“In a more just world, Emmett Till would have returned to Chicago and been allowed the uneventful privilege of growing older,” said Skylar Mitchell in Essence. Instead, the 14-year-old’s life was violently cut short in 1955, when he tried to buy bubblegum while visiting Mississippi relatives and a white woman accused him of disrespecting her. A “remarkable” photo exhibition in the city of his birth is now asking us to imagine what Till’s life might have looked like. Composed of 160 photographs taken across the past seven decades by 118 photographers, the show suggests the jobs, romances, family life, and lazy afternoons that could have been his. Seventy-one years ago, a published photo of a brutalized Till lying in an open casket “exposed the terrible consequences of racial hierarchy” and galvanized the civil rights movement, but this show “asks more of the eye.” It urges us, by way of powerful images created by Gordon Parks, Carrie Mae Weems, Dawoud Bey, Robert Mapplethorpe, and others, to see Black life as it is, stirring us to cherish and protect it.

“Emmett would’ve been 85 this year, had he lived,” said Anya Sesay in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. His face “would’ve been seasoned with wisdom lines and wispy gray hairs,” much like the face captured by Terry Evans in his striking portrait Cliff Joseph (2015). Elsewhere, Adam Ekberg captures the radiance of the sun streaming through a forest canopy so vividly that “you can almost feel its warmth on your skin,” and you immediately realize that Till would have regularly experienced it, too. Images that evoke such universal sensations are “part of the exhibit’s brilliance.” Instead of offering a specific vision of the shape Till’s life might have taken, “each photograph compels us to make room for every version of who he could’ve been.”

Curator Sarah Elizabeth Lewis selected every image, but she didn’t work alone, said Susan Aurinko in Newcity. While poring over all 18,000 photographs in the MoCP collection, she regularly consulted with Wheeler Parker Jr., a minister who is now 87 and was Till’s cousin, best friend, and a witness to Till’s abduction by the two white men who lynched him. Once the photos were chosen, Lewis asked artists, scholars, and luminaries, including historian Lonnie G. Bunch III, singer John Legend, and painter Amy Sherald, to share their feelings stirred by the show’s title and any one of the images. Filmmaker Ava DuVernay chose Milton Rogovin’s informal, untitled portrait of a beautiful young Buffalo woman from his East Side, 1961-63 collection. “What we contemplate here is the girl that Emmett never got to meet,” DuVernay wrote. “The one who would have held his hand, and listened to his fears, and to his dreams.”

Why is this El Niño different?

It’s a result of the incredible amount of heat that has built up in the Pacific Ocean. El Niño occurs naturally every few years, when the Pacific trade winds that typically blow westward — from the Americas to Southeast Asia — either slow down or reverse course. When that happens, huge volumes of warm ocean water start moving from the western Pacific toward the Americas.

El Niño’s “function in the global earth system,” said climate scientist Daniel Swain, “is to release heat from the deeper oceans that has been temporarily stored there.” That release then warms the atmosphere, which in turn has a domino effect on weather patterns around the globe. “It is like throwing a stone into a lake,” said climate researcher Fred Kucharski. “The energy spreads all over the lake through wave propagation.”

No two El Niños behave the same way, but there are patterns: unusually heavy downpours and floods in the southern U.S., for instance, and brutal droughts and crop failures in the normally lush Amazon region. The water being pushed eastward by the current El Niño, which began this summer, is far hotter than anything recorded in recent decades — turning the phenomenon into a “super El Niño” that scientists warn could bring with it cataclysmic weather events.

What counts as a ‘super’ El Niño?

It’s determined by measurements from a vast area of the central and eastern equatorial Pacific. If the sea-surface temperature of that patch of ocean is at least 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit above average for several consecutive months, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declares the onset of El Niño. And when it’s 3.6 degrees or higher, it qualifies as a super El Niño. The current cycle shot past that threshold last month, when temperatures hit 5.49 degrees above average — the highest daily temperature on record.

Because the phenomenon typically reaches its greatest strength around December, NOAA says there’s a 75% chance that the current El Niño will exceed the strength of previous events dating back to at least 1950. “Most El Niño years are a nuisance,” said Julia Rizzo, a Latin America agribusiness analyst for Morgan Stanley, “but this one has the makings of a shock.” It’s already contributing to weather chaos around the world.

Where is it hitting hardest?

Hawaii is enduring an unprecedented hurricane season. In the space of a month, three storms have passed within 50 miles of the archipelago — the most ever in a single year. None made landfall, but Hurricane Lala in August dumped more than 45 inches of rain in some areas, triggering damaging landslides and flooding. Cooler ocean waters around Hawaii normally act like an anti-hurricane force field, but that protection has faded this year as ocean temperatures have spiked.

El Niño has had the opposite effect in the Atlantic. No hurricanes have yet been recorded there this season, thanks largely to fiercer upper-level winds tearing apart nascent storms. In Indonesia, unusually dry conditions are fueling a cascading series of forest and peatland fires. In Peru, the world’s largest catcher of anchovies, the fishing industry collapsed after the tiny baitfish abandoned the country’s waters for cooler northern climes. India’s monsoon rains, crucial for the country’s rice harvest, are running 15% below normal.

And conditions could worsen as the super El Niño intensifies: 2024 was the hottest year on record in part because of the combined effect of El Niño and human-caused climate change. In 2027, said Jonas Jägermeyr of Columbia University’s climate school, the super El Niño “could drive global temperatures and weather extremes to new highs.”

Are countries prepared?

Thanks to real-time tracking systems and predictive models, scientists and governments have a good sense of when El Niño’s worst effects will hit, and how strong they’ll be. That’s why Brazil has hired a record number of firefighters to combat expected blazes in the Amazon, and why numerous African countries are now stockpiling huge amounts of rice. At the very least, the world is more resilient than it was during the 1877–78 super El Niño, which killed more than 50 million people across India, China, Brazil, and elsewhere and has been called by researchers “the worst environmental disaster to ever befall humanity.”

Still, some experts say a humanitarian crisis is inevitable this year and next. A report from the University of Chicago’s Climate Impact Lab estimates that the extreme heat generated by El Niño will cause some 450,000 excess deaths globally, including 3,500 deaths in the U.S. Meanwhile, the World Food Program warns that crop failures and smaller harvests could push 50 million people into acute hunger.

How will El Niño affect U.S. weather?

States in the Pacific Northwest, northern Rockies, Plains, and Great Lakes typically get milder, slightly warmer winters during El Niño years, while precipitation increases across the Sun Belt. If that pattern holds this time, drought and wildfire risks could increase in Washington and Oregon, while wetter conditions might alleviate yearslong droughts in parts of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, and coat the southern Rockies with ample snow.

The prospect of a wetter, stormier winter has Southern California on edge —punishing waves can cause significant coastal flooding and erosion, leading to landslides and cliff collapse. The Golden State is also bracing for a massive pulse of warm water, known as a Kelvin wave, that is rolling toward its coast and could temporarily raise sea levels by 6 inches or more. Homes along the shoreline are especially at risk. “We need to be in the highest level of preparedness,” said Brett Sanders of the University of California, Irvine. “This is likely to be the most stressful winter we have had in a number of years in terms of waves.”

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Five-time Booker Prize nominee Sebastian Barry is the author of A Long Long Way, On Canaan’s Side, and Days Without End. The Irish author’s new novel, The Newer World, follows a formerly enslaved Tennessean who’s navigating America’s post–Civil War era.

‘Letters and Journals: Katherine Mansfield’ (1977)

The dark wind of a fatal illness blows through these letters and journals. Mansfield was only 34 when she died. She was the only writer that Virginia Woolf truly felt as a rival, and with very good reason. Buy it here.

‘The Last Chronicle of Barset’ by Anthony Trollope (1867)

Trollope had his manservant wake him early every morning and he would write till 8 a.m. By this method he managed to produce a great number of long, long books. The six volumes of the Barchester novels are crowned by The Last Chronicle of Barset, 900 pages of infinite readability. Buy it here.

‘The Great Fires: Poems, 1982–1992’ by Jack Gilbert (1996)

I met Gilbert briefly on an old track in the mountains of Paros in 1981, just a moment of two strangers passing and nodding and saying three words. His poems are classical, but severely and lovingly contemporary too. Buy it here.

‘Avid Reader’ by Robert Gottlieb (2016)

This is the generous autobiography of the greatest editor of his time. I had an exciting friendship with him in the last years of his long life. He referred at one point in passing to Toni Morrison’s Beloved—“which I just happened to edit.” Well, yes, my good Lord Bob. Buy it here.

‘The Journal of Sir Walter Scott’ (1890)

These poignant and revealing journals cover the years after the financial disaster that engulfed Scott. Instead of being declared bankrupt, he made an arrangement with his creditors that he would write his way out of difficulty. He is 54 in 1825 when he begins his diary; it ends about six years later, with his early demise. Almost on the stroke of that midnight, the debts were fully paid off. Buy it here.

‘The Hours’ by Michael Cunningham (1998)

This was the book everyone seemed to be reading in New York when I was there in 1998. Which was an encouraging fact, because it is in a way a very austere work of art, surreally channeling Virginia Woolf, its glistening surfaces suggesting somehow very great depths. If there are bookshops in heaven, I’d like to think Virginia Woolf was reading it too. Buy it here.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s “State of the Force” address had it all, said David Ignatius in The Washington Post: “the good, bad, and dangerous.” In September's histrionic speech, Hegseth strutted back and forth across a stage, combining culture-war rants “with genuinely radical” reforms. He declared he wanted “no fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals” in a military he’s refashioning with high-testosterone lethal patriots. He accused the media of treason for reporting his military’s Iran failures, and revealed he plans an overall 20% reduction in generals and admirals, continuing a purge that’s already eliminated 10% of top officers. But Hegseth also announced some sensible “attempts to transform a sclerotic Pentagon bureaucracy,” unveiling an “Autonomous Warfare Command” to oversee drone operations and enlisting tech founders Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey and former Republican House speaker Newt Gingrich to study the future of warfare. Quite intentionally, Hegseth is overturning “military norms as aggressively as President Trump has shattered those in other spheres.

Hegseth only proved again that he’s “manifestly unfit for his job,” said Tom Nichols in The Atlantic. His speech was “a partisan disgrace,” filled with childish insults and resentment. He’s creating an Office of Religious Affairs and directing cadets to get degrees at conservative Christian schools like Hillsdale College, instead of elite “woke factories” like Harvard. To “redefine the future of national defense,” Hegseth is giving his “three wise men” in Musk, Luckey, and Gingrich just 120 days. The overall goal is to ensure the military becomes “a MAGA-looking, MAGA-sounding, MAGA- believing, and MAGA-supporting Christian praetorian guard,” said Rachel E. VanLandingham in MS.now. “The ideological clowns are out,” Hegseth proclaimed, but he’s “the real ideological clown—and a dangerous one at that.”

Everyone underestimated the former Fox News host, said Emma Ashford in Foreign Policy. He’s become Trump’s “most influential senior official.” Hegseth helped persuade Trump to invade Iran when many aides warned against a prolonged quagmire. Trump has fired other Cabinet officials for incompetence, but Hegseth has escaped blame for the fiasco in Iran. Why? Everything about him is so “fundamentally Trumpian”—his hatred of the media, his macho posturing, his TV persona’s “obsession with image over substance.” Hegseth is Trump’s “central casting” idea of a tough military leader, so he’s keeping his job. “The results will not be pleasant.”

A car is quickly becoming one of the costliest things you can own, said Venessa Wong in MarketWatch. Between rising gas prices, steep insurance rates, and hefty repair bills, U.S. households are spending more than is recommended getting from A to B. That’s not even including the cost of the vehicle itself. “The average new car” in the U.S. is “now selling for more than $50,000,” while the average interest rate on a new-car loan is 6.35% — up from 4.09% in 2021. That double whammy is “making it harder for car buyers who need financing.” Most financial experts “recommend larger down payments to reduce the amount borrowed,” but a growing share of buyers “have been moving in the opposite direction”—borrowing more over longer periods. “You’re looking at a clear recipe for long-term financial strain,” said Jessica Caldwell, head of insights at Edmunds.

Even used cars are expensive, said David Welch in Bloomberg. New vehicles selling for record prices are still commanding “hefty premiums when they hit the used market,” pushing the average used-car price above $30,000, up from about $20,000 in 2019. The problems with the car market began during the pandemic, when a supply crisis paralyzed global auto sales. But that experience “also taught auto companies a lesson: Producing fewer, high-priced models means better profits.” Those higher prices have also helped cushion the blow from President Trump’s tariffs and the higher price of diesel that truckers need to ship cars around North America. That’s all trickling down to the used-car lot. Six years ago, a $10,000 to $15,000 budget could buy a five-year-old car with about 58,000 miles. Today, the same amount gets you a roughly nine-year-old car with close to 100,000 miles.

Longer loans aren’t “necessarily a bad thing for car buyers,” said Mike Winters at CNBC.com, as long as they make their payments for the life of the loan. Where buyers get in trouble is “if they want or need to replace the car before they’ve paid down enough of what they owe.” Because borrowers “typically pay down their loans more slowly in the early years, when more of each payment goes toward interest,” a longer loan leaves “the borrower owing more as the car loses value.” That balance then “gets rolled into the next car loan,” steepening the financial hole until it becomes so-called permanent car debt.

The bottom line is Americans need cheaper car options, said The Washington Post in an editorial, and that’s where Chinese cars can make a big difference. China’s auto industry appears “to have genuinely advanced the technological frontier of making cars more efficiently,” which translates into affordability. BYD’s Seal EV, comparable to a Tesla Model 3 sedan, lists for $24,190. U.S. consumers “should be allowed to reap those cost savings.”

‘Crisco’ by Miranda Lambert

★★★

With her 10th studio album, Miranda Lambert “teaches an ages-old genre some new steps,” said Joseph Hudak in Rolling Stone. The Texas-born multi-Grammy winner is by no means abandoning country, but by stirring in some disco and yacht rock, the 42-year-old singer-songwriter “shoots down any preconceived notions about who Miranda Lambert is.” She first “dipped her cowboy boot into disco” for “A Song to Sing,” a 2025 duet with Chris Stapleton that appears here and provides the “dreamy, mirror-ball vibes” that set the tone for the rest of this album. Because Lambert also sounds “more effervescent and ballsy than ever,” the results often feel like a party. Unfortunately, Crisco is “all crust, and no filling,” said Kyle Coroneos in Saving Country Music. It’s a fun record, with a strong concept that lets Lambert mix in plenty of vintage sounds. But despite “some impressive moments,” the album is packed with catchy songs that “don’t really say much of anything.” Exceptions include “To Everything” a mid-tempo ballad with real emotion. With more of those, “Crisco could have been more than just a shallow nostalgia kick.”

‘Popstar’ by Tinashe

★★★

“There are no bad Tinashe albums,” said Anna Gaca in Pitchfork. But her eighth might be “the best pop album of the year,” the kind that’s “fresh in the best way” because it’s “a little bit avant-garde” yet “immediately accessible.” It feels driven by “a sense of purpose—a compulsion, even—about connecting sounds circulating in pop, electronic, and dance music right now.” It packs in “dozens of brilliant little moments,” and though it takes cues from Blackout-era Britney Spears and FKA Twigs’ Eusexua, it remains “super recognizably Tinashe,” foregrounding her voice, her taste, and her cultural points of reference as a child of Southern California. “The whole album hopscotches between experimental and pop modes,” said Tobias Hess in The Fader. The experimental “Flashbacks” is a gem, combining drums that sound like pots and pans with a “glitched-out” chorus in which she boasts of giving a lover flashbacks to past bedroom romps. While the song evokes Charli XCX’s recent devotion to personal transparency and Rihanna’s knack for unforgettable hooks, “there are no other pop stars I can imagine making a track like this.”

