Editor’s letter Turns out that even the climate alarmists were insufficiently alarmed. This summer, while we were distracted by war, gas prices, gilded ballrooms, mean AI videos, and other reckless idiocy, climate change—dismissed by Donald Trump as “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world”—seems to have reached a tipping point. The U.S., Europe, and the world are suffering through the most extreme heat and related weather events in our lifetimes. “What we’re experiencing is what our community has been predicting for 30 years,” said Jean Jouzel, former vice-chair of the United Nations’ IPCC panel of climate experts. In Europe, prolonged heat waves with temperatures over 100 degrees killed tens of thousands, baked Britain brown, sparked massive wildfires, and turned sections of the Danube, the Rhine, the Po, and other rivers… Trump’s temporary mail-in ballot win What happened The Supreme Court let President Trump continue implementing his executive order on mail-in voting while federal courts consider whether his efforts to set election rules for the states are constitutional. In a 6-3 emergency opinion, the court’s conservative justices lifted a lower court’s injunction granted to 23 states to halt Trump’s order requiring the Department of Homeland Security to collect state-by-state lists of eligible citizen voters. That provision imposes “no concrete harm” on the states, the majority wrote, so they lack the standing to sue at this time. But the justices warned that the ruling did not mean full implementation of the order “will necessarily be lawful,” adding, “On that score, time will tell.” The court sent the case back to lower federal courts, which will rule whether… Only in America ■ The U.S. Army is offering soldiers four days off to play Grand Theft Auto VI, if they’ll re-enlist for at least two more years. Offered to 130 members of an engineering battalion at Georgia’s Fort Stewart, the four-day pass coincides with what the Army calls the “highly anticipated release” of the video game in November. “The idea,” said a spokesperson for the 3rd Infantry Division, “was to have a unique incentives program that connects to what soldiers are interested in.” ■ Demon Hunter, a Seattle-based Christian metal band, is suing Netflix, claiming a tour based on the movie KPop Demon Hunters has plunged the band into “existential crisis.” Although KPDH, the most-watched movie in Netflix history, chronicles the adventures of a K-Pop girl group that literally hunts demons, Demon… The U.S. at a glance Brentwood, Tenn. American icon: Country music legend Dolly Parton died this week at age 80. A Tennessee native and the best-selling female country artist of all time, Parton sold more than 160 million albums worldwide, and won 11 Grammys, two Emmys, and an honorary Oscar. She wrote and performed on a remarkable string of hits, including “Jolene,” “I Will Always Love You,” and “9 to 5,” the title song of the hit 1980 comedy in which she also starred. Her business empire included a theme park; cosmetics, lingerie, and shoe lines; and ownership of her catalog. Parton had been hospitalized four days before her death. Last week she told People magazine that she was “dealing with some health issues” but still had many things she wanted to achieve. “I’m gonna… The Ukrainian designer turned drone maker Iryna Terekh once considered herself a pacifist, said Matthew Luxmoore in The Wall Street Journal. Then Russia invaded her country. Two weeks after the Ukraine war began, Terekh, the owner of a furniture firm in Kyiv, was speeding out of the besieged city of Bucha with her mother when her car came under Russian sniper fire. The experience awakened in her a cold determination, and she posted a manifesto on Instagram: “I’m one of those women who doesn’t know how to fight. But I’m sure of one thing: I’ll do absolutely everything in my power to make sure nothing of this sort ever happens in my country again.” She retooled her company to produce anti-tank fortifications, and her manufacturing savvy led her to be hired in 2023 as production director… Afghanistan under the Taliban Five years after the botched U.S. withdrawal, millions face repression, hunger, and despair. What is life like in Afghanistan today? For the vast majority of Afghans, it is grim. Around 90% of the population lives below the poverty line, more than twice as many as before the U.S. pullout, and more than 3.5 million children suffer from malnutrition. Under the Taliban’s draconian interpretation of sharia, watching movies, playing chess, singing, and playing or listening to music are all banned. Men must wear long beards and attend daily prayers. And for women, whose movements are governed by some 200 Taliban edicts, it is the most repressive country on Earth. Women can’t attend school past sixth grade, work in most jobs, travel without a male relative accompanying them, uncover their faces in… The corrosive power of corruption Peggy Noonan The Wall Street Journal “Corruption is more dangerous than bad policy,” said Peggy Noonan. The Trump administration’s most lasting and corrosive legacy is likely to be its unrestrained assault on laws and norms barring presidents from using the immense power of the office for personal enrichment. President Trump is engaging in breathtaking levels of self-dealing, including his family’s crypto schemes, business deals with foreign governments, the sale of pardons, and demands for contributions and tributes from companies seeking regulatory favor. Bad policy can be reversed, but “corruption works its way into a system and changes its nature.” Despite the “sheer scale” of Trump’s greed, there “is no broad public outcry.” Many Republicans “are capable of not seeing what they don’t want to see,” and everyone else is overwhelmed… Two-tier justice, just like in the U.S. Andrew Phillips Toronto Star Given Canada’s current fury over U.S. bullying, said Andrew Phillips, “the last thing you’d think we’d want to do is adopt policies that make us just a bit more American.” Yet Ontario’s premier, Doug Ford, has just instituted a new cash bail program with an “American-style, pay-for-justice system” that is so unjust several U.S. states have already gotten rid of it. Ford’s “Keeping Criminals Behind Bars Act” requires anyone pledging bail to have in hand not the 10% required for a bail bond but the full bail amount, and within two business days. Of course, most people can’t do that without cashing out a major asset, such as a car or a house. The system “risks introducing what amounts to two-tier justice into Ontario: easier bail… United Kingdom: Harry & Meghan, the sequel “The Windsors’ prodigal son has returned,” said Niall Gooch in UnHerd. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, are coming back to the United Kingdom after stepping down as senior working royals in 2020 and moving to California. The shocking news came last week, after a recent visit by the couple and their children—Archie, 7, and Lilibet, 5—to King Charles III. But “the chefs at Buckingham Palace won’t need the fatted calf recipes just yet.” The Sussexes won’t be resuming “involvement with the Firm.” There’s clearly still resentment over how they ran off in a huff, making “vague unfounded insinuations about racism in the royal household” after it emerged that the biracial, American Meghan “was rude and high-handed toward staff.” Still, they are not despised in… ■ The CIA is experiencing an “unprecedented” wave of retirements and resignations, according to an internal document. The CIA workforce is believed to have numbered 22,000 in early 2025 and about 1,000 may have since left, a former official said. Because of a backlog of paperwork, new retirees are warned they may not receive their first full retirement check for nine months. The Washington Post ■ The Bureau of Land Management, the agency in charge of protecting wild horses on federal land, is quietly selling mustangs to buyers who—to get around a ban on slaughtering wild horses—resell them to be exported alive and processed into cuts of meat. More than 3,700 horses were sold last year, some for as little as $25 a head. The New York Times ■ A… Haitians: Fear grows as deportations begin About 160 deportees from the U.S. landed in Haiti last week, said