concerned with delivering affordable meals than advancing conservative ideology, said Ashlie D. Stevens in Salon. Underpinning everything is the idea that “if Americans can be taught to eat correctly, perhaps they will require less care”—freeing the government to cut the safety net. Republicans already did that last year, slashing projected federal spending on Medicaid over the next decade by nearly $1 trillion and food benefits by $187 billion.

Of all the terrible things Kennedy is doing, hosting this show is “probably the least offensive,” said Arwa Mahdawi in The Guardian. But shouldn’t he be busy tackling the nation’s more pressing health problems, like the more than 22,000 cases of explosive diarrhea caused by the parasite cyclospora? RFK Jr. is supposed to be heading the response to that lettuce-linked outbreak. Or perhaps he could focus on the raging measles crisis— this is the worst year for the disease in the U.S. since 1991—which he has fueled as the country’s top anti-vaxxer. But that would mean doing the hard work of being a government official. He’d rather just “play one on TV.”

How widespread is AI use in publishing? 

It’s almost impossible to gauge how many authors are using tools like ChatGPT. But it appears that generative AI, which can churn out a novel-length work with a few simple prompts, is driving a boom in book publishing. More than 4 million books were released in the U.S. in 2025, up a whopping 33% from the previous year. That jump was largely due to a spike in new self-published works, which rocketed 39% year on year to 3.5 million. While it is easier than ever to self-publish, research suggests many of those books were not written by humans. A National Bureau of Economic Research study found that about half the books published in 2025 and sold on Amazon contained AI-generated text, up from 23% in 2023. (ChatGPT was released in late 2022.) AI writing is most common in popular genres such as romance fiction, which tends toward formulaic plots, and in nonfiction, where major news events can trigger a flood of AI books within hours. Online influencers “have been spreading the word for some time: Use AI to write a book. If it sells, it’s free money,” said tech journalist Kashmir Hill, who recently discovered an AI-generated, error-riddled biography of herself on Amazon. The “author” of Hill’s biography published nine other books the same week. But AI writing is not just confined to the self-publishing world: In recent months, at least two major publishing houses have withdrawn books over suspicions of AI use.

Which books were pulled? 

Most recently, the hotly anticipated debut novel from Nigerian-born Jerry Falade. Fourteen publishers bid for the U.S. rights to Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body; Falade, a grad student at Southern Methodist University, signed with a Macmillan imprint for more than $2 million. But the deal collapsed last month after Falade’s agents told the publisher they could no longer support the “stunningly good” crime novel because of AI concerns. Falade says he used AI only for research “and not for writing the book itself” and argues the deal’s cancellation was racially motivated. A few months earlier, Hachette nixed the U.S. release of Mia Ballard’s horror novel Shy Girl over suspicions it was largely AI-generated. After the book was published in the U.K., readers pointed to linguistic tells of AI, including word repetition (“sharp” or “sharply” appears 159 times in 247 pages); the grouping of adjectives, phrases, and ideas into threes; and the frequency of “something x, something y” sentence construction, such as, “In his hands is a cake, gleaming, its pink frosting too smooth, like plastic dipped in sugar, like something that belongs on a screen.” Ballard claims that an acquaintance who edited the book used AI, not her. “Everyone liked” the book, one publishing exec told the Financial Times. “After Shy Girl, every editor is nervous.”

Are publishers trying to weed out AI? 

Most publishers require writers to affirm that their work is “original,” which is increasingly being interpreted as a ban on AI-created text and images. That’s a sensible safeguard because AI-generated works are not protected by copyright, the foundation of the $140 billion global publishing industry. But publishing houses are loath to entirely bar authors from using AI, because there are other ways it can usefully be deployed, such as to check grammar and conduct research—although there are risks in handing that latter job to a chatbot.

What kind of risks? 

Media entrepreneur Steven Rosenbaum used AI tools to research and organize The Future of Truth, a nonfiction book about how AI reshapes reality. In May, The New York Times revealed the book contained numerous fabricated and misattributed quotations dreamed up by AI. Rosenbaum said that if the episode “serves as a warning about the risks of AI-assisted research and verification, that is why I wrote the book.” To avoid such embarrassments, a growing number of publishers are turning to AI detectors: software that promises to scan a text and accurately reveal how much of it was likely AI-generated.

Does the technology work? 

That depends on whom you ask. One popular detector, GPTZero, claims to be 99% accurate. Pangram, another favored detector, claims a false positive rate of only 1 in 10,000. But critics argue that AI detectors are deeply flawed. After his sci-fi manuscript was rejected by numerous publishers, Antonio Bricio, an engineering consultant and aspiring author, ran the text through the AI detector Originality.ai. The program was 100% certain he’d used AI, but when he deleted just a few sentences, it declared the manuscript to be 100% human. “What if publishers or agents start running these AI tools on everybody?” asks Bricio. Thriller writer Andrea Bartz— a lead plaintiff in a copyright lawsuit against Anthropic that secured a $1.5 billion settlement for authors over the firm’s use of pirated books to train its models—was enraged when a detector labeled her writing as 82% AI-generated. “I guess that’s what happens when your books were stolen to program AI,” said fellow novelist Rene Denfeld, whose own work was also flagged as AI.

What do readers think of AI books? 

Most want books “to come from the author’s brain and heart and not a computer that’s robbed the writer’s brain,” said author Laura Taylor Namey. And that argument is supported by the fact that book charts are still dominated by human authors. But the flood of AI works is making it harder for flesh-and-blood writers like Jess Michaels to grab attention and make a living in an increasingly crowded market. A historical romance author, Michaels has released 117 novels since 1999— most of them self-published—and has notched 10 USA Today best sellers. But she has recently seen sales drop so drastically, and the number of AI-powered imitators rise so rapidly, that she’s considering giving up publishing. “You’re talking about directly pirating my work, putting it into an engine so that you can produce a ‘Jess Michaels–type book,’ and then glutting the market with it,” she said. “I cannot tell you how soul-crushing it is.”

What happened

President Trump signed a nonbinding executive order this week recommending a radical overhaul of the U.S. childhood vaccine schedule, a policy proposal that health experts warned will only sow more mistrust and confusion about lifesaving immunizations. The order proposes reducing the number of recommended childhood vaccines from 18 to 11, downgrading vaccines for diseases such as Covid, hepatitis A and B, and RSV to optional for most children. It directs government health officials to plan for separating the doses in the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine, which has been administered as a combined injection for 55 years. The order also authorizes the Justice Department to challenge state vaccine regulations deemed insufficiently respectful of parental objections. Trump claimed without evidence that the combined MMR vaccine can be “quite lethal” if given at once.

With Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. by his side, Trump made several other false claims. He said children were being pumped with “vats” of vaccine—the MMR shot is actually a fraction of a teaspoon—and revived the debunked theory that vaccines cause autism. Pediatricians were aghast. “As measles cases reach a 35-year high in the U.S.,” said American Academy of Pediatrics president Dr. Andrew Racine, Trump’s executive order is “not only disheartening but dangerous.” Several states, including New York and Illinois, declared they would keep current childhood immunization rules in place. “We will continue to be guided by the science,” said New York state Health Commissioner James McDonald.

What the columnists said

Trump claimed “nothing bad can happen from what we’re doing,” said Jonathan Cohn in The Bulwark. But “bad things are happening already.” Nearly 2,500 people have contracted measles this year as anti-vax rhetoric has pushed MMR vaccination rates below the community protection threshold. At least two children have died from the disease. And now many more parents will wrongly believe that a proven protection is unsafe, all because “they heard it from the president.”

Trump insists he isn’t promoting “vaccine skepticism,” said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. He claims he’s merely aligning the U.S. with other “peer, developed nations” such as Denmark. But governments with “socialized health systems” have fewer vaccine recommendations because they don’t want to pay to cover rarer diseases, such as meningitis, and because problems like mother-to-child transmission of hepatitis B are “less common” there.

“Almost nothing Trump called for is practical or possible today,” said Michael Hiltzik in the Los Angeles Times. No American company even manufactures the individual components for separate measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines. Successive shots would leave kids vulnerable to the diseases for longer. But Trump and Kennedy “have been beating the anti-vaccination drum for years.” They long for the “good old days” before “excessive” immunizations. “They would expose millions of children to severe disease and death” in the name of misguided nostalgia. “In heaven’s name, why?”

What happened

President Trump’s former personal lawyer Todd Blanche was sworn in as U.S. attorney general last week, after a contentious confirmation fight focused on whether he would exert independence as the nation’s top law officer or serve at the whim of a president who regards the Justice Department as a tool of political vengeance. Blanche—who has led the DOJ in an acting capacity since Trump’s April firing of AG Pam Bondi—was approved by the Senate 50 to 49, with two Republicans, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, joining all Democrats in opposition. “The country needs an attorney general who will check the worst impulses of this administration,” said Murkowski. But Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), who cast a decisive yes vote after expressing doubts about Blanche, said the choice was “not between perfection and Mr. Blanche,” but between Blanche and another acting AG “who may not run the department effectively.”

Blanche faced particular scrutiny over his role in settling a lawsuit Trump brought against the IRS. Settlement terms included the creation of a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund—widely derided as a slush fund for Trump allies, including pardoned Jan. 6 rioters—and an agreement giving Trump and family members immunity from tax audits. Two GOP senators, John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, held up Blanche’s advancement in the Judiciary Committee over those measures, but voted yes after Blanche provided written assurances that the fund was “rescinded” and that tax immunity would not apply to future audits. Democrats excoriated their colleagues for approving Blanche. “We’re surrendering any shred of integrity left,” said Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.).

What the columnists said

Senate Republicans’ rubber-stamping of Blanche is “shameful,” said Ruth Marcus in The New Yorker. Sure, Trump could have kept him on as acting attorney general, “but the symbolism matters.” Under Blanche’s leadership, the DOJ has pursued “flimsy prosecutions of Trump’s political adversaries” and purged its workforce of perceived enemies. Missteps and misstatements have cause numerous cases to flop in court, damaging the department’s credibility with judges, and its botched handling of the Epstein files has even alienated members of the MAGA base. It’s all “on Blanche,” and a yes vote “represents a ratification” of his malfeasance.

Cornyn and Tillis were “played for fools,” said Chris Brennan in USA Today. Blanche’s written assurances on the weaponization fund and audits have “zero value” as legal documents—legal settlements can’t be amended by one party. Trump clearly wants to resurrect his slush fund, and you can bet Blanche will do his bidding. Indeed, Blanche wasted no time showing his true colors, said Edith Olmsted in The New Republic. Just hours after he was sworn in, the DOJ’s office of legal counsel argued Trump could claim executive privilege over his communications with “private advisers”—essentially anyone he’s ever talked with—which could limit Democrats if they retake the House and start investigating the president’s corruption spree.

Blanche will soon take aim at abortion rights, said Rachel Rebouché in The Nation. In a recent call with religious leaders, he vowed to ensure that the 2022 Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade “becomes permanent in every single state.” His apparent goal is to use the “archaic” 1873 Comstock Act to “impose a blanket ban on mailing abortion medications”—drugs that today account for the majority of abortions in the U.S.

Blanche has a daunting job ahead, said Jeremy Roebuck in The Washington Post. In Trump’s second term the DOJ has “been ravaged by firings, departures, and low morale.” And he’ll face “competing pressures” from congressional critics, “an attorney general’s obligations to the rule of law,” and “a president intent on seeing his enemies put on trial.” Charging decisions loom in a number of “sensitive cases,” including a months-long investigation into former Obama- and Biden-era officials, among them former CIA director John Brennan, who Trump allies claim violated Trump’s civil rights by conspiring to undermine his presidency.

Blanche’s confirmation drives home just how much Trump has “dismantled” long-standing norms, said Julian E. Zelizer in Foreign Policy. When President Nixon weaponized the Justice Department during Watergate, Americans woke up to the perils of “allowing the nation’s chief law enforcement officer to serve as an agent of the president.” A “firewall” has held since then, but with loyalist Blanche in charge, the DOJ is once again “a presidential instrument, wielded to target opponents and reward supporters.” It’s “a dangerous moment for a democracy that depends on the rule of law.”

Denver

In the historic Capitol Hill neighborhood, this 1892 Free Classic Queen Anne mansion spans three lots. The restored six-bedroom features hardwood floors, raised-panel wainscoting, a carved staircase, original built-ins, and coffered ceilings.

The kitchen has wood beams, a marble island, a pressed-tin-style backsplash, and a windowed breakfast nook. A finished basement includes a private entry. Outside are a yard and patio; parks, museums, and dining are a short drive. $2,800,000. Rachel Simring, Milehimodern, (303) 910-5225

Beacon, N.Y.

The Rombout House is a circa-1880 Second Empire Victorian about a block from Main Street in this Hudson Valley town. The three-story five-bedroom has high ceilings, white oak herringbone floors, pocket doors, large windows, a chef’s kitchen, and a conservatory with views of Fishkill Creek and Mount Beacon.

The property includes a deck, an attached garage, native landscaping, and access to hiking, dining, and shopping. $2,150,000. Jessica Brasseur, Houlihan Lawrence/Luxury Portfolio International, (850) 714-3045

Galveston, Texas

Located in the East End Historic District, this 1891 Gulf Coast Victorian townhouse is featured in the Galveston Architecture Guidebook.

The four-bedroom opens to parquet floors that connect to a recently renovated open-plan area with crown molding, an exposed brick fireplace, and a kitchen with a copper apron sink. Two verandas overlook palms and a restored tree sculpture. Stewart Beach, dining, and museums are nearby. $899,000. Martha Turner, Sotheby’s International Realty—Central Houston Brokerage, (713) 870-4645

Cambridge, Mass.

This 1886 six-bedroom Queen Anne with Colonial touches has been restored and updated with modern black and charcoal trim while retaining its original millwork, stained and leaded glass, pocket doors, and built-ins.

An open-kitchen living area has a wall of steel-framed windows, pale wood floors, an eat-in waterfall island, and a glam butler’s pantry. The landscaped lot includes a patio, mature trees, and a flat yard. $4,200,000. Gail Roberts, Ed Feijo & Team, Coldwell Banker Realty, (617) 844-2712

Richmond, Ill.

The 1898 L.B. Covell house, a Queen Anne with Colonial Revival elements, is set on nearly 6 acres along Nippersink Creek near the Wisconsin border. The renovated four-bedroom has original maple and aspen floors, a spindle-work portiere arch, oversize windows, a kitchen with Viking appliances and marble counters, and a lower level with stone walls.