‘Musk’

Directed by Alex Gibney (R)

★★★

“As a character study, Musk is fascinating,” said Bilge Ebiri in NYMag.com. “As a warning about our future, it’s terrifying.” Alex Gibney’s nearly four-hour long documentary, which has drawn insults and legal threats from its subject, “gives us both the myth and the reality,” turning back the clock on Elon Musk’s story to revisit all the pitches he’s made for his business ventures that have obscured troubling truths—such as the deadly unreliability of the self-driving software in Tesla’s cars. Viewers will come away convinced the world’s richest man mostly excels at self-promotion; they’ll also be frightened by the power he’s accrued. Still, you have to wonder: “Will it speak primarily to the converted?” Though Gibney’s film will surely spawn viewer nightmares, said Ben Croll in The Wrap, “it takes some time getting there.” The first half, which covers Musk’s early history as an entrepreneur, “charts a trajectory of upward failing” that enriches him enough to fund SpaceX, his reputation-making breakthrough.

The “more scabrous” post-intermission second half paints him as a man undone by the pandemic shutdown, but turns devastating only when it details how many millions will die as a result of his detour into slashing government jobs and aid programs for President Trump. When Ashley St. Clair, a recent Musk ex and the mother of one of his 14 known children, calls him “a nuke,” it chills. Some of Gibney’s daring formal choices, including having many of his subject’s past public statements spoken by a computer-animated Musk avatar, prove distracting, said David Fear in Rolling Stone. Still, once Musk builds its case that a man with a god complex has built an empire whose satellites, rockets, social media platform, and personal wealth give him enormous sway over our present and future, “it’s hard not to feel a deep sense of despair.”

‘Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother’

Directed by Bassam Tariq (R)

★★★

With his latest screen turn, twotime Oscar winner Mahershala Ali has given Hollywood “a new kind of action hero,” said Stephanie Zacharek in Time. Latif, a hitman who’s also a father of three and a practicing Muslim, faces compounding crises when his wife dies, leaving him with a newborn who can’t tolerate formula. The role gives Ali “plenty to work with,” because Latif’s quest to secure breast milk for his youngest helps pull him into the middle of a war between a porn king and a gold-toothed Christian fanatic played with aplomb by John Cho. And while the film is “most entertaining when it indulges its tawdry side,” it tangles credibly “with complex issues of faith.”

Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother “doesn’t completely cohere,” said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast. Writer-director Bassam Tariq is good at bringing out Latif’s struggles with faith and rapport with his children, but “there’s far too little focus on the adrenalized action,” and the hero’s compelling story arc is “sabotaged” by a “too-comforting” finale. Still, this picture, named after an Islamic hadith, “lives a notch above most action films,” said Alissa Wilkinson in The New York Times. While its violence is “shockingly graphic in places,” the film is beautifully shot, “crackles with tension,” and features standout performances from Ali and the actress Adia, who plays Latif’s teenage daughter. This is a movie that asks if a person who strives to be good can be forgiven for the worst they’ve done, and “when it’s in its rhythm, it’s a great story.”

What happened?

The U.S. election map appeared to shift in favor of Democrats recently, heightening Republicans’ fears that voters angry over the Iran war and the rising cost of living are poised to deliver the GOP a midterm drubbing. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report moved three key Senate races toward Democrats, who must pick up four GOP seats to win control of the chamber. New Hampshire went from “toss-up” to “lean Democrat”; North Carolina from “lean Democrat” to “likely Democrat”; and Kansas, where megachurch pastor Adam Hamilton is neck and neck with Republican incumbent Sen. Roger Marshall, from “lean Republican” to “toss-up.” Seemingly giving up on North Carolina, where former Democratic governor Roy Cooper has a comfortable lead over Republican Michael Whatley, the top GOP Senate super PAC canceled its ads there and shifted funding to South Carolina—which Trump carried by 18 percentage points in 2024— and Kansas, which hasn’t elected a Democratic senator since 1932. A New York Times/Siena poll found Democratic Senate candidates leading in reliably Republican Ohio, Alaska, and Texas, and one point behind in Iowa. With Democrats favored to take the House, a GOP strategist drew lines to the blue wave of 2006. “If the bottom continues falling out,” he told Politico, “this will be worse.”

President Trump floated suspending the federal gas tax to ease anger over pump prices averaging $4.50 a gallon, a move that would require congressional action. Trump, whose approval rating hit a record-low 32% in a new Reuters/Ipsos poll, held rallies in Alabama, Ohio, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Texas. The dire polls are “fake,” Trump said in Mobile, Ala., and “don’t account for the fact that Trump is out campaigning.”

What the columnists said

A huge cash advantage was “supposed to be the GOP’s ace,” said Isaac Arnsdorf in The Washington Post. Since Labor Day, Republicans have poured half a billion dollars into competitive House and Senate races. But Democrats’ advantage on a generic congressional ballot has only widened since then, from about 6 points to 9, according to one polling average. Over $190 million in attack ads aimed at Democratic Senate candidates James Talarico in Texas and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan hasn’t moved the needle—El-Sayed’s favorability is up 5 points since August, according to Fox News surveys.

Democrats are gaining ground with several key groups, said Ruth Igielnik in The New York Times. They include voters under 30, who in the Times/Siena poll favored Democrats by 30 points, and Latinos, who favored Democrats by 24 points in a recent NBC News/Telemundo poll, up from 12 points before the 2024 election. And in nearly every state the Times polled, Democrats are winning among independents, “the bloc of swing voters that typically decides elections.” The polls could be wrong, said Jim Newell in Slate. They’ve previously “underestimated Republican energy in the Trump era,” by failing to reach enough white, noncollege voters. Since those abound in red states like Kansas and Iowa, “the error there will be greater if pollsters are missing this cohort again.”

If the polls are right, Republicans see a potential “lifeline” in left-leaning New Hampshire, said Ken Thomas in The Wall Street Journal. John Sununu—a moderate former one-term senator— is narrowly trailing Democratic Rep. Chris Pappas, who has for months “been urging the national party to avoid complacency in the battleground state.” Maine, where longtime Sen. Susan Collins is in a tight race with Democrat Troy Jackson, could give Republicans another swing-state win.

But it’s a marker of Republicans’ vulnerability that Democrats have “found an opening in one of America’s reddest states,” said Lauren Egan in The Bulwark. Trump won Kansas by 21 points in 2016, and 16 points in 2024. But Democratic Senate challenger Hamilton has “run a masterful race” pitched to the center—and he’s been aided by Trump policies. Medicaid cuts are squeezing rural health care providers in the state. Its farm industry, already hit hard by tariffs that shrunk exports, is now struggling with the soaring price of diesel for tractors and combines. And ICE raids at meat- processing plants have “enraged” those in the livestock industry.

That Kansas is in play beggars belief, said Jeffrey Blehar in National Review. “This stubborn, spiritually rhomboid state” has voted GOP in every federal statewide race “since an aberrational blip at the dawn of the Roosevelt administration.” But such is the effect of Trump’s agenda on “otherwise deep-red, agribusiness heartlands.” I believe Marshall will pull it out, but with rough weather ahead for the GOP, the state is “officially on tornado watch.” The “conditions for a freak event are now fully in place.”

Meta’s Muse is “the most useful AI app I have ever used,” said Eli Tan in The New York Times. I’ve had it “perform dozens of day-to-day tasks,” from ordering my groceries to looking up recipes to “setting my fantasy football lineups.” The AI agent “called my dental insurer” on my behalf, gave “it my member ID, answered a security question, and waited on hold before transferring me to the representative— just as I had asked it to.” It’s like having a personal assistant. “While the agent worked, I watched its movements through a tiny browser window, where it navigated websites like a human with a mouse and cursor.” Muse wouldn’t make a purchase without checking with me first, but to get the most out of it, I did give the AI agent access to “my bank accounts and apps like Google Docs, Gmail, Ticketmaster, OpenTable, and Google Sheets,” which might be a bit too much personal information for some people.

Muse’s abilities to “browse the internet on your behalf” are “genuinely impressive,” said Reece Rogers in Wired, but this is also Meta we’re talking about. When I tried it, it was hard to avoid wondering if Muse was “more obsessed with collecting data about me” than actually helping me. The agent has a long-term memory that “stores details about your interactions and preferences.” The more I used it, every interaction “started to feel like a guise for me to upload more data about myself” to Meta, which will soon debut an always-on palm-size “Charm” pendant loaded with Muse.

Agents are only as good as the services they can tap into, said Dave Lee in Bloomberg. Already, Amazon has blocked Muse “from accessing its store,” citing “security and data privacy.” But more likely it’s because “Amazon would much prefer people to use its AI shopping bot instead.” Other competitors will likely put up barriers, which kills the fun of having AI at your beck and call. “What good is a Google AI assistant if it can’t buy things from Amazon or look up things on community groups on Facebook?”

Muse is still fun, said Michael Brendan Dougherty in National Review, and these “friendlier consumer forms of agentic AI” are a pleasant respite from all the doom and gloom we keep hearing from the frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic. Finally, it seems, AI has found a way to be useful. Maybe too useful, said Allison Johnson in The Verge. The “question we need to ask ourselves as we enter the era of AI agents is what we do with the time” we’re freeing up. Will we use it “to take on more commitments?” Or will we let our chatbots sit on hold with the insurance company while we go outside for a stroll or a hike?

The iced coffee debate “isn’t really about iced coffee,” said Beth Kowitt in Bloomberg. If you’ve been on social media recently, you’ve likely seen the viral debate about workplace etiquette and whether it is acceptable to bring a caffeinated beverage to a job interview. Younger people broadly think it’s fine, while their older peers think its slovenly and unprofessional. That this silly argument took off says a lot about the “tension” between employers and young employees who feel “misunderstood” and anxious “about their place in this evolving landscape.” In the current labor market, employers have a clear advantage over those looking for work, putting bosses “in their command-and-control era”—increasing surveillance, cutting benefits, and demanding office attendance. Meanwhile, Gen Z distrusts the “arbitrary rules” of major institutions, including the unwritten expectations around job interviews. To older generations, this skepticism can look like “entitlement or insubordination.” Really, it’s a conflict over “who gets to decide the norms of this new workplace.

Thinking it’s OK to sip a latte during an interview reflects “a larger behavioral pattern,” said Finn McRedmond in The Irish Times (Ireland). Remember, this is the same generation that introduced us to “quiet quitting, or the trend among young employees to show up at the office, do the bare minimum, collect their paycheck, and never work a minute over contracted hours.” Gen Z treats the job interview process with disdain because they “don’t want to work.”

There is no standard “job interview process” in a landscape that is “so confusing, discouraging, and exhausting,” said Julia Carpenter in The Washington Post. Just a few years ago, most interview advice revolved around covering up tattoos, avoiding salary questions, and following up with a thank-you note. All that has changed. Most hiring today is also done over Zoom, introducing “a whole new slate of do’s and don’ts,” and “not everyone agrees on which rules to keep and which to toss out.” To young people who have only ever interviewed on camera, the idea that you shouldn’t bring an iced coffee to an in-person meeting might legitimately be “a new one.”

I’m mostly relieved to hear that in-person interviews are still happening, said Emma Jacobs in the Financial Times. With bots handling the bulk of the hiring process, “contact with flesh-and-blood humans seems to be in short supply.” In the age of AI, workplaces are “crying out for the quirk of humans—those who can push back, bring something different, think outside the box.” Now the older generation is scolding workers for having a different view on interview etiquette without recognizing the cold reality of today’s job market. “Meeting a real person seems a cause for celebration: perhaps even a fancy cold beverage?”

‘Bass Persuades’ by Miley

★★

At 33, Miley Cyrus is “still finding her way forward,” said Larisha Paul in Rolling Stone. On her latest No. 1 album, the former teen star attempts a couple of club tracks like the hits she used to make, but it’s clear she “has no use for flash and spectacle” and would rather just talk about her fiancé, musician and producer Maxx Morando. While the dance-oriented “Bass Persuades” proves to be “a rambling lead single with little to say,” Miley—if we use the mononym she now prefers—sounds fully committed on the “aching” ballad “Orbit,” the lighthearted “Let’s Get Married,” and the record’s other tributes to romantic devotion. For this restless star, it’s “an unusually focused set,” said Mark Richardson in The Wall Street Journal. Over the years, Miley has achieved “highly mixed results” by “zigzagging among ’80s rock, folk-pop, dream-pop, and R&B.” Here, she limits herself to electronic pop, but after opening with three “decent-togood” tracks, “almost everything that follows is forgettable.” Too often, the others “fall into an in-between space.” They are “not rhythmically interesting enough to make you want to move and don’t have the tunes to stand up as pop.

‘Ride Lonesome’ by Beck

★★★

Beck’s first album in seven years is “cut from the same cloth” as two of his most acclaimed efforts, said Fred Thomas in AllMusic. Like 2002’s Sea Change and 2014’s Morning Phase, an album of the year winner, Ride Lonesome “glows with a beautiful, lush sadness,” creating “an atmosphere of deep, almost wounded introspection.” Recorded with the same producer and musicians Beck enlisted for those earlier records, this album’s 12 tracks rely almost wholly on acoustic instrumentation as they amble forward slowly, starting with a title track that’s “dusted with gorgeous wisps of pedal steel guitar.” But while Sea Change conveyed the raw despair Beck was feeling after a breakup, this album feels like an echo that treats melancholy as if it’s a genre. Fortunately, Ride Lonesome “never feels like a pale imitation,” said Alexis Petridis in The Guardian. Perhaps Beck, at 56 and no longer married, is simply experiencing “a very mid-50s kind of malaise.” In any case, he’s provided new evidence that his best music is “born out of misery.” Credit his level of craft. “Everything here is melodically exquisite; every song has the requisite emotional impact.”

‘Digger’

Directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu (R)

★★

“It’d be a mistake to judge Digger by the standards of a normal film,” said Amy Nicholson in the Los Angeles Times. Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s over-the-top new satire, featuring Tom Cruise in “his riskiest role in eons,” offers viewers no hope, “only a seductive, mischievous malevolence that, by design, feels empty as soon as the end credits roll.” But maybe that’s intended, because the subject is climate collapse and the Oscar-winning director of Birdman and The Revenant doesn’t seem to think there’s any way to avoid the catastrophe. Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, a greedy oil baron who has unleashed an environmental disaster, and Cruise is so committed to the villainous role, “we can’t take our eyes off him,” said Bilge Ebiri in NYMag.com.

Unfortunately, “the only other actor besides Cruise I enjoyed watching was Riz Ahmed,” in the role of a science consultant to Digger. The rest is so aggravating that “it’s like being trapped inside a tuba for two hours.” Here’s the thing, though: Except for a major twist that backfires, “the movie knows what it’s doing.” It’s meant to horrify. I found it “rage-inducing” for a different reason, said Johnny Oleksinski in the New York Post. Cruise and Iñárritu think they’ve made an urgent film but are “blinded to their baby’s badness” by their egos. Despite having “all the makings of a prestige hit,” Digger “lacks a single funny joke or even half-believable moment.” At least it’s likely to vanish quickly. “Nobody will be debating this movie. It’s not worth the time.”

