“With her first two albums, Olivia Rodrigo proved herself perhaps the most gifted of the many chroniclers of Gen Z romance to emerge in Taylor Swift’s wake,” said Mikael Wood in the Los Angeles Times. But her best work to date, starting with the 2021 smash single “Drivers License,” conveyed “the hot sting of betrayal.” On her “thrilling” third album, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, the 23-year-old former Disney teen star opens with “a number of first-flush-of-love songs as potent as any breakup tune,” then brings new wisdom to the heartbreak that so often follows. To accommodate the wider range of emotions, this record “pulls in chiming folk-rock and synthed-up new wave” and even throws in “a gorgeous wine-bar piano ballad that might put the scare in Rodrigo’s pal Laufey.”

The result is Rodrigo’s “most complete, musically adventurous album yet,” said Julyssa Lopez in Rolling Stone. Beginning with “Drop Dead,” a recent No. 1 single, the initial run of songs captures the dopamine rush of love’s onset. But from about the halfway point on, “the seams come apart a little more with each track.” As the record progresses, she “dives into her insecurities with a mix of humor and honesty” until, in the end, “she comes to the brutal realization that you can adore someone more than anything and still have to let them go.”

Rodrigo “has always kind of been a theater kid,” said Jason P. Frank in NYMag.com. With this album, “she’s written a musical.” As in a musical, “the songs are constantly looping back in on each other, rewriting and commenting on what Rodrigo said before.” Arriving a track before the closer, “Expectations” is a banger that’d serve beautifully as an 11 o’clock number, the kind of showstopping tune that rouses an audience for the finale. “Now all that’s left is to get this thing onstage. Broadway producers, your job starts now.”

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Tom Coyne is the author of several acclaimed books about golf, including A Gentleman’s Game, Paper Tiger, and his latest, A Course Called Home, about his adventures as the owner of a run-down nine-hole course. Below, he names the books for which he’s most grateful.

‘Where I’m Calling From’ by Raymond Carver (1988)

I am certainly not the only MFA grad who has Raymond Carver to thank (or blame) for pursuing short-story writing as a vocation. When this collection landed in my hands, I was not only taken by the stories but also inspired to try my hand at this thing he made look so easy. These are stories I return to when I worry that I need to be writing about vampires or dragons. Buy it here.

‘This Boy’s Life’ by Tobias Wolff (1989)

Memoir gets a bad rap as indulgent and self-absorbed stuff, but this book was a lesson in memoir as entertainment and storytelling. And it would influence my next five books, steering me away from the therapeutic confessional that tempts the nonfiction writer. Buy it here.

‘On Writing’ by Stephen King (2000)

I used to not read a lot of Stephen King, and a writer reading another writer’s take on writing felt like a circular chore. But the book turned out to be life-changing stuff. The man knows literature and craft in a way that his popular fiction belies, and it’s a surprising page-turner. Buy it here.

‘My Ántonia’ by Willa Cather (1918)

If you want to write books, you have to love them, unreasonably so, and I remember falling hard for My Ántonia. Everything about it—the place, the heart, the strength. I was a high schooler who found a book I wanted everybody to read, and I told everyone who would listen that I had the book for them. Buy it here.

‘To the Linksland’ by Michael Bamberger (1992)

I went to grad school to write the Great American Novel. Instead, I wrote a book about caddies. When I found myself accidentally landing in the golf-writing genre, I wasn’t sure if I had sold out my ambitions. Bamberger’s book assuaged such fears and helped me embrace golf as a subject worthy of literary treatment. Buy it here.

‘Sailing Alone Around the Room’ by Billy Collins (2001)

Insert any of Billy Collins’ collections here. Before I sit down to write, I read a few of his poems—“Snow Day” is a favorite—to recall what great sentences sound like, and to recall that one right word trumps a thousand ambitious ones. Buy it here.

‘World Cup Fever: A Soccer Journey in Nine Tournaments’ by Simon Kuper

“It would be a mistake to think of World Cup Fever as a simple sports book,” said Dan Friedman in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Simon Kuper, a sportswriter for the Financial Times, has attended every World Cup tournament since 1990, and he’s “uniquely qualified” to tell each of the several stories his latest work weaves together. Besides being a memoir, a portrait of the passions soccer inspires, and an account of how the World Cup and the game itself have evolved since the inaugural 1930 tournament, “it is, in effect, a snapshot of how history has dashed the hopes of the post–Cold War generations.” FIFA, the organization that runs the World Cup, once was led by men who dreamed that sport could help create a more just and democratic world. But power eventually shifted to the “venal creeps” who’ve run the show for three decades. Indeed, after reading Kuper’s “complex and loving” indictment of the sport, “I felt physically sick.”

Kuper, “one of the best sportswriters in the English language today,” doesn’t overromanticize the World Cup’s past, said Ian Buruma in The New Yorker. Jules Rimet, the idealist who presided over FIFA from 1921 until 1954, agreed to let Mussolini’s Italy hold the 1934 event, establishing that any nation can win FIFA’s blessing if it’s willing to pay the costs of hosting. Rimet’s successors kowtowed to murderous dictatorships in Chile and Argentina, while the most recent Cups have unfolded in Putin’s Russia in 2018 and in Qatar, an authoritarian sheikdom. FIFA was always corrupt. In Kuper’s “highly engaging” book, we learn how it’s become more corrupt than ever, but we also get much more. The Ugandan-born, Dutch-raised French resident writes “superbly” about the skills of different players and national teams, and he’s just as good at observing the cultural differences between host cities and each team’s fan following.

“Each tournament Kuper has covered marked a shift in the geopolitical weather,” said Andre Pagliarini in The New Republic. When Italy hosted in 1990, hopes were high because the Cold War had entered a twilight phase. In 2018, Russia paused to host between its invasions of Ukraine. And Kuper also provides revealing portraits of 2002 East Asia, 2010 South Africa, and 2014 Brazil. “World Cups don’t change the world,” he writes, “but they do illuminate it.” He proves that over and over again, providing “a testament to the benefits of committing oneself to a subject for a long time.” As viewers around the globe watch the World Cup unfolding, “they see virtuosity, emotion, and the hand of fate at work on the grandest stage in sports.” Because the event is a mirror, “they also glimpse the world as it is.”

‘Trash! A Garbageman’s Story’ by Simon Paré-Poupart

“It’s been a long time since I’ve read so good and rowdy a memoir about blue-collar work,” said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. Written by Simon Paré-Poupart, a veteran Montreal garbageman now in his 40s, this “slim, raffish, and spirited” book “raises the blinds on his industry,” revealing the job’s taxing demands, the coarse language and renegade attitudes of its practitioners, and the dark humor that keeps them sane. “Paré-Poupart is in love with almost all of it,” including the sense that being on society’s bottom rung makes him tougher, freer, and less prone to self deception. “Trash! has been compared to Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain’s restaurant kitchen exposé. Usually, comparisons to Bourdain are fatuous. This time it’s accurate.”

“It quickly becomes apparent how vital Paré-Poupart and his colleagues are to the functioning of polite society,” said Ceci Browning in The Times (U.K.). The mostly male cohort is packed with colorful characters. A collector nicknamed Spandex often works while wearing nothing but bike shorts and flip-flops. Another vomits each day on the first block of the run, then just does the work. Many others work drunk or high, even though a run can require lift ing heavy loads for 15 hustling miles. Paré-Poupart likens the typical garbageman to Sisyphus, fated to clean up for society day after day eternally. Despite his writing’s political thrust, it’s “suffused with literary oomph and good humor,” and “I zoomed through Trash! in a couple of hours.”

“Paré-Poupart elegantly makes the case that we should all think more about the people who collect our trash,” said Amanda Perry in the Literary Review of Canada. He’s an unusual example: He has earned advanced degrees in sociology and international business since he started his career in garbage, and his memoir “mixes in blue collar curse words with references to labor history and Émile Zola.” Politically, Trash! is uneven, “offering points of critique but no coherent program of reform,” including for the way recycling programs mostly just enable the steady increase of plastics pollution. The author leaves us, though, with a provocative thought experiment: What if we compensated and glorified professions accord ing to their social necessity?

It’s about time Europe started “flexing its innovation muscles,” said John Thornhill in the Financial Times. “In spite of the ambient Euro-gloom,” the continent still boasts extraordinary economic strengths. It is home to “thousands of world-class scientists and researchers” who are seeding “a vibrant early-stage startup ecosystem.” It’s also fast becoming a worldwide leader in areas such as material sciences, pharmaceuticals, and robotics. “If it could create a VC money-mobilization machine on a par with the U.S.,” things would really transform. To that end, the European Commission recently published new legislation that it says will “encourage more investment” in areas like data centers and chipmaking, which is “a welcome sign.” The commission also revealed a new framework to reduce reliance on the U.S. and China; that will be harder to achieve. The reality is that Europe still “remains inextricably dependent on U.S. technology,” and it won’t win in a fight with the Trump administration. But it is at least “finally flicking the switch from defensive regulation to creative innovation.”