The property also has a new garage barn with an office, plus a carriage house, chicken coop, woods, and gardens. $989,000. Michael Max, Compass, (847) 323-4619

San Antonio

This 1903 three-bedroom Queen Anne cottage in the Nathan Historic District is a short walk from the San Antonio River. A front porch opens to a foyer with a built-in window seat. The living room features wood-trimmed windows, stained glass, and 10-foot ceilings.

There is also a formal dining room and the original kitchen with stainless steel counters. A fenced yard and a garage complete the property. $519,000. Gina Candelario, Kuper Sotheby’s International Realty, (210) 744-8265

‘Tony’

Directed by Matt Johnson (R)

★★★

Though the new Anthony Bourdain biopic is merely an amuse-bouche, it’s “a memorably tasty one,” said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast. The movie covers only early chapters in the celebrity chef’s name-making memoir, Kitchen Confidential, and because it’s mere prologue to Bourdain’s New York City arrival and globe-hopping TV days, it’s “a tad slight.” Still, as it shows us a cocky but rudderless 19-year-old Bourdain falling hard for the rowdy life of the kitchen during a 1970s summer in Provincetown, Mass., “there’s a spontaneity and genuineness to Tony,” and its familiar coming-of-age story beats have an “endearing prickliness.”

Dominic Sessa is excellent in the lead role, said David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter. Making good on the promise he showed in 2023’s The Holdovers, the young actor “nails the contradictory aspects of a slippery character.” When his broke Bourdain lucks into a job washing dishes at a seafood eatery, he’s torn between the hard-partying ways of an oyster shucker played by a terrific Leo Woodall and the focus shown by Antonio Banderas as the operation’s fatherly owner. The movie’s only weak link is an underdeveloped romantic subplot involving CODA’s Emilia Jones. For compensation, we get the “quiet miracle” of Banderas’ performance, said Dana Stevens in Slate. The older actor’s chemistry with Sessa “makes this gentle, low-stakes story simmer along like a cauldron of chowder.” Even if Tony weren’t a biopic about a food-world god who died too soon, “it would be a movie worth watching.”

‘Late Fame’

Directed by Kent Jones (Not rated)

★★★

Though the new Willem Dafoe movie is a modest little drama, it’s “also fairly heartbreaking,” said Tim Grierson in The A.V. Club. Dafoe plays Ed, a Manhattan postal worker well past 60 whose one book of poetry, written when he was young, has been rediscovered by a group of dandy 20-somethings who welcome him into their fold and encourage him to write again. While the movie “has its narrative stumbles, especially near the end,” Dafoe “has rarely been so tender, playing a man allowing himself to dream again for the first time in forever.”

The aging star is well paired here with Greta Lee, who plays Gloria, the literary circle’s only female member, said Bilge Ebiri in NYMag.com. Gloria is a cabaret singer and Lee “gives the vampish and self-consciously artificial character a magnetic inner life.” In fact, Lee and Dafoe are so good together that it’s a shame the rest of the young poetry devotees are mostly treated as ludicrous poseurs. “They’re ultimately too cartoonish for a film that otherwise feels so lived-in.” But this isn’t a mean movie, said Alissa Wilkinson in The New York Times. It’s an “affectionately told” story about “a certain sort of wistful foolishness,” the kind that grips some groups of young people generation after generation. Dafoe’s Ed just happens to be open-minded enough to enjoy being part of all that again.

Millions of older Americans who are already struggling with rising gas and food prices will soon have to pay more for prescription drugs, said Anna Wilde Mathews in The Wall Street Journal. The Trump administration announced last week that it is scrapping a Biden-era subsidy program for Medicare drug plans, known as Part D, starting next year. The program, which this year will give insurers an estimated $3.6 billion to “blunt increases in premiums,” lowered average premiums by about 40% in 2025 for Part D’s 25 million enrollees. About 75% of enrollees, who today pay an average monthly premium of $36, will be hit with higher bills in 2027 because of the cancellation. The Trump administration said the subsidies encouraged insurers to hike rates, knowing the government would pick up the tab. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, said the insurance industry “bailout” was “no longer needed,” and that the administration was working with pharma companies to lower drug costs.

“Letting these Medicare subsidies expire is the right thing to do,” said The Washington Post in an editorial. The program began in 2024 with an administrative action by President Joe Biden, with no authorization from Congress. It was always a “Band-Aid for bad policy, not a long-term solution for health-care costs.” Rather than addressing why Part D premiums were going up, the subsidies shifted more of the bill to taxpayers. “If a health policy can’t work without taxpayers bailing out insurance companies when costs rise more than expected, the underlying policy is the problem, not the planned expiration of the bailout.” The subsidy was always intended to be temporary, said Aliss Higham in Newsweek. It was designed to “limit volatility and variation in Part D premiums” as insurers adapted to changes in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which reduced Medicare enrollees’ out-of-pocket expenses and capped insulin and vaccine costs. Ultimately, more than half the subsidy money flowed to just one company, UnitedHealth Group, which Oz called “unacceptable.”

The cancellation “comes at a curious time,” said Miranda Yaver in MS.now. Midterm elections are just around the corner and Democrats are pressuring Republicans on affordability issues. And now “America’s most reliable voting bloc will receive notice of higher health-care costs”—in most cases, up to $20 more per month. That might not sound like a lot, but it matters greatly to seniors who live on fixed incomes. “This policy shift undercuts Trump’s expressed commitment to prescription drug affordability,” especially because his other efforts, like the direct-to-consumer drug portal, TrumpRx, and most favored nation drug pricing, “have shown little progress” in actually lowering costs. As a political issue, Medicare “should remain untouchable.” The Trump administration is testing the “third rail.”

‘Petal’ by Ariana Grande

★★

“Does Ariana Grande still love being a pop star?” asked Lindsay Zoladz in The New York Times. On Petal, the 33-year-old showbiz vet trades in her “signature effervescence” and “leans into something grittier, spikier, perhaps even villainous.” Case in point: “Hate That I Made You Love Me,” which seems to be “a barbed song about her own most obsessive fans” and all but heralded Grande’s recent announcement that she intends to soon step back from the spotlight for a time. Petal suggests that Grande’s “light and carefree” public persona has been “a carefully constructed form of armor,” said Aimee Cliff in Pitchfork. The three-time Grammy winner can be brilliant here when she tells it like it is, as on “Stay,” which nearly equals her career high, “Thank U, Next.” More often, though, the album plays like “a tame reimagining” of past work, with “Big Feelings” a “defanged” version of 2016’s “Dangerous Woman” while “Never Get Over Me” suggests 2014’s “Problem,” only “shot with a tranquilizer dart.” Grande is trying to make a statement with songwriting that “lacks urgency and precision.” That only makes her seem more elusive.

‘The Outlaw Cherie Lee & Other Western Tales’ by Shaboozey

★★★

On his new album, Shaboozey refuses to be merely “the guy who had that one big bar song,” said Jon Dolan in Rolling Stone. In 2024, “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” topped the U.S. singles chart for a record-tying 19 weeks and has garnered 1.75 billion Spotify streams overall. Now, while continuing to infuse the sound of mainstream country with hip-hop, the Virginia-raised artist, 31, has created a concept album about a sheriff’s daughter who, while pursuing vengeance for her father’s death, falls in love with one of his killers. It’s “a romance tucked inside an outlaw epic, right on par for a guy who does well with genre mash-ups.” The 20-track album is certainly a swing for the fences, said Alexis Petridis in The Guardian. There are “ambient and Pink Floyd–y” interstitial tracks that feature plot-advancing narration by Jamie Foxx, Sam Elliott, and Teyana Taylor. “Bullets and Blades” is “a strikingly beautiful ballad” in which Shaboozey croons with “glowering power” while dueting with R&B star Kehlani. And while his vocals are still liveliest when he gives them a hip-hop spin, his “strike rate” is high here even when he’s taking chances.

‘I Can See’ by Nick Hakim

★★★

Nick Hakim’s fourth album is “R&B from a different planet,” said Jem Aswad in Variety. The New York City–based artist continues working in the vein of stoner R&B, a subgenre that Frank Ocean and Dijon also ply. But even by his cohort’s standards, Hakim favors an “unusually hazy” sound in which “vocals and instruments waft in and out of the mix like music from a passing car or sounds from the apartment next door.” That doesn’t mean the music’s not accessible. “Real Here Now” is “one of the most gorgeous R&B songs you’ll hear all year, almost like an Usher song from a parallel universe.” In these “spectral” songs, created with an assist from Dijon and Bon Iver producer Andrew Sarlo, the sound design is “so immaculate it becomes an instrument unto itself,” said Chris DeVille in Stereogum. They at once evoke “holograms and dusty old vinyl,” and because they were written by Hakim just after the end of a long-term relationship, they’re “possessed by a profound mournfulness.” Still, Hakim “breathes soothing grace into these tracks.” They “might render you a puddle, but they’re just as likely to lead you into a transcendent calm.”

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Film critic and historian David Thomson is the author of more than 25 books, including The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, now in its sixth edition. In his latest book, A Sudden Flicker of Light, Thomson proposes that cinema has in fact been a damaging cultural force.

‘The Day of the Locust’ by Nathanael West (1939)

West’s novel fixes on two groups: the freaks and hustler failures who dream of getting into pictures, and the Los Angeles crowd that longs to follow the American dream. The result is a scary portrait of a culture going crazy and a city ready to burn. Buy it here.

‘The Last Tycoon’ by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1941)

Fitzgerald’s last, unfinished novel is not so good as a narrative, but it offers a superb glimpse of how a brilliant young head of production runs a studio. The character is based on MGM’s Irving Thalberg, who was never impressed by Fitzgerald as a screenwriter. Buy it here.

‘Picture’ by Lillian Ross (1952)

Reportage from the set of The Red Badge of Courage, John Huston’s film adaptation of Stephen Crane’s Civil War novel. Ross, then a young writer at The New Yorker, records all the wild show-off talk and Huston’s battles with the studio. The world had never before heard how the moguls spoke, or thought. Those moguls were horrified when they read themselves in cold print. Buy it here.

‘The Deer Park’ by Norman Mailer (1955)

Still the best novel about love, lust, identity, money, honor, power, producers, and actors. Set against the backdrop of Hollywood and the pleasure ground of Palm Springs, Mailer’s roman à clef follows a war hero who toys with selling his life story to the movies. Buy it here.

‘My Face for the World to See’ by Alfred Hayes (1958)

A jaded screenwriter sees a young woman about to drown herself on the beach. He rescues her and then, against his smarter nature, falls for her; she is a would-be actress who drags him into her bitter melodrama. Hayes was successful with his own screenwriting, but it’s clear from this novel that he had some contempt for the craft. Buy it here.

‘The Golden Hour’ by Matthew Specktor (2025)

Matthew’s father, Fred Specktor, has been a top agent at CAA, the talent agency, since the 1950s. This book is a beautifully written memoir about growing up with the movies, making them, and trying to lead one’s life in the glow spilling from the screen. Buy it here.

‘The Frenchmen: Or, My Life in Theory’ by Emily Eakin

“It’s tempting to read The Frenchmen as atonement,” said Dayna Tortorici in The New Yorker. Some 22 years ago, author Emily Eakin betrayed one of the passions of her youth when she was working at The New York Times and she signed off on an obit for Jacques Derrida that ran under a headline dismissing the French philosopher as “abstruse.” Just a decade earlier, Eakin had been a devotee of the post-structuralists, the cohort of mostly French, mostly male thinkers who ignited a 1980s fad that had literature students at many of America’s top universities parroting the ideas that all meaning is contingent and words can’t be trusted. Eakin, who caught the “theory” bug as a Harvard undergrad, was pursuing a Ph.D. when she finally shook it. But was the entire movement nonsense? In her engaging new book, “Eakin argues persuasively that it wasn’t.”

Not that Eakin is blind to her subjects’ many flaws, said Laura Miller in Slate. “Much of the entertainment offered by The Frenchmen comes from the tea Eakin spills on men who were once presented as disembodied monuments.” Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, and Louis Althusser were all “narcissistic, imperious, and histrionic—that is, they were very French.” In Eakin’s colorful character sketches, “only Roland Barthes comes off as remotely appealing.” Theory’s long downfall began around the time Eakin bought in, when it was revealed in 1987 that one of its stars, the Belgian-born Yale professor Paul de Man, had expressed antisemitic views while writing for a Nazi-affiliated newspaper during World War II. But while Eakin tired of theory, don’t expect her to join the critics on the Left and Right who remain eager to label post-structuralism absurd. “It taught us a new way to think,” she says. “Be skeptical. Be alert. Pay very close attention. Beware political claims posing as timeless truths.”

As Eakin details, the battles over theory weren’t confined to academia, said Jonathan Derbyshire in the Financial Times. Philosopher Allan Bloom seemed to have the post-structuralists in mind when he railed against the influence of despairing European thinkers in The Closing of the American Mind, a 1987 best seller that remains a cornerstone of the Right’s case against American universities. Eakin isn’t afraid to admit that theory’s allure was its countercultural energy, said Geoff Shullenberger in Compact. She writes about her youthful indoctrination “with self-satirizing flair.” But when she defends theory’s luminaries, I can’t agree that their insistence that we vigorously question every story we’re told can help us recapture a sense of the common good in this moment. “Their imperative—to deconstruct—has been followed all too faithfully, for too long.”

‘Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast’ by Pamela Colloff

“Though its subtitle suggests true crime, Catch the Devil is by no means your typical true-crime book,” said Ted Conover in The New York Times. It focuses on not a killer but a snitch: a con man named Paul Skalnik who may well have set a record when, between 1978 and 1987, he provided testimony against jail mates that helped win more than 34 convictions and landed four men on death row. “The problem is that much, even most, of his testimony appears to have been invented, and some of those he helped convict were almost certainly not guilty.” And while the presence of such an unusual villain makes Catch the Devil an “engrossing” read, “the public policy implications make it important.”

Author Pamela Colloff, an investigative reporter for ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, focuses on an “appalling” Florida murder case, said Kristen Martin in NPR.org. In 1986, when prosecutors failed to win a death-penalty conviction for a man who’d killed a 14-year-old female hitchhiker, they turned to Skalnik to manufacture a death-penalty case against the killer’s roommate. Skalnik obliged, reporting that jail mate Jim Dailey confessed to him that he’d stabbed the girl dozens of times. Despite a lack of other evidence against him, Dailey has since spent nearly 40 years on death row, and Colloff’s “cinematic telling of this case serves to highlight the potentially fatal consequences of a criminal legal system that is more concerned with securing convictions than determining the truth and delivering justice.”

