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

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

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

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

‘Vol. II’ by Angine de Poitrine

★★★

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

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

‘Distracted’ by Thundercat

★★★

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

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

‘Creature of Habit’ by Courtney Barnett

★★★

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

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

‘Transcription’ by Ben Lerner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How common is execution?

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

Why did Trump bring it back? 

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

How have states responded?

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

Is Florida an outlier?

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

What do Americans believe?

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

Why is support declining?

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

What happened

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

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

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

What the columnists said

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

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

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

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

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

What happened

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

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

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

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

What the columnists said

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

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

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

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

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

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

What next?

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

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

Dover, Vt.

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

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

Wilmington, N.C.

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

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

Mabank, Texas

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

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

Truckee, Calif.

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

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

Montrose, Colo.

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

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

Minneapolis

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

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

We’ve recently checked off another year of inaction on the sinking ship known as Social Security, said Brenton Smith in MarketWatch. New projections from the Congressional Budget Office reveal that the trust fund will now run out of money by 2032, “resulting in benefit cuts of 22.5% in 2033.” As they’ve done for the past 40 years, our lawmakers are likely to continue to react to this slow-moving disaster “with the rhetoric of empty politics” and no real solutions. Voters, too, have consistently “responded with systemic denial.” Seniors continue to “recycle the tired cliché of indifference, ‘We paid for our benefits,’” and resist any effort to protect future generations. A 2% increase in the payroll tax in 2005 would have extended the program for another 75 years. Now the cost to achieve the same result is 4%. “If fixing Social Security were easy, it would already be done.” But hard choices must be made.

Here’s one way to “help restore sanity to a program millions of Americans depend on,” said The Washington Post in an editorial. “There’s no reason” Social Security should be sending $100,000 checks to wealthy Americans. But the way the program is constituted, couples who have continually met the taxable maximum on their earnings can become eligible for the maximum benefit, upward of $101,000. The rising costs of living will only “keep boosting payments” as time goes on. A “Six Figure Limit,” as proposed recently by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, “is the right idea.” A $100,000 cap would erase “one-quarter of the shortfalls and save $190 billion over the next decade,” said Shawn Tully in Fortune. But that would only delay insolvency by seven years. “It will take additional modest, and also more radical, fixes to bridge the yawning gaps.”

“OK, now take a breath,” said Pat Regnier in Bloomberg. Solving the shortfall may come down to a “nail-biter,” but few experts expect Congress to allow dramatic cuts to this “wildly popular” program. If the Six Figure Limit isn’t enough, other solutions “are simple in terms of math if not politics.” Lawmakers can make up for the shortfall with taxes, such as by raising the amount of income subject to a payroll tax (currently $184,500). Or they can reduce benefits “by raising the age for full retirement” again, or “changing the formulas for calculating benefits or cost-of-living adjustments.” But those nearing retirement should not panic. Even if the trust fund runs out in 2032, “major benefit reductions likely would be gradual and not kick in for at least a decade.” Social Security is going to last, but “having an aging society is expensive no matter what, and it’s going to leave a mark somewhere in the coming decades.”

The fuel crisis sparked by the war in Iran has reached the airline industry, said Will Gottsegen in The Atlantic. In addition to oil and gas, much of the world’s supply of kerosene—the base product for jet fuel—passes through the Strait of Hormuz. But with the waterway effectively closed since early March, jet fuel prices have soared by more than 58%. Airlines, “which have always had razor-thin margins,” immediately felt the strain. They have already needed to reroute many flight paths away from the war-torn Middle East, “using up more fuel and putting more pressure on airlines to compensate elsewhere.” Travelers are now seeing the turmoil show up in their ticket prices. United Airlines chief executive Scott Kirby this week warned fliers to book their “summer travel as soon as possible, before prices go even higher.”

The jet fuel crisis is so dire that “airlines are drawing up plans to cancel flights” if the war drags on, said Christopher Jasper in The Telegraph (U.K.). There is particular concern about the ability for some planes to refuel after long-haul flights to southeast Asia, a major Gulf oil importer, “potentially leaving aircraft stranded” at far-flung locales. “Because no one has a crystal ball, what this all means for travelers is up in the air,” said Aarian Marshall in Wired. But if the war continues for weeks or even months, “bigger changes—and inconveniences—might be headed to an airline near you.” Carriers could raise ticket prices, eliminate less profitable routes, or experiment with new fees—as they did during 2008’s “major and sustained” fuel shock, when charging passengers for luggage became the norm.

Wondering about the war’s impact on vacations “might seem distasteful,” said Andrea Felsted in Bloomberg. But it’s a serious problem for the tourism industry, which was “already at risk from a slowdown following the post-Covid travel boom.” Certain tourist spots like Dubai, the fifth-most visited travel destination last year, are a no-go now with the war happening. Another important global tourist spot, Mexico, is simultaneously witnessing “a wave of violence” following the killing of a Jalisco cartel leader, which will undoubtedly give travelers more pause. “While the super-wealthy will continue to travel, the simply comfortable might vacation closer to home, or not at all, particularly if the cost of energy deepens the cost-of-living crisis.”

The travel industry’s problems run deeper than the cost of jet fuel, said Ganesh Sitaraman in The New York Times. In recent weeks, travelers have endured thousands of canceled flights, hours-long lines at TSA checkpoints, and multiple safety crises, including a tragic crash at LaGuardia Airport. “Flying hasn’t always been like this,” and the culprit for America’s mess in the skies is deregulation. The Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 eliminated route and price regulation, setting the stage for the current era of “fortress hubs dominated by just one airline” at the
expense of smaller communities, as well as the relentless cost cutting that has made flying miserable. “Politicians need to learn the lessons of hundreds of years of infrastructure policy” and embrace “a regulatory and industrial policy that will once again make our air transportation system the envy of the world.”

‘Bully’ by Ye

★★

The artist formerly known as Kanye West is “probably the most contentious figure in all of popular music,” said Kelefa Sanneh in The New Yorker. So, after 2025’s flashes of blatant antisemitism and his more recent published apology, who is Ye now? “Listening to Bully, it can be hard to tell,” because on this 12th album from the 48-year-old hip-hop groundbreaker, “many of the tracks resemble fragments or sketches, with bits of singing and rapping that sound unusually tentative.” While several songs “seem designed to remind listeners of his older, less incendiary incarnations,” Ye seems “not quite sure how to give his listeners what they want.” In truth, “some of it still hits,” said Peter A. Berry in Complex. “‘All the Love’ sounds like Lion King in Space” and “‘Preacher Man’ features a nice blend of charisma and cinema.” Unfortunately, the album is “plagued by lethargic vocals, drab choruses, and trite lyricism.” You sense that Ye is unsure how to reattain excellence, and “the biggest tell” is how many songs evoke classic Kanye tracks without recapturing what worked. “Ultimately, Bully feels like Kanye searching through the crates for past glory.”

‘This Music May Contain Hope’ by Raye

★★★

“Our story begins at 2:27 a.m. on a rainy night in Paris. Cue the thunder!” That’s the British belter Raye, narrating the first few seconds of her latest album, “an epic autobiography of romantic despair,” said Rob Sheffield in Rolling Stone. Over arrangements packed with “show-tune razzle-dazzle, big-band swing frills, retro ’60s R&B, and the occasional club beat,” the 28-year-old Grammy nominee laments her serial heartbreaks with “mighty pipes” that are “as unstoppable as her flair for mascara-melting melodrama.” Whether she’s soothing herself with Edith Piaf records and chocolate cake or falling yet again for a disappointing Romeo, Raye conjures a limitless supply of “glamorously tragic scenarios.” Raye has been dogged by “endless Amy Winehouse comparisons,” said Will Hodgkinson in The Times (U.K.). But she’s “far more florid and theatrical, matching Shirley Bassey for searing drama and operatic bombast.” While her lyrics here can be “excessively on the nose,” Raye also shows ample ambition and welcome flashes of wit, and “the end result is unquestionably dynamic—the musical equivalent of seeing one’s life as a movie.”

‘Honora’ by Flea

★★★

The first bona fide solo album of Flea’s career “sounds nothing like the music that made him famous,” said Sadie Sartini Garner in Pitchfork. Anyone expecting the “screwball energy” of the bassist’s wildest Red Hot Chili Peppers contributions “may be disappointed.” Yet the 63-year-old’s idiosyncratic melodic sense informs the entire project, which features Flea on both bass and trumpet, an instrument he studied as a child. For an album whose six original compositions sound indebted to Miles Davis and Wayne Shorter, “jazz is as apt a descriptor as any.” The record also includes a wan instrumental interpretation of Frank Ocean’s “Thinkin Bout You” and a “strikingly beautiful” cover of Funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain.” Even in the company of such L.A. jazz luminaries as guitarist Jeff Parker, Flea proves “capable of holding his own,” said Janne Oinonen in The Line of Best Fit. “Morning Cry,” the fifth track, “tips its hat to bebop” while “the 10-minute ‘Frailed’ pitches Flea’s atmospheric trumpet against a minimalist electronic pulse with hypnotic results.” At one point, Flea shouts, “This shit is real”—and “that could apply to the whole of this surprising debut.”

‘Judy Blume: A Life’ by Mark Oppenheimer

“Writing the first big biography of Judy Blume had to come with enormous pressure,” said Kate Tuttle in The Boston Globe. Blume is “a treasure, an icon”: Her books, mostly written for young adults, have sold 90 million copies and earned widespread adoration because, at a fortuitous time, she was “a wild and bold truth teller” about pivotal adolescent experiences that many adults didn’t like to talk about, including menstruation, sex, divorced parents, and loneliness. Mark Oppenheimer, a veteran journalist and author, confesses at the end of his new book that he fears he may have under-delivered. But “he is being too hard on himself.” He has written a “thoughtful, thorough” biography in which Blume comes across as a breakthrough cultural figure “firmly shaped by the time, place, and culture of her birth.”

Oppenheimer’s book is at its best in its “lucid, sensitive evocations of Blume’s suburban girlhood,” said Katy Waldman in The New Yorker. Born in 1938 to a middle-class Jewish family in New Jersey, Blume was encouraged by her parents to read broadly, exercise her creativity, and live without any shame about the human body. When she began writing after college, marriage, and early motherhood, those attitudes shaped her run of early blockbusters, beginning with 1970’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, but we benefit from also having learned of the conflicts and sorrows that shaped Blume’s coming of age. In describing Blume’s best work, Oppenheimer “can be overly besotted.” But he also includes biographical material “that Blume might have bristled at,” including the abortions she had at 39 and 41. It has been reported that Blume, now 88, stopped speaking to Oppenheimer when he was well into the project, but nothing in the book seems out of place in any serious biography.

The book is strong in its general insights as well, said Meghan C. Kruger in The Wall Street Journal. “Though Blume was gifted and prolific, Oppenheimer suggests that two revolutions enabled her superstardom.” First, her early books coincided with the rise of paperbacks and mall bookstores, allowing young readers to purchase a Blume novel for just $1.25 in 1972 (the equivalent of less than $10 today). Also, the cultural moment was right. Though there were always some objections to the explicitness of Blume’s novels for both teens and adults, parents of the ’70s were more open than their predecessors to messages about body positivity, and the era’s media was less likely than today’s to judge her marital infidelity and divorces as disqualifying for a public figure guiding teens’ life choices. In the end, “Blume might seem prickly,” but “she also comes across as witty, optimistic, devoted to her craft, and sincere in her desire to nurture relationships with readers.”

‘The Drama’ 

Directed by Kristoffer Borgli (R)

★★★

“If The Drama is effectively a one-gag movie, there’s no denying that its gag is a good one,” said David Ehrlich in IndieWire. Days before the wedding of a gorgeous couple played by Zendaya and Robert Pattinson, the bride-to-be drops a bomb when banter between the couple and two friends raises the question, “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” The content of that secret proves to be “half the fun” here, and writer-director Kristoffer Borgli “milks it for all that it’s worth.” The movie also dramatizes the psychic distress of living in a country that’s in denial about its epidemic of gun violence, though the screenplay proves “too vague to fully make good on its best ideas.”

Beyond that, it’s never “entirely convincing” that Zendaya’s Emma would have undertaken the act she confesses to, said Owen Gleiberman in Variety. To a point, that doesn’t matter, because The Drama mostly focuses on the neurotic unraveling of Pattinson’s Charlie, and the actor is “certainly accomplished at moving from twitchy to twitchier.” Borgli wants us all feeling anxious, and “the way he gradually ups the cringe-comedy factor keeps us watching.” We just never fully believe in the root cause of Charlie’s crack-up.

In the end, the particular secret that Emma shares doesn’t even matter, said Richard Lawson in The Hollywood Reporter. Instead of developing into an edgy examination of gun violence, Borgli’s latest devolves into “a simple dramedy of pre-wedding jitters.” Given how perfunctory his treatment of the movie’s big social issue turns out to be, “I wish he’d chosen a totally different worst thing for Emma.”

‘Alpha’

Directed by Julia Ducournau (R)

★★

Julia Ducournau’s new film is “easily her least accomplished,” said Tim Grierson in the Los Angeles Times. Five years after winning the Palme d’Or for the body-horror shocker Titane, the French filmmaker has fashioned a melancholy AIDS parable that “rarely transcends its intellectual trappings.” In an unidentified French city, a 13-year-old named Alpha acquires a crude “A” tattoo during a night out, triggering her mother’s fears that the girl may have contracted a deadly blood disease through contact with an unclean needle. Soon, an addict uncle who’s been ravaged by the disease re-enters Alpha’s life, but all three of Ducournau’s main characters end up “overwhelmed by her grandiose ideas.”

To me, the film’s “stunning” cinematography and the work of its actors combine to achieve “a poignant emotional power,” said Jeannette Catsoulis in The New York Times. “Alpha is at times almost shockingly beautiful in its depiction of the sick as they slowly calcify, their glassy skin marbled with blue veins.”

