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.”

‘Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity’ by Paul Kingsnorth

“Paul Kingsnorth tends to think in the most sweeping terms imaginable,” said Alexander Nazaryan in The New York Times. In Against the Machine, his recent best seller, the British novelist, poet, and essayist urges us all to rediscover our humanity before “the Machine” fully exterminates it. And by “the Machine,” he means a belief system born during the Enlightenment that glorifies technological progress and has induced the people of the West to gradually cede power over their lives to government, corporations, and other large institutions. Kingsnorth has spread these ideas via his Substack, said Justin Ariel Bailey in Christianity Today, and he has now consolidated his missives into “a trenchant and terrifying account of what modern people have sacrificed in exchange for technology’s promise of power and autonomy.”

“Kingsnorth is a fascinating man,” said Corbin K. Barthold in City Journal. In his youth, he was an eco-activist who chained himself to bulldozers, and by his early 40s he was both an accomplished novelist and one of the U.K.’s leading environmentalists. But he lost faith in the green movement, and in 2014 he and his wife decamped to rural Ireland, where they homeschool their children and grow much of their food. Eventually, he joined the Eastern Orthodox Christian church. “Kingsnorth is a gifted stylist and a syncretic thinker,” and his ideas, at their best, are “sharp and layered.” In this “engrossing but often vexing” book, unfortunately, he “rests his boldest claims on little more than vibes.” He romanticizes the rural life of past centuries, ignoring its hardships, while his distrust of economic data “leaves his treatise fatally incomplete.”

Still, “the deeper provocations of Against the Machine are worth hearing, however gloomy,” said Cal Revely-Calder in The New Yorker. “Kingsnorth is surely right that public life has been overtaken by a narrow fixation on data and measurement” and that technologies of convenience are robbing us of skills, such as cooking, that were once foundational to the human experience. He tells us that the Machine has severed our ties to the four anchors of prior human cultures: people, place, prayer, and the past. But he has no concrete recommendations on how to fight the Machine beyond walking away from it—or at least limiting our participation in its growing omnipotence—while seeking to support small communities built upon older values. Even Kingsnorth, however, had to access the internet and work at a laptop to produce his book. In short, “we can’t walk away when there is no ‘away.’”

‘Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice’ by Virginia Roberts Giuffre

“Given its punishing nature, why read this book?” asked Emma Brockes in The Guardian. Virginia Giuffre, who died by suicide at 41 earlier this year, went public years ago with her allegations of being raped as a 16-year-old by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell and subsequently being trafficked by the pair to Britain’s Prince Andrew and other powerful men. (Andrew, for his part, denies any sexual contact with Giuffre.) “But while the book is relentlessly, shockingly hard, it is also a clear-eyed and necessary account of how sex offenders operate.” The deft narrative constructed by Giuffre and a co-­writer “does what deposition can’t by taking us into the room with her.” And though it adds only one figure to the list of men Epstein allegedly trafficked underage girls to—an unnamed former prime minister—it does make Maxwell, the deceased Epstein’s accomplice, look entirely undeserving of clemency.

It’s also “the saddest story I’ve read in years,” said Alexandra Jacobs in The New York Times. Giuffre describes being sexually abused throughout her childhood, beginning at age 7, allegedly at the hands of her father and a friend of his, both of whom eventually raped her. (Her father denies her accusations against him.) Giuffre says she later was raped in a car by two teenagers and by a stranger who picked her up when she ran away from a juvenile detention center. She was thus a vulnerable target at 16 when she landed a job at Donald Trump’s Palm Beach, Fla., resort and was quickly lured by Maxwell into Epstein’s twisted world. While “it will take years to unfurl the tentacles Epstein wrapped around finance, law, and politics,” Nobody’s Girl “floats free, self-­assured and self-­­contained—a true American tragedy.”

Some of Giuffre’s testimony here “feels unsatisfyingly neat,” said Claire Allfree in The Telegraph (U.K.). She oddly claims, for example, that the famous snapshot showing Prince Andrew and her together on the night of their alleged first sexual encounter was taken because she wanted to share the moment with her mother. Still, “the story is deeper and darker than this book can say,” because even Giuffre feared naming all accomplices she knew of. For standing up to Epstein, she “doesn’t deserve our scrutiny so much as our admiration.”

When you make a purchase using links on our site, The Week may earn a commission. All reviews are written independently by our editorial team.

Journalist Gilbert King is the author of Devil in the Grove, a Pulitzer Prize–winning 2012 account of a battle for justice led by Thurgood Marshall. King’s new book, Bone Valley, is adapted from his acclaimed podcast about a Florida man wrongly imprisoned for 36 years.

‘All the King’s Men’ by Robert Penn Warren (1946)

A sweeping American tragedy about power, corruption, and the cost of truth, following Willie Stark, a fictional populist governor, and the reporter chronicling Stark’s journey. The prose is musical, the moral vision unsparing. I reread it before starting a new project to reset my compass—and to remember that the bar for narrative ambition can be impossibly high. Buy it here.

‘Wise Blood’ by Flannery O’Connor (1952)

This darkly comic tale of faith, fraud, and obsession feels both Southern Gothic and shockingly modern. Hazel Motes is one of literature’s great anti-­prophets, raging at grace he can’t escape. Every line in this book counts. There’s no fat—just sharp, unforgettable writing. Buy it here.

‘Just Mercy’ by Bryan Stevenson (2014)

Stevenson’s memoir of building the Equal Justice Initiative is a master class in empathy and lawyering, centered on a wrongful 1988 murder conviction. It shows how systems fail—and how relentless care can bend them. When I need reminding why these stories matter, I return to this book. Buy it here.

‘Dead Man Walking’ by Sister Helen Prejean (1993)

With unsparing honesty, Prejean walks readers through death row, victims’ pain, and the moral wreckage of capital punishment. The book refuses easy answers yet never wavers in its humanity. Sister Helen’s calm persistence reminds me that listening itself can be a form of witness. Buy it here.

‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ by David Grann (2017)

Grann reconstructs the Osage murders of the 1920s and the birth of the FBI with investigative rigor and a storyteller’s precision. It’s a blueprint for revealing crimes hidden in plain sight. I took from it a lesson in endurance—how persistence can surface what others worked hard to erase. Buy it here.

‘Shot in the Heart’ by Mikal Gilmore (1994)

In 1977, Gary Gilmore was executed by firing squad in Utah, making him the first person executed in the U.S. after the death penalty’s return. His brother Mikal’s memoir doesn’t dwell on Gary’s notoriety but on the human cost within their family—a reckoning I find unforgettable. Buy it here.

The historian and broadcaster chooses his favourite books. He is talking about his book, “Endgame 1944: How Stalin Won the War”, at the Stratford Literary Festival, 30 October-2 November.

Stalingrad

Vasily Grossman, 1952, translated by Robert Chandler, 2019

Grossman is the 20th century’s Tolstoy, a genius whose “Stalingrad” is no less powerful than his later masterpiece, “Life and Fate”, but on a more intimate scale: a heroic struggle portrayed from the perspective of a wonderfully layered cast of characters.

Red Sparrow

Jason Matthews, 2013

The first in a trilogy of spy novels that are rooted in the murderous underworld of Putin’s Foreign Intelligence Service. “Red Sparrow” is a “sexspionage” intelligence officer who is turned by her hatred of the system. In an intricate web of international intrigue and breath-suspending drama, the emotions are intense and the violence is gruesome. Written by a former CIA operative, it feels terrifyingly authentic.

The Mayor of Casterbridge

Thomas Hardy, 1886

Set in an apparently tranquil market town, this is one of Hardy’s bleakest Wessex novels. The protagonist is a proud pillar of the community who is brought low by his past and his own deep flaws, doomed by remorseless fate.

Master and Commander

Patrick O’Brien, 1969

The first of a series of 20 novels set in the Napoleonic Wars, which are rich in nautical detail. Their brilliance lies in O’Brien’s portrayal of the deep if unlikely friendship between two of fiction’s most endearing characters – a buccaneering naval officer and his saturnine ship’s surgeon, who is a spy.

History of the Second World War

Winston Churchill, 1948-54

This is history on the grand scale. Of course you don’t get scholarly detachment; Churchill’s sweeping authorial vision is inevitably Anglocentric and often self-serving. Nevertheless, it is surprisingly candid and an awesome and invaluable achievement.

Titles in print are available from The Week Bookshop

The writer and comedian chooses his favourite biographies and memoirs. His new book, “What Have I Done? My Autobiography” is out now; he’ll be speaking at Edinburgh’s Assembly Rooms on 13 October.

My Autobiography

Charles Chaplin, 1964

A beautifully written account of the life of the most celebrated comic artist who ever lived, who journeyed from a childhood of unimaginable pain and poverty to fame and fortune without frontiers. Chaplin understood that comedy and tragedy are two sides of the same coin. After reading this book, it’s easy to understand why.

A Talent to Amuse

Sheridan Morley, 1969

A terrific introduction to Noël Coward, the man once referred to by actors and writers alike as “The Master”. It’s dated to the modern eye, containing as it does only guarded allusions to Coward’s private life as a gay man, but it’s entertaining and concise on his fabulous life in the theatre. I read it when I was 13 and it made me want to write comic plays myself.