While reading about Dailey’s plight is agonizing, said Barbara Spindel in The Wall Street Journal, “Colloff’s rendering of Skalnik is chilling.” An unrepentant liar whose rap sheet included sexual assault of a child, he died without admitting to Colloff that he’d ever traded false testimony for lenient punishment of his own crimes. In fact, Colloff came to believe he saw her merely as his latest potential mark. A reader can’t help share her revulsion against him as well as the system that supercharged the impact of his lies. “It’s unconscionable that Dailey continues to await execution. Equally disturbing are the failings of the justice system that keep him on death row.”

Robotics is the “latest front” in the “intensifying tech rivalry between Washington and Beijing,” said Steve Lohr and Xinyun Wu in The New York Times. The Federal Communications Commission last week said it would begin restricting imports of “humanoid and animal-like robots,” saying they could “function as Trojan Horses” for data collection and spy on Americans in their homes and offices. China called the measure a provocation and warned that it would retaliate. Its producers “dominate the global humanoid robot industry” to such a degree that “it has become nearly impossible to build a competitive humanoid robot without Chinese-made components.” But advanced robots are becoming “strategically important in an economy increasingly dependent on artificial intelligence.” AI startups are now experimenting with physical or embodied intelligence—essentially robots with AI capabilities—in order to teach their models about the physical world.

Popular household devices are getting caught in the crossfire, said Sean Hollister in The Verge. While the prohibition specifically calls out “humanoid robots” and “quadrupeds”—such as robot dogs—it extends to any “software-controlled robot that travels over the ground, weighs more than 4.4 pounds (including any dock), can perceive its environment, and has wireless connectivity.” That rounds up robot lawnmowers, sidewalk delivery robots, many warehouse automation machines—and even Roombas. Yes, the popular robot vacuum cleaner was acquired by a Chinese manufacturer in January, putting it on the FCC’s chopping block.

The ban covers only new models of foreign-made robots, said Jeremy Hsu in Ars Technica, so customers can still keep their old ones or buy older versions. And it should “theoretically encourage more U.S. and foreign companies to set up manufacturing facilities in the U.S.,” home to several fast-growing startups like Agility Robotics, Figure AI, and Boston Dynamics. But that’s not always the case. The FCC banned Chinese-made drones earlier this year, too, and it has yet to motivate a “competitive mass-market consumer-drone producer” to set up shop in the U.S.

The fears about Chinese humanoid robots are fantastically over-blown, said Thomas Black in Bloomberg. Reading headlines, you’d think China is building robot armies ready to serve meals, fold laundry, and steal jobs. Hardly. Robots today work best at “predictable, repetitive, high-volume tasks,” like painting or welding on a factory line. And even then they can be hit or miss. It’s beyond their ability to do multiple tasks at once, making them largely unhelpful in homes, stores, hospitals, or even construction sites. After a lot of hype, businesses are now realizing these limitations. U.S. industrial robot orders have already fallen from a peak of 44,196 in 2022 down to 36,766 last year. “The vision of an expansion of robots into everyday tasks and life is there.” But we’re nowhere near that reality.

The Trump administration is recycling the failed message that teens should be sexually abstinent, said Jill Filipovic in Slate, and urging them “to forgo contraception, get married, and plan their lives around having babies.” The Department of Health and Human Services recently canceled 53 of 67 grants, totaling $68 million, provided through the decades-old Teen Pregnancy Prevention program. The federal government will now provide grants only to sex education organizations that emphasize fertility over contraception, falsely depict the pill and hormonal contraception as dangerous, and urge teens to prepare for marriage and parenthood. The new guidelines ban any “content that encourages, normalizes, or promotes sexual activity for minors.” Since TPP began in 2010, the birth rate for 15-to-19-year-olds has decreased by over 65%, reaching a record-low 11.7 births per 1,000 last year. Now HHS is “stripping money from the programs that sent teen pregnancy rates tumbling to put it toward those that tell teens that actually, reproduction is the goal.”

But the teen birth rate has been declining since the 1990s, long before TPP, said Michael J. New in National Review. HHS tried to refocus grants toward abstinence education during Trump’s first term, but grantees sued and kept their funding. They’re doing so again, and “conservatives should hope” Trump is more successful this time. The purpose of sex ed has changed, said Kat Rosenfield in The Free Press. Preventing unplanned teen pregnancies and sexually transmitted disease was a “reasonable and appropriate” goal when they were more common. But it doesn’t make much sense “in a world where young people are barely having sex” compared with previous generations.

The new sex-ed policy is purely political, said Danielle Han in Jezebel. “Eliminating comprehensive sex ed was one of the goals of Project 2025,” the blueprint for Trump’s second term. Anti-abortion activists have sought to “change the curricula to stigmatize abortion” and teach young people that life begins at conception. Legal abortion, contraception, and comprehensive sex ed helped bring the teen pregnancy rate to this historic low, said Lisa Needham in Daily Kos. But “conservative creeps are actually sad that teen birth rates are down.” They aim to boost population growth—“well, population growth for white people, which is what the disgusting ‘pronatalist’ movement is really about.” Under Trump, sex ed now amounts to “more teen pregnancies, please.”

Covid killed more than 1.1 million Americans. But in the “twisted narrative” that has become Republican Party dogma, said Will Saletan in The Bulwark, “the villain isn’t Trump, China, or even the virus. It’s Anthony Fauci.” At a Senate committee hearing last month, Republicans demonized and slandered Fauci, the now-retired director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who served the public under seven presidents back to Ronald Reagan. Several senators suggested Fauci helped China create the virus in a lab, even though studies have traced its probable origin to animals in the Wuhan wet market. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna compared Fauci to Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. Sen. Ron Johnson ludicrously suggested Covid vaccines were “experimental gene therapy” that killed millions of Americans. Fauci declined to answer questions on the grounds that committee chair Rand Paul had vowed to use his testimony to put him in prison. Why the witch hunt? For Trump’s GOP, “someone has to be blamed for what went wrong in the pandemic, and it can’t be the party’s god-king.”

Fauci and other health officials did make mistakes, said Megan McArdle in The Washington Post. The messaging on masking was muddled, and schools stayed closed longer than they had to. But public health experts “were doing the best they could in an unprecedented disaster.” What we need is “the kind of systematic, non-partisan, and nonpunitive investigation” that followed previous national crises, not a mean-spirited “blame game” that serves only to make us less prepared for the next pandemic.

The official who really “bungled” the pandemic was the man in charge—Donald J. Trump, said Molly Olmstead in Slate. But with Republicans likely to “take a beating” in November, they’re using the bogeyman Fauci as a tool to distract and energize their fractured base. As an alternative to Fauci and science, said Nick Catoggio in The Dispatch, Trump and his populist allies are offering “witch-doctor lunatics.” Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. denied last week that Covid vaccines—which saved millions of lives—did “more good than harm” and claimed that at the height of the pandemic ICUs were “empty all over the country, including in New York.” Rather than a serious effort to explore “what went wrong with Covid,” Republicans are giving us crackpot conspiracy theories, quack miracle cures like ivermectin, and pseudo-experts “with brains worms. Literally.”

The “knives are out” for JD Vance, said Natalie Allison in The Washington Post. As he prepares for a likely White House run in 2028, the vice president is facing a growing barrage of attacks from self-declared “Never Vance” Republicans, both online and in the opinion pages. Pro-Israel conservatives, including prominent commentators like Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin, have claimed that the populist Vance is “unfit” for the top job because of his reported opposition to the Iran war and for “looking weak” during peace negotiations with Tehran. And columnists in the Rupert Murdoch–owned Wall Street Journal—the voice of traditional conservatism—have slammed Vance for his skepticism of free-market capitalism and for echoing “the anti-Israel left.” Vance’s allies claim the veep is delighted to have earned the enmity of “the pre-Trump GOP establishment,” said Mike Zapler in Axios. But the scale of the hostility shows his coronation as Trump’s successor is no sure thing, and that many in the GOP would prefer Secretary of State Marco Rubio as the nominee in 2028.

The anti-Vance campaign is understandable, said Bret Stephens in The New York Times, because he “is by far the worst person ever” to serve as vice president. Consider his recent appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast: He talked conspiratorially about aliens and claimed without evidence that Jeffrey Epstein may have been a Mossad agent and that Israel is trying to “manipulate” U.S. public opinion to keep the Iran war going. A “callow and sinister opportunist,” Vance likely doesn’t believe this bunk, but he knows the MAGA base will still lap it up. If it’s a choice between Vance and Rubio in ’28, I’ll take Vance, said Ross Douthat, also in the Times. The vice president has at least tried to get the U.S. out of the Iran quagmire, while Rubio has been “a profile in evasion, letting other officials take risks to either own the war or seek a peace while he keeps his options open.”

This fight is not just about Vance, said Kathy Gilsinan in Politico. The more traditional wing of the GOP is increasingly worried about “the rising generation of young staffers in their party,” many of whom seem happy to spout antisemitic and racist rhetoric and have no loyalty to the historical GOP platform. If Vance—who last year dismissed a racist Young Republicans group chat as “edgy jokes”—becomes the GOP’s torchbearer in 2028, it raises the question of whom exactly he’ll welcome into the fold, “and what exactly they’ll do with power once they get it.”

How popular is the parks system?

The National Park Service recorded some 323 million visits to its 433 parks, properties, battlefields, and monuments last year. That’s a slight drop from 2024’s all-time high of 332 million, but more than the combined attendance of professional football, baseball, basketball, NASCAR, soccer, and Disney theme parks. Established in 1916, the NPS is today one of America’s most beloved institutions. A 2024 Pew Research Center survey found that 76% of Americans, including overwhelming majorities of both Republicans and Democrats, view it favorably, a higher share than for any other federal agency. But the NPS, which manages more than 85 million acres across the U.S., now faces an uncertain future because of staffing cuts and the reallocation of critical funds by the Trump administration. Author and conservationist Wallace Stegner once declared national parks America’s “best idea,” but the administration “is treating our treasures like anything but,” said John Garder of the nonprofit National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA).

How many national parks workers have been laid off?

The agency has lost nearly 25% of its permanent workforce—over 4,000 positions—since the start of the second Trump administration, according to the NPCA. About 1,000 parks employees with probationary status were fired in early 2025, while senior staffers have been let go through deferred-resignation and early-retirement programs. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who oversees the NPS, said the agency can keep up standards with a reduced workforce by getting staff to focus on hands-on jobs, such as clearing trails. “I want more of that,” he said. “I want less overhead.” Staffers who traditionally work behind the scenes have been pushed into more frontline roles; at Yosemite National Park, a shortage of custodial workers in spring 2025 meant the park’s scientists, IT specialists, and senior management had to take shifts cleaning toilets. Personnel cuts and delays in hiring seasonal workers have caused backups at entry gates, which at some big parks have been exacerbated by the scrapping of timed entry reservation systems. “The traffic reminded me of L.A. at rush hour,” said Sacramento resident Walter Meyer, who visited Yosemite in April.

Are these cuts affecting park safety?

Dive team operations were quietly suspended at southern Nevada’s Lake Mead National Recreation Area in May because of staffing shortages and the need for more training and equipment. The lake has consistently ranked as one of the deadliest sites managed by the NPS, with an average of 20 people dying in the park annually, mostly by drowning; one of the dive team’s responsibilities is recovering the bodies of drowning victims. An NPS employee at Yosemite told The Guardian that a lack of workers last year meant visitors could “wreck the park with no consequence” and get away with doing potentially dangerous things, such as not properly storing their food. “We don’t want bears eating people food because they can get aggressive,” the staffer said. “I worry the park will degrade to the point where safety is a problem.” And the problems faced by national parks have only grown this year, as President Trump redirected funding toward his preferred projects.

How is Trump spending that money?

At least $90 million from visitor entry fees to parks such as Big Bend and Yellowstone has been diverted to Washington, D.C., The Washington Post reported in early June. Much of that cash went toward Trump-requested beautification projects ahead of the country’s 250th birthday celebrations, including $76 million for fountain repairs and for the botched relining of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Entry fees were used to fund a Fourth of July firework display in the capital; it cost $1.6 million, more than five times the bill in past years. NPS also spent $689,232 this spring to rip up the walkway connecting the Oval Office to the White House residence, a 45-second commute. Trump didn’t like the historic beige Tennessee flagstone and has replaced it with polished black African granite carved in Italy. Park advocates say all that cash would have been better spent tackling the NPS’s $24 billion backlog of needed infrastructure repairs and improvements. “That is not how it was designed to work,” said the NPCA’s Ed Stierli. “It shouldn’t just be all at one park at the expense of the entire national park system.”

Are many parks missing out on funding?

More than 900 NPS projects that were slated to be funded this year have yet to receive money. They include a $1.5 million roof replacement at the Yellowstone Center for Resources, which is dealing with water leaks and pest invasions. Guardrails won’t be replaced along a cliff edge deemed a “significant safety hazard for visitors” at Colorado’s Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, and crumbling walls along a scenic drive won’t be fixed at Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park. At Crater Lake in Oregon, potholes riddle the main drive and two housing units for employees have been shuttered because of mold.

Is anyone trying to protect the NPS?

Some members of Congress are speaking out, as are NPS staffers. When the Trump administration started shrinking the workforce, a group of off-duty and former employees formed Resistance Rangers to document NPS’s cuts and policy changes, while fired workers flew an upside-down American flag—a distress sign—at Yosemite. Meanwhile, lawmakers in Washington have rejected plans in Trump’s 2027 budget to lay off nearly 3,000 more NPS workers and shrink the agency’s budget from $3.2 billion to $2.2 billion. No lawmaker wants to be responsible for defunding such a beloved agency. Plus, said Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), “I just need to know that I’ve got people out in the park who are keeping the bears at bay.”

After notching a string of Democratic primary wins in New York City and Colorado, the far-left Democratic Socialists of America will face its “biggest test” soon, said Caroline Vakil in The Hill. If the polls are right, the likely winner of the Democratic gubernatorial primary in Wisconsin will be state Rep. Francesca Hong, 37, a tattooed former restaurant worker and “proud” DSA member who a few years ago called for the abolition of Thanksgiving. Hong has sought to distance herself from that statement and from the DSA’s radical platform, which includes such proposals as abolishing the police, prisons, borders, and the U.S. Senate, as well as ending U.S. support for Israel. Because of that baggage, mainstream Democrats like current Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers doubt Hong can beat the GOP’s presumptive nominee, Rep. Tom Tiffany, in November, and worry she’ll hurt downballot candidates. But Hong’s supporters see no need to stress. They note the rising antiestablishment mood among Democrats and voters in general, and say the narrow win by progressive Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan’s Senate Democratic primary shows there’s a possible path to victory in purple states.

