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

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

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

The Supreme Court has authorized Republican-run states “to disenfranchise Black voters,” said Adam Serwer in The Atlantic. A 6-3 majority, split along ideological lines, ruled two weeks ago in Louisiana v. Callais that a Louisiana redistricting map that created two majority-Black districts out of six, in a state whose population is one-third Black, was an “unconstitutional racial gerrymander.” The decision effectively gutted Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, “which prohibits racial discrimination in voting.” Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion was steeped in “reactionary color blindness”—pretending to be neutral about race in order to preserve an unjust racial hierarchy. Alito argued that states are only in violation of the VRA if they draw districts to intentionally disadvantage minority voters. If states seek partisan advantage in redistricting, Alito said, that’s constitutional under a 2019 Supreme Court ruling—as if disadvantaging Democrats doesn’t also disadvantage Blacks. In other words, according to Chief Justice John Roberts and his allies, “preventing Louisiana from disenfranchising Black voters is racist.”

As a result of this “mind-boggling piece of judicial overreach,” said The New York Times in an editorial, red states like Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi can “slice minority voters into small and powerless slivers,” so long as they claim race isn’t the reason. Once again, the court obviously “acted more like partisan legislators than like impartial judges”: Its six conservative justices, all nominated by Republicans, “have most likely made it easier for the party that chose them to hold power in Congress.

“The Voting Rights Act was a landmark of American liberty that helped to break Jim Crow,” said The Wall Street Journal, but it’s not 1965 anymore. As Alito noted, “Black voters now participate in elections at similar rates as the rest of the electorate.” This ruling will finally help end Democrats’ “partisan abuse of race to carve up congressional districts.” In the name of preventing the “dilution” of Black votes, Louisiana was compelled to draw up a preposterous majority-minority district that snakes 250 miles across the state. In their dissents, said Jason Willick in The Washington Post, the three liberal justices conflated the right to vote with the “right to have the satisfaction of voting for the winner.” Sometimes—say, for Republicans in San Francisco or Democrats in Wyoming—our preferred candidates lose, and we have to “accept the outcome of the legislative process anyway.” In a representative democracy, being “outnumbered” is not the same as being “disenfranchised.”

The reality is that Callais “will be devastating for communities of color,” said Ari Berman in Mother Jones. During the Jim Crow era, Black Americans had essentially no representation in Congress, even in Southern states with large Black populations. But with the forceful support of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, the VRA put an end to decades of “white supremacy and one-party rule” across the South. As Justice Elena Kagan put it in an anguished dissent, the law “was born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers.” She pointed out that the VRA has proved so essential in “bringing this Nation closer to fulfilling the ideals of democracy and racial equality” that Congress has reauthorized it five times—including in 2006, when the Senate voted 98-0. By rendering the law toothless, the court will likely “trigger the largest drop in Black representation since the end of Reconstruction.” And legal recourse will be all but impossible, said Erwin Chemerinsky in the Los Angeles Times. In theory, states can still be sued if they draw districts to discriminate by race. But as Kagan put it, without “smoking-gun evidence of a race-based motive”—a prospect she deemed “almost fanciful”— the law is now moot.

The court’s ruling will trigger an all-out redistricting war, said Ian Millhiser in Vox. “Callais is such an effusive love letter to the concept of partisan gerrymandering” that states will have no fear of rigging districts to favor the party in power. Louisiana, with the Supreme Court’s blessing, has already delayed its primaries so it can redraw its map, while Tennessee’s GOP governor called a special session to discuss doing the same. Republican-controlled Alabama may follow suit. Democrats will respond in kind, said Andrew Egger in The Bulwark. Many in the party are “pledging to continue the fight-fire-with-fire approach they’ve carried out successfully over the last year” in California and Virginia. By 2028, both red and blue states may eliminate most or all congressional seats held by the minority party. How is this absurd “gerrymandering tit-for-tat” good for democracy? Will anyone in Congress dare “to find some anti-gerrymandering measures on which there’s an appetite for bipartisan agreement”? If Americans are sick of this partisan race to the bottom, they should demand it.

How has Mississippi improved?

For years, Southern states with struggling education systems could console themselves: No matter how poorly they were doing, they weren’t as bad as Mississippi. Just 12 years ago, Mississippi ranked 48th in K-12 education, based on metrics like attendance, reading proficiency, and on-time graduation. Now the state is no longer a punch line. It’s up to 16th in K-12 rankings and has achieved particular success in fourth-grade reading comprehension, jumping all the way to the top 10 in the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP). When adjusting for poverty and other demographic factors, Mississippi actually tops the nation in that category. Crucially, improvements are seen among students at all reading levels, “rather than just among higher achieving or lower achieving students,” says Dan McGrath, a retired federal education official who oversaw the tests. “It’s as if Mississippi had moved a mountain.” And it did this despite spending just $12,000 per student, much less than the national average.

What did it change?

Mississippi passed the Literacy-Based Promotion Act in 2013, paving the way for implementing the “science of reading” in K-3 classrooms. This multifaceted approach—which involves teaching phonics, word recognition, vocabulary, and text comprehension—gets much of the credit for the state’s turnaround, but it’s just one tenet of the law. Accountability, from both students and schools, is another. Mississippi grades its schools A to F and sends coaches to train teachers in low-performing ones. Students get to see and track their own testing data. “I like it,” one pupil, Johnny, told The New York Times. “If I make a bad grade, but I’m going up, it’s like a staircase.” At the end of third grade, those who don’t pass a literacy exam after multiple attempts are automatically held back. That “third-grade gate” has drawn praise as a tough but beneficial rule that’s paying off: a record 77.3% of third graders passed the initial administration last year. Yet it also has its share of critics.

What do they say?

They say Mississippi has stacked its deck. Of course all the fourth graders can read, they say—the kids who couldn’t were kept back in third grade. In 2023, fully 7% of Mississippi third graders, over 2,000 kids, were held back. One study in the statistics journal Significance said Mississippi’s approach amounts to “gaming the system.” Others point out that Mississippi scores didn’t even improve much, it’s just that other states got worse. Still, some research indicates that something real is happening. A Florida State University study found compulsory grade repetition alone can’t explain higher test scores. Mississippi’s literacy gains have also remained consistent across every decile on the NAEP exam. A 90th-percentile score, for instance, leaped from 249 in 2005 to 262 in 2024, and a 10th-percentile score from 157 to 170. Andrew Ho, a testing expert at Harvard, told ChalkBeat that he doesn’t “see any smoking guns or red flags” around Mississippi’s success. That’s why other states are starting to copy it.

What are other states doing?

Across the South, states from Louisiana to Virginia have adopted at least some of Mississippi’s strategies, including teacher-training methods, curriculum reform, and high standards. Florida, Indiana, North Carolina, and Oklahoma have even copied the third-grade gate approach. Now Louisiana leads the country in recovery from pandemic-related losses in reading, while Alabama takes the crown for math recovery. These states particularly shine when NAEP scores are adjusted for demographics. After considering factors like poverty and race, the Urban Institute think tank determined, Mississippi tops the nation in fourth-grade reading, fourth-grade math, and eighth-grade math, and it’s fourth in eighth-grade reading. Still, not everyone is satisfied with Mississippi’s middle-school progress.

What happened in middle school?

If you don’t adjust for demographics, Mississippi eighth graders rank a dismal 41st in reading. Things are getting better—between 2013 and 2022, its eighth graders cut their gap with the national average in half—but the pace has been slower than in lower grades. That’s hardly a surprise, since the 2013 law focused specifically on improving early-education literacy. The state hasn’t invested the same time, money, and resources into middle-school reading, the time when literacy instruction shifts from “learning to read” to “reading to learn.” Critics say Mississippi needs to ensure that older children can read—and that students’ math skills get the same attention as their reading skills.

Is the state planning to do that?

Mississippi is now looking to pass a bill that would expand the 2013 literacy reforms into higher grades. The teachers tend to appreciate the help from literacy coaches, Mississippi education official Tenette Smith says. “We hear from teachers and administrators who say, ‘I didn’t know what I didn’t know.’” The state also seeks to adopt similar reforms for primary-school mathematics, mandating math coaches in all schools, prioritizing grades 2-6, and placing a cutoff gate for fifth grade so that only students who are ready will move on to sixth-grade algebra classes. Pilot programs are already underway to improve reading comprehension in upper grades. While it’s too soon to tell whether those efforts will pay off longterm, the early test results are promising. The Mississippi miracle is “proof positive that, yes, children in poverty can learn and can succeed,” said Carey Wright, Mississippi’s former superintendent of education. “As educators, our job is to do whatever it takes.”

What happened

In a display of President Trump’s continued grip on the Republican base, at least five of the seven challengers he backed in last week’s Indiana GOP state Senate primaries ousted incumbents who defied a White House redistricting push. The defeated Republicans, branded “RINOS” (Republicans in name only) by Trump, joined Indiana Democrats last December in voting down a new congressional map designed to give the GOP two additional House seats. An irate Trump called for the holdouts to be primaried, and pro-Trump PACs funded an attack-ad blitz, turning what would typically be low-key races into a $13.5 million battle royale. Among the losers were Travis Holdman, the Indiana Senate’s third most powerful Republican, and Jim Buck, who had held his seat since 1994. “There’s a big message here,” said U.S. Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.). “It’s Donald Trump’s Republican Party.”

Trump scored another win in neighboring Ohio, where the gubernatorial candidate he endorsed, Vivek Ramaswamy, trounced his primary competitor to set up a showdown with Democratic nominee Amy Acton in November. Democrat Sherrod Brown also secured a chance to return to the Senate after a 2024 loss. He’ll square off with appointed GOP incumbent Jon Husted in a special election to fill Vice President JD Vance’s vacated seat through 2028. Ohio has established itself as a red state over the past decade, but early polling suggests both races could be competitive. One Republican operative close to Husted called Brown a “tough out,” adding “we’ve got our work cut out for us.”

What the columnists said

“Indiana’s primaries were a referendum on Trumpism,” said James Briggs in The Indianapolis Star, and “Trumpism prevailed.” The president’s challengers not only won, they did so handily, their margins ranging from 18 to 50 percentage points. You “gotta hand it to him.” Despite “the wreckage of his second term,” Trump remains a genius campaigner, “a singular figure who can make it rain on obscure state legislative elections because they happen to be important to him personally.”

These results “carry implications well beyond Indianapolis,” said Hunter Woodall and Ebony Davis in MS.now. Other Republican-controlled states are “facing similar redistricting pressure” from the White House, and South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, and Louisiana all seem good bets to redraw their maps. Now any GOP state legislators on the gerrymandering fence “have a fresh example” of what awaits them should they cross Trump.

Democrats also have reason to celebrate, said William Kristol in The Bulwark. Their candidate won a Michigan state Senate seat by 20 points in a working-class district, continuing “a trend of notable Democratic overperformance.” The Republican elections were about “loyalty to Trump,” whose popularity is sinking. Recent polling pegs his approval rating at around 37%. A GOP that’s completely in thrall to him might actually “increase the likelihood of voters turning to Democratic candidates” in the midterms.

What happened

U.S. policy on Iran whipsawed last week, with President Trump telling Tehran to accept a peace deal or face a new wave of bombing, soon after he’d hailed “great progress” in talks and halted a military operation to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Trump had announced that, in a “humanitarian gesture,” the U.S. would guide merchant ships through the strait, a key oil export route that has been effectively shuttered by Iran since the start of the nine-week-old war. Any interference with “Project Freedom” would be met “forcefully,” Trump said. But as U.S. warships escorted two commercial vessels through the strait, Iran launched a barrage of missiles and drones. None of the ships were damaged, and U.S. attack helicopters sank six Iranian military speedboats; Iranian strikes hit a major oil hub in the United Arab Emirates and at least two commercial ships in the Persian Gulf. Trump declined to say Iran had violated a four-week ceasefire, calling the clash a “mini war.” A day later he paused Project Freedom, citing movement toward a “complete and final” agreement with Tehran.

Trump’s U-turn came hours after Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that “Operation Epic Fury is concluded” and that the war’s objectives had been achieved, despite Iran’s continuing choke hold on the strait and the lack of any deal over its nuclear program. Axios reported that U.S. officials believe they are nearing an agreement with Tehran on a one-page “memorandum of understanding” to end the war and set the stage for detailed negotiations. The war will end “assuming Iran agrees to give what has been agreed to,” Trump posted online, “which is, perhaps, a big assumption.” If they don’t, he said, bombing will resume, “at a much higher level and intensity.”

What the columnists said

Both sides are working with mediators to craft a 14-point “framework,” said Benoit Faucon in The Wall Street Journal. The working version calls for Iran to begin opening the strait and the U.S. to wind down its blockade of Iranian ports during 30 days of talks. Iran is said to be willing to discuss a possible halt to uranium enrichment and the removal of some of its stockpile of near-weapons grade uranium to a third country—but not the U.S. Divisions within Iran’s leadership could prove a roadblock, said Barak Ravid in Axios. Given the challenge of uniting disparate factions, some U.S. officials are “skeptical that even an initial deal will be reached.”

Project Freedom had two objectives, said Chas Danner in New York. One was to pressure Iran to fully open the strait and free 1,600 commercial ships stuck in the Persian Gulf, which failed miserably. The other was “a cynical attempt to rebrand the war,” which became illegal once it hit 60 days without congressional authorization. The administration wants the public to believe the offensive has ended and that the U.S. is now engaged in an entirely different “defensive” operation to open the strait.

The administration can say whatever it wants, but that “does not make it true,” said David E. Sanger in The New York Times. The war is not over. And its objectives have not been met. Trump cited five at the outset, including regime change and ensuring Iran can “never have a nuclear weapon.” Only one goal, disabling Iran’s navy, has been achieved. But the war has become a “political crisis,” and the White House is anxious to put it “in the rearview mirror.”

Americans can see the cost of this war everywhere, said Scott Waldman and Ben Lefebvre in Politico. Gas hit an average of $4.54 a gallon this week, up $1.56 since fighting began in February, and diesel hit $5.67, up $1.91. The spike in diesel, which powers trucks and trains, “in turn is expected to drive up prices for everything from groceries to postage.” Trump’s disapproval rating is climbing as well, hitting a record 62% in a new poll, said Scott Clement and Dan Balz in The Washington Post. Americans disapprove of his handling of the war by 66% to 33%, and his approval rating on the economy has dropped to 34%.

“There are now only two outcomes to the conflict,” said Scott Anderson in The New York Times. With Iran not about to cave, Trump can resume hostilities. But that seems unlikely, and “no amount of bombing” will change the fact that Iran has gained control of the strait and the ability to “paralyze the global economy.” The alternative is a settlement that will leave the “empowered” Iranian regime intact and “a blustering American president humiliated.” Operation Epic Fury is now looking more like “Operation Colossal Blunder.”

Travis Heights

The Academy, an 1889 shingle-style Victorian, was once a military school and inhabited by a Texas Supreme Court justice. Built with leftover granite from the state capitol, the five-bedroom has original details such as Majolica-tiled fireplaces, bronze hardware, and detailed woodwork, plus stained glass, a claw-foot tub, and a cupola deck with city views.

On an acre with landscaping, the home is near a park and the Colorado River. $7,900,000. Kathryn Scarborough, Engel & Völkers Austin, (512) 970-1355

Westlake Highlands

Built in 1982, this renovated modern estate is about 15 minutes from downtown. The four-bedroom post-and-beam home, made with local materials, has a main area with oak floors and a kitchen with concrete counters.

On the more than 1-acre property are a two-story apartment with a music studio, an office, a guest-house, a garage workshop space, a pool, a hot tub, and a kitchen pavilion. $4,950,000. Riley Ingebritson, Coldwell Banker Realty, (512) 947-1442

Tarrytown

On nearly an acre, this 1934 updated five-bedroom Colonial is near a nature preserve and a golf course. The formal living room has floral wallpaper, wide-plank wood floors, crown molding, and built-ins; the high-end kitchen features marble counters, a butcher-block island, and an adjoining dining area with French doors.

A covered patio overlooks a pool, a fenced yard with a play structure, and oak trees. $8,750,000. Cord Shiflet, Moreland Properties/Luxury Portfolio International, (512) 751-2673

Highland Park West

This 2025 organic-modern five-bedroom is a short drive to Lake Austin and the Westwood Country Club. The living room features whitewashed stone walls, a curved plaster fireplace, and polished concrete floors, while the kitchen has flat-front wood cabinets, a waterfall eat-in island, and exposed wood ceilings above clerestory windows.

Sliders open to a patio, lawn, mature trees, and a pool with a bathing shelf. $4,999,999. Stewart Shank, Moreland Properties/Luxury Portfolio International, (512) 905-2777

Downtown

Set in the penthouse of the W Austin Hotel and Residences, built in 2011, this three-bedroom has views of the skyline, hills, and Lady Bird Lake. The condo features 14-foot-high floor-to-ceiling windows, concrete posts, wood floors, leather accent walls, a brushed bronze fireplace surround, a modern chef’s kitchen with a breakfast nook, and two terraces.

Residents have access to the hotel’s pool, gym, and spa, and a three-car garage. $3,995,000. Kumara Wilcoxon, Kuper Sotheby’s International Realty, (512) 423-5035

Easton Park

This 2019 Craftsman with farmhouse elements is in a residential neighborhood, steps from several parks. The one-story four-bedroom has an open plan, with oversize windows, high ceilings, wood-look tile flooring, a primary bath with two vanities and zigzag floors, an office, and a kitchen with quartz counters and stainless appliances.

Outside are a covered patio, wood-fenced backyard, landscaped front yard, and two-car garage. $550,000. Matt Richard, Kuper Sotheby’s International Realty, (512) 963-4003

‘The Great Divide’ by Noah Kahan

★★★

“Noah Kahan is a master of making total strangers feel he’s looking them in the eye,” said Ann Powers in NPR.org. Stick Season catapulted the Vermont singer-songwriter to stardom in 2022 and his follow-up “finds Kahan reaching for a new plateau,” seeking to secure his place among the literary songwriter elite by working a theme while displaying musical versatility. “Instead of constantly barreling forward, this album builds in relaxed stretches and turn-abouts,” and its songs reaffirm Kahan’s gift for grounded, detailed lyrics. At the same time, it delivers more of the rousing arena-ready choruses that made Stick Season, in many ways, “the culmination of the whole stomp-clap style.” Unfortunately, Kahan overworks his theme, said Casey Epstein-Gross in Paste, because The Great Divide runs for 77 minutes and “there are only so many ways you can sing about leaving your small town, finding fame, and feeling guilty about it.” Considered individually, “most of the songs are classic Kahan fare.” But they “bleed together,” and “no matter how vulnerable a track gets, it’s hard to fully buy into the emotion when it feels so safely protected in its own sheen.”