Europe is right to worry, said The Economist. “The grip of American tech is, if anything, growing tighter.” French firms alone buy more than $50 billion “in software and cloud services annually from Uncle Sam’s tech giants.” Policymakers fear the U.S. could one day “wield tech as a geopolitical weapon, in the form of a kill switch that can turn off services.” Another concern is that Europe will get left behind economically if it can’t compete in the AI race against America and China, “which reaches into many sectors where Europe remains strong.” But building tech ecosystems up from scratch “is hard,” and “America’s strong economic momentum makes it harder still.” Unplugging from U.S. tech entirely is “probably an impossible task,” said Matt Burgess in Wired. The European Parliament has switched the default search engine on its devices from Google to a French alternative, and many French government workers are using home-grown open-source office software. But Europe is “deeply intertwined with U.S.-based technology firms,” especially those that do cloud computing, AI, cybersecurity, and mobile operating systems.

European businesses fear “the EU’s efforts to wean the continent off American technology could backfire,” said Chris Dorrell in The Times (U.K.). The new legislation includes a mandatory scoring system designed to rank the safety of foreign tech systems that some entrepreneurs have already likened to “another invisible compliance tax.” Europe also needs to tread carefully here, said the Financial Times in an editorial. “Making its economy more dynamic” is critical, but “it must avoid antagonizing” a Trump White House “that views EU regulation as aimed squarely at stifling U.S. dynamism.” In a “dog-eat-dog world,” Washington will be “ready to use its tech supremacy to exert leverage.”

David Hockney showed the beauty in the ordinary. The celebrated British artist, who emerged from swinging-’60s London to take sunny Los Angeles as his muse, turned everyday vistas—a lamp, a swimming pool, rain on a window, his dachshunds lounging on a rug—into striking, playful images rendered in vibrant color. Over seven decades he demonstrated his creative force, working on canvas, paper, and iPad; making films and photo collages; and designing theater costumes and opera sets. Openly gay when homosexuality was still outlawed in Britain, Hockney was a stylish figure in British society, a chain smoker sporting bleached-blond hair and owlish spectacles, immensely popular with the smart set. The Guardian once dubbed him “British art’s first pop star.” As a painter, he found inspiration all around him. “I can look at a little puddle on a road and the rain falling on it and think it’s marvelous,” he said. “I see the world as very beautiful.”

Hockney was born into a working-class family in “England’s grimy industrial north,” said The Washington Post. Showing “precocious talent,” he won a scholarship to a local art school and then attended London’s Royal College of Art, where his work took the school’s gold medal. Upon graduating he found success quickly, selling out his first exhibition at a “trendy London gallery.” A 1961 trip to New York “established his lasting attraction to America” and its relative sexual liberation, said The New York Times. When he visited Los Angeles a few years later, he was smitten. In 1964 he settled in the Hollywood Hills and began turning out paintings that captured the city’s “sun-soaked atmosphere” and “nouveau riche leisure life,” featuring images of swimming pools and sunbathing men.

In later years “his focus shifted back to Europe” and nature, said The Wall Street Journal. He returned to his native Yorkshire to paint expressionist landscapes, and for a time rented a home and studio in rural Normandy, creating digital paintings of the changing seasons. Throughout his life he was hugely admired, with “blockbuster exhibitions” of his work drawing record crowds. In 2018, his 1972 painting Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures) sold for $90.3 million, then a record for a living artist. Hockney maintained a dogged work ethic well into his 80s, painting for up to seven hours a day, yet he saw it not as labor but a privilege. “Pleasure and joy” were the purpose of his art, he said. “And joy is a great thing to give to people.”

It’s a pattern “as regular and predictable as the tides,” said Moira Donegan in The Guardian: A Democrat wins an election, and President Trump says the election was rigged. His latest target is the Los Angeles mayoral primary, where Republican Spencer Pratt fell to third place—and off the November ballot—behind Democratic incumbent Karen Bass and progressive challenger Nithya Raman as late-arriving mail-in ballots were counted. Trump has since repeatedly alleged, without evidence, that the election was stolen, even storming off Meet the Press when challenged on the claim. This is “a preview of what is likely to come” in November’s midterm elections, when Republicans are widely expected to lose congressional seats and control of the House. In Trump’s world, every Democratic victory is “invalid, fraudulent, and null,” and the only fair elections “are the ones where Republicans win.”

Unfortunately, the Right “seems to be along for the ride,” said Aaron Blake in CNN.com. Prominent Republicans, including JD Vance, Ron DeSantis, and Mike Johnson, have amplified Trump’s baseless claims, with Johnson saying Democratic election fraud is “so diabolical and so far upstream it is impossible to prove.” Polls show that 70% of Republicans expect election fraud in November. Trump has a new plan to block mail-in ballots, said Adam Sella and Nick Corasaniti in The New York Times. The U.S. Postal Service has proposed an “unprecedented and potentially unconstitutional” rule that would allow it to refuse delivery of mail-in ballots in states that won’t turn over voter rolls to the federal government for “screening.” Trump recently told a group of GOP lawmakers that restricting mail-in ballots “will guarantee the midterms.”

“It does, in fact, take a long time to count ballots in California,” said Jessica Levinson in MS.now. The state accepts all ballots postmarked by Election Day, even those that arrive up to a week after. Does that sometimes mean that initial results change? “Absolutely. That’s what happens when you count votes.” Sorry, that’s no excuse, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. California Democrats have made it “exceptionally easy” to cast ballots by mail to boost turnout among their likely voters, but the result is a “sloth-like” ballot count that can leave results in question for days. It’s a “disservice to democracy” to leave voters hanging, which can only “fuel distrust in elections and play into the hands of Trump.”

“It’s been quite the journey for Hunter Biden,” said Adam Gabbatt in The Guardian. In a matter of weeks, the son of former president Joe Biden has gone from “a political liability to an unlikely galvanizing force within the Democratic Party.” That transformation began in mid-May, when Biden, 56, started posting on X about addiction and recovery, his family, art, and the hypocrisy of Republicans who hounded him for influence peddling but are now engaged in an orgy of corruption. He’s earned more than 781,000 followers with his often wry and self-deprecating posts. Asked by an X user if a bag of cocaine found at the White House in 2023 was his, Biden replied, “I would never have forgotten my drugs.” His populist posts about politics—“Groceries cost too much,” “Endless wars are stupid”—even have some fans urging Biden to run for president in 2028. Asked if that was a good idea, President Trump said that the former first son’s checkered past would present a problem. Biden, who in 2024 was convicted of six felony tax and gun charges, responded: “I’m 28 felonies, 6 bankruptcies, and an Epstein bromance short of his checkered past.”

“By all accounts, Biden is no longer smoking crack,” said Robby Soave in Reason, yet he continues to make terrible decisions. As part of his comeback tour, he sat down last month for an interview with antisemitic conspiracy theorist Candace Owens. On the podcast, he tried to rescue his dad’s reputation, claiming Democratic elites pushed Joe Biden off the ticket in 2024 because “he was never part of the Epstein class.” But that’s “complete nonsense.” President Biden was not forced out because he threatened to expose a secret sex trafficking network but because his health “rendered him patently unfit to serve.” Hunter has implied that his substance abuse issues also “render him an outsider to the elite class,” said Zeeshan Aleem in MS.now. “This, too, is nonsense.” Biden traded on his father’s name to “make insane amounts of money” and had his criminal history scrubbed by a presidential pardon.

“What’s the endgame here?” asked Helen Lewis in The Atlantic. Biden is mired in debt from his various legal battles, and his paintings aren’t selling. Does he hope to spin his new social media fame into financial opportunities? Is that why he recently posted about “the value and potential utility of cryptocurrency”? Of course, “people deserve grace when they’ve screwed up,” and if Biden can help addicts in recovery, “he should post away. Just as long as he stays away from the crack den, corrupt crypto schemes, and Congress.”

What’s the goal of the SAT? 

A dreaded rite of passage for generations of high school students, the SAT—formerly called the Scholastic Aptitude Test—aims to gauge a student’s ability to handle collegelevel material. Last year, more than 2 million juniors and seniors took the exam, a two-and-a-half hour ordeal consisting of 44 questions in the math section and 54 in the reading-and-writing section. A high score on the scale of 400 to 1600 won’t by itself guarantee acceptance to a selective university, but it’s often a prerequisite. Yet over the 100 years that the test has been administered, its value has been fiercely debated, with critics saying it merely reinforces race and income inequality. Those allegations were a main reason more than 1,200 colleges and universities stopped requiring SAT scores in 2020 and 2021, instead basing admission on factors like GPA, essays, and extracurriculars. Since then, though, dozens of those schools have reinstated the requirement. “Standardized test scores are a much better predictor of academic success than high school grades,” said Brown University president Christina Paxson. In an era of grade inflation, they “reveal useful information.”

How was the test created?

Before the SAT, elite universities mainly admitted students from a handful of prep schools, such as Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire or Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts. In the early 1900s, when intelligence tests were becoming all the rage, institutions began considering general entrance exams. Princeton University psychologist Carl Brigham created what would become the SAT in 1922, when he modified a version of the Army’s IQ test and administered it to Princeton freshmen. Yet bias was built in from the start: One of his goals, Brigham wrote in his book A Study of American Intelligence, was to prove the superiority of “the Nordic race.” By June 1926, the College Board—an association of dozens of universities and colleges— had adopted the test as a general entrance exam. The first time it was administered, 8,040 students were given 97 minutes to race through 315 questions covering foreign languages, logic skills, vocabulary, and arithmetic. Word problems reflected the culture of the day, with one math problem asking: “If a package containing 20 cigarettes costs 15 cents, how many cigarettes can be bought for 90 cents?”

