Should technology that’s going to determine America’s future be left “in the hands of 50 state legislatures?” asked Michael Solon in the New York Post. President Trump doesn’t think so. Last week, he signed an executive order setting up an “AI Litigation Task Force” to challenge state laws on artificial intelligence that the administration considers overly burdensome. The order also threatens to restrict those states’ access to federal broadband funding. In an online post, Trump explained correctly that America’s global leadership in AI “won’t last long” if every state imposes its own regulations, forcing AI companies “to get 50 Approvals every time they want to do something.” Consider California’s innovation-crippling “woke” regulations, which require all AI models to comply with Sacramento’s requirements for “safe, ethical, equitable, and sustainable” systems—or else face a $1 million fine. But make no mistake: Trump’s order is a “jerry-rigged solution at best.” The Constitution charges Congress, not the president, with regulating industries involved in “interstate commerce,” and Trump’s order could be nixed by legal challenges. Still, in this age of congressional dysfunction, and given the stakes of our AI race with China— where there are no restrictions at all impeding development—can we really blame the president for “taking action?” 

Trump ran on “America First,” said Dave Lee in Bloomberg. But on AI, he’s “Silicon Valley First.” Looming over Trump as he signed the order was a beaming David Sacks, the venture capitalist and White House “AI czar” who has been lobbying for a “moratorium” on state laws since last year. Why do Sacks and his fellow billionaires care if AI is regulated by states or Washington? Because they don’t want any regulation that might crimp profits— including safeguards to protect minors from suicide-encouraging chatbots—and they’re betting on “paralysis at the federal level” to ensure they don’t get any. 

We need to take the AI threat from China seriously, said former defense secretary Chuck Hagel in The Atlantic, but state regulation is actually our best defense. The kinds of laws states are passing—to tackle “deepfake impersonation of public officials,” for example, or AI-driven phishing scams—are routinely minimized as “social issues” by Sacks and Co. But to China and other bad actors, weak regulations in these areas create precisely the kind of “soft targets” that could let them “distort elections, fracture alliances, and erode civic trust” within America. To preempt these laws in favor of federal oversight that doesn’t yet exist “would be a disaster.” 

The outrageousness of Trump’s order is “one of the few things Republicans and Democrats can agree on right now,” said Tina Nguyen in The Verge. The Left is aghast at the naked profiteering, and the possibility that AI could wipe out jobs and further empower billionaires. And on the Right, MAGA icon Steve Bannon this week accused Sacks of having “completely misled” Trump by persuading him to back an “AI amnesty,” while Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis denounced “federal government overreach” that lets tech companies “run wild.” Bannon and DeSantis are channeling the real fears of red-state voters, said Valerie Hudson in the Deseret News. We saw what unregulated social media did to our children and our families. We’re not going to surrender and let Trump, or anyone, once again put the “pecuniary interests” of tech whiz kids and billionaires above “the lives and well-being of the American people.”

How much do we spend on decorations? 

Americans splash some $6 billion a year on festive decor. We buy 30 million real Christmas trees and 20 million artificial ones, 150 million sets of Christmas lights, 70 million pots of poinsettia, and millions more ornaments, yard decorations, and window decals. Some “extreme” decorators pay big to transform their homes into elaborate Christmas villages with brilliant light displays and animatronic characters. Mike Bagwell of Springfield, Mo., estimates he’s spent more than $130,000 on holiday decorations over the years, including on the 270,000 LED lights that adorn his home. “When you see the [community’s] laughter and the joy, it just makes it all worthwhile,” he said. All that sparkle adds to utility bills: Americans’ holiday lights collectively use 3.5 billion kilowatt hours of electricity each December—enough to power more than 350,000 homes for a year—at a cost of about $645 million. Then there are the seasonal medical bills, because 18,400 of us end up in the ER with decorating injuries having, for instance, fallen from a ladder while hanging lights. Still, the emotional dividends of decorating can be profound. “If you haven’t had a great year,” says psychologist Pauline Wallin, “it can put you back in touch with pleasant memories.” 

What’s the history of decorating? 

Some Yuletide adornments go back to pagan times: Pliny the Elder wrote of Celtic druids’ reverence for mistletoe. But modern holiday decor really took shape in the 19th century. Joel Roberts Poinsett, the first U.S. ambassador to Mexico, came home in 1828 with a shrub that bloomed red in winter. Called flor de Nochebuena (flower of Christmas Eve) in Mexico, it’s now known across much of the world as poinsettia. In 1856, following a craze sparked in the English-speaking world by Queen Victoria, President Franklin Pierce unveiled the first Christmas tree at the White House. Around the same time, a craftsman in the German town of Lauscha began blowing glass tree ornaments in the shape of spheres and fruit and nuts, then silvering them inside and painting the outside. In 1880, retailer F.W. Woolworth reluctantly agreed to buy a box of the ornaments from a German salesman. Woolworth thought the “useless” decorations wouldn’t sell, but customers at his Great Five Cent Store in Lancaster, Pa., snapped up all 144 in a matter of hours. Woolworth quickly placed a new order; over the next 60 years, his retail empire would sell 500 million baubles. 

What about Christmas lights? 

They were a homegrown invention. After Thomas Edison patented the first practical incandescent light bulb, he strung a few together outside his Menlo Park, N.J., laboratory for the 1880 Christmas season. Two years later, Edward Hibberd Johnson— Edison’s business partner—wrapped a string of 80 red, white, and blue bulbs around his Christmas tree. Placed on a rotating platform in the parlor of his Manhattan home,  the tree mesmerized passersby. “One can hardly imagine anything prettier,” said one reporter. Those early illuminations were pricey: It cost the equivalent of $10,000 today to have electricians install tree lights and be on call if a bulb burned out. But in 1903, Edison’s General Electric debuted the first mass-market string of Christmas lights, which cost $12 (more than $400 today) and was marketed as a safe alternative to the candles traditionally placed in trees. In the 1960s, plastic “blow mold” lawn ornaments shaped like reindeer and Santa Claus exploded in popularity, but sales sank in the 2000s as inflatable decorations took over yards. 

Where did they come from? 

They were dreamed up by same firm behind Big Mouth Billy Bass, the animatronic singing fish. Texas-based Gemmy Industries was looking for a follow-up hit when co-owner Dan Flaherty wondered if he could make a consumer version of the inflatable animals often seen outside car dealerships. Early prototypes used hair dryers, which overheated and burned out, but Gemmy eventually devised a fan that could blow for months on end. In 2001, it launched its first inflatable—an 8-foot Santa—and now sells scores of seasonal specials, including a 7-foot shotgun-wielding Santa in a deer stand. In 2014, American entrepreneur Lou Lentine introduced another holiday innovation: a laser projector that speckles homes with festive lights. He devised the Star Shower as a safe, ladder-free way to illuminate a home, but the Federal Aviation Administration has warned that the lasers can pose “a serious safety risk to pilots” when misaimed. Americans who shopped for such gizmos and other holiday decorations this year likely noticed many prices were up from 2024. 

Why is that?

Because of President Trump’s tariffs on China, the source of 87% of all Christmas decorations. Import duties on Chinese goods skyrocketed to 145% this spring, before dropping to about 40%. Despite that fall, industry leaders warned that Americans would have to pay 18% more for decorations. Small businesses that import holiday decor have so far spent over $400 million on tariff fees, up 1,438% from last year. “We went from working toward a profit to working for tariffs,” said Jared Hendricks, who runs Village Lighting in West Valley City, Utah. 

Are Americans cutting back?

They say they are. In an October poll, only 39% of respondents said they’d buy new decorations this year, down from 56% in 2024. Still, the National Retail Foundation reports a record 202.9 million Americans shopped for Christmas items during Thanksgiving Week, and it expects overall holiday spending to top $1 trillion for the first time this year. Matthew Shay, the trade group’s CEO, suspects Americans won’t let economic gloom ruin the holiday. “Somehow,” he said, “Santa Claus always comes.”