But while Ducournau’s desire to confront the stigmas attached to disease is admirable, said Katie Rife in RogerEbert.com, “Alpha plays like a Cronenbergian after-school special,” filled with “tone-deaf” sequences that seem lifted from didactic films made decades ago. Odder still, its anti-bias messaging “isn’t aimed at contemporary young people” but at their 1980s counterparts, “creating the impression that Ducournau is nobly combating misinformation that few people believe in anymore.”

The No Kings rallies held on March 28 “may be the turning point we desperately need,” said David Rothkopf in The Daily Beast. Over 8 million people attended the third wave of nationwide anti-Trump demonstrations, marking “the largest public protest in American history.” At 3,300 marches in both major cities and rural areas like Flatwoods, W.Va.; Port Huron, Mich.; and Lander, Wyo., seas of people expressed their disgust with the fact that “we now have a corrupt, racist, misogynist, mentally defective would-be king living in our White House.”

The show of political force “could reverberate in the 2026 midterms and beyond,” said Susan Page in USA Today. Since No Kings rallies began in June 2025, Republicans have suffered a string of stunning electoral defeats in special elections. “The record-setting protests” in big cities and small towns in all 50 states are fueling the Democrats’ optimism they’ll take control of the House and perhaps even the Senate in the November midterm elections.

The massive No Kings crowds were impressive because they included not just activists “but also people who rarely protest—or have never protested before in their lives,” said Zeeshan Aleem in MS.now. Still, these one-day rallies are “not enough.” If the grassroots organizers want genuine change, they need to engage in “some type of refusal to cooperate with unjust policy,” as civil rights protesters did in the 1960s and activists did in Minneapolis during ICE’s brutal immigration crackdown. Economic boycotts and “a general strike,” with nationwide workplace stoppages, would more effectively show business and political leaders that Americans are emphatically rejecting Trumpism.

In their current form, these rallies “resemble bad group therapy,” said Jonathan Alpert in The Wall Street Journal. They provide “validation, solidarity, and emotional release” for progressives who already hate Trump. Marching and chanting slogans “feels good in the moment—and accomplishes almost nothing.”

What the cynics don’t understand, said Will Bunch in The Philadelphia Inquirer, is that No Kings’ real value “is psychological.” These demonstrations admittedly are broad and unfocused in the injustices they are targeting, but they function as a “hope-building exercise” that reminds us that most Americans still want to live in a democracy. “All these people coming out,” one protester outside Philadelphia said. “It gives you hope.” Seeing such loud and tangible proof of Trump’s unpopularity makes a very real difference, because “dictatorship only succeeds with a demoralized public.”

What is the IRGC? 

Officially, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is the military force sworn to protect Iran’s ruling clerics. Yet its enormous reach, into all aspects of political and economic life, makes it a state within a state. Far better resourced than Iran’s regular armed forces, the IRGC controls roughly half of the country’s $376 billion economy and directs Iran’s nuclear program. It has responded to international sanctions with a “resistance economy” of illicit activities, including smuggling arms, narcotics, and alcohol. Abroad, its network of violent proxy groups in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Gaza has destabilized the Middle East for decades. And the current war has only further tightened its stranglehold on Iranian society. When President Trump early on threatened the IRGC with “certain death” if it did not immediately surrender, it responded by mining the Strait of Hormuz and greenlighting attacks on Gulf Arab states. “The survival of the Islamic Republic is dependent on the IRGC,” said Georgetown University political scientist Nader Hashemi. “They were created for a moment like this.”

How was the IRGC created?

After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini didn’t trust Iran’s conventional army, saying it had “the Shah in its blood.” He set up the IRGC as his own parallel force, and during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s it absorbed the myriad local armed groups that had sprung up around mosques. When Ayatollah Ali Khamenei became Supreme Leader in 1989, he allowed the IRGC to take over the economy, controlling weapons procurement, construction, and government contracts. Now it has some 200,000 active members and holds monopolies over critical infrastructure and major industries. “It’s like a huge investment company with a complex of business empires and trading companies, while also being a de facto foreign ministry,” said Mohsen Sazegara, who helped found the IRGC and is now an exiled Iranian dissident. “I know of no other institution like the Revolutionary Guards.” An attractive employer for men in need of steady income, it has an intense indoctrination program stressing the imperative of jihad against Jews and other infidels. It exports these ideals through its elite branch, the Quds Force.

What is the Quds Force? 

It’s the armed IRGC wing charged with spreading “revolutionary values” abroad and training proxy militias. In the early 1980s, a Quds group in Lebanon helped create Hezbollah and masterminded the bombings of the U.S. Embassy and the U.S.-French barracks in Beirut, which together killed 370 people, 258 of them Americans. And it trained Shiite militias in Iraq to plant roadside bombs that killed hundreds of U.S. soldiers. But its primary archenemy is Israel and Jews, who are frequently targeted by its proxies. In 1994, a bomb killed 85 people at a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, an attack said to have been planned by the IRGC’s current commander, Gen. Ahmad Vahidi. The force trained Hamas in Gaza ahead of the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of Israelis. And IRGC-plotted arson attacks hit Jewish institutions in Australia in 2024.

Are there other wings?

The Basij, a paramilitary security force, has around 600,000 reservists at its disposal to quash dissent. Black-clad brigades typically disperse protests with batons, tear gas, and guns; their crackdown on last winter’s protests killed up to 40,000 civilians. “The population of Iran may wish what it will,” said former U.S. army adviser Brad Patty, “but they are meant to live in terror of the IRGC.” The Revolutionary Guards also have an intelligence service as well as their own versions of traditional military service branches. That includes ground troops, a 15,000-member air force that runs Iran’s missile program, and a navy of some 20,000 that patrols the Strait of Hormuz. All these branches, plus the IRGC’s drone center and cybercommand, are directing Iran’s response to the U.S.-Israeli attacks.

How are they doing? 

Better than anticipated. U.S. and Israeli air strikes have hit well over 15,000 Iranian targets, destroying ballistic missile sites as well as killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, IRGC commander Mohammad Pakpour, security chief Ali Larijani, and several other senior officials. But Iran, which watched the 2003 toppling of Saddam Hussein next door, has been hardening its regime ever since. The IRGC has built layers into its dispersed chains of command and trained its troops in asymmetric warfare. Though Trump boasted that U.S. strikes have “demolished” Iran’s regular navy and air force, the IRGC versions of those forces have struck more than 20 commercial vessels, sometimes swarming them with lightly armed speedboats. These strategies, Iranian Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi recently claimed, mean that “bombings in our capital have no impact on our ability to conduct war.”

What might weaken the IRGC’s grip? 

Decapitation strikes won’t do it—the Guards have a bench of replacements handy for each senior post, and their forces are fighting to protect the system, not any individual. Still, some IRGC units are reporting shortages of food, ammunition, and basic supplies, and the decentralization of their control raises the risk that one or more might eventually defect. Defeating the IRGC would “require not a swift campaign but, at best, a prolonged and costly war of attrition,” said Oxford political scientist Ashkan Hashemipour, but “this may prove difficult for the American president to sustain politically.”

Big Tech may have reached “an inflection point,” said Dave Lee in Bloomberg. A Los Angeles jury last week ordered Meta and Google to pay a combined $6 million to a 20-year-old woman, known as Kaley G.M., who claimed their apps caused her depression, body shame, and trauma throughout her childhood. (ByteDance, which developed TikTok, and Snap Inc. previously settled out of court.)

The decision came a day after a New Mexico jury found that Meta owes $375 million for failing to protect kids from sexual predators online. Though Meta and Google will appeal the rulings, thousands of similar lawsuits are “waiting in the wings.” Social media giants could face billions in future judgments. That’s because Kaley’s lawyers made a “novel argument” others will use, said Hannah Epstein in The Dispatch. They side-stepped “First Amendment concerns” and Section 230—which shields social media platforms from responsibility for what their users post—by focusing not on the content itself but on the algorithms and app designs that keep minors hooked to Instagram and YouTube for hours. Citing “a trove” of internal documents from Google and Meta, they contended that the companies deliberately targeted preteens with intentionally addictive features such as infinite scroll, autoplay, notifications, and beauty filters. “We’re basically pushers,” one Instagram employee wrote to colleagues.

Parents will “understandably celebrate those verdicts,” said David French in The New York Times. But the First Amendment is our most fundamental right, and it protects even “toxic and harmful” speech. I don’t doubt that social media can be damaging, but “a social media site is not a bottle of alcohol or a cigarette.” Parents “are not helpless,” and we can and should control kids’ use of smartphones and these apps. This “social media shakedown” is a big victory for trial lawyers, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial, but it’s a slippery slope that will invite countless more lawsuits. “Are platforms supposed to prohibit users from posting photos that might make someone feel depressed or insecure?” That sure covers a lot of what’s online.

It’s easy for critics to blame “greedy plaintiffs” and “runaway juries,” said Austin Sarat in The Guardian. But this case presented mountains of evidence that Meta and Google engineered “the addictive qualities of their sites.” That’s legal “negligence,” for which countless kids like Kaley “have paid the price.” For Meta and Google, it appears “the moment of reckoning has arrived, at long last,” said Valerie Hudson in the Deseret News. With the shield of Section 230 finally pierced, social media firms now face “the threat of immense financial harm” if they continue to “create compulsive, unstoppable engagement” with toxic garbage.

Don’t bank on it, said Nicholas Creel in Newsweek. These verdicts may not survive appeals, and have not created “any coherent legal standard governing how social media companies may or may not build their products.” Only Congress can create those standards through legislation. But how do lawmakers define what’s addictive or damaging? asked Douglas Murray in the New York Post. The onus is us—the consumers of Big Tech’s products. You’d be hard-pressed to find an adult in the U.S. who doesn’t have an “unhealthy relationship” with their smartphone. No wonder our children get hooked, too. The long-term solution to this problem “lies in all of our hands.”

What happened

In a remarkable break with centuries of tradition, President Trump personally attended Supreme Court arguments this week, listening in as his administration asked the justices to overturn birthright citizenship. During the questioning in Trump v. Barbara, Chief Justice John Roberts and most other justices cast doubt on the constitutionality of an executive order Trump issued in his first week in office, which requires proof of parental citizenship or permanent residency for a newborn to become a U.S. citizen. If upheld, the order could deny citizenship to some 250,000 babies a year.

Solicitor General John Sauer said the new trend of “birth tourism” required new restrictions, but the justices pushed back. “It’s a new world. It’s the same Constitution,” Roberts said, adding, “The examples you give to support strike me as very quirky.” Most justices were skeptical of Sauer’s arguments. But Justice Samuel Alito said an 1898 precedent—the Wong Kim Ark case, which concerned the U.S.-born son of Chinese immigrants—was not the last word on interpretations of the 14th Amendment, which grants birthright citizenship. We’re dealing with “something that was basically unknown at the time,” said Alito: “illegal immigration.”

The landmark hearing occurred days after the court considered arguments for a separate Trump priority: limiting mail-in balloting. In Watson v. RNC, the Republican National Committee argued that a 2020 Mississippi law allowing the counting of votes postmarked by Election Day but received up to five days later violates the federal law designating a single day for voting. The court’s conservative majority appeared skeptical of the Mississippi law and poised to strike it down, although the three liberal justices expressed fears that such a move could invalidate all early voting and override states’ constitutional powers to organize elections. Decisions on both cases are expected by July.

What the columnists said

For well over a century, said Maureen Groppe in USA Today, presidents, justices, and lawmakers agreed that the 14th Amendment guarantees birthright citizenship “to nearly everyone.” The text is clear: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” The exceptions arise from the “jurisdiction” clause, which has always been read to exclude only those children born to diplomats or to invading soldiers. But on the very first day of his second term, Trump effectively gave himself the power to “redefine who is an American” by issuing an executive order aimed at the children of undocumented immigrants. Every lower court that has reviewed that order has ruled against it. Still, some of the conservative Supreme Court justices seemed to take the administration’s arguments seriously.

The outcome could hinge on what “domiciled” means, said Adam Liptak and Ann E. Marimow in The New York Times. In the Wong Kim Ark case, Wong’s parents were legal U.S. residents domiciled in California. Sauer argued that illegal immigrants and temporary visitors are not “domiciled” here, and therefore their babies are not citizens—“meaning the court could side with him and not overturn the precedent.” Trump’s presence “added to the drama” of an “emotionally charged” session, said Abbie VanSickle, also in the Times. Conservative justices asked tough questions of Cecillia Wang, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union who is herself the recipient of birthright citizenship: Her Taiwanese parents were in the U.S. on student visas when she was born.

If the court were to find for the administration, the damage would “ripple far beyond undocumented immigrants,” said Scott Titshaw and Stephen Yale-Loehr in The Hill. Junking birthright citizenship would leave millions of children without legal status, many of them of Latino or Asian heritage. And because the executive order defines parents as “immediate biological progenitors,” it could deny citizenship to “children of same-sex couples” and those relying on surrogates. “The stakes could not be higher.”

Yet “Trump’s relationship with the Supreme Court has never been more toxic,” said James Romoser in The Wall Street Journal. Since the court ruled against his tariffs in February, “he has repeatedly disparaged the patriotism and loyalty of the justices who ruled against him.” Though birthright citizenship may be “a closer case than expected,” the administration “appears on shaky ground.” Trump seemed to realize that in the courtroom. After he left, he posted—inaccurately—on Truth Social: “We are the only Country in the World STUPID enough to allow ‘Birthright’ Citizenship!”

Sedona, Ariz.

This 1995 contemporary sits along Oak Creek near Red Rock State Park. With wings jutting off a circular copper roof, the four-bedroom centers on a round living room with an up-lit octagonal wood ceiling, a wet bar, and a three-sided fireplace.

A spiral staircase outside leads to a roof deck, and a four-person tram heads down to the water. Also on the property are a fenced dog run, stone patio, pool and spa, and gas firepit. $3,500,000. Jerry Bergis, Coldwell Banker Realty, (928) 284-1595

Los Angeles

Architect Rudolph Schindler designed the 1946 modernist Kallis-Sharlin Residence in the Hollywood Hills. The restored four-bedroom is partly wrapped in grape-stake cladding, and interiors feature clerestory windows, mahogany and Douglas fir walls, angled nooks, four fireplaces, and expansive views of the city.