How did it get so popular? 

Mainly because of the G.I. Bill. In the aftermath of World War II, some 2.5 million veterans poured into colleges, and universities turned to the SAT to help them evaluate the applicants. By 1960, more than 500,000 students were taking the test each year, and 350 colleges had made it a requirement. To meet this growing need, the College Board employs teams of teachers, professors, and testing experts to write the questions. For decades, though, that committee consisted almost entirely of white, well-off, highly educated men from the Northeast, and the test reflected their experiences—with word problems and reading passages referring to upperclass activities like sailing or riding. More recently, test makers have tried to eliminate cultural and socioeconomic bias.

Does bias in questions harm students? 

While that can’t be proved, there are certainly disparities in scores among different races and economic classes. In 2024, the average combined score was 1228 for Asian students and 1083 for white students, compared with 939 for Hispanics and 907 for Black students. A 2023 study found that over 33% of children of the top 1% in income scored a 1300 or higher, versus only 2.4% of children from the poorest 20% of households. Wealthy families, of course, can more easily pay the $68 test fee multiple times, and many can drop thousands on special SAT prep courses. Such issues were cited in a 2019 lawsuit demanding the University of California system abolish its SAT requirement. In 2020, it did, as did hundreds of other universities, including MIT, Stanford, and the entire Ivy League.

What was the result? 

Top schools received a larger, more diverse set of applications. But before long, professors complained that incoming freshmen lacked even rudimentary math skills. “I realized that for students to follow me,” said UC Berkeley string theorist Mina Aganagic, “I had to start reviewing basic algebra stuff, like fractions.” A 2024 Harvard study found that GPA alone “does a poor job of predicting academic success in college” in the absence of standardized test scores. Dozens of colleges, including every Ivy League university, have now reinstated a standardized-test mandate, and 1,400 instructors in the University of California system have signed an open letter urging the state to do likewise. “Failing to measure preparation gaps does not remove barriers,” it states. “It moves them into the classroom.”

Are there alternatives?

There’s the ACT, developed in 1959 specifically to rival the SAT; most schools accept it in lieu of the SAT, and last year 1.4 million students took it. The Classical Learning Test, created in 2015 by conservative Jeremy Tate to focus on works in the Western canon, was taken by over 180,000 students last year, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered all U.S. military academies to accept it in place of SAT scores. But are these tests fairer or more accurate than the SAT? It’s impossible to know, and some academics believe that’s the wrong question. Harvard economist David Deming says any test is bound to reflect the shortcomings and disparities embedded in the American education system. “The problem isn’t the test,” he says. “The problem is everything that happens before the test.”

Think Elon Musk “the billionaire was bad?” asked Arwa Mahdawi in The Guardian. “Brace yourself.” After SpaceX made the biggest-ever initial public offering earlier this month, the 54-year-old tycoon saw his wealth rocket to $1.1 trillion, more than the GDP of all but 21 nations. How much is a trillion dollars? Enough to spend $1 million a day for 2,700 years without going broke. “You don’t have to be a socialist or even a liberal” to find it “obscene” that the U.S. minted the world’s first trillionaire when so many Americans are struggling to afford gas, food, and housing. But the worse news is who we minted. In 2024, when he was welcoming Nazis to X and returning an autocrat to the White House, I likened Musk to a “Bond movie villain,” said Will Bunch in The Philadelphia Inquirer. That was “far too generous.” Since then, this chainsaw-wielding sociopath has shredded the U.S. Agency for International Development—causing 600,000 preventable deaths, most of them children, in a single year—and is now busy on X, rallying Britain’s white population to “firebomb and assault their Black and brown neighbors.” That this racist “monster” is the first trillionaire is a perfect symbol of “our modern empire’s decline and fall.”

“I am not a huge fan of Musk as a political activist,” said Jonah Goldberg in the Los Angeles Times. But the South African–born tech savant’s colossal fortune is “testament to human ingenuity, immigrant success, and American greatness.” Just look at everything he’s built, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. With Tesla, he launched the electric vehicle revolution. His Starlink satellite network “helped Ukraine resist Russia’s invasion.” His Neuralink brain-chip startup may let the paralyzed walk again. And SpaceX could help humanity populate other planets. Musk is our first trillionaire because “American capitalism,” by its nature, most lavishly rewards the visionaries who “make all Americans better off.”

How quaint, said Robert Reich in The Guardian. Until recently, yes, the value of American firms, like the price of their products, was set by “supply and demand” in a relatively free marketplace. But Musk and his ilk have dismantled the “old rules of capitalism.” In our “second Gilded Age,” the value of companies like SpaceX is built through hype, government connections that provide lucrative contracts and favorable regulations, “and total, arbitrary control” of pricesetting forces. Musk’s companies do have real value. But he’s a trillionaire because the system now effectively lets founders decree what their shares will be worth, then forces average Americans— through rigged markets and index-fund-driven retirement accounts “automatically” tied to SpaceX’s fortune—to buy those shares “whether we want to or not.”

We’ve been here before, said T.J. Stiles in The Wall Street Journal. A century ago, the same widening chasms—between the superrich and everyone else, between the paper value of companies and their tangible assets—provoked Americans to demand a progressive tax code and antitrust reform. Musk becoming a trillionaire on fantasies of asteroid mining could be a similar “inflection point.” Why would Musk care what Americans demand? asked TC Sottek in The Verge. He now has more “wealth, media power, and government influence” than anyone in history, and will use it to do what he wants. It’s long been clear that Musk is “the wrong man to save the world,” as some liberals once hoped he might. It’s now the world that “needs saving from him.

What happened

A tired but upbeat President Trump found common ground with fellow Group of Seven leaders in France last week, gaining their support for his Iran peace deal and lending his to a joint declaration to support Ukraine in its fight against Russia. At the first session, Trump stood at the head of the table and jokingly declared, “I’m the boss,” before ceding the floor to French President Emmanuel Macron, who was hosting the summit in the Alpine town of Évian-les-Bains. Meeting cordially with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump suggested the U.S. might reintroduce sanctions on Russian oil. But he also indicated that the Ukraine war wasn’t a major U.S. priority, saying it “has no impact on us, other than we sell weapons,” and adding, “we’re thousands of miles away.”

U.S. relations with fellow G-7 members—Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the U.K.—have been strained over Trump’s threats against allies’ sovereignty and demands that they support his Iran war, but G-7 leaders made great efforts to keep the president happy. In a joint statement, they praised Trump’s “strong leadership” in securing the Iran deal. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, whose recent criticism of the Iran war spurred Trump to pull some U.S. troops from Germany, gave him a soccer jersey with the number 47, and said, “We’re on the same team.” Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who had sharply criticized Trump’s recent broadsides against Pope Leo XIV, was seen chatting with the U.S. president at the summit. Asked if she and Trump were friends again, she said, “We have always been friends.”

What the columnists said

“For all the sharp elbows” of the past year, G-7 leaders have decided “the best way to deal with a disruptive president is to court him,” said Mark Landler in The New York Times. At last year’s summit in Canada, Trump departed early, accusing the others of making a “big mistake” by ousting Russia from the group in 2014. This time it was all flattery, and Trump was in a better mood. Macron even bestowed a rare honor on Trump, inviting him to dine at the opulent Palace of Versailles. “Versailles is not a gold leaf,” Trump said appreciatively. “Versailles is the real deal.”

Among the G-7 leaders, “the sense of relief was palpable,” said Nicholas Vinocur in Politico. Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer even offered military support to help the U.S. open the Strait of Hormuz, the oil transit corridor Iran had closed off, in exchange for Trump backing their resolution to support Ukraine. The goodwill has raised hopes that, with a critical NATO summit coming up next month, Trump can be kept “firmly inside the camp of Western powers.”

The bar is pretty low at these events these days, said Cleve R. Wootson Jr. and Dan Diamond in The Washington Post. Success is defined “by the absence of rupture.” As Max Bergmann of the Center for Strategic and International Studies put it, “Getting the United States to just be, in some ways, normal and having this come across as a relatively routine summit—that’s the win.”

New York City

In the heart of SoHo, this four-bedroom penthouse tops an 1891 building and includes a roughly 1,600-square-foot roof deck with mature plants, irrigation, and a wisteria-clad pergola over a seating area with a built-in sofa.

The home features wide-plank oak floors, a large skylight, a modern kitchen with a Viking stove, a floating staircase, and an iron fireplace. Dining, shops, and galleries are right outside. $8,500,000. Martine Capdevielle, Sotheby’s International Realty—East Side Manhattan Brokerage, (305) 773-3366

Chicago

This 1889 Second Empire–style Victorian in the Gold Coast has a spacious roof terrace with a wrought-iron decorative railing, space for alfresco dining and lounging, and lake views. The renovated historic six-bedroom townhome has a first floor with 14-foot plaster ceilings and intricate woodwork, while the chef’s kitchen includes stone checkered floors and marble counters.