San Francisco

Near dining and shopping on Hyde and Polk Streets, this two-bedroom in the 1961 mid-century modern Green Hill Tower has walls of glass overlooking the San Francisco Bay, Golden Gate Bridge, and Coit Tower.

The home includes wide-plank white oak floors, a marble-clad kitchen with Miele appliances and a beverage nook, wood built-ins, and in-unit laundry. Building amenities include door staff, parking, and storage. $3,295,000. Frank Nolan, Vanguard Properties/Luxury Portfolio International, (415) 377-3726. Status: Under contract

Lake Bluff, Ill.

Designed by John Black Lee Associates, this 1978 brick-and-glass ranch-style four-bedroom on Chicago’s North Shore has an oversize, updated solarium as its centerpiece. The 4,000-plus-square-foot home also features two marble fireplaces, recurring slatted wood doors, floor-to-ceiling windows, diamond-set terracotta tile, and herringbone wood floors.

The property, on almost 8 acres about 10 minutes from Lake Michigan, includes patios, paths, gardens, and a walking bridge. $3,895,000. Annie Royster Lenzke and Dawn McKenna, Coldwell Banker Realty, (847) 414-4045. Status: On the market

Washington, D.C.

Housed in a vast former workshop for helicopter engines, this three-bedroom apartment covers 5,077 square feet. The home features red-
brick walls, exposed beams, dangling chandeliers, and sitting, media, and billiards areas, as well as a gourmet kitchen, barn doors to the dining room, a primary suite with fireplace and marble bath, and a penthouse with bar and gym.

Outside are a roof deck and fountain court-carport; dining, parks, and Howard University are in walking distance. $3,250,000. Daniel Heider, TTR Sotheby’s International Realty, (703) 785-7820. Status: Listing removed

Hartwell, Ga.

This 2022 organic modern A-frame four-bedroom on Lake Hartwell has a large, cushioned conversation pit. The vaulted main space also includes a suspended fireplace and a chef’s kitchen, with spiral stairs connecting to a bunk room and primary suite with an in-room copper tub.

The property, which is about two hours from Atlanta, also comes with a new dock and slip. $1,725,000. Jen Vasquez, Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Georgia Properties, (404) 668-7735. Status: Sold

Berkeley, Calif.

A colorful 1901 five-bedroom Queen Anne Victorian in the Ocean View neighborhood features a diamond-shingled gable with a sunburst decoration. Inside are a vivid stained-glass window, reclaimed chestnut floors, an open kitchen with a Thermador range, and a dining area with French doors that open to a deck.

The property includes a yoga studio, a tree house, and a hot tub; shops and dining are nearby. $1,495,000. Jodi Nishimura, Kai Real Estate, (510) 459-0471. Status: Sold

Charlotte, N.C.

This first-floor, two-story condo in the artsy NoDa neighborhood is walking distance to a park, shops, and dining. The two-bedroom loft in a 1953 building features concrete floors, exposed rafters and ducts, and an open kitchen with an eat-in peninsula.

The primary bath has double vanities and a wide shower with a built-in bench, and beside the front entry is a motorized glass garage-style door that opens to the street. $420,000. Elizabeth McNabb, Corcoran HM Properties, (704) 763-8713. Status: Sold

‘One Battle After Another’

“Sometimes you can tell a movie is going to work from the first frame,” said Alissa Wilkinson in The New York Times. Paul Thomas Anderson’s comedic thriller, in which Leonardo DiCaprio plays a former revolutionary trying to protect his biracial teenage daughter from white supremacist
goons, piles up its pleasures. It’s propulsive. It’s also packed with “spot-on needle drops” and “virtuosic” performances. Still, “what makes One Battle the best film of the year is how these all lock together to tell a truth we rarely dare to acknowledge: No generation, no matter how idealistic, will ever solve the world’s problems.”

‘It Was Just an Accident’

Be sure not to miss Jafar Panahi’s Palme d’Or winner, said Adam Nayman in The Ringer, because “no other movie this year feels more ferocious from beginning to end.” Soon after a mechanic in Iran kidnaps
a man he believes was once his cruel imprisoner, the film “mutates—unsettlingly and hilariously—from a stripped-down revenge thriller into a piece of existential slapstick.” Is the captive even the right guy? Panahi
has been a political prisoner himself, and he’s inviting all of us to consider vengeance and mercy more deeply.

‘Sinners’

“Not merely a great movie but an eternal movie,” Ryan Coogler’s bluesy
period-piece horror musical proved that a smart, fun original drama can still fill theaters, said Amy Nicholson in the Los Angeles Times. When twin brothers played by Michael B. Jordan open a juke joint in the Jim Crow–era South and a small clutch of vampires take notice, “we’re expecting a
big, bloody brouhaha, and we get it.” But Sinners also serves as “a hymnal about the struggle to create something beautiful during your time on earth,” and a haunting tribute to oppressed people who refuse to become monsters themselves.

‘Marty Supreme’

Leave it to Timothée Chalamet to deliver one of this century’s “most colossal movie performances” while making it look easy, said David Ehrlich in IndieWire. Josh Safdie’s first feature since Uncut Gems has
the same “quicksilver” energy as its young star, who plays Marty Mauser, an aspiring 1950s world table tennis champ ready to steamroll anybody in his path. Marty’s mad dream repeatedly puts his life at risk—until
the movie turns its focus to “how sublime it can be for driven people to start living for something bigger than themselves.”

‘Sentimental Value’

Joachim Trier’s “truly remarkable” new work will speak to anyone who has struggled with parental baggage—“by which we mean everybody,” said David Fear in Rolling Stone. Stellan Skarsgard plays a filmmaker who, after failing to persuade his actress daughter to star in his auto-
biographical latest project, hires an American starlet instead and starts shooting in the family homestead. Skarsgard and Renate Reinsve make every father-daughter exchange sting, and Trier “uses their prickly
dynamic to explore how storytelling can both mask hurt and facilitate healing.”

‘The Secret Agent’

Kleber Mendonça Filho’s genre blender “takes the shape of a thriller, but is something more mournful and strange,” said Alison Willmore in NYMag.com. Wagner Moura is sad-eyed but magnetic as a father
on the run from the dictatorial powers-that-be in 1977 Brazil. As the former academic fraternizes with fellow dissidents and corrupt officials alike, Mendonça’s “beguiling masterpiece” becomes “an elegy for a
dark stretch of the past and for all the relationships it severed.”

‘Hamnet’

“For a movie about enduring the loss of a child, Hamnet is surprisingly warm,” said Shania Russell in Entertainment Weekly. As in Maggie O’Farrell’s novel of the same name, William Shakespeare loses a young
son and channels his grief into writing Hamlet. But Chloé Zhao’s movie isn’t tragedy porn. The Nomadland director “thrives in the details: the earthy magic of the countryside, the warm flush of first love.” Somehow, co-stars Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley display immense restraint “while
letting raw emotions run wild.”

‘If I Had Legs I’d Kick You’

“Sometimes the best films are the ones that are most difficult to describe,” said Lindsey Bahr in the Associated Press. In this dark comedy, Rose Byrne delivers an “utterly fearless” performance as a mother
pushed to the edge by multiplying challenges: a sick daughter, a stressful job, a disdainful shrink, and even a belligerent hamster. “An exposed nerve come to life,” I’d Kick You is also “one of the most audacious films of the year.”

‘Caught by the Tides’

Actress Zhao Tao “has a silent-film star’s affecting eloquence,” and her director husband, Jia Zhangke, uses that talent well in this beguiling picture, said Justin Chang in The New Yorker. During the decades Jia has been making movies, “a staggering human parade has passed before his camera,” and he has repurposed some of his footage into a “turbulent” romantic drama in which Zhao’s character, seen in three different life passages, becomes the viewer’s guide to a ceaselessly changing China.

