Bonds have gotten “a bad rap,” said Oyin Adedoyin and Miriam Gottfried in The Wall Street Journal. When the Federal Reserve quickly cranked up interest rates to counter inflation in 2022, both the stock market and the bond market “fell in tandem, burning investors conditioned to think of bonds as their portfolio’s primary line of defense.” Both markets rose over the following three years, fueling concern that bonds are no longer the hedge against risky equities that they used to be. Fear not. This year, “bonds are doing what they are supposed to be doing”— moving inversely to equities. The S&P 500 is on pace to post double-digit returns for the fourth year in a row, and a bond selloff has dropped prices dramatically. It has “dragged on returns for people who already own them,” but pushed up fixed-income yields to enticing levels for those on the sidelines. It has also helped revive “the classic 60-40 portfolio,” where a diversified mix of 60% stocks and 40% bonds “cushions volatility.”

“How quaint,” said Michael Santoli in CNBC.com. Suddenly, it doesn’t look so bad to be “prudent” as money flows into bond funds again. The present S&P 500 dividend yield of under 1.4% represents “a modern low,” at a time when “high-grade corporate debt yields 6% with low default risk.” This presents “the best opportunity for buying bonds in decades.” The stage is now set “for another quarterly rebalancing shift in favor” of fixed income. “We don’t know” how “the macro and policy paths will inform market prices.” Consider diversification “an offering of humility before the market gods.”

“It’s good to be a saver again,” said Allison Schrager in Bloomberg, but “saving isn’t quite as safe as it used to be.” I agree that, “with higher yields, the 60-40 is back”—or deserves reconsideration as an investment paradigm. Just know, however, there’s still “no free lunch in finance.” If inflation continues to rise, it “means more uncertainty about real bond returns.” All the increased government debt could also send panic through the bond markets at any given moment. So “safety pays now, but only because it has become less safe.”

Both stocks and bonds are “less effective diversifiers than many investors realize,” said Mamadou-Abou Sarr in Kiplinger. If you own an S&P 500 index fund, you probably think you’re diversified in equities. Not so. In reality, “a small group of stocks has an outsize influence on your returns.” On the flip side, investors should “no longer assume” the 40% bond allocation provides the same level of resilience it once did. It may be time to “consider investing in real assets,” like commodities, infrastructure, and real estate investment funds. Successful investing “isn’t just about choosing the right eggs—it’s about choosing the right baskets.”

‘The Sea Has No Mercy’ by Bernie Taupin

★★★

Growing up in England, Bernie Taupin was obsessed with American “cowboy lore and stories, and with country ballads,” said Barry Mazor in The Wall Street Journal. Now 76, the longtime Elton John lyricist has refined that love of Americana into a “quite personal collection of songs.” The Sea Has No Mercy is his first solo album in 40 years, with all the songs written by him alone. The title track has a “deceptively sweet melody” tempered by his “voicecracking rasp.” Billy the Kid, Neil Armstrong, and George Jones haunt the “dirge-like” standout “Ghosts of Greater Men,” as Taupin ponders the prospect of meeting these legends in the afterlife.

Ever since he anointed himself the Brown Dirt Cowboy to John’s Captain Fantastic back in 1975, Taupin has often allowed himself to be distracted by “Western shtick,” said John Aizlewood in Mojo. These songs are more distinctive. They transcend genre, even if they’re steeped in American roots music. “Come on California” is a “rueful” waltz featuring Brandi Carlile on backing vocals, while Taupin’s “grizzled, Tom Waitsian” growl on “Joker” suggests “the old dog is up for new tricks.”

‘Dopamine Chamber’ by Fontaines D.C.

★★★

This is “a rock album with the heart of a dystopian sci-fi epic,” said Jon Dolan in Rolling Stone. The fifth album from Dublin-based rockers Fontaines D.C. “has a similar world-building spirit” to its Grammy-nominated 2024 predecessor, Romance, but pushes “deeper into electronic moodiness and orchestral sweep.” The band’s sonic palette and songwriting show impressive growth here, but their lyrics have grown much darker. They imagine “doom on all sides” from impending AI extermination and transhumanist tech oligarchs bent on living forever. Yet there is hope in songs like “One Man,” which constructs “a dream-pop cathedral,” and “Where Is Gone?,” a duet featuring Rosalía that goes down like a smooth 1960s mood piece from Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood.

“Sometimes great, sometimes scattershot,” Dopamine Chamber “isn’t nearly as revolutionary as Romance,” said Grant Sharples in Paste. Yet Fontaines D.C. retains its “knack for searing anthems.” The album lives up to its title with “outsize, immediate rock songs” like “Happy for You” and “Demolition,” refreshing jolts to pierce the pervading gloom.

‘Fudge’ by Michael Kiwanuka

★★★

Michael Kiwanuka’s “beautiful but willfully understated” fourth album, 2024’s Small Changes, turns out to have a sister album, said Alexis Petridis in The Guardian. Fudge was recorded at the same time, its songs not exactly written but “jammed into existence” by Kiwanuka and his live band. It wasn’t released until now because the singer-songwriter, 39, suffered a stroke that limited his ability to speak, let alone sing; he’s still recovering in a residential facility. That lack of extra polishing time leaves Fudge rough around the edges—“Across the Sky,” an acoustic number, “starts abruptly in the middle of a chord, as if someone frantically hit the record button after Kiwanuka started playing”—but it feels “vivid and alive,” with the vibrancy of “warm and unforced” performances.

This is “a sun-soaked daydream of an album, awash in afternoon light,” said Melanie McFarland in Salon. It’s easy “to get lost in its layers of strings, to chase a cello’s lusty glide past innocent piano notes.” Kiwanuka is always at his best live. But as we wait to hear how he recovers, and if he will ever tour again, Fudge lends itself to many repeat listens.

‘Wicker’

Directed by Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson (R)

★★★

A lonely woman receives a magical husband.

Wicker “is not your mother’s olden-times cinematic fable,” said Ryan Lattanzio in IndieWire. Instead, viewers are treated to “a kooky, sex-crazed folk tale” about a fisherwoman in a vaguely medieval village, played by Olivia Colman, whose lifelong loneliness is cured when a basket maker weaves her a sentient wicker husband. Alexander Skarsgard is the soft-spoken, doting, and frisky wooden spouse, and “you emerge from Wicker with the sense that no other actor could have played this creature.” Likewise, the fisherwoman’s awakening into randiness “feels singularly like something only Colman could sell.” Yet the actress also imbues her long-suffering, ostracized character “with grounded pathos” that anchors “the rest of the movie’s airy whimsy.”

Wicker is “at its best when charting the power of desire,” said Angelica Jade Bastién in NYMag.com, and “it’s rare to see an older woman’s sexuality and interiority explored with authenticity and care.” Alas, “I regret to inform you that Wicker is nowhere near as horny as it needs to be.” Frustratingly, the focus moves from our protagonists’ bedroom frolics to the townsfolk, who are outraged at a steamy love that reveals their own lack.

There’s also a conventional late-film tonal shift that doesn’t work, said Odie Henderson in The Boston Globe. “It’s hard to buy that a woman this smart would fall for the requisite crisis that ends the second act of most movies.” But that’s “a small flaw.” This otherwise delightful film provides “sharp commentary on the way men treat heterosexual relationships—and men ought to pay heed.”