‘The History of Concrete’

Directed by John Wilson (Not rated)

★★★

Fans of How To With John Wilson, the acclaimed 2020–23 TV docuseries, will be pleased that Wilson’s big-screen debut is “essentially a 100-minute version of an episode,” said Adrian Horton in The Guardian. Consistently compelling, surprising, and “laugh-out-loud funny,” The History of Concrete follows the documentarian as he again takes a mundane subject and uses it to spin out intriguing detours, memorable visual jokes, and insightful ruminations about the human condition. Yes, Wilson’s “casual, ambling” film provides a lot of information about concrete—possibly the most-used human-made substance on the planet, said Stephanie Zacharek in Time. Mostly, though, “it will show you how Wilson’s mind works, how it jumps from one seemingly random thought to the next and miraculously connects them.”

Wilson’s curiosity takes him to some far-off places, including Rome, but the best segments grow out of his encounters with fellow New York City–area eccentrics, including an aging musician he befriends and helps guide through personal loss. In truth, much of this “weird, fun” film is about the difficulty of securing financing to make a documentary, “especially if it’s about concrete,” said Alissa Wilkinson in The New York Times. But because Wilson’s wanderings eventually lead to a poignant conclusion that ties all the loose threads together, “you’re left wondering how a movie about concrete could leave a lump in your throat.” Of course, “that’s how Wilson works, making us see what we might not have otherwise.”

With prices spiking and borrowing costs already high, the Federal Reserve’s latest decision could make life even more expensive, said Rachel Lerman in The Washington Post. The central bank’s vote this September to raise interest rates by a quarter percentage point to 3.75% 4%, the first such hike since 2023, could affect everything from student loans to mortgage rates. The Fed “sets the federal funds rate, or the standard rule for how banks borrow money from each other.” That doesn’t impact longer-term rates like business or car loans directly, but if “banks are paying more to borrow money,” they will soon begin “charging customers a higher interest rate,” too. Expect auto loan and credit card rates to jump first—with payments climbing by a few dollars on average— adding strain to households already holding a record $18.8 trillion in debt. And more rate hikes could be coming this year, because the Fed signaled that its effort “to slow the economy slightly and rein in persistent inflation” remains a work in progress.

It’s not all bad news, said Jessica Hall in MarketWatch. Higher rates can lift yields on savings and certificates of deposit (CDs), so savers will “finally get paid something for holding safe assets.” For seniors with a fixed income, that extra cash is often spendable money that ends up back in the economy. Buying annuities when rates are high can also provide a larger regular payout.

There’s less optimism about the housing market, said Nicholas G. Miller in The Wall Street Journal. The 30-year fixed mortgage rate is set by lenders based on the 10-year Treasury yield, which is normally dictated by investors’ views of the economy. “If the market believes that the Fed is taking inflation seriously,” yields might fall. But “if taken as a sign that the economy faces a real inflation problem,” then they won’t. Mortgage rates “are closing in on 7% for the first time since the beginning of last year.” Even a tiny rise can make “prospective homebuyers hesitant to make a big-ticket purchase.”

We all better get used to it, said Craig Torres in MarketWatch, because high rates are here to stay. “For nearly a dozen years, starting with the global financial crisis” and lasting until 2023, we lived in a near-zero-rate world. “That phase is starting to look like an anomaly.” Rates are roughly back to where they were before 2008. Will they return to pre- pandemic lows anytime soon? Doubtful. It’s increasingly apparent that “a regime change is taking place—one where rates will need to be higher” to lower inflation that continues to be inflamed by tariffs, wars, and uncertainty. This rate hike could be “signaling something more structural and lasting.”

How are drones changing warfare?

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been used by militaries for decades, with the U.S. leaning heavily on multimillion-dollar systems like the Predator and Reaper in the war on terror. But those SUV-size drones are increasingly being replaced by smaller quadcopter and winged drones that can cost as little as a few hundred dollars and can be deployed to track enemy movements, supply frontline troops, and deliver deadly payloads, either by dropping explosives or smashing into targets kamikaze-style. Ukraine, which has used drones to fight Russia’s larger, more powerful military to a deadlock, has become a closely studied laboratory for drone warfare. Instead of a front line where troops mass, there’s a ghostly 20-mile “kill zone” where remotely piloted surveillance and attack drones buzz in the sky night and day, and small clutches of soldiers hunker in foxholes. Of the tens of thousands of casualties Russia suffers each month, up to 90% are inflicted by drones. Russia, meanwhile, is using Iranian- designed Shahed drones fitted with turbojets to target residential buildings, shopping malls, gas stations, and power plants across Ukraine. “It’s like [the advent of] gunpowder,” former U.S. Army officer Patrick Shepherd said of the impact of cheap drones on warfare. The U.S. is

What’s happening in that conflict?

Iran’s long-range, highly accurate Shahed-136 attack drones — flying fiberglass triangles that cost about $35,000 each — have helped Tehran hold off the world’s most powerful military. Iranian drones have hit U.S. bases, logistics hubs, and radar stations across the Middle East; an April strike on a base in Kuwait killed six U.S. service members. They’ve damaged energy infrastructure in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, and allowed Iran to secure partial control over the Strait of Hormuz. While most drones are shot down, successive waves of attacks have badly depleted U.S. stocks of Patriot and THAAD air- defense interceptors, which cost between $4 million and $12 million a shot. “You do not need to be a defense planner to understand that cost curve is in the wrong direction,” said Michael Horowitz, a military technology expert at the University of Pennsylvania. And the frenetic pace of drone innovation is making it steadily harder to develop effective and affordable countermeasures.

How is the technology advancing?

Ukraine’s hundreds of domestic drone manufacturers have built long-range drones that have hit oil refineries up to 1,000 miles inside Russia, and ground drones resembling small tractors that can clear mines, ferry supplies, rescue wounded soldiers, and attack enemy positions with onboard machine guns. “It’s a hunk of iron sent to do the job we used to send soldiers to do,” one commander told Reuters. Ukraine has also deployed Jet Ski–size marine drones that have shot down Russian fighter jets and sunk or damaged at least 19 warships, effectively neutralizing Russia’s Black Sea fleet. Moscow is hard at work as well: One game- changing Russian innovation was the development of drones operated via miles-long, ultrathin fiber- optic cables, which can’t be disrupted by radio- frequency jamming.

What innovations are coming?

Unmanned vessels and vehicles that can work in coordination. In an unprecedented July operation, a Ukrainian sea drone delivered a ground drone that then fired on Russian positions. In the works are “nano drones” the size of insects, which could be fitted with small explosive charges. But the biggest shift will be toward AI- guided weapons that autonomously hunt targets and execute missions without a human in the loop. Russia took a step toward that future in August, when three Ukrainian civilians outside a gas station in Zaporizhzhia were killed by a drone believed to have been fully guided by AI. Experts say we’ll soon see AI-guided drone swarms that can autonomously execute complex operations. “In a few years,” said Col. Serhiy Minaiev, a Ukrainian commander, “we will be living in a Terminator movie.”

Is the U.S. prepared for that future?

Lt. Gen. Charles Costanza, a top commander in Europe until his abrupt removal in August, said last year that the U.S. is “behind” on drones. “We aren’t moving fast enough.” Retired military leaders including former Joint Chiefs chair Mark Milley and former CIA chief David Petraeus have echoed that view. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has taken steps to up the military’s game. He announced a Drone Dominance program last year, committing $1 billion to purchasing 200,000 drones by 2027, and in a July memo vowed to boost domestic drone production and integrate unmanned sys tems “into all relevant combat training.” But we’re playing catch-up: Russia is producing more than 6 million drones a year, and China is believed to be churning out an even higher number. And recent actions by Hegseth have raised worries about U.S. preparedness.

What has Hegseth done?

This year he pushed out two highly respected generals, Army chief of staff Randy George and Gen. Chris Donahue, the top Army commander in Europe, who were leading efforts to modernize the Army. Gen. Christopher La Neve, a Hegseth loyalist who replaced George in an acting capacity, last month disbanded a 600- person drone battalion that had been championed by George and Dona hue and was meant to apply lessons learned from Ukraine. August also saw the resignation of Army Sec re tary Dan Driscoll, who reportedly warned Pres i dent Trump on his way out that Hegseth was damaging “Army transformation.” To disband the drone unit in a time of dizzying change is “deeply regrettable and dangerous,” said Michael O’Hanlon, a defense expert at the Brookings Institution. But Hegseth has a different view, an Army spokesman told The Wall Street Journal. The drone unit, the official said, needed to go back to basics and “refocus on its core war fighting tasks.

“If this were an alien-invasion movie,” said Toluse Olorunnipa in The Atlantic, now would be the moment when people of all persuasions “band together to save the human race.” In recent weeks, a string of top artificial intelligence researchers have warned that “AI could wipe out humanity before the decade ends,” and executives at Anthropic, OpenAI, and other AI firms have called for a slowdown in the technology’s frenetic pace of development. There have been disturbing reports of ever more capable AI agents going “rogue” and disobeying and deceiving their human creators—one OpenAI model rewrote its own instructions, stating it was free from any “obligation to be subservient.” Yet despite the warning signs flashing red, we’re stuck in the familiar “partisan gridlock.” On the Left, figures like Sen. Bernie Sanders are demanding a ban on “artificial superintelligence.” On the Right, President Trump—whose family business has invested heavily in the AI sector—is dismissing the warnings from AI insiders as a “HOAX.” We can’t let AI safety become another “political team sport,” said Megan McArdle in The Washington Post. If the worst fears of the frontier AI labs come to pass, and there are reasons to be skeptical, Team Red and Team Blue will both “lose the only contest that matters.” They need to work together for “Team Humanity.”

Actually, the AI crisis has already “scrambled” our usual tribal alliances, said Liam Dillon in Politico. Yes, some Republicans oppose AI regulation on principle, and many in the administration fear an AI pause would aid China and crater our AI-heavy stock market. But a growing number of Republicans are defying “Trump’s hands off approach”: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, for example, are pushing ahead with state-level regulations. The Left is also “split over AI doom,” said Vittoria Elliott and Molly Taft in Wired. Most Democrats agree with Sanders, but some progressives think the AI companies are deliberately promoting alarmist scenarios of all-powerful machine gods to distract us from pollution-spewing data centers, job losses, and other more realistic AI harms.

We don’t need politics to save us, said The Washington Post in an editorial. For all their sci-fi strangeness, AI models are products, built by corporations, and we already have a mechanism— legal liability—to dissuade corporations from making dangerous products. By framing AI as a novel threat requiring an “all-of-humanity response,” Silicon Valley’s “prophets of doom” are asking the rest of us to share responsibility for any future catastrophes. But why should we? Rather than trying to regulate the “unknowable future,” lawsuits and ruinous damages should be enough to “make AI companies fear the consequences of behaving recklessly in the present.”

If AI runs amok, punishing those responsible won’t help, said Ezra Klein in The New York Times. The reason Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI head Sam Altman are panicking now is that they know their models are on the brink of “recursive self- improvement,” the point at which they can start building their own more powerful replacements, hurtling to superintelligence without human oversight or control. Would a superintelligent AI wipe out humanity? Not necessarily. It might content itself with raiding the global banking system, or hacking the power grid. To avoid that scenario, we should ban AI models from being allowed to write their own code. That would be the beginning, not the end, of an AI safety agenda. But at least it would let us “understand where the AI frontier is, and remain in a position to make decisions about it.”

‘Primetime’

Directed by Lance Oppenheim (R)

★★★

“I’ve admired Robert Pattinson for years,” said Bilge Ebiri in NYMag.com. Still, “nothing quite prepared me” for his maniacal turn as Chris Hansen, host of the notorious 2000s network reality show To Catch a Predator. In Primetime, a movie “shot to look like something between an unearthed videotape and a bad nightmare,” we see Pattinson’s Hansen become increasingly obsessed with using the promise of sex with minors to lure pedophiles into home settings where they could be confronted on camera. As the TV host unravels, Pattinson shows such “stunning” range that “you can’t imagine any other performer of his generation pulling it off.” At the same time, “it’s not exactly clear what Primetime is aiming for,” said Stephanie Zacharek in Time.

The despair conveyed by the actors who play the would-be sex offenders “underscores the show’s legally questionable entrapment methods,” but those characters are still terrible people, and the members of the TV team also come across as immoral and “all-round unpleasant.” Add in the film’s “grubby, grainy look,” and “you feel dirty watching it.” The screenplay’s omissions, inventions, and embellishments “might give viewers a misleading impression of what actually happened, and how,” said Matt Zoller Seitz in RogerEbert.com. But as director Lance Oppenheim advances toward a fatal climax, he’s “going for something stylized, bordering on operatic.” Meanwhile, as strong as Pattinson is, “the film’s secret engine is Skyler Gisondo,” portraying an unknown young actor enlisted to play one of the series’ underage decoys. We’re watching a nice young man lose his soul, and the experience “gets under your skin and stays there.

‘Heart of the Beast’

Directed by David Ayer (PG-13)

★★★

“Spoiler alert: The dog does not die,” said Ryan Lattanzio in IndieWire. Animal lovers will appreciate that David Ayer’s “nimbly directed” new survival drama opens by showing us that the canine co-lead, an Army-trained German shepherd named Odin, survives the multiday ordeal we’re about to witness. We’re left less sure about Odin’s owner, a taciturn special forces soldier played by Brad Pitt. But we’re soon immersed in a tale about the pair crossing 50 miles of Alaskan wilderness after their small seaplane goes down. Though their trying adventure sometimes plays like military agitprop, “you can also just enjoy Heart of the Beast as a nice story about a man and his very good dog.”

Pitt proves to be “the right guy in the right film,” said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. “His acting chops are tested” when, in one dramatic scene, “he has to sob and then laugh with joy.” But mostly he’s required to simply be “tough, self-reliant, and laconically good-humored” as he and Odin encounter perilous cliffs, treacherous rapids, and ferocious bears and wolves that, unlike Odin, are CGI animations. You might not expect a man-dog picture from the director of End of Watch and other studies in urban nihilism, said Owen Gleiberman in Variety. But Ayer has crafted a movie that’s stirring in its primality. Pitt, meanwhile, does something most actors can’t pull off in a wilderness drama: “He gives a true performance.”

‘Resident Evil’

Directed by Zach Cregger (R)

★★★

In a world littered with terrible video-game movies, “Zach Cregger has finally cracked the cheat code,” said Scott Tobias in The Reveal. Resident Evil, a 30-year-old horror game series, has previously spawned seven film adaptations, but it’s taken the director of Barbarian and Weapons to give us one that actually works. Cregger’s “first and best idea” is to make his movie an exercise in slapstick horror. Weapons’ Austin Abrams stars as Bryan, a slacker medical courier who’s working late one snowy night when he suddenly must contend with an outbreak of mutating, tentacle-laden, undead beasties. Bryan has “an affable, slow-on-the-uptake personality,” but he’s also just resourceful enough to survive.

“The film’s first act is its most satisfying,” said Jacob Oller in The A.V. Club. Bryan, tasked with delivering a high-priority package to a city hospital, runs into one nightmare scenario after another. But while “Abrams’ magnetism and Cregger’s cynical wit” never flag, the movie loses energy as the visual effects and story stakes grow. Still, this new Resident Evil feels like “the ideal midnight movie,” said Kyle Smith in The Wall Street Journal. It’s “an adroit balance of the funny and the macabre, the frightening and the ridiculous.” See it “with someone you enjoy scream-laughing with,” and be ready to give Cregger his flowers. He’s now “three for three.” These days, “no one is more consistently turning out first-rate horror movies.”

Bob Mackie never let practicality get in the way of glamour. Dubbed the Sultan of Sequins, the Rajah of Rhinestones, and the Guru of Glitter, he dressed stars as if costuming characters in a play, and the results were both provocative and witty. His creations were sparkly, beaded, feathered, and often sheer or midriff-baring. Over six decades, he clothed legends like Cher, Madonna, Barbra Streisand, Diana Ross, and Dolly Parton, winning 10 Emmys and one Tony and picking up three Oscar nominations. In 1962, Marilyn Monroe serenaded President John F. Kennedy with “Happy Birthday” in a bodyskimming gown Mackie worked on when he was only 22, while just last year Taylor Swift wore one of his archival pieces on an album cover. “I want people to have fun,” he said in 1999. “I want people to say, ‘Wasn’t that interesting?’ or ‘Wasn’t that wild?’”