The lot includes a patio, pool, hot tub, and bocce court. Laurel Canyon and Universal Studios are about 10 minutes away. $6,350,000. Cooper Mount and Hanna Ginsberg, Carolwood Estates, (310) 351-9002

Santa Barbara, Calif.

Built in 2000 and renovated in 2021, this modern five-bedroom in Hope Ranch features curved roof lines and walls of glass with mountain views. The vaulted living room’s fireplace is clad in handmade tile, and the kitchen includes three islands. A wine cellar can hold 3,000 bottles.

Outside on the 2-plus acre lot are a pool, spa, roof deck, and art studio, and there’s community access to tennis courts and a beach. $9,250,000. Riskin Partners at Village Properties/Luxury Portfolio International, (805) 565-8600

Madison, Conn.

Designed by Robert Page, this shingled 2010 coastal contemporary is three houses from the water and has Hartford Avenue Beach rights. The three-bedroom’s walls and ceilings are lined in vertical grain Douglas fir paneling, and the vaulted great room has a library and office loft, and connects to a clean-lined, wood-clad kitchen with soapstone counters.

A goldfish pond, a fountain, mature trees, and three decks complete the property. $2,495,000. Margaret Muir, William Pitt Sotheby’s International Realty, (203) 415-9187

Whistler, British Columbia

Built in 2013 of ipe hardwood, the three-bedroom Hadaway House in Sunridge is a modern ski chalet in geometric angles. The sunken living room features a built-in sofa, a wall of glass that opens to a triangular deck, steps up to a dining area, and a glass-sided staircase.

A hot tub overlooks trees and mountains. The Whistler Blackcomb ski area is a five-minute drive. $7,194,465. John Ryan, Unison Real Estate Brokerages/Luxury Portfolio International, (604) 932-7670

Danville, Ky.

On the National Register of Historic Places, the Thomas Barbee House was built circa 1790. The furnished two-bedroom log cabin of white oak was recently renovated with modern interiors and amenities, including an open-plan main room with a gas fireplace and a kitchen with a French-door stainless fridge and eat-in peninsula.

Upstairs are a bedroom, bathroom, and laundry, plus an attic sleeping loft. Centre College is walkable. $324,900. Robert Bratton, Bluegrass Sotheby’s International Realty, (859) 536-8434

The best investing strategy during periods of geopolitical strife is to have no strategy at all, said Jeff Sommer in The New York Times. Rather than “panic about what the Iran war may be doing to your investments, try to forget about all of it.” That’s been “the standard long-term investing playbook for times of crisis,” and it still applies today, even as global markets whipsaw on the latest news developments. According to market researcher Jeffrey Yale Rubin, there have been seven major U.S. military campaigns since Operation Desert Storm in 1991. “One year after the start of these conflicts, the S&P 500, on average, rose 12.5%.” Investors who fled to cash missed out on those supersize gains. That’s a good “case for doing nothing” again this time around.

It’s easy to stick your head in the sand if you’re an investor with a long-term horizon, said Annie Nova and Ryan Ermey in CNBC.com. But “those on the precipice of retirement” aren’t so fortunate. They may need to re-evaluate their risk to ensure they can “get through a downturn without needing to sell their stocks at a discount.” Financial experts recommend having “at least five years’ worth of portfolio spending in cash or short-term bonds” or two years “if that goal feels daunting.” Those who haven’t rebalanced their portfolio in a while may be surprised by their allocations. Due to the strong performance of the stock market in recent years, a portfolio that was 50% in stocks and 50% in bonds in 2020 “would now be more than 68% in stocks and around 31% in bonds.”

That traditional 60-40 portfolio split “no longer works” as it should, said Jamie McGeever in Reuters. Investors have long viewed Treasurys as a “hedge against geopolitical, economic, or financial market risk.” But since the pandemic, America’s ballooning debt and elevated inflation have “steadily eroded Treasurys’ status.” Stocks and bonds now “move in tandem, especially during sharp market sell-offs.” That means traditional risk playbooks and diversification methods “go out the window.” Some wealth managers are pushing investors to “explore alternative hedging and diversification strategies,” such as private-credit funds or gold, but those have also come under pressure lately.

Investors should be on the defensive, said Jason Zweig in The Wall Street Journal—against bad ideas. Wars usually bring on a blitz of “opportunistic marketing messages from the financial industry” that promise to keep your money safe by buying into “these funds, this asset, that industry, these AI-driven recommendations, this secret set of trading signals, these proprietary algorithms.” A good financial adviser, though, should talk you out of taking drastic action. A sensible strategy would be selling a few losing investments to offset taxable gains. “Making wholesale shifts in response to fears that might never materialize is not.”

OpenAI abruptly shut down its AI video generator this week only six months after its launch sent Hollywood scrambling, said Rachel Metz in Bloomberg. Sora, which could produce “realistic-looking AI videos” from
a text prompt, was packaged in a TikTok-style consumer app that let users share and comment on posts.

The ChatGPT maker and Disney “are also winding down their partnership, which had centered on Sora,” Metz said. Disney previously agreed to take a $1 billion stake in the startup and license 200 iconic characters to Sora in what some entertainment executives considered a watershed deal. In a note to staff, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said the company “is focusing its efforts on AI agents and a new artificial intelligence model.” The move coincides with “a push by OpenAI” to cut down expenses as it prepares to go public.

“OpenAI retrenching to focus on things like its core product and AI robotics makes sense,” said Robin Wigglesworth in the Financial Times. AI video generation “gobbles up a vast amount of computing power”—by some estimates, a 10-second Sora video was 2,000 times more costly than an AI text output. That’s “a problem until all of OpenAI’s massive data centers are actually completed.” But after all the hype that came along with Sora when it launched in September, its fast implosion “could prove to be a moment” that suggests the AI bubble is beginning to deflate.

‘Arirang’ by BTS

★★★

“Comebacks don’t get bigger than this one,” said Rob Sheffield in Rolling Stone. The world’s biggest band, after a hiatus during which all seven members fulfilled their mandatory South Korean military service obligation, has returned “stronger than ever” with the group’s first album since 2020. The record’s first half is “one up-tempo stomp after another, loaded with hip-hop braggadocio,” while the second half “stretches out in more interesting directions.” And though the lyrics mix Korean and English, the music repeatedly stresses BTS’s Korean roots. The album title is taken from a popular Korean folk song that’s also woven into the stadium-ready opening track, producing “a powerful collision of the ancient and the modern.” The entire album feels like a fulfillment of the band’s promise to be a bridge of South Korean culture to the rest of the world, said Sheldon Pearce in NPR.com. And while the “grungy pop” of “Like Animals” qualifies as a “quintessential” BTS song, that’s even more true of the rap songs, in part because rapper RM is the lead creative force. The band “has never felt more connected, inwardly or to its calling.”

‘The Way I Am’ by Luke Combs

★★★

Luke Combs’ new album “plays like an hour of prime contemporary
country radio,” said Stephen Thomas Erlewine in Pitchfork. Mixing ballads with “sports-bar anthems,” the 22-song set “hits the expected marks crisply, sometimes even memorably.” There’s talk of whiskey, Saturday nights, cowboys, and everlasting love. They’re “hand-me-down stories,” in other words, but “distinguished by an expert sense of craft.” The album proves careless only in its “rambling” length. Still, the “honeyed rasp” of Combs’ voice “commands attention,” and on weepers like “15 Minutes,” about a prison inmate, he remains “a storyteller who knows when to not telegraph a twist.” With this frequent Grammy nominee, “consistency is the name of the game,” said Ethan Beck in Paste. Throughout Combs’ catalog, “there are almost no terrible songs but only a few life-changing ones,” because he relies mostly on “well-deployed clichés” and “a blandly rocking atmosphere.” If he’d “get down in the weeds” and reveal more of his personal shortcomings, as rivals Morgan Wallen and Zach Bryan do, he’d “strike gold” more often.

‘Girlfriend’ by Grace Ives

★★★

Grace Ives’ latest tunes “bubble with detail,” said Laura Snapes in The
Guardian. The Brooklyn native, who earned her initial acclaim as a DIY
bedroom-pop artist, has expanded her sound for this third album, a record filled with “hyper-detailed songs that streak by like big-city streetlights and shimmer with cosmic awe.” Ives, 30, embraced sobriety just before starting work on the album, and she appears to be exorcising demons. With its collage-like assemblages of club beats, glitchy synths, and stabs of strings, Girlfriend evokes “the broken-mirror glitter” of Lorde’s Melodrama, distinguished by “off-the-cuff vocals” that “nudge melodies into earworms.” After making 2022’s acclaimed Janky Star, said Lindsay Zoladz in The New York Times, “Ives was often described as a kind of endearingly sloppy agent of Millennial-girl chaos.” The new album “finds her reckoning with the consequences of such behavior,” but it’s also “relentlessly catchy.” Her songs remain “cut through with her poetic sense of humor,” and they still have an intimacy that makes each sound “as if the listener is eavesdropping on the personal theme songs she hums to herself.”

‘Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939-1945’ by Ian Buruma

“Dictators thrive not on love but on indifference,” said Kevin Peraino in The New York Times. That’s the underlying message of Ian Buruma’s “crisply told and uncomfortably relevant” new history of wartime Berlin. The veteran author and journalist has pulled from letters, diaries, interviews with aging survivors, and many other sources to chart how life and behavior shifted in the German capital from 1939 to 1945. During most of those years, “Berliners turned looking away into an art form,” first by flocking to concerts and movies as if nothing had changed, later by ignoring the danger of Allied air raids while filling soccer stadiums. Jewish citizens had no such choice, of course, though not because their neighbors were all committed Nazis. Buruma’s book, by detailing the moral compromises they made, mounts “a passionate challenge to the corrosive power of indifference.”

The book’s diary-style structure “lets Buruma incorporate a wide variety of viewpoints,” said Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker. “Students, Nazi maidens, and members of the resistance are all allowed to speak for themselves,” and we see both the hard choices some people had to make and how prone others are to evasions. British bombing of the city of 4.3 million began in August 1940. By that point, the 80,000 or so Jewish residents who hadn’t fled were being herded into segregated housing. A year later, deportations were escalating, and one elderly Jewish woman is quoted as saying that in every subsequent encounter with an acquaintance, the first question asked was “Are you going to commit suicide, or will you let them deport you?” By 1944, when much of the city lay in ruins, the terror spread. Nazi “snatch squads” began roaming the streets, shooting or hanging citizens deemed to be “defeatists.”

“Of course, no descent into moral darkness is total,” said Katja Hoyer
in the Financial Times. Buruma finds a few heroes, including a woman
who ran a resistance group and who spent the last days of the war roaming the streets surreptitiously scribbling “Nein”—“no” to Hitler’s
entire project—on walls and houses. More typical is Buruma’s own Dutch father, Leo, one of hundreds of thousands of citizens of nations occupied by Germany who were forced to work in Berlin. Twenty-year-old Leo didn’t support the Nazis, but he enjoyed the aspects of city life that he could, and was left burdened with guilt. Though the author is sympathetic, he admits that his father made compromises to survive. And though he calls his book a love letter to Berlin, “the depressing moral of Stay Alive is that most people don’t challenge the circumstances they find themselves in. They adapt to them.”

‘Adult Braces: Driving Myself Sane’ by Lindy West

“What Lindy West has signed up for with Adult Braces is a horror show,”
said Scaachi Koul in Slate. Among her many readers, there will be plenty telling her loudly, via Instagram or otherwise, that she is stupid or weak or tragic to have chosen to live with her husband in a throuple after discovering that he’d secretly acquired two girlfriends—one permanently.
Not that West’s decision is news to her fans, many who were following her online well before she scored a huge hit with her fat-and-proud-of-it 2016 memoir, Shrill. West, husband Aham, and their partner, Roya, announced the arrangement in a video in 2022. But Adult Braces, West’s fourth book, details how she moved from being angry to accepting a new living arrangement, and because it’s her most personal public self-examination, it’s “also the most brutal to bear witness to.”

West clearly wasn’t happy when she learned that Aham wanted a second woman in his life, said Tyler Austin Harper in The Atlantic. In fact, “most of Adult Braces is spent describing the road trip West took from Seattle to Florida and back again to process her devastation.” And although she insists she’s found contentment in the life the three now share, “what she tells us is often disconcerting.” Rather than being the caring person West says he is, Aham appears “manipulative and sleazy,” lying about his other relationships and then guilting West into polyamory by implying that she, as a white woman, might be less sensitive than he, as a Black man, is to the way monogamy acts as a form of slavery.

West’s book proves to be “a sightseeing guide for polyamorous red flags,” starting with Aham’s behavior, said Ashley Ray in Harper’s Bazaar. West also mistakenly believes that she is being more righteously progressive by agreeing to be part of a throuple. When West and Roya eventually strike up an amorous relationship, West makes sure we know that hot, skinny Roya developed a crush on her. Still, Adult Braces isn’t about the birth of an unusual admirable romantic relationship. “It’s about West’s difficult journey to put her life back together around the person who tore it apart in the first place.”

The always-on generation may be “falling out of love with technology,” said Jessica Grose in The New York Times. A growing number of teens are taking breaks from social media, swapping smartphones for “dumb” phones, and “pushing back against tech use in their schools.” In polls, nearly half of teenagers say social media has had a negative effect on their generation, and while they still rely on it for socializing with friends, they increasingly view being “extremely online” as “a depressing way to live, and they want a future that involves more embodied activity and real-life connection.”

Depending on the survey, between 60% and 75% of teens also “support cellphone restrictions” in schools. Their relationship with tech could deteriorate further with artificial intelligence, about which there is “a lot of uncertainty.” What is certain is that many teens want to resist an “establishment” that is devaluing “their own creative contributions and humanity.”