‘Blue Moon’

“In essence, it’s the story of a man sitting in a bar,” said Dana Stevens in Slate. On the night when his former songwriting partner is enjoying a major Broadway debut, the great lyricist Lorenz Hart drinks alone, waiting for the after-party to start while “alternately charming and
boring whoever he encounters.” But Ethan Hawke’s “body-and-soul transformation into the witty, painfully insecure Hart” is captivating, and as the night continues, director Richard Linklater and his star “quietly reinvent the artistic biopic, custom-tailoring it to fit this one instantly
unforgettable character.”

Table for one, please

More of us are dining out solo, and enjoying it, apparently. Recent surveys show that reservations for one have risen dramatically, and 49% of Gen Zers say they dine out alone at least once a week. While lunch is the most common meal to eat alone, solo suppers have become a self-care ritual for some diners able to find places where they don’t feel judged by observers or resented by staff who might worry about losing revenue to a twotop left half empty. “As a longtime waiter, I can guarantee that your server does not care at all,” said Darron Cardosa in Food & Wine. “Embrace your solitude and enjoy a meal with just yourself.”

Make mine with tallow

The “Make America Healthy Again” movement is making a difference in the nation’s food aisles. While many of their claims lack scientific backing, social media influencers such as the MAHA Girls and podcasts like Culture Apothecary are echoing the talking points of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: beef tallow over seed oils, cane sugar over corn syrup, nix to ultra-processed foods and artificial food dyes. Nestlé, Starbucks, and other major companies have responded by tweaking ingredients, while Walmart has cleared space in its grocery aisles for moringa, chia seeds, and lion’s mane mushrooms. The push may not last, but health advocates are hopeful. “Food is the only bipartisan issue we have,” food and wellness consultant Maha Tahiri told The New York Times. “This is really a moment if we play it well.”

Protein everywhere

Protein everywhere “There’s no escaping the sense that we’re living in the era of peak protein,” said Emily Heil in The Washington Post. Forget protein bars and shakes. Boosted levels of the macronutrient are now a marketed feature of everything from pasta to potato chips to moon pies. While justly touted as critical to building and retaining muscle mass, protein has become synonymous with healthy for many consumers. Experts note that most of us are getting plenty of protein without having to supplement our intake and should resist doing so by neglecting other key nutrients. “Treating protein as a holy grail of health ignores the fact that your body’s needs are complex and nuanced,” said Caroline Tien in Self. “Your diet should reflect that.”

Got milk again?

Cow’s milk is making a comeback. Reversing a long trend, sales of dairy milk are on the rise and alt-milk sales declining. The protein craze and MAHA’s interest in raw milks have contributed to the rebound, and milk has enjoyed an image makeover. Demonized in the 2010s as inflammatory, unethical, and environmentally harmful, it’s being recognized again for its health benefits and for being purer than processed soy, nut, and oat milks. On TikTok and beyond, young consumers who grew up on plant-based milks are discovering dairy for the first time and, perhaps inspired by Nicole Kidman in Babygirl, treating it as the decadent, sexy choice. “After a decade of restriction and replacement,” said Ashliene McMenamy in Bon Appétit, “milk feels nourishing and subversive.”

The Southeast Asian breakout

It was a banner year for restaurants featuring the cuisines of Southeast Asia, with new footholds in fine dining established for several foodways. Kasama, a Filipino tasting-menu restaurant in Chicago, gained a second Michelin star, while the James Beard Award for Emerging Chef went to Phila Lorn for the Cambodian-American cooking at Philadelphia’s Mawn. Minneapolis became the U.S. capital of Hmong cooking thanks to Vinai and Diane Moua’s Diane’s Place, which earned Food & Wine’s Restaurant of the Year honors. It was joined on other bestrestaurant lists by New York City Vietnamese standouts Bahn Ahn Em and Ha’s Snack Bar and by three Laotian restaurants: Baan Mae in Washington, D.C., Bar Sen in Oklahoma City, and Lao’d Bar in Austin.

Flavor combos gone wild

Food collaborations got seriously weird this year. Cruising the grocery aisles in 2025, consumers could find Pepsi tinged with Peeps Easter candy, Chunky soups infused with Pabst Blue Ribbon, potato chips that tasted like IHOP pancakes, a hot sauce spiked with 5-Hour Energy, and other way-out food collaborations. At times, even nonfood products got in on the action. Krispy Kreme and Crocs gave us doughnut-themed clogs, while Red Clay and the hair-care company TRESemmé put out a hot honey called Hot Gloss. That move evoked a hair oil add-in and for me went too far, said Jaya Saxena in Eater. “Absurdity is fun, but I don’t want to drizzle it on my pizza.”

Matcha mania

The focus of tranquil tea ceremonies in Japan, matcha has become a monster in the U.S. The green tea powder now helps sell lattes, cookies, and even KitKats, and matcha bars draw long lines in cities across the country. The boom has caused matcha shortages in Japan and a profusion of counterfeit powders. Meanwhile, Americans are drowning the tea’s subtle grassy flavors in sweeteners, ignorant of the four principles of the matcha tea ceremony: respect, purity, harmony, and tranquility. “Sure, let’s sip our strawberry matcha lattes,” said Frances Giangiulio in Salon, “but maybe, while we’re sipping, we can remember the farmers who picked the leaves and the monks who first whisked them into something more.”

‘Capitalism: A Global History’ by Sven Beckert

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

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

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

‘American Canto’ by Olivia Nuzzi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“After a five-year manhunt that fueled intense speculation and conspiracy theories,” said Kyle Cheney in Politico, we may finally know who planted pipe bombs near the U.S. Capitol before the Jan. 6, 2021, riot. The FBI announced last week that it had arrested Brian Cole Jr., 30, at his Virginia home on suspicion of leaving the deadly devices outside the Democratic and Republican national party headquarters. “No new tip led to Cole’s arrest.” Instead, investigators scoured the mountains of already collected evidence, including phone tracking data and bank records that show Cole—who allegedly told agents he believed President Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen—bought galvanized pipe, timers, and other bomb components. This is “compelling circumstantial evidence,” said former U.S. attorney Joyce Vance in her Substack newsletter. Yet rather than explain her case, Attorney General Pam Bondi used a press conference to falsely claim the Biden administration had failed to aggressively investigate the plot. FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino joined in the attack, saying it was refreshing to have a president who actually goes after “the bad guys.” 

Bongino’s triumphalism is “more than a little ironic,” said Jim Geraghty in National Review. The former Fox News host spent years insisting the pipe bombs were part of an elaborate Deep State hoax, claiming the plot was “a freakin’ inside job” intended to tar Trump and the MAGA faithful as violent terrorists. In a February episode of his podcast, Bongino even called the pipe bombs “the biggest scandal in U.S. history” and argued that former vice president Kamala Harris may—“in some fashion”—have helped cover up the truth. Yet now that the agency he leads has demolished that “vast conspiracy theory,” Bongino wants us to forget all the nonsense he spouted. “I was paid in the past, Sean, for my opinions,” he told Fox News’ Sean Hannity last week. Now “I’m paid to be your deputy director, and we base investigations on facts.” 

Sorry, but conspiracy theories don’t die that easily, said Will Sommer in The Bulwark. Despite Bongino and Bondi’s attempt at truth-telling, the MAGAverse is still convinced the Deep State is responsible. Hard-right Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) said he’d never believe Cole was a Trump supporter or “lone wolf,” while Infowars host Breanna Morello claimed without evidence that one of the case’s prosecutors was somehow compromised. To accept Cole is just another election denier would blow up their whole worldview. And perhaps just as importantly, if Cole did plant the bombs, there’d be “no conspiracy theory for right-wing media to keep pursuing.” And that would be bad for business.