The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill

William Manchester and Paul Reid, 2015

Anyone in any doubt of the towering genius, awesome courage and deeply inspiring (if flawed) character of Winston Churchill should read this great adventure story. As should anyone who still clings to Marx’s theory of historical materialism – individuals can make history, and few have made more of it than Churchill.

The Moon’s a Balloon

David Niven, 1971

One of the best show-business memoirs ever written. A hilarious, hair-raising and touchingly human story, and also a brilliant introduction to Hollywood’s golden age. Niven was a glorious amateur, falling as effortlessly into the role of movie star as he did of real-life war hero.

Will in the World

Stephen Greenblatt, 2004

This is the book I started with when I began work on “Upstart Crow.” A thrillingly illuminating, intellectually rigorous, psychologically astute investigation into the life and work of Shakespeare. Who very definitely wrote his plays.

Titles in print are available from The Week Bookshop

Robert Redford was constantly described as “golden.” The adjective applied to his wavy blond hair, his sunny all-American good looks—which once led co-star Dustin Hoffman to call him a “walking surfboard”—and his decades-long career as a movie star, as headline after headline dubbed him Hollywood’s “golden boy.” But Redford was, as director Sydney Pollack once said, “a golden boy with a darkness in him.” The classic Redford character had an easy charm but with darker currents beneath the surface. Among dozens of credits, his best-known roles include a wily outlaw in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), a Depression-era grifter in The Sting (1973), a vacuous presidential contender in The Candidate (1972), and an aging baseball prodigy in The Natural (1984). A Utah resident who disdained Hollywood, Redford used his stardom as a stepping stone to other roles: as an Oscar-winning director, an environmental activist, and the founder of the Sundance Film Festival. Increasingly choosy about acting roles, he was drawn by the line “between what appears and what is,” he said in 1990. “There was always that tension, and the darker side is what interests me.”

Charles Robert Redford Jr. was born in Santa Monica, Calif., where his family spent “years on the edge of poverty” before his milkman father became an accountant for Standard Oil, said The Washington Post. Alienated by his father’s cautious conformity, he was a self-described “f---up” who “channeled his restless energy into athletics.” He was recruited to play college baseball but dropped out after a year to study art in Paris and Florence. When he returned to the states, to study set design, he was required to take an acting class and discovered his natural talent. He switched focus and entered the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where he turned heads “with the tightly coiled anger he brought to his stage auditions.” After stints on TV dramas, he landed the lead in Neil Simon’s 1963 play Barefoot in the Park, a Broadway hit that opened the door to film work. When he was cast alongside Paul Newman as the Sundance Kid in Butch Cassidy, Redford’s life took a turn, said The Times (U.K.). The revisionist Western proved 1969’s top-drawing film and made him a “bona fide movie star.”

Through the 1970s, Redford “starred in celebrated and award-winning movies,” said The Wall Street Journal. Another Newman pairing, The Sting, won seven Oscars and brought him his only nomination for Best Actor. The Way We Were (1973), a romantic drama with Barbra Streisand, and All the President’s Men (1976), with Redford and Hoffman as the reporters who broke the Watergate scandal, won several Oscars each. At his fame’s peak, he turned to directing, and film roles “became more sporadic,” said the Associated Press. His debut, Ordinary People (1980), about an upper-middle-class family wrestling with a son’s death, was a critical “triumph,” and won him Oscars for Best Picture and Best Directing. Other efforts included A River Runs Through It (1992), set in rural Montana, and Quiz Show (1994), about the TV game show scandals of the 1950s, which drew Best Picture and Best Directing nominations.

Redford’s most lasting influence may have been as the man who “invigorated American independent cinema” through Sundance, said NBCNews.com. Based in Park City, Utah, since 1985, the festival emerged from an institute Redford founded to nurture “talent from outside the Hollywood system.” A launching pad for directors like Quentin Tarantino and Steven Soderbergh, it “grew into a cornerstone of the film industry” and, to Redford’s chagrin, one of its “most glitzy extravaganzas.” Such spectacle was not for Redford, who through decades of celebrity “led a remarkably private life,” said the Los Angeles Times. He was a loner who could be mercurial and aloof; even Newman, his longtime friend, once said he didn’t feel he really knew the man. Acting into his 80s, Redford spent much of his time on his 7,000-acre property in Provo Canyon, lobbying for environmental causes. “Some people have analysis,” he once said. “I have Utah.”

“Man Ray didn’t consider photography to be a form of art,” said Marion Maneker in Puck. That notion may surprise some visitors to the Met’s survey of one of the artist’s most fertile periods, because it’s “easy to get lost” in the 64 experimental photographs that constitute the heart of the show. In 1921, Man Ray moved to Paris from New York City, and he later said he was developing images for a fashion client when he left a couple of random objects atop photographic paper and accidentally exposed the paper to light. Excited by the ghostly images the process produced, he repeated it, dubbed the results “rayographs,” and printed a dozen in a 1922 portfolio, Les champs délicieux, that caused a sensation. Today, those 12 images are “both familiar and otherworldly.” They also suggest how the rayographs provide a key to understanding everything their creator did.

“Conceptual pieces were a part of Man Ray’s practice from the very beginning,” said Rossilynne Skena Culgan in Time Out. Born Emmanuel Radnitzky in 1890, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants grew up in Brooklyn, studied art in Manhattan, and was heavily influenced by the 1913 Armory Show that introduced America to Europe’s postimpressionist avant-garde. Before the rayographs, he created a series of colorful collages titled Revolving Doors, presenting them on a rotating stand that visitors to the Met can spin. He “also had a sense of humor,” as can be seen in 1920’s Catherine Barometer, which looks like a device for gauging weather shifts but suggests a need to monitor its namesake’s moods. By then, he was a friend and collaborator of Marcel Duchamp’s, and took Duchamp’s advice in relocating to Paris to seek greater acclaim.

Before the rayographs, Man Ray was already creating “moody, enigmatic” photographs by focusing on purpose-built everyday objects, said Arthur Lubow in The New York Times. He lit an eggbeater to emphasize its looping shadows in an image he titled Man. He also used an extended exposure to turn accumulated dust into an image that suggests a vast, arid landscape. Similarly, the everyday objects that appear in the rayographs are “transfigured by the artist’s skillful manipulations of luminescence and shadows.” And while those are the works that pushed Ray’s career into overdrive, the “showstopper” in this multimedia gathering of some 160 objects is a variation that also happens to be the most expensive photograph ever sold at auction. In Le Violon d’Ingres, from 1924, his lover Kiki de Montparnasse appears naked to just below the waist and her back, which is turned to the camera, is adorned with likenesses of the f-holes on a violin. The artist used his rayograph process to burn in the suggestive flourishes, and “in its beauty and absurdity,” the $12.4 million work “encapsulates, arguably better than any other artwork, the insouciant wit of surrealism and the originality of Man Ray.”

‘Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution’ by Amy Coney Barrett

Maybe the America we know still has a chance, said Noah Feldman in The Washington Post. As Donald Trump’s attacks on the U.S. constitutional system mount, “Amy Coney Barrett is the most important justice on the Supreme Court,” and in her first book, she lays out her judicial philosophy in a way that makes clear both why she occupies the very middle of the nine-member court’s current ideological spread and why the rule of law may withstand Trump’s assault. Liberal constitutional scholars like me reject one of the major pillars of her philosophy: originalism. But “unlike some of her conservative colleagues,” including those who see the late Antonin Scalia as a model, Barrett “takes seriously Scalia’s personal aspiration to decide cases purely on the basis of what the law says, not what she thinks it should be.” That helps explain why she has broken from her conservative colleagues and the president’s lawyers even on some major cases.

At a moment when the justices often spar sharply in the court’s written opinions, Barrett’s book is “a model of collegiality,” said Barton Swaim in The Wall Street Journal. “My own conclusions from it are, first, that she has a sharp and well-organized mind, and, second, that she is a very nice person.” She “seems genuinely burdened by the reality that most Americans know little about the Supreme Court” and devotes many pages to explaining how the court operates. When explaining her approach, she “writes superbly on originalism,” the idea that the Constitution must be interpreted according to its text as the framers understood that text. But she’s a bit less persuasive in explaining how the “due process” clauses of the Fifth and 14th Amendments protect certain unnamed individual rights but not others.

If you hoped the book would help you get to know Barrett herself, you’re out of luck, said Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times. The former Notre Dame law professor and mother of seven “clearly knows that readers crave relatability, especially from women, so she offers a few breadcrumbs.” Still, “she’s not about to let her guard down, even for a reported $2 million advance.” Her book’s “studied blandness” becomes more irksome, though, when she’s claiming that justices are merely referees deciding who has played by the rules as the rules are written. For almost 50 years before she joined the court, the law of the land was that women have a right to abortion. For almost 250 years, the president had no right to act like a king. She voted to change those rules.