Outside are a yard with an English garden and a garage with a one-bedroom coach house. $6,000,000. Kathleen Malone, Compass, (773) 600-1551

Anna Maria, Fla.

On a coastal island near Tampa Bay, this 2017 contemporary Mediterranean features an observation terrace that looks out to palms, a canal, and Gulf sunsets. The four-bedroom has a curving staircase, marble floors, arched doorways, a living room with reclaimed wood beams, and a kitchen with a Lacanche range and a walk-in pantry.

The lot includes a pool, landscaping, a pizza oven, decks, and a private dock. A beach, shops, and dining are walking distance. $7,500,000. Kimberly Dunn, Coldwell Banker Realty, (941) 993-8693

Seattle

Built in 2018, this corner-lot contemporary five-bedroom features a large turf-clad roof with a grill area, a patio, a firepit, and views of the treetops and Mount Rainier, Elliott Bay, and downtown. The kitchen has an 18-foot waterfall island of Brazilian granite, and the living room has a gas fireplace.

The lower level includes a rec room, kitchenette, and guest room. Outside are a fenced yard, patio, and garage. $3,200,000. Scott Shutes, Windermere Real Estate/Luxury Portfolio International, (206) 949-5933

Washington, D.C.

Atop a 2020 modern building in Logan Circle, this three-bedroom penthouse’s professionally landscaped roof terrace includes plantings, built-in lighting, limestone pavers, a water feature, and views of the Potomac River and the Washington Monument.

The apartment’s glass walls open to interiors with clean lines, built-ins, and sliding wall systems for an adaptable layout. Downstairs are a private garage with storage and a shared gym, dog-washing station, and concierge. $3,250,000. Daryl Judy, Washington Fine Properties, (202) 380-7219

Sacramento

In a former bread factory, this 2009 loft apartment in the R Street Corridor includes access to a shared roof deck with a grill, string lights, leafy views, and alfresco dining space.

The one-bedroom condo has polished concrete floors, high beamed ceilings, exposed rafters, brick walls, in-unit laundry, and a bedroom with translucent walls that opens to a Juliet balcony. Parks, bars, and dining are steps away. $545,900. Clara Tucker, Coldwell Banker Realty, (916) 502-0400

‘Toy Story 5’

Directed by Andrew Stanton (PG)

★★★

Toy Story 5 arrives this week as further proof that “there’s no animated franchise that’s ever plumbed the human condition so deftly,” said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast. As “unnecessary and charming” as 2019’s Toy Story 4, it’s “a cute and funny sequel” that once again seamlessly weaves big ideas about the terrors of loss, abandonment, and mortality with suspenseful action, a heart-tugging message, and plenty of “good-natured goofiness.” The best thing about seeing the once-perfect Toy Story catalog expand again is that Jessie, the cowgirl doll voiced by Joan Cusack, “finally gets to take center stage,” said David Fear in Rolling Stone.

Jessie is the favorite toy of 8-year-old Bonnie, so when the shy grade-schooler is given a digital tablet and loses interest in her old playthings, it’s Jessie who leads the fight to expose the pitfalls of socializing online. But while screen technology fully deserves its villainous role, “Toy Story 5 is a screed in search of a story,” and all of the movie’s secondary plotlines—about Buzz Lightyear, Sheriff Woody, and one of Bonnie’s tween neighbors—“somehow feel like filler.” Sadly, “this is what happens when you beat a franchise to death.” The movie, to be sure, “doesn’t take many risks,” said Robert Daniels in RogerEbert.com. Jessie eventually makes peace with technology, suggesting we all simply find a balance between the online world’s attractions and organic living. “It’s your prototypically beautifully rendered movie tackling a heady subject in the safest possible manner”—which isn’t bad for a fifth outing.

‘The Death of Robin Hood’

Directed by Michael Sarnoski (R)

★★

The title character played by Hugh Jackman in this revisionist drama is “not the Robin Hood of green tights and swashbuckling adventure,” said Tim Grierson in Screen Daily. Disappointingly, he comes across instead in this latest drama from the acclaimed director of 2021’s Pig as “just another flinty antihero manfully attempting to make amends for his bad acts.” Though a gray-bearded Jackman endows the character with “sufficient sorrow” and “a believable ferocity,” the outlaw’s eleventh-hour pursuit of redemption leads to “earnestly executed but fairly predictable twists and turns.”

The movie, to be fair, “holds our attention for the sheer severity of its reinvention,” said Guy Lodge in Variety. This Robin Hood, despite the lore that’s already grown around him, robbed and killed to enrich only himself, and after a bloody opening skirmish he’d hoped would end his life, he awakens in a priory where he’s tended to by an abbess played by Jodie Comer. As he befriends an orphaned girl and a leper, the film proves both “a production of unimpeachable intelligence” and “a slow, steady downer” for most of its run. “For an often ponderously uneventful film, the ending also feels strangely rushed,” said Benjamin Lee in The Guardian. “There’s really impressive craft here, though,” as director Michael Sarnoski makes the most of natural sounds and settings to transport us to 13th-century England. While his unconventional latest effort winds up “stuck somewhere between epic and chamber piece,” he remains a filmmaker to watch. “Greatness will one day surely come.”

‘Cry Baby’ by Vince Staples

★★★★

“Cry Baby is a cry for revolution, a challenge to do better,” said Kiana Fitzgerald in Consequence of Sound. A “brash, guitar-led” album from “one of the most adept rappers we have,” the record finds Vince Staples “aiming his ire at the long-established American way.” On the “tense” lead single, “Blackberry Marmalade,” he delivers a “brutal but necessary” repetition of the N-word while juxtaposing the wisdom of his nana with the violence he sees haters inflicting on Black America. Across the ensuing nine tracks, the Southern California native urges people of color to stand up, and while he’s always called out abuses of power, “it’s his genuine care for the future of this nation that makes him such a welcome voice.” The use of guitar, bass, and live drums proves “a compelling artistic shift,” said Grant Sharples in Paste. “Staples and his band pull from various offshoots of guitar-forward music,” suggesting the Black roots of rock in all forms, many of them discernible in the record’s “thwacking drums” and “viscous bass lines.” There may be hope for the nation he describes here. For now, though, “the American dream is just that: a dream.”

‘Philadelphia’s Been Good to Me’ by Kurt Vile

★★★

“As the title of the album makes clear, Kurt Vile is proud of his roots in the City of Brotherly Love,” said Mark Richardson in The Wall Street Journal. So much so that on “You Don’t Know Cuz It’s My Life,” he takes affectionate potshots at two of his heroes, Jersey’s Bruce Springsteen and Ontario’s Neil Young, for contributing to the soundtrack of the 1993 film Philadelphia. Eighteen years into a career of making rootsy indie rock, the War on Drugs co-founder has kept his songwriting fresh “by thinking small, and engaging with what is happening around him.” On this, his 10th solo studio album, “Vile seems less like a confessional songwriter than a cartographer of the mind, mapping the ways that our thoughts can wander from prosaic to profound and back again,” said Stuart Berman in Pitchfork. Think of him as “the world’s drowsiest rapper,” writing songs “steeped in his peculiar POV.” Meanwhile, his countrified guitar licks, often “dripping with melancholy,” convey the subtle heartbreak of his nomadic musician’s life. As “99th Song” and “Rock o’ Stone” reveal, all he wants is to get home and enjoy doughnuts with his wife and daughters.

‘Doctrine of Love’ by Jalen Ngonda

★★★

“Smooth, easy to digest, and impeccably crafted,” Jalen Ngonda’s second album of throwback R&B “looks set to be the perfect accompaniment for summer barbecues,” said Chris Connor in The Line of Best Fit. The lead single, “Anyone in Love,” was a top-20 U.K. hit for the Maryland-born, U.K.-based singer, and this “often exhilarating” collection of new songs “proves he is far from a one-hit wonder.” Compared with his 2023 debut album, it’s “perhaps not as fresh.” But his voice is “once again a delight throughout,” and every song comes across as a “joyous embrace” of his Motown and 1960s rock ’n’ roll influences. With “a knowing ache” in his “slightly scratchy” tenor voice, Ngonda “gives off a moonlighting factory-worker vibe,” said Andy Kellman in AllMusic. But the “sophisticated backing” includes horns, four background singers, and “ample strings.” On “I Can’t Ever Leave You,” Ngonda “switches from belting to crooning in one short line—‘You treat me like a dog does a shoe’—with rare poise and nuance.” And when he sings “You never wanted me” on the album’s closing track, “the emotion is powerful enough to make an empath tremble.”

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James Lasdun’s new book, The Family Man, reckons with the Alex Murdaugh murder case, which the poet, novelist, screenwriter, and short-story writer covered for The New Yorker. Below, Lasdun names six great books about terrible happenings.

‘This House of Grief’ by Helen Garner (2014)

Garner’s life-affirming novels are rightly loved, but I have a special regard for her nonfiction account of the case of Robert Farquharson, who murdered his three young sons. Probing, self-searching, drily astute, it’s an extraordinary reckoning with the dark forces that erupt into ordinary lives. Buy it here.