What is in the pipeline? 

Humanoid robots that can obey commands, make decisions, and deftly perform manual tasks have long been a sci-fi fantasy. Now they are becoming reality. Artificial intelligence, coupled with advances in robotics, has the potential to give humanoid robots unprecedented power to analyze, “think,” and learn. Tech evangelists say these robots will have a transformative impact on workplaces and even in our homes, and not in distant decades but in the next few years. Elon Musk believes robots will be “the biggest product ever in history.” His Tesla robot Optimus can already climb stairs and carry 45-pound objects, and he says Tesla will deliver a million units a year by 2030. By 2035, Citigroup predicts, some 1.3 billion robots will be in operation, both in industrial settings and in households, nursing homes, and construction sites. “By the 2040s,” said Adam Dorr, research director at the analytics firm RethinkX, “there will be almost nothing a robot can’t do better and cheaper than a human.” 

Where are robots used now? 

China already has more than 2 million of them working in factories, and the U.S. is rushing to catch up. In workplaces across America, robots are lifting boxes, transporting goods, even flipping burgers. At a Spanx warehouse outside Atlanta, humanoid bots pluck baskets of clothes from wheeled bots and set them on conveyor belts. To unpack trucks in several facilities, the shipping company DHL uses wheeled Stretch robots from Boston Dynamics, which can lift 50-pound boxes using flexible arms covered in vacuum suction cups. Just one can unload nearly 600 cases per hour, nearly double what humans can do. BMW just finished a pilot program in Spartanburg, S.C., where robot tasks included loading sheet metal parts into a welder. Even small firms are getting in on the action. Greg LeFevre is CEO of Raymath, a metal-fabrication company in Troy, Ohio. His factory is using 13 robot arms, supervised by his human employees, and he says the machines can work around the clock and can execute tricky aluminum welds “anywhere from two to six times faster” than a person. But it’s the nation’s second-largest private employer, Amazon, that is taking the biggest leap. 

What is Amazon doing? 

It has a million robots working in various capacities and says some 75% of its global deliveries are assisted by robotics. At its 3-million-square-foot “next generation” facility in Shreveport, La., some 1,000 robots of various shapes and sizes shuttle pallets across floors, pluck items from storage bins, and load packages onto carts. Citing internal documents, The New York Times reported last month that Amazon is on track to replace some 600,000 jobs with robots in the coming years, even with sales projected to double by 2033. Its transformation will be closely watched, said Daron Acemoglu, an MIT professor who studies automation. “Once they work out how to do this profitably, it will spread to others too.” 

What other uses do robots have? 

Robot enthusiasts say the next frontier after warehouses and factories will be homes. The California robotics firm 1X Technologies is taking $20,000 preorders for its Neo robots, with expected delivery next year. The 5-foot, 6-inch humanoids—which currently require remote human operators to joystick them around but will eventually be autonomous—will not just clean toilets and load dishwashers. They’ll also be able to share jokes and engage in “lively, natural conversations,” says the firm. CEO Bernt Bornich believes users will rely on them for both cleaning and companionship. “I don’t think it’s another person, and it’s not a pet,” he said. “It’s something else.” 

Will we all be out of work? 

There’s no question robots will take away some jobs, but the net effect is a matter of debate. Tech CEOs are quick to say that in fact new higher-skilled jobs will be created—like the position of robot wrangler—and that robots will largely fill dull jobs that most people don’t want. The bots unloading DHS trucks, for example, do “the most hated job in a warehouse,” said Marc Theermann of Boston Dynamics. But some scientists say the robot revolution is still far off, because the machines still have significant physical limitations. Those who think android plumbers and cooks will soon proliferate should “reset expectations,” said Ken Goldberg, a roboticist at University of California, Berkeley. For one thing, it’s proved very hard to endow them with the dexterity to manipulate objects, such as “pick up a wine glass or change a light bulb,” he said. “No robot can do that.” 

But are those breakthroughs coming?

Robot evangelists say yes. They say robots are learning so quickly that their advent will inevitably lead to labor-market upheaval. Kavin, a 27-year-old who helps train AI robots to fold clothes in India, says the humanoids aren’t perfect. “Sometimes the robot’s arms throw the clothes,” he says. “Sometimes it scatters the stack.” But he says they’re improving to the point where soon, “they’ll be able to do all the jobs, and there will be none left for us.” Anticipating pushback over mass layoffs, Amazon is reportedly developing plans to mitigate the fallout through community outreach, and other companies are commissioning studies on possible impacts. “We’re basically going to live in a world,” says Brett Adcock, CEO of Figure AI, “where any physical labor is a choice.”

“A seismic shift in the nation’s approach to public health occurred,” said Leana S. Wen in The Washington Post, and American children will suffer for it. Since 1991, the Centers for Disease Control has recommended all babies be immunized at birth against hepatitis B, a virus that attacks the liver. About 90% of infected babies develop the chronic version of the disease, which often culminates in fatal liver cancer. Under the CDC’s “universal birth dose” policy, mercifully, pediatric cases of hepatitis B have fallen from 18,000 in 1991 to only 20 a year now. But the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices—packed with anti-vax allies of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—voted 8-3 to undo this miracle of public health. If acting agency director Jim O’Neill accepts the panel’s decision, the CDC will recommend that only the babies of mothers who test positive for hepatitis B be vaccinated at birth. Those who test negative will be advised to talk with their doctors about “when or if” to vaccinate and will have to wait two months to start the three-dose regimen. “Why change a policy that has been so effective?” Because Kennedy and his allies share a gut feeling, unsupported by science, that vaccines are not “lifesaving tools” but rather “a source of harm.”

Kennedy has claimed that hepatitis B is spread only through sexual activity and needle sharing, said Jonathan Cohn in The Bulwark. If true, that would obviously reduce the urgency of vaccinating newborns...but it’s not true. This highly contagious virus can survive up to a week on surfaces, and infants contract it by sharing toys or utensils with infected family members. Other critics of the current CDC guidelines, including members of the panel, also cite the example of Denmark, which recommends vaccination at birth only for babies of infected mothers. But unlike the U.S. (population 340 million), Denmark (population 6 million) has a “well-tended universal health care system” that can identify those infected mothers before they give birth. 

Expect to hear more about Denmark, said Lauren Gardner in Politico. After the vote, Trump ordered Kennedy to review “best practices” in “peer, developed countries” and to update the U.S. vaccine schedule accordingly. No prizes for guessing what this review will conclude, said Tom Bartlett in The Atlantic. Among the supposed experts who presented to the panel last week was Kennedy ally Aaron Siri, a lawyer who has petitioned the government to stop distributing the polio vaccine. “He used his time to spell out his doubts about the childhood-vaccine schedule.” And the panel has other ways to weaken childhood vaccinations: Its chair said it will examine the aluminum salts added to many vaccines to trigger a stronger immune response. The amount of aluminum in shots is paltry, less than what naturally occurs in breast milk, and a ban would “upend childhood immunization in the U.S.” But that, of course, is what Kennedy and his “allies have wanted all along.” 

It isn’t just children, said Dylan Scott in Vox. The CDC has already “walked back” its recommendation that most adults get Covid shots, and the FDA announced this week it was investigating “deaths potentially related to Covid vaccines.” Is there evidence of such deaths? Not that the FDA has shared. But evidence hardly matters to people whose goal is the dismantling of medical science. Maybe a surge in pediatric hepatitis cases will spark a backlash and end this nightmare. For now though, “America’s vaccine playbook is being rewritten by people who don’t believe in them.” 

Lebanon Township, N.J.

On nearly 63 acres in central New Jersey, Double G Farm is centered on an 1800s barn, now the three-story, beamed great room of this 2009 home. The rustic-contemporary six-bedroom features a 35-foot silo with
stairs to bedrooms, plus a billiards room and a large entertain-
ment barn with an indoor saltwater pool.