‘Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival’ by Stephen Greenblatt

“Christopher Marlowe was, is, and will doubtless remain a troublemaker,” said Anthony Lane in The New Yorker. In Stephen Greenblatt’s new book, the 16th-century poet and playwright best known as a contemporary rival of William Shakespeare’s is presented as the wild-child catalyst of the English Renaissance, and Greenblatt is “right to sound the trumpet.” Marlowe lit the fuse in at least one sense: Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth all owe him a debt for freeing English verse by pioneering the use of unrhymed iambic pentameter. Beyond that, Marlowe today seems “frighteningly” modern in his relish for shocking audiences in his portrayals of violence, vice, and religious bigotry. Though many mysteries surround Marlowe’s life and violent death at 29, Greenblatt isn’t fazed. Indeed, “speculative riffs are not a weakness but a mainspring of his biographical approach.”

Clearly, Marlowe was a prodigy, said Hamilton Cain in The Boston Globe. Born, like Shakespeare, in 1564, during Queen Elizabeth’s stormy regime, Marlowe was a cobbler’s son who won scholarships that enabled him to earn two Cambridge degrees, and the queen’s advisers took such an interest in him that evidence suggests he may have been a spy for the crown. “Greenblatt argues, at best, a circumstantial case for the playwright’s espionage role, yet these speculations season his narrative, lending crucial context.” Protestants and Catholics were at war, and Marlowe took a pot stirrer’s interest in the contest of ideas and the violence it provoked.

“Oh, to be a student in one of Greenblatt’s Harvard classes!” said Heller McAlpin in The Christian Science Monitor. The Pulitzer–winning author of The Swerve and Will in the World backs up his praise for Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Tamburlaine the Great with “astute textual analysis,” and he earns our trust as a biographer by admitting where the facts of Marlowe’s life can’t be nailed down. Was he a spy or crook? Was he targeted for murder or killed in a boozy brawl? “With its mix of fastidious scholarship, storytelling chops, and educated guesswork,” Dark Renaissance gives readers reason to celebrate Marlowe’s daring response to his own troubled era.

Three years after it launched, Renault’s midsize crossover, the Austral, has been given an update with new shock absorbers and bump stops to improve the ride. As before, the Austral is only available as a self-charging hybrid in the UK. Now four-wheel steering has been ditched as an option here too. The facelift includes a new bonnet, grille and tailgate, with “fancier lights” in line with a new brand identity, said Car Magazine.

If you're after a hybrid crossover, the Austral is “a good choice”, said Top Gear. All models have a 1.2-litre petrol engine with a four-speed gearbox, plus an electric motor with two gears of its own for 197bhp combined; and on paper, it does an excellent 58.9mpg. It’s quiet and smooth in town, and handles corners well without too much body roll, but the steering is overly light unless you’re in Sport mode.

The updated Austral has more supportive front seats and better sound proofing. There are three trim levels, and standard kit (Techno trim) is generous, including 19-inch alloys, LED headlights and smartphone mirroring. The interior has lots of storage and plenty of room up front. A 12.3in driver’s display and a 12in touchscreen with “crisp graphics” dominate the dash, but there are some physical controls too, said What Car?.

“Hard as it is to believe at this late date, not everyone gets yet that Sabrina Carpenter is up to something a lot more wily than just being a sex goddess,” said Chris Willman in Variety. The 26-year-old pop star just scored her second No. 1 album with Man’s Best Friend, whose cover art shows her on hands and knees, playing dog to a man who’s holding a few locks of her blond hair. But understand: The former Disney teen star is “a comedienne at heart,” and “no other star of songland is nearly so dedicated to getting laughs out of the carnage in the battle of the sexes.” The photo spoofs her own readiness to do more for undeserving guys than they’d do for her, and the dozen songs on her “very winning” new album drive home the theme by routinely mocking men’s inadequacies and her inability to stop lusting after them.

But where last year’s Short n’ Sweet established Carpenter as “one of pop’s queens of quirk,” said Jon Caramanica in The New York Times, this album “has all the hallmarks of a rush job.” Almost every song “feels traceable to a very specific ancestor,” echoing hits by Olivia Newton-John, ABBA, Blondie, and others. And the meter of the lyrics often doesn’t even fit the melodies. Yet Man’s Best Friend is still “a bright, effervescent pop record,” said Amanda Petrusich in The New Yorker, and the borrowing Carpenter does fits her approach to music making and modern romance. “I like that she is trying to inject a little messiness into a pop landscape that often feels focus-grouped into oblivion.” Besides, “maybe she’s showing us the sanest way to fall in love.” Namely, “don’t think too much” and “laugh when you can.”

Patrick Hemingway was comfortable in the shadow of his famous father, Ernest Hemingway. Though the elder Hemingway was famously troubled and mercurial, their affection was deep and mutual. “I would rather fish with you and shoot with you than anybody that I have ever known since I was a boy,” Ernest wrote in a letter to his son. Patrick completed Ernest’s unfinished novel True at First Light and published Dear Papa, a collection of 120 letters the two exchanged over a period of 30 years. His father’s outsized reputation, Patrick said, “didn’t bother me because I don’t think that I was terribly ambitious.”

Patrick Miller Hemingway was born in Kansas City, Mo., to Ernest and his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, during a stopover in the family’s many travels. The middle child of three boys, Patrick mostly spent his childhood “in Key West with summers in Wyoming and Idaho while his private school education was punctuated by regular hunting and fishing trips,” said The Times (U.K.). Inspired by his father’s 1935 novel The Green Hills of Africa, Patrick moved to Tanzania in 1951, funding the move by selling the Arkansas plantation he inherited on his mother’s death. He became a safari guide, hunter, and forestry officer for the United Nations, returning to the U.S. in 1975.

Hemingway “managed a long life in a family haunted by suicide and mental illness,” said the Associated Press. Patrick’s brother Gregory, who transitioned and adopted the name Gloria, struggled with alcohol abuse and died in a Miami jail cell in 2001. Ernest famously suffered from depression and alcoholism and shot himself in 1961. “Under proper treatment, he would have had a nice old age,” Patrick said, before adding sardonically, “there’s no such thing as a nice old age.”

When you make a purchase using links on our site, The Week may earn a commission. All reviews are written independently by our editorial team.

Jessica Francis Kane's new novel, Fonseca, fictionalizes an event in the life of British novelist Penelope Fitzgerald. It follows the future literary legend as she and her 6-year-old son travel to a small town in Mexico in 1952, hoping to claim an unexpected inheritance.

'The Beginning of Spring' by Penelope Fitzgerald (1988)

I've been steeped in everything by and about Fitzgerald for the better part of a decade, and this is my favorite of her novels. A city (Moscow), a landscape (winter giving way to spring), and a vanished time (pre-revolutionary Russia) are all mastered in less than 200 pages. The English printer Frank Reid—confused husband, loving but baffled father, patient friend—is one of her best creations. Buy it here.

'The Means of Escape' by Penelope Fitzgerald (2000)

Fitzgerald was preparing this book, her only story collection, when she died in 2000. Like her novels, the stories are precise and morally astute. They range across countries and ages, stretch from the historical to the supernatural, and are all mordantly funny. My favorite is "Our Lives Are Only Lent to Us"; it provides clues to her thinking about a place like Fonseca. Buy it here.

'The Afterlife' by Penelope Fitzgerald (2003)

After you've read all of her novels (there are only nine), you'll want more of Fitzgerald's distinctive sensibility. That is when you turn to this collection, full of brilliant literary and personal essays. Buy it here.

'According to Queeney' by Beryl Bainbridge (2001)

Bainbridge was a contemporary and an acquaintance of Fitzgerald, as well as a fellow master of the supreme art of what and exactly how much to leave out. This novel about Samuel Johnson captures the great man's personality with dexterity, humor, and compassion. Buy it here.

'The Queen of the Tambourine' by Jane Gardam (1991)

Gardam, an approximate contemporary, and the third guest at my dream dinner party after Fitzgerald and Bainbridge, shares their wit and humor. Gardam is well known for her Old Filth series, but this novel about a woman losing and then regaining her sense of self is not to be missed. Buy it here.

'Beautyland' by Marie-Helene Bertino (2024)

This beautiful novel about Adina, a girl not quite of this world, is my favorite novel of the past year. Fitzgerald would have admired the way it champions the underdog and the misunderstood, her heroes to the end. Buy it here.

Southampton, New York

Landscaped with dogwood and cherry trees, perennial flower gardens, and evergreens, this restored 1907 cedar-shingled home in the Hamptons includes stained glass, crown molding, wood panels, and built-ins, plus a high-end country kitchen with an eat-in butcher-block island.

A large, screened porch faces a patio, pool, and pool house. Dining and beaches are a five-minute drive. $7,950,000. Dawn Petrillo and Pat Petrillo, Sotheby’s International Realty—Southampton Brokerage, (631) 278-9578.

Nantucket, Massachusetts

This five-bedroom Cape Cod–style home on the summer-destination island features a fenced garden with raised veggie and herb beds, a potting shed, mature trees, and hydrangeas. The living room of the updated 1992 home has a vaulted ceiling and wide-plank pegged wood floors, and downstairs are a theater, bar, and gym.

A pergola-topped deck looks over the 3-plus-acre estate, which includes a pool and fountain. $4,940,000. Cynthia Lenhart, William Raveis Real Estate/Luxury Portfolio International, (508) 325-1648.