‘Nada’ by Jean-Patrick Manchette (1972)

Manchette drew on pulp and noir to create vehicles for grappling with serious societal issues. The result was a set of riveting political thrillers. Nada, about a group of 1970s radical leftists who plot to kidnap a U.S. ambassador, is his cynical but mind-blowing masterpiece. Buy it here.

‘The Journalist and the Murderer’ by Janet Malcolm (1990)

In a sense, all of Janet Malcolm’s books are crime stories—needle-sharp forensic examinations of human folly—whether she’s writing about poets or psychologists or actual criminals. This one, a study of the treacherous relationship between a killer and the journalist he took into his confidence, is my favorite. Buy it here.

‘The Friends of Eddie Coyle’ by George V. Higgins (1970)

If this is the hardest of hard-boiled crime stories, it’s also one of the most unexpectedly moving. Higgins had a Dickensian eye and ear for the world he made his own—Boston’s seedy criminal underworld—and its denizens become tragic figures in his hands, none more so than the aging gun dealer Eddie Coyle. Buy it here.

‘The Vanishing’ by Tim Krabbé (1984)

I’m not a fan of horror, but this take on a venerable horror trope (I won’t give it away) rises to a Dostoyevskian philosophical brilliance as it entraps its two young innocents in the logic of pure evil. It was made into a very good Dutch film by George Sluizer (who remade it into a bad Hollywood film), but it is the short, utterly unsparing book that has always haunted me. Buy it here.

‘Demons’ by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1871–72)

The great novels of the master himself tower over just about everything else. I’m inclined to think that this tumultuous passion play, about idealists warped into murderous criminals by their own ideals, is the greatest of them all. Buy it here.

‘Whistler’ by Ann Patchett

“Is there a place in serious literature for kind, happy characters and kind, happy stories?” asked Helen Schulman in The New York Times. Ann Patchett’s “intimate and entertaining” 10th novel “makes the strong case that there is.” The tale begins in high suspense, with 53-year-old Daphne and her husband, Jonathan, seemingly being stalked while visiting New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. But the stranger trailing them turns out to be Eddie, Daphne’s beloved former stepfather. She hasn’t seen him in over 40 years, and their chance reencounter brings her to tears. As the two reconnect over weeks, then months, fans of Patchett’s past novels will “wait in vain for the terror of Bel Canto or the thrills of State of Wonder,” said Ron Charles in his Substack newsletter. Instead, Whistler is “that loveliest of summer gifts, a story of reconciliation, of old affections renewed, of a family’s circumference enlarged.”

A novel both “radiantly intelligent” and “emotionally wrenching, Whistler is “the exquisite production of an author working at the height of her powers,” said Priscilla Gilman in The Boston Globe. Patchett’s masterfully constructed story intertwines two timelines. In the present, Eddie, a book editor, charms everyone in Daphne’s circle, including her mom, who divorced him decades earlier. The other story thread reveals the cause of the family split: a car crash in which Eddie was in the driver’s seat and both he and 9-year-old Daphne were nearly killed. The two storylines are “intertwined in a way that builds tension, deepens character, and allows for unexpected discoveries,” including why the novel is named Whistler. And even when the characters grapple with heavy subjects, “Patchett’s touch is light, her humor delightful, her empathy generous and vibrant.” Without a doubt, the book is “a magnificent achievement” and “I think it’s her best novel yet.

To me, Whistler is “top-shelf comfort food, the literary equivalent of pricey ice cream,” said Beejay Silcox in The Guardian. Although “we almost care about these vanilla-bean people,” and almost care about their floral arrangements and champagne brunches, it’s “all so neat” and so untouched by lingering sorrows that it “often reads like a gratitude journal.” But there’s “a sly wit and sagacity” to Patchett’s writing that here has been “honed to perfection,” said Leigh Haber in the Los Angeles Times. As it explores family trauma and life’s transitory nature, Whistler proves “sweet but never sentimental, infinitely wise and suffused with love,” and it’s clear that some of its heft owes to Patchett drawing on events from her own life. “I don’t recommend consuming Whistler in one enormous gulp. I dipped in and out, savoring scenes, reflecting on them, occasionally shedding a tear. In other words, I didn’t want it to end.”

‘View From the East Wing: A Memoir’ by Jill Biden

Jill Biden’s best-selling new memoir repeats a very self-serving story, said Tunku Varadarajan in The Wall Street Journal. Displaying a “mulish unwillingness” to face up to the evidence of her husband’s cognitive decline in 2024, she blames “Democratic elites” for robbing him of the shot he deserved to bounce back from his disastrous June 2024 debate performance and win a second presidential term. She admits he was so off that night that she worried he’d been drugged or was having a stroke. She even reports that she agreed when he afterward whispered to her, “I really f---ed up, didn’t I?” But she insists he remained fully capable of governing, campaigning, and beating a foe she detests, and the result is “a memoir that is at turns delusional, sappy, resentful, and—in a weirdly irresistible way—revelatory of the former first lady’s agitated state of mind.”

“The most charitable interpretation of Jill Biden’s book, particularly the parts dealing with her husband’s aging,” said Jake Tapper in CNN.com, “is that she’s having difficulty accepting what’s been happening to him for years.” Joe’s mental acuity, already visibly declining in 2024, has probably worsened. But she insists that he showed no signs of impairment that summer and that she’d have raised red flags if he had. Those claims are “very difficult to believe, if not just downright false.” And she can argue all she wants that Joe, at any age, would be a better president than our current leader. “But the choice wasn’t Trump vs. Biden. It was Trump vs. which Democrat would be best.”

“View From the East Wing says almost nothing of consequence,” said Scaachi Koul in Slate. Besides filling you in on, say, how many soups were served at a particular state dinner, “it follows all the regular hits for a former first lady’s memoir, reminding you that she’s a good mother and a faithful wife and a dedicated teacher.” But all of its talk about how she and Joe are good people who were doing their best reads like one of those Instagram posts you see from an acquaintance randomly reporting that she and her husband have weathered some storms but are still going strong. “It’s a woman defending her husband to an audience who didn’t ask.”

“For years, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket company operated in secrecy, overshadowed by the success of Elon Musk’s SpaceX,” said Karen Weise in The New York Times. Founded in 2000, the venture didn’t put a craft into orbit until January 2025. Over the past 18 months, Blue Origin finally seemed to be gaining momentum, getting closer to reliably launching a gigantic rocket, called New Glenn, that could lift greater payloads and potentially challenge SpaceX’s domination of the sector. But late last month, New Glenn exploded in a fireball during a test, badly damaging its sole launchpad in Florida. “At least one massive steel tower appeared to be essentially gone,” and the hydraulics and fuel systems beneath the $1 billion pad might be irrecoverable. Amazon has about 3,000 satellites it needs to launch to begin commercial operations of its Leo satellite internet service, a potential competitor to SpaceX’s Starlink. The explosion could set Blue Origin, Amazon, and other customers back a year.

One of those customers is NASA, said James B. Meigs in The Wall Street Journal. The agency is “working furiously to get its Artemis program on track to land astronauts on the moon by 2030,” and both Blue Origin and SpaceX have been contracted to develop vehicles that can carry “astronauts from NASA’s Orion capsule down to the lunar surface and back.” Blue Origin is also building a smaller “workhorse” lander called Blue Moon for ferrying humans and cargo. “But right now, the only rocket configured to carry the Blue Moon is Blue Origin’s New Glenn.” So until New Glenn is operational again, “all those plans are on hold.”

The explosion “sets the stage for Elon Musk’s dominance of space,” said Faiz Siddiqui and Carolyn Y. Johnson in The Washington Post. It leaves the U.S. government and other customers “more reliant on SpaceX’s services.” The timing could not be better for Musk and SpaceX, which last week made the largest initial public offering in history. Musk, for his part, shared a motivational message to Bezos and his team on X. “Ad astra per aspera,” he wrote—“through hardships to the stars.”

Musk would know, said Ryan Whitley in National Review. As recently as 2008, “it was not clear SpaceX would even survive as a company given its early failures.” But it persevered, because the company’s strategy “was to learn faster than anybody else in the industry”—by learning from its mistakes. Unlike NASA, which became overzealous in its pursuit of perfection under the motto “failure is not an option,” Musk brought a Silicon Valley ethos to the space industry, where “failure was a necessary feature, not a bug.” Blue Origin is at a similar crossroads. It needs to embrace this moment as a learning opportunity and get back up—quickly.

Marjane Satrapi made revolutionary Iran come alive in stark black-and-white images. The Iranian-born writer, artist, and director was best known worldwide as the creator of Persepolis, the groundbreaking graphic novel describing her childhood experiences of the Islamic fundamentalist 1979 revolution that ripped away women’s rights and led to the horrors of the Iran-Iraq War. Published in four parts, from 2000 to 2003, Persepolis sold millions of copies, and Satrapi’s 2007 film adaptation received an Oscar nomination and the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Satrapi said her goal was not just to protest the regime but also to humanize a people stereotyped as either terrorists or veiled, silenced women. “If these people scare you, look closer,” she said in 2007. “They have parents, they have lovers, they have hope, they have stories.”