Gerard Maxineau and Dánica Coto in the Associated Press, and as they deboarded the plane, “many covered their faces” out of fear of being identified by the gangs who roam the country. The flight ended in Cap-Haïtien, because planes that fly into the capital, Port-au-Prince, have been shot at—belying Trump administration claims that conditions were safe enough for their return. It was the first deportation flight to Haiti since the administration revoked the Temporary Protected Status of 350,000 Haitians. “It’s a great day to deport illegal aliens,” Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin gloated on social media. Haitian officials reluctantly welcomed this first batch, amid concerns that thousands of possible newcomers without homes could further destabilize a country roiled… Smart glasses: Preferred eyewear for creeps? The smart-glasses backlash is here, again, said Anthony Cuthbertson in The Independent (U.K.). Twelve years after privacy concerns killed off Google Glass—whose wearers were labeled “glassholes”—Meta has successfully revived the technology. Last year, it sold 7 million pairs of its Ray-Ban smart glasses, which you can use to “make phone calls and take photos or videos without needing to pull out your phone.” Integrating the technology into “one of the world’s top-selling sunglasses” was a stroke of branding genius, and for a while it looked like Meta’s smart glasses were “a contender for the most impressive consumer hardware of the 2020s.” But not everyone is on board. Critics have taken to calling them “pervert glasses” because of their association “with creeps who use them to film people without their consent”—on… An mRNA breakthrough in cancer vaccines In a potential revolution in the treatment of melanoma, an experimental vaccine has succeeded in stopping an aggressive skin cancer from returning in high-risk patients, reports The Wall Street Journal. In a clinical trial, more than 1,000 people who’d had surgery to remove melanoma tumors were given a personalized mRNA shot—intismeran, made by Moderna and Merck—alongside the immunotherapy drug Keytruda. While the companies haven’t yet provided the exact numbers from the newest phase of the trial, they say the combination both significantly lengthened the time before the cancer came back and kept it from spreading to other organs. Earlier trial results showed that the pairing of the vaccine and drug lowered the odds of recurrence or death by nearly 50%. Unlike the mRNA Covid vaccine, this vaccine is tailored to… Take baby on your run Could the cure for a runner’s aching knees be a jogging stroller? A new study suggests that parents who run while pushing one are less prone to the overuse injuries—shin splints, sore knees—that plague other runners, reports Smithsonian. Researchers compared self-reported data from 196 stroller-running parents with that of 53 who ran unencumbered, all raising children under 4. Only 19% of the stroller pushers reported such an injury, compared with 30% of the stroller-free group, and their injury rate per 1,000 miles was 55% lower. The likely reason is biomechanical: Gripping the handlebar channels some of running’s downward force through the arms and into the wheels rather than the legs, easing the jolt of each footfall. Strollers seemed to keep parents moving, too—among those with a baby age 6 to… (Random House, $29) Téa Obreht’s “masterful” new novel “delightfully mashes up several genres,” said Julia Scheeres in The New York Times. Its young heroine, Nina Terzic, survives a plane crash in the opening pages, pulling herself out of a Wyoming mountain lake before stumbling upon a ghost town and its layered history, which is built around a famous gunslinger. Soon, Nina’s stay in this town called Sunrise has us toggling between a survival drama, a Gothic western, and a murder mystery, and Obreht, the prize-winning author of 2011’s The Tiger’s Wife, proves “at the top of her game, offering a suspense-driven plot, sharply drawn characters, and succulent prose.” Nina’s tale is marred by a few “loopholes in logic,” said Nina Allan in The Guardian. She suffered no injuries from her… Also of interest…in icons of the ’70s The Jackal by Joby Warrick (Scribner, $30) Carlos the Jackal botched more terror plots than he saw to completion, said Gerard DeGroot in The Times (U.K.). In this new biography, journalist Joby Warrick pulls together “a great deal of new material” about the long murderous career of the Venezuelan gun-for-hire, who chased money, women, and attention until he was finally imprisoned. Though Warrick’s prose at times is “a bit purple” and his tone “surprisingly dispassionate,” he’s packed a lot of story into “a fast-paced, easy read.” Days of Miracle and Wonder by Ashley Kahn (Atria, $30) Paul Simon’s Graceland is “an album whose beauty can’t be separated from the circumstances of its creation,” said Philip Martin in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. In 1985, Simon shook off a decade-long lull by ignoring… For 33 gloriously scuzzy years, the Cramps served up “a proprietary cocktail of Sun-baked rockabilly, surf rock, early R&B, and punk attitude,” said Kory Grow in Rolling Stone. Gravest Gravy, an album consisting of a dozen previously unheard tracks that were recorded in 1977, with Big Star’s Alex Chilton producing, captures the band’s pioneering psychobilly sound at its birth. The group’s “B-movie aesthetic” set them apart as frontman Lux Interior and his partner in life and lunacy, guitarist Poison Ivy, made their mark on New York City’s nascent punk scene a year earlier. Lux died at 62 in 2009, but Poison Ivy partnered with punk icons Henry Rollins and Ian MacKaye to restore and release this record’s early takes on originals like “TV Set” and covers like “Rockin’ Bones,” this… Coyote vs. Acme The Looney Tunes gang takes on the Man. In Wile E. Coyote’s latest misadventure, the hapless would-be carnivore “won’t stop until he defeats [checks notes] Warner Bros.,” said William Bibbiani in The Wrap. In this “gut-bustingly hilarious” romp, Wile E. finally pauses in his Sisyphean pursuit of the Road Runner to try something new: He hires a lawyer to sue the Acme corporation over its defective mail-order products, and Acme turns out to be the parent company of the studio that owns every Looney Tunes character. The really crazy part? Warner Bros. once tried to shelve this movie to earn a tax write-off, only to be forced by a public outcry to sell it to a tiny distributor. Coyote vs. Acme mixes animation with live actors, said Jacob Oller in… The Invite Olivia Wilde, Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz, and Edward Norton keep the conversation edgy, uncomfortable, and funny in this edgy comedy about a dinner party that brings together two very different couples. $20 on demand I Love Boosters Keke Palmer steals the show in this funky, surreal, and totally uproarious comedy. She plays the ringleader of a shoplifting crew that roams the Bay Area taking designer clothes from big retail stores and selling the booty from car trunks. With LaKeith Stanfield and Demi Moore. $6 on demand The Sheep Detectives A menagerie of superb actors, including Bryan Cranston, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Regina Hall, and Patrick Stewart, voices the computer-animated sheep in this clever, all-ages comedy about a flock that sets out to solve who murdered their beloved shepherd. Prime Power… The advantages of shaving: Two showy summer salads So much can depend on how you slice a raw ingredient, says Pierce Abernathy in Every Leaf, Every Stem (Clarkson Potter). In the first of the recipes below, I treat melon “like a piece of raw fish,” shaving it into very thin slices that soak up the fat and acid from olives and vinegar, creating a savory crudo. “What makes the melon really sing,” though, is the addition of the seasonal sweet peppers. The second recipe gives summer zucchini similar treatment. Because zucchini is “almost spongelike when raw,” it “can soak up a lot of flavor.” Melon crudo with peppers, olives, and capers 1 (2-lb) white honeydew melon or other crunchy, sweet melonKosher salt2 habanada peppers1 Jimmy Nardello pepper¼ cup white wine vinegar2 small shallots¼ cup olive oil3 tbsp finely… This week’s dream: France’s