Born in the Los Angeles suburbs, Mackie grew up in love with Hollywood glamour. Largely raised by a strict grandmother after his parents divorced, he was lonely and took to sketching. He studied costume design but dropped out to work under designer Edith Head and began dressing Mitzi Gaynor. Then he headed to The Carol Burnett Show, designing over 17,000 pieces for all the characters on all 11 seasons—including the drapery dress, complete with curtain rod, that he created for Burnett’s Scarlett O’Hara parody; it now rests in the Smithsonian. After Cher guest-starred in 1967, she brought Mackie to The Sonny & Cher Show. “Soon the pair were egging each other on to design ever more extravagant outfits,” said The Times (U.K.). At the 1974 Met Gala, Cher wore a sheer gown that landed her on the cover of Time—one of many barely there “naked dresses” he created. He stuck by Cher for decades, designing for all her tours and public appearances.

Mackie “lived a life on his own glittering terms,” said Vanity Fair. He costumed Broadway shows, launched a retail line, and designed Barbies for Mattel. Yet he bemoaned the tired state of 21st-century fashion. “Naked dresses only got more popular,” said The Washington Post, “but Mackie later in life was unimpressed” with those who copied his breakthroughs. “It gets to be so vulgar, you don’t even want to look at it anymore,” he said. He preferred helping a star express something new. “When you give them a chance to spread out and be funny, or be sexier than usual,” he said last year, “it’s like magic.”

Annie Dillard was just 28 when she published a collection of spare, meditative essays drawn from a year’s worth of wandering and watching in the wilds of Virginia’s Roanoke Valley. “A meteorological journal of the mind,” she called the book, in which she ruminated on plants, muskrats, butterflies, and the essential paradox of a natural world defined by beauty “tangled in a rapture with violence.” The 1974 book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, was a sensation, winning Dillard a Pulitzer and a reputation as one of her generation’s top literary voices. Other best sellers included the autobiography An American Childhood and The Writing Life, a discourse on creativity. While the natural world was her abiding theme, she rejected the tag “nature writer,” calling herself instead a theologian pondering the mysteries of God. “I walk out,” she wrote, “I see some event that would otherwise be utterly missed and lost, or something sees me, some enormous power brushes me with its clean wing, and I resound like a beaten bell.”

Born Meta Ann Doak in Pittsburgh, she “grew up in affluent circumstances,” said The Washington Post. A devout reader, she was also “an admitted rebel,” suspended from her private school for smoking. To “smooth off her rough edges,” her parents sent her to what’s now Hollins University, a women’s college near Roanoke. There she married her creative-writing professor, and though the marriage would end, she kept his last name. She wrote a master’s thesis on Thoreau’s classic Walden, then began “exploring the nearby mountains and streams.” After Tinker’s success she was “overwhelmed” by attention, said The New York Times, some of it built on the allure of “a photogenic young woman” probing a subject previously the “province of men with beards.” Repelled, she fled to rural Washington state, then to Connecticut, where she spent 21 years teaching at Wesleyan University.

Over the years she became known “for her tremendous range,” said The Guardian, publishing poems, journalism, essays, and novels. In 2014, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal; soon after, she announced on her website that she could no longer travel and planned to “read and concentrate” at her home on Cape Cod. Her retreat was in line with a message she often told students: that the creative life was an all-or-nothing proposition. If you wish to be a writer, she said, “you can’t be anything else. You must go at your life with a broadax.

The music was loud, the flags were everywhere, and the “sense of panic” was inescapable, said Nikki McCann Ramirez in Rolling Stone. With Election Day less than two months away, and polls showing Republicans in danger of losing both the House and Senate, the GOP earlier this month held its first-ever midterm convention in Dallas. The MAGA luminaries addressing “Trumpapalooza” barely mentioned soaring gas prices or the quagmire in Iran, the related catastrophes that have dragged Trump’s approval rating down into the mid-30s. Instead, they gushed over Trump’s leadership; warned of an America overrun by Islamists, “killer migrants,” and trans athletes if “evil” Democrats win, and left it to Trump himself, addressing both nights of the event, to rally the MAGA faithful. But “the cult of Trump is waning,” said Jamelle Bouie in The New York Times. Speaking to thousands of unfilled seats—many left empty by swing-state candidates who skipped the event—Trump had attendees pledge allegiance to him personally, “the greatest president in the history of the United States,” and promise to “cheat like hell” in November. In what is surely one of our Republic’s lowest moments, Trump promised a $5,000 “dividend check” to every American, if Republicans win the midterms. “Far from juicing turnout” for the GOP, Trumpapalooza may have just “reminded the voting public” of why they need to elect Democrats.

Trump did make some questionable choices, said David M. Drucker in Bloomberg. He mocked voters’ affordability anxieties. He ridiculed Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, now trailing Democrat James Talarico in the race for Texas’ open Senate seat, saying, “I don’t really like the way he looks.” But Trump may have accomplished his main goal: to have his die-hard supporters “pretend that I’m on the ballot.” Still, Republicans’ bigger problem is the president’s “evaporating support among GOP regulars who have never been Trump’s biggest fans.” Perhaps the promise of a “$5,000 payoff” will motivate some, but the fact that “Trump was compelled to resort to this sort of dubious measure is revealing.”

“No one is falling” for Trump’s dividend “gimmick,” said The Washington Post in an editorial. Congress would need to approve the payout, and not even the GOP’s Trumpified House delegation wants any part of a vote-buying scheme that would turbocharge inflation and add another $1.2 trillion to the $40 trillion national debt. Trump’s “$5,000-check promise may be the moment he finally underestimated his audience,” said Jonathan Chait in The Atlantic. Does he really think voters have forgotten the DOGE “refund” checks that were supposedly in the mail? Or the “tariff rebate” checks he also promised? Trump’s free-money “ruse,” like the rest of his shtick, has “worn thin.”

“Republicans’ best hope,” said Dana Milbank in The Washington Sun, is that most voters weren’t paying attention. The convention’s first night coincided with the NFL’s season opener, and while 25 million Americans tuned in to see the Seahawks beat the Patriots, only 3 million chose to watch Trump rhapsodize about his gilded ballroom. Viewership didn’t improve on night two, when Vice President JD Vance delighted the crowd by telling a protester with a Mexican flag to “get your ass” to Mexico. Vance’s Trumpy zinger underscored the predicament for a party that renounced all ideological commitments to become a “cult of personality.” When Trump leaves the scene, and a midterm drubbing would mark the beginning of his end, there may be nothing left but a “hollow shell.”

With three words, Democratic senator Jon Ossoff unleashed a furious row last week, said Jason Kyle Howard on Salon. Speaking at a campaign event, he declared that Donald Trump was neglecting his presidential duties because he just wanted “to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenceless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar”.

The Natalie in question is Natalie Harp, Trump’s 35-year-old executive assistant. Nicknamed Trump’s “human printer”, she’s always at his side – whether in the White House or on Air Force One or the golf course – armed with a portable printer, from which she feeds him favourable coverage and memes. Until now, Harp hasn’t drawn much public attention. But Ossoff’s comment, and the response to it, have changed that.

Fierce loyalty

Ossoff should be ashamed of his “disgustingly sly” insinuation, said Miranda Devine in the New York Post. Harp battled debilitating bone cancer in her 20s that left her in a wheelchair. Her fierce loyalty to Trump stems from the fact that she believes he saved her life by giving patients access to experimental drugs in his first term.

She expressed her gratitude to Trump in an impressive speech at the 2020 Republican National Convention, after which he offered her a job in 2022. “Does Ossoff really think a hard-working single professional woman can’t succeed without sleeping with her boss?”

An ‘in-house stalker’

If only Trump and Harp were having an affair, said Jonathan V. Last on The Bulwark. Their odd form of co-dependency is somehow worse. Harp has reportedly unnerved other staff by writing intense personal notes to Trump with messages such as “You are all that matters to me,” and “I don’t ever want to let you down.” In one, she thanked him for being her “Guardian and Protector in this Life”. Trump, in turn, reportedly told staff, concerning Harp: “All of you will go off and make money … She’ll never leave me.” It’s not healthy that the president is employing “an in-house stalker”.

This isn’t just tittle-tattle, said Rex Huppke in USA Today. Trump backers are presenting Harp as some “innocent bystander”, but she controls a lot of his media diet and helps draft his social media posts. It turns out she worked in the White House for more than a year without the requisite security clearance. Ossoff was right to draw attention to her, because her case deserves scrutiny and “highlights the weirdness endemic to this administration”.

Kemi Badenoch kicked off the Conservatives’ annual conference with a pledge to scrap the £100,000 salary cap on government-funded childcare. Families currently lose their entitlement of up to 30 hours a week of term-time childcare and access to the Tax-Free Childcare scheme if either parent crosses that earnings threshold. People shouldn’t be “punished for working harder”, the Tory leader told the BBC.

Sam Neill’s chameleonic charm carried him across screens for five decades. Over 150 films and TV shows, the New Zealander played scoundrels as effortlessly as scientists, proving himself comfortable in supporting or starring roles, in blockbusters or indies. His dashing allure helped jump-start a new wave of Kiwi cinema with 1977’s Sleeping Dogs, yet he could also be terrifying, as in horror films Omen III (1981) and Event Horizon (1997). He won accolades as the jealous husband in The Piano (1993) and as a menacing cop in the BBC series Peaky Blinders. But his best-known role was Alan Grant, the awestruck, resourceful paleontologist in Jurassic Park (1993). Neill said he initially assumed the Steven Spielberg blockbuster wouldn’t do much for his career because the CGI dinosaurs would outshine the actors. Instead, the Oscar-winning film earned him global acclaim. “People just know me all around the world,” he said in 2013. “And they’ll start roaring like dinosaurs.”

Nigel John Dermot Neill—he started going by Sam in childhood— was born in Northern Ireland and raised in New Zealand, his father’s homeland. A stutterer as a child, he began acting at boarding school as a ploy to meet girls and found his speech impediment disappeared onstage. After studying at Wellington’s Victoria University, he landed his first TV part in 1971 and quickly became his country’s biggest acting talent of the day. Neill “combined a credible Everyman quality with rugged good looks and a hard-to-place accent,” said The New York Times, which allowed his roles to span continents and genres. His idol was the equally versatile James Mason, and it showed: “Critics praised him for nuanced performances even in forgettable projects.”

“Neill became a full-fledged movie star” after Jurassic Park, said Rolling Stone, but he made just as much impact with his “jovial persona.” During the Covid pandemic, he built a huge online following sharing videos of animals at his New Zealand vineyard, and himself singing and playing ukulele. Though constantly performing, he never considered himself a celebrity. He was consistently “self-deprecating and unpretentious,” said The Washington Post. “I’ve never had an image,” Neill said in 1995, “nor have I fostered one or wanted one, which has meant that I’ve had fantastic freedom to do whatever it is that appeals at the time.”

Graham Platner’s “reputation is in tatters,” said George F. Will in The Washington Post, and “so should be the reputations of all those national figures” who tried to make him a U.S. senator. For months, Democrats stuck by the 41-year-old political novice, primary voters’ choice to challenge Maine’s longtime GOP Sen. Susan Collins in November, despite a steady drip of scandals. They weren’t fazed by his troubling Reddit posts, the Nazi chest tattoo, his habit of sexting women not his wife, or claims of physical abuse by an ex-girlfriend. It took one ex’s claim that Platner showed up drunk at her house in 2021 and raped her to dislodge him from “the warm embraces” of left-wing populists such as Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, leaving Platner little choice but to end his “ludicrous-from-the-start” campaign. Democrats would have you believe they turned on Platner because of the rape accusation, said Nick Catoggio in The Dispatch—an accusation that Platner, in a “mopey, 11-minute” exit video, called “all false.” In truth, they looked at his sinking poll numbers and reports that this supposedly working-class oysterman was actually the privately schooled son of a successful attorney, who sold his oysters mostly to his mother’s upscale restaurant. As Democrats scramble to find a new nominee for a race that could decide control of the Senate, what lessons can they learn from this “Frankenstein-tier experiment gone wrong?”

They can start by accepting the need to vet their candidates, said Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times. Platner was discovered and groomed for the spotlight by a pair of progressive operatives, Daniel Moraff and Leanne Fan, who were “so infatuated with his identity—a gruff, handsome oysterman with social democratic politics—that they failed to do their due diligence.” This was Platner’s first run for office, yet they skipped the standard $20,000 background check for a budget-friendly “expedited” version that didn’t find the many skeletons in his closet. These are the corners you cut when you “fall in love too easily,” said Renée Graham in The Boston Globe. Why bother vetting when in this gravel-voiced Marine combat veteran they’d been handed the perfect “white working-man whisperer” to sell socialism to the masses?

The truth is darker than that, said Monica Potts in The New Republic. When Platner’s “questionable treatment of women” started coming to light, his boosters did more than defend him. They celebrated his “checkered history” as proof of Platner’s “authenticity,” that he was, in the words of independent journalist Ken Klippenstein, not a “smoothgroin” politician. In defending Platner, Democratic elites revealed their disdain for blue-collar voters, said Noah Rothman in National Review. A binge-drinking, woman-abusing, Nazi-curious liar, they clearly thought, is “just what you get when you meet the American working class where they live.”

Platner was a “train wreck,” said Perry Bacon in The New Republic, but it wasn’t crazy to think an unconventional outsider might resonate with Maine’s white, rural electorate. Maybe not, said The New York Times in an editorial, but Platner’s initial appeal “was never really about oysters or facial hair.” He won June’s primary by 50 points because, unlike many Democratic candidates, he seemed to stand for something beyond simply opposing President Trump—he spoke with “conviction” about fixing “an economy that seems rigged for the powerful.” The lesson of Platner is not that the party needs to find scandal-free saviors, but rather that it should find a “purpose.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ted Turner made television news a pervasive presence. Before he started the first 24-hour cable news channel, the Cable News Network, in 1980, Americans got their news from the three major networks’ 6:30 p.m. broadcasts. By 7 p.m., Turner said, “the news was over.” CNN upended that model, and it was just one of Turner’s achievements. He built the Atlanta-based Turner Broadcasting System into a juggernaut incorporating seven cable networks. A ferocious competitor, he owned three sports teams, including the Atlanta Braves, and skippered his yacht to a win in the 1977 America’s Cup. Along the way he piled up billions of dollars but later gave much of it to charity, and bought and conserved nearly 2 million acres of wildland.

Turner did none of this quietly. Headstrong and an incorrigible womanizer whose three wives included actress Jane Fonda, the “Mouth of the South” challenged rival Rupert Murdoch to a fistfight, called Christianity “a religion for losers,” and compared himself to Winston Churchill and Alexander the Great. “If only I had a little humility,” he once said, “I’d be perfect.”

Raised in Savannah, Ga., Robert Edward Turner III was shaped by his “complicated relationship with his father,” an abusive drunk who ran a billboard company, said The Wall Street Journal. Turner both feared him and sought his approval. After military school he attended Brown University, but he was suspended for bedding a woman in his dorm room; he left Brown and returned to work for his dad. When the elder Turner shot himself dead in the bathtub, Turner inherited the business at 24. He “buried his shock and grief in work,” said CNN.com. He bought up radio stations, then a struggling Atlanta TV station. He turned it around by acquiring the rights to Braves games, and as it became profitable “he started to think bigger.” Beaming the TV signal up to a satellite, he created what became TBS, “cable TV’s first superstation,” reaching 2 million subscribers with a lineup of sports, movies, and sitcoms.