‘Kehlani’ by Kehlani

★★★

“Self-titled albums are often an inflection point,” said Shahzaib Hussain in Clash. Like 1993’s Janet and 2013’s Beyoncé before it, Kehlani is an “assertion of full artistic and sexual autonomy,” this one from an Oakland-born artist who turned 31 on the day of its release. But instead of subverting R&B conventions, as its predecessors did, this record turns out to be its creator’s “most fluent and faithful reading of the genre.” Kehlani, which arrives after her four previous top 25 albums, features “Folded,” which is both her first top 10 hit and already “a certified R&B classic.” And whatever Kehlani lacks in “risk or originality,” it “makes up for in songs that explore the fullness of female/nonbinary sexuality.” On “Oooh,” a standout slow jam, “sexed-up coos and stacked harmonies flower all around her lead vocal.” Several “pitch-perfect collaborations” enhance the listening experience, said Adelle Platon in Vibe. “Shoulda Never” brings in both Usher and Babyface while Missy Elliott adds swag to “Back and Forth,” a bop with a “girls-night-out groove.” There and everywhere on this self-titled “masterpiece,” Kehlani “flaunts her range—vocally, lyrically, and emotionally.”

‘Your Favorite Toy’ by Foo Fighters

★★★

“Your Favorite Toy is the second Foo Fighters album to arrive in the wake of life-altering events,” said Stuart Berman in Pitchfork. In 2023, But Here We Are responded to the deaths of drummer Taylor Hawkins and Dave Grohl’s mother with a clutch of emotionally revelatory songs. But don’t expect Grohl to now dissect the challenges of commitment after revealing that he fathered a daughter outside of his 22-year marriage. “Blood on the Tracks, this ain’t.” Instead, he leans into “main villain energy” on the pounding title track, sneering about nice guys before spitting out an acrid chorus that mocks anyone who’d put him on a pedestal. The whole band has exchanged reflectiveness for “high-energy garage-rock catharsis,” said Jon Dolan in Rolling Stone. On “Caught in the Echo,” Grohl asks a question that he contemplates on several songs: “Who can save us now?” He and the rest of the Foos reveal themselves to be “firm believers in the power of heroic, high-protein mainstream alt-rock as a salve against encroaching darkness.” Your Favorite Toy can be “slashing and scabrous,” but “at 10 fast, extremely catchy songs, it flies by and demands repeat immersion.”

‘The Lost Boys,’ Palace Theatre, New York City

★★★

“The good things about The Lost Boys are so good that they make its fumbles frustrating,” said Adam Feldman in Time Out. An adaptation of a trashy cult-favorite 1987 teen vampire movie, Broadway’s last new musical of the 2025–26 season “aims to set your pulse bounding,” and it does, offering “a world we’ve never seen onstage before,” with performers flying and flipping through the air against a marvel of a three-story set. Meanwhile, the rewritten story, “rooted in daring sincerity,” starts off surprisingly strong. Even though the show’s campier second act undermines the overall effort, this Lost Boys, to a laudable extent, “succeeds where earlier vampire-themed musicals have merely sucked.”

Yes, that second act “could have benefited from more work,” said Frank Rizzo in Variety. Even so, this adaptation is “a stunner of a show rich in imagination, humor, and heart,” and it all begins with two teenagers and their mom moving to a new California town after escaping a monstrous husband and father. LJ Benet plays Michael, 17, who falls in with four teen vampires who play in a rock band while quietly racking up kills. Shoshana Bean is terrific as the mom, the younger brother’s coming out is a welcome addition, and a “smashing” Ali Louis Bourzgui brings “a cool swagger and menace” to the lead vampire role once filled by Kiefer Sutherland.

With a show this big, “it’s possible to find ways to love it and hate it at the same time,” said Sara Holdren in NYMag.com. It’s far too long. The songs, by the L.A. indie rock band the Rescues, aren’t particularly memorable. Ultimately, though “it’s a dedication to camp that helps this new megamusical take flight.” Bourzgui is “absurdly charismatic,” the flying sequences are, “on some deep, prepubescent level, extremely fun to watch,” and when a show this big and expensive “manages to bring with it both genuine humor and beauty,” I don’t complain; “I’m pulled toward enjoyment.”

‘The Rocky Horror Show,’ Studio 54, New York City

★★

In Broadway’s first revival of The Rocky Horror Show in 26 years, “there’s much to like, even adore,” said Johnny Oleksinski in the New York Post. It’s “sexily performed,” it’s “well sung,” and whenever Luke Evans struts onto the stage as Dr. Frank-N-Furter, the horny cross-dressing mad scientist, “you can’t take your eyes off him.” Andrew Durand and Stephanie Hsu are also ideal as Brad and Janet, the naïfs who stumble upon Frank-N-Furter’s castle, with Hsu “a total wow” at playing Janet’s descent from nice to naughty. Alas, the production proves “wishy-washy” in its commitment to the tradition of loud, rowdy audience participation that made the 1975 film adaptation a midnight-movie classic. “Choose your call-outs carefully,” the show’s website cautions. And the audience’s resulting cautiousness produces “an inevitable energy dip.”

For anyone weaned on the movie, this production “may underwhelm,” said Richard Lawson in The Guardian. Director Sam Pinkleton won a Tony just last year, but “the crispness that Pinkleton brought to Oh, Mary! is not present here.” While Rocky Horror began as a spit-and-gum spoof of a B-movie monster flick, Pinkleton seems “overwhelmed by Richard O’Brien’s helter-skelter plotting,” eventually “letting beats and jokes whiz by incoherently,” making the show indecipherable to newcomers. “A Rocky Horror revival should be an opportunity to mint new fans rather than mere time warp back to remembered nights at the movies.”

But “damn it, Janet, I’m glad that the show hasn’t entirely worked out how to deal with the audience,” said Helen Shaw in The New York Times. Rocky Horror “can’t just be a sacred relic.” Its special energy requires “a tussle between the stage and the seats,” a tension between what is prohibited and what is allowed. Given that tension, casting SNL alum Rachel Dratch as the narrator “looks like Nobel-level brilliance,” because the improv vet fields most of the heckling and responds with drollery that’s “entirely hilarious.” Sure, “after an exhilarating first half, the show softens in the second.” But you sit through the whole thing wondering if the night you’ve chosen will be the one when the dam breaks. “The point of Rocky Horror is to lose control. C’mon, let’s do it again.”

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Actress Jamie Lynn Sigler, who played Meadow on The Sopranos, co-hosts the popular podcast MeSsy with Christina Applegate. In her new memoir, And So It Is..., Sigler opens up about her disastrous first marriage, her eating disorder, and living with MS. Below, Sigler shares six books that help ground her.

‘The Alchemist’ by Paulo Coelho (1988)

If I had to pick one book, this would be it. It quietly rearranged how I move through the world. It taught me that purpose isn’t something you chase at the expense of your life; it’s something revealed through paying attention to your life. Buy it here.

‘War of Art’ by Steven Pressfield (2002)

This is the book I return to when I can feel myself slipping into hesitation, distraction, or self-doubt. It tells us that showing up consistently, imperfectly, is the work. It reframed creativity from something precious and intimidating into something sturdy, almost blue-collar. You don’t wait for the muse—you just clock in. Buy it here.

‘The Untethered Soul’ by Michael A. Singer (2007)

This one really changed my life when I learned how to step back from the voice in my head and realize that I am not my thoughts. It gave me a sense of internal space I didn’t know was possible—that peace isn’t something you earn but rather something you just stop interrupting. It changes how you relate to anxiety, fear, even joy—less resisting, more allowing. Buy it here.

‘Man’s Search for Meaning’ by Viktor Frankl (1946)

This is one of those rare books that doesn’t just change how you think; it changes what you believe you can endure. It strips life down to the (in my opinion) most essential life question: not “Why is this happening to me” but “What is being asked of me now?” Buy it here.

‘The Four Agreements’ by Don Miguel Ruiz (1997)

I have a mini version of this book in my purse at all times as a reminder. It’s deceptively simple, but it hits hard. The “agreements” aren’t just nice ideas—they’re practices that quietly remove so much unnecessary suffering from your life. It’s like a mental detox. Buy it here.

‘Inside Out’ by Demi Moore (2019)

As I prepared to write my memoir, I began to read others, searching for a tone that felt gripping, and raw and relatable. This was just that. It isn’t just a celebrity memoir; it’s a brutally honest excavation of identity, self-worth, and the cost of trying to be who you think you are supposed to be. She is admirably unguarded about the patterns that shaped her. Buy it here.

‘The Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis & Clark’ by Craig Fehrman

“Do we really need another book about the Lewis and Clark expedition?” asked Andrea Wulf in The New York Times. The answer, after reading Craig Fehrman’s new page-turner, is “an emphatic yes.” One reason for its novelty is that, in revisiting Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s westward trek into the newly purchased Louisiana Territory, Fehrman has shifted focus away from the famous pair, widening the scope to include other members of the so-called Corps of Discovery as well as several Native Americans the 33 men met en route. The result is “a richly woven tapestry of voices” that “reframes this well-known story, revealing it as more complex, and profoundly human.” Because certain members portrayed didn’t leave expansive journals, Fehrman sometimes has to rely on conjecture or push his imaginative reconstruction too far. But that’s a minor complaint. Fehrman’s multifaceted account is “a fantastic achievement.”

More than 220 years on, “the Lewis and Clark expedition still intrigues,” said Karin Altenberg in The Wall Street Journal. Tasked by President Thomas Jefferson, who had been long obsessed with exploring the West, Lewis and Clark’s team journeyed from St. Louis to the Pacific Ocean and back, with most of the 8,000-mile journey on the Missouri and Columbia rivers. Some members of the party had joined out of patriotic spirit, some for money, and others, including the kidnapped Shoshone teenager Sacagawea, had no choice. “Lewis and Clark had to make sure this diverse, multilingual crew jelled, all the way to the Pacific and back,” and it’s a testament all parties’ desire for peace that the expedition’s many interactions with Indigenous tribes resulted in only one violent death. “Immensely engaging,” The Vast Enterprise gives a well-known story “fresh breadth.”

“This is vivid, character-based history,” said Chris Vognar in The Boston Globe. The chapters rotate between the viewpoints of principal players, among them soldier John Ordway, Lakota and Arikara leaders, Jefferson, and, yes, Lewis and Clark. Fehrman also fleshes out two participants often treated as footnotes. York, an enslaved servant to Clark, was awarded a degree of autonomy during the journey, while Sacagawea, the enslaved wife of interpretor Toussaint Charboneau, is shown to be a valuable collaborator and becomes “a three-dimensional character with her own hopes, dreams, and regrets.” Shuffling between these figures “pays enormous dividends, as Fehrman weaves a tale that uses human stories to go beyond hard facts and calcified myths.” The result is “a ripping good read.”

‘Small Town Girls: A Writer’s Memoir’ by Jayne Anne Phillips

Jayne Anne Phillips’ evocative new book “rejects the linear chronology of a typical memoir,” said Donna Rifkind in The Wall Street Journal. Instead, its structure “mimics the fracturing of modern American life as she has witnessed it.” Born and raised in West Virginia in an Allegheny Mountain town, the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist, who is now 73, left Appalachia in early adulthood and has since lived on both coasts and in the Mountain West. But her hometown of Buckhannon “has never loosened its grip,” and as the author of 2023’s Night Watch reflects on her upbringing and nomadic adulthood in the book’s 22 personal essays, she seems to be both blurring the line between dreams and memories and tracing “a slow-motion rupture” in American society.

“Phillips brings to this memoir the kind of resonant details and sharp insights that have enriched her fiction,” said Heller McAlpin in The Christian Science Monitor. Her family helped settle West Virginia; one side of the family fought for the Union, the other for the Confederacy. She brings us inside the local beauty parlor where her schoolteacher mother kept weekly appointments. She writes empathetically about her parents’ separation after she and her brothers left home and movingly about her mother’s final days. Almost by necessity, given her deep local roots, “Phillips’ gaze often extends beyond family,” and in one essay, she details how West Virginia, once cut off from the coast, was gradually sullied by timber barons, then coal companies and, most recently, the fracking industry.

“It is hard to read Small Town Girls without recalling your own childhood,” said Gabrielle Stecher Woodward in the Southern Review of Books. But Phillips hasn’t created a “one-stop antidote to home-sickness.” Instead, “what she does provide is a sense of comfort for those grappling with their own grief,” whether about lost loved ones or bygone times. Her “quietly devastating” passages about witnessing her mother’s final decline are “grounded in Phillips’ refusal to look away from the truths so easily postponed.” Because her sensibility is the only through line we need, Small Town Girls proves to be “a master class in the art of the personal essay.”

Editor's note: The following is The Week's Good News newsletter. You can subscribe to it on Substack here or register to have it emailed to you every week here.

First-ever footage of orangutan using human-made bridge

A critically endangered Sumatran orangutan was filmed for the first time using a canopy bridge to cross a road in North Sumatra, delighting conservationists. The bridge was built two years ago to reconnect two local orangutan populations split by a busy road. With only about 14,000 orangutans left in the wild, the animal crossing success offers hope that simple infrastructure can help the species survive habitat fragmentation.

Results from pioneering bowel cancer trial reveal zero relapses

Swapping post-surgery chemotherapy for pre-surgery immunotherapy resulted in substantial improvements for colorectal cancer patients involved in the NEOPRISM-CRC clinical trial. Early results showed that 59% of patients administered the immunotherapy drug pembrolizumab before surgery had zero signs of cancer, and 33 months later, none of the study participants have seen their cancer return. Previous research showed that pembrolizumab led to major tumor shrinkage in patients with stage 2 or 3 colorectal cancer.

Girl has vision restored after first-of-its-kind eye gene therapy

A 6-year-old child with Leber’s Congenital Amaurosis (LCA), a rare eye condition that often leads to total vision loss, had her sight restored following cutting-edge gene therapy at London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital. Saffie Sandford’s treatment with Luxturna, which involved injecting both eyes with healthy copies of the RPE 65 gene, was the first demonstration that gene therapy can strengthen visual pathways in a child with LCA. It “restored her sight in the dark,” said Saffie’s mother, Lisa Sandford.

New York nonprofit distributes used books to kids in need

The Book Fairies, a New York nonprofit that helps underserved communities, recently distributed its 6 millionth book. The group launched in 2012, in founder Amy Zaslansky’s garage. It collects new and gently used books, then gives them to kids in New York City and Long Island to help instill a lifelong love of reading. A new donation of 25,000 books from ThriftBooks will “change so many lives,” Book Fairies associate executive director Courtney Collins told Good News Network.

“Strange as it sounds, it’s uplifting to visit Ukraine these days,” said David Ignatius in The Washington Post. That’s because “the good guys are winning—or at least holding their own.” Ukrainian troops pushed back a ferocious Russian offensive last fall, and their cities survived a frigid winter despite a Russian blitz on energy infrastructure. Now it’s spring, the power is still on, a $106 billion loan from the EU has been approved, and Ukraine is outpacing Russia despite being outgunned. The country’s military said it killed or wounded some 35,000 Russian troops in March, the highest monthly toll of a four-year war in which Russia has suffered more than 1.2 million casualties. That battlefield success has been powered by Ukraine’s homegrown drone industry. Its drones account for about 90% of all Russian casualties and are hitting targets deep behind enemy lines, including oil export facilities near St. Petersburg.

In Russia, President Vladimir Putin “is facing a spring of discontent,” said Nathan Hodge in CNN.com. Ordinary Russians are frustrated with the sanctions-battered economy, “rolling digital blackouts” intended to curb dissent, and the war’s rising death toll.

Kyiv has achieved all this without President Trump, said Phillips Payson O’Brien in The Atlantic. For more than a year, Ukrainian officials held out hopes they could win him over, even after Trump publicly berated President Volodymyr Zelensky in the White House, repeatedly lavished praise on Putin, restricted military aid—first out of spite, then out of a need for weapons to strike Iran—and tilted peace negotiations in favor of the Russian invaders. “But now Kyiv appears to have given up on the U.S.” It is striking new diplomatic and military partnerships, sharing its hard-won expertise in drone warfare with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and other Gulf nations targeted by Iran, and with European nations threatened by Russia. “Writing the U.S. off as a friend might once have been a sign of doom for Ukraine. It isn’t anymore.”

Other American allies are following Kyiv’s example, said David French in The New York Times. In Europe and Canada, governments are racing to achieve greater military and financial independence from the U.S. They have woken up to the dangers of relying on a superpower protector whose leader has slammed them with sanctions, toyed with leaving NATO, and threatened to annex their territory. America may still be the world’s most powerful nation. But “the moral and strategic heart of the defense of liberal democracy” no longer beats in Washington. “It’s in Kyiv.”

How big is true crime?

It’s a nationwide obsession. According to a recent study by Edison Research, some 230 million Americans, or about 67% of the population, consume true-crime content: documentaries, podcasts, YouTube videos, and books that delve into real-life murders, scams, and scandals. The genre’s popularity can be seen in last year’s top-5 most-watched documentary TV shows on Netflix. Four had a true-crime theme and the No. 1 series, American Murder: Gabby Petito, had more than 60 million views. On podcast charts, series such as Crime Junkie and the audio version of NBC’s Dateline routinely sit among the most downloaded shows. This demand for crime-related content has led media giants to heap cash on top producers: In 2022, Amazon paid more than $100 million for exclusive distribution rights to the hit podcast My Favorite Murder. For the loved ones of some of the victims covered in the shows, it’s traumatizing to see their real-life pain replayed for profit and entertainment. “I’m so tired of murder victims being used as cash cows,” said Charlie Shunick, whose 21-year-old sister Mickey was kidnapped and murdered in Lafayette, La., in 2012.

How did the genre become so popular?

True-crime stories have long been a subject of public fascination, from the penny dreadfuls of Victorian England to the murder-heavy newsmagazine shows launched in the 1980s and ’90s, such as Dateline and CBS’s 48 Hours. But it was an NPR podcast, Serial, that ushered in the modern true-crime craze. For the first season in 2014, host Sarah Koenig delved into the 1999 murder of Baltimore high schooler Hae Min Lee, finding weaknesses in the case that led to the conviction of her ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed. He was freed in 2022. That Serial season was downloaded more than 300 million times, and its success spawned thousands of copycats and a vast community of true-crime fans. “Everybody loves a whodunnit,” explains criminologist Scott Bonn.

Who are true crime’s biggest fans? 