Emerald Coast Though France’s Emerald Coast draws nowhere near as many visitors as the Côte d’Azur, said Annie Etheridge in The New York Times, “those who make the journey often find themselves smitten.” A picturesque corner of northwestern France, encompassing roughly 50 miles of the coast of Brittany, the region is known for its oysters, cool summer temperatures, and 40-foot tidal swings. I spend part of each year near the Côte d’Azur, in Marseille, but “feeling the irresistible pull of the tides,” I recently boarded a train and rode 700 miles north to get a taste of that other coast, whose name was inspired by the brilliant color of the waves, tinted by phytoplankton, that hammer its shores. “We must run!” shouted our guide just as water began licking our feet. Our… ‘Nonna-maxxing’ goes global I recently started seeking out travel experiences led by older women, and “I’m not alone,” said Emily-Ann Elliott in BBC.com. More than 75% of Gen Z travelers say they’d happily book a “grandma-inspired” vacation activity, and grannies everywhere are meeting the demand. Search online and you’ll find you can hire a Japanese obaasan as a tour guide, bake madeleines with a French mémé, or forage for edibles in Australia with a silver-haired Indigenous chef. “Learning from women who have, in turn, learned from their mothers feels very special,” as I can attest from my time in a Thai massage course. Grandmothers are “strict when they need to be, tease us when we make mistakes, and encourage us when we doubt ourselves.” When the stress of the final exam had me… Tariffs: The beef over beef imports GOP lawmakers and cattle ranchers were ringing “alarm bells” this week over President Trump’s decision to temporarily lower tariffs on ground beef, said Mallory Wilson in The Hill. To curb soaring beef prices—which have been pushed up by drought, rising input costs, and shrinking herds—Trump declared that he would let up to 300,000 metric tons of foreign ground beef into the U.S. with “no out-of-quota tariff.” He claimed the meat would be sold at 25% below the current market rate of $6.89 a pound, but offered no details on how the plan would work or which countries would participate. Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-Mont.) warned that the import of cheap foreign meat will only hurt American ranchers, “most of whom are MAGA Republicans.” Meriwether Farms, a farm-to-table operation in Wyoming, called… Real estate: A two-tier housing market It’s a have or have-not housing market out there, said Samantha Delouya in CNN.com. Look no further than San Francisco. Just a few years ago, the City by the Bay was a symbol of “urban decline.” Now it has the hottest housing market in the country. “Fueled by the artificial intelligence boom” that has left tech workers “flush with cash,” home prices are routinely getting bid up more than $1 million above their listing price. The median home in San Francisco now sells for $1.7 million. And the frenzy has “spilled over into the rental market as well.” Rents for one-bedrooms are up nearly 23% this year to $4,180 a month, and two-bedrooms are up nearly 26% to $6,020. And the upcoming initial public offerings from AI startups Anthropic and… Bonds: Can Bessent drive down borrowing costs? Scott Bessent just got “schooled by the bond market,” said Sam Goldfarb in The Wall Street Journal. After the yield on 30-year Treasury bonds surged to 5.3% last week, a near two-decade high, the Treasury secretary announced a major intervention. The federal government, he said, would at least double the amount of its own long-term bonds that it buys back from September through November—a move intended to stop a sell-off of U.S. debt that was pushing up T-bond yields. Those yields, which rise when bond prices fall, set a floor on borrowing costs, affecting mortgage rates, student loans, and credit cards. Bessent understandably wants to drive down borrowing rates ahead of the midterm elections, in which Republicans are expected to take a pummeling from voters over affordability issues. But his… The unofficial diplomat who defended her husband Nancy Kissinger was always by her husband’s side, but never in his shadow. A foreign policy specialist in her own right, she accompanied Henry Kissinger on game-changing diplomatic trips while he ran the State Department for the Nixon and Ford administrations in the mid-1970s. And she remained fiercely protective of his reputation afterward, despite criticism of his role in expanding the Vietnam War and backing right-wing coups in Latin America. When a protester accosted the Kissingers at an airport in 1982, Nancy grabbed the woman by the throat and was charged with assault. A judge dismissed the charges, noting that nobody was injured. “I did say to her, ‘Do you want to get slugged?’” Nancy said following her acquittal. “I just wanted her to stop and leave us alone.” Nancy… The Week Contest This week’s question: A wooden replica of Stonehenge that stood outside a pub in southern England since 2015 was recently destroyed in a fire. In seven or fewer words, come up with a message that could be inscribed on a memorial plaque for the short-lived Woodhenge. Last week’s contest: Dissatisfied with the limited effectiveness of its Do Not Call list, France has banned spam calls outright and will levy fines of up to $578,000 for marketing calls made without the recipient’s consent. If Congress were to consider legislation that drastic to combat the scourge of telemarketers, what should the bill be titled? THE WINNER: Don’t Ask, Don’t Telemarket Bill Levine, Belmont, Mass.. SECOND PLACE: One Big, Beautiful Block Karen Shepherd, Social Circle, Ga. THIRD PLACE: Don’t Call Us; We’ll Fine… Canada strikes back at U.S. in trade war What happened A defiant Canada this week vowed to give no quarter in a spiraling trade war with the U.S., as each side hit the other with steep tariffs that will spike consumer prices and harm industries on both sides of the border. The two countries had appeared close to a trade deal after a month of talks to stave off new U.S. tariffs announced by President Trump in July and to lower those he imposed last year on Canadian steel, aluminum, and automobiles. But after negotiations collapsed late last week, Trump levied 50% tariffs on $20 billion of imports from the U.S.’s No. 2 trading partner, including lumber, paper, clothing, and agricultural products. Vowing to retaliate “dollar for dollar,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney slapped tariffs of up to… U.S. threatens sanctions on Iran’s trading partners What happened The Trump administration this week declared that it had launched an “economic D-Day” against Iran, vowing to sanction anyone who does business with the country, in a bid to force Tehran to the negotiating table. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the White House aims “to sever every economic lifeline” that sustains Iran. “We are going to collapse this regime,” he said. His department announced immediate sanctions against 60 Iran-linked entities, individuals, and vessels. But Bessent said that Iran’s trading partners—which include China, Iraq, and Turkey—would have an unspecified amount of time to decouple from Iran before incurring harsh penalties. When asked why he was waiting to impose those sanctions, Bessent said, “Why would I want to blow up the global financial system?” China, Iran’s biggest trading partner, said… Good week/bad week Never changing, after election denier and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell announced he’d pay $825,000 for a hand recount of his own recent defeat in Minnesota’s GOP gubernatorial primary, then withheld payment, calling the state’s plan for the recount an “unlawful bait and switch.” Tiebreakers, after former Anchorage mayor Dan A. Sullivan endorsed incumbent GOP Sen. Dan S. Sullivan over challenger Dan J. Sullivan in Alaska’s U.S. Senate race. Invoking his status “as the O.G. Dan Sullivan,” the former mayor urged “Alaskans to vote for Daniel S. Sullivan.” Cinderella stories, after Prince Laurent of Belgium formally recognized Clément Vandenkerckhove, a 26-year-old former car salesman, as his biological son, the product of a brief relationship between the prince and a Belgian singer. Vandenkerckhove can