‘The Only Living Pickpocket in New York’

Directed by Noah Segan (R)

★★★

An aging thief targets the wrong mark.

“Somehow, despite a 40-year career full of memorable roles, John Turturro is still underrated,” said Alissa Wilkinson in The New York Times. This quiet gift of a new movie, in which he plays an aging pickpocket still skillfully plying his fading trade, “lets him showcase all of his best qualities: He gets to be quick-witted and fleet-footed, but also full of love and grief.” Though Turturro’s Harry Lehman gets himself into a jam when he lifts the wallet of a mob-connected subway passenger, the movie remains less about Harry’s subsequent race to save his skin than “the loose spider web of connections that we create, by necessity or affinity,” with the people we interact with on a routine basis.

The film is “obsessed with the gap between the old and new,” to the point that it arguably overplays the theme, said Benjamin Lee in The Guardian. And a third-act cameo by a former Oscar winner feels out of place rather than like a happy surprise. But Noah Segan’s wistful crime drama runs a tight 88 minutes and never ceases to be engaging, and “Segan does manage a satisfyingly bittersweet ending.”

It helps that the director has packed the film with terrific actors, said Glenn Whipp in the Los Angeles Times. Besides Turturro, we get Tatiana Maslany as Harry’s estranged daughter, Giancarlo Esposito as a detective who has tangled with Harry for years, and Steve Buscemi as Harry’s go-to fence. “This one’s a low-key charmer. Start spreading the news.”

New York City’s big new Roy Lichtenstein show turns out to be “far more touching than I had anticipated,” said Jason Farago in The New York Times. Lichtenstein, who’s routinely celebrated as one of pop art’s visionaries, is usually credited with deflating high art by borrowing from comic books while reducing painting to components simple enough that a machine could reproduce them. In truth, the native New Yorker rendered each of the famous Ben-Day dots on his canvases “with something a lot like love,” a revelation that helps make the show “the most momentous exhibition of the season.” At a time when many of us are routinely deluged with AI-generated images, we see Lichtenstein (1923–97) modeling a constructive, decades-old response. With each dot painted by human hand and each choice he made in selecting from existing images and reworking them, he was insisting on the importance of a singular human vision, answering his own era’s flood of mass-market imagery by “keeping faith with a beauty that could last for all time.”

Lichtenstein wasn’t a lazy plagiarist, said David Smith in The Guardian. At the Whitney show, the artist’s sketchbooks and preliminary drawings show how often he altered the images of his source materials, “re-engineering line weights, cropping compositions, and shifting color fields to agitate the viewer’s eye.” The impact of his innovations was immediate, and the museum has re-created his breakthrough 1962 solo show at the Leo Castelli Gallery. His prescience was also such that by 1968, he was already speaking about his Ben-Day dots in relationship to new technologies that were translating visual imagery into transmittable data.

There’s no doubt that Lichtenstein is one of the winners of the American century, said Jerry Saltz in NYMag.com. He changed art forever, and “his style is one of the most recognizable in all of art history.” But while the Whitney show is “jazzy, bright,” and “packed to the rafters” with “paintings that jump off the walls,” its thesis falls flat. “The curators say every picture is an argument about seeing,” but Lichtenstein’s argument is the same every time, making “Like New” an illustration of “what happens when a revolutionary visual language becomes so familiar that the revolution disappears and leaves little to chew on.”

Lichtenstein’s best works, all from 1962 to 1965, were “satirical commentaries on American consumerism, the good life, the heroic male, and standardized beauty,” said John Yau in Hyperallergic. Unfortunately, he exposed the limitations of his style as soon as he began using it to produce mock re-creations of works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne, and other past masters. “He went from being a satirist of America’s ideals of comfort and beauty to being a parody of himself.” If we’re being honest, he never recovered.

AI is causing “a crisis of trust” in publishing, said Vauhini Vara in The Atlantic. Earlier this month, Zimbabwean writer Simbarashe Steyn Kundizeza won the prestigious Caine Prize for African Writing—worth $13,000—for a short story that “has all the personality of a chatbot.” That may not be coincidental: Pangram, an artificial-intelligence-powered AI detection tool, flagged “almost the entire story as AI-generated.” Kundizeza is not the first award recipient to be flagged by Pangram; it deemed one of the winning stories in this year’s Commonwealth Short Story Prize to have been entirely authored by AI. Kundizeza says his story, “The Blue Fighter,” is “entirely my work.” Pangram is reputed to be “highly accurate”—the company claims its tool misidentifies AI use in just 1 out of 24,000 cases—but it’s not infallible. So who should we trust? The author or Pangram?

This is exactly the “chaos” that publishers feared, said Anna Silman in The Wall Street Journal. Publishing houses have tried to crack down on AI usage by authors, inserting strict clauses into book deals and leaning on Pangram to vet manuscripts. But “a new AI scandal engulfing” the industry seemingly every month is “forcing a reckoning over the nature of authorship.” The Big Five publishing houses—Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, and Macmillan—have been reluctant to “make sweeping pronouncements about” the technology, possibly because they’re waiting to see if people care whether the books they’re reading are AI-generated or AI-assisted, “especially in genres like fantasy and sci-fi.” Meanwhile, many writers feel that a contract clause “that relies on the honor system lacks the teeth necessary to combat” intellectual dishonesty.

I write a lot, and I use AI, and I’m worried that “I’ve started to internalize” how a chatbot thinks, said Alex Kirshner in Slate. I’ve begun to “self-police against this,” modifying my drafts “to sound less like AI.” I also put my work into Pangram “before it appears anywhere else” to ensure that “the model concurs that I wrote it myself.” It feels dystopian—I’ve had to “rewrite sentences of my own work in hopes of satisfying this new integrity god.”

Still, we need the “AI slop detectors,” said Brian X. Chen in The New York Times. The tools do more than pick out obvious indicators of AI authorship, such as the excessive use of em dashes and bullet points. They’re trained to understand how AI models make decisions on word selection and phrasing. Pangram, which costs $20 a month, is incredibly “useful for sniffing out annoyances like AI-written email scams and phony online reviews.” Yes, the technology “still has a long way to go.” But “at the rate that slop is proliferating on the web,” it’s an “empowering” tool for people who still want to read the human-written word.

‘The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East’ by Simon Sebag Montefiore

Simon Sebag Montefiore’s latest best seller is “a triumph of blood-and-thunder narrative history,” said Sean McMeekin in The Wall Street Journal. At a time when conflict in the Middle East is again touching lives around the world, the British historian has delivered a sweeping and energetic account of the region’s turbulent last 125 years. Beginning in 1902, when the young prince Ibn Saud seized Riyadh to puncture Ottoman dominance, “Montefiore doesn’t play favorites, subjecting all his characters to scrutiny.” We get British and French meddling during and after World War I, the dramatic reset brought on by the next global conflict, and Cold War machinations that enflamed new conflicts. Then comes the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which Montefiore characterizes as epochal in its impact. “Not all his stories are original,” of course, “but he enriches them with fascinating details.”