The “Democratic machine is fighting back” as best it can, said Noah Rothman in National Review. The Democratic National Committee last week tweaked its presidential primary schedule to favor centrist-leaning states like Nevada and South Carolina, which should help ward off “the insurgent socialists in their ranks.” But with 1 in 3 Democratic voters now identifying as a democratic socialist it may be too little, too late. This is “a story of establishment collapse rather than left-wing ascension,” said Astead Herndon in Vox. Candidates like Hong are winning over normie Democrats not with the DSA’s extreme ideas but by pushing popular measures: new taxes on the superrich, Medicare for all, restraining the artificial intelligence industry. The “rudderless” Democratic establishment, by contrast, is offering nothing except ineffective opposition to President Trump.

We need better labeling, said Jonathan V. Last in The Bulwark. The truth is that a likely majority of DSA members, and the overwhelming majority of those who tell pollsters they’re “democratic socialists,” aren’t “socialists” at all. “They’re social democrats, in the European tradition.” Like the DSA-endorsed Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), their main objectives are an expanded welfare state, including universal health-care coverage, funded by a more progressive tax code. Social democrats also want to win elections, meaning they could be a great asset within the Democratic coalition. Not so the DSA’s “Das Kapital–loving, Mao-admiring” genuine socialists who need to be rejected before they “do to the Democratic Party what MAGA did to Republicans.”

Democrats should stop “whining,” said Paul Waldman in Public Notice. With the primaries largely over, it’s electoral self-harm to keep screaming “half our candidates are crazy!” The party’s centrists need to understand that, with control of Congress in the balance, “they have an interest in seeing all Democrats succeed—even those who are too progressive for their taste.” Whatever happens in November “will inform 2028,” said Nia-Malika Henderson in Bloomberg. If DSA-backed candidates can “pull off victories in purple states,” then a new template will emerge on how to win. But if those candidates lose, the Democratic Party will have less power than ever to “rein in Trump’s many excesses,” and will sail toward 2028 still “wrestling with itself” over what it actually believes.

What happened

Progressive firebrand Abdul El-Sayed narrowly defeated establishment-backed Rep. Haley Stevens in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary last week, in a race viewed by many political observers as a referendum on the party’s identity. That fight turned out to be much closer than polling suggested. El-Sayed, a former public health official endorsed by independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), used his campaign as a litmus test for Democratic support of Israel, and blasted Stevens for receiving more than $30 million—about half her advertising funding—from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Stevens said El-Sayed, who would become the first Muslim U.S. senator if he wins in November, wants to “blame all of your problems on Jewish Americans.” After his victory was confirmed, El-Sayed called on Michigan Democrats to “mend fences” ahead of his race against the GOP nominee, former Rep. Mike Rogers.

Another Michigan progressive, William Lawrence, won his Democratic primary in a battleground House district following a campaign that focused heavily on opposing data centers. But the party’s leftward momentum stalled in St. Louis, where Missouri Rep. Wesley Bell defeated his challenger, former Rep. Cori Bush, in a House primary. A pro-Israel moderate, Bell unseated Bush in 2024 after she became one of the first sitting lawmakers to call Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide. Following that loss, Bush vowed to run again and warned AIPAC that she would “tear your kingdom down.” Bell won this week by more than 20 points.

What the columnists said

El-Sayed’s win was not the “resounding verdict in the Democratic civil war” he had anticipated, said Adam Wren in Politico. He was confident throughout the race, bragging about feeling no stress as voting began. Can you blame him? Some polls gave him a double-digit lead. But in the end, Stevens lost by only a point, thanks to strong support from Black and lower-income voters. Still, it was “an impressive effort” from the grassroots El-Sayed, who was outspent by Stevens by almost $60 million.

Are Democrats “playing for fun” or “playing to win”? asked Kevin D. Williamson in The Dispatch. Defeating Rogers, the GOP’s “bland Trump factotum,” in November ought to have been “pretty easy.” But it won’t be after Democrats nominated El-Sayed, a “left-wing goofball” who fixates on Jews, parties with podcaster and “Hamas apologist” Hasan Piker, and “advocates a state-monopoly health-care system that would strip Michigan union members of cherished benefits.” In a must-win battleground state, polls show he’s trailing Rogers, 46% to 43%.

Stevens may have been a safer bet, said William Kristol in The Bulwark. But once the bitterness of the primary subsides, the “national environment will still help the Democratic nominee.” It’s Rogers, not El-Sayed, who’s tainted by the historically unpopular President Trump. If El-Sayed leaves his squabbles with fellow Democrats for another day and sticks to “the fundamentals” of fighting Trump, he can help them flip the Senate.

Spring City

Set in a historic arts community, the Behunin-Beck house is an 1883 Utah Gothic Revival stone home that’s been recently updated. The three-bedroom has a new aqua-tinted chef’s kitchen with a La Cornue range, a library, a new HVAC system, and a third bath, while period details, including wallpapers and the paint palette, have also been introduced.

The more than 1-acre lot includes a renovated log cabin, a horse barn, a garage, and a tree house. $1,850,000. Carolyn Kirkham, Summit Sotheby’s International Realty, (801) 450-0800

Salt Lake City

Built in 1926, this French château–style three-bedroom is in the Gilmer Park Historic District, 15 minutes from Temple Square downtown. Renovated in 2006, the home features a living room with a vaulted hand-painted ceiling, French doors, and a Juliet balcony; a two-story library has quartersawn oak built-ins.

Included on the nearly 1-acre lot are a pool, yards, ponds, mature trees, stone bridges, and stairs to a creek. $4,600,000. Mimi Sinclair, Summit Sotheby’s International Realty, (801) 580-6089

Eden

In the Powder Haven ski community in the Wasatch Mountains, this 2018 contemporary mountain home has ski-in, ski-out access. The four-bedroom comes furnished and has an open plan with clerestory windows, hardwood floors, a gas fireplace, and a lower level with a rec area and guest rooms.

Outside are a barrel sauna, hot tub, and deck; shared amenities include trails and lifts, dining, and a lakefront lodge. $6,250,000. Brian Williams, Engel & Völkers Park City, (435) 602-0217

Ivins

Located beside Snow Canyon State Park in southwest Utah, this desert modern home is set against the red rock cliffs of the Kayenta area.

The 2023 three-bedroom has walls of windows that frame the hills, a mauve-toned kitchen that includes an upholstered banquette and a butler’s pantry with a wine fridge, and a green zellige-tiled fireplace surround that mirrors the xeriscaping. The almost 2-acre lot also features a pool, spa, and patio. $4,700,000. David Ellis, The Agency St. George, (435) 862-9199

American Fork

This 2026 triple-gabled contemporary six-bedroom is near Utah Lake and Mount Timpanogos, 20 minutes outside Provo. The vaulted great room has a floor-to-ceiling fireplace and a wall of glass sliders. A kitchen includes teardrop pendants and a full pantry, and a lower level encompasses a kitchenette, theater, gym, sauna, cold plunge, and billiards.

The property includes a pool, lounge areas, and a putting green. $4,500,000. Leanna Deherrera, Windermere Real Estate—Utah/Luxury Portfolio International, (801) 688-4060

Salt Lake City

In the Dorius, a 1912 building in the Avenues neighborhood, this two-bedroom condo is walking distance from a park, pickleball courts, and dining.

The home has exposed brick walls, original hardwood floors, crown molding, and high ceilings, with a floor-to-ceiling fireplace, a bay window, and a refreshed kitchen with quartz counters and stainless appliances. The living room opens to a covered private balcony. $385,000. Bobby Vigil, Windermere Real Estate—Utah/Luxury Portfolio International, (801) 455-6550

‘Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma’

Directed by Jane Schoenbrun (R)

★★★★

“There is absolutely no one else, alive or dead, who could have made a feature that looks and feels like this one,” said Ryan Lattanzio in IndieWire. Jane Schoenbrun, the nonbinary trans director of I Saw the TV Glow, has followed up that acclaimed 2024 release with an “often spellbinding” film that’s part slasher sendup, part “future cult lesbian classic.” Hacks’ Hannah Einbinder plays Kris, a queer indie filmmaker who’s been handed a chance to direct a reboot of a 1980s slasher series whose mass killer was genderfluid. But when Kris decides she’d like the final girl from the original film to appear in the reboot, the “entrancingly sexy” pas de deux that ensues steers the tale in a surprising direction.

Once Einbinder and costar Gillian Anderson are brought together, said Richard Brody in The New Yorker, the heart of this movie becomes a “sharply written” two-hander, “with plenty of scope for the two leads to shine.” Anderson’s Billy lives like a recluse, but she’s funny and insightful, and she helps Kris discard her sexual inhibitions while Schoenbrun is simultaneously weaving in “gleefully gory” scenes from the fictional earlier Camp Miasma movies. Anderson, incidentally, “appears to be enjoying her foray into sapphic high-camp tremendously,” said Jessica Kiang in Variety. But then every actor here seems to be having fun, even as the movie’s second half “uses the silliness of slasher convention to get to some fairly profound places,” particularly about culturally constructed obstacles to women’s experience of pleasure. The result is Schoenbrun’s “most accomplished, most persuasive, and most playful movie yet.”

‘The Samurai and the Prisoner’

Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Not rated)

★★★

The “detached, dispassionate” tenor of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s new film “recalls the work of another Kurosawa,” said Tim Grierson in the Los Angeles Times. A hit this summer in Japan, The Samurai and the Prisoner shares with Akira Kurosawa’s Ran “not just a feudal-Japan setting but also an older man’s dim view of our species’ vain stabs at glory through conquest.” It’s 1578, and a seasoned warrior played by Masahiro Motoki is trapped in his besieged castle after defy ing a fearsome warlord. But fans of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s great horror films “may be thrown off by his new movie’s relatively muted approach.”

They may also be thrown by the title, said Jordan Mintzer in The Hollywood Reporter. This isn’t a samurai film but “a refined murder mystery dressed up in feudal garb.” Inside the castle, an unknown killer begins racking up victims, and Motoki’s clan leader keeps turning to one of his prisoners for help. “This sounds like the perfect setup for a suspenseful feudal thriller—think Knives Out meets Throne of Blood.” Unfortunately, four murders occur, and the story “winds up repeating the same scenario each time.” Be patient, though, because Kurosawa “choreographs his material with grace,” constructing an intricate drama that’s “as psychologically rich as his best work,” said Nick Schager in the Daily Beast. It “reaffirms Kurosawa’s standing as international cinema’s preeminent jack of all trades. Simply put, he can do anything.”

A law aimed at curtailing surprise medical billing has been surprisingly lucrative for doctors, said Anna Wilde Mathews and Tom McGinty in The Wall Street Journal. Health-care providers were awarded nearly $15 billion last year from arbitrators called in to settle medical billing disputes, more than triple the amount in 2024. It’s an unintended result of the No Surprises Act, passed by Congress in 2020 in response to a surge of complaints from patients about “huge, unexpected bills from doctors who weren’t in their insurers’ networks.” Patients are no longer responsible for those bills, but their insurers now battle doctors in arbitration hearings “over how much they will pay.” Doctors are winning around 80% of the cases. Some insurance groups allege that the system is getting “gamed,” said Sarah Kliff in The New York Times. Seeing the favorable results, “a growing number of medical providers and billing firms have begun using it to obtain higher payments for scheduled procedures”—and then winning payments “that are 10 or hundreds of times as high as what insurance typically pays.”

The No Surprises Act has spared millions of Americans from unexpected medical costs, said Lisa Jarvis in Bloomberg. It “addressed a real problem many Americans regularly experienced.” Unfortunately, that great bipartisan achievement is getting abused, which means patients will start “paying the bill in other ways.” Several insurers, like UnitedHealthcare of New York, have already said that “costs associated with the dispute process accounted for a portion of its premium hike for next year,” which could be as high as 9%. “What began as an exercise in consumer protection” is instead becoming “another force pushing health care out of Americans’ reach.”

It’s a perfect example of a policy with consequences “nearly the opposite of what was intended,” said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. The Biden administration estimated there would be 17,000 disputes every year; last year, there were 2.6 million. Part of the problem is that “arbitrators don’t often throw out ineligible claims.” The government should audit and discredit the obvious money grabs. However, the Trump administration “finalized a Biden-proposed rule aimed at making arbitration more efficient and less expensive.” This will only “encourage more claims.”

Early drafts of the No Surprises Act foresaw this very issue, said the Washington Examiner. Those drafts required “insurers to pay out-of-network providers a clear, market-based benchmark rate,” which was usually tied to the median in-network price for the same service in the same area. “This was the simplest and fairest solution.” But hospitals and medical groups argued this would be too favorable for insurers. And so instead the arbitration process has become “a racket.” Congress must fix its mistake.

‘Music, Fashion, Film’ by Charli XCX

★★★

“If you can get over the fact that it’s not Brat 2.0,” said Lindsay Zoladz in The New York Times, you might grow to appreciate the “proudly prickly, satisfyingly scuzzy” new album by Charli XCX. Unlike the 2024 smash that catapulted the British pop artist, at 31, from cult favorite to megastar, this eighth album “embraces, even glorifies, the slapdash.” Instead of hyper-burnished club anthems, we get sub-three-minute tracks anchored by hiccuping, glitchy guitar riffs and layered with electropop flourishes. Beyond the guitars themselves, “there’s rock ’n’ roll attitude to the quick ’n’ dirty concision of these songs,” said Carl Wilson in Slate. Seeking to avoid making any big statements, Charli has made a record that’s “much better heard as a whole” than highlight by highlight, in part because “the labor here is in the microscopic details,” the way Charli’s longtime collaborators A.G. Cook and Finn Keane are “constantly mutating the timbres and textures of sounds.” The album, in the end, “neither takes itself too seriously nor insists too hard on its jokes.” More importantly, it “reminds her and us that she’s just always had a great time making music with her friends.”

‘Reality Awaits’ by The Strokes

★★

The Strokes’ seventh album turns out to be “occasionally bizarre, consistently engaging, and often spectacular,” said Ryan Reed in Paste. The quintet that turned New York City into an epicenter of post-punk rock circa 2001 has teamed again with celebrity producer Rick Rubin, and the result is “a far weirder and more challenging listen” than 2020’s The New Abnormal, but “that’s largely for the better.” On the single “Going Shopping,” Julian Casablancas’ vocals are distorted by “gloopy pitch-correction” as he sings about wanting to be a 7-foot zombie over “galloping art-punk guitars.” Such uses of AutoTune have made some Strokes fans furious, but not me, said Danielle Chelosky in Stereogum. “Sure, Casablancas sounds like a malfunctioning robot,” but the worst thing about “Going Shopping” and the second advance single was “how utterly forgettable they were.” The album contains some gems, including “Dine N’Dash,” one of the band’s “most perfect slices of polished, clean indie rock.” While there’s “no shortage of duds” on Reality Awaits, there’s much to love, and “the Strokes wouldn’t be as interesting if everything they touched was gold.”