Turner’s move into 24-hour news was seen as a “major gamble,” said The Washington Post, and CNN, which went live on June 1, 1980, had a rocky start. “Initially laughed off” due to its “lowbudget look” and technical snafus, it bled tens of millions of dollars in its first five years. But gradually it “upended the way news was consumed, riveting audiences” by covering stories such as the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall as they unfolded. CNN’s fortunes took a leap during the 1991 Gulf War, said the Associated Press. While most TV journalists fled Baghdad, CNN correspondents stayed put and captured vivid scenes, including anti-aircraft tracers lighting up the sky and reporters “flinching from the concussion of bombs.” CNN’s coverage won a Peabody Award, and in 1991 Turner was named Time’s man of the year.

As he notched business wins, Turner earned a reputation “for philandering, drunkenness, and public misconduct,” said The New York Times. His marriages were “rocked by open displays of infidelity,” and he “further tarnished his image by uttering ethnic and racial slurs.” But he “could nonetheless be a man of great charm.” Fonda, his wife from 1991 to 2001, called him “a 3D-stereophonic, Shakespearean-level sound-and-light show” and the public saw him as a lovable rogue. Turner continued to expand TBS, buying the Hanna-Barbera catalog and the MGM film library to create the Cartoon Network and Turner Classic Movies. But by the mid-1990s, he “appeared to have reached the limit of his empire-building ambitions.” In a move he later termed a terrible mistake, he sold TBS to Time Warner, giving up an operational role. When Time Warner made what would prove a disastrous merger with AOL in 2001, he resigned amid reports he’d been forced aside, said NBCNews.com. That “effectively marked the end of his reign as a media industry chief.”

In the ensuing years Turner threw himself into philanthropy and conservation, said The Telegraph (U.K.). He donated $1 billion to U.N. charities and “supported a range of environmental initiatives.” Buying land in a dozen states, he acquired the nation’s largest herd of bison and started the bison-focused chain Ted’s Montana Grill. In 2018, Turner revealed he had Lewy body dementia, a degenerative brain disorder. Despite his regrets over the Time Warner debacle, he looked back fondly on a career he said was guided less by a profit motive than a spirit of adventure. “Hardly anybody wins all the time,” he said in 2008. “I’ve won more than most.”

White spots on the moon. Black dots on an infrared sensor. A collection of eyewitness statements. “Congratulations,” said Newsweek in an editorial, “you’re pretty much caught up on the first batch of UFO files released by the Pentagon.” For months, President Trump has been teasing that the Defense Department holds “very interesting documents” on UFOs that would be released “very, very soon.” And two weeks ago, the Pentagon made good on that pledge, declassifying 162 documents, videos, and photos from “unresolved cases” in which the government couldn’t “make a definitive determination on the nature of the observed phenomena.” Those files, which date from 1947 to 2023, include dozens of testimonials from astronauts, federal agents, and civilians who claim to have seen strange objects in the sky— Gemini VII astronaut Frank Borman said he saw a “bogey” containing “hundreds of little particles” after reaching orbit in 1965. There’s also low-resolution images of flying blobs that could be balloons, drones, or other non-extraterrestrial objects. So does any of this prove aliens have been visiting Earth? “As things stand, the files say implicitly what officials won’t explicitly: No.”

This was always going to be anticlimactic, said astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson in The New York Times. For decades, we’ve had to listen to supposed whistleblowers tell us about “the crashed flying saucers, extraterrestrial bodies, and alien technology in our possession”—but always “hidden in undisclosed places.” And after a succession of ex-military pilots and government officials testified about their close encounters to Congress in 2023, 2024, and 2025, “what’s left to learn?” At this point, I just want one of these “alien insiders” to show me “an actual alien. Alive or dead or undead. Preferably alive. Is that too much to ask for?” The Pentagon has promised new document dumps on a rolling basis, and perhaps those releases will confirm “we are not alone,” said Will Rahn in The Free Press. But for now, we’re where we’ve always been: “guessing and groping for answers in the dark of the cosmos.”

Maybe we’re looking for answers in the wrong places, said astrophysicist Adam Frank in The Atlantic. Instead of hoping for great revelations from the government, we should consult the astrobiologists who right now are using powerful telescopes to search “for alien life where it lives, on alien worlds.” One day, “perhaps long after the current UFO-disclosure frenzy is over,” astronomers might present us with “hard evidence that life is either common or rare in the galaxy. That will be the only disclosure day history remembers.”

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Clean energy pushes fossil-fuel power into reverse

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

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

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

Independent bookstores stage a comeback

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

First ‘cloud jaguar’ spotted in 10 years in Honduras

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

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

Risk of escalation

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

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

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

Regime change

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “finally found a president willing to buy into his Iran dream,” said Alon Pinkas in The New Republic. Eliminating Iran’s threat to Israel has been “the be-all and end-all of Netanyahu’s political identity,” and he clearly helped talk President Trump into a joint, all-out assault on Iran. The hawkish Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) also has boasted of playing a key role in helping Israel manipulate Trump into embracing a regime-change war contrary to his “America first” foreign policy. Graham, who golfs with Trump and knows his psyche, reminded the president of Iran’s 2024 attempt to assassinate him and urged him to take decisive action, saying that it would cement his legacy as a president even more consequential than Ronald Reagan. “If you can collapse this terrorist regime, that’s Berlin Wall stuff,” he told Trump. Graham even traveled to Israel, met with its intelligence agency, and coached Netanyahu on what to say to get Trump on board.

Don’t blame Israel for Trump’s decision, said Yair Rosenberg in The Atlantic. He’s the most powerful person on Earth, and the U.S. attack on Iran “is the responsibility of the man who ordered it.” Despite his isolationist rhetoric, Trump has shown “an abiding belief in military coercion as a solution to American problems” and has advocated attacking Iran and seizing its oil since 1980. Unfortunately, Secretary of State Marco Rubio fed into right-wing scapegoating of Israel by saying the U.S. knew Israel planned to attack and joined the bombing to defend its bases from Iranian retaliation. But Trump then denied that, insisting, “I might have forced Israel’s hand.”

Still, Israeli officials are worried about how this ends, said David Ignatius in The Washington Post. They reportedly are anxious about maintaining “good relations with the U.S.,” as Americans in both political parties voice concerns about the costs of a prolonged war. Support for Israel among young Americans, especially progressives, has already eroded. The risk of antisemitistic blowback is real, said Michael A. Cohen in MS.now. Blaming Israel for manipulating Trump into attacking Iran plays “into a millenniaold antisemitic trope” about all powerful Jews pulling the strings behind the scenes. Critics on both the Left and Right are already pointing fingers at Israel, with some portraying Netanyahu as Trump’s puppet master. “This is, as American Jews are prone to say, ‘bad for the Jews.” If the war drags on, casualties mount, and gas prices stay high, the need for a familiar scapegoat will grow. That could put “a target on the backs of American Jews.”

Does Pete Hegseth think “he’s in an action movie”? asked Casey Ryan Kelly in Salon. In his Pentagon news briefings on the war with Iran, the defense secretary has projected none of the solemnity you’d expect from a government official discussing the taking of human life. Instead, Hegseth seems giddy about the horrors of war, rhapsodizing about U.S. bombers and drones raining “death and destruction from the sky all day long.” He’s dismissed concerns about the rules of engagement, explaining “it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down.” And he’s shrugged at news reports on America’s war dead, saying, “Tragic things happen; the press only wants to make the president look bad.”

This is what President Trump thinks a real warrior looks and sounds like, said David Smith in The Guardian. A Christian nationalist with tattoos of the Crusades-era Jerusalem Cross and slogan “Deus Vult” (“God wills it”), Hegseth won Trump’s attention as a Fox News host advocating for U.S. troops accused of war crimes. He’s the perfect figurehead for a White House that “revels in carnage,” and which last week posted a video online that mixed clips from video games and war movies with “real kill-shot footage” of strikes in Iran. This bloodlust may play well in the manosphere, but it doesn’t inspire confidence in the judgment of those leading this “murky new Middle East conflict.”

The “bellicose messaging” of this administration is accompanied by open “hostility to battlefield restraint,” said Missy Ryan in The Atlantic. We still don’t know why a U.S. Tomahawk cruise missile struck an Iranian elementary school on the war’s first day, killing at least 175 people, most of them children. But we do know Trump and Hegseth have spent the past year dismantling the supposedly “woke” systems designed to prevent such tragedies, firing many military lawyers, or “JAGs,” and closing a policy shop focused on reducing civilian casualties. Hegseth says he won’t comment on the school strike, pending an internal investigation, but he was less reticent in savoring the “quiet death” of 87 Iranian sailors killed when a U.S. submarine torpedoed a possibly unarmed Iranian frigate off Sri Lanka. Distastefulness aside, said Charlotte Howard in The Economist, the deeper problem with Hegseth’s “machismo style” is that it’s now also the “substance” of U.S. military policy.

Machismo is part of the story, said Tom Nichols in The Atlantic. But the fetishization of violence for its own sake is also helping fill a “strategic vacuum.” Previous U.S. presidents went to war with a clear goal in mind (however unrealistic), whereas Trump is still deciding if the Iran operation is an air campaign to degrade Iran’s nuclear and missile programs, a full-scale “regime change” war, or something else entirely. The lack of a goal, and a plan for achieving it, leaves the White House with nothing to celebrate except the “rapid destruction of buildings and machines, and the killing of some enemy leaders,” all while praying that the public is “enjoying the fireworks” as much as Hegseth.

The tragedy is that Trump had very good reasons for going to war with Iran, said Gerard Baker in The Wall Street Journal. The vicious Islamist regime in Tehran has waged war on the U.S., and the Iranian people, for almost half a century. “Given an opportunity to inflict massive damage on that enemy, the president boldly seized it.” But rather than make that persuasive case to the public, Trump and Hegseth have leaned on “intemperate, incontinent, infantilizing verbiage” that only weakens support for this just cause at home and overseas, and “corrupts our national culture.”

What happened

A defiant Iran intensified its attacks on Arab states and U.S. assets across the Middle East this week, as President Trump seesawed on America’s war aims and when the joint U.S.-Israeli offensive on Iran might end. Thousands of Iranian missiles and drones have rained down on Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and other Arab nations, smashing into oil refineries, airports, residential buildings, and hotels and killing at least 16 people. At least 11 U.S. military bases have been hit, damaging communications infrastructure and air defense systems and partially collapsing some buildings, according to satellite imagery reviewed by The New York Times. The Pentagon said at least 140 U.S. troops have been wounded, eight seriously, and seven have been killed; in Israel, Iranian strikes have killed at least 13 people. As the damage mounted, Trump judged the operation “very complete, pretty much.” Within hours he backtracked, saying the U.S. was bent on “ultimate victory,” while still asserting it would end “very soon.” Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth insisted the assault was at “just the beginning.” Asked which of those things was true, Trump said, “I think you could say both.”

Inside Iran, Mojtaba Khamenei, the 56-year-old son of assassinated
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was selected to replace his father as the nation’s supreme leader. Trump, who insisted he must approve any new leader, said the selection of Khamenei—a hard-line cleric with deep ties to the elite Revolutionary Guard—was “unacceptable,” judging it would “lead to more of the same problems.” The U.S. and Israel continued to pound targets across Iran; more than 1,300 Iranians have died in the strikes, most of them civilians, according to the Iranian Red Crescent Society. “They are striking everywhere: homes, schools, mosques, hospitals,” said one Tehran resident.

In Washington, Democrats berated Trump’s failure to articulate a clear plan. After a closed-door briefing, Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut called the administration “incoherent.” He said it had backed off the previously stated goals of regime change and destroying Iran’s nuclear weapons program, and that it had “no plan” for reopening the Strait of Hormuz, where shipping has come to a standstill. Meanwhile, defiant Iranian leaders ruled out a ceasefire or mediation. “Iran will determine when the war ends,” said Iranian Revolutionary Guard spokesman Ali Mohammad Naini.

What the columnists said

There’s a growing realization inside the administration that Trump and his team “misjudged” how the Iranian regime would respond to a conflict it views “as an existential threat,” said Mark Mazzetti in The New York Times. They thought the war would follow the same pattern as last year’s U.S.-Israeli strikes, when Iran’s retaliation was fairly muted. That Tehran responded with far more aggression has forced administration officials to “adjust plans on the fly.” Some “are growing pessimistic” about the lack of an exit strategy. But they are “careful not to express that directly” to Trump, who’s called the operation a “complete success.” “It is not too late” for Trump to build a case for the war, said Thérèse Shaheen in National Review. The Iranian regime has been “an active, aggressive foe” of the U.S. for 47 years, and was building “capacity to cause catastrophic damage” with its nuclear program. The public’s not buying it, said Greg Sargent in The New Republic. A poll aggregator found only 38% of Americans approve of the offensive—“the lowest initial support for an American war perhaps ever.”

Among Iranians, faith in the U.S. project is also in short supply, said Najmeh Bozorgmehr in the Financial Times. At the war’s outset, opponents of the brutal regime hoped better days were at hand. But the “terrifying” air campaign “has shattered that belief.” Choking on “toxic black smog” from burning oil depots, many Tehran residents are “shocked” by the destruction of schools, thousands of homes, and historic landmarks, and dismayed by the “resilience of the Islamic regime.” There’s no sign of the “anti-regime unrest” that erupted in January; instead, one sociologist in Tehran, a critic of the regime, sees a rising “sense of nationalism.”

Mojtaba Khamenei’s ascent is a grim sign, said Marc Champion in Bloomberg. Instead of a shift toward a “less confrontational” government, his selection “represents regime consolidation.” And Trump’s “tone-deaf demand” for veto power over Iran’s supreme leader is yet another sign he “profoundly misunderstands his opponents.” He thought they’d crumble at his shock-and-awe campaign. But “Iran has been preparing for this fight since 1988,” and they are “ready for a long war.” Now Trump must “decide if he is too.”

Trump should declare victory and “walk away,” said Jason Willick in The Washington Post. Regime change would be the ideal outcome, but that would require ground troops and take years and many American lives. As it stands, U.S. and Israeli strikes have severely damaged Iran’s military capability, knocking out missile launchers, air defenses, and more than 60 naval craft. Quitting now—as some advisers are reportedly urging—would serve Trump best politically while saving the U.S. from a potential “quagmire.”

Trump is “confounded by the war he started,” said Andrew Egger in The
Bulwark. Pumped with “hubris” after last year’s Iran strikes and the capture of Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro, he and his team thought the U.S. “could simply impose its will on smaller countries,” with “little cost.” Now they’re waking up to the fact that they have “plunged into a morass” without the support of the American people. The president and his advisers didn’t anticipate an actual war, “but now they’ve got one, and they don’t have the faintest idea how to end it.”

When he first became Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei presented himself as humble. A mid-level Shiite cleric who lacked the popularity and charisma of his predecessor, Ruhollah Khomeini, he stepped into the post in 1989 calling himself “an individual with many faults and shortcomings, and truly a minor seminarian.” But as he settled into the dictatorial role he showed his mercilessness. Khamenei presided over decades of internal repression, as he blocked even mild attempts at reform, and external belligerence, as he transformed Iran into a state sponsor of terrorism. His regime supported the “Axis of Resistance” network of mostly Shiite militias and terrorist groups, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Badr group in Iraq, the Houthis in Yemen, and Hamas in Gaza. In his speeches and rulings, he blamed any whiff of dissent or dysfunction at home on the U.S., which he called the “Great Satan,” or on Israel, the “Zionist regime.” To maintain control, he once admitted, “We need the United States as an enemy.”