Outside are a four-bedroom guesthouse, stables, a 12-car garage, and extra sheds, smokehouses, and barns. $7,250,000. Lou Ann Fellers, Kienlen Lattmann Sotheby’s International Realty, (908) 930-9564

Villanova, Pa.

About 40 minutes outside Philadelphia, this five-bedroom converted barn has a two-story great room with exposed trusses, a brick fireplace
flanked by roofline windows, and a glass-sided cupola. The 1979 home’s
kitchen includes cherry cabinets, and the walk-out basement has a theater, recreation area, and fireplace.

The property is filled out with a saltwater pool with stone surround, a deck, yards, and mature trees. $2,689,000. Lisa Yakulis, Kurfiss Sotheby’s International Realty, (610) 517-8445

Elk Grove, Calif.

In a suburb of Sacramento, this renovated, 1990 A-frame board-and-batten-clad barn home has a floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace in the vaulted main room. The three-bedroom’s modern kitchen has quartz counters, open shelving, a stone backsplash, and a paneled refrigerator.

On the 3-acre lot is an additional two-bedroom unit, plus a pool, an outdoor kitchen, equestrian facilities, and a 9,000-square-foot space with a pickleball court, horse stalls, workrooms, and a bathroom. $2,395,000. Thomas Phillips, Coldwell Banker Realty, (916) 799-4571

Mound, Minn.

Near Lake Minnetonka, this 1960 three-bedroom incorporates an original cedar-clad barn and silo, with gambrel rooflines on the addition. The
kitchen and dining area, with beadboard ceilings and live-edge beams, steps up to a wood-lined living room with a stone fireplace.

On more than 3 acres, the home includes a pool, yards, a patio, and a boat slip connecting to the lake. $2,100,000. Jacqueline Day, Edina Realty—City Lakes/Luxury Portfolio International, (763) 522-9000

Accord, N.Y.

Built in 1920 as a dairy barn, this rustic-modern Hudson Valley conversion includes a 2022 addition. The four-bedroom opens to wide-plank wood floors, a cement fireplace, a kitchen with brass fixtures, and an open staircase to a hayloft living room with skylights and a woodstove.

The 6-plus-acre lot has a fenced garden, a chicken coop, meadows, and woods. Midtown Manhattan is about two hours south. $2,750,000. Diana Polack, Compass Greater N.Y., (845) 825-2815

Running Springs, Calif.

Surrounded by pines, this 1970 gambrel lodge-style cabin nestles against a three-story silo watchtower with a spiral staircase. The two-bedroom’s great room has a wood-burning fireplace, skylights, and stained glass, with a loft bed- room above. Outside is a wraparound covered deck
and a yard.

Downtown Running Springs, a resort area with skiing, trails, shops, and dining, is minutes away. $330,000. Amy Kaplan, Windermere Real Estate Desert Properties/Luxury Portfolio International, (909) 499-9312

‘Marty Supreme’

Directed by Josh Safdie (R)

★★★★

The Timothée Chalamet movie that’s arriving on Christmas Day is “a 150-minute-long heart attack of a film,” said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast. In “a career-best turn” that’s “a feverish go-for-broke tour de force,” Chalamet plays Marty Mauser, an aspiring table tennis champ in 1950s New York City who’s ready to lie, cheat, and steal for the chance to become the best in the world. This first film from director Josh Safdie
since 2019’s Uncut Gems turns out to be a character study that “doubles as a cracked American success story,” said David Fear in Rolling Stone. Marty is a scrawny kid with a pathetic mustache, but he’s also a fast-talking grifter with supreme self-confidence, and his game earns him a trip to London and the world championship tournament before a humbling stokes his hunger for a comeback.

Surrounding Chalamet is “a supporting cast you’d swear was assembled via Mad Libs,” because it features Fran Drescher, Penn Jillette, Tyler the Creator, Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary, and—as a faded movie star Marty sweet-talks into an affair—Gwyneth Paltrow, “reminding you how good she was before Goop became her full-time gig.” To me, it’s the story beneath the story that makes Safdie’s “nerve-jangling, utterly exhilarating” movie one of the best of the year, said Alissa Wilkinson in The New York Times. “It’s about a Jewish kid who knows just what kind of antisemitism and finely stratified racial dynamics he’s up against in postwar America, and who is using every means at his disposal to smack back.”

‘Is This Thing On?’

Directed by Bradley Cooper (R)

★★★

“There are far worse things that a gifted filmmaker could offer an audience these days than a feel-good divorce comedy,” said Owen Gleiberman in Variety. But it’s still slightly disappointing that screen star Bradley Cooper has followed up A Star Is Born and Maestro with this minor work, due Dec. 19, about a father of two who starts doing stand-up in New York City to cope with the likely end of his marriage. With Will Arnett and Laura Dern as its co-stars, Is This Thing On? is “an observant, bittersweet, and highly watchable movie,” but it’s also so eager to hide the agonies of divorce that it “can feel like it’s cutting corners.”

The 124-minute film “doesn’t really get going until hour two,” said Ryan Lattanzio in IndieWire. Until then, it’s “lethargic and listless,” slowed by long takes “that drag on and on.” Fortunately, Arnett and Dern have real chemistry that kicks in when Dern’s Tess accidentally catches Arnett’s Alex performing his bit about their sidelined marriage and sees him with new eyes. Good as Arnett is, “it’s Dern who’s the revelation as a woman who truly doesn’t know what she wants and is figuring it out in real time,” said Alison Willmore in NYMag.com. Cooper, playing a reprobate friend of Alex’s, gives himself the script’s biggest laughs. More importantly, he proves again to be a director with “a real flair for domestic drama.”

The advantage of having a college degree while job hunting is “becoming a thing of the past,” said Jonnelle Marte in Bloomberg. Historically, recent college grads have snatched up jobs more quickly than peers with only a high school diploma. But the job-finding rate for college-educated workers ages 22 to 27 has dropped sharply over the past 20 months, and is now “roughly in line” with that of young high-school-educated workers, according to new research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. That concerning convergence is another sign of the dearth of entry-level opportunities for young, mostly white-collar workers. The overall unemployment rate overall for 20-to-24-year-olds hit 9.2% in September, “up 2.2 percentage points from a year prior.”

Given those vanishing job prospects, it’s no surprise that more Americans are saying college isn’t worth it, said Ben Kamisar in NBCNews.com. As recently as 2017, 49% of Americans felt that an advanced education improved their chances “to get a good job and earn more money,” compared with 47% who did not. Today, the sentiment has completely flipped, with 63% now disputing the value of a college degree. “Exploding tuition prices” are a huge factor, but the labor market is also making Americans sour on a traditional “ingredient of the American dream.” Artificial intelligence is making white-collar jobs feel riskier, while blue-collar work “is looking like a safer bet,” said Julie Jargon in The Wall Street Journal. Just ask Hannah Talley, 25, who dropped out of Texas A&M to become an auto mechanic and is now earning $53,000 a year at a Firestone shop. Meanwhile, her 22-year-old sister, Sophia, is struggling to find her way as a freelance journalist after graduating from the University of Texas.