‘A*Pop’ by Tyla

★★★

At 24, Tyla is “stepping out as a new type of music star from Africa,” said Wale Oloworekende in Fader. Three years after scoring a global hit with the Grammy-winning “Water,” the Johannesburg native has titled her sophomore album to announce her intent to be the It girl of Afro-pop, one who, through her choice of featured guests, is “bringing her community along with her for the ride.” Despite all the bravado, and even though the log drums common to South African amapiano are a constant presence, “much of A*Pop is still primarily derivative of R&B.” While Tyla “has achieved a new high for African music,” the record should have leaned harder into South African house and soul. Still, it’s an impressive showing, said Michael Cragg in The Guardian. Like Barbadian star Rihanna before her, “Tyla is able to nimbly traverse genres and reference points thanks to a characterful voice that suits every mood.” She can give a song “the full-belt treatment” or relax and ride a lithe shuffle beat as if on a pool float with a cocktail in hand. A*Pop includes a few throwaways, but “as a bold statement of intent, it’s close to top marks.”

★★★

“Whoopi Goldberg has been a pop culture fixture for so long that few may remember how and when she first rose to national fame,” said Charles Isherwood in The Wall Street Journal. But the five esteemed actresses starring in the current off-Broadway revival of Goldberg’s 1984 multicharacter, one-woman show surely remember. In this reverent restaging, “what’s inevitably lost is the excitement of watching a single performer act the chameleon.” What’s gained, however, is “the warm camaraderie of an ensemble work,” and the shared sense of purpose among the performers who divide up Goldberg’s monologues: All are here to honor a game-changing writer and performer.

With no Whoopi onstage, “you more clearly appreciate her work as a playwright,” said Jackson McHenry in NYMag.com. The show opens with Kara Young playing a junkie philosopher named Fontaine, and the two-time Tony winner so quickly makes the role her own that you know that the night will yield fresh pleasures. Dominique Fishback gets the show’s “masterpiece,” about a Black girl who wishes to be blond. Jurnee Smollett, replacing Kerry Washington, plays the teenage surfer girl who’s coping with an unwanted pregnancy. In the final monologue, which Goldberg added in 2004, Kecia Lewis is as solid as her co-stars. Unfortunately, “the relentless sharpness” of the 1984 material goes missing.

The entire show is “markedly shinier” than the original staging, said Brittani Samuel in The New York Times. In addition to the larger cast, which also includes Danielle Pinnock as a Jamaican immigrant caring for a dirty old white man, there’s a more lavish set, projections, and even a brief group dance. “But the styling feels like an appropriate nod to the celebratory mission of this production.” It also “reinforces the show’s most prevalent sensibility: that an entire generation of actors has been inspired by Goldberg’s work.”

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Writer, theater director, and podcast host Isaac Butler is the author of The Method, an acclaimed history of method acting. His new book, The Perfect Moment, explores how the culture wars of today took root when a culture war broke out in the late 1980s.

‘It Was Vulgar & It Was Beautiful’ by Jack Lowery (2022)

Lowery’s biography of Gran Fury, the most prominent of the art collectives within the AIDS advocacy group ACT UP, is equal parts thrilling, inspiring, and enraging. Drawing on interviews and archives, Lowery shows how artists and activists banded together to fight two plagues—one a disease, the other of hatred and indifference—that were devastating our nation. Buy it here.

‘Fire in the Belly’ by Cynthia Carr (2012)

Carr knew the artist David Wojnarowicz and, as a journalist for The Village Voice, extensively covered the 1980s East Village milieu in which he lived. Her portrait of Wojnarowicz and his era brilliantly captures what it means to lead a fiercely principled life in a corrupt world. Buy it here.

‘The History of White People’ by Nell Irvin Painter (2010)

Painter weaves thousands of years of history together, telling the complex story of why we invented whiteness and how its meaning has both shaped and been shaped by world events. One great surprise of the book is how much art history can be found within it. Buy it here.

‘The Wars of the Roses’ by Dan Jones (2015)

I did a mini crash course in military histories while writing The Perfect Moment, and by far the best contemporary example I read was Dan Jones’ chronicle. Beginning with the usurpation of Richard II and ending with the ascension of the Tudors, Jones manages a massive story with superhuman clarity and storytelling bravado. Buy it here.

‘The Devil Finds Work’ by James Baldwin (1976)

Today we take for granted that long-form criticism will often include both autobiography and political critique, but Baldwin was a pioneer of the mode and remains one of the best to ever do it. The Devil Finds Work is a slim volume that will have you rethinking the relationship between film, politics, and identity over and over again. Buy it here.

‘Fear of Flying’ by Erica Jong (1973)

When I started reading Fear of Flying, I knew that it was a landmark feminist novel and that it was the subject of a congressional inquiry. What I didn’t know is that it is outrageously funny, endlessly compelling, and equally artful and honest. Buy it here.

‘Cool Machine: A Novel’ by Colson Whitehead

Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Trilogy, which his “dizzyingly brilliant” new novel completes, is “destined to live on as an American classic,” said Leigh Haber in the Los Angeles Times. Since 2021’s Harlem Shuffle, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner has been following Harlem resident Ray Carney, watching the Black furniture store owner and sometimes fence for stolen goods as he navigates a changing New York City from 1959 to 1986. While the novels “have a great deal to say about serious subjects such as systemic racism and corruption, they often lean on humor to get the message across.” Ray, having now reached 50, has achieved respectability, but he’d rather step back into crooked side hustles than fade into semiretirement, said Ron Charles in his Substack newsletter. “This man wants to feel alive again, and you will too, riding along through escapades so cinematic the book should come with a bucket of popcorn.”

Cool Machine turns out to be the strongest novel of the trilogy, said Walton Muyumba in The Boston Globe. And though it’s “doused in Whiteheadian cynicism, sardonicism, and ambivalence,” it “counters those sensibilities with a foundational Black American concern: justice.” The novel consists of three novellas, set, respectively, in 1981, 1983, and 1986, with each tale driven by a bid by Ray or an associate to level the world’s playing field. In the first, Ray joins a criminal ring after white bankers deny his wife a business loan. In the “taut, gorgeously designed” second, a menacing but avuncular associate named Pepper tries to recover an African mask in the East Village. And in the final section, Ray seeks to rescue a younger family member from a murderous scheme involving cable TV, union contracts, the mob, and U.S. attorney Rudy Giuliani.

Though you don’t need to read the trilogy’s books in order, “I’d recommend it,” said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. “The best reason to come to Cool Machine, and to the others in this series, is to drink in Whitehead’s intellectual breadth, his ambivalent irony, his moral seriousness, and pinball verbal play.” These aren’t “‘great’ novels as we have traditionally understood that term,” but “they are entertainments of a high order” and they offer pleasures that The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, Whitehead’s more somber 2016 and 2019 prizewinners, do not. You can read Cool Machine for its heists and beatdowns, because Whitehead “nails the pacing and the details.” But you’ll also get a memorable portrait of a marriage and a sideways look at how the interests of cops and criminals intertwine. “Most saliently, this is a heavyweight New York novel.” In a manner that’s all his own, “Whitehead cracks the city open like a crab and pulls out the meat.”

‘The Renoir Girls: A Hidden History of Art, War & Betrayal’ by Catherine Ostler

“Reading The Renoir Girls feels like watching the unfolding of a horror film, albeit a very pretty one,” said Luke Lyman in The Washington Post. The pretty 1881 painting at the book’s center, Pierre-August Renoir’s Alice and Elisabeth Cahen d’Anvers, or Pink and Blue, depicts two sisters, roughly ages 5 and 6, who had no idea of the grim future that awaited them. The girls’ father, Louis, was a powerful Parisian banker and their mother, Louise, a salonnière who commissioned Renoir to paint the portrait. The Cahen d’Anvers family was also Jewish, and their peak years were followed by a downfall that wealth could not prevent. By tracking the life stories of the sisters, author Catherine Ostler “transforms history’s grand sweep into intimate profile.”

In describing the sisters’ upbringing, Ostler “paints a glittering picture of cake shops and cotillions, trips to the dressmaker and dancing till dawn,” said Kathryn Hughes in The Times (U.K.). To fully capture belle epoque Paris, Ostler draws material from the novels of Marcel Proust, who based Charles Swann, a prominent figure in his magnum opus, on a man who had a long affair with Louise and may have been the father of Alice. But this isn’t a book filled with high-society gossip. “Its real subject is antisemitism, which starts as a background whisper and becomes a terrifying roar,” particularly after French army captain Albert Dreyfus, who was Jewish, was unjustly convicted of treason. The case sharply divided France, and Renoir sided with the haters.

It’s in following the diverging paths of Alice, Elisabeth, and their older sister, Irène, that Renoir Girls “gathers its emotional force,” said Guy Walters in The Independent (U.K.). Irène largely retained her luxurious life during World War II, though both her daughter and grandchildren were murdered at Auschwitz. Alice, meanwhile, effected a desperate escape from Europe in 1940. Elisabeth, at 69, was swept up by the Nazis four years later, dying at or en route to Auschwitz. “By the time the narrative reaches its conclusion, the painting with which it began has acquired a different weight.” The stillness of its figures “becomes poignant, even unsettling,” because that stillness “marks not the permanence of a world, but its transience.”

The recent news that OpenAI lost the handle on two of its AI models “sounds like something out of a sci-fi film,” said The Economist. AI labs frequently “test their models for potentially dangerous capabilities before releasing them.” OpenAI wanted to see how its latest models would fare on a cybersecurity test. Well, guess what: They somehow “broke free from the laboratory” and unleashed a complicated “multistep attack” on a popular data library called Hugging Face—hacking a system in hours that would take humans weeks, according to Bloomberg. The result could have been worse. The models had “gained access to the open internet,” and easily could have “gone on to compromise other companies’ servers” and wreak havoc. “This is not the first sign that AI models’ capabilities are starting to exceed people’s control.” After the hack was reported, lawmakers introduced a new bill in the House that would give Washington the authority to shut down rogue AI models.

The breach occurred because of a “very human mistake,” said Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai in TechCrunch. It never would have happened, experts say, if OpenAI had used a more secure “sandbox,” a term for an isolated virtual environment for testing risky software. But the environment wasn’t totally isolated, because it “internally hosted third-party software” that apparently wasn’t fully secure. That’s where “the real fault lies.” But what did the researchers expect? asked David Berlind in ZDNET. The AI was doing “exactly what it was designed to do.” When the rogue AI invaded Hugging Face’s systems, it was acting under a directive to achieve its goal “no matter what.” This is what agentic AI is programmed to do: act “on its own” without human intervention. The industry just “didn’t expect it to do it so well,” so soon.

With AI agents, the internet has entered a “vulnerable new era,” said Matteo Wong in The Atlantic. Cutting-edge models are getting better at hacking, and the internet is “full of rickety and vulnerable code.” Until recently, companies have gotten away with relaxed security, but the “speed, scale, and sophistication of AI hacks means that everything is vulnerable,” including “hospitals, banks, electrical grids, the military.” AI companies want the public to believe they have the technology in “safe hands,” said Parmy Olson in Bloomberg. This incident suggests otherwise. OpenAI “shouldn’t be building systems that have advanced cyber capabilities if it can’t contain them properly.” Technology companies should operate like government and defense organizations and “air-gap” powerful software, meaning that they run it on computers that are “completely disconnected from the internet.” It would mean development is slower. But AI firms will have to “accept some uncomfortable trade-offs to make their models more secure.”

America’s own Louis XIV has embarked on his next home improvement project, said Tiago Ventura in Time. President Trump recently announced the construction of a $5 million granite helipad engraved with the U.S. presidential seal on the White House’s South Lawn. It’s the latest flourish from a president who seeks to “refashion both the White House and Washington through a series of high-profile renovation projects.” The most well-known are the botched repainting of the Reflecting Pool and the demolition of the White House’s East Wing to make way for a still-unbuilt ballroom. But in total, Trump has launched 18 known projects to remake the U.S. capital in his own image and taste. The Oval Office has been adorned with so much gold leaf that it resembles the glittering excess of Versailles, while White House walls now bear gaudy gold script proclaiming “The Oval Office,” “The West Wing,” and “The Presidential Walk of Fame.”

Trump claims his renovations are being funded by private donors and won’t cost taxpayers a dime, said Andrew Feinberg in The Independent. But a close examination of public records reveals “a pattern of ballooning budgets, noncompetitive bidding, and the weaponization of federal funds” to bankroll Trump’s vanity projects. These “improvements” have drained at least $1 billion in taxpayer dollars. Trump’s projects are also illegal, said Edith Olmsted in The New Republic. By law, Congress is required to approve any construction on federal land. But because congressional Republicans fear crossing the president, he has been allowed to treat the White House “like one of his gaudy resort properties,” rather than the once-dignified, 226-year-old People’s House.

While Congress turns a blind eye, “a majority of Americans don’t approve,” said Sarah Davis in The Hill. A recent Washington Post poll found that 2 out of 3 Americans take a dim view of Trump’s extravagant renovations. When asked about Trump’s motivations, 64% said he was transforming Washington, D.C., to “glorify himself” or “leave his mark,” not to benefit the public. Renovation is easier than the economy or foreign policy, said Jackie Delamatre in The Guardian. With mounting troubles both domestically and internationally, it’s no surprise that Trump has retreated to the safety of these relatively small matters. He’s even been caught supergluing gold accents to the Oval Office’s mantle himself. In his desperation to self-soothe, Trump can’t stop himself from adding “just one more gilded vase.”

“America is about to go over a peptide cliff,” said Tom Bartlett in The Atlantic. An FDA advisory panel voted last month to recommend that six unproven peptides be added to the list of custom drugs that so-called compounding pharmacies can sell. Peptides are chains of amino acids that tell cells to regulate biological processes; some peptides, including insulin and GLP-1s, are FDA-approved medicines. But pharmacies were banned in 2023 from dispensing these six peptides—which adherents claim deliver benefits ranging from improved endurance to reduced inflammation—over efficacy and safety concerns. That annoyed Heath Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a peptides fan, who added eight new members to the panel ahead of the vote, six of whom run clinics that offer the chemicals. The vote is only a recommendation, but “ultimate approval seems likely”—to the glee of sellers anticipating a “peptide gold rush” and the horror of experts who fear we’re opening a “Pandora’s box.”