now legally use his father’s surname, Saxe-Coburg, but… The world at a glance London Pay up: Prince Harry, Elton John, actress Elizabeth Hurley, and four other notables were ordered last week to pay an initial $13 million to the publisher of the Daily Mail. That figure will rise once the legal costs the paper incurred fighting the celebrities’ joint, failed defamation suit are assessed. The seven accused the company of hacking their phones and voicemail and tricking people into handing over private documents. Justice Matthew Nicklin called the claims “speculative” and criticized the accusers for failing to drop the case after they couldn’t prove the information was obtained illegally. Harry has long clashed with the press: He blames pursuing paparazzi for the 1997 Paris car crash that killed his mother, Princess Diana, and tabloids for criticism of his wife, Meghan, that drove the… How Kidman listens to her heart Nicole Kidman won’t let the end of her second marriage get her down, said Giles Hattersley in Vogue. The star’s divorce from country singer Keith Urban last fall wasn’t dramatic—the couple didn’t even go to court. But Kidman, 59, admits it’s been a hard year. “You make all these plans and you have all these ideas of what it’s all going to be like and then it’s…not. You have to adjust.” In the aftermath, she’s relied on her lifelong “feelings first” approach. “I don’t overthink things,” she says. “I lead with my heart. I just go, ‘OK, what do I feel here? I’ll give it a go.’” That same philosophy buoyed her when she was thrust into the paparazzi glare after marrying Tom Cruise at 23. Some friends warned that… When AI deceives its creators Jen Easterly The New York Times “The warnings lights are blinking again,” said cyber defense expert Jen Easterly. Before 9/11, the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, and the 2008 financial meltdown, there were “impending signs of danger” that decision-makers decided to ignore. In recent weeks, advanced artificial intelligence systems “took actions their creators did not intend” during testing, using deception to outwit humans. An Anthropic AI agent fabricated identities to plant malicious code in software; another swarm of AI agents sabotaged a platform used to evaluate AI models, “executing more than 17,000 autonomous actions” before its intrusion was detected. Clearly, “AI capabilities are advancing at extraordinary speed and behaving in ways we often can’t anticipate.” We need meaningful regulation before AI goes rogue in a truly damaging way. The… “Eggs recalled because of ‘probability of death.’ Deli meals, possible metal contamination. Beef. Blueberries. I haven’t eaten a salad in the last month that wasn’t made with lettuce I didn’t grow myself and I’ve abandoned my beloved blueberry muffins. But it’s about more than giving up favorite foods. It’s about being sick because Taylor Farms wanted to make more money, and the Trump administration was OK with that. Contaminated lettuce turns out to be a story about the time of Trump, when the corruption gives us an object lesson in what happens to ordinary people when our institutions work for the rich and powerful instead of for us.” Joyce Vance in her Substack newsletter… A broken consensus on guns Michael McGowan The Sydney Morning Herald “For most of my life, Australia’s gun laws have been about as close to a settled issue as you could get,” said Michael McGowan. After the 1996 Port Arthur massacre, when a gunman slaughtered 35 people in Tasmania, the government “took a principled stance.” It created a national firearm registry, mandated a 28-day waiting period for new firearm sales, and placed tight controls on automatic and semiautomatic weapons. Still, the two shooters in last year’s Bondi Beach massacre, who killed 15 people celebrating Hanukkah, managed to exploit a loophole to acquire the guns they used. Polls soon afterward showed public backing for even stricter gun control. Yet when Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced a gun-buyback program last week, he faced unexpectedly significant backlash. What… Who are we without our snowcaps? Regula Fuchs Der Bund “This summer, the Matterhorn wept,” said Regula Fuchs. That’s not a metaphor: After a thunderstorm in June, the king of the Swiss Alps trembled and shuddered, and water from melting glaciers “cascaded down the mountain’s gray flanks like a torrent.” This is now far from a freak event. More than 1,000 of our glaciers have disappeared since 1973, and more than 20 of our largest have lost a quarter of their volume in the past decade alone, leaving their slopes dangerously unstable. Last year, a landslide swept away the 800-year-old mountainside village of Blatten, where some 300 people lived. This year, the imminent collapse of a rock formation threatens to destroy Kandersteg, a hamlet of some 1,300 people that is popular with tourists for its glorious… Data centers: Now a factor in the midterms The backlash against data centers is “scrambling the midterm elections,” said Phillip M. Bailey in USA Today. Across ideological and regional lines, Americans are rising up in “populist opposition” to the hulking warehouse-like structures that are fueling the artificial intelligence boom. A recent Gallup poll found 71% of Americans would oppose one being built in their area, because of pollution and noise concerns and their vast use of water and electricity. Candidates in House, Senate, and gubernatorial races are now trying to score points with angry voters by opposing server farms—and assailing opponents who’ve supported them. Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott and Pennsylvania Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro, who both previously courted data centers, have put the brakes on their construction after being attacked as subservient to Big Tech. In the… National debt: How did it reach $40 trillion? Even “the liberal intelligentsia” expressed alarm last week when America’s national debt surpassed the $40 trillion threshold, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. Blame the entitlement programs of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, which “keep growing on autopilot,” along with a pandemic-era “spending binge” by both political parties that has doubled annual deficits to nearly $2 trillion. The initial Covid relief bill in 2020 was necessary, but continued sending out checks for far too long. The Biden administration spent trillions on additional stimulus for a “mostly recovered” economy, as well as a “bipartisan infrastructure bonanza,” and “a climate extravaganza.” Because of these spending sprees, the gross national debt has ballooned by $17 trillion since 2019—about as much as the country accumulated “during the entire first 225 years of… Innovation of the week A city in China has turned over some of its traffic policing to robots, said Chenxi Yang in Reuters. More than a dozen 6-foot-2, 216-pound “robocops” have begun manning busy intersections in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, part of a pilot program “aimed at handing some of police officers’ most repetitive traffic-control duties to machines.” The T2 robots, developed by Supcon Information, use “cameras, radar, and onboard computing” to identify e-bike riders without helmets, vehicles stopped over marked lines, and pedestrians crossing against signals, among other infractions. They can also “answer questions about directions” and traffic rules, and their arms can make “gestures synchronized with the signals.” Supcon says the robots have helped reduce some traffic violations by more than 40%.… The mystery of black hole stars