“While vast in scope, The Cauldron is written in a way that is equally accessible to regional experts and neophytes,” said Jonathan Harounoff in the New York Post. Often, his story is carried by “the compelling and, at times, insidious characters who helped forge the Middle East we know today.” Jassim bin Mohammed Al Thani, Qatar’s founding emir, sired 56 children. King Farouk, who ruled Egypt for 16 years, was addicted to gambling, food, and sex. As Montefiore marches readers though various crises and flashpoints, said Mark Urban in The Times (U.K.), he shows a determination to nail down which actors deserve blame. “Time and again,” he shows that the region’s leaders have been more than mere puppets, having more agency than self-regarding Westerners might suspect. And though he rips into Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, today’s Israeli right wing, and many other regional players, “this is not a polemic but a work of history in which his judgments are rooted in deep research.”

The astonishing scope of the book is “both its greatest strength and its principal weakness,” said Sam Kiley in The Independent (U.K.). At his best, Montefiore “can make a complicated political order suddenly legible through a few deft sentences,” but the pileup of rulers, coups, and wars at times becomes “so dense that the reader can struggle to retain a firm sense of causation.” He also “distributes sympathy unevenly,” favoring pragmatists over fervent believers and, subtly, Israelis over Palestinians in the Middle East conflict that so often looms largest in the minds of outsiders. Montefiore is “too candid about Israeli wrongdoing to be described as an apologist.” Better yet, he’s written a book that anyone could learn from. “Its scholarship, range, and vitality make it an impressive achievement.”

‘Death of an Ordinary Man’ by Sarah Perry

“Death of an Ordinary Man is not a remarkable story,” said Amy Bloom in The New York Times. “What is remarkable is this book.” In 2022, a 77-year-old man was diagnosed with esophageal cancer and died nine days later. Because the man was her father-in-law, British novelist Sarah Perry watched that small drama unfold at close range after she and her husband moved in to provide 24-hour care. In Perry’s attentive account of those nine days, “there are no celestial visits, no shocking reconciliations.” Instead, there’s incontinence, there’s paperwork, and there are good and bad medical people—“all the things people ordinarily don’t write about.” Those details belong in this gift of a work, though, because “Perry’s entire point is that this condition of being alive includes, inevitably and properly, the process of dying.”

In speaking of her own experience in those final days, Perry “captures the feeling of existing in a strange, panicked void,” said Karin Altenberg in The Wall Street Journal. Perry and her husband, Robert, both previously busy with other things, suddenly find themselves caretakers sleeping on the floor of their patient’s bungalow. The world outside ceases to exist as nurses, relatives, and clergy visit. Meanwhile, Perry and Robert are figuring the logistics of end-of-life care in real time straight through to their charge’s final breath. Many of us are likely to find ourselves in a similar situation one day, and through her “deeply tender” account, Perry has “extended a hand to the reader with profound grace.

“It’s not easy to account for what makes this book so special,” said Joe Moran in The Guardian (U.K.). David Perry, the ostensible subject, was such a content, reserved Englishman that “some may even find him a little boring.” In part, Perry’s beautifully written book “works its magic through the adamantine detail and quiet lyricism with which it recounts a particular, unrepeatable life.” More than that, though, “what makes this book gem-like is that it succeeds in conveying the reality of death as this monumental, mythic thing that coexists surreally with the mundane world of council bin collections.” Though the breakdown of David’s body isn’t dignified, Perry notices that it’s also transfiguring, right down to this ordinary man’s fingertips.

What happened

As the most destructive riots in modern French history engulfed the country last week, France ordered troops into the streets and imposed curfews in multiple cities. Shattered glass littered sidewalks after rioters smashed and looted thousands of shops, torched cars and buildings, and attacked police, who fired tear gas and water cannons. The protests began in September as student demonstrations over underfunded, understaffed schools, but they soon mushroomed into a larger, less coherent outpouring of rage involving at least half a million protesters. In Limoges, the clock tower of the 19th-century city hall collapsed in flames; masked vandals broke into Marseille’s city hall and toppled the statue of Marianne, the national symbol; and Paris’ iconic Monument to the Republic was damaged. Over the weeks of demonstrations, at least 1,250 people have been injured — the majority police — and more than 7,000 have been arrested. President Emmanuel Macron acknowledged some “legitimate demands” but vowed that “those who destroyed must pay.”

The unrest soon spread across Europe, where nearly every capital saw protests, some of them violent. In Belgium, buildings, monuments, and public facilities were damaged. Italy sent 500 soldiers to combat looting and arson in Milan, where most of the hundreds arrested were teens. Ongoing demonstrations over the housing shortage swelled in Spain and Portugal, where students set up tent camps in city squares. In Albania, where anger over development in a nature preserve has spawned an antigovernment movement, protesters hurled Molotov cocktails. President Trump and Vice President JD Vance sought to tie the riots to the upcoming midterms. “If you want to see what is at stake in this election,” Trump said, “just look at what’s happening in France.” Vance shared a post of the burning Limoges tower with the comment “This is the future congressional Democrats seek for your country.”

What the columnists said

France is no stranger to protests, said Nora Bussigny in The Free Press, but these “civil-war-like scenes” are new and horrifying. Law-abiding citizens are “traumatized.” One young Parisian mother told me that when she warned the rioters ransacking a café outside her window not to sully their cause by looting, they shouted, “You bourgeois bitch, we’re going to rape you!” Then they tried to break into her apartment.

These are not “mere schoolchildren,” said Noah Rothman in National Review. “Within their ranks, the protesters have incubated” the “civilizational cancer” of antisemitism, and it’s a radical and violent strain. Rioters in Paris burst into Ohaley Yaakov synagogue, “scattering holy books across the floor, overturning tables, and opening the Torah ark — defiling its contents.” It’s not that this was an explicitly anti-Jewish protest. But the protesters in France, as in the U.S., have adopted the Palestinian flag as a catchall symbol of oppression, and violence as their strategy. When will we “wake up to the West’s peril?”

These riots had many causes, said Sylvie Kauffmann in the Financial Times. The country “is adrift, politically, fiscally, and socially,” and its political class is only making things worse. Farleft party leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon of France Unbowed has “tried to capitalize on the chaos,” openly sympathizing with the protesters and even joining protests last weekend. The “main beneficiary,” though, is likely Marine Le Pen, whose far-right National Rally party wants to expel migrants; she is now favored to win the presidency next April.

The postwar French social compact was “never really tenable,” said Bret Stephens in The New York Times. American progressives have often gazed longingly at France’s “sacrosanct social benefits,” which include universal health care, cheap tuition, and retirement at age 62. But funding all that is insanely expensive. Government spending now makes up “a whopping 57%” of France’s GDP. Nearly a third of its education budget is eaten up by pensions, so its poorer schools are crumbling. Debt outpaces GDP altogether. It’s not surprising that these “policies of national self-impoverishment have broader effects on social cohesion and national security.” Young talent is fleeing, and those who remain are rioting in the streets and fighting one another for dwindling resources.

“It’s not only France that’s feeling the heat,” said Lionel Laurent in Bloomberg. Most Western countries are aging and feeling the sting of inflation, especially in ballooning housing costs. That’s why affordability is the main question in the French election next year as well as in the U.S. midterms. What’s missing from the politicians “is honesty on the reforms that are needed — both from politicians and the aging electorates that are blocking inescapable change.”