They tend to be white and female. Women make up 62% of listeners to true-crime podcasts and an oversize share of true-crime TV watchers. Some social scientists say women may be drawn to the genre because, in an often violently misogynist society, they want to pick up on survival skills. “If you are more fearful, you are more interested in knowing more about how these situations can occur,” said psychologist Dean Fido. Others say it’s simple human nature to be fascinated with taboo subjects like murder and rape—just as it’s natural to rubberneck at a car crash. But critics argue that true crime gives Americans a misleading picture of real crime. Serial killers, a favorite of the genre, are exceptionally rare. And true-crime creators disproportionately focus on white female victims such as Petito, 22. Her 2021 murder in Wyoming Bridger–Teton National Forest received extensive media coverage, unlike the more than 700 Indigenous women who had disappeared in the park over the previous decade.

What happens when a crime is spotlighted?

Sometimes, coverage results in a breakthrough. The case of 19-year-old Kristin Smart, who was murdered in her California Polytechnic State University dorm room in 1996, went cold until 2019 when Christopher Lambert, then a Cal Poly student, started a podcast, Your Own Backyard. Listeners sent in tips, and in 2022 former Cal Poly student Paul Flores was convicted of Smart’s murder. True crime can also reveal miscarriages of justice: Investigative podcast In the Dark helped free Curtis Flowers, a Black man from Mississippi who faced execution after being tried six times for the same crime. But critics say those shows are outliers, and that most of the genre is pure exploitation. Family members of the 17 young men murdered by Jeffrey Dahmer were outraged by Netflix’s hit Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, saying the streamer not only failed to consult them but also glamorized the serial killer. “We’re all one traumatic event away from the worst day of your life being reduced to your neighbor’s favorite binge show,” said Eric Perry, a cousin of Dahmer victim Errol Lindsey.

Are there other problems with the genre?

Independent sleuths can interfere with active investigations. After the suspected February kidnapping of Nancy Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of Today co-host Savannah Guthrie, hordes of true crime livestreamers set up camp outside Nancy’s Tucson home. Police had to deploy extra patrols to manage the vloggers, one of whom had a pizza delivered to the crime scene. Those streamers typically don’t adhere to the journalistic standards of mainstream reporters. Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos had to publicly refute allegations made by some streamers that members of Guthrie’s family were involved in Nancy’s disappearance, calling the claims “wrong” and “cruel.” Meanwhile, some psychologists warn that hardcore fans can become desensitized to violence. My Favorite Murder listeners, who call themselves “Murderinos,” can buy T-shirts featuring the hosts’ catchphrases, including “Stay sexy. Don’t get murdered.”

Can such shows keep our attention? 

There are some signs the industry is stagnating. While true-crime podcasts today account for 15% of all new podcasts released, that share is down 20% from 2022, according to industry journalist Frank Racioppi. And today’s most-listened-to true-crime podcasts are largely the same ones as those four years ago. But few experts think our fascination with true crime will fade anytime soon, because it runs so deep. Dr. Michael Mantell, former chief psychologist for the San Diego Police Department, notes that prehistoric humans painted “true crime” images of people killing one another on cave walls. “This is not something that’s new,” he said. “It didn’t start with Ted Bundy. This began 30,000 years ago.”

The war with Iran has hit a “toxic stalemate,” said Janna Brancolini in the Daily Beast. American officials poured cold water on a proposal from Tehran to end the two-month conflict, under which the U.S. would end its naval blockade of Iranian ports and Iran would reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial oil-shipping route whose closure is choking the global economy. The regime’s nuclear program, meanwhile, would be discussed at a later date. A U.S. official said the nuclear punt was a nonstarter because it “would deny Trump a victory,” and in a 4 a.m. social media post—accompanied by an image of Trump as a gun-toting action hero and the caption “NO MORE MR. NICE GUY”—the president made his feelings clear on Tehran’s offer. “They better get smart soon!” he wrote, saying the regime’s only hope is to go “nonnuclear.” For now, Trump is set on “an extended blockade of Iran,” said Alexander Ward in The Wall Street Journal. He’s decided his other options, walking away or resuming bombing, carry more risk than targeting “the regime’s coffers in a high-risk bid to compel a nuclear capitulation Tehran has long refused.”

“Time is on America’s side,” said Mark Dubowitz and Miad Maleki in the New York Post. While U.S. motorists grumble about gas topping $4.20 a gallon, the remnants of Iran’s regime are battling triple-digit inflation, mass unemployment, a currency in “free fall,” and a U.S. blockade that has them “bleeding cash.” Worse, said Amit Segal in The Free Press, Iran is now “drowning in its own oil.” Within a few weeks, Iran will run out of storage for the crude it pumps out of the ground, leaving the regime no option but to halt production and see extraction systems clog up, a “death sentence” for its oil industry.

Don’t underestimate “Iran’s pain threshold,” said Ben Geman in Axios. The country has alternate storage facilities, including a fleet of floating crude carriers, and continues to sneak tankers past the U.S. Navy. And experts say the regime has other revenue sources, including oil exported overland, “to keep its troops paid and its position in Iran secure.” Iran believes it can hold out for at least another two or three months, said Ali Vaez in The New Yorker, and that “the American timeline” is more like two to three weeks. With Trump’s approval rating hitting a record low of 34% in a new Reuters poll, the regime thinks cost-of-living pressures will force him to back down and save Republicans from a wipeout in the midterms. Trump also doesn’t want the war to dominate his mid-May visit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, let alone for jet-fuel shortages to ruin this summer’s World Cup, which the U.S. is co-hosting with Mexico and Canada.

Trump might still be able to reach a deal with Iran, said Katrin Bennhold in The New York Times, but it won’t be as good as the Obama-era pact he ripped up in 2018. That deal barred Iran from enriching uranium above 3.67% purity; its current stockpile is at 60% and with further processing could be used to build 100 nuclear bombs. And Tehran now has better cards to play than during the negotiations for the 2015 deal, including control of the Strait of Hormuz. For future talks to have any chance, Trump will “have to abandon his ‘I win, you lose’ approach to diplomacy,” said Trudy Rubin in The Philadelphia Inquirer. As gas prices climb higher, perhaps he’ll accept a compromise that lets both Iran and the U.S. save face. But based on everything we’ve learned about our president, “this hope requires a suspension of disbelief.”

What happened

A California man accused of trying to storm the White House Correspondents’ Dinner with an arsenal of guns and knives was charged last week with attempting to assassinate President Trump, as investigators dug through writings and social media posts that showed his increasing fury at the administration. Cole Tomas Allen, a 31-year-old high school tutor from Torrance, checked in to the Washington Hilton ahead of the black-tie dinner there. As waiters cleared salad plates in the ballroom—packed with more than 2,000 journalists and Beltway insiders—Allen sprinted past a security checkpoint carrying a shotgun and .38-caliber handgun. One federal agent opened fire and another in a bulletproof vest was shot in the chest but was unharmed; ballistics experts are investigating whether he was shot by Allen or by the other officer. Allen tripped and was jumped on by agents, who stripped him of his weapons. In the ballroom, attendees crouched under dinner tables as the president and first lady Melania Trump were rushed out along with Vice President JD Vance and Cabinet members. “It scared all of us,” said CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer. “We had no idea what was going on.”

Before the attempted attack, Allen wrote a note detailing his plan to target Trump administration officials “prioritized from highest-ranking to lowest.” He referenced abuse in ICE detention camps, the U.S. bombing of a girls’ school in Iran, and the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. “I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes,” he wrote, in apparent reference to Trump. Neighbors and acquaintances described Allen, a leader of his college’s Christian Fellowship, as quiet and respectful. But on social media he raged against Trump. “Everyone already knows trump is a f---ing awful person in multiple dimensions and no one has done shit,” read one April 2025 post on the Bluesky platform.

Trump called for unity at a press conference following the incident. But the tone soon shifted, as White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt blamed the assassination attempt on the “deranged lies” of Democrats who “falsely label and slander the president as a fascist and threat to democracy.” Trump, who has survived two previous assassination attempts, called this one a marker of his success. “The most impactful people,” he said, “are the ones they go after.”

What the columnists said

This was a “security fiasco,” said Hugh Dougherty in the Daily Beast. How was Allen able to stroll into the Hilton with a shotgun in his luggage, check into a room, and roam freely? After I checked in, I was never asked for ID, and I walked into the dinner with a ticket that could easily “have been a photo-copy.” Actually, the Secret Service did its job, said Garrett Graff in his Substack newsletter. Securing a hotel with some 1,100 rooms isn’t their responsibility, nor is it “to prevent any incident at a high-profile event.” Their task is to set up a security perimeter and keep the president safe—which is exactly what they did.

Allen presents a puzzle, said Odette Yousef in NPR.org. A well-liked young man with a master’s degree in computer science, he was incensed by Trump administration policies. But his online history displays none of the extremist or conspiratorial views that typically drive would-be political assassins. His writings express “pretty moderate left-wing” views, said extremism researcher Jared Holt. It’s left him and other experts unclear as to what tipped Allen over the edge.

There’s no mystery here, said Jeffrey Blehar in National Review. Allen hung out on lefty-dominated Bluesky, and “seems to have been radicalized into committing violence by the panic and apocalypticism common in such spaces.” In his “manifesto,” he accused Trump of being a pedophile—a “wild, reckless lie” that is commonly bandied about by Trump haters, and one that “is intended to inflame.” Now “we see where that line of rhetoric can lead.”

The Right’s attempt to pin this attack on Democrats is cynical and bogus, said Peter Hamby in Puck. But progressives can’t shy away from the fact that “a rising miasma of conspiratorial thinking, dangerous fact-denying, and dehumanizing language has taken hold on the American left.” Before a trans-rights supporter shot dead conservative activist Charlie Kirk and Luigi Mangione allegedly murdered a health-care CEO “in a fit of anti-corporate rage,” it was easier for liberals to claim “the nutjobs and wackos were mostly on the other side.” That’s no longer the case.

Trump is the primary cause of our “culture of political violence,” said Jonathan V. Last in The Bulwark. At the start of his political project in 2016, he urged his supporters to punch people they disliked. Since then, Trump has unleashed a mob on the U.S. Capitol, referred to anti-ICE protesters “murdered by his regime as ‘domestic terrorists,’” called his political opponents “enemies of the people,” and cheered the deaths of his critics. Now he and his supporters are shocked that the violent world he willed into being is coming for him.

We’re watching “the best democracy on earth destroyed by madness,” said Will Bunch in The Philadelphia Inquirer. In a nation where firearms outnumber people, we’ve reached the stage where attempted assassination sites are “getting recycled”—President Ronald Reagan was shot and wounded outside the same Hilton in 1981. Last month, we collectively shrugged when a disturbed father killed eight children in Shreveport, La., and a mall in Baton Rouge “erupted in a Wild West shoot-out.” We’ll no doubt soon move on from this latest grim spectacle, in an “unserious America” where “appalling forms of violence” feel increasingly like business as usual.

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Jimmy McDonough is the author of acclaimed biographies of music greats Neil Young, Tammy Wynette, and Al Green. His new book, Gary Stewart: I Am From the Honky-Tonks, chronicles the shambolic life of a cult country-music legend. Below are his picks for the books that moved him most.

‘Nico’ by James Young (1992)

I preferred the original title for this masterwork, The End, because that’s exactly what it’s about: the threadbare last tours of Nico, the sphinx-like goddess of the underground. She scores drugs, urinates in sinks, and just doesn’t give a damn about anything except (maybe) her music. Grim, hilarious, moving. I can picture Nico getting to the last page and stubbing out a cigarette on the cover. Buy it here.

‘Happy Like Murderers’ by Gordon Burn (1998)

Burn calmly takes you on a submarine ride through the horrors of married serial killers Fred and Rosemary West, and he never comes up for air. Unlike much of the true crime ground out these days, this book does not feel cheap and exploitative. Buy it here.

‘America’s Most Hated Woman’ by Ann Rowe Seaman (2005)

“Exacting” doesn’t do Seaman justice. In this book on the improbable life of superstar atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair, she methodically wades through minute details from court records, press accounts, and living witnesses to pin her subject to the wall for all time. Buy it here.

‘Tiny Tim’ by Harry M. Stein (1976)

Much has been written about vaudevillian supernova Tiny Tim, but this wildly entertaining book got inside “the dainty bear” first. An old-school gumshoe reporter with an eye for withering detail, Stein gets Tiny to spill the beans just by hanging around, and he does it with wit and affection. Buy it here.

‘I’d Rather Be the Devil’ by Stephen Calt (1994)

Calt had a love-hate relationship with decrepit blues genius Skip James and most likely himself. It makes for riveting reading. He strips away myths like he’s using paint remover to erase a bad mural, only to find a worse portrait underneath. Provocative. Buy it here.

‘Liberace’ by Darden Asbury Pyron (2000)

Liberace seldom comes up these days unless it’s as a kitschy GIF. This heartfelt work bestows the showman with the dignity he deserves and rightfully tells his story as one of a complex, contrary American hero who managed to break barriers while wearing sequined hot pants and laughing his way to the bank. You will not think of Liberace the same way again. Buy it here.

San Anselmo, Calif.

Anchored by a sunken, Prairie-inspired living room with exposed beams, a wall of windows framing trees, and a fireplace, this shingled 1989 four-bedroom also features a second living room connected to a kitchen with granite counters, cherry cabinets, and a copper range hood.

Powered by battery-backed solar, the landscaped property has a deck with views of Mount Tamalpais. Trails are nearby, and San Francisco is about 45 minutes south. $4,500,000. Shelley Reynolds, Corcoran Icon Properties, (415) 515-2265

Denver

This updated 1908 home in the Potter Highlands historic district has original stained glass and woodwork that includes door casings, built-in cabinets, posts, a fireplace surround, and colonnades. The five-bedroom features wood floors, a modern kitchen with open shelving and a beverage fridge, and a lower-level apartment with private entry.

Outside are a heated pool, landscaping, a built-in kitchen, a bocce court, a cedar fence, a garage, and a detached studio. $2,100,000. Liz Richards, LIV Sotheby’s International Realty, (303) 956-2962

Nashville

Built in 1930, this renovated five-bedroom bungalow in Richland–West End opens to a living room with wood window casings and a dining room with Prairie-style window grilles. The three-story house includes a living room and kitchen area with French doors, an eat-in island, a pantry, and a family room that opens to a screened porch.

A deck leads to a fenced yard. Downtown is about 10 minutes away. $1,799,000. Jill Frost, Zeitlin Sotheby’s International Realty, (615) 624-0845

Los Angeles

Set in Angelino Heights, this 1907 gut-restored home features its original front door and diamond-paned front windows, plus views of the Hollywood sign and downtown. The four-bedroom includes high, beamed ceilings, an open plan with wide-plank wood floors, a stone fireplace, and a kitchen with dramatic Calacatta Viola marble counters, zellige tiles, and oak cabinets.

Out back are a new pool, a deck, and a two-bedroom ancillary dwelling unit. $2,950,000. Raul Cañada, The Agency, (818) 274-9184

Portland, Ore.

In the Mount Tabor neighborhood, this 1909 bungalow with a bracketed gable has a living room with wood floors, painted shelving, and a colonnade, plus a dining room with paned built-ins. The four-bedroom’s kitchen features end-grain wood floors, soapstone counters, and fir cabinets; upstairs are two bedrooms with coved ceilings.

A wood fence secludes a backyard with lawn, plantings, and a patio. Downtown is about a 15-minute commute. $975,000. Kevin Caplener, Windermere Realty Trust/Luxury Portfolio International, (503) 888-6999

Tacoma, Wash.

A 10-minute drive to downtown and close to a park, this 1918 four-bedroom in the Lincoln District has original woodwork, including the seating in an entry area, wood crown molding, and a paneled dining room with a built-in hutch.

The remodeled kitchen has bamboo floors and stainless appliances, and a finished basement offers a separate entrance and a kitchenette. The fenced backyard includes a pergola-topped patio. $515,000. Melo Hogan, Windermere Abode/Luxury Portfolio International, (253) 304-8058

April 15 is typically a day Americans want to forget. Not this year, said Julie Z. Weil in The Washington Post. Thanks to the “big, beautiful bill” passed by congressional Republicans last year, taxpayers were able to claim an average of $3,462 in tax refunds as of Tax Day, up nearly 11% from 2025. Over $241 billion has been refunded to Americans so far, compared with $211 billion at this time last year. That’s a result of language in the GOP law that increased the standard deduction, added a $6,000 rebate for qualifying seniors, boosted the child tax deduction, and set new rules for deducting tips, overtime, and car loan payments. The bill also overrode planned tax increases for a vast majority of filers. People have taken notice. Alia Shawa, a waitress at a New York City restaurant, said that she and her husband, a chef, got “a whopping $26,000 refund” after deducting the taxes on her tips and his car loan, compared with owing $12,000 to the IRS last year. “I finally get something back,” Shawa said.

People are using their refunds “to shore up their finances rather than splurge,” said Julia Fanzeres and Josyana Joshua in Bloomberg. Early filers increased debt payments by about 20%, according to the Bank of America Institute, using the funds to pay off bills, car loans, credit card balances, and student loans. Lower-income households put even more of their refunds—nearly 30%—toward repaying debts. At a time of stubborn inflation and rising gas prices because of the war with Iran, Americans are “focused on getting their own fiscal homes in order.” That’s why the refund boost isn’t likely to improve voters’ sour mood, said Daniel Bunn in Barron’s. The average refund is only about $350 more than last year, which is well below what President Trump originally claimed it would be. And “an extra few hundred dollars landing in Americans’ wallets from once-a-year tax refunds won’t ease” the economic strain caused by many of Trump’s other policies, including his tariffs and cuts to Obamacare. “The reality is that on Tax Day 2026, the cost of day-to-day life was higher and more financially tenuous than it was a year prior.”

Besides bigger refunds, there’s another thing that’s different this tax season, said Richard Rubin in The Wall Street Journal: a lack of enforcement. The IRS has shed more than 25,000 workers since last year, “leaving fewer federal employees to audit returns, collect unpaid tax debts, and deter Americans from skirting the law.” At the top, there’s no acting IRS commissioner, and senior officials are “doing double duty.” Audits of people with at least $10 million are set to drop 39% this year. The Trump administration “has defunded the police,”said one tax lawyer. “There’s no more succinct way to describe what’s happened.”

‘Fidelity’ by Yaya Bey

★★★

“Whether the subject is her people, herself, or a loved one,” Yaya Bey is “one of the most thoughtful, incisive, and witty lyricists of her generation,” said Andy Kellman in AllMusic. On a record that “caps a three-album/three-year streak for the ages,” the Queens-born singer, songwriter, and producer is once again synthesizing soul, funk, hip-hop, reggae, and electronic dance music “with buoyant facility.” While she lamented her late father on 2024’s Ten Fold, the mourning she does on Fidelity is more expansive, addressing losses suffered by the Black community, from gentrification to the abbreviated lives of great artists. Despite the focus on weighty subjects, the artist, at 35, “still finds ways to inject some humor,” said Grant Sharples in Paste. On “Simp Daddy Line Dance,” she chides a deadbeat lover while playfully interpolating dance commands from DJ Casper’s “Cha-Cha Slide.” She’s at her best on “Blue,” with her rhythm section entwined “like slow dancers in a tight embrace” before Bey’s “mesmerizing” voice “emerges like a light in thick fog,” singing about a new day. “Life is far too short, she tells us, to not lay it all out there.”