“Satrapi was a born troublemaker,” said The Nation, just like the rest of her family. Descendants of a prince who became a communist, the Satrapis “opposed both the dictatorship of the shah and the theocracy that was established by the 1979 revolution.” At school, Satrapi “talked back,” wore what she liked, and hoarded tapes of rock music. When she was 14, her parents sent her to boarding school in Vienna for her safety, but she was lonely there, bouncing from dorm to dorm and even living on the streets a few months. After an illness, she returned to Iran, had a brief marriage to a war veteran, and earned a master’s degree in art. It was when she moved to France for further studies in 1994 that she finally “found her artistic voice,” said The Hollywood Reporter, as well as her longtime husband, Swedish actor Mattias Ripa. She followed Persepolis with Chicken With Plums, an illustrated story and film based on a musician relative. She then directed several more movies, including the 2019 Marie Curie biopic Radioactive, starring Rosamund Pike.

Yet her masterwork remained Persepolis, the story of the “gradual suffocation of a society,” said Le Monde (France), and of the lifelong depression that drove her to suicide attempts. Her family said she died “of sadness” a year after Ripa’s death from cancer. In her last book, she explored the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in Iran, which started in 2022 after a woman arrested for improper hijab died in custody. “Human nature,” she said, “is made for freedom.”

What do the statistics show?

That the U.S. is experiencing the largest and most sustained drop in homicides on record. After spiking sharply at the start of the pandemic, peaking at 6.8 murders per 100,000 people in 2021, the homicide rate started to come down in 2022. Since then, murders have dropped by an average of 16% a year; they fell 21% across 35 large cities from 2024 to 2025, according to the nonpartisan Council on Criminal Justice. Killings declined in cities in blue and red states: Chicago and Baltimore both recorded a 31% drop (to 416 and 133 homicides, respectively), Salt Lake City 27% (to 8), and St. Louis 11% (to 121). If a similar decline is reflected in national data, the homicide rate will drop to 4 per 100,000, the lowest since 1900. Early figures for this year suggest the downward trend is continuing: New York City registered 102 murders from January to May, the lowest number on record for the period and down 21% from the same months in 2025. Such numbers are “absolutely astonishing,” said CCJ president Adam Gelb. “It’s a historic collapse in the homicide rate.” Other violent crimes are also down. From 2019 to 2025, the robbery rate fell 36% in major cities, carjackings 29%, and domestic violence incidents 19%.

What’s driving this drop?

Some of it is a reversal of the pandemic effect. The factors that sent the murder rate soaring 30% in 2020—social disruption, workplace and school closures that put young men on the street, stay-home recommendations that trapped people with abusers— faded as normal life returned. But murders have since dropped well below pre-pandemic levels. The Trump administration has a simple explanation: It says President Trump “turned the tide” by “removing savage criminal illegals” and flooding blue cities with federal agents. Experts give that claim no credibility, noting that murders started dipping years before Trump returned to office. Instead, it seems as though multiple factors are behind the decline, including important shifts in policing.

How has policing changed?

After temporarily retreating from many communities following the May 2020 killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, which led to Black Lives Matter protests and calls to defund the police, “cops got back to work,” said former New York Police Department chief Kenneth Corey. They also became “much more focused on gun violence.” Part of that involved zeroing in on the small number of repeat violent offenders responsible for an outsize share of crimes. Advances in DNA technology and the spread of surveillance cameras also helped catch killers. “There’s nowhere in this city where you can walk without being on video,” said Frank Simpson, chief homicide prosecutor in Camden, N.J., which recorded 12 murders last year, down from 67 in 2012. But some experts question the role of law enforcement in the homicide drop, noting murders have fallen as police departments across the nation have lost manpower. Philadelphia, for example, has the fewest officers per capita in 40 years and just posted its lowest annual homicide total—222—since 1966.

What else could explain the decline?

Crime experts and local leaders point to the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), which then-president Joe Biden signed in March 2021 to combat the pandemic’s impacts. It sent hundreds of billions of dollars to state and local governments, which in many locales funded community violence intervention (CVI) programs. Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett credits his city’s plunging murder rate in large part to Indy Peace, a CVI program that offers support to gunshot victims and their families in the hope of preventing retaliatory shootings. “It saves lives,” said Hogsett. The federal windfall also went to other community investments that may have made a difference: summer jobs programs for teens, after-school programs, community centers, and mental health services. “I think it has gone unrecognized how incredibly effective it was in stabilizing communities,” Princeton University sociologist Patrick Sharkey says of ARPA. Other changes in American habits could also be curbing violence.

What kind of changes? 

A decline in drunkenness—54% of U.S. adults now say they drink alcohol, the lowest in nearly 90 years—has likely helped shrink the number of murders. “You get drunk, you do something stupid,” said Rafael Mangual, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute. Experts also nod to the effects of social media—many young people now socialize online rather than in person—the way the 2020–22 homicide spike took potential killers off the street, and even the possible influence of GLP-1 weight loss drugs, which may diminish impulsive behaviors. But none of these factors can explain the sheer scale of the murder drop, said crime analyst and former CIA agent Jeff Asher, and neither can changes in poverty or the availability of guns. “We didn’t fix any of those things,” Asher said. “So, what you’re left with is a bunch of explanations, none of which explains all of it.”

How low will the murder rate go?

Experts don’t know that either—and point to two factors that could nudge it back up. One is that the Biden stimulus money is running out, and its effect “will wane substantially this year,” said John Roman, a University of Chicago criminal justice researcher. Then there are the steep cuts to community funding by the Trump administration. As part of its offensive against “DEI and cultural Marxism,” it terminated at least 373 grants from the Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs last year, wiping out some $500 million in funding for efforts including CVI programs, victim services, and programs to aid ex-offenders. Some experts call that a tragic miscalculation after such historic gains. “Don’t take our foot off the gas,” said criminal justice researcher Jennifer Doleac. “We do have control over our destiny here.”

In this dark moment, “Scott Pelley is the hero we need,” said Jonathan V. Last in The Bulwark. At a recent all-hands meeting with Nick Bilton, new executive producer of 60 Minutes, the veteran CBS correspondent demanded Bilton explain the “Black Thursday” massacre, in which correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega were fired along with other senior staff. When Bilton claimed ignorance, Pelley took him “to the woodshed.” He accused Bilton and Bari Weiss—the Free Press founder now running CBS News—of trying to “murder” 60 Minutes as a favor to President Trump, who has a long-standing grudge against the show. Not coincidentally, CBS’s billionaire owners, Larry and David Ellison, need Trump’s approval to complete their takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, home of CNN and the Warner movie studio. Bilton swiftly fired Pelley, but failed to silence him. Speaking later to The New York Times, Pelley debunked Weiss’ “ludicrous rationalizations” about revamping 60 Minutes for the digital age. (Viewership climbed 9% last season and online views 190%.) More damning, Pelley claimed that in February Weiss pushed him to impart a Trumpian spin to a report on anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis, demanding he make the demonstrators look “more violent,” and inform viewers—falsely—that protester Renée Good was “driving toward” the ICE officer who shot her dead.

I’m sorry, said Charles C.W. Cooke in National Review, but no “employee can behave like this and expect to remain employed.” Even one who makes $7 million a year. Before last week’s blowup, Weiss and Bilton invited Pelley to clear the air in private. Pelley refused, preferring to humiliate Bilton before the full staff, which he did in deeply personal terms, mocking Bilton’s “slender” credentials and sneering that he “will never be welcome here.” There’s “something unconsciously fitting” about Pelley’s self-martyrdom, said Gerard Baker in The Wall Street Journal. In his “hysterical reaction” to Weiss’ changes to 60 Minutes, the 68-year-old Pelley displayed the pomposity and unreflecting, lefty self-righteousness that made those changes necessary.

Pelley’s not the only one getting old, said Chris Cillizza in his Substack newsletter. The average 60 Minutes viewer is now 65. The show’s audience is “literally dying off,” just as broadcast TV itself has entered terminal decline. Bilton tried explaining this during Pelley’s “barrage,” likening broadcast TV to “an ice cube that is melting.” In a prior memo to staff, Bilton claimed to have a “notebook full of ideas” of how 60 Minutes can thrive in a post-broadcast world, said Brian Stelter in CNN.com, and maybe he does. But if he and Weiss bungle the execution of those ideas as badly as they’ve bungled the last two weeks, many staff fear they’ll succeed only in “speeding up the melting process.”

Maybe 60 Minutes will survive in some form, said Rick Wilson in his Substack newsletter. But its days as a beacon of “accountability journalism” effectively ended last year, when Weiss tried to scrap a report on El Salvador’s CECOT prison, then the Trump administration’s preferred destination for migrant deportees. True, David Ellison reached out this week to staff, promising to respect the show’s “editorial independence.” But with an autocrat in the White House, what sane billionaire wants to bankroll the work of asking questions that “make powerful people uncomfortable?” In our 250-year history, 60 Minutes’ “ticking stopwatch was the closest thing American power had to a conscience it could not buy. Until they did.”

Scarborough, Maine

In the Prouts Neck community between Massacre Pond and the Atlantic Ocean, this 1965 beachfront home is on more than 4 acres. The refreshed six-bedroom contemporary features a vaulted living room, eclectic pendant lights, wood floors, a steel-and-wood floating staircase, an open kitchen with two islands, and bedrooms with dramatic wallpapers.