Winnetka, Illinois

Designed by architect Edwin Clark and built in 1927, this English manor in the Chicago suburbs features a landscaped garden with a rose ring, a greenhouse, and undulating flower beds adjacent to bent grass lawns and a tennis court. Inside the six-bedroom are a grand curved staircase, arched doorways, formal sitting rooms, a sunroom, and a screened porch.

A two-tier bluestone terrace overlooks the nearly 2-acre grounds, and there is a three-car garage topped by a two-bedroom apartment. $4,599,000. Paige Dooley, Compass, (847) 609-0963.

Dixon, New Mexico

Along the Rio Embudo about 40 minutes from Taos, this compound has 13 raised garden beds, a greenhouse, and peach, nectarine, cherry, and old-growth apple and pear trees. The adobe two-bedroom includes a chef’s kitchen with a kiva fireplace and a primary bedroom with a screened balcony.

Spread across nearly 4 acres are a casita, garden house, dining pavilion, art studio, and 400 feet of river frontage. $2,300,000. Jolie Jones, Jones West, (575) 741-0603.

Denver, Colorado

The backyard of this 1900 Denver Square–style home in the Capitol Hill neighborhood has an 8-foot wood fence, raised garden beds, perimeter beds, a water feature, a deck, and a dining area. The four-bedroom’s restored details include a wood staircase, exposed brick, and leaded glass, and among its modern updates are a new kitchen with quartz counters and a primary bath with a deep tub.

Parks and museums are nearby. $1,400,000. Mckinze Casey, LIV Sotheby’s International Realty, (720) 539-4547.

Royal Oak, Michigan

On a tree-lined street about 20 minutes from downtown Detroit, this 1928 brick Tudor has a backyard with mature trees, perennial plantings, a fire pit, and a pergola. Inside the four-bedroom are wood floors, leaded and stained-glass windows, arched doorways, and a lower-level family room, laundry, bath, and wet bar.

The kitchen opens to the garden, and a two-level gazebo sits atop the garage. $480,000. Linda Novak, Max Broock Birmingham/Luxury Portfolio International, (248) 408-7811.

'A Matter of Time' by Laufey

★★★

"The emergence of Laufey is largely attributable to her abundant talent," said Maura Johnston in Rolling Stone. But "Gen Z's chief flag-waver for throwback pop" is also "a product of her time." In the TikTok era, there are many ears seeking out singable period-style tunes, and Laufey has both a "full-bodied alto" and "a knack for marrying 21st-century problems with fishhook melodies that recall standards from previous centuries."

The L.A.-based 26-year-old Icelandic singer-songwriter opens her third album on a bright note with the carefree "ding-dong" refrain of "Clockwork." But she's also exploring modern love's pitfalls, and by the time "Sabotage" closes the album with a touch of chaos, she's calling herself her own worst enemy. "Lyrically, this album is as timely as it gets," said Roisin O'Connor in The Independent (U.K.). With these 15 songs, "Laufey has achieved the kind of confessional storytelling that makes Taylor Swift so relatable." Laufey, though, adds "glamour and glitz." From the "lovely momentum" of "Carousel" to the "shivery, spellbinding flair" of "Forget-Me-Not," this is "sublime" work.

'Private Music' by Deftones

★★★★

"Against all odds," Deftones now rank among rock's elite, said Sadie Sartini Garner in Pitchfork. Once known as "nu-metal B-listers," the Sacramento-born quartet are today "avant-rock heroes" with a sizable Gen Z following. And while the band's 10th album is "unlikely to draw in unconvinced listeners," it shows them "fully in control" of their menacing sound, "able to effortlessly bend it around whatever structures they put in place." Still, the turnaround in Deftones' reputation owes mostly to the rock audience, particularly "the evolution of how people feel about heaviness, romance, and the primacy of our emotional life." A great Deftones song, as always, "can feel like an arduous hike to a stunning vista that reveals a violent storm on the horizon."

Private Music "should please all corners of their wide fandom," said Neil Z.Yeung in AllMusic. The band's "muscular" guitar riffs and Chino Moreno's "primal screams" are tempered by "catchy chord progressions" and "shimmering, melodic programming," producing a "sensual, sexy, and soulful" 11-song set that reaffirms Deftones as "one of the greatest bands of their generation."

'Live Laugh Love' by Earl Sweatshirt

★★★

Surrendering to the "weird logic" of Earl Sweatshirt's sixth solo album is "an enrapturing way to spend 25 minutes," said Alexis Petridis in The Guardian. "This is music from deep within hip-hop's 'otherground,' an area in which normal rules don't apply." The songs "unexpectedly short out or crash into each other." On the sixth track, "Live," the "bright-hued" synth backing starts glitching midway through before the beat and the rhythm of Earl's rhymes shift entirely. Yet there are hooks and samples here, including the harpsichord loop on "Forge," that "dig into your brain as they repeat."

Renowned for his bleak outlook, Earl seems to have lightened up, perhaps owing to the arrival of the children he pays tribute to on "Gamma (need the <3)" and "Tourmaline." The quest for self-knowledge has always colored Earl's music, and "he's using Live Laugh Love to catch us up on his hard-earned progress," said Kiana Fitzgerald in Consequence. On "Well Done," a track that's all of 71 seconds long, he raps about being "baptized in the fires of flaw and failures." Blink and you could miss it, but "Earl Sweatshirt might finally be happy."

The much-anticipated rollout of OpenAI's new GPT-5 artificial intelligence model was so poorly received that it may have jammed the AI hype engine, said Dave Lee in Bloomberg. After pumping up GPT-5's launch with an image of the Star Wars Death Star and claims of near superintelligence, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was forced into an embarrassing rollback, restoring access to an older model for displeased users. Investors in other AI companies largely shrugged off the stumble—good news for Wall Street, because the field is a singular driver of stock market records. But "what sets the narrative around AI progress (or lack of) is practical application, and it's here where all AI companies are still falling short." One piece of research from McKinsey should give pause: While 8 of out 10 companies surveyed said they were implementing generative AI in their business, the consultancy group observed, just as many said there has been "no significant bottom-line impact."

Altman promised that GPT-5 would serve as "a legitimate Ph.D.-level expert in anything," said Gary Marcus in his Substack newsletter. In fact, the new model delivered the same old "ridiculous errors and hallucinations." Users posted examples of GPT-5 struggling with basic reading and summarization, unable to correctly count the number of b's in "blueberry," and mislabeling handlebars and wheels on a bike. "It's no hyperbole to say that GPT-5 has been the most hyped and most eagerly anticipated AI product release in an industry thoroughly deluged in hype," said Brian Merchant, also in a Substack newsletter. "For years, it was spoken about in hushed tones as a fear-some harbinger of the future." But now all the talk of what OpenAI calls AGI, or artificial general intelligence, is just getting "waved away." It seems that OpenAI needed to demonstrate progress to investors and partners ahead of a pre-IPO sale of employee shares. Still, there "is a cohort of boosters, influencers, and backers who will promote OpenAI's products no matter the reality on the ground."

Some of the unhappiness about GPT-5 may be less technical than emotional, said Dylan Freedman in The New York Times. It's not clear that the new version is actually worse than the old one. But many users had developed an emotional link to the chatbot, asking it deeply personal questions. "And then, without warning, ChatGPT changed." The old version was often criticized as "sycophantic"; the new one, by contrast, is far less "warm and effusive." That was intentional: OpenAI found that an AI chatbot that was too human-like led frequently to "delusional thinking." But many perfectly stable users, it turned out, had built a relationship with the chatbot, and they've found GPT-5 to be a chilly companion.

"Smartphones and streaming services seem likely culprits" in a catastrophic loss of life skills among younger Americans, said John Burn-Murdoch in the Financial Times. Troubling new data from the University of Southern California's Understanding America Study shows that adults in their 20s and 30s have grown increasingly careless, easily distracted, and less eager to honor commitments. Conscientiousness—"the quality of being dependable and disciplined"—in particular is in "free fall" among people ages 16 to 39, but other measures of the ability to get along with others are falling, too. Since 2017, neuroticism has jumped while agreeableness and extroversion have dropped. More Americans say they are easily distracted, and fewer think they are helpful or outgoing. After all the time we spend online, "real-life commitments now feel messy and effortful."

Even our sense of time is getting warped by social media "impairing both short-term and long-term memory," said Gurwinder Bhogal in The Free Press. Chances are you can't remember any of the posts you saw in your feed, even if you scrolled for hours. This is because "attention engineers" have designed the interfaces and algorithms so that the feeds resemble casinos, never-ending mazes of shiny posts and videos that hypnotize you into passivity. "A social media feed is like the Lethe," the mythical river where lost souls sought absolution and received it in the form of oblivion. If you need hard evidence of how this is playing out in the real world, said Colby Hall in Mediaite, "just go to any public park and witness the vast majority of people staring into their phones."

"No, the kids are not alright," said Sydney Saubestre in U.S. News & World Report. But it's awfully easy to just blame smartphones and social media for society's ills. The idea that social media is responsible for declining mental health "is based on weak correlations and ignores a broad range of other factors," such as academic pressures, poverty, family instability, and exposure to violence. "Remember the panic in the 1990s over video games and youth violence?" We're looking again for the same easy solutions to hard problems.