“We can’t all be plumbers,” said Callum Borchers, also in The Wall Street Journal. There was a time after the pandemic when “skills-based hiring” that ignored credentials was in vogue. Employers at the time “didn’t have much choice” in a tight labor market. Now they “have their pick of available talent.” Faced with options, employers will increasingly “revert back to the degree as a proxy,” HR experts say, partly because it takes “more effort to determine whether someone without a degree can handle a job.” The value proposition of going to college “has stopped being a no-brainer,” said Allison Schrager in Bloomberg, but that doesn’t mean it “isn’t worth the expense for many people.” Having a degree is “a lifetime asset,” and “the average college graduate can still expect to earn $1 million more over their lifetime” than those with high school diplomas. That’s enough to give college at least a passing grade.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“‘A Painter’s Secrets’ is that rare, magical exhibition that casts a storybook spell,” said Lance Esplund in The Wall Street Journal. It brings together 55 of the paintings of Henri Rousseau, a self-taught and widely misunderstood French artist whose popularity blossomed shortly after his death in 1910. The show “aims to dispel myths about Rousseau,” casting him as alert to the potential commercial advantages of being seen as naive. But the appeal is largely in the work and the “beautifully abundant” make-believe world it conjures. In Rousseau’s paintings, evocations of folk art and pre-Renaissance Christian religious painting merge with “magical thinking and the candid spontaneity of children’s art.” From the first gallery, we’re enchanted. Rousseau’s “early enigmatic masterpiece,” 1886’s Carnival Evening, depicts two small, costumed figures walking arm in arm out of dusky woods. The image is “a harbinger of surrealism,” and it’s both “eerie and romantic.

“What Rousseau did best was recast elements from his cultural milieu in his own personal idiom,” said Kelly Presutti in Art in America. To achieve his storybook-like images, he flattened the pictorial space, played with scale, and gave his human figures “an almost caricatural stiffness.” In 1908, when France performed well in a rugby match with England, Rousseau created an image in which four players seem to be dancing on a field framed by two rows of trees, the men “appearing both of the moment and suspended entirely outside of it.” Rousseau, a former customs agent, struggled to support himself as an artist after turning fully to the field when he was nearly 50. But he was most successful in selling his jungle scenes, which he devised not by traveling but by visiting zoos and botanical gardens and perusing magazine photos. Though some of the resulting images are clichéd, they’re imbued with “a luminosity and strangeness that still fascinates.”

“While his work may seem simple at first glance,” said Elisa Carollo in The Observer, “walking through the exhibition reveals the astute social commentary woven into his paintings.” Those jungle images are “deeply allegorical works that critique modernity and colonialism,” and Rousseau is “equally insightful” when his subjects are war or bourgeois life. The Barnes exhibition “culminates with some of Rousseau’s most elusively mystical works”—The Sleeping Gypsy (1897), Unpleasant Surprise (1899–1901), and The Snake Charmer (1907). The three paintings “blend fantasy with fear, inviting viewers to consider the deeper mysteries of human experience at its most primordial essence.” Rousseau’s insights into human nature and modern society were “ahead of his time,” as was his method.

Kent, Conn.

The stacked-stone, two-sided fireplace with a wood nook anchors the living room in this four-bedroom with Prairie design elements. The 2009 home features wood-grilled clerestory windows, walls of glass doors, and an eat-in chef's kitchen with a Sub-Zero fridge.

Most rooms open to outdoor space on the property's more than 22 acres of woods, a brook, gardens, and a studio. Manhattan is about two hours south. $2,300,000. Steve Pener, William Pitt Sotheby's International Realty, (203) 470-0393

Ellensburg, Wash.

Swiss, mid-century modern architect Moritz Kundig designed this recently updated 1970 home that features a Focus suspended fireplace in front of vertically wood-clad walls. The three-bedroom includes polished concrete floors, floor-to-ceiling windows framing Stuart Mountain, and a floating wood staircase.

The approximately one-acre parcel is dotted with fruits trees and has a detached studio with a wood-burning stove, a three-car garage, a patio, and yards. $1,449,000. Sean Nielsen, Engel & Völkers Mercer Island, (206) 909-0622

Winter Park, Fla.

On Lake Maitland near Orlando, this 1996, five-bedroom, neoclassical, Italian-inspired home has a two-sided Parisian fireplace in a sitting room with coffered ceilings, glossy stone floors, and marble columns.

The primary suite has two ornate baths and double closets, one with an office. Outside are a guest house, pool and spa, pool house, covered patio, a fireplace, terraces, and tropical landscaping, with access to a private dock. $5,895,000. Rachel Peters, The Agency Orlando, (407) 625-3227

Pasadena, Calif.

Designed by Doug Ewing, this Craftsman on Johnston Lake in the San Rafael Hills includes a great room with 18-foot ceilings and a fireplace of large boulders. The 2006, open-plan four-bedroom features wood-framed door casings, exposed beams, and built-ins; the primary bedroom has a tile fireplace and French doors overlooking the water.

Just over half an acre, the lot has oaks, sycamores, a covered patio, a guest house, a dock, and community pool access. $6,800,000. Nancy Valentine, (818) 259-4270

West Stockbridge, Mass.

This 2025, modern farmhouse four-bedroom in the Berkshire Hills has a wood-burning Malm fireplace on a concrete hearth in the vaulted great room. Opposite is a sleek, German-imported kitchen; a loft above has mountain views and connects to a suite.

The more than 18-acre lot includes an alfresco dining area, a garage, and mature trees. The music venue Tanglewood and downtown Lenox are minutes away. $3,750,000. Christian Deckert, William Pitt Sotheby's International Realty, (413) 841-2813

La Luz, N.M.

In Laborcita Canyon, this 1995 Southwest Territorial-style three-bedroom has five kiva fireplaces; the kitchen-adjacent one is floor-to-ceiling, with built-in side shelves and a mantle. The three-bedroom has Saltillo tile floors, ceilings with vigas, decorative Spanish tile, and a chef's kitchen with a Wolf range.

On almost five desert acres, the property has patios and a two-car garage. Dining and shops in Alamogordo are about 12 miles away. $529,500. Michelle Wilson, Coldwell Banker Sudderth Nelson, (575) 430-5385

A “viral” essay on household income has sparked debate over a polarizing question, said Julie Zauzmer Weil in The Washington Post: Just how many Americans are living in poverty? Michael Green, a Wall Street portfolio manager, argues in a Substack article that the federal poverty line— calculated for decades at three times the cost of a “minimum food diet,” and currently $32,150 for a family of four—is an egregious “lie.” That calculation made sense in the 1960s, writes Green, when “housing was relatively cheap,” health care was employer-provided, and “college tuition could be covered with a summer job.” But such expenses have skyrocketed, and a second income is now essential for many families, which means they must also pay out for child care. A household income of $136,500 is now the real “break-even point” for a family of four, Green calculates, which would mean most Americans are impoverished. While many economists slammed Green’s argument, it met with “effusive” praise online. “The most important thing most of us will read all year,” wrote one commenter.

Green’s treatise is “silly,” said Noah Smith in his Substack newsletter. There are serious issues with his calculations—for example, he uses average spending figures and treats them as minimum amounts. But on a more basic level, his claims are just “out of touch with reality.” Given that the median income for a family of four is $125,700, he’s claiming “more than half of American families are poor,” at a time when our middle class enjoys unprecedented “material luxury.” Americans today live in bigger houses, eat out more often, and have more leisure time than they did in the 1960s. In the real world, official measures show poverty fell from 19.5% in 1963 to 10.5% in 2019, said Michael R. Strain in National Review. And over the past 30 years, inflation-adjusted wages for “typical workers” have risen by 40%.

Putting the poverty line at $136,500 may be “absurd,” said Jacob Weindling in Jezebel, but there’s a reason Green’s essay resonated. Record housing prices have put homeownership out of reach for many young people, who feel “priced out of the so-called American dream.” An estimated 100 million Americans have medical debts, while college graduates’ salaries increasingly don’t “cover student debt servicing.” In short, people whose incomes look decent on paper are feeling a new “kind of precarity.” That may not technically constitute poverty, but the financial hardship grinding them down “is very real.”