Young Americans are replacing their devices with “analog” hobbies, said Megan Sauer in CNBC.com, and businesses are noticing. Sales of retro products like “rotary phones, needlepoint kits, and embroidery services” are up for the first time in years. With Gen Z leading the way, roughly 75% of adults said they did at least one crafting project last year, up from 62% in 2019, according to Mintel research. A doll house and miniature figurine shop in New York City has seen a surge of young clients flocking into the store for “tiny Labubu keychains, Pez dispensers, and mock Eames chairs.” Some tell the owner, Leslie Edelman, “I’ve seen you on TikTok.”

A growing number of social media influencers are counterintuitively pushing more people “to kick the digital habit,” said Karen Garcia in the Los Angeles Times. The influencers’ goal isn’t to get followers to renounce technology entirely—that wouldn’t be good for business—but to help screen addicts wean themselves off “constant connectivity” and “reclaim their time.” It isn’t “the first time that people have tried to exit the online world,” but this trend may be different because of how it is being linked with wellness and mental health.

Boomers are the “real iPad babies,” said Sophia Solano in The Washington Post. While teens are returning to real-world hobbies, “grandma and grandpa can’t seem to stop scrolling.” Social media use among people 65 and older has grown from 11% in 2010 to 45% in 2021, while their time spent on YouTube nearly doubled from 2023 to 2025. The children and grandchildren are noticing. Some are worried that the devices are becoming a “constant companion,” and their parents are “slipping quietly into screen addiction” that keeps them couch-bound and isolated. Parental controls are a useful program to reduce screen time for kids. But who is enforcing grandparent controls?

Chuck Norris knew exactly what his audience wanted. A six-time world karate champion, he also had black belts in tae kwon do, tang soo do, Brazilian jujitsu, and judo, and when he pivoted to films he chose warrior
roles. Showing up to save the day in movie after movie, he won millions
of fans, even if he never quite won over the critics. From the 1970s to 2000s, Norris was omnipresent in the action genre, starring in films like The Delta Force (1986) as well as three Missing in Action movies. From 1993 to 2001, he also starred on TV in the CBS hit Walker, Texas Ranger. At heart, every role he played was an American good guy, taking down the bad guys with necessary violence. His legions of fans loved it. “They want to believe in me,” he said, “just as I believed in John Wayne when I was a boy.”

Norris grew up poor in Oklahoma and Southern California, moving 13 times by age 15. He was “not notably athletic,” said The New York Times, and with his alcoholic father often absent, he turned to movie heroes like Wayne for lessons in manhood. After high school, he joined the Air Force in 1958 and discovered tae kwon do and tang soo do while stationed in South Korea. With his strength and agility compensating for his relatively slight frame, he soon earned black belts in many martial arts. In karate, he was an undisputed master, reigning as world middleweight champion
from 1968 to 1974. Still, the karate schools he owned in California went
under, and Steve McQueen, who’d been one of his students, told him,
“If you can’t do anything else, there’s always acting.” Another friend, Bruce Lee, got him his first big role, in The Way of the Dragon (1972). Unlike other action stars, he possessed “an air of humility, even serenity,” said The Guardian, and preferred roles that cast him as a defender, not an aggressor.

In later years, he was known “for his support of conservative causes such as gun rights,” said The Washington Post, supporting President Trump
in 2016 and becoming the face of Glock in 2019. In the mid-aughts he became “a cultural phenomenon,” when the Chuck Norris Facts meme took over the internet with gems like “Chuck Norris does not sleep. He waits.” Norris found it amusing. He said he didn’t mind being seen as just an action hero. “I never dreamed of being an ac-tor,” he said. “I do what I do.”

Robert Mueller began his term as FBI director on Sept. 4, 2001, just a week before the 9/11 terrorist attacks that refocused the agency’s mission. A decorated Vietnam veteran who’d spent years prosecuting major cases as a U.S. attorney—and earned a reputation as a by-the-book lawman of the highest integrity— Mueller knew right away that the bureau faced a new era. Over a 12-year term under Republican and Democratic presidents, he expanded its focus from domestic crime to thwarting terrorism. Four years after that term ended, Mueller became a household name as the special counsel investigating ties between President Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia.

Issued in 2019, the resulting Mueller Report found numerous links between Trump’s team and Russia but stopped short of declaring a criminal conspiracy. Trump said the report was the work of “Trump haters.” But pursuing justice was Mueller’s “only lifetime motivation,” said biographer Garrett M. Graff in 2017. He “might just be America’s straightest arrow.”

Raised in a “stately manor” outside Philadelphia, Mueller was “born into privilege,” said The New York Times. He attended the “elite boarding school” St. Paul’s, where he captained the hockey and lacrosse teams, and then went to Princeton.

Upon graduating, he volunteered to join the Marines and led a rifle platoon in Vietnam, earning a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. He then studied law at the University of Virginia and became a federal prosecutor. Stationed in San Francisco and then Boston, he “rose swiftly through the ranks,” and in 1990 headed the Justice Department’s criminal division, where he oversaw winning prosecutions of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega and mob boss John Gotti. Tapped by George W. Bush as FBI chief, he “built a reputation for nonpartisan rectitude and stonefaced reserve,” said The Washington Post. When the Bush administration proposed to extend a secret wiretapping program on U.S. citizens, he threatened to resign—and Bush backed down.

As special counsel in the Trump investigation, the tight-lipped Mueller maintained his “oldschool, buttoned-down style” as he led a probe that riveted the nation, said the Associated Press. In the end, he brought charges against six Trump associates, but his “nebulous” report—which left to Congress the question of whether Trump obstructed justice—“did not deliver the knockout punch” Democrats hoped for. Still, Mueller did explicitly refute the president’s claim that there was no substance to the Russia investigation. “Absolutely,” he said, “it was not a hoax.”

The cracks in MAGA are getting “harder to paper over,” said Megan Messerly in Politico. When Joe Kent resigned in protest as the nation’s top counterterrorism official last week, claiming President Trump had been hoodwinked into the Iran war by “Israel and its powerful American lobby,” he revealed the “deepening battle for the soul of the Republican Party.” Many mainstream conservatives condemned the former Green Beret as a conspiracy theorist and raging antisemite “who was probably better off gone.” But among the “antiwar populist right,” Kent was hailed as a true “America first” hero. Podcasters Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens—“whose average viewership rivals CNN’s prime-time lineup”—praised him for taking a stand against a conflict that they too consider to be in Israel’s interest, not America’s. And a day after Kent’s resignation, two leading MAGA-aligned intellectuals, Sohrab Ahmari and Christopher Caldwell, declared that the war had irreparably broken a movement that was supposed to end America’s forever wars. “The attack on Iran is so wildly inconsistent with the wishes of his own base,” wrote Caldwell, “that it is likely to mark the end of Trumpism as a project.”

Forget the “right-wing iconoclasts and dissidents,” said Noah Rothman in National Review, because MAGA remains “whatever Trump says it is.” A Politico poll this week found that 81% of self- identified MAGA voters and 70% of Trump’s 2024 voters support the war in Iran, likely because they understand that Iran is “an avowed and blood-soaked enemy of the U.S.” Trump has not alienated himself from his base; “rather, critics of the war seem to be eagerly marginalizing themselves.” The president’s real problem is not with the MAGA faithful but with independents who swung for him in 2024, said Damon Linker in his Substack newsletter. Every poll shows those voters are “deeply disenchanted with the Trump administration on nearly every front,” from the economy to foreign policy. If Trump were allowed to run again in 2028, he’d struggle to overcome “the departure of those indie voters from his electoral coalition.”

That’s just one of the problems that will face Trump’s GOP successor, said Will Sommer in The Bulwark. In a few years, the Iran war could be as unpopular on the Right as the Iraq War is today, especially if American casualties climb higher and an energy shock shakes the economy. Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Trump’s heirs apparent, will “likely be stuck on the wrong side of that debate in 2028.” But America-first true believers, such as Kent and Carlson, won’t be.

How influential is Rubio?

As the first official since Henry Kissinger to serve as both secretary of state and national security adviser, the 54-year-old former senator is the most powerful foreign policy voice in the White House in decades. An executor of President Trump’s “America first” doctrine, he has presided over the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, fired hundreds of foreign service officers, and revoked more than 80,000 visas, many belonging to foreign students in the U.S. who had criticized Israel’s war in Gaza. He played a key role in planning the January raid that captured Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro and was later tasked by Trump with helping to “run” the country. Rubio’s MAGA ascendance is in many ways unlikely. Battling Trump for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, Rubio savaged his current boss as a “con artist” and made insinuations about Trump’s manhood by referencing his “small hands.” A skilled political operator, the man Trump once dismissively nicknamed “Little Marco” has since ingratiated himself with Trump, who regularly lauds him in public. “When I have a problem, I call up Marco,” Trump said in May. “He gets it solved.”

What is his background?

He was born in Miami to Cuban immigrant parents, whom he for years described as “exiles,” suggesting they arrived in the U.S. after Fidel Castro seized power in 1959. In 2011, multiple outlets uncovered records showing his father, a bartender, and mother, a hotel maid, arrived in the U.S. three years before the Castro- led revolution. Still, his family’s immigrant story and staunch anti-communist beliefs became a key theme in his political career. Elected as a city commissioner in West Miami in 1998, the University of Miami Law School graduate won a seat in the Florida House two years later. Rubio impressed GOP colleagues with his drive and became the chamber’s first Cuban American speaker in 2006. Elected to the U.S. Senate on a Tea Party platform in 2010, he focused on national security; while running for president, he vowed to spread “economic and political freedom,” bolster alliances, and resist despots who “subjugate their smaller neighbors.” He ended his presidential campaign in 2016 after Trump crushed him in the Florida primary.

How did he become a Trump ally?

When Trump retreated to Mar-a-Lago following his 2020 defeat, then-senator Rubio began building bridges with his former foe. The pair spoke regularly on the phone, and as Trump prosecutions and scandals mounted, Rubio “went out of his way never to criticize the president publicly,” said one Rubio associate. When Trump ran for president again in 2024, Rubio gave an early endorsement and began wooing Trump’s children. Since becoming secretary of state, he has loudly defended the president’s policies and lauded his boss. Trump is “standing up for America in a way that no president has ever had the courage to do before,” Rubio wrote on X after Trump lashed out at Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in an explosive 2025 White House meeting. The administration is “a snake pit, but Rubio just seemed to be a little better at navigating it,” a former administration official told Politico. He’s also proved remarkably malleable in adapting his views to the MAGA agenda.

How has he changed?

Having demanded in 2022 that President Joe Biden boost funding for USAID to counter China’s rising global influence, Rubio last year oversaw its dismantling, calling it “an agency that long ago went off the rails.” A onetime champion of immigration reform and human rights, Rubio brokered a deal to send 250 Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador’s brutal CECOT prison, where inmates have reported torture. Some former colleagues are appalled by the shift. “Rubio’s MAGA brain transplant is complete,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.). But some lawmakers and diplomats insist that, behind the scenes, Rubio acts as a restraining force.

Is there evidence of that?

Rubio intervened on Ukraine’s behalf last November when White House special envoy Steve Witkoff was pushing a ceasefire deal that Rubio reportedly condemned as a Kremlin “wish list.” After Rubio inserted himself into U.S.-Ukrainian negotiations, the deal was revised to account for Ukraine’s red lines. And when Trump threatened to grab Greenland from Denmark this year, Rubio quietly reassured European leaders. “He’s doing his best to moderate Trump’s worst impulses,” a European foreign minister told The New Yorker. But in other instances, he’s fueled Trump’s aggression—pushing for the removal of Venezuelan strongman Maduro, whom he’d long denounced as a “narco-dictator,” and for an almost total embargo of Cuba. The “stunning 10-out-of-10 success” of the Maduro capture lifted his capital with Trump, said University of Florida foreign policy professor Patrick Hulme—and boosted Trump’s confidence in his ability to impose his will abroad. “You could draw a direct line from the Maduro raid to the Iran attack.”

What does Rubio’s future hold?

Another White House bid is near certain, say observers. The question is when. Vice President JD Vance is MAGA’s heir apparent, and he dominates Rubio in early 2028 polling. The secretary of state has pledged to back Vance if he runs, and associates say he might hold his fire for a later run. But ABC News recently reported that a group of Republican donors is quietly exploring ways to boost him as a 2028 contender, and Trump has repeatedly floated Rubio as a possible successor. He has been privately polling advisers and friends about the relative merits of Vance
and Rubio, according to media reports, and shown increasing fondness for the secretary of state. At a recent dinner for 25 donors at Mar-a-Lago, he asked the crowd whom they wanted: Vance or Rubio. The verdict, one attendee told NBC News, “was almost unanimous for Marco.”

“It’s not easy to topple a $30 trillion economy,” said Alicia Wallace in CNN.com. But if the war in Iran keeps driving fuel prices higher, things will soon “start getting dodgy” for America. With Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz stopping the export of oil from many Gulf Arab states, and missiles and drones raining down on oil and natural gas facilities across the Middle East, the International Energy Agency warned last week that the world is facing the biggest energy crisis in history.

The U.S. is already feeling the shock waves. Oil has rocketed by roughly 30% to about $100 a barrel. Gasoline has hit a national average of $3.98 a gallon—up by a dollar since February—and is over $5 in California, Washington, and Hawaii. Understandably, some 45% of Americans say they are “extremely” or “very” concerned about gas prices, according to an Associated Press poll. For a “first glimpse” of where we may be headed, “look at Asia,” said Alexandra Stevenson in The New York Times. In a region that relies on Middle Eastern energy, gas stations in Thailand and Vietnam are posting “Sold Out” signs. People in India are hoarding cooking gas. Asian airlines have canceled thousands of flights, after the price of jet fuel more than doubled—and all this after only one month of a conflict “with no clear end in sight.”