Demand for injectable peptides is surging “thanks to the endorsement of podcasters, wellness influencers,” and celebrities, said Emily Mullin in Wired. Among the chemicals that got the nod from the panel are two that combine to make the Joe Rogan–backed “Wolverine stack,” which supposedly aids in injury recovery. Undaunted by the lack of evidence that they work, users currently buy peptides on the “unregulated gray market”; the chemicals are sourced from labs in China and India and sold as for “research use only.” The vote “exposed a deep divide” between Kennedy’s appointees and FDA scientists, said Yonathan Daniel in ABCNews.com. The latter cited the absence of clinical trial data and the possibility of harmful immune reactions. But proponents argued thousands of people already take potentially dangerous black market peptides, and that the agency should protect them by granting access to safer product.

This isn’t “just about peptides,” said Julia Belluz in The New York Times. It’s “part of a broader push” to increase access to drugs that haven’t met “the strict evidence standards the FDA usually requires.” The agency “wasn’t designed for this wellness-crazed” telehealth era, in which Americans are “going outside the bounds of traditional health care in growing numbers.” But the FDA is “the only thing standing between consumers and a Wild West market” for untested and potentially harmful drugs. “There has to be a better way forward” than dropping standards and allowing consumer demand to override “scientific evidence.”

The Trump administration has found a novel way to limit the U.S. death toll in the Iran war, said Jack Crosbie in Rolling Stone: Claim that “some deaths don’t count.” Last month, the names of four service members killed by Iranian strikes in mid-July suddenly vanished from the Pentagon’s official list of war dead, lowering the total from 18 to 14. U.S. officials gave differing explanations for the change, from benign “temporary data disruptions” to the claim that the troops killed in Jordan and Iraq didn’t actually die in the war with Iran since “Operation Epic Fury” technically stopped when President Trump struck a temporary ceasefire with Tehran in April. Never mind that neither side ever ceased firing. After Senate Democrats and veterans groups protested the disappearance, the names of the four service members reappeared on the Pentagon website—but under a different category for “Overseas Operations,” which includes only those killed and injured since July 7, when fighting fully reignited.

This is only the latest attempt by the administration to obscure the human cost of its unpopular war, said Edith Olmsted in The New Republic. In March, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth dismissed an Iranian drone strike on a tactical operations center in Kuwait as a “squirter,” and the Pentagon said just five troops were seriously wounded. In fact, dozens of soldiers suffered injuries “including burns, shrapnel wounds, and brain trauma.” And when the Pentagon restored the four dead soldiers to its online database, it also quietly upped the number of wounded personnel by more than 140— pushing total U.S. casualties in the war above 600. Trump last month tried to put a positive spin on the casualty count, said Joe Lancaster in Reason, favorably comparing in an online post the conflict’s “4 months, 18 dead” with the thousands of Americans killed in multiyear wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. That may be true, but “American soldiers are still dead as a direct result of the conflict he helped instigate.”

This is predictable behavior from Trump, said David A. Graham in The Atlantic. He “has frequently treated the military as a political prop” and, according to his first-term chief of staff John Kelly, called U.S. troops who died in wars “suckers” and “losers.” Trump and Hegseth seemed to think that the American public are suckers as well, and thought their accounting tricks would prevent Iran war deaths from becoming a political liability. But that plan backfired and has succeeded only in drawing attention to the 18 dead Americans. “The administration sought to hide the war with Iran; instead, it showed the painful and growing costs.”

How big a problem is hunger in the U.S.? 

The nonpartisan Urban Institute reports that nearly 1 in 4 adults last year experienced household food insecurity, defined as not having enough to eat or knowing where the next meal may come from. That’s up from 1 in 5 in 2020. (The Trump administration stopped collecting data on food insecurity in 2025, saying the information was used to “fearmonger.”) For nearly 40 million low-income Americans, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program—commonly known as food stamps—serves as a lifeline. The 62-year-old program gives recipients an average of $187 a month to spend on groceries. Qualifying households must have an annual income below 130% of the poverty line, which this year is $15,960 for a single person and $38,680 for a family of five. Nearly 80% of households receiving SNAP benefits have members who are over 60, disabled, or under 18. But more than 4 million people—including at least 776,000 children—have been dropped from the program’s rolls over the past year, largely because of changes to SNAP included in the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) passed by the Republican-led Congress last summer. With grocery prices up by nearly a third since 2020, a growing number of Americans are now struggling to put food on the table. “I go to sleep thinking about what are we going to [eat],” said Dee McDonald, a 65-year-old cancer survivor raising three grandsons in Mesa, Ariz., and who last year lost her SNAP benefits. “I’m exhausted.”

What did the OBBB do?

To reduce SNAP’s costs by $187 billion over the next decade, the package tightened eligibility requirements and shifted more financial responsibility to state governments. States became responsible for 75% of SNAP’s administrative costs, up from 50%. The OBBB also mandated states cover up to 15% of SNAP benefits if their error rate—mistakes that lead to under- or overpayment of benefits—exceeds 6%. Error rates nationally sit above 10%, and only nine states are below that threshold; those above will face billions of dollars in new costs unless they can bring their error rates down. The OBBB also removed work exemptions from groups including adults ages 54 to 64, veterans, and parents of teenagers, all of whom must now prove they spend at least 20 hours a week working or volunteering to get benefits. Refugees were made almost completely ineligible.

What’s the justification for those cuts? 

The Republicans who passed the OBBB say the program had become bloated and strayed from its goal of helping society’s most vulnerable; they also saw SNAP cuts as a means to finance the law’s tax reductions. SNAP has expanded substantially in recent years: The number of recipients has more than doubled since the early 2000s, and the Biden administration lifted average benefits by more than 25% during the pandemic. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said the recent drop in SNAP enrollees is a result of a better economy, which means “people don’t need food stamps,” and measures in the OBBB that removed “fraudulent” claimants.

Is there much fraud in the program?

While error rates seem high, that’s mostly due to unintentional mistakes—often made by caseworkers—in calculating how much an applicant should receive based on their income and expenses. And most recipients are not avoiding work to claim benefits: 89% of SNAP households with children and a working-age, nondisabled adult have at least one working member. But the OBBB is making it harder for them to get on SNAP. States are scrambling to find ways to lower error rates: more paperwork to prove eligibility, phone interviews, and AI-run wage checks. That extra workload is swamping state SNAP agencies, many of which were already understaffed. In Massachusetts, over 80% of calls to the agency that administers SNAP are now being dropped; disconnections happen automatically when there aren’t enough agents to answer. Arizona has dropped nearly half of all state SNAP recipients, including Tiffany Hudson, a single mother of two who had been receiving $600 a month in food assistance to supplement her earnings as a part-time caretaker. After her benefits were cut off, she was told to provide more documentation, including a written statement that a monetary birthday gift from her father was not a recurring payment. “We’ve been going to food banks every week,” Hudson said. “We’re eating less.”

Can charities make up the difference? 

They’re trying, amid a surge in demand. A New York Fed report in February revealed that nearly 16% of Americans now rely at least partly on donated food. Sometimes “people are sitting in a 2-to-3-mile line the night before a distribution starts,” said Amy Breitmann, director of a food bank in Augusta, Ga. Beth Fiorenza’s food bank in Phoenix has been receiving more than 200 people a day—up from 150 to 175—about 40% of them newcomers. “Charities do not have the capacity to make up for the shortfall,” said Harvard health policy professor Sara Bleich. “For every meal that food banks provide, SNAP provides nine.”

Are there more changes ahead? 

An appropriations bill recently passed by the House would cut $141 million for fruit and vegetable benefits from the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, or WIC. The program, in which nearly 5.4 million children and pregnant and postpartum women are enrolled, has historically enjoyed bipartisan support, and the bill’s Republican backers argue the cuts won’t limit access. But Trump’s own 2027 budget proposal, submitted in April, would reduce WIC’s monthly fruit and vegetable allowance for children under 5 from $26 to $10. “They just don’t care what they’re cutting,” said Myriah Hamilton, 35, a Philadelphia-area mother who receives WIC for her infant son and is struggling with the rising cost of food. “How much more do you think I can bear?”

Members of Congress are leaving Washington for their summer recess, said Calen Razor in Politico, but the break will be anything but relaxing for GOP lawmakers. With less than 100 days left before the midterm elections, and with Democratic candidates up by an average of 6.1 percentage points in the generic ballot, Republicans must now spend five anxious and “potentially grueling” weeks at home in their districts. They’ll try to somehow persuade voters not to punish them in November for the high cost of living, an unpopular war in Iran, and the failures and excesses of President Trump—whose approval rating has flatlined below 40%, and who is loudly and regularly attacking Senate Republicans for failing to pass his “SAVE America Act” package of voting restrictions. Parties in power usually lose seats in the midterms, said Liz Goodwin and Ben Binday in The Washington Post, and November was going to be “tough no matter what” for Republicans, given Trump’s sagging poll numbers. But with the Iran war heating up again, pushing gas prices back above $4, some GOP pollsters are “raising the alarm” about the widening enthusiasm gap between the two parties’ voters. While Democrats are champing at the bit, Republicans are “listless and demotivated,” with about 1 in 5 “reliable Republican base voters” saying they may stay home on Election Day, or even vote Democrat.

Republicans should be doomed, said Chris Stein in The Guardian, but Democrats have their “own woes.” For starters, the party is broke. While the Republican National Committee has nearly $130 million in cash, most of it from wealthy donors, the Democratic National Committee is $2 million in debt. If the midterms were held today, Democrats would be favored to at least win back the House, said Julia Mueller in The Hill. The latest forecast from Decision Desk HQ suggests they’ll win a 15-seat advantage in the chamber and send House Speaker Mike Johnson’s caucus back into the minority. But that’s down 10 seats from early July, and it doesn’t help that Democrats are now attacking one another in a “bitter” public argument over the party’s future.

That debate has been a “gift” to Republicans, said Mona Charen in The Bulwark. Earlier this year, the GOP had “nothing to run on” and seemed headed for a deserved drubbing in November. But candidates aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America then scored a succession of Democratic primary wins, in New York and Colorado. The DSA’s platform calls for abolishing prisons, borders, and the presidency, while pushing sky-high taxes to fund a worker’s paradise of “free everything”—a set of policies seemingly designed to repel swing voters. The DSA’s rise has given the GOP its “midterm message,” said Ed Kilgore in New York. Republicans can and will now frame the midterms as a “vast ideological struggle” against Radical Socialism, with Trump and the GOP, for all their flaws, as the “safer bet.”

Much may hinge on the “final wild card” of the season, said Hans Nichols in Axios: Michigan’s Aug. 4 Senate Democratic primary between centrist Rep. Haley Stevens and “progressive insurgent” Abdul El-Sayed. A leftist Muslim with a habit of “equivocating about terrorism” may not be able to win in a Midwest swing state, said Nick Catoggio in The Dispatch. But will this “new red scare” really make the electorate as a whole forget 21 months of rising prices, ICE killings, weaponized government, and “lascivious corruption”? Socialism may be an “albatross” around Democrats’ necks, but “it’s likely less of one than Trump is for Republicans.”

What happened

The Iran war expanded further across the Middle East last week, as Saudi Arabia joined the U.S. in striking Iran-backed militias in Iraq, Yemen’s Iran-allied Houthi militant group hit Saudi tankers in the Red Sea, and a U.S.-owned natural gas storage tanker at an Egyptian port was set ablaze in a drone attack. In Riyadh’s first acknowledged involvement in the conflict, Saudi and American fighter jets attacked the Iraq-based Popular Mobilization Forces, an umbrella group of Iraqi militants, in retaliation for more than 30 drone attacks on Saudi oil facilities, which the U.S. accused Iran of directing. The U.S.-Saudi operation, which killed at least 20 fighters, came hours after Iran launched a surprise ballistic missile attack at American military sites in Jordan, shattering a days-long pause in fighting. The missiles were all intercepted, but the assault marked a shift in strategy for Iran, showing it was willing to go on the offensive and not simply respond to U.S. strikes. After the drone strike at Egypt’s Mediterranean port of Damietta, President Trump vowed to retaliate against Tehran, saying, “It’s our turn to hit them.”

In the southern Red Sea, the Houthis claimed at least four attacks on Saudi-linked tankers since announcing a maritime blockade of Saudi ports last month. Iran fired on three tankers it said were using an “illegal” route through the Strait of Hormuz—Saudi Arabia’s other major shipping route—and reportedly rejected a proposal from Oman to divide control of the strait and solicit voluntary fees.

What the columnists said

Iran’s escalating attacks “illustrate a fundamental shift” in the war, said Jared Malsin and Suha Ma’ayeh in The Wall Street Journal. The hard-line Revolutionary Guard “exerts more power than ever in Tehran,” and “has grown more assertive and more comfortable with a state of war that could continue for months.” It suits them better than a peace in which they’d have to confront public anger over Iran’s “struggling economy.” Their “zero sum” stance makes any agreement to end the war even more remote, and “heightens the risk of more-frequent rounds of escalation.”

Trump has been told that “a return to major combat operations would be a hugely risky endeavor,” said Eric Schmitt and Jonathan Swan in The New York Times. At a meeting with Cabinet members and top advisers last month, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Dan Caine warned such an offensive would “dangerously deplete” the military’s stockpile of air defense munitions. Trump and aides “are also uneasy” about a widening war alienating Gulf allies vulnerable to Iranian attack, and a “growing energy crisis.” Sources say “few if any in Trump’s inner circle” believed “escalation was wise.”

That interceptor shortage could put “American troops at more risk,” said Ben Finley in the Associated Press. Our stockpile of Patriot interceptors has fallen from 2,330 before the war to as low as 759, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. And our stash of 452 THAAD interceptors has dropped by nearly 40%. To conserve inventories, the U.S. could “take more risks,” such as firing two rather than the standard three interceptors at incoming missiles. That might prove fatal for soldiers on the ground: Last month, three U.S. soldiers were killed in Jordan after an Iranian missile slipped through air defenses.

Meanwhile, growing hostilities between Iran and Ukraine show the war’s potential to “go global,” said Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times. Ukraine recently sank an Iranian vessel in the Caspian Sea it said was ferrying military cargo to Russia, drawing threats of retaliation from Tehran. Iran has supplied Russia with drones that have “killed a great many Ukrainians”; Ukraine says Russia in turn has given Iran intelligence to target American military assets. That “Ukrainians are clashing directly with Iran” is an ominous step toward a wider conflagration.