But the internet was supposed to fix social isolation and fragmentation, said Yascha Mounk in The Dispatch. Technologists claimed it would "make us realize how much we have in common with those who are very different from us." Instead, the internet has sparked a return to tribalism, made us less likely to socialize outside digital spaces, and "left more people single and celibate"—despite the endless stream of potential romantic matches on dating apps. The tools "we built to connect us are, in practice, turning us into the worst version of ourselves."

Hey, ladies: Have you been trapped into "man-keeping" your boyfriend or husband? asked Emma Specter in Vogue. That's the new term for the widespread phenomenon of women assuming full responsibility for a couple's social life—and serving as the only person their emotionally isolated male partner can confide in. Coined by Stanford University fellow Angelica Puzio Ferrara, mankeeping describes the hard work a woman "does to keep her less-than-motivated male partner" from "succumbing to the male loneliness epidemic." In 2021, 15% of men reported having zero close friends, up from 3% in 1990. Today, just 20% of men say they reach out to friends to discuss personal issues. That leaves women with the "unreciprocated" burden of meeting all of their partner's social and emotional needs, and planning get-togethers with friends like parents scheduling playdates for children.

Providing emotional support is part of "the deep and abiding joy of a loving relationship," said Kat Rosenfield in The Free Press. For decades, women complained that men were uncommunicative and "deep in the grips of toxic masculinity." Mankeeping is "downstream of a decades-long cultural consensus that men, and masculinity, are fundamentally defective." We mocked male social life, demonizing activities like fraternities and all-male clubs as "bro culture." So now men are more dependent on women for emotional connection and social life. Apparently, when women said we wanted men to share their feelings, "we didn't mean with us."

Women, though, say it can be "draining" to meet all of a man's emotional needs, said Catherine Pearson in The New York Times. Some young women even say it's driven them to celibacy. Among single men, 61% are looking for a relationship—but just 38% of single women want one. These women are opting out because they are "weary of the emotional labor" of "supporting their partners through daily challenges" and "encouraging them to meet up with their friends." Mankeeping may be "an actual phenomenon," said Jesse Singal in his Substack newsletter, caused in part by "the collapse of traditionally male civic institutions," like churches, bowling leagues, and veterans' organizations. Still, the term is condescending. Most terms that end with "-keeping" involve "inanimate objects or animals," like housekeeping or beekeeping. Men are suffering from "a genuine problem" with social isolation. It doesn't help anyone to give their struggles a derisive name "that makes them sound burdensome and not quite human."

'Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You' by Ethel Cain

★★★

If Ethel Cain's second album reminds you of the music from TV's Twin Peaks, it's no accident, said Chris Kelly in The Washington Post. Last year, Cain tracked down the same synthesizers that Angelo Badalamenti had used on the 1990 series soundtrack. The result is a stately paced concept album that "drips with the yearning of young love and the pain of your first real heartbreak." It marks the 27-year-old singer-songwriter as "the true heir to Lynch" because she's "the musical artist most capable of capturing the beauty of all-consuming love, the terror of man's capacity for evil, and the traumatic toll taken by both."

While Cain's world is "a landscape of despair," said Mark Richardson in The Wall Street Journal, she presents her Gothic tales with "a tender, almost nostalgic edge." She shows great empathy for her characters, even the self-destructive ones, and uses beautiful arrangements to draw listeners in before "taking them somewhere dark and foreboding." Willoughby Tucker serves as a prequel to Cain's first album, 2022's Preacher's Daughter, but the new music is where new listeners should start. It's "a stunning artistic statement."

'Black Star' by Amaarae

★★★★

Amaarae's "hugely enjoyable" third album "requires a slight resetting of expectations," said Shaad D'Souza in The Guardian. The Ghanaian American singer's previous album, Fountain Baby, was "sensual and musically dense," establishing her as a creative force on a level with Rosalía and Charli XCX. But because that record didn't break through commercially, "this is her take on a club record, weaving elements of house, trance, and EDM into Afrobeats and spiky rap cadences." The new sound comes with a heaping side of hedonism: The songs "exalt drinking, drug‐­taking, and rowdy sex in such an unapologetic way that they would elicit blushes even from the Weeknd, pop's reigning king of smut."

On Black Star, Amaarae is "pursued by hangovers and hangers-on," said Walden Green in Pitchfork. While the album's rave-ups sound "powder-dusted in ketamine and coke," Amaarae the lyricist "has never sounded quite so guarded." The album's "lacquered surface" finally begins to crack on "Dream Scenario," revealing a hint of candor. Otherwise, Black Star is the record you make when you've wallowed in every indulgence and wonder, "Is this all there is?"

'No Rain, No Flowers' by The Black Keys

★★

"The Black Keys' clockwork competence is a durable wonder," said Jon Dolan in Rolling Stone. Sure, the duo's last album, 2024's Ohio Players, and accompanying tour were market flops. But more than a dozen years since they broke through as unlikely retro-rock hitmakers, guitarist-singer Dan Auerbach and drummer Pat Carney didn't mope. Instead, they retreated to their Nashville studio, gathered a few high-profile collaborators, and put together "one of their most precision-tuned LPs yet." The 11-track set evokes the song list of a radio station of yore that leaps from "bubble-funk workouts" to Bee Gees–style falsettos to a "fuzzed-out blues-metal stomp." It's all "seamlessly smooth" and "a poppy far cry from the garage-grind they built their career on, but it's not without heart."

Unfortunately, the title track is "massively cheesy," said Will Hodgkinson in The Times (U.K.), and the disco-inflected groove of "Make You Mine" is "an awkward fit" for these garage revivalists. "Babygirl," at least, "has the mix of pop catchiness and retrograde rock that made their biggest hits so all-conquering." Most else sounds like "a band in crisis, unsure of where to go next."

Highest 2 Lowest

Directed by Spike Lee (R)

★★★

"A new Spike Lee movie is still a calendar-clearing event," said David Fear in Rolling Stone. The latest addition to his canonical but up-and-down oeuvre bears the title Highest 2 Lowest yet "falls ironically right smack dab in the middle." Denzel Washington, in his fifth Spike Lee joint, stars as David King, a once-mighty music mogul who is pursuing a crowning business deal when he's told that his teenage son has been kidnapped. Despite an intriguing plot twist—the discovery that the kidnapper grabbed the son of David's right-hand man and driver—the next hour "risks being sluggish." Still, "when Spike wants to turn it up, he rises to the occasion."

After the movie's "bafflingly rough start," said Alison Willmore in NYMag.com, the action moves to the streets of New York City "and when it does," Highest 2 Lowest "bounds forward with a thrilling vibrancy," beginning with a suspenseful ransom drop-off that starts in the subway. And when King confronts the crime's perpetrator, played by rapper A$AP Rocky, this movie based on the same 1959 Ed McBain novel that inspired Akira Kurosawa's High and Low "finds its way to the shores of greatness."

In the end, "it's half mess, half triumph, and thrilling even in its failures," said Richard Lawson in Vanity Fair. You root for Lee and Washington because, at 68 and 70, respectively, they're reaffirming a fealty to art over commerce. "If much of Highest 2 Lowest plays like older men shaking their fists at the youth culture of today, it does so in charming, rakish fashion."

Weapons

Directed by Zach Cregger (R)

★★★

Last week's U.S. box-office champ "begs to be seen in a theater, where a moviegoer can ride the communal waves of horrified delight," said Ty Burr in The Washington Post. As Zach Cregger's "nerve-shredding" yet "almost absurdly enjoyable" follow-up to his 2022 sleeper hit Barbarian begins, 17 third-graders in a small American town have mysteriously fled from their homes in the middle of the night, vanishing without a trace. The town quickly turns on the children's teacher, and as the mystery deepens, Cregger "slowly and fiendishly turns up the heat." With Weapons, he "vaults into the esteemed company of modern horror maestros like Ari Aster, Robert Eggers, and Jordan Peele."

The movie's story unfolds by way of several characters' perspectives on the crisis, said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast. Julia Garner plays the unraveling teacher and Josh Brolin an angry parent, and as the town's anguish builds, so does the terror, until the film's "sterling" climax "tips into outright lunacy," making it "difficult not to laugh" at the anarchy Cregger has exposed beneath the surface calm of suburbia.

The division of the story into segments can be frustrating, said Manohla Dargis in The New York Times. "Not all the viewpoints are equally engaging," and the repeated resets of the timeline feel like a delaying tactic. Still, "Cregger understands the importance of pacing as well as how laughs can amplify scares." Also, "the guy knows how to slither under your skin—and stay there."

In Beatriz Williams' new novel, Under the Stars, a mother and daughter are drawn into an 1840s mystery by the discovery of a cache of paintings. Below, the best-selling author of Husbands and Lovers and The Summer Wives names works that have shaped her own.

'The Aubrey-Maturin novels' by Patrick O'Brian (1969–2004)

Among its manifold dazzling virtues, O'Brian's 20-volume saga of a Royal Navy captain and his ship's surgeon so effortlessly evokes life aboard a warship during the Napoleonic era, and the humanity of those aboard, that you experience the story as the characters do. I'm rereading the entire series for the fifth time since I picked up Master and Commander as an undergrad, and my reaction remains the same: This is how you write historical fiction. Buy it here.