The war is also “driving the world toward a food crisis,” said Heather Stewart in The Guardian. Hormuz is a “key choke point” in the global supply of urea, a nitrogen-based fertilizer that’s made using natural gas, and sulfur, “a by-product of oil and gas refining and another critical fertilizer ingredient.” Once farmers get hit by the “double whammy of higher energy bills and more costly fertilizer,” it could push some 45 million people around the planet into “acute hunger,” according to a U.N. estimate. Americans won’t starve, said Max Zahn in ABCNews.com, but they will pay more for everything “from groceries to smartphones.” A third of the world’s helium travels through the strait; that gas is essential for the production of microchips used in phones, AI servers, and almost all electronics. The chaos in the Middle East is also pushing up the cost of plastics, which are made of petrochemicals, and aluminum, because the region is home to several key smelters.

There is some “good news” for Americans, said John Cassidy in The New Yorker. Thanks to decades of tightened emissions standards—so detested by President Trump—our economy is “far less energy-intensive” than it used to be, with “every dollar of GDP created” requiring only half the energy it needed back in 1980. As long as the war ends soon, many economists think the U.S. can probably “scrape through this year without a recession.”

It’s already too late, said The Economist in an editorial. Even if fighting stopped today, it would take at least four months for oil facilities in the Middle East to restart production and process back-logged crude into usable fuel, and for markets and prices to regain “some semblance of normality.” And that’s a best-case scenario, said Rogé Karma in The Atlantic. If fighting escalates instead, Iran could reach for the “doomsday option” it previewed last week, when it responded to an Israeli strike on its largest natural gas field by attacking a Qatari facility that produces 20% of the world’s supply of liquified natural gas—causing natural gas prices to spike 35% in Europe. If there are more such attacks on energy infrastructure in the target-rich Middle East, our current energy crisis may become a global “economic catastrophe” that we’ll be living with for years.

What happened

Former senator Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) was sworn in as secretary of
the Department of Homeland Security this week, as lawmakers struggled to reach a deal to end a weeks-long DHS shutdown that is causing chaos at major airports. The Senate confirmed Mullin by a comfortable 54-45 margin after he sold himself as a more pragmatic alternative to his ousted predecessor, Kristi Noem. But the partial government shutdown has left his department with no new funds since Feb. 14, and around 90% of the DHS workforce has been working without pay. Only ICE and Border Patrol workers are still getting paychecks, and only because they were funded out of last year’s “big, beautiful bill.”

Senate Republicans suggested ending the shutdown by funding most parts of DHS through a bill that would require Democratic support, and cleaving off ICE funding to bundle it with other priorities Democrats object to, including increases in military spending and new voter ID requirements. They hoped to pass those later as a budget-reconciliation measure, which is immune to a Democratic filibuster. Democrats, predictably, nixed the idea outright.

At airports, thousands of unpaid TSA agents have called in sick, and nearly 500 have quit altogether. With waits at security lines topping three hours at some major hubs, President Trump ordered ICE to deploy its agents as extra hands—even though ICE agents are not trained to operate TSA X-ray scanners. The crowds at New York’s LaGuardia Airport, where a crash between an Air Canada Express jet and a fire truck killed two pilots and wounded dozens, blocked investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board from getting to the scene. They had to “beg” to be let through, said NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy. “It’s been a really big challenge to get the entire team here.”

What the columnists said

Deploying ICE to airports is “a stunt, not a policy solution,” said The Washington Post in an editorial, and has produced little besides social media images of camo-clad agents idling in terminals. Note that these extreme delays are not happening in the 20 U.S. airports that are allowed to use private contractors to perform TSA screenings; we should clearly expand that program to avoid future airport snarls. For now, though, “the quickest solution is to fund DHS.” The Republican plan would have gotten partway there by resuming paychecks for employees of most of the department’s agencies, including the TSA, the Coast Guard, and FEMA.

Democrats had plenty of reason to balk at the GOP proposal, said Aaron
Blake in CNN.com. Treating ICE funding separately would have robbed them of their ability to insist on reforms that “appeared to be quite popular,” including restrictions on agents wearing masks and raiding churches and schools. That, after all, was their original rationale for the shutdown, which grew out of their outrage at ICE’s killings of three Americans. Plus, they point out, it wasn’t just ICE involved in the violent crackdowns in Minneapolis and elsewhere, but also Border Patrol and other Homeland Security agents. “They have everybody at DHS right now doing immigration enforcement,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), so by funding any part of the department,“you’re providing money for immigration enforcement.”

Yet under Mullin, such enforcement might be less confrontational, said Dace Potas in USA Today. The new DHS secretary “at least speaks the right language.” He pledged that his immediate goal for DHS was to ensure “we’re not in the lead story every single day”—a blessed change from Noem’s showboating. The Trump administration is trying to signal a more moderate approach, said Erika D. Smith in Bloomberg, having abandoned the phrase “mass deportations.” Still, Mullin is “an immigration hawk who has repeatedly backed Trump’s crackdown in cities” and called undocumented immigrants “federal fugitives.” Worse, he has “no experience running anything beyond his family’s plumbing business.”

“Everyone will have their own views” on what should or shouldn’t change about U.S. immigration policy, said Margaret White in The Detroit News, “but holding the American people hostage is not a responsible or effective way” to implement them. Spring break travel season is here, and millions of us are “disgusted and outraged” at seeing “our airports, TSA officers, and all of us” reduced to “bargaining chips in a partisan game.” Lawmakers “need to get in a room—now—to resolve this, and not leave until they do.”

What happened

President Trump claimed that “very good and productive” talks with Iran were underway this week, even as elite U.S. combat troops were dispatched to the Persian Gulf and Iran denied it was engaged in negotiations. “They want to make a deal so badly,” said Trump, who asserted that envoy Steve Witkoff, son-in-law Jared Kushner, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Vice President JD Vance were all engaged in talks that had yielded “points of major agreement.” But Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of the Iranian parliament, said no talks had taken place, and that Trump was using “fake news” to “manipulate the financial and oil markets and escape the quagmire in which the U.S. and Israel are trapped.”

The administration sent a 15-point plan to end the war to Tehran, under which Iran would dismantle its main nuclear sites, suspend its ballistic missile production, and end its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz—a channel in the Gulf through which 20% of the world’s oil was shipped prewar. Iran publicly rejected the plan, which was delivered by Pakistan. But The New York Times reported that behind the scenes, some Iranian officials were considering meeting with U.S. negotiators in Pakistan next week.

The wrangling followed a threat by Trump to “obliterate” Iran’s power plants unless it reopened the strait within 48 hours. Trump, who a day before issuing the threat had said the war was “winding down,” backed off as the deadline neared, citing “productive” talks. Iran’s foreign ministry called Trump’s about-face a bid “to reduce energy prices and buy time for implementing his military plans.”

As Iran continued to exchange missiles and drones with the U.S. and Israel, the Pentagon ordered up to 3,000 paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division to head to the Middle East. The directive came as three warships redeployed from Asia approached the Gulf, carrying some 4,500 sailors and Marines. U.S. officials said the troops could potentially be used to seize Kharg Island, Iran’s main oil export hub, or to reopen the strait by seizing parts of Iran’s shoreline. Trump suggested a deal could be struck for the strait to be “jointly controlled.” Asked by whom, Trump said, “Me and the ayatollah. Whoever the ayatollah is.”

What the columnists said

Trump backed down from his “obliteration” threat after Arab allies warned him of “the dangers of following through,” said Ben Bartenstein in Bloomberg. They said the destruction of Iran’s energy infrastructure “would almost inevitably result in a failed state” on their doorstep, and that Iran would strike back against oil and natural gas facilities across the region. Trump, whose approval rating has sunk to 36% in a new Reuters/Ipsos poll, had another motivation: “calming markets rattled by his threats and the ongoing conflict.” He issued the reprieve just before the start of U.S. trading this week; the S&P 500 then rebounded and the price of Brent crude dropped sharply.

Trump was so spooked by spiking energy prices that he made another concession, said Andrew C. McCarthy in National Review—this one utterly indefensible. His administration lifted sanctions on 140 million barrels of Iranian oil, which will yield Tehran about $14 billion, money that will fund its “combat operations against the U.S., Israel, and U.S.-friendly Gulf states.” The administration claims the move will lower global crude prices and give the U.S. more time to topple the mullahs. In reality, all it does is reveal that Trump will “make valuable concessions to our enemies if they disrupt financial markets” and harm his poll numbers.

This whole war is an exercise in “hollow absurdity,” said Jacob Bacharach in New York. Why are we fighting? What is the endgame? With no coherent answers, “we are left with the weird machinations of a would-be despot” who “seems to operate entirely on his whims.” Part of Trump’s problem may be his information diet, said Katherine Doyle in NBCNews.com. Sources say that each day aides show him a two-minute video montage of “the biggest, most successful strikes on Iranian targets.” Amid the triumphalist messaging, some allies fear he’s not “receiving—or absorbing—the complete picture of the war.”

Let’s dial back the panic, said Bret Stephens in The New York Times. The war’s “going better than you think.” In less than a month, we’ve crushed the military capacity of a hostile regime and decapitated its leadership. And we’ve done it with “no naval losses” and the deaths of only 13 personnel. Compare that with the 23 personnel we lost in the 1989–90 invasion of Panama, whose “military phase lasted a few days.”

Any negotiations to end the war face daunting odds, said Laurence Norman in The Wall Street Journal. Both sides have “maximalist demands,” with the U.S. insisting on unfettered passage through the strait and “zero nuclear enrichment,” while Iran wants full sanctions relief, compensation for the war, and removal of U.S. bases in the region. But if both sides want “an off-ramp,” there are ways to get there—perhaps a pause in enrichment and a “drawdown on sanctions” to be “phased in as Iran frees up the strait.” Other issues “could be kicked down the road.”

Trump’s military adventure has reached a dizzying impasse, said Edward Luce in the Financial Times. So certain of a quick victory he lacked a Plan B, he’s now tossing out wild threats and claims of diplomatic breakthroughs and seeing what sticks. But the one thing Iran will never agree to surrender is its “ability to disrupt the global energy markets”—which is “the one thing Trump must have.” Amid the “torrent of feints, hype, invention, and bluster,” it remains disturbingly unclear “how Trump will find a way out of this morass.”

What next?

The war’s snowballing has left Trump with hard choices, said Seth Cropsey in The Wall Street Journal. But his task is clear: He “must put boots on the ground to open the Strait of Hormuz.” The “temptation to walk away” and declare victory is understandable. But leaving Iran with the power to control the strait “would destroy American credibility” and send our adversaries the message that the U.S. “has no stomach for a knockdown fight.” Any such operation would “pose considerable risk to American forces,” said The Economist. Iran has many ways to attack landing craft and ships, including missiles and drones, speedboats rigged with explosives, and underwater mines. The strait is only 24 miles wide at its narrowest, with bunkers storing anti-ship missiles along the coastline. Troops onshore would “be well within range of Iranian artillery,” and escorting tankers through the strait would be “complex and perilous.” And that “presumes there are commercial ships willing to run this gauntlet.”

Palm Springs, Calif.

This landmarked home is one of R. Lee Miller’s four Araby rock houses in the Colorado Desert’s Coachella Valley. The updated 1929 one-bedroom,
which blends into the surrounding stones, includes original carved doors, beams, ironwork, and two fireplaces, plus stone walls, cement floors, and a hidden room behind a bookcase.

The nearly half-acre lot includes professional desert landscaping, paths, and two studio casitas. $1,375,000. Jason Cochran and Craig Chorpenning, Desert Sotheby’s International Realty, (323) 243-6998

Marfa, Texas

On 10 acres in the Trans-Pecos region of the Chihuahuan Desert, this 2016 modern home is wrapped in clerestory windows, with glass walls overlooking xeriscaping.

The three-bedroom’s heated concrete floors flow through the open plan, which includes a high-end black kitchen, window-topped walls, and dramatic bedroom wallpaper murals. Sliders open to a shipping-container pool and spa, an arbor for alfresco dining, and a firepit. $2,495,000. Jeff Burke, Douglas Elliman Real Estate, (832) 256-7001

Ivins, Utah

In Sentierre, a resort community in the Mojave Desert, this 2018 home features views of Padre Canyon red rocks. The desert-modern five-bedroom has floor-to-ceiling windows, a kitchen with a waterfall island and Sub-Zero and Wolf appliances, and a red rock wall.

Outside are three patios, a pool, desert landscaping, and firepits. Snow Canyon State Park, dining, and shops are less than 10 minutes away. $3,399,000. Andy Levine, Engel & Völkers Park City, (435) 901-8190

Henderson, Nev.

Part of the gated Ascaya community, this 2025 four-bedroom is in the Mojave Desert about 25 minutes from Las Vegas. Wraparound windows frame canyon views, the living room is anchored by a rock feature wall, and a glass-sided staircase ascends to a second floor.

Motorized sliders open to a covered terrace, pool, and two-sided fireplace. Ownership includes access to pools, a gym, and tennis courts. $4,119,000. Taya Welte, Redeavor Sales for Ascaya, (702) 499-4086

Tucson

This 1963 Sonoran Desert home, designed and built by Lewis Hall, features an adobe exterior and Spanish colonial elements. The four-bedroom includes arched windows, brick walls, exposed beams, wood floors, and a rustic-modern eat-in chef’s kitchen.

Part of the Skyline Country Club and on more than 1 acre, the lot has cacti, a covered alfresco dining area, patios, and a roof deck with Catalina Mountain views. $2,150,000. Lawrence Grabell, Long Realty Company/Luxury Portfolio International, (520) 850-6494

Santa Fe

On 5-plus acres in the high desert, this 1980 home was completely renovated in 2023. The two-bedroom has an open plan, expansive desert views, wide-plank flooring, a butcher-block island, and stainless appliances.