What happened

Trump administration envoy Steve Witkoff praised Russian President Vladimir Putin as a “humanitarian” on a visit to St. Petersburg last week, after President Trump stunned U.S. allies and lawmakers from both parties with a string of decisions that will aid Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine. In Russia to discuss possible peace talks between Trump, Putin, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Witkoff hailed Putin for releasing Stephen Hubbard, a retired American teacher who was snatched from his home in eastern Ukraine after Russia’s 2022 invasion. Hubbard, 74, was imprisoned on what the State Department called false charges of fighting for Ukraine; fellow prisoners said he was tortured for being American. “You are a humanitarian, sir,” Witkoff told Putin, whose invasion of Ukraine has killed at least 15,000 civilians. “I salute that and I commend you.”

Trump issued an executive order last week suspending sanctions included in legislation that he signed last month, which would have hit top buyers of Russian energy and Russian officials and companies. Trump said the sanctions pause was needed because he didn’t want to “drive Russia away from the bargaining table.” The waiver came a week after Trump announced he was suspending other energy sanctions to buy hundreds of thousands of tons of Russian diesel fuel. Meanwhile, Ukrainian officials said the U.S. cut off advanced warnings on incoming missile strikes for several days and had limited Ukraine’s access to the satellite internet service Starshield, used to guide Ukrainian attack and defense drones. The Wall Street Journal reported that Elon Musk, whose Starlink supplies Starshield under a Pentagon contract, ordered the slowdown after consulting with Trump. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the Pentagon had not manipulated the service, but noted that Starlink has “terms of service” that need to be complied with.

Zelensky said it would be a “historic mistake” for the U.S. to switch sides and support Russia. But Trump claimed “Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine” and hasn’t “been doing much,” despite its increasing attacks on Ukraine’s power grid and on civilians. He spoke just hours after a drone strike on a park in Kharkiv killed six people, including a 1-year-old who died in her stroller. “We’ve given tremendous amounts to Ukraine,” Trump said. “We’ve got nothing back.”

What the columnists said

“Trump’s assistance to Putin keeps growing by the day,” said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. In waiving the sanctions contained in the law — which was championed by the late GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham — Trump claimed he was serving the national interest. “But the opposite is true.” Trump’s best pal Putin responded to this “gift” with one of the war’s fiercest strikes on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, hitting more than 15 power facilities. Meanwhile, the administration “still hasn’t come clean” on who throttled Starshield, or why the delivery of crucial Patriot interceptor missiles to Ukraine is being held up. After the midterms, there must be a “bipartisan reckoning.”

The dealmaker in chief may be eyeing business opportunities, said Jonathan Lemire and Simon Shuster in The Atlantic. Instead of “a battle for the modern, rules-based world order,” many Trump allies see the Ukraine war “as an impediment to future business deals with Russia.” If Kyiv just surrendered, it would “open up avenues to Russia’s diesel, rare earth minerals, and other resources.” The New York Times has reported that the administration has discussed a possible multibillion-dollar deal for assets owned by Russia’s Lukoil. That deal would directly benefit a Trump donor as well as Middle Eastern executives with ties to Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.

Trump has finally achieved his heart’s desire, said David Corn in Mother Jones: “a deal with Putin.” For decades he’s hungered to do business in Russia; as president, he’s laid bare his yearning “to be a Putin BFF,” providing cover for “a foreign adversary that has attacked American democracy repeatedly.” Trump, who couldn’t give a fig about international laws or Ukraine’s democracy, has seen Russia’s invasion “mainly as a nuisance” blocking him from the alliance he craves. “Putin’s criminality and barbarity were obstacles.” But Trump “has decided to move past that. Vlad is his man.”

For Republicans and Democrats alike, Trump’s “shocking” actions should be “the last straw,” said Andrew C. McCarthy in National Review. Russia is “an enemy committed to our destruction,” led by a “murderous dictator.” Trump is “giving him aid and comfort” as he wages war against a democratic ally, bent on its “conquest.” And he’s doing it all as Russia is “actively abetting Iran’s military operations” against the U.S. with intelligence and drone weaponry.

“America is now an ally of Russia,” said Tom Nichols in The Atlantic. In thrall to Putin, Trump has not only betrayed Ukraine; he’s “abandoned the Western order, the most successful—and powerful— security arrangement in human history.” And he seems to have done so to serve not national interests but his own. Until now, “Manchurian candidates and red presidents” allied with Russia were “the stuff of paranoid fiction. But this alliance now exists.”

“The question at issue is not just about Ukraine and Russia,” said Mark Hertling in The Bulwark. “It is about what the United States stands for.” For 250 years, Americans have believed in “sovereignty, self-determination, and opposition to territorial conquest.” Now Trump is executing a “disturbing and shameful abandonment” not only of Ukraine but of those bedrock principles. In America’s long history we haven’t always lived up to our values. “But rarely have we so obviously and notoriously abandoned them.”

Elon Musk has “learned to love political spending again,” said Chad de Guzman in Time. After splashing at least $250 million on getting President Trump back in the White House, the world’s richest man announced last year that he’d spend “a lot less” on future campaigns because “I’ve done enough.” Instead, he’s become the biggest single donor this midterm cycle. Since July, Musk has given at least $276 million to various Republican groups—$158 million of which went to the GOP’s main Senate super PAC, “one of the largest known political donations in history.” That infusion of cash allowed the super PAC to launch a $149 million ad campaign for Ken Paxton, the GOP’s struggling candidate in the Texas U.S. Senate race. Musk’s huge spend “isn’t surprising, given what’s at stake for him if Republicans lose.” Democrats have vowed to investigate the multibillion- dollar government contracts held by SpaceX, Tesla, and other Musk companies if they win the House—and to subpoena Musk over his role leading DOGE, which slashed hundreds of thousands of federal jobs and gutted foreign aid.

Musk has learned that candidates “want his money but not him,” said Jim Newell in Slate. Back in 2024 and 2025, he was everywhere: “prancing about onstage with Trump,” living at Mar-a-Lago, and handing out million- dollar checks to Wisconsin voters. This time, he’s confined himself to insulting Democrats on his social media platform X and making donations that, while eye- poppingly large, are “effectively less than couch change” for a man worth about $1 trillion. “That’s some intimidating profligacy,” said Noah Rothman in The Boston Globe. But Musk’s money will make a difference on Election Day only if his beneficiaries can pair it with a compelling message. As voters keep telling pollsters, “that’s the missing part of the GOP’s 2026 strategy.”

As “a prominent and powerful white supremacist,” Musk has his own message, said Jamelle Bouie in The New York Times. On X, he traffics in extremist conspiracy theories about brown and Black “invaders” destroying “‘Western,’ meaning white, civilization.” He “heavily promoted” the movie Citizen Vigilante, in which the hero kills Arab and African immigrants. He supports “remigration,” the forced deportation of nonwhite citizens to their supposed countries of origin. Yet Republicans are allowed to pretend such rhetoric from the party’s “most important donor” is irrelevant to them, even while Democrats are often asked to denounce Hasan Piker, a popular but niche far-left streamer. “I think Republicans should have to answer” for Musk’s ugly views. And if Democrats win Congress this November, they should work to ensure that no one man will ever again “have all this power.”

What is the administration doing?

In a first in U.S. history, the government has separated tens of thousands of children from parents who were arrested on immigration violations, often deporting them without their kids. Many such parents entered the U.S. legally as asylum seekers and have been working and raising families while pursuing citizenship. This spring, the Brookings Institution counted more than 146,000 children who are U.S. citizens and have had a parent deported; more than 22,000 have had both parents deported. Sometimes deportees are given the option to take their children with them—but not always. When Physicians for Human Rights interviewed women deported to Honduras this year, they found that many had not been asked if they had children, while others simply had their kids taken. One was parted from her 2-month-old breastfeeding baby. Migrant advocates say the crisis mirrors 2018, when the first Trump administration’s policy of separating families at the southern border sparked an uproar. “It’s leading to all the same forms of trauma,” said Kelly Kribs, an attorney for immigrant children. “But the speed and the scale of the separations now is at a level we’ve never seen before.”