'Persuasion' by Jane Austen (1817)

"Ten thousand a year" is all very sexy, as Pride and Prejudice readers know. But this tender, bittersweet story of lovers reunited years after an agonizing rupture will always be my favorite Austen, my blueprint for true love. Buy it here.

'The Palliser novels' by Anthony Trollope (1865–80)

Nobody else in my MBA class was procrasti-reading Trollope instead of case studies, but then what else could have better prepared me for my career than this master class in creating a fictional universe of beloved characters? Buy it here.

'Testament of Youth' by Vera Brittain (1933)

I had to abandon this harrowing First World War memoir midway through, after an enemy sniper kills the author's fiancé. Eventually—like Brittain herself—I picked myself up and carried on with the narrative, and its raw emotional truth populated my understanding of history with real human beings. Buy it here.

'Their Eyes Were Watching God' by Zora Neale Hurston (1937)

We swooned over Gatsby glamour in high school, but it was Hurston's shattering novel about a Black woman facing down sexual and racial politics in early 20th-century Florida that opened my ears to the virtuoso power of voice to convey character and ideas. Buy it here.

'Heart of the Matter' by Emily Giffin (2010)

On the face of it, this novel of an affair in the Boston affluburbs is pure literary catnip. But Giffin commits so honestly to each woman's perspective, electrified by the punch of visceral detail, she altered the way I think and write about human relationships, whether historical or contemporary. Buy it here.

Hulk Hogan brought the over-the-top theatricality of pro wrestling into mainstream American culture. A comic book character come to life, the 6-foot-7, 320-pound mustachioed colossus would enter the arena to the song "Real American," cup his hand to his ear to encourage the crowd's roars, flex the bulging biceps he called "24-inch pythons," and rip off his shirt before facing his opponent. As the face of Vince McMahon's World Wrestling Federation, he was everywhere in the 1980s and 90s—appearing in commercials, sitcoms, and even his own animated series. His Main Event bout against Andre the Giant was watched by more than 33 million people. His advice to "Hulkamaniacs" was always simple: "Train, say your prayers, eat your vitamins, be true to yourself, and true to your country."

Born weighing "a formidable 10 pounds, 7 ounces," said the Los Angeles Times, Terry Gene Bollea got his bulk from his construction-worker father and his showmanship from his dance-teacher mother. Growing up in Tampa, he was a star pitcher in Little League and then a bass player in local bands, but he longed to break into wrestling. Approached by wrestling scouts in 1976, he went pro the following year and joined the WWF in 1983. His charisma and McMahon's promotional talents proved "a formula for success." Hogan headlined eight Wrestlemania events, starred in three movies, and had a recurring stint on The A-Team, all while hawking endless merchandise and doing plenty of charity work. The Make-a-Wish Foundation named him its most requested celebrity in 1992, "and he reportedly visited as many as 20 sick children a week."

Yet "weightlifting alone" wasn't responsible for Hogan's beefy physique, said The Times (U.K.). McMahon was tried for drug trafficking in 1994, and Hogan admitted to steroid use. He jumped to World Championship Wrestling for a few years, playing a heel, or wrestling villain, before returning to his home league and persona. Decades later he was embroiled in a "completely different, but no less sensational" scandal, said Rolling Stone. In 2012, gossipy news site Gawker ran a clip of a sex tape featuring a 2006 encounter between Hogan and Heather Clem, who was married to Florida shock jock "Bubba the Love Sponge." With the financial help of tech billionaire Peter Thiel, Hogan sued and won $31 million in 2016, which bankrupted Gawker. During the appeals process, "another tape leaked," which showed Hogan, ranting about his daughter's Black ex-boyfriend, making "liberal use of the N-word." The WWE (by this time renamed from WWF) promptly terminated his contract and wiped him from its Hall of Fame. But "the punishment didn't last long," and he was reinstated in 2018.

Hogan "remained in the spotlight" to the end, said The New York Times. A longtime friend of wrestling fan Donald Trump, he gave a well-received endorsement speech at the 2024 Republican convention in Milwaukee. Tearing off his Hulk Hogan shirt to reveal a Trump-Vance shirt underneath, he roared, "Let Trumpamania run wild, brother!"

President Trump has a plan to rig the 2026 midterms, said Mary Ellen Klas in Bloomberg. At his urging, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott last week called a 30-day special legislative session to redraw the state's congressional districts, a process that typically happens only after the census, which is next scheduled for 2030. The goal, as Trump has openly stated, is to net five more U.S. House seats for Republicans, with possibly another three seats to come from a similar redrawing in Ohio. That might be enough to protect the GOP's narrow House majority in next year's elections, blunting Democrats' plans to win the chamber and halt "Trump's march toward authoritarian rule." Democratic governors are "promising to fight back" with gerrymanders of their own, said Cameron Joseph in The Christian Science Monitor. California's Gavin Newsom, Illinois' JB Pritzker, and New York's Kathy Hochul are all threatening to retaliate by making their maps more partisan. We're in for a "multistate brawl of naked political opportunism that could go a long way to determining who controls the House, no matter how the voters themselves feel."

Democrats may be ready "to play dirty," said Christian Paz in Vox, but their redistricting plans "will face steep hurdles." Independent and bipartisan commissions have the final say on maps in five Democratic states, including California and New York, and returning that power to legislatures would require statewide referendums or court challenges. There are already "signs that Democrats may not be up for the fight," said Lauren Egan in The Bulwark. Pritzker recently wavered on his redistricting threat, declaring that "cheating the way the president wants to is improper." His ambivalence is understandable, because Democrats already control 14 of Illinois' 17 U.S. House seats; creative map drawing may nab them only one more. All this "redistricting talk from Democrats may be more boast than bite."

The party's best hope may be to sit back and hope the Texas redrawing "backfires and causes Republicans to lose otherwise impregnable seats," said David Dayen in The American Prospect. That's a real possibility, because if existing Democratic districts are dismantled and their voters spread across safe GOP areas, reliable seats could suddenly turn competitive for Republicans. If 2026 shapes up to be a Democratic wave year—which it could, with Trump's approval rating currently sitting below 40% in some polls—Republicans may come to regret their attempt to rig the vote.

'Headlights' by Alex G

★★★

"If you are under 35 and enjoy indie rock, Alex G is close to a household name," said Mark Richardson in The Wall Street Journal. "If you are over 50 and not particularly invested in new music, you may not have heard of him." His 10th studio album, which arrives 13 years after he found a big audience at age 19, is also his first on a major label, but as always, "you get a feeling that this is music he needs to make." While the opening tracks "have the bright, chiming sound of R.E.M. in the early '90s," his music still "feels of and for the internet," shifting from breezy acoustic instrumentation to warped electronics that sometimes distort his nasally voice. In short, the album "has all the immediacy and eccentricity that have carried him this far." The polish that label money buys "doesn't corrupt Headlights," said Ian Cohen in Pitchfork. Even when he calls on a string section, Alex G is merely expanding his range. At 32, he is also a father for the first time, and while you sometimes hear the money he spent to make this album, "you always hear the love even louder."

'Don't Tap the Glass' by Tyler, the Creator

★★★

"Don't Tap the Glass is Tyler, the Creator switching off the anxious side of his brain and allowing simple pleasures to guide him," said David Renshaw in The Fader. A surprise release that arrives just 10 months after his chart-topping Chromakopia, the 10-track set aims to put bodies back on the dance floor and comes with Tyler explicitly demanding that it not be listened to while sitting still. "Traversing G-Funk, bouncy R&B, Miami bass, jungle, and everything in between," it's the Grammy winner's "most don't-overthink-it record in years." And "at a breezy 28 minutes," it's also his tightest. Despite its brevity, Don't Tap the Glass is another sign that Tyler is "on a generational roll right now," said Aaron Williams in Uproxx. Who else gets to play so fast and loose with release schedules? Or "so wildly experiment with sonics?" Veering from '80s L.A. freestyle on "Sugar on My Tongue" to "Zapp-like funk-R&B" on "Sucka Free," he has whipped up "a living museum of Black music from the past four decades." If only "more artists were allowed to be like Tyler, the Creator and just...create."

'Sex Hysteria' by Jessie Murph

★★★

Jessie Murph's sophomore album "has even more sass and swagger than her impressive 2024 debut," said Jem Aswad in Variety. A "precociously talented" singer and songwriter who sings with a twang but is "absolutely not a country artist," the 20-year-old from Alabama follows in Amy Winehouse's footsteps by making music steeped in the sound of 1950s and '60s torch singers and girl groups. At the same time, "the flow and attitude of hip-hop are so deep in her DNA" that even her sung verses "hit like rap lyrics." The "brooding" title track, a rock ballad, "doesn't just set the emotional tone for the album; it is the tone," said Caitlin Hall in Holler. While the album includes a top-20 hit in "Blue Strips," which feels like "post-apocalyptic country pop," many of Murph's new songs "wrestle with self-worth, heartbreak, and survival," and the title song "exposes the mess of needing someone who you know is bad for you, just to feel anything at all." Characteristically, "it doesn't try to resolve the hurt." It just sits with it, "which in Murph's world is sometimes more powerful."