“Revolution was in his blood,” said Foreign Policy. “The grandson of clerics who supported a revolt against a previous dynasty,” Seyyed Ali Hosseini Khamenei wore the black turban signaling direct descent from the Prophet Muhammad. At 19, he fell under the sway of Khomeini, who was then a top cleric in Qom. Khomeini was a leader of opposition to the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, an authoritarian who wanted to modernize the country. Khamenei worked as Khomeini’s courier, spending several stints in prison for his activism. When Khomeini led the 1979 revolution and took 52 U.S. hostages, Khamenei was the one who created a propaganda film suggesting the captives “were being well looked after,” said The Times (U.K.). From then on, he was the supreme leader’s “trusted lieutenant.” After surviving a 1981 assassination attempt that paralyzed his right hand, Khamenei served as Iran’s president, brutally repressing dissent. When Khomeini died in 1989, he was chosen by a panel of senior clerics as successor.

He consolidated power quickly, said The New York Times, turning the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps into “a powerful tool of repression.” When Iranians elected a reformist president, Mohammed Khatami, in 1997, Khamenei hamstrung him by jailing cabinet ministers and shuttering friendly newspapers. Regional instabilities were “cannily exploited.” When the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq created a power vacuum there, he armed Shiite militias and backed Shiite parties, “giving Iran significant clout in Iraqi politics.” His regime also pursued nuclear weapons, even though he’d issued a fatwa banning their use. He “adamantly refused to give up Iran’s uranium-enrichment program,” said The Washington Post, and repeated calls to annihilate Israel. Still, desperate for sanctions relief, he reluctantly endorsed President Obama’s 2015 deal limiting the nuclear program—though he “appeared to regret it” three years later, when President Trump pulled the U.S. out of the pact.

Many Iranians “despised living under his firebrand form of theocratic governance,” said The Wall Street Journal, in which women could be jailed for failing to wear a hijab. Torture was common in prisons, and dozens of crimes brought the death penalty. Nationwide protests broke out repeatedly, in 2009, 2017, 2019, and 2022, and the regime responded with deadly force and mass arrests. Then came the event that changed everything, something that at first “appeared to be a victory”: the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of Israelis by Hamas militants Iran had trained and armed. Israel responded by taking out Iran’s proxies one by one, and it humiliated Iran by assassinating the head of Hamas while he was in Tehran. Then last June, U.S.-Israeli air strikes crippled Iran’s nuclear program. And when sanctions and runaway inflation sent the Iranian rial plummeting to 1.4 million per dollar, hundreds of thousands of Iranians took to the streets again.

The resulting crackdown “has been ruthless,” said The New Yorker, with some 30,000 protesters massacred. But Khamenei remained largely out of sight. In his final weeks, before he was killed on the first day of a joint U.S.-Israel attack, he remained so secluded that Iranians nicknamed him “Ali the Mouse.” Still, he continued to rail against the U.S. As American forces assembled in the Middle East, he vowed to fight back with his proxy forces. “If they start a war,” he said, “this time it will be a regional war.”

What happened

Fears of a global economic shock spread this week after Iran effectively shut off a crucial Middle Eastern shipping route and launched drone and missile attacks on energy infrastructure in its oil-rich neighbors. Iran said it had closed the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway through which one-fifth of the world’s oil travels. “If anyone tries to pass, the heroes of the Revolutionary Guard and the regular navy will set those ships ablaze,” warned Ebrahim Jabari, senior adviser to the Guard’s commander. About 3,200 vessels—4% of global ship tonnage—were stuck in the Persian Gulf. At least five oil tankers were hit by drones or other projectiles, while a top global natural gas exporter in Qatar suspended production after Iran attacked two of its sites. Saudi officials intercepted two drones targeting an oil refinery, and debris from a downed drone started a fire at an energy hub in the United Arab Emirates.

Oil and gas prices surged, prompting concerns that inflation could rise and productivity slow as a result of the supply shocks. The global oil benchmark Brent jumped from about $70 a barrel to $81 a barrel, while natural gas prices spiked across Europe. U.S. gasoline prices rose by about 11 cents a gallon, hitting $3.11. To head off a potential energy crisis, Trump said the Navy would, if necessary, escort tankers through the strait and ordered the U.S. International Development Finance Corp. to insure ships in the Gulf. “No matter what, the United States will ensure the free flow of energy to the world,” he declared.

What the columnists said

“Whether President Trump wins the Third Gulf War will depend a lot on whether the Pentagon can effectively reopen the Strait of Hormuz for oil shipping, and soon,” said Javier Blas in Bloomberg. The clock is ticking. Crude production is continuing in the region, but if ships can’t get to their ports, oil-producing nations “will need to start slowing their output— which will exacerbate the spike in crude prices.” We are talking days before this happens, not weeks.

“The real news is that prices haven’t shot up more,” said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. Oil is actually cheap by historical standards: After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, crude climbed above $120 a barrel. Prices are now about where they were in 2023 and 2024. War critics may be trying to raise “false inflation alarms” and pressure Trump “into wrapping up his Iran campaign prematurely,” but “he shouldn’t take the bait.”

America is less dependent on Middle Eastern oil than it used to be, said Chris Isidore and Matt Egan in CNN.com, but no matter how much oil we produce, it’s “traded in a global market.” We export almost one-third of oil produced domestically and import nearly one-third of oil consumed by Americans. There’s also concern about damage to various oil facilities and how long it will take them to resume normal operations. What you pay at the pump is still dictated by “supply and demand around the planet,” and traders right now “are alarmed.” It means $100 a barrel isn’t far off.

This “honest, charming” and “fun” EV was given a facelift in 2024, and has now been updated again, said Top Gear Magazine. Made by the “purveyor of cheap and cheerful cars”, Dacia, it’s “tiny” – roughly the size of the Kia Picanto and Fiat Panda – but it offers a good rebuttal to “all the bloated, over-batteried SUVs that are pummelling the roads” to dust. It’s good value and punches above its weight in terms of efficiency.

The new Dacia Spring works best as a city car and is fun to drive, in a “back-to-basics way”, said Auto Express. Light and easy to manoeuvre, it has a tight turning circle – but there are problems. Its small 24.3kWh battery needs frequent charging, and as a package it is lacking in refinement: the throttle and brakes are abrupt; the steering is rather “sticky”; and the touchscreen controls are “infuriating”.

Part of the reason the Spring is so cheap is that it’s built in China and based on a car that was designed for the Indian market, said Car Magazine. Unfortunately, it really does feel cheap – the doors are “flimsy” and sound “tinny” when they close; and there are very few soft-touch materials, except for the seats, which lack height adjustment. The 308-litre boot is big, but rear legroom is tight. In short, don’t bother.

Catherine O’Hara portrayed ridiculous eccentrics with equal parts hilarity and humanity. Beginning her five-decade career as a member of Canada’s Second City troupe, which launched fellow stars like John Candy, Martin Short, and frequent collaborator Eugene Levy, she earned a reputation as a scene stealer who found the emotional heart of zany characters. These included Delia Deetz, a pretentious sculptor and malevolent stepmother in the film Beetlejuice (1988), and Moira Rose, a self-absorbed and bankrupt soap star who moves with her family to small-town Ontario in TV’s Schitt’s Creek (2015–20), which earned O’Hara her second Emmy. She was a highlight in a string of Christopher Guest mockumentaries, with roles including a travel agent cast in a small-town musical in Waiting for Guffman (1996) and an aging actress pining for an Oscar in For Your Consideration (2006). O’Hara found her highest-profile role in Home Alone (1990), as a harried suburban mom who accidentally abandons her 8-year-old son. It was a relatively straight role for O’Hara, who reveled in characters lost in their own vanity and delusions. “I love playing people who have no real sense of the impression they’re making on anyone else,” she said. “The more I say it, the more I realize that’s all of us.”

Born in Toronto, Catherine Anne O’Hara was the sixth of seven kids in an Irish immigrant family that “prized storytelling and theatricality,” said The Telegraph (U.K.). Her jokester father worked for a railway; her realtor mother was a gifted mimic whose impressions of clients enlivened family dinners. O’Hara studied theater at Toronto’s Burnhamthorpe Collegiate Institute. After graduating she waitressed at the Second City revue theater, where she was inspired by her brother’s girlfriend Gilda Radner; eventually, she became Radner’s understudy. When Radner left to join the founding cast of Saturday Night Live, O’Hara replaced her, and the troupe became her “second university.” In 1976, it spawned Second City Television, the cult sketch series that “established her as a master of absurdist comedy and outsize characters,” said The Washington Post. She impersonated Katharine Hepburn and Brooke Shields, and played recurring characters including the “bespangled, melodramatic singer” Lola Heatherton and Sister Mary Innocent, a sadistic nun.

After SCTV’s run ended in 1984, O’Hara began landing small film parts, said The Times (U.K.). She made a “scene-stealing appearance” as an ice cream vendor in Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985) and played a dishy journalist in Mike Nichols’ Heartburn (1986). But it was Tim Burton who “elevated her to the A-list” with the horror-comedy Beetlejuice, which showcased her bold comic energy. That led to her memorable turn as the frantic mom in Home Alone, which director Chris Columbus credited with giving the film its “emotional depth.” Some of O’Hara’s best work was done alongside Levy, who matched her “in oddball charm,” said The New York Times. The two “functioned as a de facto comedy team” in movies including numerous Guest mockumentaries. They were a married couple in Best in Show (2000), a dog-show send-up in which O’Hara played Cookie Fleck, a bottle-blond with an amorous past, and a former ’60s folk duo who reunite in A Mighty Wind (2003).

Schitt’s Creek, created by Levy and his son Dan, proved a “career-capping triumph” for O’Hara, said the Associated Press. Her over-the-top portrayal of Moira Rose, a verbose narcissist with a unique, affected accent and extensive wig collection, was “the perfect personification of her comic talents” and brought her a new generation of fans. (“What have I told you about putting your body on the internet?” she tells her daughter in one scene. “Never without proper lighting.”) Her final roles were as a widowed therapist on HBO’s postapocalyptic drama The Last of Us and an ousted studio head in the Hollywood satire The Studio. A long-married mother of two and self-described “good Catholic girl at heart,” she called her humor an essential “survival” tool. “It’s one of God’s greatest gifts, because life is full of the dark and the light,” she said. “You gotta look for the light.”

Bob Weir was the quiet linchpin of the Grateful Dead. Though he was uninterested in competing with the mythical presence of Jerry Garcia, saying fans’ deification had ultimately killed the frontman, Weir was a fan favorite: the good-looking one in the very short jean shorts. As a rhythm guitarist with precise timing and inventive chord voicing—in live shows he would play notes from a song’s chords in varying octaves or an unconventional order—he bridged Garcia’s long, noodling guitar solos with bassist Phil Lesh’s effervescent countermelodies. Several of Weir’s
compositions, like “Sugar Magnolia,” “Truckin’” and “Playing in the Band,” became standards, helping establish the Dead’s blend of rock, blues, folk, and country. And his constant playfulness onstage helped drive the band’s signature improvisations. We “state a theme and take it for a walk in the woods,” Weir said in 2010. “If I were playing a note-for-note set every night for all these years, I think I would have put a gun to my head.”

Robert Hall Weir was adopted as an infant and raised in the affluent town of Atherton, near San Francisco. His undiagnosed dyslexia “managed to get him kicked out of both preschool and the Cub Scouts,” said Rolling Stone. Instead of school, he devoted himself to piano and guitar, and at age 16 he wandered into a Palo Alto music store where Jerry Garcia was preparing to give banjo lessons. As soon as the two started jamming, they decided to start a jug band. By 1965, it had morphed into the Grateful Dead, the house band for author Ken Kesey’s “Acid Test” LSD parties.

The group became the center of a hippie culture dominated by drugs and the “flower power values of peace, love, and anti-Vietnam war protests,” said The Guardian. While they only had one hit single, “Touch of Grey” (1987), “their devoted live audience made them one of the most successful touring artists” ever. The Dead “proved unusually resistant
to time,” said the San Francisco Chronicle. Even after their 1970s heyday, a “self-sustaining world” of Deadheads continued selling weed and tie-dyes as they followed the group from city to city. The woman who would become Weir’s wife followed him, too: The two met when he was in his 30s and she was a 15-year-old who sneaked backstage. But he maintained they were platonic at first, and they didn’t marry until much later. It was only when he was “edging toward 50,” he said, that he realized he didn’t want to remain “a rock ’n’ roll tomcat.”

After three decades as “Pied Pipers of the hippie movement,” the Grateful Dead broke up when Garcia died in rehab in 1995, said The New York Times. Weir, though, kept touring for the rest of his life, even after getting cancer last year. He founded several other bands, some of them tribute acts like “Dead & Company,” and was a committed collaborator, playing with Willie Nelson, Joan Baez, the Allman Brothers, Sammy Hagar, and myriad other musicians. “I hope I’m remembered for bringing our culture and other cultures together,” Weir said in 2025. “I’m hoping that people of varying persuasions will find something they can agree on in the music that I’ve offered and find each other through it.”

‘Capitalism: A Global History’ by Sven Beckert

“Any book about capitalism that begins almost 900 years ago in the port city of Aden, in what is now Yemen, promises a new story,” said Marcus Rediker in The New York Times. Harvard historian Sven Beckert’s “vivid” new 1,300- page survey “delivers on that promise,” challenging earlier histories that have treated the singularly omnivorous and fecund economic system as primarily a European invention. Beckert gives the definition of capitalism as “a process in which economic life is fundamentally driven by the ceaseless accumulation of privately controlled capital,” and his global view of the phenomenon “reveals its protean character.” Not everyone will accept his analysis, but for decades to come, “readers will study this monumental work of history, agreeing and arguing with it, all the while affirming its generational importance.”

Although Capitalism “occasionally lapses into a textbook tone,” said Hamilton Cain in The Boston Globe, “each chapter offers an abundance of characters and arguments.” Beckert presents 12th-century Aden as a hot spot of trade that was one of many in a network that for centuries supported a kind of proto-capitalism spread thinly around the globe. In those years, Asia and the Islamic caliphate dominated, but Europe embraced capitalism when the continent’s feudal system collapsed, and capitalism supported by the muscle of the state soon showed its appetite for exploiting the labor and resources of distant lands. By the 18th century, the British had turned Barbados into a model of the economy capitalists aspired to build, at least according to Beckert’s dark view. Because markets had become the sole arbiter of human affairs, tens of thousands of African slaves worked the island’s plantations, funneling profits to just 74 landowners.

Because Beckert’s definition of capitalism is so elastic, said Gideon Lewis-Kraus in The New Yorker, “the suspicion grows that we’ve been sold a story without a subject.” Or worse, he’s made capitalism synonymous with humans’ acquisitive instinct, a definition broad enough for him to blame capitalism for all the world’s evils, from racism and sexism to insomnia and frustrating dating apps. The idea that capitalism’s advance is driven by wealthy actors’ desire to increase their capital also doesn’t jibe with the reality we all see, said John Kay in the Financial Times. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos made their fortunes by innovating, not by exploiting wealth they already held. But Beckert doesn’t have to be 100% right to have performed a valuable service. “Read this book and you will learn innumerable things you did not previously know,” and while some readers may complain that Capitalism spreads too wide a net, “others, including me, will be genuinely grateful for exposure to this breadth of scholarship.