The property has a new deck with glass railings and a hot tub, a patio with a fire-pit, and a history as a vacation rental. Downtown is about a 20-minute drive. $550,000. Julie Tokoroyama, Sotheby’s International Realty—Santa Fe, (505) 469-3893

A little-known corner of the investment world is sending worrisome signals to the broader market, said Shawn Tully in Fortune. Until recently, it was “a glorious time to make money” if you happened to have parked your cash with one of the institutional investors that operates a private credit fund. These funds provide loans to companies that are too high risk to be serviced by traditional banks, and they became one of Wall Street’s “hottest investment crazes” when interest rates were high. But private credit is an opaque market, with no organized exchange and little accessible information, which can make investors jittery when the winds shift. Many of the borrowers were software and technology companies that are now under threat from artificial intelligence, and some investors are now “demanding their money back.” Shares of Blue Owl Capital, the largest publicly traded private lending firm, have fallen 50% in the past year, and it has “restricted withdrawals” and “ended its quarterly liquidity payments.”

“Is this 2008 all over again?” asked Martin Baccardax in Barron’s. When the housing market began to sour, “banks didn’t know where all the mortgage-bond risks lay,” and some prevented investors from exiting funds tied to the housing market. “There are worrying similarities today” with Blue Owl and other private lending firms. “The truth is we simply don’t know” where “the true risks in private-credit portfolios lie,” and that’s troubling. Investors may feel some global financial crisis “déjà vu,” said Gillian Tett in the Financial Times. But some perspective is warranted. The private credit industry is about $2 trillion in size, “so fairly small for the system as a whole,” reducing the risk of contagion. The wider financial system is also “better prepared for shocks,” thanks to post-2008 regulation that ensures big banks can absorb some pretty hefty losses. Nonetheless, the private capital bubble is “deflating”—perhaps “with a long hiss, not a pop.”

“Bad loans and failures are an ordinary part of a capitalist system,” said Judge Glock in City Journal, but private lending fills “a vital economic need” and should not be to blame for any wider financial meltdown. Private credit “is almost entirely devoted to lending to working companies that need money to grow,” particularly in the tech world. Investors can take their money out of these funds at any time, but the withdrawals are capped at 5% per quarter. This infuriates investors, but it makes the funds less likely to “suffer devastating runs or get forced into asset fire sales.” They are also “far less leveraged” than traditional banks that hold much more debt on their balance sheets. There are reasons to be worried about the economy. But private credit isn’t one of them.

‘Monica’ by Jack Harlow

★★

Jack Harlow’s swerve into muted R&B turns out to be “at once easy to mock and easier to enjoy than expected,” said Jeff Ihaza in Rolling Stone. The 28-year-old white rapper, who scored back-to- back No. 1 hits in 2022–23, has returned three years later with a 10-song set that contains no rapping at all. But while he’s taken hits for a prerelease interview in which he described himself as getting “Blacker” by turning to R&B, the album is “one of Harlow’s most coherent projects,” a collection of songs that “rely on texture, pacing, and arrangement—muted keys, unfussy bass lines, drums that never push too hard—to create a sense of intimacy he can slide into.” His fine backing musicians give the record “an easy warmth.” So here he is, three years after trying to rap like Drake, “sounding like Robin Thicke without the vocal chops,” said Peter A. Berry in Okayplayer. That’s not the insult it may seem. “By his own admission, Jack is a limited vocalist,” and some of these tracks “kinda go, to be honest.” Still, the album proves “a bit drab in spurts,” and because the star is trying to write more mature lyrics, “the incisive wit he’s been known for really isn’t there.”

‘A Pound of Feathers’ by The Black Crowes

★★★

It’s a “miracle” that a band this far into its career could still make an
album “this daring and defiant,” said Tim Sendra in AllMusic. Written and recorded in just 10 days, the Black Crowes’ follow-up to their strong 2024 comeback release is “loose and gritty,” the work of a decades-old band eager to “kick up some serious rock ’n’ roll noise.” On the punkish “Do the Parasite!” the Crowes come across “like a Southern-fried Hives” while “Doomsday Doggerel” finds them dipping into Zeppelin-like psychedelia. A couple strong ballads are mixed in; elsewhere, singer Chris Robinson is “at his strutting best” while guitarist Rich Robinson “sounds like he’s having a blast tossing off molten lava riffs and lightning-fingered leads.” In these toxic times, the Black Crowes are “dancing toward doomsday,” said Matt Melis in Paste. At the same time, the band “finds a natural balance between raucousness and reflection,” invoking in the album’s title and the record’s first single the old riddle, What’ll you have, a pound of feathers or a pound of lead? “As the Crowes remind us, it’s really all about how you choose to shoulder that pound.”

‘Play Me’ by Kim Gordon

★★★

“Chill vibes are in short supply on Kim Gordon’s third exhilarating collaboration with Charli XCX producer Justin Raisen,” said Victoria Segal in Mojo. “Immersed in the helter-skelter currents of modern life,” the latest songs from the 72-year-old Sonic Youth alum capture “the high-wire panic of daily existence.” In Gordon’s “stress-fractured” vocals, we hear an artist “whose nerve endings are uninsulated” as she highlights “both the absurdity and the seriousness” of our current political predicament. Meanwhile, the “brutalist, slabby” tone of the music is tempered by “the distinct sense of joy taken in its creation.” On every level, Play Me is “the most populist music Gordon has ever made,” said Emma Madden in Pitchfork. At less than 28 minutes, it’s “addictive and brisk,” chugging forward with “modulating bass lines and a steady krautrock influence.” But too often Gordon forgoes her signature ambiguity. The title track is simply a recitation of imagined Spotify playlists, and once the joke lands we’re not left with much. “In an era defined by un-subtlety, simply pointing at the surface can feel indistinguishable from scrolling through it.”

‘Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity’ by Matthew Avery Sutton

As our country nears its 250th anniversary, “the time is right” for a sweeping new history of Christianity’s role in our national story, said Heath W. Carter in The Atlantic. Matthew Avery Sutton, a historian at Washington State University, begins his account with the arrival in the Americas of European explorers and missionaries more than 500 years ago, and his book “argues convincingly that the quest for Christian America is a perennial national obsession.” Though the U.S. often presents itself as a secular nation, Sutton points out that nearly two-thirds of U.S. citizens today identify as Christians. He also declares, “a bit too boldly,” that the history of American Christianity is the history of America and vice versa. Still, “there is no doubting Christianity’s centrality to U.S. history, for better and for worse.” Sutton, to his credit, is alert to both effects.

First, he identifies four main streams of American Christianity, said Brenda Wineapple in The New York Times. In his taxonomy, “conservatives” are practicing Christians who want little from the state but to be left alone to worship. He uses the label “revivalists” to describe evangelical Christians, who by definition seek to spread their faith. Sutton’s “liberals” value religious pluralism while his “liberationists,” consisting largely of Black churchgoers, promote a form of Christianity that demands justice for the oppressed. But while he “celebrates the vitality of American Christianity,” the “nub” of his argument is that this vitality is a product of a largely nominal separation of church from state that empowered, in his words, an “unofficial, Protestant-infused establishment.” That argument feels paranoid, and “diminishes the very real contribution of the First Amendment to the nation.”

Though Sutton “tries to be fair to each of his subjects,” said Daniel K. Williams in Christianity Today, his sympathies are clearly with America’s marginalized, and the “revivalists” in his account “appear to be agents of oppression.” Because his focus is on the intersection of Christianity and political power, he also says little about the particulars of American Christian teachings and how they’ve impacted people on an individual basis. Still, Chosen Land is the first book since Sydney Ahlstrom’s 1,100-page A Religious History of the American People, published in 1972, to attempt such a comprehensive survey. Sutton’s “superbly written” work manages to cover “an enormously wide range of material” in half as many pages. Better yet, it’s so full of colorful story-telling that it’s “the type of popular work you can read on a plane or a bus.”

‘Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!’ by Liza Minnelli

“There are a lot of extravagant emotions in Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!” said Joanne Kaufman in The Wall Street Journal. That’s to be expected from Liza Minnelli, daughter of the gifted but deeply troubled Judy Garland. Minnelli became a star in her own right before she reached her 20s and embarked on a string of addictions, affairs, and marriages. But in her new memoir, she’s most compelling when writing about her early adolescence, when she was policing her mother’s addictions while feeding her pills to keep her functioning. Once Minnelli frees herself at 16, “the book devolves into a standard, frequently repetitive blend of triumph and trial,” and while Minnelli is admirably candid about her own addictions, it’s “a bit Liza with a zzzzz.”

To me, Minnelli’s memoir is “surprisingly cohesive and spry,” said Fiona Sturges in The Guardian. Importantly, “it captures Minnelli’s voice, which combines showbiz luvviness with winning vitality.” Recounting her quick rise to screen, stage, and recording stardom, she “gleefully” labels herself “the original nepo baby,” conceding the edge she had as the daughter of Garland and the great screen director Vincente Minnelli. Liza “revels” in her career highs, including her four Tonys and her Oscar for 1972’s Cabaret. And though she also eventually details passing out drunk on a New York City sidewalk, “the most eyebrow-raising material concerns her tumultuous love life.” She calls her fourth husband “a pasty-faced jerk” and refuses to apologize for her youthful cheating, when the lovers she juggled included Peter Sellers, Martin Scorsese, Desi Arnaz Jr., and her first two husbands.

“I’m not sure the story I absorbed is the story Liza wanted to tell,” said Sam Wasson in Air Mail. “Or maybe I got it perfectly”: that since suffering maternal neglect, she has been constantly running from herself. “Is it all those lost decades of drink and drugs that account for the Wikipedia-like blandness of her memories?” That could be, though it’s also possible that when she describes her mother dying at 47 from an overdose and attributes the death to Garland’s having “let her guard down,” she’s provided us a different clue. “Suffice to say, Liza is not about to repeat her mother’s mistake.”

Iranian drone strikes on data centers in the Middle East signal “how wars will be fought in the future,” said John Herrman in New York. Tech companies are used to defending their systems against hackers. Now they need to worry about physical attacks too. Early in the Iran war, two Amazon Web Services facilities in the United Arab Emirates were “directly hit” by Iranian drones, while another in Bahrain sustained damage from a drone strike nearby. Even these relatively small attacks led to internet disruptions that affected banks, financial tech companies, rideshare providers, and other popular services, raising questions about the vulnerabilities of massive Middle Eastern server farms. Our digital lives are increasingly cloud-based, but there is still a large, physical footprint required to make that happen. With a “remote-controlled drone that costs less than a new car,” a hostile actor can now cripple our “multibillion-dollar digital infrastructure.”

Iran has openly declared war on U.S. tech firms, said Dana Alomar in Wired. Last week, it published a list of offices and infrastructure run by U.S. companies, including Google, Microsoft, Palantir, IBM, Nvidia, and Oracle, and named them “potential targets.” Warfare has become “increasingly dependent on digital systems, from satellite data to AI-powered intelligence analysis.” So the infrastructure underlying those systems holds “strategic significance.” Companies were already thinking about ways to protect their data centers, said Rachyl Jones in Semafor. Some are building server farms “in underground, nuclear-hardened bunkers.” But this “introduces a new level of complexity”—not to mention added costs for projects that are already eye-wateringly expensive. For now, “the cheapest way to protect data is to duplicate it” and store copies in safe regions.

The Middle East sold itself as exactly that, said Indranil Ghosh in Rest of
World—“a safe harbor for the world’s data.” But the Iran war “has upended that pitch.” Less than a year ago, the region was being hailed as the next great AI hub after President Trump’s four-day visit to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE yielded more than $2 trillion in investment pledges. The security arrangements around those deals were mostly designed to keep advanced AI chips out of China’s hands. “Not one of them contemplated the possibility that a regional adversary would launch missiles at the physical buildings where those chips were meant to run.” This was an “obvious blunder,” said Rana Foroohar in the Financial Times. Tech companies were “desperate to take advantage of huge subsidies and cheap energy offered by Gulf countries.” But putting massive, energy-draining, water-dependent facilities in a geopolitically vulnerable desert was “nuts.” Now, “the geopolitical and the geo-economic chickens coming home to roost.”

“The narrative of this year’s Oscars was: How to pick?” said David Sims in The Atlantic. Coming into awards night, two “majorly successful, critically beloved” studio releases led all contenders, with One Battle After Another carrying in 13 nominations and Sinners a record 16. But rather than celebrating one over the other, the 98th Academy Awards “did a good job making plenty of room to celebrate both movies sincerely.” One Battle took home six trophies, including best picture, while Sinners nabbed four. “To see that kind of big-budget artistry properly lionized, given some of the duds the Academy has recognized in recent years—I’m looking at you, Green Book—felt like a true triumph.”

As the night progressed, “there was a lot of history made,” said Daniel Fienberg in The Hollywood Reporter. Sinners’ Autumn Durald Arkapaw became the first woman to win an Oscar for cinematography. The summer hit “Golden,” from KPop Demon Hunters, was the first K-pop tune to be named best original song. This year also saw the debut of the best casting category, with the award going to Cassandra Kulukundis for One Battle. Before this year’s telecast, that movie’s director, Paul Thomas Anderson, had set a record in futility by racking up 11 Oscar nominations without a win, said Sam Adams in Slate. He finally took home three trophies, including for best director, and because One Battle can stand with the best of his impressive previous catalog, the victory “felt like it was earned, rather than simply foreordained.”

“What Timothée Chalamet wanted was to become the second-youngest best actor winner in Oscars history,” said Nate Jones in NYMag.com. Instead, that trophy went to Michael B. Jordan for Sinners. Though Chalamet stirred an online storm by disparaging the cultural relevance of ballet and opera, the comment came so late that it probably didn’t affect Academy voters. My guess is that they were already “just a little sick of Chalamet” and his aggressive Marty Supreme campaign. In the end, he was beaten by “one of the most well-loved actors operating in Hollywood,” said Lanre Bakare in The Guardian. “Some wondered in the buildup to the Oscars about whether Jordan is a ‘star’ rather than a ‘great
actor.’ The truth appears that he is both.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has a pair. So do Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick; Vice President JD Vance reportedly has four. They’re Florsheim dress shoes beloved by Donald Trump, said Andrew Egger in The Bulwark, which members of his Cabinet are slavishly wearing in the sort of “fealty” display usually associated with “totalitarian regimes.” Trump so loves the $145 black shoes, The Wall Street Journal reported last week, that he’s gifted them to “all the men in his office.” Sometimes guessing at sizes, he often gets them wrong—but, one female White House aide told the paper, “it’s hysterical because everybody’s afraid not to wear them.” Photos show Cabinet members sporting identical shoes—with Rubio in particular clomping around “in outrageously large Oxfords” that must cause him blisters. The secretary of state “resembles a small child playing dress-up” in Daddy’s shoes, said Marina Hyde in The Guardian. Serving El Jefe, he and others have learned, requires “submitting utterly to his regular humiliations.”