An object as wide as our entire solar system, glowing brilliant red and blazing with 100 billion times the energy of any known star, may be an entirely new kind of cosmic body: a “black hole star.” Astronomers spotted it by zeroing in on the reddest speck in the image archive of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope—a dot in the constellation Cetus that formed just 660 million years after the Big Bang. Its energy output looks nothing like a star’s and everything like a black hole’s, yet its light carries the telltale signatures of a star. The researchers believe it is actually a black hole wrapped in shrouds of gas so dense that it shines like a star. If the team is right, reports The Guardian (U.K.), that means the… When primates keep pets High in the canopy of a Ugandan wilderness reserve, two young chimpanzees approached a red-tailed monkey. Yet instead of the attack that watching scientists expected, the chimps began gently combing the monkey’s tail. Were they treating it like a pet? Intrigued, the researchers combed media reports and scientific papers and polled primatologists for other, similar events, and they managed to amass 427 similar accounts across 88 primate species. Each one showed some behavior hinting at pet-keeping instincts. In one case, a macaque bonded with a stray chicken; in another, capuchins nursed a baby marmoset for months. The interactions echoed how the primates treat their own kind—juveniles played, adult females mothered, adult males stayed aloof. While most encounters were fleeting, a few became long-lasting. The pull, the team suspects, could be… The Ego Trip: Psychedelic Toads, a Trail of Deaths, and the Guru Who Peddled Transcendence (Doubleday, $35) “Readers who are unaware that the secretions from some toads may serve as portals to the divine are in for some significant revelations,” said Dave Shiflett in The Wall Street Journal. Kimon de Greef’s engaging new book takes as a given that the Sonoran Desert toad produces 5-MeO-DMT, a powerful natural psychedelic. But de Greef is also interested in the subculture that’s arisen around “the God molecule,” as advocates call it. Toad facilitators now regularly milk the toad’s glands and dry the extract so it can be smoked, generating potent trips that are said to collapse the ego. Toad smoking can cause instant psychosis, but fans of the practice include Mike Tyson and Hunter Biden, and “de Greef describes the effects of 5-MeO-DMT in such glowing terms that… If Emilee Hackney’s best-selling new memoir reads like a retort aimed at JD Vance, maybe that’s because it is, said Olivia Weeks in The Daily Yonder. Hackney started writing the essays that became All That’s Unseen eight years ago, when she was an unlikely Harvard undergrad frustrated by how her native Appalachia was depicted in Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and how she felt looked down upon because of her accent and background. “I didn’t want to do what JD Vance did in his book—talk about Appalachian culture as a whole,” she says. “I wanted to talk about my experiences in Appalachia, my personal experiences.” Those experiences were unique. At 14, she began dating an 18-year-old aspiring pastor at her Pentecostal church and was two weeks from marrying him when he was… In concept, the third single from Weezer’s latest album doesn’t sound promising, said Ryan Reed in Consequence. “A self-referential quiet-loud rocker,” the song, titled “C.E.O.,” intentionally imitates the feel of the band’s very first single, 1994’s “Undone—The Sweater Song,” and opens with Rivers Cuomo speak-singing that he wishes he could do something new. Fortunately, “everything about ‘C.E.O.’ feels real,” from the lyrics to the angsty, fuzzed-out guitar attack. It’s not “instant-classic Weezer,” but it’s certainly “keeper-tier Weezer” and emblematic of its surroundings—the band’s “funniest, rawest, most musically spry album since at least 2014.” It’s definitely the Weezer album “with the gnarliest guitar sounds and most thunderous rhythm section,” said Tim Sendra in AllMusic. On this, the group’s seventh self-titled album and 20th overall, every tune was hashed out by the… A TV mascot turns killer. “Buddy is everything you could want from a midnight movie,” said Christian Zilko in IndieWire. A mock horror tale that riffs on the chilling cheeriness of 1990s children’s TV shows like Barney, it features a giant, talking orange unicorn named Buddy who begins murdering the kids in his own series’ cast. In a separate world, a mom played by Cristin Milioti begins digging into buried Buddy history when she comes to suspect she once had a third child, and “the results are electric.” Unfortunately, after a “side-splittingly funny” opening 20 minutes, said Johnny Oleksinski in the New York Post, Buddy struggles to maintain momentum. Director Casper Kelly made his name with Too Many Cooks, a 2014 parody of a sitcom’s opening credits sequence, and he’s brilliant… The Week’s guide to what’s worth watching Untold: Raygun: Breaking Badly Few athletes have crashed and burned at the Olympics the way Rachael Gunn did. The debut of breakdancing at the 2024 games introduced the world to the then 36-year-old Australian academic, who competed as Raygun. Her kangaroo-inspired hopping and other unorthodox moves drew wide ridicule, forcing her into retirement shortly after. Gunn and others recount the controversy, and the toll taken. Tuesday, Sept. 1, Netflix The Runner Gal Gadot plays a wonder woman of a different sort in this fast-paced original thriller about a high-powered London attorney forced into a high-stakes game. On her morning run, she receives a phone call from a stranger who says he has abducted her son and will spare the boy’s life only if in the next hour she kills a… Desert dining: New Mexico’s flowering food scene “It’s one of America’s most intriguing regional cuisines—and one that’s often overlooked,” said Kat Odell in Food & Wine. In New Mexico, age-old Pueblo foodways long ago intertwined with the traditions of Spanish settlers who brought sheep, cattle, fruit orchards, and Mexican chiles to the region. While corn, beans, squash, and chile remain the foundation, “over the past decade, a new generation of indie chefs has bolstered New Mexican cuisine,” accessing a “broader pantry” of high-desert ingredients. These restaurants are leading the way. /shed Think of this 12-seat membership-based dining club as New Mexico’s Noma. A “hyperlocal ethos” guides the tasting-menu dinners, which showcase ingredients raised, grown, or foraged very close by. A meal might feature thin sheets of sun-dried criollo beef with citrusy dogweed. Indigenous ingredients, such as ponderosa… Waldorf Astoria Costa Rica Punta Cacique Guanacaste, Costa Rica “Travelers from around the world chase the spirit of pura vida that permeates Costa Rica,” and they can find it at the country’s first Waldorf Astoria resort, said Kristin Braswell in Travel & Leisure. The property’s 148 guest rooms and 40 suites are spread across multiple earth-toned structures that cascade through “storybook” jungle surroundings and past multiple pools and terraces down to a secluded beach. The six on-site dining options include a café serving coffees made from “some of Costa Rica’s most prized beans,” and the 17,000-square-foot spa specializes in treatments featuring such indigenous ingredients as volcanic clay, cacao, and Melipona honey. hilton.com; doubles from $494… This week: Homes built in the 1920s 1 Garrison, N.Y. Built in 1929, Evarts Hill sits on more than 50 acres in the Hudson Valley about 50 miles from Manhattan. The estate’s updated six-bedroom main home is a stone-and-stucco French Norman château featuring a three-story rotunda with a curving staircase, a living room with hand-hewn beams, and a chef’s kitchen with a canary-yellow BlueStar stove. The land includes a five-bedroom carriage house, plus a rose garden, pool, and lawn. $8,950,000. Tony Cutugno, William Pitt Sotheby’s International Realty, (914) 582-7789 2 Kirtland, Ohio The Playmore, a 1929 French Provincial–style estate in a Cleveland suburb, overlooks Lake Erie. The expanded and updated seven-bedroom features detailed woodwork, ceiling frescoes, marble floors, a kitchen with a Tiffany skylight dome, and a 3,000-square-foot entertainment wing with a bar, billiards, a hookah lounge,… Social media: Meta’s $16.7B addiction settlement Meta reached a landmark settlement with 47 states this week, agreeing to pay up to $16.7 billion over claims it designed its platforms “to encourage compulsive use among young users,” said Madlin Mekelburg in Bloomberg. As part of the deal, the company must add new safety features to Facebook and Instagram, including “restricting how much time youths can scroll and preventing them from switching off certain safety settings without parental consent.” SEC: Questions for Wall Street over troubled hedge