‘Nine Inch Noize’ by Nine Inch Nails & Boys Noize

★★★

“Ever wondered what Trent Reznor would be like with a couple of glow sticks and a string vest?” asked Rich Hobson in Louder. “That’s effectively the question Nine Inch Noize answers,” memorializing the recent rave-tent collaborations between the industrial-rock legend and German-Iraqi DJ Alex Ridha, aka Boys Noize. The pair’s remixes feature “some brilliant reinterpretations of classic Nine Inch Nails cuts,” including of “Heresy,” which here becomes “a cross between Purple Rain–era Prince and Godflesh.” All that’s missing is “the full sensory experience” of the act’s live show, so don’t miss the videos from Coachella posted online. While Nine Inch Noize is “essentially an EDM album,” said Kory Grow in Rolling Stone, it’s also “a full-circle moment” for Reznor. From NIN’s earliest days, he put out multiple mixes of the band’s singles “in hopes of filling smoky dance floors at Midwestern goth nights.” Aside from “Closer,” Reznor and Ridha avoided obvious NIN hits. “Instead, they chose songs that could benefit from head-imploding electronic bass drums and a little TB-303 squelch.” The most unexpected track: a cover of Soft Cell’s “Memorabilia” that ends with a big house beat.

Leave it to L.A. to erect a new signature building that “challenges nearly every convention of what a museum should be,” said Sam Lubell in the Los Angeles Times. Twenty years in the making, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s new $724 million centerpiece is a megastructure three football fields long whose sinuous single exhibition floor hovers 30 feet off the ground and on one end hurdles palm-tree-lined Wilshire Boulevard. “This is no machine or temple for art. It has the scale of a landform and the shape of a living being. And like all living beings, it is far from perfect.” But the new home of LACMA’s permanent collection reinvents the largest museum in the western U.S. and, in an era when even Southern California seems to have lost its nerve, “stands as a reminder that risk and ambition are still possible.”

It’s certainly “the most significant American museum built this century,” and “not merely because of its architecture,” said Michael J. Lewis in The Wall Street Journal. Michael Govan, LACMA’s director since 2006, aimed to redefine the museum-going experience when he picked Swiss architect Peter Zumthor to pursue the mission. Govan wanted to eliminate the chronological display of an international art collection that spans centuries, inviting visitors to wander among the works unguided, as if in a forest. Unfortunately, the largely formless building Zumthor has created shows “a willful disregard for the way that people experience space” and is “maddeningly difficult to navigate.” The natural light let in by the floor-to-ceiling windows that wrap the half-mile-long gallery space is welcome, but the interior is crammed with 29 boxy concrete galleries that are all “oppressively gloomy.” It’s a confounding place. “Its error is to confuse formlessness with freedom.”

The concrete-and-glass exterior, despite its sweeping curves and amoeba-like form, looks “surprisingly conventional” from ground level, said Paul Goldberger in Air Mail. “You want it to dance a little more.” Stepping inside, however, I was pleasantly surprised. When LACMA provided a preview last summer, before the art was installed, some visitors worried that the endless windows and concrete interior walls would defeat effective display, but rough concrete turns out to be an “exceptionally elegant” backdrop for paintings and sculpture, adding more drama than painted plaster could, while Zumthor’s meandering form “makes you want to meander within it.” The experience of chancing upon remarkable works of art and design as you wander can be “thoroughly engaging,” said Sarah Amelar in Architectural Record. You might be taken in by a 17th-century Dutch master, a court robe from Qing-dynasty China, or a Raymond Loewy–designed 1963 Studebaker Avanti. “I didn’t expect to be enthralled, but I found the art-viewing experience so captivating that I eventually had to be torn away—and can’t wait to go back.”

‘Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class’ by Noam Scheiber

“A college-educated working class sounds like an oxymoron,” said George Packer in The Atlantic. But New York Times labor reporter Noam Scheiber has great hopes for the cohort on which he’s affixed that label: college graduates in their 20s and early 30s who have had to settle for low-paying wage work after earning their degrees. In his new book, Scheiber profiles about a dozen or so young Americans who turned to labor activism following dispiriting experiences with employers including Starbucks, Amazon, Apple, Hollywood studios, and the universities that impoverished them in the first place. While he occasionally questions his subjects’ career decisions, “he’s plainly on their side,” viewing their perception of unfairness as real and their activism as the best way to fight economic inequality. Unfortunately, “he isn’t sufficiently aware of the insularity of their project,” of how unlikely it is that these young progressives will ever be joined by noncollege wage workers in an effective broader movement.

“There’s much truth in Scheiber’s reporting,” said Eric Levitz in Vox. College graduates have become more progressive in their economic views since the 1990s and more likely to identify with rank-and-file workers. But his claim that today’s college grads have been pushed leftward mainly by their collapsing economic fortunes is “a bit misleading.” Yes, tuition and housing costs have soared. But the share of college grads who hold low-wage jobs is smaller than it was three decades ago, and the relative return on a degree in lifetime earnings, despite the impact of the Great Recession and the pandemic, is significantly greater. The stories Scheiber shares are well told, and the precarity of his subjects’ lives “vividly evoked,” said Ruy Teixeira in The Wall Street Journal. But among their generation, they’re “an idiosyncratic subset,” not the norm.

You could also say Scheiber’s heroes were naive to expect better from their employers, said Kenneth S. Baer in Washington Monthly. Often, though, they were misled. Apple used the label “geniuses” for retail-store staffers like Chaya Barrett, but the sweet talk didn’t pay her bills and she soon turned to union organizing. While Mutiny celebrates such activism, Scheiber is “too keen an observer of American political life” to fail to mention that the college-educated working class may be too progressive to mesh easily with the rest of the working class, whose members strongly favored President Trump in 2024. But while Scheiber focuses on workplace issues, Mutiny is “ultimately an education book,” a warning to our colleges and universities that “higher education, as an industry, has become too expensive, too mercenary, and too irrelevant for far too many.”

‘Famesick: A Memoir’ by Lena Dunham

“This may be the first Lena Dunham work built on deep hindsight,” said Madeline Leung Coleman in NYMag.com. The star and creator of Girls shot to fame in her early 20s by appearing to present her own life raw, with all its embarrassments. She did so in her debut film, in her hit HBO series, on Twitter, and in her best-selling 2014 memoir. Now, though, as she nears 40, Dunham is ready to look back on those heady years and connect the dots between her impulse to share, her lightning-rod status, and the onset of chronic illnesses that still plague her. “It’s a Hollywood story written in blood and vomit and pus,” but because she’s a savvy writer, “she knows to foreground the relatable.”

“If you’ve hated Dunham this whole time and resented her success, well, good news,” said Scaachi Koul in Slate. “Famesick will tell you just how awful all that success made her feel.” As her star rose, critics blamed her for everything wrong in the world, including the failures of feminism, Millennials, and white people, and Dunham was listening. Worse, as she stretched herself thin during Girls’ six-season run, her body was rebelling, generating racking pain, triggering a Klonopin addiction, and eventually requiring acceptance of living with an incurable connective tissue disorder. Not surprisingly, “it’s a shocking and funny read,” packed with tidbits about fellow celebrities, and a reminder of “what made her so interesting in the first place.”

Dunham’s first memoir was “pert and packaged,” adorned with lists, asterisks, and “cute little pen-and-ink illustrations,” said Alexandra Jacobs in The New York Times. Famesick, to its credit, “dispenses with such pleasantries.” It also names names. Hitmaker Jack Antonoff is painted as an inadequate boyfriend. Adam Driver, Dunham’s onscreen boyfriend, throws a chair during the shooting of a difficult scene. Jenni Konner, Dunham’s co-showrunner, comes across as “a callous taskmistress,” one who ignored Dunham’s calls for medical help. “What a relief,” then, that Dunham, who’s been sober for eight years and is now married to a man she mentions only in the acknowledgments, is “not a true casualty of all the cruelty visited upon her.”

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Clean energy pushes fossil-fuel power into reverse

Renewable energy met all global electricity demand growth in 2025, with solar generation surging by nearly a third. This is the first time that clean energy generation, including solar, wind and water power, has pushed “fossil fuel power into reverse,” said Euronews. Solar generation met 75% of the rise in demand, while wind supplied most of the remaining increase, according to research from the think tank Ember. Renewables now produce 34% of global electricity.

A music fan’s recordings of 10,000 shows go online for free

Aadam Jacobs has been taping live concerts for 40 years, and is now uploading 10,000 recordings to a free online archive. The Aadam Jacobs Collection, hosted by the Internet Archive, features his recordings of major artists at small Chicago venues in the 1980s, including Nirvana and The Cure. He first used a Walkman-style recorder to tape the performances, and then purchased digital recorders. Volunteers are working with Jacobs to organize, digitize and upload the tapes.

Independent bookstores stage a comeback

A total of 422 new independent bookstores opened across the U.S. in 2025, up 31% from 2024, according to data from the American Booksellers Association. That uptick defies “predictions of retail consolidation,” said Gene Marks at The Guardian, and leans into the spirit of “entrepreneurism and independence.” Indie bookshops also offer “resources and spaces for learning, organizing and respite,” providing “third spaces” for people in cities, towns and rural areas, Mark Pearson said at the Los Angeles Times.

First ‘cloud jaguar’ spotted in 10 years in Honduras

A camera trap in Honduras’ Sierra del Merendón mountain range recently captured the first footage of a jaguar there in a decade. The animal is called a “cloud jaguar,” since it was spotted in a mountaintop cloud forest. Local officials and Panthera, a wildcat conservation organization, have been working together to improve conditions in the area for jaguars, taking steps like increasing the number of anti-poaching rangers on patrol and reintroducing iguanas and other prey.

“If chatbots were as all-knowing as we’ve been led to believe, they should have seen the backlash to artificial intelligence coming,” said Martin Baccardax in Barron’s. Now it’s here. Daniel Moreno-Gama, 20, was carrying an anti-AI manifesto when he allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s $27 million San Francisco mansion earlier this month. Two days later, a man and a woman in their 20s were arrested for allegedly firing a gun outside Altman’s house. Someone fired 13 bullets into Indianapolis councilman Ron Gibson’s home the previous week, leaving a note reading, “No Data Centers.” Gibson had supported a new AI data center. AI is barging “into public life with a pace and aggression unlike any of its technological predecessors.” Its creators warn that AI will eliminate half of white-collar jobs in five years, concentrate even more money and power at the top, and consume vast amounts of water and electricity. Just 26% of Americans see AI as a positive force. Is it any surprise the backlash has “turned violent”?

On social media, many people justified the attacks against Altman, said Clare Duffy in CNN.com. If the “commoditization of what it means to be human is allowed to continue,” wrote one Reddit user, violence “will be much more common.” Some activists deemed Moreno-Gama a hero, comparing his alleged attack to Luigi Mangione allegedly murdering UnitedHealthcare’s CEO. Before he was charged with attempted murder, Moreno-Gama himself posted about “Luigi-ing tech CEOs.”

The “Stop AI” movement is being driven by young people who’ve already experienced technology taking over their lives, said Eva Roytburg in Fortune. But the backlash is spreading across America’s heartland as communities reject massive data centers, citing concerns about water usage and utility bills. Americans have stopped or delayed $64 billion worth of data centers in two years. Maine is set to become the first state to ban them. In Festus, Mo., voters just ousted local politicians who approved a data center. These developments “signal an escalation in the blowback,” said Brian Merchant in his Substack newsletter. AI executives have been warning that they’re building a tool so powerful it will automate millions of jobs and “might literally end humanity,” but seem shocked we’re finally listening. “Ordinary people are saying: Wake up. We have good reason to hate AI.” The backlash will likely only “get worse from here.”

“Kash Patel has never been qualified to lead the FBI,” said Danielle Han in Jezebel, and The Atlantic just showed us “the gazillionth reason why.” In a damning report published two weeks ago, the magazine alleged that the bureau’s director suffers paranoid “freak-outs” about being fired, is often absent from work, and is “regularly too drunk to do his job.”

Justice Department and White House sources told The Atlantic that Patel’s security detail has repeatedly struggled to wake the seemingly hungover FBI boss, forcing meetings and briefings to be rescheduled for later in the day. Last year, his detail even reportedly considered using SWAT-style “breaching equipment” because Patel had been unreachable behind locked doors. Some FBI and administration officials wonder if alcohol explains Patel’s repeated missteps—such as his sharing of inaccurate information about a suspect following the September murder of Charlie Kirk—and fear that he’s become a national security risk. Patel vehemently denies all the accusations and last week filed a $250 million defamation lawsuit against The Atlantic, calling its report “hit-piece lies.”

“Patel’s goal, of course, isn’t actually to win in court,” said William Kristol in The Bulwark. To do that, he’d have to prove not only that the claims in The Atlantic were false but also that the outlet knew they were so when it published them, “or at least didn’t care if they were true or not.” His real aim is to punish a publication that dared embarrass him with a costly nuisance suit “and to demonstrate to an audience of one, President Trump, that he’s fighting the lying lib media.” For now, Patel “still has support from the White House,” said Mike Pesca in his Substack newsletter. Trump appreciates his willingness to target perceived enemies—Patel vowed last week that arrests related to the 2020 election are “coming soon”—and to purge anyone who is “anything less than loyal to the president,” including scores of FBI agents over the past year.

It’s possible The Atlantic exposé will doom Patel, said Jeet Heer in The Nation. Trump, a teetotaler who watched his older brother drink himself to death, cannot abide substance abuse in his underlings. But whatever happens with Patel, the damage he’s wreaked “will outlive his tenure.” He has gutted FBI teams focused on terrorism, political corruption, and organized crime, and turned the bureau into “a dangerously right-wing” agency with the power to hurt the president’s political foes. “The real problem is not Patel’s alleged inebriation but the deep corruption of the most important law enforcement agency in the country.”

An “ethics earthquake” hit Congress two weeks ago, said Zachary Schermele in USA Today, and it’s only intensifying. The first tremor was the resignation of Rep. Eric Swalwell, the seven-term California Democrat and a leading candidate to be the state’s next governor, after he was accused of sexual assault and misconduct by multiple women. The married father of three says the accusations—including that he raped two women—are “false” and “lies.”

Just hours after Swalwell quit, Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas), who admitted an affair with a female aide who later died by suicide, also resigned. In both cases, a bipartisan coalition of female lawmakers had signaled they were moving toward expulsion votes, but this “#MeToo moment” seems part of a broader reckoning, Schermele said. Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (D-Fla.) resigned last week after the House Ethics Committee found her guilty of spending millions of Covid relief dollars on her 2022 election. And pressure is mounting on Rep. Cory Mills (R-Fla.), who’s being investigated over allegations of domestic violence, revenge porn, and campaign finance violations; he denies any wrongdoing.

Why is this happening now? asked Joan Vennochi in The Boston Globe. Maybe it’s a backlash to the #MeToo backlash. Maybe it’s our post-Epstein sensitivity to “power and perversion.” Whatever the reason, it’s good for the country that Congress is policing itself and “setting standards in a bipartisan way.”

Swalwell’s exit was about politics, not decency, said Allysia Finley in The Wall Street Journal. Democrats knew for years that Swalwell was a sex pest, but they still cheered his relentless attacks on President Trump and nodded along as he declared during Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings that sexual assault victims “deserve to be heard.” But when the allegations against him became public, Democrats turned on Swalwell in case he threw the California governor’s race to a Republican. It’s nice that other resignations have followed, said Jon Allsop in The New Yorker. But the careful, scalp-for-scalp arithmetic carries “an unseemly whiff of partisan horse-trading.” Is this a real crackdown on ugly behavior? Or a choreographed effort to look like they’re “taking it seriously”?

The House’s “culture of turning a blind eye” will be hard to shake, said Michelle Cottle in The New York Times. Yes, the #MeToo movement “scared some people straight for a while,” but it didn’t change “the essential power dynamic on the Hill,” where members drunk on flattery and self-regard routinely abuse the often young, often female staffers who work for them. For the ambitious Swalwell, that culture of sexual tolerance was as much of a draw as fame, power, and the other “trappings of office,” said Melanie Mason in Politico. A protégé of former speaker Nancy Pelosi, Swalwell “thought he was untouchable—until he wasn’t.”

Republicans are in no position to moralize, said Christian Schneider in National Review, having handed their party to “inveterate horndog” Donald Trump. But Swalwell does represent a uniquely Democratic species of predator: the “male feminist” who trumpets his support for women as a “prelude to making advances,” then uses his progressivism as a “cloak of invisibility” when accountability looms. Swalwell, at least, has paid a price, and with criminal probes underway in New York and California, it could get higher, said Ingrid Jacques in USA Today. But until both parties stop recruiting “creeps and criminals,” and voters start demanding better, the swamp of congressional ethics will remain “a bipartisan problem.”

What happened

Democrats’ efforts to reclaim the U.S. House of Representatives got a major assist last week, after voters in Virginia approved an aggressively gerrymandered electoral map that could gain the party four more seats in the chamber. By 51% to 49%, Virginians voted to allow the state legislature to redraw the state’s representative districts in a way that likely gives Democrats 10 out of its 11 seats—up from six now—until at least after the 2030 census. President Trump immediately claimed without evidence the result was “rigged.”

Since California voters had earlier approved a map that eliminated five Republican districts, Democrats have now pulled even with GOP redistricting gains in Texas, Missouri, Ohio, and North Carolina. Those states heeded Trump’s repeated calls to redraw maps to help the GOP hold the House in the midterms, setting off the redistricting battle with Democrats. “Many expected Democrats to roll over,” said House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. “We fought back. When they go low, we hit back hard.”

Virginia’s redrawn map could still be scrapped by the state Supreme Court, which is still considering Republican claims that Democrats illegally organized the redistricting effort. Republicans could also gain as many as five more seats from Florida, which will hold a special session on redistricting next week. The U.S. Supreme Court, meanwhile, has delayed a ruling on a case that could overturn the 1965 Voting Rights Act’s prohibition of racial gerrymandering, which could encourage legislatures in multiple Southern states to redraw their maps before the midterms.