Having "nurtured conspiracy theories for his entire political career," Donald Trump is suddenly in danger of "being consumed by one," said Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times. His MAGA movement is "in revolt" this week over the insistence by Trump, his Justice Department, and the FBI that there are no "incriminating client lists" or scandalous new documents to be revealed regarding Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier found dead in his jail cell in 2019 while awaiting trial on charges of trafficking underage girls. The statement sparked immediate "fury and disappointment" on the Right, where MAGA influencers—including now FBI director Kash Patel and his deputy, Dan Bongino—have insisted for years that Epstein was murdered by the Deep State and that the release of a client list would expose a sprawling cabal of elite, liberal pedophiles. Most of the MAGA rage was initially directed at Attorney General Pam Bondi, who said in February she had the Epstein list "sitting on my desk" and then announced last week no list existed. Trump then began taking fire when he implored "weakling" supporters to "not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about." But MAGA influencers like Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, and Steve Bannon are continuing to stoke MAGA's rage, warning Trump, in Jones' words, that "this isn't going away."

Trump's quandary is that he's "in the Epstein files," said William Kristol in The Bulwark. He was friends with Epstein—a neighbor in Palm Beach, Fla.—for 15 years. Trump once said they had a shared taste in "beautiful women," adding with a chuckle that Epstein liked his "on the younger side." Trump flew more than once on Epstein's notorious jet, the "Lolita Express," and author Michael Wolff recently claimed that Epstein showed him photos taken at his home of topless young women sitting on Trump's lap. No wonder his DOJ says that "no further disclosure" of Epstein documents, photos, and videos "would be warranted." To add to the suspicion, said Steve Benen in MSNBC.com, Trump is now saying that the "Epstein files" were "written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey," and his other political enemies. So is Trump's position now that the files "do exist but they're fake?"

Files from the lengthy federal investigations no doubt exist, said Andrew McCarthy in National Review. But "the Justice Department and the FBI are not in the transparency business," and it would be highly unethical for them to release documents naming people who associated with Epstein but were not charged with crimes. Good luck convincing MAGA of that, said Josh Marshall in Talking Points Memo. Its cultlike belief that a cabal of "rich and powerful pedophiles" controls the world "runs really, really deep," and if Trump keeps stonewalling, "the Epstein wildfire" will continue to burn out of control.

"This has to be bewildering" for Trump, said Amanda Marcotte in Salon. If his fans can shrug off his own history of sexual assault, why are they so hung up on Epstein? The answer lies in "the age of the victims." It's only by positioning themselves as righteous warriors against pedophilia—the through line of MAGA conspiracy theories from Pizzagate to QAnon—that Trump's supporters find "moral absolution." Trump fans "need the Epstein files" if they're to keep seeing themselves as "the good guys." If they think Trump is protecting pedophiles, they may see him as another villain—and themselves for what they are: his "accomplices."

President Trump is "ushering in America's ICE age," said Edward Luce in the Financial Times. The "big, beautiful bill" he signed into law last week will pump an extra $170 billion toward his mass deportation and border security agenda, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement getting the biggest boost. ICE will receive an extra $75 billion over the next four years, making its annual budget larger than that of most other law enforcement agencies combined—including the FBI, DEA, and Bureau of Prisons—and "higher than Italy's entire defense budget." With that gush of funding, ICE will be able to expand its force of agents from 6,000 to 16,000, and build a nationwide network of detention camps to hold 116,000 deportees, more than double the number of beds it has today. And because the agency's in-house watchdog has been scrapped and the Supreme Court has granted the president sweeping immunity for "official" acts, there's little to stop Trump from turning a supercharged ICE into "his de facto private army."

"What might these new investments mean in practice?" asked Catherine Rampell in The Washington Post. To meet the administration's daily quota of 3,000 migrant arrests, ICE agents are already filling detention centers "not with criminals and gangbangers, but people with no criminal history whatsoever." The number of ICE detainees with "zero criminal convictions or charges is up nearly 14-fold" since Trump returned to office. Putting more ICE agents on the streets will result in even more "gardeners, home health aides, grad students, nannies, and construction workers" being seized. Local and state officers could also join in the frenzy, said Hayes Brown in MSNBC.com. The law allocates $3.5 billion to compensate states that detain migrants, and given how eagerly police departments and sheriffs' offices compete for federal funding, "it's likely that many will leap at the chance to share in this bonanza."

Ordinary Americans won't be safe from "an ICE force on steroids," said Patricia Lopez in Bloomberg. At least 674 U.S. citizens were arrested by the agency between 2015 and 2020, according to a government report, and an unknown number have been detained this year. Heidi Plummer, an attorney in Orange County, California, was strolling through a park last month when she happened upon an ICE raid and was handcuffed by agents. "I was in utter shock that this could happen to any U.S. citizen," said Plummer, who was held until she could prove her identity. Her story is yet more proof that Trump's crackdown has "gone too far—and now he has the funds to take it even further."

'I Quit' by Haim

★★★

Haim, L.A.'s three-sister rock trio, has always made music that "pairs best with an iced beverage and a lawn chair," said Angie Martoccio in Rolling Stone. On their fourth album, "they don't just perfect that summer vibe; they dial up the heat—and bask in it." All three were single when recording the album, and the result is another dose of "sleek, soft pop-rock" that's also a cohesive concept record, one focused on breakups and "the hard-won independence you earn from them."

It's perhaps "too on the nose" that George Michael's "Freedom! '90" is sampled on the opening track, said Rachel Aroesti in The Guardian. Much of the album "fixates on the bitter end of a flawed relationship," evoking the breakup of lead vocalist Danielle Haim and Ariel Rechtshaid, producer of the band's first three albums. At first the Michael sample doesn't quite fit the tune, but then a guitar solo kicks in and this "Frankenstein's monster of a song" turns brilliant. Some of the remaining tracks are "instantly forgettable." But the sisters have packed in a few other gems, including "Relationships," an "absurdly delightful" single and "the best pop song they've ever made."

'Addison' by Addison Rae

★★★

Addison Rae, against all odds, has just released "one of the most exciting pop records of the year," said Jaeden Pinder in Paste. This caps a year in which the former TikTok teen sensation transformed herself from a "flop star" to "the next left-of-center diva" because she "put her scrunched-up nose to the grindstone" and started making music she cared about. Back in 2021, Rae's ultraprocessed first single, "Obsessed," was widely mocked. But the 24-year-old has since teamed with two female songwriter-producers, and the young trio clearly draw inspiration from today's pop vanguard. You can hear Lana Del Rey's influence on "Diet Pepsi," while "New York" mixes Charli XCX–style electroclash with early FKA twigs.

Addison arrives in the wake of "a string of improbably great singles, each one a little weirder than the last," said Meaghan Garvey in Pitchfork. After "Diet Pepsi" came "Aquamarine"—"a four-on-the-floor siren song" reminiscent of Madonna's "Ray of Light." Throughout, "there's something potent in Rae's winking performance—a borderline unhinged devotion to the American promise that a person's destiny is entirely in their hands."

'Tether' by Annahstasia

★★★★

Annahstasia, a Los Angeles–based singer-songwriter, is "a once-in-a-generation vocalist" who has been trapped in a bad record contract for 13 years, said Laura Molloy in NME. But with her debut album, the 30-year-old is not only sharing the kind of music she's always wanted to make. She's also claiming "her rightful place as a pioneer of modern folk, propelling the genre forward by weaving in moments of tense rock and intoxicating blues."

Silenced for too long by handlers who steered her in a poppier direction, Annahstasia "has a lot to say" here, all in a husky purr that commands attention even in the sparest arrangements. And on Tether, she "balances the sweet, poignant lyrical observations of Joni Mitchell with the sensuality of Sade's Love Deluxe and the immense vocal power of Nina Simone." It's "as beautiful a record as you will hear this year," and it "heralds the arrival of a major talent," said Steve Baltin in the Los Angeles Times. "Gentle, soft, elegant, and graceful in a way that calls to mind a female Nick Drake," the album is "actually a bold statement to dare listeners to think and feel this much in these tumultuous times."

"John Singer Sargent loved people, and it shows," said Lisa Yin Zhang in Hyperallergic. Born to American parents who'd become cosmopolitan wanderers, the painter was only 18 when he moved from Florence to Paris in 1874, and an inspiring exhibition now at the Met captures how and why the young man took the city by storm. Across the next decade, Sargent befriended socialites, celebrities, and fellow artists such as Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Auguste Rodin, and though some of his early student work is stiff, his potential was obvious, and soon burst through. Portrait of Frances Sherborne Ridley Watts, the 1877 painting with which he made his debut at the Paris salon, catches a family friend "shifting in her seat, the buttons of her dress snaking sinuously around her body." The image turned out to be a harbinger of many great Sargent portraits to come, his subjects "almost always depicted asymmetrically, and captured mid-movement, as if to underscore that they surpass the boundaries of the frame."