‘The Secret Agent’

Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho (R)

★★★★

“This is one of the year’s best films, and one of the most distinctive,” said Matt Zoller Seitz in RogerEbert.com. An award winner at Cannes, the sixth feature from Brazilian writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho is “a drama, a satire, an intriguingly laid-back espionage film, and a re-creation of a time and place,” yet that’s not all. Wagner Moura stars as a young widower on the run who returns to his home city to check on his young son in 1977, during Brazil’s brutal dictatorship. “Murder is everywhere,” a constant threat. But Mendonça is less focused on the violence than how people learn to adapt to it, and “if you’re willing to bend with the story, The Secret Agent will take you places movies rarely go.” Moura, whose
character goes by the alias Marcelo, “carries the film with a star turn of suave determination,” said Richard Brody in The New Yorker.

But Mendonça has made a political thriller that’s “overflowing with sharply drawn characters,” including the elderly den mother of the safe house Marcelo moves into, a female neighbor who takes an interest in Marcelo, and a corrupt police chief. Mendonça’s wandering focus “brings history to life with bracing immediacy,” a feat all the more impressive because of his film’s “audacious twists of cinematic form,” including a hallucinatory sequence in which a severed human leg itself turns murderous. “The filmmaker’s refusal to present a traditional thriller payoff may frustrate some viewers,” said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast. Though it’s a surprising choice, “it’s in keeping with The Secret Agent’s depiction of the way in which dictatorships torment and destroy via denial.”

‘Zootopia 2’

Directed by Jared Bush and Byron Howard (PG)

★★★

“Sometimes more of the same isn’t a bad thing,” said Amelia Emberwing in The Wrap. The original Zootopia, after all, was a 2016 megahit that won
the Oscar for an animated feature while delivering a powerful message about the dangers of discrimination. And while the long-awaited sequel doesn’t break new ground, “there’s a lot to love in Zootopia 2.” The movie returns us to a colorful city populated by anthropomorphized animals. Its
animation is “bright and pop-y.” And it didn’t have to back off its core message to haul in $560 million in its first five days, the largest-ever launch for an animated film. Unfortunately, “the sweetness of the original is absent in the sequel,” said Soren Andersen in The Seattle Times.

Sure, it still features Judy the lovable bunny cop, and she’s paired again
with Nick, a fox who’s learning to be less cynical, but this movie sags when the pair pause the action to analyze the state of their partnership. The rest of the time, the film “seeks to bowl the audience over with
noise, velocity, and an insistent tone that winds up being kind of irritating.” But Zootopia 2 has “the kind of heart that has too long seemed to be missing from other Disney animated offerings,” said Kate Erbland in IndieWire. Not only is there real care put into developing Judy and Nick’s relationship, but this time the duo are also digging into a secret history that explains why there are no reptiles in their city, giving real weight
to the film’s messaging. “That’s not to imply that Zootopia 2 isn’t funny, zippy, and highly enjoyable.” To me, it most certainly is.

President Trump’s “brand is tanking,” said Inae Oh in Mother Jones. A Gallup survey released last week found his approval rating has “cratered to 36%, the lowest of his second term” and close to his all-time low of 34% after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. Trump’s approval numbers have fallen across the board over the past month: from 91% to 84% among Republicans, 33% to 25% among independents, and 6% to 3% among Democrats. Trump can only blame himself for this collapse, said Michael Tomasky in The New Republic. Polls show that only one of his major initiatives—securing the border—enjoys broad public support. Everything else, from tariffs to mass deportations to conflict with Venezuela, is opposed by a clear majority of Americans. Trump may be able to win over Middle America on the campaign trail, but he loses their support when “governing becomes the task.” 

Which is why it’s odd that Trump hasn’t held a “bombastic” campaign-style rally in months, said Jonathan Lemire in The Atlantic. Those events “provided real-time feedback”—he could see which lines and ideas got the crowd animated and which flopped. But rather than mingle with the MAGA faithful, he’s opted instead to travel abroad, golf at his clubs, and dine with “business titans and billionaires” who flatter him in exchange for favors. A growing number of Republicans fear that Trump has become a “bubble-wrapped” president, who’s too isolated to know what his voters want. Trump’s low-energy second term could simply be a result of age, said Margaret Hartmann in New York. He’s displayed “health issues typical of a 79-year-old,” from repeatedly dozing off in meetings to showing up to events with bruised hands, and lacks the vigor he possessed even a year ago. Despite receiving an MRI in October for unclear reasons, Trump insists his health is “PERFECT.” But President Joe Biden made similar claims, and we all know how that ended. 

Trump increasingly resembles “a prizefighter doubled over from a gut punch,” said Chauncey DeVega in Salon. He’s “looking to the referee for help,” but even long-standing loyalists like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene are trying to “distance themselves” from their beleaguered leader. That has Democrats in a “jubilant” mood, with many declaring Trump a “lame duck” one year into his term and MAGA on the verge of splintering. But there’s a difference between popularity and power—just ask the Americans who’ve seen neighbors and family members “deported or disappeared” by Trump’s immigration enforcers. Even a low-energy, unpopular Trump “remains profoundly dangerous.”

What is pig butchering? 

It’s a term used to describe a major global cyberscam in which criminals entrap victims by first sending them seemingly innocent questions via text, Instagram, OKCupid, or some other messaging platform. An estimated 300,000 butchers—who are often based in Southeast Asia— stand ready to establish friendly contact when people respond to these “accidental texts,” gradually gaining the trust of victims and “fattening” them with supposed investment opportunities or flirtatious exchanges promising romance. Then the butchers encourage victims to invest money in a nonexistent fund or crypto scheme. That leads to theft of their investment—the butchering.

If you’ve received a text message from someone pretending to have the wrong number, a stranger asking something like, “Hey, we met at the bar how are you,” or a simple “Hi” from an unknown number, you’ve experienced the opening gambit in pig butchering. Because tens of millions of scam texts are sent, even a low percentage of responses makes the scam very lucrative. “We’ve had people from all walks of life that have been victimized in these cases,” Andrew Frey, a financial investigator for the Secret Service, told ProPublica. “The paydays have been huge.” 

How much money has been stolen? 

Some victims are so embarrassed they do not report being scammed. But the FBI received reports of almost $13 billion in losses from cyberscams in 2023, and total global losses from pig butchering are estimated to top $75 billion. In 2024, pig-butchering revenue grew nearly 40% year over year, according to the research firm Chainalysis. Some victims have lost their entire life savings. It can take months to fatten a pig, or build trust. Some victims are fooled by promises of easy money through inside crypto deals. Others are older men and women desperate for connection that the butcher offers along with investment advice. Erika DeMask of Lombard, Ill., was forced to sell her home and everything in it after she lost $1 million to a pig butcher. The fraudster spent months cultivating DeMask, a widow, even sending her a bouquet of flowers. “He said that he loved me,” she said. 

Who’s running these scams? 

Mostly gangs and organized crime syndicates based in Southeast Asia, but it’s spread globally. The scam operators post listings for well-paid customer service jobs to lure young people desperate for work. Fan, 22, was living in China’s Fujian province when he answered an ad for a food delivery service in Cambodia, offering $1,000 a month. When he arrived to start the job, he was locked into a barbed-wire compound with guards. An estimated 150,000 scammers are enslaved in compounds in and around Cambodia, often run by Chinese gangs. About 120,000 more are toiling in Myanmar, and tens of thousands are in Thailand and Laos. 

How do these places operate? 

Scammers spend up to 17 hours a day sending messages, for little or no pay. At one, rows of hunched workers labored under posters declaring, “One team, one dream.” Supervisors give them scripts to memorize. One manual instructed them to “make the customers feel happy and comfortable,” aim to “create dependency,” and “make him fall for you.” Sometimes, the butcher will send male targets phony photographs of beautiful women. Butchers who do not meet daily quotas for sending messages are punished with physical abuse and torture. 

What happens to them? 