What the columnists said

Carving up Virginia into “salamander-like” districts “wasn’t an easy sell,” said William Kristol in The Bulwark. As Virginia Republicans emphasized in attack ads, Democrats such as Barack Obama and Gov. Abigail Spanberger once condemned gerrymandering. But now that Trump has forced the issue, Democrats—often “thought to be hapless competitors” in this dirtier political age—finally “stepped up and fought back.”

Now they can “spare us the false sanctimony about democratic norms,” said The Washington Post in an editorial. Some 46% of Virginians voted for Trump in 2024; this outrageously gerrymandered map would reduce their House representation to barely 9%. We can blame “Trump’s original foolhardy and suicidal decision to goad Texas into mid-decade redistricting,” said Jeffrey Blehar in National Review. But it’s still unjust to turn purple Virginia “into almost a one-party state.”

This was a “less resounding” win for Democrats than the party might suggest, said Aaron Blake in CNN.com. Spanberger won the Virginia governorship by 15 percentage points in November; this map squeezed by with 2. It also may have cost her politically. The centrist Spanberger, a potential presidential candidate, faced complaints of hypocrisy from the Right and criticism from the Left for not advocating for the referendum strongly enough. “The lesson of the current redistricting war” is that pragmatism doesn’t pay; you need to “take whatever advantage you can, whenever you can.”

What happened

With peace talks between the U.S. and Iran at an impasse, the clash for control of the crucial Strait of Hormuz intensified last week as Iran seized at least two cargo ships in the trade corridor in retaliation for a U.S. naval blockade of its ports. The Navy has turned back some 30 ships trying to enter or exit Iranian ports since the blockade was imposed earlier this month, and in a bid to ramp up the economic pressure on Tehran, the U.S. last week boarded a tanker carrying Iranian oil in the Indian Ocean and seized an Iranian-flagged container ship that tried to run the blockade. The Iranian regime accused the U.S. of “piracy” and soon after seized two cargo ships—one flying a Panamanian flag, the other a Liberian flag—claiming the vessels had tried to navigate the contested strait without its approval. White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said Iran’s attacks on “international vessels” didn’t constitute a violation of the U.S.-Iran ceasefire.

A U.S. delegation led by Vice President JD Vance was set to travel to Pakistan for a second round of peace talks, but the trip was delayed after Iran refused to take part. A foreign ministry spokesman cited “contradictory messages” and “inconsistent behavior” from the Americans; other Iranian officials cited the blockade, which the regime called “an act of war.” Trump, who had warned that the “military is raring to go” for strikes on Iran if a deal wasn’t reached before the temporary ceasefire ended last week, extended the truce indefinitely, saying Iran’s leadership was “fractured” and needed time to “come up with a unified proposal.” Iranian officials accused Trump of trying to “buy time for a surprise strike.”

With traffic at a standstill in the strait, which carried some 20% of the world’s oil before the start of the war, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright acknowledged that gas prices—now averaging about $4 a gallon—might not drop below $3 until next year. Trump said that’s “totally wrong” and that prices will plummet “as soon as this ends,” a claim experts called unrealistic. “Oil and gasoline rise very quickly, and they come down very slowly,” said economist Peter Earle. A new Quinnipiac poll found 65% of Americans blame Trump for the spike in gas prices, and more than half blame him “a lot.”

What the columnists said

As Trump’s approval numbers plunge to the mid-30s, associates say he “wants out of the increasingly unpopular war,” said Barak Ravid in Axios. His negotiators suspect a peace deal is within reach, but that “they may not have anyone in Tehran empowered to say yes.” Hard-line generals from the elite Revolutionary Guard now run the country, and they’re “openly at odds over strategy” with Iran’s civilian negotiators. The new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, could break the impasse. But he is rumored to have been badly wounded in the air strike that killed his father, former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and is “barely communicating.”

There’s another major obstacle, said Alayna Treene and Kevin Liptak in CNN.com: The Iranians don’t trust Trump. The two sides seemed two weeks ago to be nearing an agreement. Then Trump went on a tear on social media and in interviews, falsely claiming Iran had agreed to “a host of provisions that hadn’t been finalized” and had accepted the most contentious U.S. demands, such as handing over its stockpile of enriched uranium. That tanked “the rising optimism for a deal,” and “it’s unclear where peace talks go from here.”

“Even Trump’s most basic claims about the Iran war can’t be trusted,” said Daniel Dale, also in CNN.com. He said last week that Vance was en route to Islamabad; in fact, the veep had never left the U.S. And he falsely claimed two weeks ago that Iran had agreed to never again close the Strait of Hormuz. Virtually nothing the president says can be taken at face value, a situation the world “has never had to contend with.” He’s confounded not just negotiators but ordinary Americans, said Peter Hamby in Puck. A new poll shows they “have no idea why this war is happening,” with answers ranging from keeping Iran from getting nukes (22%) to “taking oil” (20%) to “a show of power” (13%).

Control of the strait has become “the strategic fulcrum of the war,” said National Review in an editorial. Iran seems to think if it keeps the strait closed it will “exact so much economic pain” that Trump will end his blockade, or accept a deal that relents on his “red lines.” He needs to convince Tehran he’s “perfectly willing to start shooting again” and “take the strait back by force.”

Iran thinks it has the upper hand, said Erika Solomon in The New York Times. After a “high-stakes game of chicken,” it believes “Trump blinked first” when he extended the ceasefire with no concessions. That validates its view that Iran’s readiness to absorb the economic pain wrought by the war exceeds Trump’s. The regime sees this as an “existential battle,” and no matter how much suffering the blockade inflicts, experts say “it’s not going to blink.”

Both sides have powerful incentives to end this, so “in a world of logic” a settlement would be “a safe bet,” said Marc Champion in Bloomberg. But we’re in a realm where logic doesn’t seem to apply, stuck with leaders who lack “the personal and political courage needed for compromise.” In Tehran, fanatical hard-liners call the shots. In Washington, we have a president who “seems to live in his own movie, reinventing reality to follow a script in which he plays the triumphant hero.” It’s “an inherently unstable situation” with no obvious way out, and “a return to war looks all too possible.”

Tampa

This 1994 six-bedroom Mediterranean home on Tampa Bay includes a cocktail lounge with a stone bar, bottle shelving on a mirrored wall, a fireplace, and water views. The open-plan interior features a curved iron staircase and arched doorways, a gourmet kitchen, and a gas fireplace.

A saltwater pool and spa, a covered patio, an outdoor kitchen, and a shared dock complete the property. Downtown Tampa is a 15-minute drive. $5,600,000. Jennifer Zales, Coldwell Banker Realty, (813) 758-3443

Farmington, Conn.

Built by a renowned abolitionist in 1832, this historically designated Georgian-inspired estate has a fully outfitted Irish pub with wainscoting, coffered ceilings, and a wraparound wood bar. The eight-bedroom main house includes a library, a sitting room with inlaid floors, a billiards room, a wine cellar, a music room, and an updated chef’s kitchen.

The nearly 5-acre property includes a guest cottage, pool, tennis court, and greenhouse. $3,450,000. Scott Holmes, William Pitt Sotheby’s International Realty, (860) 485-5875

Darby, Mont.

Hart Bench Ranch, in the Bitterroot Mountains, features a Western-style saloon in a workshop with wood walls, saddle barstools, and a sitting area with a woodstove. The main residence, a 2001 four-bedroom log home, has a double-height great room with a loft, an antler chandelier, a stone fireplace, and a windowed gable.

The 155-acre lot offers mountain views, a greenhouse, a guesthouse, a garage, and a barn with five horse stalls. $7,450,000. Deke Tidwell, Hall and Hall, (406) 544-7191

Berthoud, Colo.

This 2022 contemporary four-bedroom has a lower-level rec-room wet bar with cristallo quartzite counters, a beverage fridge, and an adjacent wine room. In the living room are clerestory windows, accordion doors, and a 21-foot floor-to-ceiling fireplace finished in hot rolled steel.

An upper deck and a patio with a built-in grill offer mountain views. Access to a pool and gym are included. $2,750,000. David Johnson, LIV Sotheby’s International Realty, (970) 213-0648

San Francisco

Designed by Robert Arrigoni and built in 1970, this curved modern home above Edgehill Way has a C-shaped four-seat bar with a brass footrest, wood walls, and cement posts in a sitting room. The eight-bedroom’s main space has 20-foot ceilings, a catwalk, herringbone wood floors, and cement beams and details contrasting with warm wood.

There’s also an elevator, and ocean and city views. Edgehill Mountain Park is a short walk, and Golden Gate Park is a 10-minute drive. $7,950,000. Neal Ward, Compass, (415) 269-9933

Sherrills Ford, N.C.

This updated 1990 ranch near Lake Norman has a step-up barroom just off the vaulted living room, with an eight-door cabinet and beverage fridge. The three-bedroom includes new wood-look floors, a painted brick fireplace, and a skylighted sitting room with walls of glass.

On the 1.5-acre property are a two-bay garage, a fenced saltwater pool, a hot tub, three decks, flat yards, and a shed. Charlotte is less than an hour away. $560,000. Victoria McHutchon, Compass, (206) 565-4106

‘Michael’

Directed by Antoine Fuqua (PG-13)

★

“Michael is like if you made a cheery biopic of Bill Cosby that ended with his successful run on The Cosby Show,” said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast. “A deliberate act of whitewashing,” the long-awaited new Michael Jackson biopic presents the crowd-pleasing half of a “sordid” true tale, cutting short its account just before it would have become necessary to revisit the multiple allegations of child sexual abuse that surfaced in 1993 and have continued to shadow the pop star’s legacy since his 2009 death. “The fact that Michael concludes with a title card announcing ‘His Story Continues’ doesn’t suffice as an explanation.”

If you focus only on what this “lavishly conventional” biopic leaves out, however, “you may miss the compelling urgency of what it gets in,” said Owen Gleiberman in Variety. The movie opens in 1966, when Michael was roughly 8 and his tyrannical father Joe, played by Colman Domingo, is beating and berating his five young sons to push them to stardom. We then leap to 1978 to witness a young adult Michael, played by real-life nephew Jaafar Jackson, engineering his escape into a solo career, with Quincy Jones guiding him. The younger Jackson isn’t as photogenic as his indelible uncle, “but does he ever nail the look, the voice, the electrostatic moves—and, more than that, the mixture of delicacy and steel that made Michael who he was.” The picture’s downfall is its lack of real interest in Michael as a human being, said Robert Daniels in RogerEbert.com. Produced by its subject’s estate and four of his siblings, “it has nothing original to say about him,” merely resketching his life to age 30 as most of us know it, failing even to provide insight into his emotional pain. Barely a movie, Michael is “a filmed playlist in search of a story.”

‘Mother’

Directed by David Lowery (R)

★★

“The more movies you’ve seen, the less patience you might have with movies that try to impress you with how wiggy they are,” said Stephanie Zacharek in Time. When the new film featuring Anne Hathaway as an icy fictional pop icon isn’t teasing us with glimpses of ghosts or bloodlettings, it’s “just a slog,” despite a premise and a pairing of two stars that suggest it could have been more. At times, Mother Mary is “a phantasmagoric fever dream of a gothic pop opera,” said Katie Walsh in the Chicago Tribune. At others, it’s “a single-setting two-hander that pits two of our most mesmerizing actresses against each other.”

Hathaway, playing the titular singer on the eve of a highly anticipated comeback, journeys to the atelier of a former close collaborator portrayed by Michaela Coel. Hathaway’s fraying idol wants a dress of nearly magical power as she returns to the stage, and Coel’s Sam agrees to make it, airing grievances as she does about how Mary treated her. The movie “certainly casts a spell,” but the story itself “devolves into mush.” To enjoy the film, “a certain leap of faith is required,” said David Fear in Rolling Stone. When, at last, it “rushes headfirst into delirium,” viewers ready to roll with it may find that it “taps into the same transcendent state that great pop music does,” getting into your head and under your skin “in ways that defy description.

Congratulations to Kevin Warsh, President Trump's preferred pick to be the new chairman of the Federal Reserve, said Hakyung Kim in the FT. He managed to get through an eagerly awaited grilling about his nomination by the Senate Banking Committee “without causing a Treasuries market meltdown”.

Risk of escalation

Warsh carefully “sidestepped multiple gotchas on his independence from Trump” – including the suggestion that he is “a human sock puppet”. But ultimately the world's most important central bank still faces a political deadlock, said DealBook in The New York Times.

Thom Tillis, a Republican committee member, has vowed to block Warsh's appointment unless the Department of Justice drops its investigation into the current chair Jay Powell's building renovations. Powell has refused to quit next month as scheduled unless his successor is in place; Trump has threatened to fire him. For the moment, investors “are largely ignoring the drama”. But any escalation “carries huge risks”.

Even if this soap opera is swiftly resolved, Warsh faces “a high-wire act” convincing investors that he's his own man, “without angering Trump”, said Nick Timiraos in The Wall Street Journal. An erstwhile inflation “hawk”, he auditioned for the job by constructing a case for the rate cuts Trump wants – arguing that an AI boom “would soon deliver a productivity surge”. Yet the Iran war has changed everything.

Regime change

When Trump picked Warsh in January (in part because of his “central casting” looks), markets were factoring in at least one or two cuts this year, probably more, said The Economist. But the soaring oil price pushed headline inflation to 3.3% in March (up from 2.4% the month before) and next month's data could be equally painful. Few now expect cuts this year. Moreover, Warsh's AI argument has always been “shaky”. If the technology really does make US workers more productive, “the correct monetary response might well be to raise interest rates”.

Warsh's most interesting views, which also potentially bring him into conflict with politicians and the markets, concern the Fed's balance sheet, said John Authers on Bloomberg. “He is loudly on record that it should be smaller” – meaning that the Fed should sell down some of the huge portfolio of bonds it took on to deal with the 2008 financial crisis and then the pandemic. “At the margin, that would mean less liquidity in the market, and higher bond yields.”

Yet we're no clearer how he might actually go about this, said Hakyung Kim. Warsh is proposing “regime change”. But “if you're going to rip up the current playbook, you'd better have a better one, and it's not clear that Warsh does”.

Americans in privately run Medicare plans caught a break earlier this month, said Maya Goldman in Axios. Dr. Mehmet Oz, the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, announced that the government will increase average Medicare Advantage payments by 2.48%, or more than $13 billion, in 2027. That’s a big improvement over the 0.09% raise initially proposed in January. Insurers will also benefit from a decision to pause a proposed overhaul to Medicare’s risk-adjustment model, which pays more for covering sicker patients. It means benefits should remain steady for people in Medicare Advantage, which allows seniors to choose private insurance plans that are covered by the government. Some providers “said the pay boost still doesn’t reflect economic realities,” with the rising costs of “drugs, supplies, and more patient visits stoking medical inflation.” But there is growing “bipartisan concern over how much” the popular program is costing taxpayers.

The $13 billion handout “sits oddly with the Trump administration’s performative chainsaw-wielding claims about reducing spending,” said Brett Arends in MarketWatch, because it rewards a program that is “grossly inefficient.” The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, an independent government watchdog, says that the government spends 14% more—$76 billion—for Medicare Advantage enrollees than it would if those beneficiaries were enrolled in traditional Medicare. After saying he was going to hold those costs down, Trump is back-sliding in favor of the “big insurance companies, most of them listed on Wall Street.”

Medicare Advantage enrollment numbers keep rising because the program works, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial—by “using market competition to improve care for seniors” and, yes, restrain spending. Overall Medicare spending was $431 billion less over the past decade than the Congressional Budget Office projected in 2010, “even as the share of beneficiaries in Advantage increased by half.” A Trump plan to expand Medicare Advantage further by automatically enrolling seniors in private insurance plans would “reduce Medicare waste, fraud, and abuse.” But Democrats—who prefer government-run health care—are opposed.

Trump himself has labeled health insurers “as fat cats that need to be reined in,” said Bob Herman in Stat News, yet “his policies are enriching them.” He threatened “to demand lower premiums” from health insurance companies in December but never did. Now lobbying letters reveal that the largest Medicare Advantage insurers “pressured the Trump administration not to move forward with its risk adjustment proposal,” which would have “led to more accurate, and lower, payments.” There was no justification for the pause “other than industry resistance,” analysts say. And in the end, the insurers got “exactly what they wanted.”

‘Dandelion’ by Ella Langley

★★★

“Ella Langley wants to write timeless songs, ones that’ll be passed down and rediscovered in 75 years,” said Ethan Beck in Paste. The 26-year-old Alabama native may have done that with “Choosin’ Texas,” a tune that’s featured on her new album and has now been atop Billboard’s pop chart longer than any other single by a female country artist. The song warns that “cowboys always find a way to leave,” and the rest of Dandelion also finds Langley putting the Americana of her 2025 debut behind her and focusing on “slick, ethereal pop country” powered by “unquestionable hooks.” Not that Langley simply tries to replicate “Choosin’ Texas,” said Will Hermes in Rolling Stone. “Instead, she leans into a fresh color wheel of vintage influences,” delivering a “wholly laudable” cover of a 1952 Kitty Wells hit and signaling her allegiances in originals like “We Know Us,” which “begins like a Patsy Cline fever dream.” The record includes generic corn too, which even Langley’s plaintive voice can’t save. Still, it’s “a coherent, fully realized album,” one that puts her in the select company of artists bringing “smart, woman-centered songwriting” into country’s mainstream

‘My New Band Believe’ by My New Band Believe

★★★

“Cameron Picton has a way of making violence sound a little romantic and intimacy sound alienating,” said Sam Sodomsky in Pitchfork. On his first solo album as My New Band Believe, the former bassist in the now-defunct British group Black Midi embraces such contradictions and proves himself, at 26, to be “one of the most crucial voices in indie rock today.” Picton has brought the “twitching” rhythms and “controlled chaos” of post-punk into “musical settings that suggest formal attire,” flush with strings and horns and flamenco-style guitar. At times, his debut “sounds like either the most tenderhearted prog album you’ve ever heard or the most cold-blooded mutation of folk music.” Other times, “it’s just plain stunning.” The record is “teeming with musical ideas from out of nowhere,” aid Alexis Petridis in The Guardian. But My New Band Believe shows a greater concern for melody than Black Midi ever did, and it’s telling that Picton initially hoped Brian Wilson collaborator Van Dyke Parks might orchestrate the record. He’s also wearing his intelligence a little more lightly than he once did, “which might be the smartest move of all.”

‘Death of a Salesman,’ Winter Garden Theatre, New York City

★★★

“Death of a Salesman has returned to Broadway, yet again in triumph,” said Helen Shaw in The New York Times. It’s been a mere four years since Arthur Miller’s tragedy last appeared on the Great White Way, and that one didn’t have Nathan Lane’s unusual take on Willy Loman. Whereas the aging, fading salesman is often portrayed as a hulk of a man, “Lane’s our song-and-dance man, after the music stops”; he’s so weightless that he “seems to drift like a tumbleweed.” That makes Laurie Metcalf the show’s center of gravity, and her portrayal of wife Linda is “a masterpiece of layered tensions.” She doesn’t cry when her self-aggrandizing husband dies, and neither will you.