"The flow from his easel in the following years was masterly," said Judith H. Dobrzynski in The Wall Street Journal. Among the brilliant portraits we encounter is the Met's own Dr. Pozzi at Home, a "spectacularly sensuous" 1881 painting that depicts a handsome gynecologist known as "Dr. Love" wearing embroidered slippers and a scarlet red dressing gown. "It recalls the papal and princely portraits that Sargent would have admired in Italy, but has greater vigor and more than a scintilla of eroticism." A year later, Sargent paid tribute to Diego Velázquez's Las Meninas with The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, scattering his four young subjects around a large room, none fully connected with another, creating "an ambiguous portrayal of family relationships."

All other galleries in this show lead to the masterpiece Madame X, a full-length 1884 portrait that "still startles," said Brian T. Allen in National Review. But don't rush to the end without taking in the many wonderful paintings in between and the way they upended the hierarchy of art genres in 1880s France. Because Sargent is so famed as a portraitist, "it must surprise visitors to see that his earliest Salon submissions were scenes of everyday life from his travels." And when he painted portraits, he chose everyday contemporary settings that make the images more immediate, blurring the lines between genres. The curators suggest that during his travels Sargent sought to capture anthropological types. But look closely. His Setting Out to Fish, from 1878, isn't a study of Breton oysterers. It's "about a sparkling sky, shadows, and light reflecting from puddles of water in the sand." Likewise, Among the Olive Trees, Capri, from the same year, isn't about the young peasant woman at its heart. It's "about a vaporous, romantic ambiance."

The Week Junior Book Awards have unveiled the 2025 shortlist, celebrating the best in children’s literature across 14 categories, from exciting adventures, heartwarming stories and gripping graphic novels to fascinating factual books and eye-catching front covers.

The shortlist committee, including children’s book consultant Jake Hope, award-winning bookseller Sanchita Basu de Sarkar, and The Bookseller’s children’s editor Caroline Carpenter, have selected 63 books for consideration. Author and singer Geri Halliwell-Horner, TV presenter and author George Webster, presenter and actor Rhys Stephenson, and lexicographer Susie Dent are among the judges who will select the winning titles. The Week Junior readers will also vote for the winners of the Children’s Choice and Cover of the Year Awards categories. Winners will be announced at an award ceremony in central London on 29 September.

To view the full shortlist, plus find out more about the awards, visit theweekjuniorbookawards.co.uk.

Now in their third year, The Week Junior Book Awards were created to celebrate the very best in books for young readers, increasing awareness of the lifelong benefits of reading for pleasure and ultimately inspiring children to discover their next great read.

A recent survey of 2,000 UK families commissioned by The Week Junior magazine found that while an overwhelming 82% of children are keen to discuss current events, just three in 10 parents report feeling fully confident in their ability to talk about what’s going on around the globe in a manner that is accessible, accurate, and reassuring to their children.

The shortlist reveals the vital role children’s literature plays in tackling important topics in an approachable way, helping young people make sense of their world. Debut novel The Boy in the Suit (James Fox) and The Wrong Shoes (Tom Percival) both explore the impact of child poverty; Elle McNicoll’s Keedie tackles bullying; The Letter with the Golden Stamp (Onjali Q. Rauf) highlights the challenges of being a young carer, and poetry anthology And I Hear Dragons explores identity. First Questions and Answers: Why Are There Wars? (Mairi MacKinnon and Katie Daynes) and Martin Impey’s graphic novel Blitz: One Family’s War are accessible and informative aids for discussing conflict with children, while Deborah Meaden Talks Money provides a simple and enjoyable introduction to finance.

Editorial Director of The Week Junior, Anna Bassi says: “From anarchic animals, rowdy Romans, riddles and rollercoasters, to magic, money and monsters, the outstanding books on this year’s shortlists are guaranteed to ignite young imaginations and spark family conversations. At a time when the world can feel unstable and overwhelming, it’s incredibly reassuring to see children’s authors, illustrators and publishers rising to the ever more important challenge of informing, entertaining and boosting empathy through their work. I’m delighted to have the help of so many expert and enthusiastic judges – including The Week Junior’s readers – to help decide which of these exceptional books should triumph.”

Caroline Carpenter, children’s editor and deputy features editor at The Bookseller, says: "We are delighted to support The Week Junior Book Awards again as they continue to grow their scope and reach. Initiatives to encourage children reading for pleasure are needed more than ever and these awards celebrate the whole breadth of children's literature - from brilliant fiction to engaging non-fiction, illustration and poetry - ensuring there is something for every child to enjoy on these shortlists, while also recognising the hard work and talent of the authors, illustrators and publishers involved."

To view the full shortlist, plus find out more about the awards, visit theweekjuniorbookawards.co.uk.

'Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference' by Rutger Bregman

Rutger Bregman's latest book "makes profound change look easy," said Isabel Berwick in Financial Times. The Dutch author of the best-seller Humankind: A Hopeful History has set his sights on today's educated elite, urging each of his readers to reject the allure of high-paying but damaging or pointless careers and choose instead to devote their careers to doing good for the world. While the suggestion may sound unrealistic, "there's a playbook here," as Bregman shares stories about the successes achieved when individual idealists have banded together in teams, such as the army of young lawyers Ralph Nader assembled in the 1960s and '70s to rewrite U.S. environmental and consumer protection law. The great challenges of our own time are many, and Bregman's "brisk and persuasive" argument stands a chance of waking many readers to the role they can play in meeting them.

His opening idea "may sound like a promising point of departure," said Helmer Stoel in Jacobin. He puts people into four categories: those who are neither idealistic nor ambitious, those who are ambitious but unidealistic, those who are idealistic but unambitious, and those who get the mix right. Sure, few of us want to fall into any of the first three categories. The first group, in his moral cosmos, winds up in "bullshit jobs," and he dismisses the sorry third cohort as "noble losers." But Bregman is so focused on coaching readers how to find individual satisfaction that he makes the heroic individual efforts to do good more important than the righteousness of any collective cause. "It is not clear what the 'good' is that needs doing."

Still, "the stories that Bregman tells are vivid and often genuinely inspiring," said Rowan Williams in The Guardian. He writes of a young Cambridge University graduate deciding in 1785 at age 24 to commit his life to ending slavery worldwide—and largely succeeding. He writes about Dutch and French families who sheltered their Jewish neighbors during the Nazi occupation, and of the strategic thinking that made the 1955 Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott so effective. Beyond all that, he also acknowledges his heroes' errors, such as when a messianic streak led Nader to stay in the 2000 presidential election even though that choice put a free-market Republican in the White House. Should you remain skeptical, maybe Bregman will turn you around at the end of the book, when he argues that doubting that an individual can make a difference is essentially egotistical because doing so rejects how interwoven one's actions are with those of all other humans. "Oversimplified? Perhaps. But calls to arms often have to be."

'Is a River Alive?' by Robert Macfarlane

"Robert Macfarlane is the most engaging of British writers," said Pico Iyer in Air Mail. The 48-year-old nature writer and Cambridge University professor produces prose "as dense as a forest but flooded with sunlight." And "savingly," he also has a sense of humor. In his new book, the tireless explorer shares his journeys to three threatened river systems—in the cloud forests of Ecuador, in southernmost India, and in northeastern Canada—each time cataloging what the rivers give to humans and what humans give back. Despite all the damage he sees, he "tenaciously assembles a history, and a geography, of hope," showing that the ancient idea of rivers as living entities is again taking hold, changing law and politics in countries scattered across the globe.

Macfarlane decides to refer to each river as a "who," not an "it," and that's "jarring at first," said Clea Simon in The Boston Globe. But you adjust to it, helped by the many quoted Indigenous sources who do the same. The book proves to be "a compelling, if occasionally maddening, read, veering from gorgeous, almost hallucinatory writing into overeffusiveness." Still, as Macfarlane weaves in the stories of activists and the beliefs of far-flung river cultures, he succeeds in "building a foundation for his case that is both deep and broad." And as dense as the book can be, it is also "a profoundly beautiful and moving work."

Alas, "the sentimentality of the writing reflects a certain sentimentality of thought," said Becca Rothfeld in The Washington Post. Macfarlane never tells us what he means by calling a river a living thing. "Surely not everything dynamic is alive," and "just as surely, something does not need to be alive to be worthy of reverence." To insist on calling a river alive is to cram it into a human category when "it is the very strangeness of rivers and mountains and other inanimate solidities that moves and compels us." But the book's mission isn't to win a logical argument, said Mark Dery in 4Columns. "Running like a cross-current beneath Macfarlane's passionate, activist storytelling is a bracingly new approach to nature writing." Urging us to unplug from rationalism and embrace animism, "he dreams of nothing less than the re-enchantment of the world."

Great news! Our app now offers more reading pleasure than ever before. As well as a digital version of the magazine every Friday, you have access to our daily editions, published each weekday morning and evening. Plus you can now listen to content on the go, with our brand new audio feature.

You asked for it; we listened. Based on your feedback, we’ve introduced these new features;

• Listen on the go to every article with our new audio feature
• Find your favourite sections easily with improved navigation
• Stay up to date with daily editions, now featured on the homepage

To find out more about digital subscriptions, and try 6 issues for free, visit subscription.theweek.co.uk.