What happens to children left in the U.S.?

Many go to relatives or friends, but because deportees have little or no time to arrange for care, some end up in foster care. When Marlyn, a Venezuelan with a pending asylum application, landed in ICE detention after a traffic stop in Alabama, her two young children, including a 2-year-old just weaned, were left with her co- worker. When she chose to accept deportation rather than endure prolonged detention in a case likely to fail, she said she begged to have her children sent with her. “I told them, ‘I have no one to take care of them.’ But they never did anything.” Nearly a year later, Marlyn has been unable to arrange extradition for her toddler, who doesn’t recognize her in video calls. Some parents choose to leave their kids behind because they are returning to countries roiled by violence. One Haitian woman, identified by The Guardian only as L.T., made the wrenching decision to leave her sick baby with a grandmother, knowing that there wouldn’t be medical care in gang-plagued Haiti. Now she’s racked by fear that her daughter could wind up with strangers. “I’m terrified of losing my baby,” she said.

What does the law say?

The law allows for parents to be deported without their children, but until recently there were protections. ICE policy held that federal agents should avoid separating families and either deport them together or confirm a caregiver is in place. The Trump administration revised the policy to say agents should do that “when operationally feasible,” which advocates say gives ICE leeway to ignore it. The administration insists it doesn’t intentionally separate families, and that this only occurs when parents make the choice to self- deport. But critics say otherwise. ICE is intent on meeting its deportation quotas, said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), even “if that means tearing families apart and traumatizing children.” Migrant advocates also cite a growing trend of children being taken from parents and put into federal custody.

Why is this happening?

Children of detainees are being reclassified as unaccompanied minors and sent to the Office of Refugee Resettlement. When Luis, a construction worker from Venezuela, was detained with his 11-year-old son, Andrés, after being arrested in El Paso, he said agents removed Andrés and transferred him to ORR instead of sending him to his grandfather. Case workers said Andrés couldn’t sleep in foster care and screamed for his parents at night. It’s not clear how common such reclassifications are, but Mother Jones spoke to a dozen lawyers who confirmed the trend. “They’re kidnapping people’s kids and keeping them in government custody,” said Jen Smyers, who was a Biden-era ORR official. There’s a process for applying to get them out, but the administration has made it arduous—to protect children from predators, it says—and ICE has arrested undocumented people who apply.

Are minors ever deported alone?

Frequently. An analysis by Pro Publica found that judges have issued over 10,000 removal and voluntary departure orders for unaccompanied minors every month, a rate four times higher than in Trump’s first term. Most of these children came from Central American countries riven by violence and economic upheaval, have no criminal record, and are pursuing legal residence. Minors with Special Immigrant Juvenile Status, granted to those who’ve suffered parental abuse or neglect, used to be protected from deportation, but the Trump administration ended that policy. It also ended $200 million in annual funding for the Acacia Center for Justice, a nonprofit that provides legal services to migrant children.

Has there been pushback?

Not much. Migrant advocates say there’s been a notable shift from 2018, when blowback over family separations led to legal challenges, bipartisan opposition, and an eventual climbdown. This time, there’s no explicit policy to challenge in court, and the separations are happening outside public view—no media images of children in cages. Advocates also cite less resistance within the administration, as staffers who might have objected have left or been laid off. The fallout in human trauma will be vast, experts say, especially for the youngest children. “They are left with a sense of abandonment that’s kind of imprinted,” said Michele Heisler, a doctor with Physicians for Human Rights. Her organization also documented signs of trauma among separated mothers, including panic attacks and uncontrollable crying. The “gratuitous level of cruelty,” she said, “is hard for all of us to understand.

‘Live at Carnegie Hall’ by Cameron Winter

★★★★

While listening to this album’s opening track, “I hear the Great American Songbook compressed into a brilliant point of light,” said Walden Green in Pitchfork. Cameron Winter, the frontman of the rock band Geese, was just 23 when he took the stage at Carnegie Hall last December for a single solo performance in which he put away his guitar to accompany himself alone on a grand piano. The resulting album—and the concert film that’ll soon accompany it—may be exercises in mythmaking, but Winter earns his acclaim here. The more he strips down his sound, “the closer he gets to some platonic ideal of music,” and though his 2024 solo album provided most of his set, the three new tunes are “some of Winter’s very finest.”

Still, this record “might drive a further wedge between the believers and the skeptics,” said Mark Richardson in The Wall Street Journal. Winter’s “unusual” singing style is even more conspicuous here; if you can’t get past that, his gifts as a songwriter may escape you. Still, the album is inspiring “precisely because it’s challenging.” It’s fun engaging with music “that needs time to sink in.”

‘She’s the Best’ by Troye Sivan

★★★

“There seems no reason why Troye Sivan should still be a relative cult figure within pop rather than an actual multiplatinum star,” said Alexis Petridis in The ­Guardian. The fourth album from the 31-year-old Aussie native is packed with “very hooky” songs and evidence of his many A-list backers. They include Madonna, who signed off on his cribbing of a past hit for “Party,” a deadpan good-times anthem. But at least Sivan “seems to be using the space he occupies to his advantage, to push and experiment,” and to write lyrics “as unapologetically queer” as they are here.

She’s the Best is “easily his finest collection of songs to date,” said Craig Jenkins in NYMag.com. “On the surface, the album is an ode to women Sivan has called friends, collaborators, and defenders,” but it’s “perhaps more interested in unpacking the invisible strings of lust and yearning that drag Sivan off the couch night after night.” For now, club life answers his worries about failing to find a forever mate, and an array of producers help him connect to today’s “time-travel-pop wave” as he expresses those feelings. The effort leaves him “redefining himself from song to song.”

‘Dedicated to You’ by Branford Marsalis Quartet & Dianne Reeves

★★★

The 1963 album John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman “will always remain sacred,” said Jim Hynes in Glide. But in Coltrane’s centennial year, saxophonist Branford Marsalis and singer Dianne Reeves have reinterpreted the most revered ballads album in jazz and made it newly stunning. “For so many of us who have grown used to Hartman’s warm baritone over countless listens,” hearing a new vocalist sing the same six standards “can be ear-bending.” But Reeves “wrings every drop of emotion from the title track,” delivers a “flawless interpretation” of “You Are Too Beautiful,” and teams with pianist Joey Calderazzo for an endearing “My One and Only Love.”

Marsalis and his quartet fill out the album with three Coltrane instrumentals, said Chris Pearson in The Times (U.K.). Still, “it’s those vocals that stay with you.” Reeves, to her credit, “becomes very much part of the band, embedded, one of the instruments.” On “Lush Life,” she does so by singing the intro alone, then stopping halfway through for solos from Marsalis and Calderazzo that “echo and expand on her initial vocal, as if they are her thoughts.” It’s an “exceptionally brilliant” take.

“Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner’s marriage was not a marriage of equals,” said Sebastian Smee in The Atlantic. “Pollock was weak and Krasner was strong.” That dynamic comes across in the new joint exhibit at the Met. More importantly, the show “does each artist the honor of representing them at their best” and, by gathering so many of their exhilarating paintings, “makes a powerful case for abstract expressionism as an unassailable peak of 20th-century American visual expression.” It’s plainly “thrilling” to stand before a great Pollock or a great Krasner. And while Pollock’s groundbreaking drip paintings, the ones that made him America’s most famous artist, have lost none of their visceral power, this show “establishes beyond a doubt” that Krasner was both more talented than her hard-drinking, insecure husband and equally as accomplished and original. At Krasner’s peak in the late 1950s and early ’60s, the paintings she produced were better than any made by more celebrated contemporaries. Unfortunately, being Pollock’s wife, then widow, “meant being relegated to second place.”

“Right off the bat, the show opens with a big blast of Krasner,” said Holland Cotter in The New York Times. A half dozen large collage paintings, all from the mid-1950s, “look like a lineup of ghostly raised arms, but also like a garden grown wild.” One of them, 1955’s powerful Bald Eagle, incorporates scraps of both her husband’s drawings and her own earlier work. “Inevitably, and justifiably,” Pollock’s history-making canvases are presented in a huge gallery at the heart of the exhibition. These are the pictures that “brought a merging of paint, choreography, and gravity to the point of explosion,” prompting Life magazine to canonize Pollock in 1949 as arguably the country’s greatest living artist. But abstract expressionism, “like all radical art impulses,” soon lost its freshness, even for Pollock. He hit a creative block in the ’50s, returned to heavy boozing, and died in 1956 while driving drunk, about a mile from the eastern Long Island home he shared with Krasner. His young mistress survived the crash.

“By any reckoning, ‘Krasner and Pollock’ is one of the most gorgeously designed and ingeniously installed exhibitions in the Met’s history,” said Lucy Ives in Hyperallergic. And there’s little mystery about its subtext: We come seeking insight into how Krasner survived her entanglement with a needy, art-world comet, and how it all affected her art. As it unfolds the story in politely phrased wall text, the show “has all the sweetness of a gossip session with a cherished confidante.” Yet there’s “something breathtaking” about the way it “simultaneously undercuts Pollock and demonstrates why his priceless canvases remain relevant.” Here, amid 48 of his pieces and 74 of hers, his work matters most in the ways it contributed to Krasner’s artistic development. “I’ve never seen an upending quite like this.”

Kate Atkinson is the celebrated author of Life After Life, Case Histories, and 12 other novels set mostly in her native U.K. In her latest, Our Noble Selves, a former POW becomes a murder suspect while helping stage a 1951 festival intended to boost national morale.

‘Middlemarch’ by George Eliot (1871–72)

Essentially, Middlemarch is a historical novel, set in the period 50 years prior to its publication. Eliot’s breadth and ambition and energy in painting a picture of a society in the midst of cataclysmic change is astounding. I also think it’s a very romantic book—not something Eliot is often accused of.

‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)

It took many years before Vonnegut felt able to give fictional shape to his experiences as a POW in the Dresden firestorm. The time-­ traveling, science-­fiction elements along with Vonnegut’s typical off-­kilter style work against the odds to make this—along with its ­ brother-in-arms, Heller’s Catch-22—one of the most powerful novels about World War II.

‘Persuasion’ by Jane Austen (1817)

I could have simply picked all six of Austen’s novels, but if I had to choose one, then this final one—a profound exploration of the human heart—would be the one. It is also about the pain of the path not chosen and the absolute powerlessness of women.

‘Parade’s End’ by Ford Madox Ford (1924–28)

This is cheating perhaps, because it’s actually a tetralogy that follows the fortunes of Christopher Tietjens from before the First World War and into its aftermath. It’s one of those novels—sorry, four novels—that I have trouble describing and am inclined to say, “Just read it.”

‘The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman’ by Laurence Sterne (1759–67)

Tristram Shandy is a very funny, digressive novel about a man trying to write his autobiography and failing to get past the first scene. I always remember my English tutor at university introducing it by saying that it was one of the first novels and also one of the first antinovels, although nowadays I think they would probably call it metafiction.

‘Just William’ by Richmal Crompton (1922)

I had a quietly passive only-­childhood, but ­William provided an alternative, escapist universe of naughtiness and high spirits. Even now, I would, if I could, be happy to live in William’s world. And have a dog called Jumble.

“It is a shame how many people wouldn’t dream of reading James Marriott’s eloquent, learned, and admirably brief book,” said Daniel Akst in The Wall Street ­ Journal. Reading is dying, as the 33-year-old London Times columnist tells us, so it’s inevitable that most of the public will miss out on the joys of following him as he lays out his concerns. The causes of his worries aren’t new. A 2022 survey found that in the previous 12 months fewer than half of American adults had read a book. A year later, another study found that in an average day only 16% read anything for pleasure. Of course, there’s “a lot more at stake” in this decline than good books being left unread. Marriott, by revisiting ties between the rise of mass literacy and mass democracy, “makes a strong case” that long-form reading is a necessary ingredient to sustaining the kind of rational and probing collective dialogue that has made mass democracy possible.

Marriott “might be insufficiently pessimistic,” said George F. Will in The Washington Post. Though he’s right that smartphones and the short-form videos they spawn have contributed to reading’s decline, the larger problem is that too many of our fellow citizens have become “pathetically nostalgic for the mental lassitude of pre-literate people.” It was not until the 18th century that large numbers of our forebears began reading widely, but we have them to thank for launching the modern age, and today, as childish thinking spreads, we’re seeing that “reason, tolerance, and progress are contingent, not inherent, facets of humanity’s story.” Marriott, “like many alarmists,” builds his argument on ­ cherry-picked data, said Chris Ferguson in Reason. He reports that reading scores for U.S. students hit an all-time low in 2024 without mentioning that they’d peaked in 2012, several years after the advent of smartphones. Meanwhile, the supposed link between literacy and healthy democracies is undermined by the highly literate societies that gave birth to the fascist regimes of 20th-­century Germany, Italy, and Japan.

“The New Dark Ages is too ominously titled,” said Michael O’Donnell in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Throughout the book, Marriott “thoughtfully acknowledges” evidence that reading and reason might not be utterly doomed, though he could have done more to acknowledge that the work many of us do still requires a lot of reading and writing. “Are we courting the same scenario as the Middle Ages, when a select few held the keys to knowledge, to the exclusion of all others? Probably not.” Still, “the thrust of Marriott’s ­argument — there is a decline in reading that is antithetical to the progress of the ­Enlightenment — strikes me as persuasive.”

Anyone shopping for airline tickets these days has likely experienced sticker shock, said Elaine Glusac in The New York Times. Airfares have “spiked,” with tickets now 24% higher on average than last year, the Consumer Price Index estimates, and holiday fares for Thanksgiving and Christmas approaching uncomfortable “new heights.” The question some consumers are asking is, Is the death of Spirit Airlines to blame? Possibly. Aviation analytics company Cirium looked at over 1,120 of the budget airline’s former routes and found that the “fares on more than 90% of those routes” have climbed since Spirit collapsed. “The median fare rose by 25.3%,” suggesting other airlines are feeling less pressure to keep a lid on their prices. “But price rises go beyond Spirit’s network” as well.