While “there’s no such thing as a definitive staging of Salesman,” said Charles Isherwood in The Wall Street Journal, “this version ranks as the finest Broadway production of any classic play in many years.” Lane’s Loman seems “doomed to defeat as soon as we see him,” Metcalf is “extraordinary,” and Christopher Abbott is “a revelation” as the couple’s disappointing elder son, Biff. With its stark staging, this Salesman also feels more like an existential, rather than particularly American, tragedy. Miller’s play becomes “a resonant examination of the isolation and loneliness of life, the fear that comes with the waning of hope, the tenuousness of human connection.”

But director Joe Mantello has softened all the male characters, and that “drains the drama of its potency,” said Naveen Kumar in Variety. Though Lane is “undoubtedly” gifted, “his natural gentility is tough to dress down.” Worse, the tension we should feel between Willy and Biff never takes hold because neither seems sufficiently fixated on the idea of what a man should be. Fortunately, Mantello has Metcalf, “upholding her reputation as a Broadway MVP” by reminding us at every turn of the anxieties of reaching the end of life nearly penniless. “The revival is worth seeing for her performance alone.”

‘Cats: The Jellicle Ball,’ Broadhurst Theatre, New York City

★★★★

“Good luck naming a musical revival that has ever departed so radically from the original,” said Johnny Oleksinski in the New York Post. In Cats: The Jellicle Ball, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s balletic 1980s kitsch fest becomes “a glitter bomb of euphoric pandemonium,” and the transformation could happen only because the show’s performers aren’t pretending to be cats anymore and are instead celebrating Cats as participants in New York City’s competitive queer ballroom culture. Though I worried the show might not transfer well to Broadway following its hit off-Broadway run, “I was delighted to find it’s even better uptown.”

“We could quibble about what’s gained and lost,” said Jackson McHenry in NYMag.com. The ballroom competition’s runway is now shorter, leaving the performers “less room to strut.” But the staging does give the soloists a brighter spotlight, and as before, this reimagined Cats “makes a thrilling number of choices to comment on the bizarre musical entity borne of a posh Brit’s love of T.S. Eliot’s poems for children.” Every cat (or person playacting as a cat) still gets a Lloyd Webber song. And the tension between the composer’s commercial juggernaut and the marginalized art form of ballroom only enriches the show and its implied message: that “given any kind of stage, some talent, and enough attitude, a person can transform into whatever real thing they want to be.”

“As always, the showstoppers are the showstoppers,” said Greg Evans in Deadline. The Wiz actor André De Shields brings the audience to his feet when he enters as Old Deuteronomy, and “Memory,” delivered by “Tempress” Chasity Moore, is bathed in “thunderous” applause. Every other number is “entirely recognizable yet completely fresh,” helping make Jellicle Ball “so flat-out fun it smothers every slight ever suffered by Lloyd Webber’s mega-musical.”

‘London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth’ by Patrick Radden Keefe

“The best true-crime stories use a particular event as a key to unlock a world,” said Laura Miller in Slate. Patrick Radden Keefe’s latest book “does just that,” finding, in the unexplained death of a London teenager, “both a private loss and a parable of the decay of a once great city.” In the early hours of Nov. 29, 2019, Zac Brettler, a 19-year-old from a comfortably middle-class family, leaped from a fifth-floor balcony into the Thames River and drowned after striking the sloping river wall. Though the official inquest failed to determine whether Zac jumped to escape danger or to kill himself, The New Yorker’s Keefe winds up blaming the death on the corruption of London in recent decades by oligarchs, con men, and international criminals. The strands of the story he tells “strongly suggest that it was the city that destroyed the boy.”

Keefe’s book “opens a window onto a world of financial dirty work and Walter Mitty–like fantasies of aspirational wealth,” said Ian Thomson in The Guardian. As a teenager, Zac became wealth-obsessed, but his parents were unaware their son had become a compulsive fabulist who had told entrepreneur Akbar Shamji and Shamji’s violent associate, Verinder Sharma, that he was “Zac Ismailov,” a Russian oligarch’s son soon to receive a hefty inheritance. The pair eventually uncovered Zac’s ruse, and they were the last to see him alive, but they denied causing him to jump from the balcony of Sharma’s apartment. Keefe’s “scrupulously researched” account proves “grimly absorbing from start to finish” as the author of Say Nothing and Empire of Pain weaves together the stories of these three men.

With London Falling, Keefe has given us “a morality tale for an amoral age,” said Hamilton Cain in The Boston Globe. But he appears to have been so invested in providing Zac’s parents’ perspective on the story that his own conclusions can’t be fully trusted. “He shrugs off Zac’s deceptions as a kind of precocious child’s play,” and “despite red flags everywhere,” proves “reluctant to consider the teenager’s fraught mental health,” leaning instead on “a golden-boy-ensnared-by-the-wrongcrowd approach.” For me, Keefe’s close collaboration with Zac’s parents “transforms the narrative from a standard true-crime procedural into a profound exploration of parental grief and the search for accountability in a city that often protects its most shadowy residents,” said Tobias Grey in Air Mail. The police come off as disturbingly negligent, but even the Brettler family takes its knocks, and “Keefe’s probity and knack for telling a compelling story ensure that no stone is left unturned.

‘Western Star: The Life and Legends of Larry McMurtry’ by David Streitfeld

“An unmistakable sadness clings to Western Star,” said Andrew R. Graybill in The Wall Street Journal. Though David Streitfeld’s new biography of Larry McMurtry is also “highly entertaining,” it can’t ignore that Texas’ most famous novelist was also, despite his Hollywood triumphs and enduring friendships, a loner at heart who was defined by his deep ambivalence about his home state. Characteristically, McMurtry wasn’t keen on being the subject of a full biography; Streitfeld, after befriending him, won his cooperation piecemeal. Somehow, the veteran journalist succeeds in “resisting any inclination to hagiography,” creating a memorable portrait of the author of Lonesome Dove, Terms of Endearment, and dozens of other novels.

“Streitfeld’s writing is notable for its descriptive energy and reportorial straightforwardness,” said Joyce Sáenz Harris in The Dallas Morning News. After a flash-forward to the 2023 estate sale that followed McMurtry’s 2021 death, Streitfeld lays out his subject’s life nearly chronologically, starting with his 1936 birth in Archer City, the small Texas town that inspired The Last Picture Show. McMurtry’s obsession with books began in childhood, and his ties to Hollywood began when his first novel, published when he was 25, was adapted as Hud, the 1963 Paul Newman classic. Streitfeld also covers the filming of the screen adaptations of Picture Show and the Lonesome Dove series as well as McMurtry’s late-career co-authoring of the screenplay for Brokeback Mountain. As the life chapters accrue, “it is hard to imagine anyone could have done a more thorough, honestly reported, yet compassionate job.”

McMurtry loved spinning tales about himself, and though Streitfeld reports the lore, “he fact-checks as he goes,” said Marilyn Bailey in Texas Monthly. McMurtry liked to claim that he grew up in a home bereft of books, but that now looks like a stretch. It’s also doubtful that the home sat on “Idiot Ridge.” McMurtry did die with 228,000 books on his shelves in Archer City. He just didn’t die in Archer City, as obituary scribes were told. As Streitfeld puts it, “If you’re the greatest writer in Texas, there’s no romance to dying in Arizona.”

Afrika Bambaataa was a formative figure in hip-hop, as influential at the start as his better-known peers Grandmaster Flash and DJ Kool Herc. At South Bronx street parties in the 1970s, he galvanized the crowds with breakbeat DJing that incorporated sounds ranging from funk and rock to electronica, salsa, and movie soundtracks. He helped bring hip-hop into the mainstream in 1982 with his electrofunk breakout hit “Planet Rock,” built around a keyboard riff from the German electronic group Kraftwerk.

Beyond his musical contributions, Bambaataa also helped shape hip-hop as a broader cultural movement, founding the collective Universal Zulu Nation, which supported the four components of hip-hop: DJing, MCing, breakdancing, and graffiti art. “I was seeing all this that was happening,” he said in 2009, “and decided to make this as a cultural movement.”

Born Lance Taylor, he was raised by his Jamaican mother in a housing project in the South Bronx, a neighborhood blighted by “years of economic neglect,” said the Associated Press. Thanks to his mother’s extensive record collection, he “was exposed to music at an early age,” and as he began to DJ at community centers his “ability to repurpose and mix old hits became one of his signatures.” By 1975, when he was 22, he had adopted his stage name—drawn from a 19th-century Zulu leader— and was bringing his parties to a bigger audience, said The Guardian, “pulling together crews of fledgling rappers, organizing breakdancing competitions, and generally helping to create a new aesthetic.” As hip-hop grew popular, he helped move it from funk and soul beats “toward a more futuristic technopop feel.” His “Planet Rock” was the epitome of that sound, and “one of the earliest rap songs to impinge on the wider public consciousness.”

“Prolific to a fault,” Bambaataa went on to release dozens of albums, said Rolling Stone, and collaborate with artists such as James Brown, George Clinton, and former Sex Pistol John Lydon. But allegations of a dark past came out in 2016, when three men accused him of having sexually abused them in the 1990s. Other men then also came forward to say he’d abused them as teens, and one filed suit. Bambaataa denied all the allegations but lost the civil case after refusing to appear in court. His legacy as “a foundation architect of hip-hop culture” will remain, rap pioneer Kurtis Blow said after Bambaataa’s death, but that “legacy is complex.”

Every day and every week, it becomes more alarmingly evident that in the White House “a mad king reigns, virtually unchecked,” said Jackie Calmes in the Los Angeles Times. Since he launched the frustrating war in Iran, President Trump has “reversed and contradicted himself repeatedly” about its goals while descending into enraged, profanity-flecked threats of genocide. On Easter Sunday, with Iran defying his demands to open the Strait of Hormuz to oil tankers, our commander in chief posted on Truth Social: “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell.” He threatened to completely destroy Iran’s power plants, bridges, and infrastructure—leaving 93 million Iranians without electricity, running water, or functioning hospitals—and followed two days later with this genocidal vow: “A whole civilization will die tonight.” In everything the nearly 80-year-old Trump does, he shows the world “he is mentally unstable, unfit for the office.” When Pope Leo XIV criticized the war in Iran and Trump’s brutal immigration roundups, Trump posted that the pontiff was “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy” before following up with an AI-generated image of himself as a robed Jesus Christ healing a sick man—later claiming it depicted him “as a doctor.” That was too much even for onetime acolytes, said Makena Kelly and David Gilbert in Wired. Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and podcasters Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones, among others, denounced Trump’s depiction of himself as the Messiah, and called for him to be removed from office, with Greene suggesting that Trump may actually be the Antichrist. Greene told former MAGA allies: “I know all of you and him and he has gone insane, and all of you are complicit.”

It’s no longer just Democrats and late-night comics questioning Trump’s sanity, said Peter Baker in The New York Times. Retired generals, former Republican officials, and foreign leaders are expressing deep concern about the “state of mind” of “the oldest president ever inaugurated.” In his second term, Trump “seems even less restrained and more incoherent,” publicly using profanity, wandering off at official meetings “into odd tangents” about poisonous snakes, Sharpie pens, and his White House ballroom, and repeatedly calling Greenland “Iceland” while insisting it should belong to him. He appalled allies when he gloated that liberal Hollywood director Rob Reiner had been allegedly stabbed to death by his son, and when, after the death of former FBI director and special counsel Robert Mueller, he said, “Good. I’m glad he’s dead.” After Trump’s genocidal threats against Iran, Democrats have called on the Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Trump for mental unfitness, but he has surrounded himself with fawning loyalists, “rendering that idea moot.” Trump’s “chest-thumping and semi-coherent bluster” are nothing new, said Becket Adams in National Review, but now that he’s started a war of choice in the Middle East, he’s provided “the added bonus of a ticking body count”—including more than 3,600 Iranians and at least 13 Americans. It’s “fully reasonable” to question why our president keeps “teetering frantically between talk of peace and threats, promising terrible outcomes that no American has had time to consider, let alone endorse.”

Trump haters may “clutch at their pearls,” said Hugo Gurdon in the Washington Examiner, but he has a long, successful track record of issuing “bellicose threats” and making “outlandish” demands to get the other side to the negotiating table. Hasn’t anyone learned “he should be taken seriously, not literally?” Sorry, said Janan Ganesh in the Financial Times, but it smacks of “desperation” to claim Trump is cleverly using Richard Nixon’s “madman theory” to intimidate Iran into concessions. Trump’s wild, irresponsible threats “achieved next to nothing.” Iran did not reopen the strait or surrender to his other demands.

All this “is utterly exhausting for Americans and the world,” said Sohrab Ahmari in Unherd. Trump owes his presidency to voters who grew tired of technocrats such as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama overriding the public will to make trade, economic, and immigration policy, “often to the benefit of themselves and other elites.” But Trump “went into mad-king mode,” and the results make liberal technocrats “look better by comparison.” This is life “under a personalist regime,” said Lisa Needham in Public Notice, where all power is held by a cultlike leader “not accountable to the military or to a political party.” Trump “reverses decisions based on nothing but whims.” He demands that aides and followers show loyalty by “agreeing to believe the same lies he does.” When “Congress and the Supreme Court simply step aside and abdicate their power, then it’s all Trump, all the time.” Personalist government has brought us nonstop chaos, corruption, bitter division, and foreign conflict, and “it’s wrecking us.”

What’s the situation in Cuba? 

The country is running out of fuel—and fast. Oil shipments from Venezuela, Cuba’s main fuel supplier for the past three decades, ended in January after the U.S. attacked the South American country and captured its president, Nicolás Maduro. President Trump then declared a full oil blockade, threatening severe tariffs on any country that sent Cuba fuel. The blockade has exacerbated a long-simmering economic and humanitarian crisis for Cuba’s 11 million people. Blackouts of up to 20 hours are routine, and their consequences are severe: Running water has been cut off in many urban areas because the systems rely on electric pumps; trash has piled up for lack of gas to run garbage trucks; and doctors say preventable deaths are rising as equipment fails. In late March, the U.S. Coast Guard allowed a single Russian oil tanker carrying about 730,000 barrels of oil to pass through the blockade, providing Cuba with at best a few weeks of fuel. “It’s not going to have an impact—Cuba is finished,” Trump said. “And whether or not they get a boat of oil, it’s not going to matter.”

How did Cuba get here?

The island has been under U.S. sanctions for nearly seven decades. What began with an arms embargo during the Cuban Revolution in 1958 was broadened into a full trade and travel embargo after Fidel Castro established his communist government. While Castro’s rule saw an expansion of access to education and health care, alongside those gains came political repression and the confiscation and nationalization of private land, businesses, and homes, prompting millions of Cubans to flee. The U.S. trade embargo— the longest in modern history—intensified Cuba’s chronic economic woes, which deepened after the collapse in 1991 of its main foreign backer, the Soviet Union. The Cold War–era embargo continued until the second term of President Barack Obama, who sought to ease what he called “a rigid policy that is rooted in events that took place before most of us were born.”

What did Obama do?

Believing a rapprochement could reduce repression on the island and provide economic opportunities for ordinary Cubans, he opened discussions in 2014 with Raúl Castro, Fidel’s brother and successor. The Obama administration restored diplomatic relations and struck Cuba from its list of state sponsors of terrorism. In March 2016, Obama became the first U.S. president to set foot in Cuba since Calvin Coolidge in 1928. Americans were allowed to travel to Cuba for “educational” purposes for the first time in decades, and direct commercial flights resumed and embassies opened. Cuba’s tourism revenue jumped 15% in the first half of 2016, and a record 4 million foreigners visited that year. But few Cubans reaped benefits, as increased demand for food and poor planning caused shortages and price hikes. “It’s a disaster,” said Lisset Felipe, a government-employed air conditioner seller, in 2016. “We never lived luxuriously, but the comfort we once had doesn’t exist anymore.”

Why didn’t the thaw last? 

On the campaign trail in 2016, Trump pledged to undo Obama’s policies—promises that helped him win the votes of a majority of Cuban Americans in Florida. In office, he imposed a “maximum pressure” campaign against Cuba and put the country back on the list of state sponsors of terrorism. Though President Joe Biden reversed that move in his last week in office in January 2025, Trump quickly reimposed it after returning to the White House last year with a newfound interest in Latin America, heavily influenced by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a foreign policy hawk and the son of Cuban immigrants. Trump’s first target was Venezuelan autocrat Maduro, a close ally of Cuba, and many Cuban Americans saw that intervention as a step toward realizing Rubio’s desire to topple the island’s communist government. “If I lived in Havana, and I was in the government, I’d be concerned—at least a little bit,” Rubio warned hours after the January raid that captured Maduro.

What does the White House want?

The end of Cuba’s communist government. The Trump administration has been negotiating with President Miguel Díaz-Canel’s regime and seems inclined to avoid using military force, hoping the blockade will inspire Cubans to rise up against their government. Protests are spreading, with furious residents banging pots and chanting, “We’ve had enough,” “Freedom,” and “Put the lights back on.” In the central city of Morón last month, protesters set the Communist Party’s local headquarters on fire—the biggest show of dissent in years. But the blockade is also inflicting pain on ordinary Cubans. “The U.S. is trying to punish the Cuban government,” said one Havana resident. “But it’s the people who are suffering.

How do Cubans feel about the blockade?

They’re desperate. In a country where the official average monthly wage is about $15, gas is now nearly $40 a gallon—if you can find it. There were three major blackouts in March, and the United Nations has warned the blockade will result in a “severe humanitarian crisis,” with fuel shortages hitting every aspect of the island’s food system, from irrigation and harvesting to refrigeration and distribution. Health experts predict diseases such as dengue and chikungunya will return. Cuba’s once-vaunted health system is collapsing. There’s little fuel for ambulances, doctors and nurses are unable to commute to work, and pharmacy shelves are bare. Many refrigerated medicines spoil when the power goes out. Doctors say premature births are increasing as an antibiotic shortage leads to rising infections. It’s also getting harder to administer chemotherapy amid blackouts, and patients on ventilators now rely on backup batteries or hand pumps. “I don’t know how long we can keep going,” said Xenia Álvarez, whose 21-year-old son’s lungs can’t pump air on their own. “His life depends on electricity.”