Trump is in a bind, said Andrew Egger in The Bulwark. Through months of negotiation, Iran has offered “a steady, ironclad” position, insisting on an end to sanctions, no nuclear concessions, and control of the Strait of Hormuz. Our flailing president has toggled between “two demonstrably failed positions: If we bomb the hell out of them, they’ll give us what we want. If we stop bombing them, they’ll give us what we want.” While he vacillates in the vain search for an exit strategy, the damage mounts. “Petroleum reserves, missile stockpiles, global trust in the U.S.-led world order—these are finite resources that are all being spent down at alarming rates.”

Green Township, Ohio

Covedale Gables is a 1921 8.5-acre Tudor estate in a Cincinnati suburb. The three-bedroom main house opens to a marble and limestone foyer that connects to a living room with stained-glass windows, wood-paneled walls, intricate plaster ceilings, and a solarium with a Venetian window; downstairs is a Prohibition-era speakeasy behind a hidden door.

The property includes a one-bedroom gatehouse, a patio with a fountain, mature trees, and yards. $999,900. Rakesh Ram, Coldwell Banker Realty, (513) 608-1199

Accord, N.Y.

On more than 4 acres in the Hudson Valley, this 1994 Brutalist-inspired home is part log cabin, part glass-and-steel cottage. The three-bedroom features a two-story glass wall, a central steel-and-concrete staircase, maple floors, exposed beams, and a minimalist, wood-clad chef’s kitchen.

Outside are a patio with a hot tub, stone walls, and access to woods and hiking; culture and dining in Kingston are about a half-hour away. $995,000. Kathryn Johnson, William Pitt Sotheby’s International Realty, (917) 826-7050

Santa Fe

This two-story 1978 adobe condo house is in the Llano Compound, a historic enclave. The one-bedroom home has exposed wood beams, a kiva fireplace, tile floors, a second kitchen fireplace, and a spiral staircase to an upstairs primary suite with wood floors and mountain views.

The lot includes a private, terraced stone patio. The Santa Fe Plaza downtown is a five-minute drive. $998,000. Skye Smith, Sotheby’s International Realty—Santa Fe—326 Grant Avenue Brokerage, (505) 470-1150

Bend, Ore.

In a central Oregon city known for outdoor activities, this 2012 three-bedroom Prairie-influenced Craftsman is on a tree-lined residential street. Vaulted ceilings top slate floors, wood-trimmed windows, oak built-ins, and a gas fireplace with ocher tiles; the primary suite has a coffered ceiling and heated bathroom floors.

The backyard includes a pergola over a patio, plus a fountain, raised garden beds, and a fenced yard. $749,900. Holly Perzynski, Windermere Real Estate/Luxury Portfolio International, (541) 241-4393

Oak Creek, Colo.

About 20 miles from Steamboat Springs and its ski resorts, this 2019 two-bedroom Scandinavian-modern mountain home is on 35 acres in the Yampa Valley. Its open-plan layout includes a freestanding wood-burning stove, pale wood floors, and a kitchen with a waterfall island and flat-front cabinets, plus a primary bedroom and bunk room.

Glass sliders open to a patio, a flat backyard, and an elevated deck surrounded by forest. Town is about 10 minutes away. $995,000. Cheryl Foote, Compass, (970) 846-6444

Palm Springs, Calif.

Located in the desert-modern Racquet Club Cottages West community designed by influential architect William F. Cody, this 1964 one-bedroom was gut-renovated in 2022.

At just over 500 square feet, the condo has walls of glass, a sleek kitchen with quartz counters and a Wolf induction range, and a bedroom nook. Outside are a covered patio with a breeze-block screen, a cactus garden, a lawn, and access to a shared pool. $495,000. Marc Lange, Equity Union, (760) 834-5484

‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ 

Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton (PG-13)

★★★

“Brand New Day might not be the most rambunctious or exciting of Tom Holland’s Spider-flicks,” said Brian Truitt in USA Today. Instead, the fourth of the actor’s Spider-Man solo outings “aims to be a little deeper than the average Marvel Cinematic Universe installment while trapping you in its gratifying web.” The story picks up nearly five years after the events of 2021’s No Way Home, in which Spidey/Peter Parker averted disaster by having himself erased from the memories of everyone who knew him, even MJ, his girlfriend. As he now continues fighting criminal types in New York City, most notably a baddie who can jump from body to body, he’s “dealing with more adult problems,” including his isolation.

Holland seems “invigorated by the dramatic shift, giving a dense, great performance, easily his best in this series,” said Brian Tallerico in RogerEbert.com. Eventually, however, Brand New Day “succumbs to one of the biggest problems of late-stage MCU: The feeling that it’s just preparation for more movies.” But while that’s true to a point, said Nick Schager in the Daily Beast, this film “figures out how to integrate its individual and big-picture concerns into a relatively seamless whole.” It weaves in Jon Bernthal’s Punisher as Peter’s ally, the two making “a well-matched pair, with the former’s aw-shucks nobility clashing humorously with the latter’s fascistic gruffness.” Sadie Sink, meanwhile, fills a new role that promises to help keep the story interesting. And so far, the Spidey saga is only getting better. With the “possible exception” of the second Tobey Maguire Spider-Man, Brand New Day rates as the wall crawler’s “best film to date.”

‘I Want Your Sex’

Directed by Gregg Araki (R)

★★★

“I don’t entirely understand how we got here,” said David Ehrlich in IndieWire, but apparently, “it’s up to a 66-year-old filmmaker to remind the young people of America that it’s OK to be horny.” In his first movie in over a decade, director Gregg Araki aims to convey that message by casting Cooper Hoffman as a timid college grad who, after signing on as an assistant to an anti-woke artist played by Olivia Wilde, can’t say no when she selects him to serve as her latest sex slave. Unsurprisingly, the pair’s S&M-style trysts turn out to be “more comic than carnal,” and while Araki has made films with more focus and verve, this one “at least offers plenty of delights to gawp at along the way.”

Hoffman and Wilde “sport a playful, teasing rapport,” and Wilde clearly enjoys playing a shameless user who thinks all art is a scam, said Tim Grierson in Screen Daily. But a distracting framing device informs viewers that the story ends in an apparent murder, and because Hoffman’s Elliot becomes overly enamored of his boss, I Want Your Sex “fails to deliver on its initial promise to be an irreverent, libidinous romp.” A prevailing “devil-may-care sensibility” mostly saves the film, said Bilge Ebiri in NYMag.com. Araki and his cast clearly are having fun, and that feeling proves contagious. “Who ultimately cares if they don’t quite stick the landing?”

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

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

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

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

‘Heartwood’ by Amity Gaige (2025)

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

‘Wild’ by Cheryl Strayed (2012)

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

‘Five’ by Ilona Bannister (2026)

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

‘Into the Wild’ by Jon Krakauer (1996)

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

‘A Good Person’ by Kirsten King (2026)

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

‘Atmosphere’ by Taylor Jenkins Reid (2025)

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

‘Oh Yeah?’ by Steve Lacy

★★★★

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

‘Daughter From Hell’ by Gracie Abrams

★★

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

‘New Avatar’ by Kelela

★★★

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bluffton, S.C.

This 2021 lodge-style home near the coast in the Lowcountry has a studio accessory dwelling unit (ADU) above a carriage-house garage with a covered front porch, wood floors, a full bath, and a galley kitchen.

The three-bedroom main home has marsh views, a double-height living room with reclaimed beams and a loft, and a kitchen with dolomite counters. A screened porch and balconies overlook the leafy property. $4,125,000. Amanda Cutrer, Palmetto Bluff Real Estate Company, (843) 874-3558.

Gladwyne, Pa.

Built in 1920, the Normandy-style Wooded Hill estate, on almost 7 acres in a Philadelphia suburb, has a refreshed contemporary two-bedroom guesthouse with a floor-to-ceiling art-piece fireplace, a sunroom, and a wall of windows.

The eight-bedroom central home has seven fireplaces, formal dining and living rooms, a billiards room, and a lower level with a theater and gym. The lot includes a pool, a golf green, formal gardens, and stone paths. $7,495,000. Lavinia Smerconish, Compass, (610) 547-6637.

Santa Monica, Calif.

In the Ocean Park neighborhood, this 1911 expanded and updated one-story Craftsman shares a lot with a 2004 one-bedroom modern guesthouse with polished concrete floors, a second-level deck, and oversize windows.

The two-bedroom main home has coffered ceilings, roofline windows, stained glass, and glass doors that open to a fenced courtyard with a mature sycamore and an orange tree. The Santa Monica Pier is about a 10-minute drive. $3,350,000. Mike Deasy and Sara Clephane, Compass, (310) 275-8880.

West Coxsackie, N.Y.

Haas Hill, a more than 148- acre estate in the Hudson Valley, includes a renovated twostory cottage circa 1950 with a full bath and kitchenette, plus a cabin set up as a kids’ bunkhouse. The main Englishcountry-style home has three bedrooms, a kitchen with a new AGA stove, heated terra-cotta floors, and a built-in banquette.

The wooded property features a pool, barn, and wildflower garden. $2,450,000. Raj Kumar, Four Seasons Sotheby’s International Realty, (201) 689-0533.

Woodbury, Ga.

The Cove, a 136-plus-acre property along the Pine Mountain Escarpment and Flint River about 45 miles from Columbus, has a main lodge and three furnished guest buildings, including the one seen here, with vaulted wood ceilings and a bay window reading nook.

The main three-bedroom has an open plan with a stone fireplace and water-facing deck. Also on the grounds are five ponds, waterfalls, a pool and spa, a tennis court, a dock, and a boathouse. $4,400,000. Jon Kohler, Jon Kohler & Associates, (850) 508-2999.

Thornton, Colo.

About 20 minutes north of Denver, this 1955 ranch home has a chalet studio ADU with a bed nook, a pass-through galley kitchen, laundry, and a deck.

Across a fenced, xeriscaped courtyard with fountains is the two-bedroom main home, which has an open living area and a kitchen with a granite peninsula and sliders to the back. A pool, community center, and park are walking distance. $515,000. Kim Davis, LIV Sotheby’s International Realty, (303) 882-0888.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul understands what her constituents want, said Sara Pequeño in USA Today. The Democrat recently imposed a one-year moratorium on the construction of large AI data centers, giving state regulators breathing space to write new rules intended to limit the effect these “gigantic eyesores” have on power grids, water supplies, and local communities. It’s the “right move—and a politically savvy one.” While many lawmakers support data center projects, claiming they’ll “bring jobs and economic activity to their municipalities,” voters aren’t buying it. They know these buildings are noisy, generate a lot of air pollution, use up tons of water, and are causing electricity bills to skyrocket. More Democrats should follow Hochul’s example, said Tressie McMillan Cottom in The New York Times. In our “virulently partisan” era, “rage against data centers” is one of the only issues that unites ordinary voters on the Left and the Right. At the grassroots level, the opposition includes eco activists, soccer moms, farmers, and hardcore MAGA types. If Democrats can harness this energy and “anti-establishment sentiment,” they could create “a political movement that wins elections.”

This resistance is about more than just NIMBYism, said The Economist. A Pew survey from April found that “Americans who have merely heard of data centers are just as opposed to them as those who live within 5 miles of one.” It’s because of the fears of what data centers represent: the growth of artificial intelligence that could “doom humanity by hoovering up all its resources and paving Earth with servers.” Tech leaders are partly to blame for this mess, because they’ve spent years warning that their AI tools will “throw most people out of work” or be used to inflict “mass harm.” Now that the infrastructure needed to achieve their AI revolution “is arriving on people’s doorsteps,” who can blame Americans for wanting to slow the progress?

But this is “blocking development that would benefit” their communities, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. New York’s green mandates and resistance to building new generation plants have reduced the state’s electricity supply and caused prices to rise—not AI data centers. Hochul also leaves out the fact that “data centers can also deliver a property tax windfall” along with thousands of jobs. AI is set to be “fracking all over again,” said the New York Post. New York banned the energy-extraction practice “on the basis of bogus environmental concerns,” and as a result the state lost out on “tens of thousands of jobs and literally trillions in wealth” that went next door to Pennsylvania. Now, billions of dollars in investment are going to AI-friendly Pennsylvania, all because “New York is banning progress.”

“I can’t imagine a world without books,” said Nicole Russell in USA Today. But most Americans already “live in that world.” That’s the “devastating” takeaway from a viral new story in The Atlantic, which details why “the age of reading is over.” It notes that the number of Americans who read for pleasure has dropped more than 40% over 20 years — the decline cuts across age groups, gender, and education levels — and that fewer than half of adults read a single book a year. Reading progress for elementary students has stalled and only about a third of high school seniors are “proficient” at analyzing complex fictional themes. We can blame smartphones, social media, and short-form videos, all of which deliver “perpetual hits of dopamine” at the expense of the deeper analysis and comprehension gained by reading. It’s no wonder President Trump was re-elected, said Marsha Lederman in The Globe and Mail (Canada). When the electorate relies on TikTok for knowledge, “you get today’s dumbed-down, polarized world on fire.”

Reading is not “going extinct,” said David Wallace-Wells in The New York Times. Yes, fewer Americans are reading for pleasure, but those who do are reading more. Book sales are near-record highs; there are now 70% more independent bookstores than in 2020; and the amount of time that young Americans spend reading has actually crept up from 8.4 minutes a day in 2003 to 11.7 minutes in 2022. And let’s not pretend there was ever a golden age of reading, said Joel J. Miller in his Substack newsletter. In the supposedly idyllic pre-smartphone age, the best sellers were often genre junk and millions of Americans “read nothing, read little, read badly, or read mainly to kill time.” Worrying about the future is “easy to do when you romanticize the past.”

My worry is we’re not alarmed enough, said Rod Dreher in his Substack newsletter. Hitler came to power in a highly literate Germany, but the Nazis took advantage of movies and radio to push simple messages with immediate emotional impact. We know how that ended, and in our postliterate age, a future dictator would “have an incomparably easier time of it.” Don’t believe me? Consider “the college students who are being memed into hating Jews” by social media. And things will only get worse as more people use AI to digest, analyze, and make judgments on everything from study papers to legal documents and news reports. By giving up on the hard work of reading, Americans “are training themselves not to think, but to obey.”

How many sailors are in the Gulf?

About 6,000 seafarers are stuck onboard several hundred tankers and cargo ships, many of which have been stranded in the Gulf since the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran erupted in late February. “It’s as if we are trapped in a pond,” Shafiqul Islam, captain of a ship carrying some 37,000 tons of fertilizer bound for South Africa, told the BBC last month. “There’s only one way out.” That’s via the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway between Iran and Oman through which 20% of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas—as well as shipments of crucial commodities including fertilizer, aluminum, and helium—once flowed from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Iraq, and Iran to global markets. Before the war, more than 100 ships a day transited the strait, which is 21 miles wide at its tightest point. After hostilities began, Iran declared the waterway closed and launched missiles and drones at vessels trying to sail through, grinding traffic to a halt. At one point, up to 20,000 mariners and 2,000 ships were stuck in the Gulf, with only a few vessels squeezing through the strait each day.