Outside are a covered porch with ocean views, a pool, and a sandy beach. $8,950,000. Elise Kiely, Legacy Properties Sotheby’s International Realty, (207) 838-1050

Chicago

This 1969 Gold Coast townhouse is a short walk from Lincoln Park. Transformed several times over the years, it is now an Art Deco–inspired three-bedroom with a curved bronze-and-steel staircase, inlaid oak floors, four fireplaces, a primary suite with a soaking tub carved from a block of marble, and a high-end kitchen with a banquette.

A deck, a landscaped patio with a koi pond, and a two-car garage are also included. $5,995,000. Jennifer Ames, Engel & Völkers, (312) 440-7525

Salt Lake City

The Siegel House, a 1962 modernist home designed by renowned architect John Sugden, is in the Mount Olympus neighborhood, adjacent to the Wasatch Mountains.

The four-bedroom has a rectilinear frame made of white U.S. steel and an open plan interior with floor-to-ceiling windows and original terrazzo flooring. The eat-in kitchen includes walnut cabinets, and the bedrooms have wool carpeting. Downtown is a 20-minute drive. $2,995,000. Mony Ty, Summit Sotheby’s International Realty, (801) 550-7430

Pinecrest, Fla.

Architect Barry Sugarman designed this 1966 home, on a canal about 30 minutes from Miami. The updated five-bedroom has a central vaulted rotunda with curved walls and a suspended fireplace with a rounded hearth, and other interiors have cherry wood floors and custom Italian doors.

A chef’s kitchen includes double Wolf stoves and a Sub-Zero fridge. Glass doors open to the nearly 1-acre lot, which has a pool, yards, and lounge areas. $3,295,000. Adam Levy, Compass Florida, (305) 389-3959

Zionsville, Ind.

Built in 1963 as a Dutch Colonial Revival, a 2021 gut renovation upgraded all systems and interiors in this five-bedroom home. The kitchen includes white oak cabinets, honed quartzite counters, and a walk-in pantry. The primary suite has a Japanese soaking tub, and downstairs is a sauna. A screened porch overlooks the property’s nearly 4-acre wooded lot.

Indianapolis is about a half-hour away, while a nature park, rail trail, and schools are all walkable. $2,250,000. Louise Bergmann, F.C. Tucker Company/Luxury Portfolio International, (317) 332-2046

Guerneville, Calif.

This hillside two-bedroom split-level cottage in Sonoma County’s Russian River Valley was built in 1963. The vaulted open-plan main room includes hardwood floors and a kitchen with open shelving, marble counters, and Viking appliances, plus a freestanding cone fireplace and a sky-light.

A deck bounded by the hill has a hot tub and shade from mature trees. The Armstrong Redwoods State Natural Reserve, wineries, shops, and dining are nearby. $519,000. Summer Stubblefield Olson, Compass, (707) 319-5983

‘Disclosure Day’

Directed by Steven Spielberg (PG-13)

★★★

“It’s been a long time since Steven Spielberg directed a film as quintessentially Spielbergian as Disclosure Day,” said David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter. Like his best work, the beloved filmmaker’s latest alien adventure combines “a propulsive yarn” with human drama, here anchored by “deeply felt” performances from co-stars Josh O’Connor and Emily Blunt. O’Connor plays Daniel, a cybersecurity expert on the run after stealing evidence that the U.S. government has been hiding proof of extraterrestrial life for decades. Meanwhile, Blunt’s Margaret, a TV meteorologist, one day develops psychic powers linked to those secrets.

Daniel’s and Margaret’s paths eventually collide in a fantastic speeding-train sequence that proves Spielberg “hasn’t lost the knack,” said William Bibbiani in The Wrap. But while he’s crafted “an incredibly fast-paced summer thrill ride,” the story doesn’t work, largely because in our age of disinformation and complacency, it’s now naive to think that society would be turned upside down if one man announced proof of alien life. “Disclosure Day would have been a great thriller in the heyday of The X-Files, but in the 2020s, it’s out of touch.” If you seek flaws, “there’s much to roll your eyes at,” said David Fear in Rolling Stone, including the story’s “frustratingly arbitrary” twists and a climax that “should feel showstopping but somehow falls flat.” Even so, “this is a Steven Spielberg film,” and he brings “a baseline of love for filmmaking” that adds vitality to every scene. Better yet, his work still emits a simple faith: “that movies still have the power to blow minds and open hearts.”

‘Carolina Caroline’

Directed by Adam Rehmeier (Not rated)

★★★

“Carolina Caroline is a story we’ve seen play out a million times,” said Natalia Keogan in The A.V. Club. It’s a lovers-on-the-lam picture in the vein of Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands, and True Romance, “but there’s a down-to-earth quality here that eludes so many of these other iconic capers, and that’s what sweeps you up.” Samara Weaving and Kyle Gallner are “electric” as Caroline, a Texas gas station clerk, and Oliver, the charismatic con artist who whisks her away into a life of crime.

The absence of surprises in the story once they commence their Carolina-bound bank-robbing road trip “isn’t inherently a bad thing,” said Vikram Murthi in IndieWire. “It can be fun to watch talented people play the hits,” including when law enforcement starts closing in on this pair. Weaving imbues Caroline with “just the right amount of cunning that she never comes across as a simple victim” while Gallner lends the dangerous Oliver “a potent romantic streak.” But even the two stars can only do so much with some scenes in the film’s lumpy middle that “feel like going through the motions.” Throughout, though, there’s “legitimate heat and chemistry between the two lead actors,” said Sheila O’Malley in RogerEbert.com, and director Adam Rehmeier gives them space to connect at a soul level. “When Caroline and Oliver kiss, it’s not just hot or sexy. You can feel their relief. Finally, they are not alone in this weird, sad world.”

Homebuyers are losing faith that mortgage rates will fall, said Julie Z. Weil in The Washington Post. The average fixed rate for a 30-year home loan hasn’t dipped below 6% since the fall of 2022. For a brief moment earlier this year, it looked like the tide might be turning. But then the Iran war erupted in February, and rates, which are linked to Treasury yields, have since surged more than half a point, recently topping 6.5%. Potential buyers “who had been waiting for better” news are reconciling with the reality that rates “aren’t coming down this year in a significant way.” Some are biting the bullet, hoping they can refinance later—and trying to find ways to cover higher housing costs. They include Bob Anderson, 66, who will close on a Detroit-area home in June that will cost $350 more a month than his rent. “I will admit I’m a little stressed,” Anderson said.

Home Depot is “a barometer for America’s housing market,” said The Economist. But the company’s share price has “plunged by a quarter from its peak last year,” as fewer home sales have led to lower sales of construction equipment and for DIY projects. “We have never seen housing activity this slow for this long,” chief financial officer Richard McPhail said in April. Real estate agents are also under pressure, said Nicole Friedman in The Wall Street Journal. Most realtors are “independent contractors and get paid when a deal closes.” But deals have been hard to come by this spring. The National Association of Realtors’ membership has decreased by 200,000 since 2022, and in a 2025 NAR survey, only 71% of agents “said real estate was their only profession”—a record low.

One Texas city offers a road map out of this mess, said Shaina Mishkin in Barron’s. Since Austin simplified its permit approval process a decade ago, housing “supply has increased, prices are down, sales are up, and buying costs have shrunk.” The typical household in Austin can now “afford 74% of listings, nearly on par with 2019 levels” and bucking the downward trend in other big cities. Austin’s leaders “understood that expanding the housing stock in any way, even with luxury apartment buildings, would ease pressures,” said The New York Times in an editorial. Let that be a lesson to everyone: “We need to build more homes.”

The build-more theory faces a major obstacle, said Ryan Dezember in The Wall Street Journal: rising construction-material costs. The average American home uses “more than 400 pounds of copper,” the price of which is soaring thanks in part to high demand from data centers. Lumber, fuel, resins, and plastics, as well as the costs of delivering these products to work sites, have all gotten more expensive because of President Trump’s tariffs and the Iran war. These costs are “adding to an affordability problem that is pushing homeownership beyond reach for more Americans.”

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In Katherine Center’s new novel, The Shippers, a woman attending her sister’s cruise-ship wedding ropes her childhood bestie into being her wingman. Below, the best-selling author of The Bodyguard and Happiness for Beginners names six favorite books about love.

‘Persuasion’ by Jane Austen (1817)

This is my all-time favorite Jane Austen novel—and hands-down favorite literary love story. The romantic angst and the longing that Anne Elliott feels as the man she rejected, Captain Wentworth, shows back up in her life, still angry—it’s a feast of love agony. Totally page-turning! Buy it here.

‘Just Like Heaven’ by Julia Quinn (2011)

This is a perfect ride of a historical romance about two old friends who wind up falling madly for each other after he gets sick and she arrives at his estate to nurse him back to health. The anticipation, the stakes, the slow build—it’s all exquisitely, perfectly done. Buy it here.

‘Beach Read’ by Emily Henry (2020)

Emily Henry is one of the all-time greats, and this contemporary romance is my favorite of hers. Two writers—one a writer of literary fiction, the other a romance writer—wind up summering next door to each other as they work on their novels. The sparring between them is unbeatable. Buy it here.