What happened

Hungarian voters booted out their longtime prime minister, Viktor Orban, in a general election last week, dealing a blow to the European far right and robbing the Trump administration of its biggest cheerleader in the EU. Though the Kremlin-friendly Orban had held power for the past 16 years, partly by tilting the electoral system in his favor, his far-right Fidesz party lost to the center-right Tisza party of anti-corruption campaigner Peter Magyar. With turnout at a record 80%, Magyar took a two-thirds parliamentary majority, which will allow him to undo the changes Orban made to Hungary’s courts, elections, and press that had restricted the country’s democratic freedoms. While Orban had been expected to cry fraud if he lost, the trouncing was too complete. Instead, he conceded quickly as pro-Magyar crowds celebrated across the country. Magyar pledged to work more closely with the EU and NATO and restore checks and balances. “Together we liberated Hungary and took back our country,” he told cheering supporters. “Those who commit the sin of dividing the nation must leave power.”

Ahead of the vote, the Trump administration had made a show of supporting Orban, with Vice President JD Vance visiting Budapest last week to campaign with him. President Trump even called in to a rally to praise Orban’s anti-immigrant policies. “I love Viktor,” he said. “He didn’t allow people to storm your country.” Russia, too, had an interest in keeping Orban in power, as he had consistently advanced Kremlin aims by blocking EU aid to Ukraine and vetoing EU sanctions on Moscow. “This is not just a repudiation of Russian influence,” said Ian Bremmer, head of the risk advisory firm Eurasia Group. “It’s also a repudiation of Trump.”

What the columnists said

Why was the White House “so invested in seeing Orban prevail”? asked Nick Catoggio in The Dispatch. Because MAGA elites looked to his “illiberal Christian democracy” as a model, even holding an annual conservative confab in Budapest. Orban was the “ur-Trump,” who proved back in 2010 that voters would flock to an anti-immigrant and culturally reactionary “strongman.” And crucially, he showed that such a person could entrench power by packing courts with loyalists, handing the press over to friendly oligarchs, and rigging the election system for his own party.

Yet eventually Orban forgot “a basic rule of politics” said Andrew Higgins in The New York Times. A populist must actually “be popular to win elections.” But as Hungary’s economy became “deformed by corruption,” voters grew angry. Hungary today has “the slowest growth in the region,” and “unemployment is at a 10-year high.” In the end, even Orban’s near-total control of the media, which effectively barred Magyar from TV during the entire campaign, was no match for reality.

That’s why Fidesz’s shellacking could be an “omen for Trump’s MAGA movement,” said Max Boot in The Washington Post. Like Orban, Trump “presides over flagrant corruption while inflation is rising and economic growth slowing.” He could face a similar smackdown in the November midterm elections. That would be more likely if Democrats were to follow Magyar’s script, said William A. Galston in The Wall Street Journal. The Hungarian challenger’s “disciplined and energetic campaign” focused on bread-and-butter issues: “cronyism and corruption, economic stagnation and inflation, and decaying public services.” Wisely, he avoided discussing “divisive social issues” or “attacking his opponent as an enemy of democracy.”

“Don’t read too much into Orban’s defeat,” said Jamie Dettmer in Politico. Sure, it’s tempting to see Hungary’s result as a “symbolic setback” for populists everywhere, especially given the effort that Trump and Vance have put into juicing far-right European parties. Yet elections reflect “local political and economic circumstances” much more often than “broad and lasting transnational” trends. This vote in a nation of only 10 million “isn’t a devastating blow to the far right”—not in Europe and not in the U.S.

Perhaps not, said Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic, but it does show that “illiberalism is not inevitable.” There’s been a belief within the MAGA movement—one that’s “also present in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric”—that it and its international brethren are “somehow destined not just to win but to hold power forever, because they have the support of the ‘real’ people.” But that’s no longer the case. Hungary showed that “‘real’ people grow tired of their rulers. Old ideas become stale. Younger people question orthodoxy.” If Orban can lose, so too can his “Russian and American admirers.”

Mountain View, Colo.

This remodeled 2009 studio is in the Madeline Hotel and Residences, a ski-in, ski-out community that’s a gondola ride from downtown Telluride. Fully furnished, the contemporary space has a wall of wood-framed French doors, a fireplace, a kitchenette, and a bath with a double vanity.

A terrace overlooks trees and a natural stone wall. Amenities include a pool and hot tub, a spa, dining, and a ski valet. $1,375,000. Tracy Boyce, LIV Sotheby’s International Realty, (970) 708-0737

San Francisco

In a converted 1909 Cow Hollow house near the marina and the Presidio, this home has a private entry and garden, and features a large picture window, a brick- ringed fireplace surrounded by built-ins, and a pass-through alcove kitchen with a Sub-Zero refrigerator.

There’s also in-unit laundry, a walk-in closet that can serve as an office, and oak-plank floors throughout. Outside, mature trees offer shade on the patio. $925,000. Tania Toubba, Sotheby’s International Realty—San Francisco Brokerage, (415) 902-2702

Sunny Isles, Fla.

Part of Armani Casa Residences, a waterfront condo community, this 2019 cabana has a path to Sunny Isles Beach. The modern home features built-ins, a slatted wood feature wall, a sleek compact kitchen, and a bath with a stone counter and walk-in shower.

Outside is a beachside terrace, plus access to a pool, playground, sauna, hot tub, an association gym, and a picnic zone. Miami is about a half hour south. $999,000. Daniel Tzinker, The Agency Florida, (786) 234-9898

Seattle

This converted loft is in a 1910 former furniture factory across from Pike Place Market. The home includes exposed brick walls and ducts, beamed ceilings, windows with views of the Seattle Great Wheel and Elliott Bay, plus a newer kitchen with subway tiles, open shelves, an eat-in island, and stainless appliances.

Coffee, shops, dining, the Seattle Aquarium, and Waterfront Park are walking distance. $365,000. Sally Tafft, Windermere—Seattle-Sand Point/Luxury Portfolio International, (206) 390-5906

New York City

A block from Hudson River Park, this 2022 alcove studio in Hell’s Kitchen’s 547 West 47th Street has south-facing windows, a closet that doubles as an office, and in-unit laundry. The condo’s galley kitchen has marble counters and Bosch and Miele appliances, and the bath features terrazzo floors and a marble vanity.

Building amenities include a library, fitness studio, dog run, playground, and rooftop pool. $890,000. Kristin Black, Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group, (212) 353-5009

Austin

Set in West Campus five minutes from the University of Texas, this recently updated 1973 condo features two loft-sleeping platforms, one above the alcove kitchen, another atop the living area. The unit has a fireplace, wood-look flooring, a walk-in closet, and a kitchen with butcher-block counters, subway tiles, and open shelving.

A balcony overlooks the shared pool. A tennis center and park are a short drive. $240,000. Jesper Taktblad, Compass RE Texas, (512) 657-2250

President Trump wants to “open up workers’ retirement plans to his pet industries,” said Sam Gustin in The New Republic. The Labor Department recently proposed a long-awaited rule that would shield 401(k) plans investing in crypto and private equity and credit markets from getting sued over excessive risk—no minor concern since crypto prices have cratered in the past six months. “The stakes are enormous.” A 1% shift of funds would flood “more than $100 billion in new capital” into troubled sectors in desperate need of a bailout. This is just another way for Trump, whose family has billions of dollars in crypto, to use the presidency as a “giant ATM for himself, his family, and his cronies.”

Actually, the Labor Department’s proposal will make “retirement better for millions of Americans,” said Charles E.F. Millard in The Wall Street Journal. The idea is to let “fiduciaries be fiduciaries” and protect them from “frivolous litigation” when they seek the best investments. If the plan goes ahead, 401(k)s will look “more like traditional defined-benefit pension plans,” in which investment management and risk management was left to the employer, who could then “use the actuarial law of large numbers to pool longevity and investment risk and provide an income that retirees could count on.” Critics on the Left say the little guy will get bamboozled” as huge swaths of people’s hard-earned savings get shoved “willy-nilly” into risky assets. But “that’s just politics.” This proposal “is all about retirement security” and freeing professionals to find “lifetime income solutions” for their clients.

Retirement plans are long overdue for an update, said The Washington Post in an editorial. Most existing rules date to 1979, long before cryptocurrencies and other digital assets existed, and they have deprived employees of the “chance to gain more of a stake in the entire U.S. economy.” The private capital market grew from “$2 trillion in 2008 to $13.7 trillion in 2023”—why shouldn’t workers get a piece of that? Sure, investing everything in such assets “would be a bad idea,” but diversifying portfolios with 5% here and there reduces portfolio risk as opposed to adding to it.

This is no time to expose retirement funds to the private credit market, said Alan Rappeport and Colby Smith in The New York Times. “Cracks have begun showing” in the $3 trillion market as funds start to cap investors’ redemption requests. Private loans are already at risk of defaulting at rates not seen since the pandemic, and the situation will only get worse as AI scrambles the prospects for software firms. Some economists now see “echoes of the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis.” If Americans’ wealth gets bound up in the fate of these funds, a “broader private credit meltdown could become a political liability for Trump.”

‘Vol. II’ by Angine de Poitrine

★★★

“The Canadian rock duo Angine de Poitrine conquered the internet this year with long-nosed, polka-dotted masks and music that’s intricate, microtonal, mostly instrumental, and unquestionably fun,” said Jon Pareles in The New York Times. Hailing from Quebec and named after pre-heart-attack chest pain, the two musicians, a guitarist and a drummer who go by Khn de Poitrine and Klek de Poitrine, seem to have mind-melded over two decades of collaboration. To build each song, Khn uses a looping pedal to stack guitar and bass riffs while Klek’s drumming “underlines every essential syncopation.” Despite the costumes that have helped attract millions of YouTube views, “Angine de Poitrine’s music is no gimmick,” requiring great feats of dexterity.

So here we are, in 2026, and “the world’s hottest rock band looks like they snuck a double-necked guitar onto the set of Beetlejuice,” said Christopher R. Weingarten in Pitchfork. It’s unexpected, because the act’s first album went unheard yet the duo’s sudden success is well-earned. “They have the muscle, the melody, and the magic to be the world’s weirdest party band.”

‘Distracted’ by Thundercat

★★★

On his first album in six years, Thundercat is “staring down loss while
making the struggle as beautiful, funny, spacey, and vibe-y as he can,” said Will Hermes in Rolling Stone. The 41-year-old bass virtuoso and R&B visionary has done the same before, dedicating his Grammy-winning previous album to rapper Mac Miller, a longtime friend. This time he’s also mourning another creative partner, jazz producer-promoter Meghan Stabile, and paying tribute with a sound that’s “’70s jazz fusion meets ’80s quiet storm,” supported by guests who include A$AP Rocky, Lil Yachty, and Willow Smith. Meanwhile, the newly sober headliner brought in hitmaker Greg Kurstin to replace Flying Lotus as his primary producer, and he “makes things smoother, shinier, and less weird.”

Kurstin’s approach “gives these tracks more oxygen than FlyLo’s arrangements ever would,” said Philemon Hayes in his Substack newsletter. That allows us to better hear Thundercat describe his ADD impulsivity and the wasted days it can cause. While “the jokes are still constant,” Thundercat’s old stoned persona “has been swapped out for something plainer and harder to dismiss.”

‘Creature of Habit’ by Courtney Barnett

★★★

“Creature of Habit makes it plain: Courtney Barnett is here to rock,” said Eoghan Lyng in PopMatters. The fourth album from the Australian-born singer is “a no-nonsense, heartfelt barrel of songs” that in spots hearken back to icons such as Lou Reed and Kurt Cobain. But while the grunge and indie-rock influences are obvious and expected, Barnett has also rarely sounded as confident as a vocalist, delivering her simple, artful lyrics “with rapier-sharp wit and total commitment.” There’s “yearning poetry” in the spare ballad “Mostly Patient,” while “Great Advice” features Barnett cackling as she tells critics she needs their opinions like a needle in the eye. Judging by the album’s plethora of zingers, Barnett could have been a stand-up comedian.

“Musically and lyrically, Barnett’s latest is a treatise on why humans are such habitual creatures,” said Grant Sharples in Paste. “Ironically, Barnett treads well-worn ground in her exploration of these ideas. Nothing here feels unfamiliar.” Still, there are worse things than playing to one’s strengths. “When you’re this good at what you do, there’s nothing wrong with continuing in that vein.”

‘Transcription’ by Ben Lerner

“As ever with Ben Lerner’s novels, the plot of Transcription is sparse, propelled mostly by the characters’ winding speech and the narrator’s thoughts,” said Hannah Gold in Harper’s. But even at 144 pages, it’s a “remarkable” book, one that suggests human consciousness, and thus our individual experience of the self, has been forever changed by the phones most of us now carry in our pockets. “The novel is by turns slapstick and sincere in its consideration of digital devices”: It opens with its unnamed Lerner-like narrator accidentally dropping his phone in a sink of water, triggering a foolish bit of subterfuge. When this middle-aged poet meets with his former mentor, a renowned 90-year-old intellectual, for what’s likely to be the older man’s final interview, he pretends that the broken phone is recording, then creates a faked transcript. As events play out, Lerner’s writing “crackles with new insights, images, motifs.”

“In another writer’s hands, the novel would be a comic tale of comeuppance,” said Sukhdev Sandhu in The Guardian. “Lerner is more ambitious.” The voice of the German-born mentor, Thomas, unfolds in “layered, associative sentences” that “skip across time and place to riddling, thrilling effect,” and although the narrator is lambasted when, in the novel’s middle section, he reveals at a symposium lecture after Thomas’ death that he reconstructed Thomas’ words. Lerner doesn’t end there. He adds a third section that finds the narrator in dialogue with an old friend, Max, who was also Thomas’ only son. That pair’s conversation touches on technology, parenting, and the Thomas they both knew, and yet the bristling intelligence of their back-and-forth is “at its most gripping when it addresses a seemingly simple issue: how to get a teenage girl to eat.” Max has watched his only daughter waste away, pained that she seems, in his eyes, to be rejecting the life provided to her because that life is a lie.

Such ideas “risk becoming arid, and there are certainly times when Lerner overexplains them,” said Sam Sacks in The Wall Street Journal. But “Lerner’s method is to flicker between humor and heartbreak,” and Transcription “mines a lot of humor from the bumbling of its poet-narrator.” Max recalls having his own final interview with Thomas, a remote phone-assisted conversation he recorded while Thomas lay dying in isolation because of Covid restrictions, yet that scene too is “ultimately reconfigured in surprising ways, leaving its meanings bracingly indefinite.” It remains a striking moment, said Alexandra Jacobs in The New York Times. These days, “smartphones have become so integral to our lives that how modern authors incorporate them into regular old paper books has become a kind of steeplechase. Right now Lerner, with his combination of erudition and lightness, is winning.”

‘The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness’ by Arthur C. Brooks

“You might call Arthur C. Brooks ‘the happiness professor,’” said Anna Maxted in The Telegraph (U.K.). For the past decade, after all, the 61-year-old author and former president of the center-right American Enterprise Institute has been a Harvard faculty member teaching a popular course on the science of happiness. Beyond that—“and what a rare thing”—when he speaks about the importance of aspiring to what he calls moral beauty, he embodies the practice. His latest best seller, The Meaning of Your Life, aims to help anyone who finds that, even while enjoying successes by many measures, their existence feels empty. Self-focus alone, of course, “doesn’t bring happiness.” Even so, he shows how it can, when done right, lead to a surer sense of life purpose.

Brooks is “remarkably ill-equipped” to dispense such wisdom, said Becca Rothfeld in The New Yorker. He has made a career of parroting the fashionable ideas of the conservative establishment while avoiding taking meaningful stands. Now that he’s turned to self-help, a tack that has earned him hefty speaking fees and the privilege of co-authoring a 2023 best seller with Oprah Winfrey, the counsel he offers gets readers only so far. “Who would deny,” for example, “that we would all do better to turn off our phones, interact with other human beings, and maybe even go outside for a walk every once in a while?” Unfortunately, Brooks misuses science, and he “struggles when he strays into the rugged realm of philosophy.” Not surprisingly, he advises against trying to ascertain what’s true and right, or fighting for it. Instead, “he eschews all convictions, save those about what makes people feel better.”

Even so, much of Brooks’ advice rates as “wise and sometimes urgently needed counsel,” said Matt Reynolds in Christianity Today. He tells us to cultivate loving relationships, to seek out beauty, to pursue a professional calling, to ponder big questions, to engage in regular spiritual or philosophical study, and to learn from suffering rather than try to avoid it. When it comes to life’s meaning, though, his advice “remains curiously individualistic.” In short, you have to figure it out yourself.

Should Democrats shun Hasan Piker? asked Lauren Egan in The Bulwark. The irreverent, far-left livestreamer, who has nearly 5 million subscribers between his YouTube and Twitch channels, has become a “litmus test” for the party. Some progressives view Piker, a 34-year-old video gamer and gym bro, as a “liberal Joe Rogan” who can reach “tuned out” young white men. “Operatives have hustled to get their candidates booked on his stream,” which runs eight hours a day, seven days a week. Recent Democratic guests include Tom Steyer, who’s running for governor of California, and Abdul El-Sayed, a U.S. Senate candidate in Michigan who invited Piker to campaign with him on college campuses.

But many Democrats say Piker’s extremism should be disqualifying: A self-described Marxist, he has said that it didn’t matter “if rape happened on Oct. 7,” and that “Hamas is a thousand times better than the fascist settler colonial apartheid state” of Israel. Piker has also used the C-word and other misogynistic slurs.

Piker’s language sometimes is unfortunate, said Aaron Regunberg in The New Republic. But moderate “Third Way” Democrats have, “in bad faith” and without context, seized on a few moments from “almost 20,000 hours of entirely unscripted, off-the-cuff streaming.” The son of Turkish Muslim immigrants, he is an anti-Zionist but not an antisemite, and in fact has warned that antisemitism is “a canary in the coal mine of fascism.” Piker didn’t condone Hamas’ sexual violence against Israeli women, but argued that the attacks didn’t justify Israel’s subsequent bombing and killing in Gaza.

Why any Democrat would want to associate with Piker “is baffling,” said Michael A. Cohen in MS.now. A recent poll found that just 55% of Democrats have ever heard of him, and of those, “only 13% view him favorably.” Given his history of toxic comments, going on his livestream show is “a potential liability.” Sure, Piker can be “an insufferable jerk,” said Jesse Singal in his Substack newsletter, but Democrats he interviews don’t need to endorse his views. Piker appeals primarily to young, disillusioned males “who are looking to rebel.” In 2020, many in this cohort voted for Donald Trump. “It’s unfortunate” that young dudes are drawn to transgressive loudmouths, but to win back power, Democrats must “go to war with the potential voters they have, not the potential voters they want.”