Forcing underlings to copy your style is “a classic dictator trope,” said Miles Taylor in Defiance.news. Think of Mao Zedong and the“Mao Suit”; Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein and the thick black mustache widely aped by subordinates; the military tunic that under Joseph Stalin became “the unofficial costume” of every Soviet apparatchik. Wearing his chosen Florsheims is a “loyalty test” for Trump, and it “identifies who can be controlled.” There’s another subtext in Rubio’s oversize “clown shoes,” said Anna Cafolla in Vogue. The Journal reported that Trump asked Vance and Rubio for information before ordering their Florsheims and said, “You can tell a lot about a man by his shoe size.” Did Rubio, who gave his as 11½, inflate the number because of the myth that “correlates a man’s shoe size and his penis length?”

The Rubio photo tells us “where we are at this moment in Trump’s second administration,” said Tina Brown in her Substack newsletter. Like Little Marco, we’re trapped in an “inescapable escape room” in which a wannabe autocrat spouts “vehement ignorance,” launches wars for fun, and demands that aides, allies, corporations, the press, and foreign adversaries bend their knees to him. It’s easy to laugh at the hapless Rubio, but the grim reality is that “we are all wearing Florsheims now.”

The Trump administration has identified a new enemy in its war on Iran, said Caitlin Vogus in The Guardian: the American media. Frustrated that outlets are daring to inform the public about U.S. casualties, the conflict’s economic fallout, and the administration’s “lack of planning or strategy,” President Trump and his allies are pressuring news organizations to provide favorable coverage—or else. Trump has mused online about “charges for TREASON” for journalists and “lowlife ‘papers’” that “perpetuate LIES.” Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr has threatened to revoke the licenses of broadcasters that air what he deems “hoaxes and news distortions.” And Defense Secretary Pete
Hegseth has used Pentagon briefings to assail outlets for being insufficiently patriotic, saying “the sooner” CNN is taken over by Trump-friendly billionaire and Paramount owner David Ellison, “the better.” It seems that, rather than a free press, the Trump administration wants a media that “operates more like that in, well, Iran,” with “obedient, state-run broadcasters that run propaganda praising a supreme leader and his wars.”

“Carr’s threats ring hollow,” said Brian Stelter in CNN.com. The FCC hasn’t yanked a broadcaster’s license in decades, and any revocation attempt would spark an ugly, years-long litigation battle “with many opportunities for stations to beat back the Trump administration’s pressure.” Broadcasters would be favored to win any case, by arguing their free speech rights are threatened by “Trump’s retributive streak” and by noting that reporting the truth of the war is in the public’s interest. Still, “station owners have to be willing to defend themselves. And that’s not always a given.” Carr knows that some outlets will change their coverage rather than “go through the arduous work of defending themselves,” said Tom Jones in Poynter.org. And he knows that broadcasters are uniquely vulnerable to pressure when they have a merger requiring FCC approval—like station owners Nexstar and Sinclair, which temporarily pulled Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show last year after Carr complained about the comedian.

This ongoing crusade against the free press is deeply un-American, but also highly revealing, said Steve Benen in MS.now. When a war is going well, administrations typically don’t “whine incessantly about media coverage” and threaten news organizations. If Trump and his team genuinely felt confident about achieving their objectives in Iran, they wouldn’t be making the “kind of hysterical press complaints we’re seeing now.” They can shoot the messenger, but that won’t change the fact that their unpopular war in Iran is not going to plan.

What is glyphosate?

It’s the world’s most used herbicide, best known in the U.S. as Roundup. American farmers alone spray about 300 million pounds of it on fields annually. Such chemical herbicides have long been opposed by environmental groups and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAGA-aligned Make America Healthy Again movement, which claims glyphosate causes cancer and other health problems. Bayer, the German chemicals giant that makes Roundup, last month proposed a $7.25 billion settlement to resolve tens of thousands of lawsuits from people who allege the glyphosate-based weed killer is to blame for their non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a cancer of the immune system. (Bayer insists glyphosate is safe and has not admitted liability, but in 2023 began phasing the chemical out of Roundup sold for residential use.) So MAHA activists were stunned when President Trump issued an executive order a day after the settlement was announced to boost glyphosate production, calling it “central to American economic and national security.” Zen Honeycutt, founder of the MAHA-linked Moms Across America group, said she felt “sick to my stomach” when she read the executive order, calling it, “a love letter to glyphosate.”

Is glyphosate safe?

The evidence is mixed. The International Agency for Research on Cancer, an affiliate of the World Health Organization, designated the herbicide in 2015 as “probably carcinogenic to humans.” Bayer points out that the IARC puts drinking hot beverages and eating red meat at the same hazard level as glyphosate, and that other public health bodies—including the EPA and the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization—disagree with this assessment. But Lianne Sheppard, a University of Washington professor who served on the EPA panel that reviewed glyphosate in 2016, notes that scientific evidence for the herbicide’s effects on human health has recently “strengthened for cancer and other end points.”

What is that evidence?

A meta-study she co-authored found that people with high exposures—such as agricultural workers or people who live near farms—have a 41% increased risk of developing non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Meanwhile, laboratory studies using human cells and animals suggest glyphosate can damage DNA and harm the liver and kidneys. Critics caution that animal and cell studies typically use far higher exposure levels than most people would encounter. “There’s just no compelling evidence that glyphosate causes cancer,” said Robert Tarone, a 28-year veteran of the National Cancer Institute. But other scientists argue that there’s a lack of hard evidence showing glyphosate to be safe, especially following the retraction in November of a landmark study cited by many regulators as proof that the herbicide is not carcinogenic.

Why was the study pulled?

Because lawsuits against Monsanto—the former owner of Roundup, which Bayer acquired for $63 billion in 2018—revealed emails that show the company’s scientists secretly helped conceive and write the supposedly independent study. In messages sent in 2000, one Monsanto employee complimented her colleagues’ “hard work” on the paper and said the “plan is now to utilize it both in the defense of Roundup and Roundup Ready crops worldwide.” In withdrawing the study, the Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology journal cited “serious ethical concerns” over the “independence and accountability of the authors,” who may have been paid by Monsanto for their work. The study’s retraction doesn’t mean its findings were incorrect, but it adds to the haze of uncertainty around glyphosate. “We absolutely must study it, given it is the most commonly used herbicide in the world,” said Brenda Eskenazi, a public health expert at the University of California, Berkeley. “Even a small, tiny effect, if it’s real, can have a huge public health impact because so many people would be exposed.”

How many people are exposed to the herbicide?

A 2024 CDC study found glyphosate traces in the urine of about 70% to 80% of Americans, but researchers say that the presence of the chemical does not mean it is causing harm. While running for president in 2024, Kennedy vowed to curb Americans’ exposure to glyphosate, which he called “one of the likely culprits in America’s chronic disease epidemic.” And as an environmental lawyer in 2018, Kennedy won a nearly $290 million lawsuit against Monsanto, in which he argued Roundup caused his school groundskeeper-client to develop cancer. But since joining the agribusiness-friendly Trump administration, Kennedy has quietened his criticisms.

What has he said about glyphosate?

The first report from the White House’s Kennedy-led MAHA Commission in May mentioned glyphosate once in 72 pages, saying studies have “noted a range of possible health effects.” A second 20-page report in September made no mention of it. That led to rumblings of discontent in the MAHA movement, which became thunderous after Trump’s executive order. In a statement, Kennedy said herbicides “are toxic by design” but that he backed the president’s order as a necessary step “to bring agricultural chemical production back to the United States.” Many MAHA supporters—a group that includes 62% of parents who identify as Republican—called that about-face a betrayal. So-called MAHA moms “feel like they were lied to,” said conservative wellness influencer Alex Clark. “How am I supposed to rally these women to vote red in the midterms?” Kelly Ryerson, a MAHA advocate who goes by Glyphosate Girl online, said the order feels “very, very much like the breaking point. People can’t continue to make excuses for the administration.”

As President Trump boasts about the pain he’s inflicting on Iran, Americans are discovering “violence has a way of breaking containment,” said Campbell Robertson and Tim Arango in The New York Times. On March 1, the war’s second day, a gunman wearing a T-shirt with Iranian flag colors opened fire outside a bar in Austin, killing three people and wounding 15. A week later, two ISIS-supporting teenagers from Pennsylvania tried to explode homemade bombs at a protest in New York City. And in the space of two hours last week, an ISIS supporter fatally shot an ROTC instructor at Old Dominion University in Virginia, and a Lebanese American man rammed an explosive-laden truck into a synagogue in West Bloomfield Township, Mich., where 140 children were attending preschool. The attacker, Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, was killed by security; his was the only death. There’s no evidence Iran directed any of these attacks. But faced with an existential threat, the regime in Tehran might activate “sleeper cells” and conduct assassinations, bombings, and cyber strikes in the U.S. The violence in the Middle East could also inspire more attacks by “lone offenders” like Ghazali, who went on the rampage after an Israeli air strike on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon killed four members of his family.

“Team Trump may be less ready to deal with” such threats “than previous administrations,” said Daniella Cheslow in Politico. It’s not just that the Department of Homeland Security is partially shut down, with Democrats refusing to fund the department unless there are meaningful immigration enforcement reforms. It’s also that former DHS secretary Kristi Noem slashed the staff at an intelligence office “that would ordinarily focus on the kind of threats posed by Iran.” Meanwhile, the National Counterterrorism Center, which fuses intelligence about threats from across government, has shifted its focus under Trump toward drug cartels. And then there’s Kash Patel, said former FBI agent Jacqueline Maguire in The New York Times. The “sophomoric” FBI director has redirected counter-terrorism personnel to work on Trump’s migrant crackdown and purged scores of agents, including a dozen Iran specialists just days before the war. Their crime: taking part in past investigations of Trump.

The deeper problem is that terrorism has evolved, said Kevin Cohen in The Wall Street Journal. In the years after 9/11, security agencies focused on keeping foreign radicals from either entering the country or recruiting people already here. But in 2026, most terrorists are “made in the USA,” like last week’s attackers: U.S.-born or naturalized citizens who “self-radicalize” and who are near impossible to identify before they act. Not everything has changed, said The Free Press in an editorial. We don’t help ourselves by ignoring the truth that these terrorists share the same Islamist ideology that motivated the 9/11 hijackers. “A society that cannot name its enemies cannot protect itself against them.”

If demonizing Muslims were enough to keep us safe, Trump might be the perfect leader for this moment, said Jackie Calmes in the Los Angeles Times. But it isn’t, and he isn’t. The same “recklessness” that led Trump to launch a war with no clear goal or exit plan has left us effectively undefended from “retaliatory attacks.” Our security agencies have been gutted. The professionals who ran them have been replaced with “genuflecting enablers.” And they answer to a president who, when asked last week if he expected Iran-related terrorism on U.S. soil, could only reply with a shrug: “I guess.”

What happened

President Trump lashed out at U.S. allies this week after they rebuffed his demand to help break Iran’s blockade of a crucial oil shipping route, as the energy shock unleashed by the U.S.-Israel war with the Islamic Republic reverberated around the globe. Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz—the Persian Gulf channel that carries 20% of the world’s oil—has slowed to a trickle since the war started on Feb. 28, causing the cost of crude to spike more than 50% to above $110 a barrel. Few shipping companies want to risk a voyage through the channel: Iran has hit at least 16 ships with drones and missiles and, according to U.S. officials, has begun laying mines in the strait. Trump demanded that European nations, China, Japan, South Korea, and other countries “that receive oil” from the Middle East send warships to escort tankers, warning that if NATO allies didn’t step up it would “be very bad for the future.” No nation offered ships. “This is not our war,” said German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius. Trump then raged on Truth Social that the U.S. did not “NEED THE HELP OF ANYONE” to open the strait. “WE NEVER DID.”

Israel intensified its strikes on the Iranian regime, killing Intelligence Minister Esmail Khatib and top security official Ali Larijani, the country’s de facto ruler. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the “crushing” strikes had created “optimal” conditions for an uprising. Trump said asking unarmed Iranian civilians to take on a regime that killed up to 30,000 protesters in January was “a big hurdle to climb.” Officials in Tehran said more than 1,300 Iranian civilians had been killed in the war so far; at least 13 U.S. personnel have died, including six crew members onboard a refueling plane that crashed in Iraq last week.

U.S. National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent announced his resignation, saying he couldn’t support the war “in good conscience” and that U.S. soldiers shouldn’t die in a conflict started “due to pressure from Israel.” The departure of Kent, an outspoken member of the “America first” movement, came as warships carrying 2,500 Marines headed from Asia to the Persian Gulf, fueling speculation they could be used to seize the strait or Kharg Island, a departure point for Iran’s oil exports. Asked if he was worried that deploying ground troops might lead to a quagmire, Trump said, “I’m really not afraid of anything.”

What the columnists said

Trump’s “catastrophic” war “is the worst conceived in American history,” said Jen Rubin in The Contrarian. He was warned that a U.S. attack would lead Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz—and that attempting to topple an entrenched regime was fraught with risk. But pumped up by the lightning capture of Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro, he ignored the red flags. Now the war is raging out of control; the price of gas, diesel, and jet fuel is spiking; “and the economy is teetering.” Iran’s closure of the strait isn’t just a “blow to the global economy,” said Rich Lowry in National Review. It’s “an assault against one of the foundations of American power.” Allowing it to stand would bring “intolerable” economic damage and our “national humiliation.” Trump has two options: Negotiate a ceasefire with an enemy that’s just demonstrated “de facto control of one of the most consequential waterways in the world,” or “break their grip on the strait by force of arms.”