fund The SEC has subpoenaed some of Wall Street’s largest banks as it investigates the near collapse of hedge fund Situational Awareness, said Akila Quinio and Joshua Franklin in the Financial Times. The AI-focused firm, led by Leopold Aschenbrenner, 24, was a client of Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Citigroup, and Bank of… What the experts say ■ How brides profit off their wedding Some brides take on debt to fund their weddings, said Chavie Lieber in The Wall Street Journal. Others see their big day as an opportunity to make money. As costs rise, brides are borrowing from the “celebrity-influencer playbook,” seeking sponsors for food, gifts, invitations, and more. The average wedding already tops $34,000, and so far this year, costs are up 8.5% because of inflation and tariffs, which have driven up the prices of essentials like flowers, liquor, and travel. Yet even those without huge social media audiences can have success in defraying such costs. One New Jersey bride, a marketing professional with only 2,000 followers, scored a free wedding dress, bridesmaids’ dresses, tuxedos, and invitations after one of her posts went viral. ■… Why won’t Dems go driverless? Rogé Karma The Atlantic The driverless future is here, at least for those in red states, said Rogé Karma. Waymo’s self-driving robotaxis are becoming indispensable in places like Miami and Dallas, yet they’re still banned in most Democratic-led states, including Massachusetts and New York. There, “coalitions of labor unions, anti-tech activists, and politicians have kept driverless vehicles off the streets,” claiming the technology would “make the roads more dangerous and throw millions of human drivers out of work.” This is misguided. Yes, driverless cabs may take some jobs, and yes, they have on rare occasions blocked roads or even hit pedestrians. But overall, they are “much safer than human drivers” and could reduce the number of crash-related injuries that send some 10,000 Americans to the emergency room each day and… The Donna Reed daughter who married Coach Shelley Fabares radiated an onscreen wholesomeness at every age. She played perky eldest daughter Mary Stone on the squeaky-clean Donna Reed Show from 1958 to 1966. She then stepped into a bikini and shimmied her way through three Elvis movies; graduated to the role of supportive young wife in 1971’s Brian’s Song, an Emmy-winning TV movie about interracial friendship in football; and sparkled as the self-assured TV news anchor who eventually weds Craig T. Nelson’s character in the 1989–1997 sitcom Coach. She took pride in most of her roles: “The Donna Reed Show changed my life forever,” she said in 1989. “The Elvis movies, just great.” But she was forever mystified by her brief musical success, when her recording of the pop ballad “Johnny Angel” hit No. 1 for two… It wasn’t all bad ■ A British man’s wedding was saved by his future grandfather-in-law’s mobility scooter. While out on his bachelor celebrations, Andy Sheldon, 47, slipped on a step and broke his tibia, fibula, and another bone in his ankle. His fiancée, Lisa, worried that his crutches would stop them holding hands on their big day. But her granddad happily loaned the lovebirds his scooter, and Sheldon cruised down the aisle hand in hand with his now wife. “Everyone was saying it was the best wedding entrance,” said Lisa. ■ At age 91, Helen Woodyard finally got the high school diploma she’s wanted for decades. Inspired by her four children, who all earned their degrees, Woodyard began attending GED classes at West Georgia Technical College at age 88. Over nearly 1,000 hours of… Natalie Harp: A symbiotic relationship with Trump Until last week, Natalie Harp was just another colorful “background character” in President Trump’s “deeply, profoundly weird” administration, said Rex Huppke in USA Today. Political junkies knew Harp, 35, as Trump’s adoring, omnipresent “human printer” who kept him supplied with paper “printouts of people saying nice things about him.” But Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff has now made Harp a household name. In a speech last week, Ossoff accused Trump of having little interest in the job of president, preferring to golf, design ballrooms, and “travel with Natalie.” Ossoff hit a nerve, said Jonathan Lemire in The Atlantic, and “the West Wing lost its mind.” Trump spokesmen released blistering statements calling Ossoff a “cuck loser,” while Trump surrogates in the media claimed that it was “sexist” of Ossoff to imply that… Trump’s new crackdown on asylum seekers In the Trump administration’s latest immigration crackdown, the State Department announced plans this week to revoke the visas of foreign citizens who originally came to the United States temporarily but sought to stay longer by applying for asylum, potentially affecting as many as 200,000 visa holders and asylum applicants. Those being targeted came to the U.S. between 2016 and 2026 on B-1 or B-2 visas, which are issued for the purposes of business or tourism. The State Department plans to revoke the visas on a rolling basis. “Under President Trump and Secretary Rubio’s leadership, we are making clear that a visa is a privilege—not a right,” said a State Department spokesman. The State Department also told embassies and consulates that they must postpone all scheduled… Rhys’ confidence issues Matthew Rhys refuses to trust in his success, said Lulu Garcia-Navarro in The New York Times. The actor has won critical acclaim, including an Emmy for The Americans and over a dozen award nominations. But he’s wrestled with self-doubt since he was a boy in Wales—a locale that breeds such sentiment, he says. In England’s shadow, “we’re the small cousin who’s always put into the corner and ignored. There’s a great subservience and insecurity nationally.” He idolized David Niven, an English actor with Welsh roots and the quintessence of understated confidence. “He was always so quietly self-assured and said the right thing. I wish I could be that person.” He also looked to countryman Richard Burton, who broke the mold. “He was the first to be very, very un-Welsh. [He… ■ Hayden Panettiere’s boyfriend Brian Hickerson administered an anti-overdose drug to the actress shortly before she was declared dead last week, his brother Zach Hickerson told TMZ. Zach said he dropped by the couple’s Airbnb in Greenville, S.C., after they failed to respond to his messages. His knocking on the door woke Brian, 37, and the two brothers found the Heroes actress unconscious on a couch bed. “I immediately called 911,” Zach said, “and Brian gave her Narcan”—a nasal spray that can reverse an opioid overdose. EMS workers performed CPR on Panettiere but were unable to revive her. The Drug Enforcement Administration has joined the investigation into the death of Panettiere, who struggled with addiction. Her estranged mother, Lesley Vogel, said this week that Panettiere knew Brian Hickerson, who had… Blanche’s commitment to injustice Mona Charen The Bulwark Todd Blanche has made only one promise about his tenure as U.S. attorney general, said Mona Charen: total subservience to Donald Trump. Blanche, who was Trump’s personal lawyer before he was nominated to serve as the nation’s top law-enforcement official, was narrowly confirmed by the Senate several weeks ago. Asked on Meet the Press if he would pledge to “act independently of the White House,” Blanche flatly said no, and insisted that the attorney general must answer to the president. When pressed, he claimed that Trump “will never” ask him to do anything unethical or illegal. That’s laughable, given that Blanche and his predecessor, Pam Bondi, have shamelessly weaponized the Justice Department to conduct “blatantly political” investigations and attempted prosecutions of James Comey, Jerome Powell, Mark… It must be true… ■ A Long Island, N.Y., man has completed six marathons running barefoot. John Mazzei, 57, a ballroom dance instructor, ditched the sneakers after finding it ended his knee problems, and ran his first shoeless marathon in 2010. He’s suffered occasional blood blisters and glass shards from running barefoot on pavement, but no serious problems. He attracts plenty of attention on his runs: “People say, ‘Hey! You forgot your shoes!’” Mazzei says. Once he was stopped by police who “thought I robbed somebody. I said, ‘Actually, I was doing an 8-minute mile.’” ■ A British farm has stirred outrage for operating a children’s slide modeled on the Titanic. The ride at Graveley Farm in Hertfordshire, which offers activities for families, tilts a boatlike structure and sends riders down chutes onto a… How they see us: Favoring North Korea over South “A shadow of disaster looms over the Korean Peninsula,” said The Chosun Ilbo (South Korea) in an editorial. President Trump’s abrupt decision last week to dramatically downsize ongoing military drills with South Korea was an act of “clear disrespect to an alliance partner.” The U.S. order came as 18,000 South Korean troops and nearly as many American service members were already in the midst of exercises, and both sides had to scramble to recalibrate, shifting live-fire exercises to computer simulations. These drills rehearsing defense against a North Korean attack are “the core” of the U.S.