Fuel costs are the main factor, said Rio Yamat in the Associated Press. The price of “jet fuel has risen even faster than oil during the war” in Iran, since jet fuel competes with diesel for refinery space. But even if fuel prices suddenly drop, fliers might not see airfare reductions for months. Carriers “typically decide several months in advance how many flights to operate and seats to offer,” and they will try to lock in higher prices for as long as they can. Some blame can also be directed at what’s in your wallet, said Mark Kahan in The New York Times. The U.S. desperately needs more competition in air travel. But the legacy carriers get billions each year from banks that issue their popular reward cards. “These programs function as collateral, giving the biggest airlines access to inexpensive capital that their smaller rivals can’t match.” That is “the biggest barrier to another national carrier emerging” to keep fares in check.

There are still ways to find cheaper flights, said Megan Cerullo in CBS News. Flexibility with dates and times can lead to better deals, but it’s still best to book early. Google Flights recommends buying Thanksgiving flights in October, between 57 and 21 days before departure. For December holidays, look to book “56 days before departure” or around Halloween. Off-peak days are generally less expensive, especially Mondays and Tuesdays. Be careful if you want to ask AI for help, said Webb Wright in Gizmodo. I asked Meta’s new Muse AI agent for help “booking my holiday travel, something I have an annual habit of putting off until the last possible minute.” Bad idea. “I fell into a long and rather disorganized conversation” with my chatbot, which offered me “various flight itineraries” of questionable benefit. It’d be nice if Muse could simply search on Expedia, but AI agents aren’t allowed to access the site. For booking travel, AI “felt less like a seamless assistant than a slow and superfluous middleman.”

‘You Can See Everything’

Directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim (R)

★★★★

“No two people will draw the same conclusions from this movie. That is part of what makes it a masterpiece,” said Shane O’Neill in The Washington Post. Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s unsettling portrait of convicted Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes became “the most anticipated documentary of the decade” when an “unnerving” teaser was released last month showing a smiling, unblinking Holmes in extreme close-up staring at Fielder and insisting on her guilelessness. Word spread that shortly before she reported to prison in 2023, she had invited Fielder, the idiosyncratic mastermind behind The Rehearsal, to bring his cameras into her home, and in the resulting three-hour film, “she doesn’t get any less weird or more scrutable.”

Somehow “more shocking, thornier, and revealing than billed,” You Can See Everything “plays like an unraveling of certainty in real time,” said Adrian Horton in The Guardian. Holmes continues to insist she did nothing wrong when she became a billionaire a decade ago by touting a breakthrough medical device that her company couldn’t build, said Owen Gleiberman in Variety. Yet when she heads to prison halfway through, bidding goodbye to her husband and two children, this already riveting film “truly takes wing.” Bringing in a stand-in for Holmes, Fielder keeps pushing to understand his subject’s apparent detachment from reality, until the movie becomes “an intricate investigation into, among other things, the incomprehensibility of love,” said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast. In the end, “it’s not just the film of the year.” It’s also “a documentary that stands shoulder to shoulder with the form’s all-time greats.”

‘Sense and Sensibility’

Directed by Georgia Oakley (PG)

★★★

The new screen adaptation of Sense and Sensibility is “not the lush, buttoned-up period drama of tradition,” said Nikki Baughan in Screen Daily. Director Georgia Oakley, coming off an acclaimed 2022 art house debut, clearly wanted to foreground relatable emotions over Regency-era costumery with her take on Jane Austen’s tale of the cash-strapped Dashwood sisters. “That’s not to say the film doesn’t look gorgeous.” But compared with Ang Lee’s “candy-colored” 1995 version, Oakley’s is “decidedly more grounded” as it once again lets us watch sensible Elinor and free-spirited Marianne pursue husbands after their father’s death lands them in relative financial peril. “For those of us who adore the 1995 film, unfavorable comparisons seem inevitable,” said David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter.

Despite a “more than capable cast,” led by Daisy Edgar-Jones and Esmé Creed-Miles, the new movie has “a low-energy feel” in part because Oakley and her screenwriter “lean so heavily into Elinor and Marianne’s crushing disappointments and the forces holding them back in a period of vast gender inequality.” Fortunately, none of Oakley’s tweaks “dim the roiling passions of the sisters as they approach love from opposite ends of the emotional spectrum,” said Derek Smith in Slant. By focusing on Elinor and Marianne’s bond and how it’s tested by their different outlooks, this Sense and Sensibility “manages the difficult feat of breathing new life into these familiar characters’ interior lives.”

‘Misty Green’

Directed by Chris Rock (R)

★★★

“If Misty Green never comes apart at the seams,” it’s because Rosalind Eleazar “simply won’t let it,” said David Ehrlich in IndieWire. The Slow Horses actress is “never less than great” in the title role of Chris Rock’s new drama about a hot-mess Hollywood has-been who might just land a comeback role nearly 20 years after her peak if she can refrain from sabotaging herself for once. Rock’s “unkempt” script strains to combine a poignant character study with a scalding takedown of L.A.’s dream factory, and its excesses might have tanked the film if Eleazar didn’t hold it all together by “sheer force of will.”

The movie has “nothing insightful” to tell us about Hollywood’s dark corners that we haven’t heard already, said Alison Willmore in NYMag.com. The despicable side characters “feel a little easy,” starting with a producer, played by Adam Driver, who tempts Misty with drugs and lucrative sex work. Only one industry player comes across as noble—“probably because he’s played by Rock himself.” Fortunately, none of Rock’s misfires matter “once you lock into what Eleazar is doing,” said David Fear in Rolling Stone. She brings “nuance, shade, and emotional depth” to every story beat in Misty’s quest for redemption. “Eleazar doesn’t just make the movie work; she is the movie.” The TV veteran has never previously landed such a robust role, and “dear god, does she make the most of it.” She “deserves every accolade and every bit of the spotlight that Misty Green affords her.”

The data center boom has “entered a new, contradictory phase,” said Brian Martucci in Utility Dive. Construction activity on the massive warehouses filled with AI servers “remains robust.” But several billion-dollar projects are facing “a host of challenges,” including worker shortages, a lack of gas turbines, grid constraints, permitting delays, and widespread community opposition. The problems came to a head recently in New Mexico, when Oracle issued an unusual force majeure notice—normally reserved for insurance against “acts of God”—to “protect itself financially from the delay or cancellation” of its so-called Project Jupiter, after state regulators “blocked a gas pipeline proposed to serve it.” Google has also recently had to halt work on two data centers in Finland after a local outcry spurred an environmental review, while a Microsoft project in Michigan “faces an uncertain future amid local permitting delays.” Goldman Sachs estimates only 50% of planned data-center capacity may actually come to fruition in the near term.

That means the AI boom may soon hit a bottleneck, said Asa Fitch in The Wall Street Journal. Tech giants need “lots of data centers and electricity” to fulfill their ambitions, but the “delays are biting.” The amount of electricity demanded by data centers globally in the next two years “is enough to power around 118 million homes.” It’s curious that “chipmakers aren’t yet blaring their sirens” about the capacity squeeze. Possibly, that’s because they can’t even accurately tell “how much is being built”—and how much is being idled.

This “cornucopia of holdups” should be a wake-up call for investors, said Chris Bryant in Bloomberg. AI companies are spending billions “to secure precious supplies of computer memory” from chip makers like Nvidia and AMD. But if they can’t build data centers, they could end up “with too many chips and not enough operable server farms.” Almost half of the U.S. data-center pipeline is being built by first-time developers who have jumped into the gold rush, making big promises they might not deliver. It’s a “high-stakes game of musical chairs,” where losers will be left holding chips “without a seat.”