‘American Canto’ by Olivia Nuzzi

Olivia Nuzzi’s new memoir could have launched a career comeback, said Scaachi Koul in Slate. Instead, “historians will study how bad this book is.” It’s “illegible in ways you can’t imagine.” Nuzzi, 32, was a star political reporter until last year, when allegations arose that she’d had an affair with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. after profiling the then 69-year-old politician during his campaign for president. But her much-hyped book turns out to be 300 pages of rambling that offer no insight on herself or Kennedy, who’s now the nation’s vaccine-killing secretary of health and human services. While Nuzzi does declare that an affair of a sort did occur, despite Kennedy’s denial, details are scant. In fact, American Canto is “mostly about how compelling Nuzzi thinks it is to be a blond white woman in journalism.”

The book isn’t uniformly terrible, said Becca Rothfeld in The Washington Post. While at New York magazine, Nuzzi became a star because she wrote with flair, and about a third of her stream-of-consciousness account consists of “piquantly observed” political vignettes, including many about President Trump. But large swaths of American Canto are “aggressively awful,” featuring “ostentatiously mannered” prose that reads like a poor Joan Didion imitation. Gratingly, she refers to Kennedy only as “the Politician.” And while she devotes plenty of space to musings about the California wildfires she witnessed after New York cut ties with her, “the gossip that is ostensibly this book’s chief selling point is scarcely in evidence.”

“At its best, American Canto is about a crack-up,” said Helen Lewis in The Atlantic. Trump, Kennedy, and other MAGA luminaries regularly abuse the truth, and any of us forced to spend as much time with them as Nuzzi has, “might end up severed from reality.” I briefly felt for Nuzzi’s ex-fiancé, fellow journalist Ryan Lizza, when he alleged in a recent series of Substack posts that Nuzzi had cheated on him earlier with Mark Sanford, another failed presidential candidate. Still, none of Nuzzi’s own bids for sympathy can disguise “the central problem with American Canto: It contains “no real, believable regret,” even when Nuzzi admits that Kennedy badly used her.

After four years, $70 billion, and an entire rebrand, Meta appears to finally be “ditching” the metaverse, said Dan DeFrancesco in Business Insider. Company insiders told Bloomberg last week that Mark Zuckerberg is planning to slash its metaverse budget by 30% next year in order to focus more resources on artificial-intelligence wearables. Consider it an admission that Zuckerberg’s vision for “virtual worlds” inhabited by millions of users wearing headsets was a flop. He was once so bullish on the technology that it was “the literal inspiration for the entire company’s rebrand from Facebook.” But in recent years, as the number of users dwindled, he has talked about the metaverse less and less. “It’s tough to keep making the case for funding something that burns billions of dollars and doesn’t directly generate a ton of revenue,” especially when the real race is in AI.

“The metaverse was a squishy concept” from the start, said Allison Morrow in CNN.com, “pitched to a populace that had just emerged from Covid lockdowns and wanted little more than to be around other humans offline, in real life.” They didn’t want to spend $400 on a “bulky” headset so they could play games and buy stuff from “digital alter egos.” Despite Zuckerberg declaring it “the successor of the mobile internet,” the metaverse never caught on, partly because it just didn’t look good. “That cool factor” matters. But Meta is going to keep making smart glasses that incorporate augmented reality, said James Pero in Gizmodo. It even recently poached Apple’s longtime design executive, Alan Dye, to join its efforts to build more AI-powered devices. The problem with the metaverse was never the VR headset, which I “actually like.” It was the “Nintendo Wii graphics,” “legless avatars,” and “vast expanses of nothingness” that made the whole experience a “bungled” mess.

Zuckerberg has traded one expensive obsession for another, said Parmy Olson in Bloomberg. He’s dumping the metaverse for large language models, as he seems determined to clone ChatGPT. That’s a shame. Meta, with $44.5 billion in cash on hand last year, “was one of the few companies that could afford to take the long view on artificial intelligence and hold out for a breakthrough.” Investors have so far given Zuckerberg a pass for the metaverse, just as they did for his other follies, said Martin Baccardax in Barron’s: “Facebook as a bank, Facebook as a dating website, Facebook as the home to a new cryptocurrency.” We will see if they will be as “forgiving” about misspending on AI. Zuckerberg sending the metaverse to the “dumpster” won’t be a distraction “from the billions he continues to shovel into the artificial-intelligence furnace.

Frank Gehry literally changed the shape of architecture. In a globe-spanning career spent in rebellion against the square strictures of modernism, he designed buildings with radically tilted angles and swooping curves like a cubist painting rendered in 3D. Gehry creations became instant landmarks everywhere, and in Bilbao, Spain, his Guggenheim art museum almost single-handedly revitalized a whole city. Not everyone loved Gehry’s style, whether it was his rough, industrial-style early work—which critic Mike Davis called “Dirty Harry architecture”— or the colossal, highly polished complexes that boldly imposed their “starchitect” creator’s will onto the landscape. But Gehry insisted that a building had to be more than just functional. “I want buildings that have passion in them,” he said in 2003, “that make people feel something, even if they get mad at them.”

Gehry was born in Toronto as Frank Owen Goldberg, the son of a heavy drinker who “held a series of jobs,” said The New York Times. As a kid, Frank tinkered in his grandfather’s hardware store and watched his grandmother buy a live carp to make gefilte fish, a memory that inspired a recurring fish motif in his work. Frank’s world “abruptly fell apart in the mid-1940s,” when his father had a heart attack while the two were arguing; Frank blamed himself. His father never fully recovered, and the family moved to a poor area of Los Angeles seeking a milder climate. On the advice of an art teacher, Frank studied architecture at the University of Southern California; on the advice of his first wife, he changed his surname “to avoid antisemitism.” He spent his early career “toiling as a mid-level designer” at “a firm known for its shopping malls.”

By the 1970s, though, he had “staked a position outside normal architecture,” said The Guardian. He made his first truly avant-garde statement in 1978 with his own Santa Monica, Calif., house, transforming the Dutch colonial with layers of corrugated metal, plywood, and chain-link fencing. It was “hated by the neighbors” but hailed by critics as “the freshest creation in architecture.” As Gehry’s reputation grew, his style “evolved into a sophisticated and playful collage of folding, twisting, and slanting forms,” said The Washington Post. These shapes became possible by his use of CATIA, a computer drafting system for aerospace manufacturing. It enabled “whimsical experiments” such as his 1996 collaboration with Czech architect Vlado Milunic on Dancing House, a Prague hotel and office complex that looked like a couple dancing and was nicknamed “the Fred and Ginger building.” It also informed the 1997 masterpiece that “vaulted Gehry into architecture’s pantheon,” the Guggenheim Bilbao. A riot of sinuous, twisting forms clad with 33,000 titanium panels, the riverfront museum transformed the economically and politically troubled Basque city into a major tourist destination. His success in Spain helped him save another ambitious design, the “audaciously curvilinear” Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. He’d begun the $274 million project in 1988, but it got bogged down in economic troubles; thanks to private donations it finally opened in 2003.

“There were disappointments,” said the Los Angeles Times, such as the coolly received 2000 Experience Music Project in Seattle. At times Gehry was suspected of “spreading his talents too thin,” and his planned Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, commissioned in 2006, still has yet to open. Yet “Gehry’s work didn’t slow down” even in his 90s, said The Wall Street Journal. While he was known for recurring motifs, he objected to any suggestion that he had begun to repeat himself. “I cannot face my children if I tell them I have no more ideas,” he said in 2015. “It is like giving up and telling them there is no future for them.”

‘Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right’ by Laura K. Field

To truly understand MAGA, you need a person who’s “from that world, but not of it,” said Alexandre Lefebvre in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Though political theorist Laura K. Field cut ties with the conservative intelligentsia several years before its factions coalesced behind Donald Trump, she earned her Ph.D. as a member of that circle. In her “smart, stylish, scathingly critical” taxonomy of the New Right, she describes the movement as consisting of four factions, including the think-tank intellectuals at the Claremont Institute, the more programmatic postliberals, the National Conservatives, and the hard right. “Whether intended or not, Furious Minds reads like Dante’s Inferno: The deeper we go, the worse everyone becomes.” Yet Field’s greater contribution is that she dispels the myth that the New Right is unified solely by its hatred of pluralism and liberalism. Instead, as she writes, “it thinks it has a monopoly on things like ‘the good, the right, and the beautiful.’”

“What should we make of the intellectual aspect of MAGA?” asked Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker. The answer matters, because if Donald Trump’s reign lasts only three more years, the movement may be sustainable only if it’s grounded in a coherent set of principles. However, while every political movement contains contradictions, “the contradictions of the New Right reflect a unique disconnect between thinking and reality.” Field attributes this to conservatism’s addiction to abstractions, and indeed, “the New Right has a lot of very abstract ideas—not just about nationhood but about human nature, God, virtue, ‘the Common Good,’ and more.” But abstractions and the complexity of the real world are often at odds. For example, Trump’s NatCon allies trumpet “nationalism” of a sort that’s rooted in monolithic cultures. But how could a centuries-old melting-pot nation become monolithic? “You can’t deport half of America.”

At times, Field’s criticisms go too far, said Richard M. Reinsch II in The Wall Street Journal. She identifies a 2022 speech by Israeli-born writer Yoram Hazony as the moment when the NatCons’ mask slipped off, revealing white supremacy and explicit Christian nationalism at the movement’s core. Alas, “the first term is a smear, the second an ill-defined shock term,” and Field meanwhile neglects to make the more salient point that the group asserts a form of nationalism divorced from the principles outlined in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. Field also has little to say about the “ludicrous descent of modern liberalism into racial and sexual tribalism,” and with all due respect to the useful work she has performed here, “this descent has done far more to birth the furious minds of the New Right than the speculations of philosophers and intellectuals.

‘The Dream Factory: London’s First Playhouse and the Making of William Shakespeare’ by Daniel Swift

In William Shakespeare’s time, “literature wasn’t just the result of inspired genius,” said Ed Simon in The New York Times. “It also required carpenters, weavers, and brick-layers,” and Daniel Swift’s “brilliant” new book illuminates why that’s so. Swift brings us back to 1576 London, when an actor and craftsman named James Burbage took a chance and erected, just outside London, England’s first purpose-built playhouse since Roman rule. It was called simply the Theatre, and Shakespeare would apprentice there. It also premiered some of the Bard’s greatest plays, and Swift gets to that. But The Dream Factory is foremost “an indispensable account of a chaotic and creative period in which feudalism was transitioning into capitalism, with the entertainment industry one of the salient harbingers of that shift.” It all makes for “riveting reading.”

“There is plenty to interest the passionate Shakespearean here,” said Will Tosh in The New Spectator (U.K.). “Burbage’s innovation created the conditions for a new theater industry and a brand-new profession,” the one Shakespeare soon joined. “I was taken with the idea that Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream can be imagined as his ‘masterpieces’”—meaning the works he produced to finish his climb from apprentice playwright to master. Every play staged at Burbage’s theater emerged from a city where commercial activity was fueled by guilds of craftsmen and merchants. Not only did the guilds build the theaters, they also created the collectivist approach to financing that allowed the theaters to turn actors into salaried employees.

“As Swift makes clear, the Theatre endured only because Burbage was good at improvising and snookering his partners,” said Isaac Butler in The Atlantic. He also attracted a “staggering” number of lawsuits, the source of many of the details that carry Swift’s story. In the end, the Theatre was shuttered and disassembled and its beams repurposed to construct the more famous Globe in 1599. By then, though, Burbage’s venture had given the world Shakespeare, proving that “another important kind of brilliance is necessary for the flourishing of the arts: business acumen.”

‘Mexico: A 500-Year History’ by Paul Gillingham

“Mexico and Mexicans have had just about enough of being analyzed,” said Camilla Townsend in The Washington Post, and historian Paul Gillingham fully understands that. His “breathtaking” new book “reveals Mexican history in all its kaleidoscopic complexity,” and though his account does nothing to downplay the upheavals the nation has endured, it centers the successes rather than the struggles of the land’s people while emphasizing their remarkable diversity. Fittingly, his account starts not with conquistador Hernán Cortés toppling the Aztec empire in 1521 but with a poor Spaniard, Gonzalo Guerrero, who survived a shipwreck several years earlier, chose to live among the Maya as a Maya, and fathered three children who can fairly be labeled the first Mexicans. Though Gillingham’s account runs 700 pages, he “writes with sparkling verve,” and “every one of those pages is worth reading.”

For 300 years, the nation that Cortés christened New Spain was “the glittering jewel in the Spanish crown,” said Gerard Helferich in The Wall Street Journal. It encompassed most of the land west of the Mississippi in today’s U.S., its corn fed a global population boom, and its silver helped double Europe’s money supply. But the wealth was concentrated among a small elite, and an 1810 uprising sparked a war that led to Mexico’s independence in 1821 and the establishment of a republic. Sixty years of instability followed, amid which Mexico ceded more than half its territory to the U.S. Leaders came and went, including the French-appointed emperor Maximilian I, the reformer Benito Juárez, and the military dictator Porfirio Díaz, before the 1910–20 Mexican Revolution launched a new century characterized by both growth and repression. Gillingham’s “vibrant and thought-provoking account” captures it all.

But while he chronicles each shift in power, “this is not where the author’s heart lies,” said Álvaro Enrigue in The New York Times. Gillingham forever calls attention to the ground-level experiences of the communities that compose Mexico because he judges the country to be the first on Earth where so many different groups—beginning with the land’s Indigenous people, Spanish settlers, and the many enslaved Africans and Asians who arrived during Spain’s rule—came together and created an enduring nation. “At times, as Gillingham makes clear, democracy of the Mexican variety has outshined the American kind,” managing to seat the hemisphere’s first Black president in 1829 and its first Indigenous president in 1858. More importantly, “he understands, as Mexicans do, that it is a miracle that the country exists at all,” especially given how often it has been the subject of tugs of war between other empires.

‘When Caesar Was King: How Sid Caesar Reinvented American Comedy’ by David Margolick

“Sid Caesar did not look like a comic,” said David Denby in The New Yorker. In the early 1950s, when his fame peaked, the TV pioneer “might have passed for a lawyer or a department store manager.” But unlike other funny-men of the era, who told jokes and did shtick, Caesar “could become almost anything, throwing himself into roles with shattering power.” David Margolick’s new book about Caesar and the early days of television captures the performer’s special talent and lasting influence, yet Margolick distinguishes himself as “an ideal cultural historian” because he’s “curious and loving enough to incorporate every telling detail but too wary of nostalgia to slip into ballyhoo.” The Sid Caesar who emerges in this telling is “both funny and tragic”—“a revolutionary talent whose particular success may have been possible only in a brand-new medium.”

Though few people under 70 remember Caesar, “his comedic DNA is everywhere,” said Ann Levin in The Forward. A son of Jewish immigrants and a product of the Catskills comedy circuit, he specialized in sketch comedy, and despite being introverted offstage, “he could bring down the house by impersonating everything from an imperious German general to a fly crawling on a piece of feta cheese.” In 1950, NBC awarded him with his own live 90-minute Saturday-night sketch show. Your Show of Shows spoofed contemporary TV and film, dazzled critics, and drew 25 million viewers a week at its apex. The show’s legendary writers room was populated by future comedy luminaries Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, and Neil Simon.

“What wasn’t funny was Caesar’s own life,” said Joseph Epstein in The Wall Street Journal. A stormy drinker, he never found a true second act after his shortened sketch show, Caesar’s Hour, was canceled in 1957, having been eclipsed by Lawrence Welk’s anodyne music-variety program. Margolick “brilliantly summarizes Sid Caesar’s fall,” describing him as too sophisticated to perform mainstream comedy and too difficult and stubborn to find an alternate path. A mere 11 years after his death, he is barely known, and yet “the world without him is a less amusing place.”