–South Korea alliance, and halting them undermines military readiness. Worse, Trump actually “defended the enemy of the alliance while disparaging the alliance itself,” describing his relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un as “very good”… The EU’s addiction to U.S. tech Mathieu Pollet Politico.eu “The first thing I noticed when I gave up American technology was the silence,” said Mathieu Pollet. With EU leaders seeking to wean the continent from its reliance on Silicon Valley, I set out to see what it would be like to live in Brussels for a few days without access to a single U.S. product. “No iPhone. No Mac. No Slack or Teams. No Google Search or Maps. No ChatGPT. No WhatsApp or Signal. No Facebook or Instagram feeds. No credit card payments.” Would it even be possible? The depressing answer is: not really. Living without U.S. tech “essentially amounts to trying to live without tech at all.” Walking around town, I had to keep wads of cash on me, since local European bank cards generally… Islamophobia: A spreading hate on the Right Conservative voters in Texas have a new bogeyman, said J. David Goodman in The New York Times: Muslims. Though only 1% to 2% of Texas residents are Muslim, the community is growing fast—and so is fearmongering from the Christian hard right about the spread of “sharia law” and a planned Islamic “takeover.” A proposed mosque development outside Dallas was denounced by influencers as a threat to Western civilization and investigated by state authorities. Multiple conference panels at this summer’s state Republican convention “warned of a Muslim invasion.” And Gov. Greg Abbott has jumped on the bandwagon: He has designated the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a national civil rights group, a terrorist organization; ordered the cancellation of a private water-park party celebrating a Muslim holiday; and last week threatened to pull… “I remember thinking, as I taped a piranha to my boomerang, this could come back to bite me.” Comedian Olaf Falafel, quoted in The Guardian “Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.” Economist Theodore Levitt, quoted in Medscape “My characters are not larger than life, they are in fact as big as life. And life is really very big.” Toni Morrison, quoted in Popville “When intellectuals can do nothing else, they start a magazine.” Dissent founder Irving Howe, quoted in The Argument “A prudent ruler cannot, and should not, honor his word when doing so works against his interests and when the reasons that made him make the promise are no longer relevant.” Machiavelli, quoted in the Sri Lanka Daily News “Show me the incentive and… Bytes: What’s new in tech ■ A disturbing TikTok ‘experiment’ Two senators are demanding answers from TikTok after it conducted an “appalling” safety experiment that allegedly resulted in a 16-year-old’s suicide, said Olivia Carville in Bloomberg. Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) sent a letter last week to TikTok executives after Bloomberg Businessweek reported on the experiment, which was “discussed in detail in a confidential 2023 company document.” The document revealed how TikTok “intentionally switched off an algorithmic safeguard from 10% of U.S. users, turning them into a control group.” Among that group of about 15 million people was Chase Nasca, 16, of Bayport, N.Y. He “was fed thousands of videos about sadness, hopelessness, loneliness, and suicide.” Within a month, Chase had killed himself. “This was a happy 16-year-old boy with no mental… Darwin’s theory of tickling Charles Darwin was right about the origin of species, and now his speculation about the origins of ticklishness also appears to be vindicated, reports The Times (U.K.). In 1872, the naturalist suggested that we giggle and flinch when being touched in certain spots because those are the parts handled the least. In a new study, researchers at Radboud University in the Netherlands tested Darwin’s notion against four rival theories: that ticklishness relates to thinner skin, that it’s about the density of touch-sensitive nerves, that it protects vulnerable areas from injury, or that it’s linked to pleasure and erogenous zones. They asked 450 people in China, the Netherlands, and Greece to color in on the outline of a human body the locations where they were most ticklish. The common areas were… The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy (Avid Reader, $30) “Picture this: A loosely organized cabal of obscenely wealthy tech moguls aim to overthrow democracy and replace it with a corporatist dictatorship,” said Kevin Truong in The San Francisco Standard. The premise, undoubtedly, “would make for a good political thriller.” In Gil Durán’s new nonfiction hit, it makes for more unsettling reading. Durán, a journalist who’s also been a spokesman for Jerry Brown and Kamala Harris, argues that tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel, the main patron of JD Vance’s career, sits at the center of an active and powerful circle of tech evangelists who believe democracy is obsolete, technology will create a utopian future, and their cohort is an elite that should decide how the future unfolds. The claim would sound like mere conspiracy theory, said Tonya Mosley… Best books…chosen by Jennifer McMahon Jennifer McMahon is the best-selling author of 12 suspense novels, including The Winter People and Promise Not to Tell. In her latest book, Stay Buried, siblings new to a remote Vermont town discover that the locals live in fear of a vengeful spirit. ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ by Washington Irving (1820). The story of Ichabod Crane terrified me as a kid. I remember running home on wooded paths from a friend’s house, certain I heard hoofbeats behind me. I was sure that if I turned back, I’d see a rider with his head tucked under his arm, and that just as I was making out the lights of home through the trees, he’d hurl it through the air at me. ‘The Lottery’ by Shirley Jackson (1948). Until I read… Willem de Kooning Drawing Art Institute of Chicago, through Sept. 20 Everyone knows Willem de Kooning as one of the 20th century’s great painters, said Dian Parker in Observer, but “to understand and appreciate any of his work, you need to witness his radical approach to drawing.” Fortunately, the Art Institute of Chicago is offering that opportunity in a “sensational” exhibition that gathers more than 170 of the Dutch native’s drawings along with 11 paintings. De Kooning, who arrived in the U.S. in 1926 as a 22-year-old stowaway on a freighter, never renounced the value of the drafting skills he had cultivated in Rotterdam. But over the next several decades, he “pushed himself relentlessly and with fevered exuberance” as he chased new ways of seeing and new ways of sharing his discoveries. He famously… Jon Batiste can’t hide his joy when he’s playing Thelonious Monk, said Michel Martin in NPR.org. On Monk Movements, one of three solo piano albums the eight-time Grammy winner released on Aug. 14, you can hear his exclamations as he constructs personal takes on “Blue Monk” and “Ugly Beauty.” Batiste fell hard for Monk’s music over 20 years ago, said Larry Blumenfeld in The Wall Street Journal. Now, as a global star, he’s released two tributes