“Why assume the data center has reached its final physical form?” asked Todd G. Buchholz in The Washington Post. Historically, as technology has advanced, it’s gotten smaller. In 1946, a computer “took up the size of a house”; now it “fits in the palm of one’s hand.” Likewise, we can safely assume that the land, electricity, and equipment needed to produce a unit of intelligence will keep dropping. “That’s why communities should welcome new investment but insist that developers pay the costs of power, water, and grid upgrades.” The benefits from the technology will last for years, but the size of the physical footprint will not.

What happened?

Ukraine said its access to U.S. intelligence and crucial battlefield technology was abruptly curtailed this month, days after President Trump called for the ouster of the Ukrainian president and American officials reportedly threatened to cut military assistance to the war-torn nation. Trump turned on Volodymyr Zelensky after announcing that he’d struck a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin to buy Russian diesel, a stunning reversal of the nearly five-year-old U.S. and Western campaign to economically punish Russia for its war of aggression in Ukraine. Eager to bring down the soaring price of diesel before the midterms, Trump said Russia would immediately supply 300,000 tons of the fuel, followed by an additional 4.5 million tons beginning in November. The deal, which could inject some $4 billion into Russia’s ailing economy, shocked European nations and angered Zelensky, who called it “a weak decision” that would allow Putin “to kill more” Ukrainians. Trump demanded Zelensky end Ukraine’s strikes on Russian oil refineries, which have caused fuel shortages in the country. When Zelensky said Moscow must first end its attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure, Trump said Zelensky must “damn well stop” and that Ukraine needs “a new leader who can make a deal” to end the war.

Three days later, Ukraine’s armed forces said their access to the Starshield satellite internet service—the military version of Starlink, used for communications and to pilot drone fleets—was being throttled. The cutback came soon after the country was hit by dozens of ballistic missiles, which took out power for 600,000 people in Kyiv, without America’s customary advance warnings. Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, which supplies Starlink under contract with the Pentagon, said any “limits on usage” are decided by the Pentagon “and ultimately POTUS.” The administration offered no comment, but Ukrainian officials—who Zelensky said had been threatened with an end to U.S. intelligence sharing—drew their own conclusions. “This action cannot be a coincidence,” said military adviser Serhiy Beskrestnov.

Democratic and Republican lawmakers assailed the diesel deal, which came a month after Trump signed a bill to impose tariffs on countries that import Russian oil. The U.S. “should not provide Putin with a financial life line,” wrote six senators, including Republicans Susan Collins of Maine and John Curtis of Utah. In striking a deal with “a murdering dictator,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Trump “makes us complicit.”

What the editorials said

Trump’s deal is “a moral and strategic mistake,” said The Wall Street Journal. With diesel above $6 a gallon, he wants to throw a bone to voters weeks before the midterms. But all this deal will do is “directly finance Putin’s bloody war in Ukraine.” Trump announced it after a week in which more than 100 Ukrainian civilians, including at least 20 children, were killed in Russian strikes. And he asked nothing of Putin in return. “The only pressure Trump ever applies is on Ukraine.”

“Trump has stooped to new lows,” said the Financial Times, and his hypocrisy here is “glaring.” Having assailed India and China for importing Russian oil and threatened tariffs and other sanctions on countries that buy from Moscow, he’s now ready to hand $4 billion to Putin’s murderous regime. It thoroughly “undermines the credibility of Western efforts to isolate Putin.”

What the columnists said

Trump’s deal is “a fraud on the American people,” said Andrew C. McCarthy in National Review. He’s “desperate” to show he’s doing something to bring diesel prices down, but short U.S. supply isn’t the problem—we’re the world’s top exporter. Even if it were, the amounts involved are “trifling.” The first shipment of 300,000 tons equates to about 2.2 million barrels. Our transportation sector alone uses “about 3 million barrels of diesel daily.”

Trump ridiculously blames Ukraine’s refinery attacks for Americans’ pain at the pump, said Jonathan V. Last in The Bulwark. But the real culprit is his failing Iran war, which has choked supply from the Middle East. And “Russia has been helping Iran the entire time.” It’s provided Tehran with satellite imagery, drone components, and explosives—all of which have been used “to kill American soldiers.” Now Trump is begging Putin to take our money for some fuel? It’s “the most stunning display of submission and weakness from an American president ever.

Trump has personal reasons for “going for Zelensky’s jugular,” said Edward Luce in the Financial Times. He vowed to end the Ukraine war within 24 hours of taking office. Since he won’t make demands of Putin, that required “Ukraine’s capitulation.” Zelensky understandably refused to surrender— turning himself into “a constant reminder of Trump’s dealmaking impotence.”

This grim debacle is the latest evidence that Trump’s relationship with Russia “remains intense, important, and very weird,” said Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic. Since his first Moscow visit in 1987, “he has loudly repeated Russian propaganda and reflected Russian views,” a stance that’s “remained remarkably consistent.” Whether he’s just a “useful idiot” or a “deliberate agent of the Kremlin” is open to debate, said David Rothkopf in The Daily Beast. But with his grotesque betrayal of Ukraine, it’s never been clearer that he’s a Putin “puppet” ready to place “Russian interests ahead of America’s.” It’s “a profoundly dangerous development,” and we can only hope that more Americans begin to “recognize that there is no greater enemy to this country than its own president.”

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

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

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

Why is this El Niño different?

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

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

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

What counts as a ‘super’ El Niño?

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

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

Where is it hitting hardest?

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

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

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

Are countries prepared?

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

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

How will El Niño affect U.S. weather?

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

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

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

‘Letters and Journals: Katherine Mansfield’ (1977)

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

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

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

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

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

‘Avid Reader’ by Robert Gottlieb (2016)

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

‘The Journal of Sir Walter Scott’ (1890)

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

‘The Hours’ by Michael Cunningham (1998)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Crisco’ by Miranda Lambert

★★★

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

‘Popstar’ by Tinashe

★★★

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

‘Musk’

Directed by Alex Gibney (R)

★★★

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

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

‘Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother’

Directed by Bassam Tariq (R)

★★★

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

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

What happened?

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

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

What the columnists said

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Bass Persuades’ by Miley

★★

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

‘Ride Lonesome’ by Beck

★★★

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

‘Digger’

Directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu (R)

★★

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

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

‘The History of Concrete’

Directed by John Wilson (Not rated)

★★★

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

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

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

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

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

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

How are drones changing warfare?

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

What’s happening in that conflict?

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

How is the technology advancing?

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

What innovations are coming?

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

Is the U.S. prepared for that future?

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

What has Hegseth done?

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

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

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

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

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

‘Primetime’

Directed by Lance Oppenheim (R)

★★★

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

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

‘Heart of the Beast’

Directed by David Ayer (PG-13)

★★★

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

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

‘Resident Evil’

Directed by Zach Cregger (R)

★★★

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fierce loyalty

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

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

An ‘in-house stalker’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Clean energy pushes fossil-fuel power into reverse

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

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

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

Independent bookstores stage a comeback

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

First ‘cloud jaguar’ spotted in 10 years in Honduras

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

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

Risk of escalation

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

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

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

Regime change

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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