In a new angle on its anti-globalization policies, the Trump administration plans to shutter five overseas embassies and consulates, and the news has some worried about the implications. The rare moves, which often occur only during times of conflict, could create new foreign-affairs headaches, even as Republicans laud the plans.

What did the commentators say?
The U.S. State Department has reportedly informed Congress that it is planning to close the embassy on the Caribbean island of Grenada; the consulates in Nagoya, Japan, and Medan, Indonesia; the diplomatic post in Winnipeg, Canada; and the embassy in Douala, Cameroon. The closures are “expected to save the government roughly $4.4 million per year,” but the affected buildings also “employ very few people compared with others,” said The Associated Press.

Democrats “argue that cuts to the U.S. diplomatic footprint — coupled with the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, ‌which ⁠provided billions of dollars worth of aid globally — risks undermining American leadership,” said Reuters. While “on paper, the move is about efficiency,” in practice it “goes far beyond the fate of five buildings,” said Newsweek. The consular slashing “suggests the Trump administration sees America’s overseas presence as a dollar figure to be managed on a balance sheet, not as a strategic asset to be maintained.”

What next?
The State Department hasn’t specifically confirmed or denied the closures but said its officials were “​focused on ensuring that the ⁠nation’s diplomatic footprint was efficient and effective,” the agency told Reuters in a statement. No exact timeline for the shutterings has been announced.

The decision follows a recent pattern of closures. Earlier this year the Trump administration announced it would “permanently close the U.S. consulate in Peshawar, Pakistan, which was the closest diplomatic mission to Afghanistan,” said the AP. At the same time, the U.S. is also “investing millions of dollars into reopening the U.S. embassies in Caracas, Venezuela; Damascus, Syria; and Tripoli, Libya,” to “restore America’s formal diplomatic presence following the ouster of long-ruling autocrats in those countries.”

The movies are suddenly thriving. The latest Spider-Man flick is setting records, and Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” (pictured above) has dominated discourse for weeks. Americans were slow to return to cinemas after the pandemic sent them to streaming, and the cause of moviegoing was not helped by a pair of Hollywood strikes that disrupted the flow of new films to theaters. Now all that has changed. 

‘Finally releasing more movies’
“Hollywood has got its mojo back,” Thomas Buckley and Lucas Shaw said at Bloomberg. Analysts expect the U.S. box office to “deliver its best performance” since before the pandemic, aided by the release of a “new potential blockbuster” nearly every weekend this summer.

It is too soon to “fully dismiss recent concerns about the future of moviegoing,” Bloomberg said. Films are making more money, but the rate of movie attendance in the United States has “fallen to half what it was 25 years ago.” For now, though, studio heads finally have a “belief that they can win again,” actor Seth Rogen said to Variety.

“Studios are finally releasing more movies” following the strikes and pandemic, thus “generating more money,” Scott Mendelson said at The Outside Scoop. Hollywood still faces “countless issues” like the looming Paramount-Warner Bros. merger and the departure of many productions from California, but analysts “haven’t been this optimistic about the box office since mid-2015.”

It is not just volume. Movies are “kicking boring TV’s ass,” Johnny Oleksinski said at The New York Post. The obituary for the big screen experience has been “written so many times.” But Hollywood this year has given audiences a “varied offering of box-office hits” and peak TV is a “hazy memory.”

‘Rediscovering community’
There was a belief that Generation Z would “forever choose small screens over big ones,” Anonymous Content’s Darren Walker said at The New York Times. The success of recent films like “Backrooms” and “Obsession,” made by twentysomething directors, has “upended conventional wisdom” about the possibility of reaching young audiences. The entertainment industry remains in a “turbulent time of transition and transformation,” but films are serving the role they always did: “We are rediscovering community.”

A praying mantis is pictured in a drought-stricken cornfield near Cuneo in northern Italy, as all 27 of Italy’s major cities are placed under the highest heat alert. Europe is the world’s fastest-warming continent and has suffered record-breaking temperatures and ​destructive ⁠wildfires this summer.
Marco Bertorello / AFP / Getty Images

In the wrong hands, a salad is a vapid strategy for healthful eating. In Hetty McKinnon’s hands, a salad is a gallivanting exploration of flavor, place and texture. 

Hearty economy
“Neighborhood: Hearty Salads and Plant-Based Recipes from Home and Abroad” is McKinnon’s second cookbook. “Twice every week,” beginning in 2011, she writes, “I would cook healthy and hearty plant-based salad boxes, stack them into my bicycle basket” and deliver them to locals in her then-home of Sydney. She and her family moved to Brooklyn, New York, in 2015, and McKinnon published “Neighborhood” in 2017. Lucky for roughage lovers, McKinnon’s salad daring also made the transcontinental move.

At the book’s outset, McKinnon banishes the notion that salads are consumptive meals: frail assemblages that keen and collapse if you look at them sideways. No, salads can — and should — be both sound and protean.

Vegetable traipsings
The salad-making blueprint of “Neighborhood” comprises six chapters, taking the reader from McKinnon’s current home in the United States back to Australia, with stops in France, the Mediterranean and Asia. The recipes strive for inspiration not purity.

Chili is molly-whopped into a substantive dish of various beans, bell peppers and tomatoes served with a vibrant sauce of yogurt, avocado, cucumber and lime. A salade niçoise becomes greenified, with fried green beans, oozy steamed eggs, lentils and caper mayonnaise. A dressing of honey, fresh ginger and toasted sesame oil napes quinoa, edamame and sautéed bok choy. The salad, in McKinnon’s kitchen, wonders and wanders, and the author heeds its inquisitiveness.