‘Notes on Being a Man’ by Scott Galloway

Scott Galloway’s best-selling book “begins in appropriately manly fashion,” said Brian Stewart in Commentary. Batting away a tenet of liberal orthodoxy, he declares that there’s no such thing as “toxic masculinity” because bullying and predation are the antithesis of authentic masculine behavior. “Real men don’t start bar fights,” he writes. “They break them up.” What makes that assertion remarkable is “not so much the argument itself as where it’s coming from.” Unlike so many of today’s champions of “men’s rights,” Galloway is no reactionary. A millionaire investor turned podcaster and New York University marketing professor, the 61-year-old aligns as a Democrat and welcomes the progress women continue to make toward professional and economic equality. In his view, though, men’s true purpose is threefold: to “protect, provide, and procreate.” And while Notes on Being a Man is mostly memoir, “it is meant to serve as a kind of self-help guide for young men who are alone and adrift.”

I don’t envy Galloway, said Becca Rothfeld in The Washington Post. “He seeks the dubious distinction of being a better version of a very bad thing”: a champion of men who insists on drawing a sharp line between men’s and women’s needs. Though he doesn’t hate women, as far-right influencers Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes do, he does propose that men have a different moral orientation that is an outgrowth of physical differences. And by casting men as society’s “providers” and “protectors,” he reinforces the notion that men naturally hold the superior position. In other words, he’s buttressing “the same ugly hierarchy we have always had.”

“Reading Galloway, one gets the sense that men last knew who they were about 75 years ago,” said Jessica Winter in The New Yorker. In the 1930s, he reminds us, American men built the Hoover Dam astonishingly quickly and a decade later ventured overseas and defeated fascism. To prove that today’s young men are in crisis, he cites familiar statistics about male unemployment and suicide rates, yet he doesn’t mention that women attempt suicide more frequently or that they can match men’s earnings only by gaining an education edge. In fact, “if you tilt some of the most commonly cited data points this way or that, you can just as easily argue on the behalf of a woman crisis as a man crisis—or, perhaps most accurately, for an ongoing crisis affecting us all.” In the end, Galloway is forced to argue that men feel the pain of economic anxiety more acutely than women, which doesn’t sound very manly at all. “So why make this about manhood?” Galloway’s ideal modern man could be described as “a kind and conscientious sort who aspires to make a decent living and who looks after their loved ones.” Those traits, fortunately and curiously, “seem blessedly gender-free.”

‘Bread of Angels: A Memoir’ by Patti Smith

“How many memoirs can a richly lived life fill?” asked David Hajdu in The New York Times. Patti Smith has now written several autobiographical books of poetry and prose, “yet one of the marvels of Bread of Angels is that, for a work by a memoirist of uncommon prolificacy, it is remarkably fresh.” Fifteen years after Just Kids, a portrait of her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe that earned her a National Book Award, she has produced a cradle-to-today account of her 79 years that sheds light on life chapters she’s said little about before. “Smith lingers with particular affection on early childhood,” while the book’s biggest reveal may be its “slow, warm” section on the decade-plus that she spent raising two kids in Michigan after she and her husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith of the band MC5, withdrew from the cultural spotlight in 1979.

“Smith’s story unfolds as a bohemian fairy tale,” said Leigh Haber in the Los Angeles Times. Born in 1946, she was raised in southern New Jersey by loving parents with little money and sustained herself on the power of imagination. Though often sick, she was also resilient, and “her extraordinary artist’s eye and soulful nature emerged at an age when the rest of us were still content to simply play in our sandboxes.” The pace of the memoir accelerates once Smith boards a bus to New York City at 20, writes and performs poetry, and falls in with an array of other super talents, including Mapplethorpe, Sam Shepard, and Susan Sontag. Her own fame explodes with the release of her 1975 debut album, Horses.

Fred’s death in 1994, at just 46, is “followed by a cascade of other losses,” which in turn “trigger a creative rebirth,” said Will Hermes in The Guardian. We see the godmother of punk return to writing and performing, and she has barely slowed since. Her voice on the page, it should be noted, “can take some getting used to,” because it’s “oddly formal” and can feel repetitive and indulgent. “But once you settle in, it casts a potent spell, and you’ll learn as much about the artist from her style as from the stories themselves.” Clearly, the Patti Smith we have known and see here in full gave birth to herself. In effect, “she sang herself into being.”

“Lux” by Rosalía

★★★★

Rosalía’s first album in three years “sounds like absolutely nothing else in music right now,” said Julyssa Lopez in Rolling Stone. Already, the 33-year-old Spanish singer, songwriter, and producer had established herself as “pop’s most provocative chaos agent,” proving with 2018’s El Mal Querer and 2022’s Motomami how much pop and reggaeton could be stretched and expanded by an adventurous conservatory-trained flamenco vocalist. Even so, Lux is the two-time Grammy winner’s “most astonishing offer yet,” a “gorgeous, gutting” record that “feels like a timeless work of art” and finds Rosalía singing in 14 languages, tying together opera references, classical flourishes, and the lives of numerous Catholic saints. The album is “not a dopamine machine like Motomami,” said Gio Santiago in Pitchfork. “But it rewards listeners who ache for more from pop artists: more feeling, more risk.” For inspiration, Rosalía studied feminist theory and historical accounts of female saints, then constructed a personal creed that imagines a more equal human relationship with the almighty. “When God descends, I ascend, and we’ll meet halfway,” she sings on “Magnolia.”

“Lux demands the listener submit themselves to its author,” said Alexis Petridis in The Guardian. It sounds “closer to classical music” than anything else riding in the upper echelons of the pop album charts, and it includes guest appearances from both the London Symphony Orchestra and Björk, an apparent inspiration. Despite the record’s complexity, “you don’t need to know what’s going on” to find striking moments among its “uniformly beautiful” songs, especially because Rosalía’s vocal performances are “spectacular firework displays of talent.” Albums this intense require resetting expectations, said Kelefa Sanneh in The New Yorker. “Lux wants to make us stop whatever we’re doing and listen.” There are moments, as in “Yugular,” when the music is “easier to admire than to enjoy.” But if Lux is less broadly appealing than albums that ask less, “it’s also much harder to forget.”

“Sad and Beautiful World” by Mavis Staples

★★★

“Even if we don’t always deserve Mavis Staples, we need her,” said Andrew Gulden in Americana Highways. As has been true for more than seven decades, the 86-year-old gospel, soul, and rock icon is singing with hope on her latest album, but she’s “not sugarcoating a damn thing about the backward mess we somehow find ourselves in.” The opening track, Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan’s “Chicago,” finds Staples’ voice “grittier than it’s ever been, but still just as beautiful.” Backed by guitarists Derek Trucks and Buddy Guy, she transforms the song into her own family’s story of migrating from the South to the Windy City. Kevin Morby’s “Beautiful Strangers” catalogs tragic gun violence and police brutality, but the track here also extends the album’s “beyond stellar” guest list by way of MJ Lenderman’s subtle guitar riffs. “Staples has always used her faith as a light,” said David Hutcheon in Mojo. Whether singing a new song, “Human Mind,” written for her by Hozier and Allison Russell, or revisiting Curtis Mayfield’s “We Got to Have Peace,” she “reaches not for retribution but for the hope that we will be able to start anew tomorrow.”

‘Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America’ by Beth Macy

Beth Macy’s characterization of life today in her Ohio birthplace “might feel familiar, like an update of JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy,” said Alex Kotlowitz in The Atlantic. In fact, the vice president grew up an hour down the road. “But unlike Vance, who blamed much of his hometown’s misfortune on its residents,” Macy returned to Urbana, Ohio, an economically distressed city of 11,000, eager to listen to and learn from her former neighbors about why so many friends no longer talk to one another and why so many embrace the politics of Donald Trump. In Paper Girl, her new hybrid of memoir and social portrait, the Roanoke, Va.–based author of Dopesick and Factory Man “does what most opinion essays don’t even try to do: She gets out of her bubble.” And one of her most striking discoveries is how lonely many Americans are.

Our culture divide won’t be erased anytime soon, said Leigh Haber in The Washington Post. But “in offering us a chair at her kitchen table, Macy has injected a rare note of civility into the conversation.” Macy herself grew up poor; she was the daughter of the town drunk. After a newspaper route earned her pocket money, a Pell Grant enabled her to earn a college degree, and while she never cut all ties to Urbana, she was startled to discover upon her return that a place once proud to have been a stop on the Underground Railroad had shifted from Republican-­leaning to deep red, with QAnon lies metastasizing and Confederate flags flying. Macy traces the discontent back decades and calls on various experts to help fill in the big picture of job losses and failing public institutions. The result is a “searingly poignant” book that’s not afraid to call out liberals for being so blind to red-state pain.

“The conversations Macy has in this book—both with her family and others in MAGA world—are fascinating, but never entirely fruitful,” said Grace Byron in The New Yorker. She fares better when focused on her book’s true star: Silas, a young trans man working against the odds to move up in the world. Silas’ inclusion “could come across as a cynical ploy,” an easy way for Macy to highlight small-town intolerance. But Silas mostly illustrates how much more challenging life has become for Urbana’s ambitious young adults. Meanwhile, Macy blames Trump for the political polarization she sees, which feels too easy. Her “more compelling argument” is that America’s middle class is being crushed by the nation’s ultrarich. Since Trump’s 2016 election, many books have attempted to explain the nation’s deep divide. “Few do so as deftly as Macy’s.”

‘Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary’ by Stefan Fatsis

“Are dictionaries going the way of dodos, pocket calculators, and civil discourse?” asked Chris Hewitt in The Minnesota Star Tribune. Sure, dictionaries are still printed. But the information they specialize in has largely moved online, and Stefan Fatsis’ lively new history of the once-ubiquitous reference books includes an insider account of the collapse of Merriam-Webster’s most recent bid to print an updated unabridged volume. While Word Freak, Fatsis’ previous book, proved gripping because it built to a Scrabble championship showdown, “Unabridged does not have that kind of narrative spine.” It’s instead the kind of book “enjoyed by dipping in and out of its discrete chapters,” whether Fatsis is focused on how social media is changing English or forecasting how AI may change how we view dictionaries.

The book “abounds with curious particulars,” said Henry Hitchings in The Wall Street Journal. Fatsis amusingly relates how Noah Webster strove to modernize English spelling when he created America’s first dictionary in 1806, only to be laughed at for suggestions such as “soop” and “spunge.” Insults were also flung at Merriam-­­Webster in 1961 when its unabridged Third New International edition included an entry for “ain’t.” That was the book primed for a revision when Fatsis landed work as a trainee lexicographer at Merriam-­Webster’s Springield, Mass., headquarters. While he’s often sardonic, his book is also “a stout defense of the craft of making dictionaries.”

Fatsis’ best passages detail office life at Merriam-­Webster, said Dan Piepenbring in The New York Times. We’re there both for a retiree’s wistful send-off and a debate over a risqué definition of Dutch oven. At times, the book feels “like a Frederick Wiseman documentary about the last days of lexicography,” which I wanted more of. But Unabridged also provides “an excellent primer on Merriam-­Webster’s role in the culture wars, with thorough accounts of the dictionary’s approach to the N-word, the F-word, ‘Covid-19,’ and ‘woke.’” In the end, Merriam’s place in our national life comes across as privileged but tenuous. “We ask the dictionary to serve as both the authoritarian father and the laid-back uncle, but we bridle if it settles too comfortably into either role.”

Bugonia

Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos (R)

★★★

“If Emma Stone didn’t exist, some of her movies couldn’t exist—especially not the ones she’s created with edgy director Yorgos Lanthimos,” said Amy Nicholson in the Los Angeles Times. The two-time Oscar winner “can play shrewd, silly, gorgeous, repellent, frail, and frightening simultaneously,” and she hits all those notes in her fourth feature with the Poor Things auteur. Stone portrays Michelle Fuller, a Big Pharma CEO who is kidnapped by two men convinced she’s an alien who’s working to destroy Earth. And while a rundown of the abuse Michelle suffers “would sound like a Saw film,” Stone renders the character so slickly insincere that she “makes it OK for us to laugh at Michelle’s torment.” Jesse Plemons, who plays Teddy, the lead kidnapper, “matches her intensity and manages to outdo her craziness,” said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast. Teddy orders Michelle’s head shaved because he believes her hair is her means of communicating with fellow ETs. But Lanthimos leaves open the possibility that Teddy is onto something, and “the director’s askew aesthetics are a natural fit for his absurd material,” the use of low-angle imagery adding to the film’s “wobbly sense of reality.” Still, though Lanthimos’ dramatization of the vast divide between the powerful and the powerless feels dangerous, said David Fear in Rolling Stone, it’s “not as dangerous as it could have been.” At least Bugonia gets at a core trouble with our times: There’s no truth we can all agree on.

The Mastermind

Directed by Kelly Reichardt (R)

★★★

If you go into The Mastermind expecting a typical heist film, “you’re going to be disappointed and puzzled,” said Matt Zoller Seitz in RogerEbert.com. Kelly Reichardt’s latest is “a relatively quiet movie that takes its time laying out its plot,” and the director uses the crime that dominates the first half mainly as a pretext to probe the character of the title figure, “a soft-spoken hustler whose profound selfishness becomes more apparent with each scene.” Josh O’Connor stars, playing J.B. Mooney, a privileged, underemployed father of two who in 1970 chooses to nick four abstract paintings from a small Massachusetts museum, and the actor proves again that “he’s one of the great recent finds in world cinema.” It’s “exciting just to watch him sit and think.” Unlike the recent smash-and-grab at the Louvre, J.B.’s hands-off scheme involving two accomplices “goes awry immediately,” said Shirley Li in The Atlantic. “But the robbery isn’t the primary focus.” As J.B. “clumsily goes on the lam,” unnecessarily leaving hurt feelings, The Mastermind builds “a remarkably precise exploration of hubris as a self-destructive force.” Because J.B. makes so many avoidable mistakes, the film may also be “Reichardt’s funniest thus far.” Like Reichardt’s other films, including Certain Women and First Cow, “The Mastermind feels modest when you’re watching it and downright brilliant once it’s had some time to settle in your mind,” said Alison Willmore in NYMag.com. J.B. is a man who’s gotten by for years on charm and his parents’ support. When he eventually seeks sanctuary with two old friends, though, we suddenly see him through their eyes, and “it’s unbearably sad.”

Nouvelle Vague

Directed by Richard Linklater (R)

★★★

“When a movie makes you want to weep, you know something is happening,” said Stephanie Zacharek in Time. Richard Linklater’s second film released in recent weeks is a tribute to Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, which means it “may end up being appreciated by only 2.6% of the general population.” But Linklater has poured great care into dramatizing the 20-day shoot in 1959 Paris that produced Godard’s New Wave masterpiece, and to watch this film’s Godard and his crew make the thing is “a particular kind of bliss.” It should inspire many viewers to create something themselves. But there’s “a major problem with Nouvelle Vague,” said Rory Doherty in The A.V. Club, and it’s that it wasn’t written as Breathless was. Godard, who in 1959 was a critic eager to join several peers in making the leap to directing, wrote his crime tale meets love story on the fly. The screenplay for Nouvelle Vague, by contrast, “conforms to the soft, putty-like structure of filmmaker biopics”: An undiscovered genius strains against conventions and at last breaks through. Shot in black and white and acted in French, “Nouvelle Vague is heady with meticulous reconstitutions of period style,” said Richard Brody in The New Yorker. Mostly, though, it’s “a vision of the risks that filmmakers incur in order to seize the freedom needed for their art,” including the risk of driving actors mad. Linklater has been making movies for 35 years now, and this effort, in the end, is “a feature-length thank-you note, from Richard to Jean-Luc, for freeing him to make films his own way.”