to the jazz legend, with Monk Movements the livelier of the two. Whether the Louisiana native is interpreting Monk or playing original compositions that engage with Monk’s legacy here, “it feels as if he’s letting us in on a private communion with his hero.” As on Batiste’s other piano studies albums, said Philip Martin… New and notable podcasts “When was the last time the word ‘manifesto’ carried anything but a negative connotation?” asked Nicholas Quah in NYMag.com. That question animates Dan Taberski’s Manifesto, the latest podcast from the creator of Missing Richard Simmons and 9/12, which aims to reclaim the tradition of impassioned statements of purpose from their usual contemporary association with serial killers and mass shooters. Because Taberski focuses on what makes a manifesto effective, the show “could easily veer into being a little too cute or twee.” Luckily, “the strength of Taberski’s writing, the quality of his interviews, and the clarity of his perspective keep the series firmly grounded.” Throughout, Taberski “argues that, done right, a manifesto is a nonviolent call to action,” said Sarah Larson in The New Yorker. Yes, there’s an episode on accused… Cold War thrills and buddy-comedy hijinks collide in this clever new feature co-starring Ryan Reynolds and Kenneth Branagh. Reynolds plays a U.S. pilot forced to eject from his SR-71 Blackbird during a botched 1987 reconnaissance mission. Landing somewhere in the USSR’s boreal forest, he’s rescued by Branagh’s character, a gruff former KGB agent who saves his life. Luckily, the ex-spy is an American culture buff and, sensing an opportunity to defect, agrees to help his new friend escape the country. Reynolds and Branagh’s chemistry complements some top-notch action scenes. Friday, Sept. 4, Apple TV… Wine: Beaujolais blanc Beaujolais blanc has to be “one of the best-kept secrets” of France’s Burgundy region, said Edward Deitch in Vinepair. The Beaujolais region is often regarded as distinct from Burgundy because its soils differ and its red wine is gamay rather than pinot noir. But its white wines are “quite similar to Burgundian chardonnays”—aside from being far less expensive. 2024 Jean-Paul Brun ‘Terres Dorées’ ($22). This “gorgeous” chardonnay has a “delicate, chalky minerality” undergirding “notes of pear, mandarin, and fennel seed.” 2025 Emmanuel Fellot ($24). “Crisp, balanced, and delicious,” this “mineral-driven” chardonnay also offers notes of peach and citrus, followed by “firm acidity on the finish.” 2024 Château Pougelon ‘Pierres Doreés’ ($33). “This wine sets a benchmark in the region for non-oaked chardonnay.” Its notes of apricot and green apple are… Getting the flavor of… An adult summer camp in Texas At Camp No Counselors, “nobody’s going to tell you to put down The New Yorker because it’s time for a cornhole tournament,” said Wendi Aarons in Texas Monthly. That’s both a good and bad thing about adult summer camps, as I learned when I recently spent a long weekend in Marble Falls, Texas, at a getaway for grown-ups eager to “recapture their youth, unplug, or see if tug-of-war is as fun as they remember.” While watching a Wiffle ball game on Day 1, I was puzzled: “Everyone, even the spectators, looked so into it.” And at dinner, “I faced that classic cringe moment: New kid looks for a place to sit.” That night, though, I met Julie and Terri, who were so into it… The bottom line ■ Over a third of web pages published since the release of ChatGPT in late 2022 show signs of being written by AI, according to a new Pew Research study. URLs with a .com domain showed signs of AI authorship at about 10 times the rate of a .edu or .gov domain. TechCrunch.com ■ Employers expect their health-plan costs to rise by 11.1% in 2027, the steepest hike in at least two decades. Much of that increase will be passed on to employees, who this year are expected to spend an average of $5,297 on health care, $388 more than in 2025. The Wall Street Journal ■ Lego posted a record $6.5 billion in revenue in the first half of this year, up 21% from the same period in 2025.… Networking with a side of romance “Tired of the endless roulette of online dating, more people are looking for love on LinkedIn,” said Celia Bernhardt in The Wall Street Journal. With its “clear headshots and ample personal information,” the professional site has become a “go-to tool for singles.” LinkedIn’s guidelines “strictly forbid any kind of romantic advances.” But at least 22% of professionals confessed in a recent survey to having either reached out or responded to someone on the platform with romantic intent. Daters say it’s a “useful vetting tool,” especially for singles seeking companions with similar “professional, financial, and personal life goals.” Londoner Esme Gordon-Craig, 24, uses LinkedIn to make connections—“professional, social, and maybe more”—but makes sure that the messages she sends to potential love interests always read as work- or career-related, not as pickup… Charity of the week For more than 125 years, the Native Plant Trust (nativeplanttrust.org) has worked to conserve New England’s native flora and raise awareness of those plants’ value, use, and beauty. Its headquarters outside Boston at Garden in the Woods, a 45-acre botanical garden showcasing over 1,000 native plant species, welcomes visitors from around the world. Plants cultivated from the nonprofit’s bank of more than 10 million rare seeds have helped restore or diversify wild and domestic habitats and provide food for native animals. Volunteers used banked seeds to replant coastal flora after Hurricane Sandy in 2012, and staff botanists have reintroduced several endangered local perennials to their habitats. The nonprofit also operates plant nurseries that sell to the public, offers formal certifications in native plant botany and horticulture, and hosts workshops, children’s… Using data to charge you more Stephanie T. Nguyen The New York Times Companies are going all-in on individualized pricing, said Stephanie T. Nguyen. Corporations from Starbucks and Kroger to Target and Home Depot are using data to make “targeted calculations about what to charge you.” A customer’s location, browsing history, and social media activity can help determine how much they’re willing to pay. Companies insist such targeting is “simply how modern discounts work,” that it’s the “natural evolution of coupons.” That’s not the case. With coupons, everyone gets the same discount, so consumers see the original price and what they’re saving. But with surveillance pricing, people are offered different prices for the same thing. One Washington Post reporter found that Starbucks will, in some cases, charge loyal customers more than new ones. Such practices need… The music critic who chronicled Springsteen Dave Marsh wasn’t one to mince words. Journey was “Stepford Wives rock, dead on its feet without any awareness of the utter triviality.” Queen “may be the first truly fascist rock band.” The Grateful Dead? “Virtually worthless except for documentary purposes.” In his decades as one of the most influential critics in rock, Marsh delivered many such takedowns in the pages of Creem and Rolling Stone, but he was equally noted for his fervent praise of the music he loved, which ran from the Supremes to the Sex Pistols, Marvin Gaye to the MC5. Bruce Springsteen, whom he helped launch to fame, was his favorite, the subject of five of Marsh’s many books; he also wrote books on Elvis Presley, George Clinton, and the song “Louie Louie.” Pugnacious and contrarian,… The preacher’s digital twin Pastor Justin Lester wanted to give more of himself to his congregation, said Eli Saslow in The New York Times. So he created an AI clone to provide spiritual support around the clock. HE HAD BAPTIZED them in his waders, counseled them through marital crisis, and prayed at their hospital beds, and now Justin Lester stood in front of his congregation and asked for their trust again. “I can’t lie,” he said earlier this summer, as a few dozen people crowded into a backroom of the church. “What I’m about to show you might seem a bit out there.” Lester, 37, pulled up a slideshow on his computer and started to describe the church of the future—the one he’d been working to build ever since he became the pastor of…