Pam Bondi has discovered that “loyalty can get you a job with President Trump,” said Lindsey Granger in The Hill, “but it certainly won’t help you keep it.” The attorney general was fired earlier this month despite trying to do everything the president wanted. Over her 14-month tenure she purged scores of career prosecutors perceived as insufficiently MAGA, shuttered Justice Department offices that had probed Trump and his pals, and conducted lawfare against his political opponents. “But in the end, that just wasn’t enough.” Sources said the president was especially frustrated that Bondi hadn’t been more successful in prosecuting foes like former FBI boss James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Never mind that those cases “didn’t fail for lack of effort—they failed because they were weak.”

With Bondi ousted just weeks after Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, other top administration officials are now wondering if they’ll be next to hear “You’re fired,” said Matt Dixon and Peter Nicholas in NBCNews.com. Trump advisers say National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick are all at risk of being booted.

Bondi’s real sin in Trump’s eyes was that “she couldn’t make ‘it’ go away,” said LZ Granderson in the Los Angeles Times. “And you know what I mean about ‘it.’” She fueled the public obsession with Jeffrey Epstein by telling Fox News in early 2025 that the sex trafficker’s “client list” was “sitting on my desk right now.” There was no client list, and the resulting furor led to a bipartisan law that forced the release of the DOJ’s Epstein files—which contain hundreds of references to the financier’s former friend, Donald Trump. Bondi was an incompetent lackey, said the New York Daily News in an editorial. But “her firing bodes ill for the state of our democracy” because whoever comes next could be even worse. Acting DOJ boss and former Trump lawyer Todd Blanche has already declared his hostility to the rule of law, saying that it’s the president’s “duty” to influence investigations against his political opponents.

Can anyone succeed at the Justice Department “given Trump’s expectations?” asked The Wall Street Journal. The president wants an AG who’ll twist the law to his whims, but judges and juries will still refuse to play along. Trump needs an attorney general who will give sound legal advice, and—as then-AG Bill Barr did in 2020 when Trump demanded the Justice Department unearth nonexistent evidence of election fraud—say no. But that’s a word the “boss doesn’t want to hear.”

How common is execution?

It has varied over the decades, as public opinion sways for and against it. Hangings were frequent in colonial times, but by the mid-1800s some states had abolished the death penalty altogether. In 1972, the Supreme Court ruled that Georgia’s death penalty as then applied was arbitrary and discriminatory, forcing all states to rewrite their laws and beef up their systems to provide for death row defense lawyers. Executions then resumed in 1977, when double murderer Gary Gilmore was put to death by firing squad. A steady rise in state-level executions followed, reaching a peak of 98 in 1999 and then declining again. In recent years, the number of states abolishing the death penalty has grown, yet executions have surged in a handful of the 27 states where it remains legal. Last year, 11 states carried out 47 executions, the most since 2009. At the federal level, President Trump broke a 17-year moratorium in the final months of his first term, when he approved 13 executions in rapid succession. “We owe it to the victims and their families,” said then-attorney general Bill Barr, “to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system.”

Why did Trump bring it back? 

He’s always been in favor of the ultimate punishment. In 1989, long before he entered politics, Trump bought full-page newspaper ads calling for New York to “bring back the death penalty” after five Black and Latino teenagers—all of whom were later exonerated—were arrested on suspicion of raping a woman in Central Park. During his 2024 presidential campaign, he promised to “vigorously pursue the death penalty to protect American families and children from violent rapists, murderers, and monsters.” Last year, he instructed the Justice Department to pursue federal death sentences when possible and to assist states in carrying out executions. After Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee, was stabbed to death on public transit in Charlotte last August, Trump called for her killer to be quickly sentenced to death. “There can be no other option,” he said.

How have states responded?

North Carolina, which has not carried out an execution since 2006, swiftly passed what legislators called “Iryna’s Law,” expediting the execution process and broadening available execution methods. Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, has been in “lockstep” with Trump’s pro-death-penalty agenda, said Maria DeLiberato of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. Last year, Florida overtook Texas in carrying out the most executions, accounting for 19 of the 47 state-level executions in 2025. So far this year, Florida has executed four death row inmates; a fifth is scheduled for execution later this month.

Is Florida an outlier?

Pretty much. Upset after three jurors voted to spare the life of the Parkland school shooter, who had killed 17 people in 2018, state legislators passed a new law requiring only eight of 12 jurors to authorize a death sentence. That’s the lowest bar for execution of any state. Florida also passed the TRUMP Act, which mandates a death sentence for undocumented immigrants who commit capital crimes. Yet outside of Florida, the death penalty has been “losing its legitimacy,” says the American Civil Liberties Union’s Cassandra Stubbs. Last year, juries returned 23 death sentences nationwide; 30 years ago, the figure was over 300. While capital punishment is practiced by fewer jurisdictions, those that do it use it often. Just 2% of U.S. counties, most of them in the Southeast, account for 60% of America’s death row inmates.

What do Americans believe?

Public opinion is currently split, but support for capital punishment is waning. Some 52% of American adults back the death penalty for convicted murderers, according to a 2025 Gallup poll, down from 80% in 1994. But younger Americans are markedly less supportive than older ones, and the share of adults who believe the death penalty is applied unfairly has risen steadily and is now also right around 50%. Kirk Bloodsworth, a former death row inmate exonerated by DNA evidence in 1993, told National Geographic that people often rethink their stance on criminal penalties when they learn “how easy it is” to be convicted of a crime you didn’t commit. Still, pro-execution sentiment remains strong for particularly heinous crimes with clear perpetrators. “How much worse would the crime have to be to warrant the death penalty?” said Annika Dworet, whose son Nicholas was killed in the Parkland shooting at age 17.

Why is support declining?

Because faith in the system is, too. More than 200 death row inmates have been exonerated since 1973, thanks to DNA analysis and other investigative advancements. Blacks and Latinos make up 34% of the U.S. population but account for 53% of death row, which suggests there is racial bias in sentencing. The cost of maintaining death row prisoners and a number of botched executions in recent years—lethal injections or gas administrations that take far too long to work, for example—have also undermined confidence. Meanwhile, the U.S. rate of homicide, the crime most likely to engender a death sentence, is at its lowest level in at least 125 years, according to the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan think tank. And despite the upsurge in executions in a few jurisdictions, juries across the U.S. are returning fewer new death sentences. “Today’s death sentences are tomorrow’s executions,” says Corinna Barrett Lain of the University of Richmond School of Law. “If you don’t have new death sentences feeding the machinery of death, the death penalty will die on the vine.”

What happened

The U.S. military this week pulled off an audacious rescue of an Air Force colonel stranded 200 miles into mountainous Iranian territory, one of the most complex and dangerous special ops missions it had ever undertaken. An Iranian missile downed the weapons officer’s F-15E Strike Eagle—the first U.S. fighter jet lost to enemy fire in the war—forcing him and the pilot to eject. Officials said the pilot was rescued within hours, but the weapons officer could not be located for nearly two days. Injured and armed with only a pistol, he trudged up a 7,000-foot peak to make contact using his emergency beacon before hiding in a crevice to evade Iranian drones scouring the area. The CIA bought the military some time by spreading word in Iran that the airman had already been rescued, while the military used top-secret CIA tech to pinpoint the officer’s location.

The resulting nighttime exfiltration involved hundreds of special ops
troops and 155 aircraft. An official said it took several “excruciating” minutes for Navy SEAL Team 6 to find the airman and get him into a helicopter. “We just really wanted to get our guy out of there,” the official told CBS News. After they got to a temporary airstrip in Iran, their escape was delayed for hours because the transport planes were stuck in loose soil. Replacement aircraft were called to take everyone to safety in Kuwait. There were no additional U.S. casualties during the operation, though Iran downed an A-10 Warthog plane—its pilot ejected safely—and American helicopters sustained fire during the initial search.

A triumphant President Trump called the mission an “Easter Miracle,” and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth drew parallels to Jesus’ resurrection story. “A pilot reborn,” Hegseth said. “A nation rejoicing.” Trump then threatened to prosecute media outlets unless they revealed who leaked the information that the F-15 had been shot down. “Give it up or go to jail,” he said.

What the columnists said

There’s only one possible response to this amazing story, said Jeffrey
Blehar in National Review. That’s to “stand up and cheer.” You’ll be able to do so in the theaters when this inevitably hits the big screen “in a year or two.” It should be an easy lift for screenwriters: The operation played out like “a triumphant Hollywood action flick,” with thrilling details that “will revive your flagging hopes” about “America’s continued logistical and problem-solving excellence.”

No wonder the Trump administration is exulting, said Katherine Krueger in The Intercept. It hopes the happy ending will distract Americans from its “failing” and “deeply unpopular” war. Despite the ceasefire, the U.S. hasn’t secured a permanent opening of the Strait of Hormuz or a solution to Iran’s nuclear ambitions. “Don’t worry about that,” the administration seems to say, “check out this action sequence.”

Even the successful rescue demonstrated that Hegseth’s “repeated claims of air dominance come with serious caveats,” said John Hudson in The Washington Post. It turns out Iran is capable of shooting down U.S. aircraft after all. And while Hegseth told us last month that Iran’s missile and drone programs had been “overwhelmingly destroyed” by Israel and the U.S., an American intelligence assessment now says that “more than half” of Iran’s missile launchers and thousands of its kamikaze drones are intact.

Still, there’s no doubt that the U.S. scored a huge win by plucking the airman out of the heart of enemy territory, said John Sakellariadis in Politico. Had Iran gotten to him first, it would have had “a powerful bargaining chip.” Tehran, after all, has a history of taking hostages and using them to political advantage. What wouldn’t the U.S. have agreed to in order to get our man back? That would have been “a significant political embarrassment for the Trump administration.”

Strategic consequences aside, the airman’s rescue was “a victory of values,” said Mary Julia Koch in The Wall Street Journal. It was a reminder of the American military’s “sacred pledge of ‘No Man Left Behind.’” That doctrine has critics, who argue that it’s “outdated for modern, asymmetric warfare and can endanger more lives.” But it is what underpins U.S. troops’ pride and morale, what helps make them the most formidable force in the world. As one senior defense official said: “The notion that we will come and get you any time, in any place, no matter the cost, is an incredibly powerful thing.”

What happened

President Trump recently claimed a “total and complete victory” after Iran agreed to a 14-day ceasefire with the U.S., a fragile deal that both sides presented in starkly different terms. The agreement was struck just hours after Trump threatened to destroy Iran’s “whole civilization” and a day after he threatened the “complete demolition” of every bridge and power plant in the country unless it agreed to a deal and reopened the Strait of Hormuz—a Persian Gulf channel through which 20% of the world’s oil flowed before the start of the six-week war.

Trump’s threat to target civilian infrastructure, a likely war crime if carried out, drew condemnation from figures ranging from Pope Leo XIV to podcaster and former MAGA ally Tucker Carlson, who pleaded with White House aides to keep the president away from the nuclear football. But shortly before Trump’s 8 p.m. deadline, he announced a Pakistan-brokered deal for the ceasefire. Trump called the agreement a landmark that could pave the way for “the Golden Age” of the Middle East. Iran’s security council, meanwhile, hailed the agreement as an “undeniable, historic, and crushing defeat” for the U.S.

Questions remained about the shape of the deal. Trump called a 10-point Iranian plan “a workable basis” for upcoming peace talks in Islamabad. But he then said a version of the plan released by Iran—which called for the lifting of all sanctions and the payment of war damages by the U.S.—wasn’t the one he’d agreed to. Trump hailed the “complete” and “immediate” opening of the Strait of Hormuz, but Iranian officials said transiting ships would have to arrange passage with Iran’s military and pay tolls to Tehran. Trump also said the U.S. would work with Iran to “dig up and remove” its stockpile of 970 pounds of enriched uranium that was buried under joint U.S.-Israeli attacks last summer. But Tehran’s 10-point plan includes U.S. acceptance of Iran’s right to enrich uranium.

Amid the wrangling, Lebanon emerged as a flashpoint. Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said the ceasefire applied everywhere “including Lebanon,” but Israel, which is battling Iran-backed Hezbollah there, and the U.S. insisted otherwise. Israel hit Lebanon with scores of air strikes in a single day, killing at least 250 people, according to local officials. Trump said the issue will “get taken care of.”

What the columnists said

Trump’s retreat followed a “chaotic” blitz of negotiations, said Barak Ravid in Axios. After U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff flatly rejected Iran’s initial 10-point peace proposal, it set off a fevered round of amendments, passed by Pakistani mediators between Witkoff and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, with Egyptian and Turkish officials helping to “bridge gaps.” Once they landed on a ceasefire proposal, it was greenlit by Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, whom China was advising “to seek an off-ramp.” Next was Trump, who was urged to reject it by “hawkish allies and confidantes.” Even some close associates thought he’d spurn the offer “right up until he took it.”

Trump thankfully backed off his “genocidal threats” said Jennifer Rubin in The Contrarian. But that shouldn’t diminish their “horror.” A man who holds the nuclear codes threatened the vaporization of a nation of 93 million people in starkly religious terms, warning in one post that “Hell will reign down” and “Glory be to GOD!” It was “a mortifying intersection” of Christian nationalism, “pathological narcissism, and fascist warmongering.” This deeply sick man endangers not just our national security but the “stability of the planet.” Congress must remove him from office.

The president’s rhetoric was “condemnable,” said Noah Rothman in National Review. But to project “unflinching determination” amid a “contest of wills and hard power” has undeniable benefits. And it “forced the Iranians to blink,” said Eli Lake in The Free Press. They’ve agreed to ease their blockade of the Strait of Hormuz based on nothing but an agreement to negotiate. Meanwhile, having lost its navy, most of its missile launchers, and its top political and military leadership, the Islamists in Tehran have “never been poorer, weaker, or more isolated.”

This was a straight-up “surrender,” said William Kristol in The Bulwark—but by Trump, not Iran. Just a month ago he was demanding Iran’s “unconditional” capitulation. But the mullahs and Revolutionary Guard still control Iran. The regime still has its enriched uranium and “functional missile and drone capabilities.” And it now has unprecedented control over the waterway through which its Gulf Arab neighbors export oil and natural gas, and has shown the devastation it can inflict on those countries and the global economy in any future conflict.

Selling this as a win won’t be easy, said Jack Blanchard and Dasha Burns in Politico, but that’s clearly Trump’s intention. Given the public opposition to the war, spiking gas prices, and “the rapidly worsening global economic outlook,” he’s anxious to move on. And because stock markets surged following his ceasefire announcement, it’s hard to imagine he’ll resume the bombing. So “brace yourselves” for a barrage of messaging that “America won.”

Let’s count the cost of this debacle, said Anthony L. Fisher in MS.now. Thirteen U.S. service members are dead along with at least 32 people in Gulf Arab nations, 20 Israelis, and more than 1,600 Iranians, while the rest “remain under the yoke of a sadistic theocracy.” With his warmongering, flip-flops, and unhinged threats, our unstable, amoral president has done “irreparable damage to America’s reputation” and “upended” the postwar global order. “I’m not feeling any safer. Are you?”

What next?

President Trump will send a team led by Vice President JD Vance to Pakistan to “negotiate an end” to the war, said Steven Nelson in the New York Post. Special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner will also join the weekend talks. Iran’s participation “is in flux,” because it has told mediators it won’t attend without a ceasefire in Lebanon.

Reopening the Strait of Hormuz is “only the first step” toward “getting more energy flowing through the Persian Gulf,” said Rebecca F. Elliott and Ivan Penn in The New York Times. Dozens of refineries, storage facilities, and oil and gas fields across the region were hit during the conflict, shutting down “10% or more of the world’s oil supply.” Reversing that requires replacing equipment and “recalling employees and ships that have scattered across the globe.” With the ceasefire “on shaky ground,” the timeline is “highly uncertain,” but even under positive conditions, recovery will be “a months-long process.”

Dover, Vt.

Sleepy Bear Farm, a 2004 timber-frame five-bedroom home on more than 90 acres, features two rustic post-and-beam bunk rooms—one with six double beds. The great room has cathedral ceilings, a two-sided double-height hearth, and French doors to a stone patio.

A lower level has media and wine rooms. Close to Mount Snow, the property includes trails, a brook, fruit trees, and a swimming hole. $3,300,000. Story Jenks, LandVest/Christie’s International Real Estate, (802) 238-1332

Wilmington, N.C.

Built in 2010, this West Indies–inspired waterfront home includes a bunk room with four beds, built-in shelves, and shiplap walls. The five-bedroom
features coffered ceilings, walnut floors, a fireplace, French doors, and a kitchen with a stove nook, a pot filler, and a butler’s pantry.

Outside are an infinity pool, a spa, a fireplace, a putting green, and views of the Intracoastal Waterway and Atlantic Ocean. Downtown Wilmington
is about 20 minutes away. $8,000,000. Nick Phillips, Landmark
Sotheby’s International Realty, (910) 620-3370

Mabank, Texas

On Cedar Creek Lake, this 2019 contemporary has two double bunk rooms with water views and en suite baths. The four-bedroom includes rustic beams, wood floors, a chef’s kitchen, and a white stacked-stone fireplace.

The property spans more than three waterfront acres, with a patio, pool, boathouse, yards, and a deck. Community access to riding, pickleball, and trails is included; Dallas is about a 45-minute drive. $3,500,000. Debbie French, Ebby Halliday Realtors/Luxury Portfolio International, (903) 340-7747

Truckee, Calif.

Set in the Martis Camp community about 20 minutes from Lake Tahoe, this 2014 lodge-style five-bedroom includes a six-person bunk room, as well as hickory floors, vaulted ceilings, exposed trusses, and a kitchen with a SubZero fridge and Wolf range.

There’s also a media room and billiards table. The lot, at just over an acre, includes a firepit, a built-in grill, and access to a shared beach, tennis courts, a lodge, and golf. $8,695,000. Dominic Cristalli, Martis Camp Realty, (206) 412-2493

Montrose, Colo.

This seven-bedroom modern farmhouse on nearly 15 acres has an eight-bed bunk room with tongue-and-groove walls. The 2006 home features exposed metal trusses, a stone fireplace wall, a 16-seat bar, and a chef’s
kitchen with a walk-in pantry.

Surrounded by the Uncompahgre National Forest north of Telluride, the property has a patio with a fireplace, an alfresco dining area, a putting green, firepits, shuffleboard, and a hot tub. $8,250,000. Kevin Holbrook,
LIV Sotheby’s International Realty, (970) 729-1601

Minneapolis

In the North Loop’s 1922 Soho Lofts building, this rustic modern studio loft has two bunks with four double beds, clad in barn-style wood. The condo has exposed brick and ducts, high ceilings, a large window, a reading nook, an open kitchen with concrete counters and a beverage fridge, and in-unit laundry.

Parking and a storage locker are included. Coffee shops, dining, and green space are steps away. $299,900. Joe Grunnet, DRG, (612) 244-6613