How were they able to get out?

India, China, Pakistan, and other countries negotiated with Tehran for safe passage for their flagged vessels, and some tanker operators paid Iran up to $2 million for transit rights for individual ships. The logjam in the Gulf eased in June after Washington and Tehran struck a preliminary peace deal, after which about 30 ships a day were able to move through the strait. But that number dropped back to single digits earlier this month after the war restarted. For the sailors stuck in this war zone—many of whom hail from the Philippines, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Ukraine—the fear of death or injury is a constant. “Everyone is just exhausted,” said captain Hassan Khan, “both physically and mentally.” While standing on ships often loaded with highly explosive substances, the crews have watched missiles and drones streak overhead, and more than a dozen mariners have been killed in Iranian and U.S. strikes. Raman Kapoor, a tanker captain who had 10 days left on his tour when war erupted, watched helplessly in March as a nearby tanker exploded in flames after being hit by an unmanned craft. One crew member died. “Everyone was so scared,” Kapoor said. “We are just seafarers. We are not trained for any war.”

What are days like onboard?

Long, monotonous, and hot. While the crews work to ensure their ships remain seaworthy, and movies and ping-pong serve as distractions, staving off boredom and depression is a struggle. “We do our best to keep [up] morale,” Abhijit Chopra, the captain of a tanker that’s been stuck for more than 120 days, told Bloomberg. “But there is definitely a sense of strain and uncertainty.” To entertain themselves and add some diversity to onboard meals, some crews are catching and cooking fish; they report that dried ribbonfish is surprisingly delicious. Calls home are a boon, but infrequent, because satellite phone time is limited and expensive. To protect sailors’ mental health, captains encourage crews to do everything together and to never leave anyone alone—even when they dine or relax. Sailors report that access to knives and other sharp objects is more tightly controlled than normal, to prevent people from harming themselves or others. Meanwhile, food, water, and medicine on many vessels is running low.

Is anything being done about that?

Boats from nearby ports are delivering supplies, but prices keep going up. One Korean sailor told the BBC that it feels like suppliers “are trying to take advantage of the situation to make excessive profits.” The engineer of one ship said the cost of 180 tons of water has spiked in recent months from about $2,000 to $11,000. Price gouging isn’t the only way people are taking advantage of the stranded vessels. Scammers claiming to belong to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard have also tricked shipping firms into sending hefty payments to their cryptocurrency wallets in exchange for safe passage.

Have there been any evacuation attempts?

A short-lived one. While a ceasefire was in effect in late June, the U.N.’s International Maritime Organization began ushering ships through the strait’s southern and northern corridors—avoiding the central lanes where Iran had laid mines. Some 130 ships and 3,000 sailors made it out, but the U.S.-backed initiative was scrapped within days after Iran attacked a tanker that was not taking part in the evacuation off Oman’s coast. Some sailors have taken matters into their own hands. Stuck at an Iranian port, Santosh Kumar borrowed nearly $7,000 to pay an agent to drive him to neighboring Armenia, where he boarded a flight to Dubai and then on to his native India. “My family just wanted me home alive,” he said. But such escapes have become increasingly difficult: Some Gulf Arab states have restricted short-term shore passes for sailors over security concerns. Many merchant sailors are now wondering if the profession has become too dangerous, because the Iran war is only the latest crisis to ensnare the shipping industry.

What were the other crises?

Mariners were stranded at sea during the pandemic, and drone attacks on vessels in the Black Sea have become routine since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Iran’s Houthi allies in Yemen—who attacked more than 100 vessels during the HamasIsrael war—this week declared an embargo of Saudi Arabian shipping in the Red Sea, putting more commercial vessels in the line of fire. Merchant sailors seem increasingly wary of going to sea: Companies have struggled to secure replacement crews to relieve sailors in the Gulf whose contracts have expired, despite offering monthly salaries of up to $30,000. The war, said IMO Secretary-General Arsenio Dominguez, has shown that “people take seafarers for granted, they don’t value them.”

If there’s anything Donald Trump enjoys more than “relitigating the 2020 election,” said Peter Baker in The New York Times, it’s “finding ways to cast doubt on the 2026 election.” The president did both this month, giving a primetime address to the nation in which he called the U.S. electoral system “so broken and vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it.” Debuting a new conspiracy theory of how his 2020 loss was “rigged,” Trump accused China of having “bought, stolen, or hacked” millions of voter registration files in the run-up to that election. As for the validity of this November’s midterms—a likely “drubbing” for Republicans—Trump offered a grab bag of predicates for disputing the results, including the claim that at least 278,000 noncitizens are registered to vote in federal elections. In a curious move, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial, the White House released a trove of intelligence documents that actually undermine Trump’s claims. The reports showed that the data China acquired was publicly available, and that Beijing largely stayed on the sidelines in 2020. As for the foreigners registered to vote, that claim relies on a dataset that’s plagued with errors. So why give this speech at all? It’s too late to enact Trump’s SAVE America Act package of voting restrictions in time for the midterms, and his supporters may now be wondering whether they should bother going to the polls in November, if our elections are as “catastrophically” broken as Trump claims.

In fairness, said Tom Nichols in The Atlantic, Trump’s documents do prove that one hostile foreign power “engaged in operations against” the 2020 election. That nation is Russia, which the declassified reports state used a “range of measures” to boost Trump’s chances in 2020, from spreading rumors about Joe Biden’s supposed “criminal activity” in Ukraine to flooding social media with Trump-loving bots. Of course, our Putin-fan president didn’t mention the Russian autocrat in his speech. But he did emulate him, said Nick Catoggio in The Dispatch, issuing “fascist threats” to revoke the broadcast licenses of “fake news” networks ABC and NBC for the crime of declining to carry his lie-filled speech live.

We know why Trump gave this speech, said Brian Tyler Cohen in The Bulwark. In February, The Washington Post reported that Trump allies had drafted a 17-page executive order that would let him use the “pretext” of foreign interference to declare a “national emergency.” Trump could then dispatch troops or ICE agents to polling places, and even seize voting machines. If Democrats rush to block the order in court, Trump could point to his recent speech—its “nonsensical” content notwithstanding—as proof that he was warning of foreign meddling as far back as July.

Trump’s attempted theft of the midterms is already underway, said Zolan Kanno-Youngs in The New York Times, and he’s using “the full arsenal of the federal government.” Led by “election deniers and loyalists,” the FBI and CIA are hunting for pretexts to discredit state election officials, while Justice Department lawyers craft legal arguments to prosecute them. Even the Postal Service is floating a Trump-approved plan to roll back mail-in voting. These are perilous times, said David A. Graham in The Atlantic, but “a close election is easier to steal than a decisive one.” Trump’s speech removed any doubt that he intends to sow “chaos” in November. Instead of discouraging Americans, that should inspire us to turn out in overwhelming numbers, and vote like our democracy depends on it.

What happened

Lawmakers in Washington recently demanded that the Trump administration outline its strategy in Iran, as a war that President Trump had vowed would end quickly approached its sixth month and spread further beyond the Persian Gulf. In the first U.S. casualties since March, three American soldiers were killed in a missile attack on a military base in Jordan earlier this month. The next day, a fourth soldier died in Iraq during the controlled detonation of a downed Iranian drone, bringing total U.S. deaths to 18. In response, the U.S. intensified its assault on Iran, hitting bridges and rail lines as well as missile and drone launch sites and air defense facilities. Iran stepped up its attacks on U.S. regional allies, striking a water desalination plant in Kuwait and a U.S. air base and an Amazon data center in Bahrain; the Revolutionary Guard also fired on a tanker in the Strait of Hormuz, forcing the crew to evacuate. President Trump vowed the U.S. would “destroy one bridge or power plant” each time Iran targets a ship in the waterway, through which 20% of the world’s oil once flowed.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was pressed on U.S. strategy during a contentious appearance before the Senate appropriations committee. Hegseth, who put the war’s current price tag at $37.5 billion, urged Congress to approve $67 billion in emergency defense funding and warned that the Pentagon would face “critical shortfalls” without the money. Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said Democrats would not bankroll “this war and whatever other misadventures Trump wants to get us into”; Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) called for “hard answers” about plans to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Hegseth insisted the U.S. had the upper hand, but Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) said Hegseth and the administration had “failed” U.S. troops, adding, “You don’t have a long-term plan to actually win this war.

Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi militia vowed to block Saudi Arabian ships from exiting the Red Sea and deployed drones and missiles near the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, leading energy analysts to warn that oil prices— which spiked $20 this month to $95 a barrel—could go even higher. Attempts by mediators to secure a 10-day ceasefire and reopen the Strait of Hormuz made no apparent progress. Until Iran is “ready to meet in a meaningful way,” said Trump, “we have no interest."

What the columnists said

The Iran war “has entered a bleak new phase,” said Megan Messerly and Alex Gangitano in Politico. Trump allies fear the president is running out of ways to extricate America from an unpopular conflict ahead of the midterms. With average gas prices hitting $4 a gallon for the first time since June, Republicans say the war could sink them “in an election that is expected to hinge on costof-living issues.” Even among Trump’s MAGA base, 37% said in a new Politico poll that the U.S. should hold course in Iran only if it doesn’t raise costs.

Trump’s war will only “get harder and harder to defend,” said Zeeshan Aleem in MS.now. Nearly 100 troops have been injured over the past few weeks as Iran ramped up attacks on U.S. bases, and the war’s “human toll is likely to increase.” The Pentagon has been slow to release information on casualties, likely because it knows “the war will become even more widely despised as more people die.” The public will swallow casualties in a campaign they support, but won’t tolerate troops dying “for no obvious reason at all.”

Iran, it turns out, “may be stronger than we thought,” said Joshua Keating in Vox. Contrary to previous assurances by the Trump administration, Iran retains “significant missile and drone capabilities,” with 70% of its prewar missile stockpile intact, according to a recent intelligence report. Meanwhile, there are “growing questions about whether U.S. air defense capabilities are depleting.”

A Houthi blockade of the Bab al-Mandeb Strait could widen the war and “further disrupt global oil supplies and international trade,” said Fatma Khaled and Ahmed Al-Haj in The Associated Press. Sitting at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, the strait serves as a conduit for about 12% of global trade and has become even more vital for Saudi oil exports following the shuttering of the Strait of Hormuz. The Houthis say they’ll stop only ships connected to Saudi Arabia, but even the threat of attack could drive up insurance premiums and deter other ships from using the route.

The conflict now “stands on a knife’s edge,” said Erika Solomon in The New York Times. We’re at a critical moment where both sides must find a way to dial back the hostilities or “risk provoking a war that cascades beyond what they may be able to contain.” With Iran’s economy in tatters and Trump under mounting domestic pressure, “the costs of accelerating the conflict are high for both sides.” But the same factors that make escalation dangerous are “pushing them to riskier attacks,” as they seek to gain leverage.

“Trump has only terrible choices,” said Brynn Tannehill in The Atlantic. With hard-line leaders and “a captive population” accustomed to “economic pain,” Iran is unlikely to bend. Facing that reality, Trump can “stay the course,” with scant odds of success. He can declare victory and walk away. He can ratchet up the pain by targeting civilian infrastructure, which would draw Iranian retaliation against Arab states and make the U.S. a pariah. Or he can launch a ground invasion, and pay a steep price in blood. It boils down to “an unpalatable choice between accepting Iranian hegemony over the strait—or initiating cycles of escalation that cannot end well.”

Apple just declared war on OpenAI, said Rolfe Winkle in The Wall Street Journal. In a lawsuit filed last week, the iPhone maker accused the artificial-intelligence startup of a corporate espionage campaign “at every level.” It claims that former Apple engineer Chang Liu kept a company MacBook after joining OpenAI and exploited a software flaw to access Apple servers and download privileged data—while allegedly bragging about it. “LOL, I found out I can access the [network storage], so funny,” said Liu in one text message. Apple also alleges that OpenAI’s hardware chief, Tang Tan, who worked at Apple for 24 years as a key product designer, solicited confidential information from current and former Apple employees during interviews and even encouraged poached employees to bring “actual parts” for “show and tell.” Tan has worked closely with Jony Ive, the industrial artist who designed the iPhone, at io products, which OpenAI bought in 2025 to develop “a mystery device” aimed at supplanting existing smartphones. OpenAI said that it takes the allegations in Apple’s suit “seriously,” but is “not aware of any evidence that this complaint has merit.”

This is just Apple’s m.o., said Patrick McGee in The Free Press. It’s “not the first time Apple used litigation as a weapon.” In 2010, Steve Jobs declared “thermonuclear war” on Google after calling Android devices a “stolen product.” Tim Cook “looks to be using the same playbook.” But Apple isn’t upset only about the fact that “OpenAI harbors ambitions to be a hardware company.” It’s that OpenAI is pursuing them “with former Apple employees it has been relentlessly poaching.” Twice now “OpenAI has aligned itself with a leading tech giant,” said Peter Kafka in Business Insider, “and ended up in a messy breakup.” The first big rift was with Microsoft, which was OpenAI’s most crucial ally—until OpenAI started making deals with Amazon behind Microsoft’s back. Apple, too, once had an agreement to integrate ChatGPT into its iPhone software. But that ended once it became clear OpenAI was building an iPhone rival. It’s a disturbing pattern that raises questions about the AI firm’s leadership. If I’m a Big Tech executive who’s working with OpenAI, I’d have many “reasons to fret.”

The timing couldn’t be worse for OpenAI, said Hayden Field in The Verge. Most AI leaders have “at least one lawsuit or accusation to their name.” But for OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, it’s been a “roller-coaster six months full of drama.” The company has faced multiple lawsuits, including ones from co-founder Elon Musk, the families of young people negatively affected by ChatGPT, and The New York Times over copyright infringement. Altman said he’s “not afraid of Apple,” but perhaps he should be. Apple is a “tenacious litigant” that doesn’t like to back down.

OpenAI never stood a chance of toppling the iPhone anyway, said Dave Lee in Bloomberg. The challenges—from design to integration to mass production and distribution—“are insurmountable.” It wanted a big consumer splash to pair with its initial public offering. But Apple has perhaps forced OpenAI “to give up the folly sooner rather than later,” a change of course that could save it “billions of its desperately needed dollars.” It may look back at this episode as a blessing in disguise.