‘Love in the Afternoon’ by Lisa Kleypas (2010)

The first time I read this historical romance, it made me cry. The longing that our quirky but lovable heroine feels for a man who doesn’t know who she is and doesn’t know that he loves her—it’s palpable. The heart of this story is about being seen and loved for exactly who you are. Buy it here.

‘Why We Love’ by Helen Fisher (2004)

This book by behavioral researcher Helen Fisher changed my understanding of the role of love in human life. Fisher studied subjects’ brains as they looked at photos of their beloveds in scanners, and she argues that romantic love isn’t some made-up cultural thing but instead a fundamental human drive. Buy it here.

‘Love 2.0’ by Barbara Fredrickson (2013)

This utterly compelling nonfiction read redefines love, transforming it from something enormous and monolithic into micro moments of experiencing “positivity resonance”: the kinds of connections that happen between people all the time, even strangers. It’s a whole new way to think about love. Buy it here.

‘Trudeau & Doonesbury: A Biography’ by Joshua Kendall

The new Garry Trudeau biography is, compared with the comic strip he’s known for, “not as sophisticated, in tone and content,” said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. But while it’s merely “a meat-and-potatoes biography,” it “has a good story to tell,” and “I devoured it in two or three sittings, as if it were an ideal bag of popcorn.” Trudeau, now 77, is a hero to many because, beginning with the first syndicated appearance of Doonesbury in 1970, he “dragged a knowing hippie sensibility onto the playground of the comics pages.” For decades, his strips were “a daily confirmation of one’s sanity,” and he’s been just as sharp since slowing in 2014 to a Sunday-only publication schedule. He is, as this book reveals, a short guy who shot up at age 17 but who “never forgot what being a short guy was like.”

Author Joshua Kendall traces Trudeau’s life back to its origins — “a childhood marked by both immense privilege and a quiet, defining trauma,” said David Smith in The Guardian. Trudeau grew up in an upstate New York town essentially built by his great-grandfather, but his mother left the family when Garry was 10, and he battled depression and towering bullies when he was sent away to prep school. But an inspiring teacher helped him express himself through art, and after he entered Yale in 1966, he started a comic strip in the student paper that evolved into Doonesbury. By the mid-1970s, he’d won a Pulitzer Prize and was carried in newspapers with a total readership of 60 million, and he’d graduated from lampooning jocks and preppies to calling out Richard Nixon’s criminality. In 1980, he married Today show co-host Jane Pauley.

“Kendall reminds us of the many times that Doonesbury was more than just a comic strip,” said Alex Beam in The Boston Globe. A moving chapter details Trudeau’s deep immersion in the experiences of wounded combat veterans, a group he honored when one of the strip’s original characters, the footballer B.D., lost a leg fighting in the Iraq War. At other times, Trudeau has drawn anger or censorship, as when he created the funny pages’ first openly gay character or spoofed new state limits on abortions. Though Kendall persuaded the famously reclusive Trudeau to answer some biographical questions, the author offers little insight about his subject’s emotional life, leaving “a yawning hole” in his account. Still, the book is “a warm and fuzzy romp for Baby Boomers” and “a perfect biography for Trudeau: respectful, informative, and none too intrusive — just the way he would want it.”

‘Dekonstructing the Kardashians: A New Media Manifesto’ by MJ Corey

In the preface of her new book, MJ Corey offers a note of apology for pouring so much energy into analyzing a family that’s famously famous for being famous, and for little else, said Megan Garber in The Atlantic. “The rest of Corey’s book, however, is unapologetic, and rightfully so: The Kardashians matter, Corey suggests, because of who they are but also because of who we are.” It’s the viewing habits of the rest of us, after all, that have turned sisters Kim, Khloé, Kourtney, Kendall, and Kylie—plus mother Kris—into ubiquitous and persistently influential presences in 21st-century culture. The Kardashians have become billionaires on the fuel of our attention, and Corey, who for years has been applying scholarly analysis to the family in her popular Kardashian Kolloquium social media posts, has written a book that “reads less as a biography of one clan than as a study of the culture that elevated it.”

To argue its points, the book “deploys a litany of canonical media theorists and philosophers,” said Kyle Chayka in The New Yorker. Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, and Marshall McLuhan are invoked to show how the Kardashians shrewdly used media formats both old and new to build an enduring following. Kim, now 45, has been particularly adept at amassing attention, building her fame off the 2007 leak of a sex tape to become a billionaire entrepreneur whose image still fills social media feeds. “Corey is at her best when parsing the ways in which the Kardashians resonate with their audience.” Alas, Dekonstructing the Kardashians can be “a frustratingly frenetic and recursive book, whose agglomeration of details doesn’t always amount to a deeper narrative.”

Yes, the book jumps around, said Molly B. Nash in the Chicago Review of Books, but “it is an organized chaos, one that reflects the progression of this multifaceted matriarchal family into the heart of the cultural zeitgeist.” Corey’s “incredibly ambitious” study takes in all the ways the Kardashians have harvested attention, all the ways they’ve infiltrated various consumer spheres, and all the ways our responses to their evolving act reveal shifts in our relationship to mass media. “Whether we’ve wanted to or not, we’ve been keeping up.”

Pope Leo XIV is deeply worried about what artificial intelligence might do to all of us, said Francis X. Rocca in The Atlantic. The 42,300-word encyclical issued by the American-born pontiff recently—his first since being elevated to the papacy last year—was almost entirely devoted to AI, and he outlines “the choice humanity faces in stark terms.” With the help of governments and institutions, he says, the technology could become “an instrument of growth, justice, and fraternity.” But right now, it is fueling unemployment, destroying the environment, and reducing workers to “cogs in a machine.” We are unwisely entrusting AI with “lethal or otherwise irreversible decisions.” And the technology’s ready-made answers, he warns, can “weaken personal creativity and judgment,” threatening the “desire to form genuine human connections.” The Vatican “tends to ‘think in centuries,’” as one aphorism puts it, but on this issue Leo has moved “with remarkable speed.” It’s a clear sign of what he thinks humanity is up against.

Leo“should be applauded,” said The Guardian in an editorial. The “reckless hubris, profit seeking, and lack of accountability of figures such as Elon Musk represent a threat to the common good,” and regulation is needed to ensure their ambitious plans are deployed “for the good of all.” While Leo’s thoughts are—of course—informed by theology, his “humanity-first message” is one that even the secular world can support. AI is a “spiritual and civilizational test that forces us to face what it means to be human,” said Russell Moore in Christianity Today. Leo’s concern is not that machines will outpace humans, but that “human beings will become more like machines,” prioritizing “efficiency, control, optimization, and power above human dignity.”

The problem with Leo’s encyclical is that it doesn’t go nearly far enough, said Matthew Walther in The New York Times. Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”) begins with a parable about the Tower of Babel, “perhaps the greatest biblical symbol of technological hubris.” But it misses the story’s key point, which is not that the tower should have been built more ethically with greater “feedback from a more disparate assemblage of stakeholders.” The moral is instead: “Don’t build it!” And that’s the message Leo needed to deliver on AI, which is “unambiguously evil.”

We get it, said Barton Swaim in The Wall Street Journal: The pope’s a doomer. Clearly, he has “genuine concern for the ill uses to which AI may be put.” But “nobody yet understands the moral import of AI,” and calls for governments to “regulate AI” are incoherent and dangerous. Leo is simply echoing what the “left-liberal orthodoxy” is saying. But what’s the point “of a grand moral pronouncement” by a pope or any religious figure if it “doesn’t offend or seriously challenge honored cultural arbiters”?

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

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

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

What’s happening to the river?

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

How did the situation get this bad? 

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

Are states willing to take less water?

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

What’s the federal government doing? 

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

What happens if states can’t reach a deal?

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

Could taps actually run dry? 

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

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

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

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

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

Manhasset

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

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

Quogue

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

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

Southampton

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

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

Water Island

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

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

Sag Harbor

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

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

Port Washington

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

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

‘Backrooms’

Directed by Kane Parsons (R)

★★★

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

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

‘Power Ballad’

Directed by John Carney (R)

★★

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

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

‘Masters of the Universe’

Directed by Travis Knight (PG-13)

★★

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

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

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Wearable ultrasound tracks high-risk pregnancies

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

Paralympian could be first astronaut with disability in orbit

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

New method transforms ocean water into drinking water

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

Patients helped by therapy donkeys at French psychiatric hospital

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

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

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

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

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

‘The Boys of Dungeon Lane’ by Paul McCartney

★★★★

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

‘Blue Morpho’ by Ed O’Brien

★★★

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

‘Little Wide Open’ by Kevin Morby

★★★

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

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

‘Pariah Genius’ by Iain Sinclair (2024)

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

‘Mother London’ by Michael Moorcock (1988)

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

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

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

‘Gormenghast’ by Mervyn Peake (1950)

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

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

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

‘I Got References’ by Gerald Kersh (1939)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Block Island, R.I.

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

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

North Miami Beach, Fla.

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

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

Pasadena, Calif.

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

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

Turks and Caicos

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

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

Kilauea, Hawaii

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

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

Naples, Fla.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘The Sari Shop’ by Rupa Bajwa (2004)

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

‘Ghachar Ghochar’ by Vivek Shanbhag (2017)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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