That won’t be easy, said Sarah Young and John Irish in Reuters. The strait’s shipping lanes—which are just 2 nautical miles wide—wind past a “mountainous coast that provides cover for Iranian forces.” While Iran’s navy has been obliterated, the elite Revolutionary Guard still has plenty of ways to attack, including speedy small boats, mines, and anti-ship missiles. Getting a few ships a day through with U.S. Navy escorts would be “feasible in the short term” but hard to sustain in the long run.

Three weeks into the war, Trump is staring down “a stalemate,” said Walter Russell Mead in The Wall Street Journal. U.S. and Israeli strikes have laid waste to the Iranian regime’s military and political infrastructure. But they haven’t “broken the mullahs’ will.” As they choke energy shipping and keep hitting our Gulf allies, Trump faces a fateful choice: to pull back or dive in deeper. If he retreats without reopening the strait or securing Iran’s nuclear materials, the words “Trump Always Chickens Out” will “be carved on his tombstone.” But to plunge “further into the chaos of an escalating and widening war” is loaded with other risks.

Netanyahu has his own goals, said Adam Rasgon in The New York Times. He’s betting that Israel’s attacks on Iranian security forces will destabilize a widely hated regime and pave the way for a popular uprising. “I’m telling the Iranian people,” he said this week: “The moment you can come out for freedom is getting closer.” U.S. intelligence agencies don’t think that’s likely, said Ellen Nakashima in The Washington Post. In their assessments, the regime will “remain intact and possibly even emboldened” by the war, “believing it stood up to Trump and survived.”

As a military campaign that was supposed to be a “quick, surgical operation” deepens, Trump’s White House allies increasingly fear the “off-ramps” are closing, said Megan Messerly in Politico. They see Trump being boxed into a corner where escalation and putting boots on the ground “become the only way to credibly claim victory.” Given the steep cost of walking away, fear is growing that Trump is “drifting toward the kind of open-ended Middle East conflict he has long railed against.”

What next?

Iran’s Kharg Island is “an appealing target for Trump,” said Anton Troianovski in The New York Times, but one that carries “high risks.” Seizing the island or wiping out its oil infrastructure could “cripple” Iran’s regime-sustaining energy industry. But that could prompt damaging retaliatory strikes against energy sites across the region, and pulling Iran’s oil from the world market could spike energy prices even further, “with all the economic and political problems that would accompany such a surge.” Trump could also try to seize Iran’s stocks of enriched uranium, said Michael R. Gordon and Laurence Norman in The Wall Street Journal. But locating and extracting them would be a complex, dangerous operation involving hundreds of troops. It could require “the largest special forces operation in history,” said retired Adm. James Stavridis. But leaving that uranium—much of which could be quickly converted to weapons grade—in the hands of a regime “looking to ensure its survival” would be “dangerous too.”

Avon, Colo.

This 1998 mountain home in Bachelor Gulch Village exemplifies hygge, the Danish and Norwegian concept of coziness. It has wood walls and floors, a stone fireplace, and reclaimed barnwood elements and comes with high-end furniture in earth tones.

The four-bedroom also features vaulted ceilings and large windows with Gore Range views, plus a chef’s kitchen, den, bunk room, and gym. Outside are a hot tub, a heated pathway, and a patio with a firepit and grill. $7,300,000. Darwin McCutcheon, Compass Vail, (970) 390-0422

Palo Alto, Calif.

In the Professorville neighborhood near Stanford University, this 1909 four-bedroom Craftsman has a living room with original wood ceilings,
floors, and walls, plus diamond-pane windows, built-in shelves and cabinets, and a fireplace. A formal dining room features wainscoting and a corner cabinet; a modern white kitchen has marble counters and an
O’Keefe & Merritt range.

The property includes a one-bedroom cottage, a patio, and oak and redwood trees. $3,998,000. Susan Tanner, Golden Gate Sotheby’s International Realty, (650) 255-7372

Park City, Utah

Located in the Deer Valley Resort, this ski-in, ski-out 1985 two-bedroom condo has a neutral palette, with log walls and beams, wood floors, and a floor-to-ceiling wood-burning stone fireplace with a log mantel. The updated unit’s primary bedroom has a fireplace, French doors, and a granite bath.

There’s a private hot tub on the deck, and shared amenities include a heated pool, a ski valet, a gym, and a lounge. $2,650,000. Chris O’Neill, Windermere Real Estate/Luxury Portfolio International, (435) 901-0832

Rockport, Maine

Renowned architect Hugh Newell Jacobsen designed this 2008 minimalist modern colonial with light wood, natural stone, and a central fireplace. Oversize windows throughout the two-bedroom have water views, and the primary bath has a sunken tub and sauna.

On a cul-de-sac overlooking Rockport Harbor, the 1-plus-acre lot includes a balcony and terrace, an antique guest house, a beach area, and a three-car garage topped by bonus space. $5,200,000. Lewis Wheelwright, LandVest | Christie’s International Real Estate, (207) 232-3951

Brooklyn

Built in 2025, this Scandinavian-inspired four-bedroom townhouse in East Williamsburg has white oak throughout its floors and in a banister and cabinets. Lower and upper windows in the vaulted living room offer
leafy views, and the mezzanine level overlooking the room has a wood-lined bay window seat.

The kitchen features honed Calacatta marble counters and opens to a backyard. The home is topped by a roof deck. $3,750,000. Deborah L. Rieders, The Corcoran Group, (917) 494-2503

Victor, Idaho

Walking distance to shops and dining, this 1910 stone cottage opens to a mudroom with a cozy seating nook and expands into an open-plan one-bedroom with an exposed brick wall, wood stove, and open shelving.
The en suite bedroom has two windows, a private entrance, and a modern candelabra-style chandelier.

A teal wood fence surrounds the front and backyards, which include mature trees. Jackson Hole, Wyo., is a 45-minute drive. $545,000. Meghan Bell Leidy, Jackson Hole Sotheby’s International Realty, (307) 690-8293

Just as it was starting to look like the housing market had turned a corner, the conflict in Iran is “chilling the spring home-buying season,” said Andrew Keshner in MarketWatch. When the average 30-year fixed rate finally dipped below 6% in late February for the first time since September 2022, economists began projecting that the housing market “could be busy after years of sluggish home sales.” That optimism, however, was short-lived. Mortgage rates—which are set by lenders based on “the yield on the 10-year Treasury note”— skipped back above the 6% threshold shortly after the U.S. bombed Iran, ending a downward trend. Now there’s also uncertainty about the lasting impact of the war, which could affect “the willingness of would-be buyers to make a major financial decision.”

That’s a big loss, said Rukmini Callimachi in The New York Times, because the market was finally “tilting back toward buyers.” For years, buyers were the ones courting reluctant sellers “like star-crossed lovers in a Hollywood rom-com”—making offers above asking price, even waiving inspections. Eventually, many buyers simply gave up, and now there are “47% more sellers than buyers” nationwide, the largest such gap since Redfin began collecting data in 2013. This supply/demand imbalance could begin to help lower prices. The median U.S. home price is still at a record $405,000, said Julie Z. Weil in The Washington Post. That “has prompted cities, states, and nonprofits to expand eligibility” for some down-payment assistance programs to include even middle-income households. San Francisco, for instance, now offers interest-free loans of up to $500,000 to first-time homebuyers making up to $218,200 annually.

At 6%, mortgage rates are still out of reach for many people, said Annie Lowrey in The Atlantic. Data from the Mortgage Bankers Association “show that Americans are applying for fewer mortgages than they have at any point in the past quarter century.” This is a troubling trend. Homeownership is the best path to the “long-term financial security of the American middle class” and has been “a cornerstone of wealth building.” If young and working-class people aren’t “getting on the property ladder anymore,” they will end up “poorer in retirement than their parents.” Not being able to afford a home is a “broader problem for society,” said economists Younggeun Yoo and Seung Hyeong Lee in Bloomberg Businessweek. As the dream of home- ownership fades for young renters, research shows that they “systematically shift their behavior.” They decide to live closer to their means, work less hard, and choose riskier investments, such as cryptocurrencies. “Perhaps these renters are hoping to gamble their way back into the housing market,” but “giving up” on a house “can lead to enormous gaps in lifetime wealth.”

Though optimism “can feel out of reach right now,” said Holland Cotter in The New York Times, the art in the latest Whitney Biennial seems to want to keep the mindset alive. Breaking from the recent tradition of gathering works that address a single theme, this 82nd showcase of contemporary art is “something broader and looser.” The exhibition’s inventive curators focus on American artists but also on artists from countries that have been subject to U.S. intervention, and the result is a show “shaped by references to forces now ever-present in the cultural air: climate disaster, border policing, and technological dominance.” Even so, the strongest thread may be the idea of community, in all forms, as a source of shared respect and care.

That makes for an odd show, said Ben Davis in Artnet. “At a time when the political news is as alarming as it has been at any moment in my life, the consensus appears to be that ‘political art’ is washed.”

The Whitney’s curators have followed the direction of the wind and chosen work that’s light on message but big on feelings. The first piece viewers come upon on the exhibition’s main floors “signals a sincerity-first credo,” because it’s a tribute to a deceased seeing-eye dog featuring hand-molded dog-toy facsimiles arranged by artist Emilie Louise Gossiaux to invoke a canine heaven. With a few exceptions, much of the rest of the work is “defined by its small-scale-ness, by being little bits of things halfway between sculptural statement and personal talisman.” Too meek to demand change in the world or to even offer escape, the show is left summoning “whatever can be felt when you don’t believe in either.” For me, such bids for emotion succeeded brilliantly, said William Van Meter, also in Artnet. “More than once,” as I examined individual works, “I found myself holding back tears.”

“Mourning, shrines, grief—they run through both floors of the show,” said Aruna D’Souza in Hyperallergic. Kelly Akashi’s Monument (Altadena), is a “ghostly” glass-brick reconstruction of the chimney of the home she lost to Los Angeles’ 2025 wildfires. Oswaldo Maciá’s Requiem for the Insects is a chapel-like installation that calls attention to the bugs we share our planet with. On the museum’s sixth floor, visitors are drawn to Michelle Lopez’s Pandemonium, a tornado of discarded plastic, faded U.S. flags, and other detritus that’s projected on a circular screen overhead. “It’s not subtle, but it’s effective; the polycrisis sublime.” And for every piece that’s sorrowful, there’s another that’s “charming and joyful.” All in all, walking the galleries “felt like the world as I experience it these days: no clear path in front of me but enough moments of beauty and joy to convince me to put one foot in front of the other.”

‘Kiss All the Time, Disco Occasionally’ by Harry Styles

★★★

From the start, Harry Styles’ first album in nearly four years establishes “an almost psychedelic sense of adventure,” said Joe Levy in Rolling
Stone. Subverting the expectations sown by Harry’s House, his 2022 Grammy winner, the 32-year-old pop idol has turned down his star power to create a more sensory musical experience. His voice is often submerged in the mix, “and though there are hooks—plenty of them—they too sometimes take a back seat to low-frequency thumps and grooves.” Strings and acoustic guitar pop up amid the beats and synth washes, resulting in an album that’s “delightfully strange, often lovely, and consistently fascinating.” You can often hear the influence of Radiohead and LCD Soundsystem on Styles’ new sound, said Lindsay Zoladz in The New York Times. It’s there in the “nervy electro-pop” of “Are You Listening Yet?” and the “glitchy pulse” of “Aperture,” the lead single. If you’re seeking depth, don’t bother. Often, the lyrics “resemble the seemingly life-altering epiphanies one has during a psychedelic trip.” Most don’t hold up to sober scrutiny. But when “Aperture” praises love, “who can argue with that?

‘Mutiny After Midnight’ by Johnny Blue Skies & the Dark Clouds

★★★★

Though you won’t find it on streaming services, the new Johnny Blue
Skies LP is “an instant contender for Album of the Year as well as Greasiest Album of the Year,” said Alex Pappademas in GQ. Johnny is the alter ego alt-country great Sturgill Simpson adopted in 2024, and this time he takes listeners on a seriously wild ride, mixing “fevered curly-guitar-cord boogie” with “life-in-the-fast-lane disco” plus “true-testimonial soul” and “possible-final-season-of-American-democracy anxiety.” Currently, the record, an Atlantic release, is available for sale only in physical copies, and when some country fans hear it, said Matt Mitchell in Paste, they’re “going to call Simpson a commie or a libtard more than they already do.” He rips into Trump 2.0’s cruel authoritarianism from Track 1 and, keeping a promise about the album’s theme, “argues that sex is an antidote to fascism.” But he also pours his heart into “Don’t Let Go,” a tribute to his wife, and makes most of the rest grease-fry hot. Mutiny finds the 47-year-old Kentucky native and his band “on a country-funk tear, letting muscular guitar riffs defrost into mirror-ball rhythms.”

‘Memory Be a Blade’ by Waterbaby

★★★

“It all felt so important, till it all went away,” sings Waterbaby on her debut
album. Such is the mood of the brief eight-song record, which finds the
28-year-old Stockholm-based songwriter “half-fraught and half-free” as she looks back on a breakup, said Ben Beaumont-Thomas in The Guardian. Some lyrics are improvised, which may explain why the opening track feels vague. After that, though, Waterbaby “locks into a run of superb material,” her pretty voice sailing atop music featuring piano, guitar, strings, and brass, with occasional flute and dulcimer. Compared with the down-tempo bedroom pop she originally shared online, the record reveals “a surprising evolution in sound,” said Marcy Donelson in AllMusic. The music still has hints of jazz, but it leans more on acoustic instrumentation, and “the result is something physically closer, more delicate, and more diaristic.” Over the “bright and staccato” piano groove of “Beck n Call,” she and her singer-rapper brother, Ttoh, sketch a happy alternative reality in which the expired relationship worked out. The spell
can’t last. “By its final ‘mmm,’ Memory Be a Blade’s title has come into sharp focus.”