An Ethiopian man rescued from a compound on the Myanmar-Thailand border described supervisors using electric probes to deliver agonizing shocks to butchers who didn’t perform well. Sexual abuse of women is commonplace, and in Cambodia, bodies of tortured butchers have been discovered in dumpsters. One Taiwanese woman arrived in Cambodia for the promise of a front desk job, only to be threatened with a stun gun and raped. She was sold from compound to compound and repeatedly assaulted. Fan saw a co-worker “half-beaten to death” by guards. “People were saying, ‘Help him! Help him!’” he recounted. “But nobody went up to help him. Nobody dared to.” 

Is law enforcement responding? 

Yes, but it is facing a problem of massive scale. The U.S. imposed sanctions on Cambodian tycoon Ly Yong Phat in September, accusing him of involvement in cyberscams and forced labor. It also charged Chen Zhi, founder of Cambodia’s Prince Holding Group, with organizing an international cyberscam network that scammed 250 Americans. The U.S. seized assets including $14 billion in Bitcoin, and the U.S. and U.K. announced joint sanctions. China is now getting involved because so many Chinese nationals have been enslaved. Beijing sentenced five people to death for involvement with a gang operating compounds in Myanmar in November. But despite these efforts, the scams continue to rake in billions, and more pig butcher compounds are opening every month in the Philippines, West Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. “As all sorts of attackers learn that they can make serious money doing this, they’re going to make those pivots,” says Ronnie Tokazowski, co-founder of Intelligence for Good, a nonprofit that researches online scams. “There is little to no sign of this stopping.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Woodstock, N.Y.

John Storyk, acoustician and architect of Jimi Hendrix's Electric Lady studios and many music venues, designed this home in the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony in 1969.

The redwood-clad, four-bedroom, organic modern house is entered through a wood half-pipe and anchored by a curved, sunken living room with a white brick fireplace, while floor-to-ceiling glass allows for natural light. The almost 9-acre lot includes a guest house, pool, pond, and gardens. $3,500,000. Sharon Breslau, BHHS Hudson Valley, (845) 901-6978

Jamul, Calif.

The Boulder House, a California mission style home near San Diego, was designed by a father-son team comprising the late artist James Hubbell and his son, "ecotect" Drew Hubbell.

Built in 2000, the eco-friendly three-bedroom features straw bale walls, arched doors, saltillo tile, and a temperature-regulating 14-foot boulder that juts into the great room. Outside are an arched arcade leading to a pool, patio, and mountain views. $2,000,000. Jeannine Savory, The Agency, (619) 454-3607

Naramata, British Columbia

German-Canadian modernist architect Florian Maurer designed this award-winning 2004 home in the Okanagan Valley as his residence. The glass-walled, minimalist three-bedroom is spread over several structures built into the bedrock, including a guest suite; a garage; a primary suite; a main space with a kitchen, pantry, living room, and bedroom; and an art gallery.

The nearly half-acre lot has a garden, dining area, and lake and mountain views. $1,795,000. Lyndi Ainsworth, Engel & Völkers South Okanagan, (250) 809-1260

Detroit

Leonard Willeke's residential projects included a home for Henry Ford and this 1925 Tudor Revival in the Palmer Woods historic district. Inspired by Cotswold cottages, the updated eight-bedroom features an oversize great room with vaulted ceilings, stone walls, Flint Faience tile floors, hand-hewn trusses.

The landscaped property is a 3-minute drive to the Detroit Golf Club and 15 minutes from downtown. Austin Black II, @properties REMI Christie's International Real Estate, (313) 550-2307

Santa Monica, Calif.

In Santa Monica Canyon, about 10 minutes from the pier, this 2006 modern home was designed by Melinda Gray, an edgy modernist who runs her own firm.

The open-plan four-bedroom includes exposed steel beams and wood rafters; wood floors; a staircase of glass, wood, and steel; a sleek kitchen with clerestory windows; and a lower-level theater. A retractable glass wall in the living room opens to the pool, spa, and yard. $6,250,000. Carl Gambino, Compass, and Joey Parsi, The Agency, (310) 780-0770

Washington, D.C.

Charles M. Goodman, a late, multi-award-winning residential and government architect who eschewed Colonial styles, designed the gated, mid-century modern River Park community in 1962. This three-story, three-bedroom townhouse features parquet wood floors, barrel top-floor ceilings, and a retro modern kitchen with terrazzo flooring and aqua tile.

The home has a balcony and courtyard, and access to a shared playground, gym, and pool. Shops and a Metro station are walkable. $509,900. Andy Peers, Compass, (301) 370-4499

“Having problems with your favorite websites lately? It’s not just you,” said Lisa Eadicicco in CNN.com. Many businesses were left scrambling last week after a malfunction at the web security firm Cloudflare knocked out everything from ChatGPT to the app of the New Jersey transit authority. Even Downdetector, a website that tracks internet outages, went down. The blackout happened only a couple weeks after a global outage at Amazon Web Services disrupted schools, airports, and hospitals, and a fault in Microsoft’s Azure downed the company’s invaluable workplace products. What’s happening, experts say, is not that the number of service outages are rising. Rather, the “consolidation of critical cloud infrastructure” and network safeguarding “between just a few large companies” has left more websites and businesses vulnerable to even minor tech hiccups.

A single bad file is all it took to knock out Cloudflare, said Jon Brodkin in Ars Technica. The cybersecurity giant “is relied upon by many online services” for protection and internet routing, so when chief executive Matthew Prince learned about the outage, he suspected the company was being attacked. Wrong: A small glitch had caused “an important file to unexpectedly double in size and propagate across the network,” leading the entire system to crash. That tiny errors can be so widely felt is a symptom of “how the internet has evolved since its inception,” said Rose Henderson in Bloomberg. “During the 1990s and 2000s, any company that had its own website probably had its own servers,” limiting the damage from an issue. Today, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft alone operate millions of servers comprising 60% of the cloud-computing market. What’s surprising is that the infrastructure “doesn’t crash more often.”

Exactly, said Emma Roth in The Verge, which is why we “need a backup plan.” Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of internet performance monitoring firm Catchpoint, has been raising the alarm, but few are listening. “Everybody’s putting all their eggs in one basket,” Daoudi said, “and then they’re surprised when there is a problem.” Cloudflare’s failure, he adds, should be a “wake-up call.” The internet is “an irreplaceable linchpin of modern life,” said Aisha Down in The Guardian. “But it’s also a web of creaking legacy programs and physical infrastructure” that could come crashing down. “A summertime tornado cruising through the town of Council Bluffs, Iowa,” could lay waste to a cluster of Google-owned data centers “critical to its cloud platform as well as YouTube and Gmail.” Or a “heat wave in the eastern U.S.” could cause a meltdown of servers in Virginia’s “‘data center alley,’ a key hub for Amazon Web Services,” knocking out Slack, Signal, Netflix, and Lloyd’s Bank without a quick remedy. It’s scary to consider how fragile the internet may truly be.

‘Hamnet’

Directed by Chloé Zhao (PG-13)

★★★★

The “violent beauty” of Chloé Zhao’s new film “rips your soul out of your chest,” said David Ehrlich in IndieWire. An adaptation of Maggie O'Farrell’s 2020 novel, Hamnet proposes that Shakespeare’s Hamlet was a response to the death from bubonic plague of the playwright’s similarly named young son, and the grief the movie conjures is so emotionally overwhelming that it “feels like falling in love.” Paul Mescal proves “transcendent” as Shakespeare, but the film is anchored by Jessie Buckley's astonishing performance as the dramatist’s wife, Agnes (pronounced Ann-yis), who doesn’t write but comes across as “an even more powerful creative force than her husband.”

For Zhao, who made a superhero flick after Nomadland won 2021’s Best Picture Oscar, Hamnet is “not exactly a return to form,” said Justin Chang in The New Yorker. As we come to know the Shakespeares and their angelic children, the movie lurches from “subdued pastoral realism” to "forceful, sometimes pushy emotionalism.” I’ll admit that when the climax arrived, my eyes were “blurred by tears.” Still, that doesn’t excuse the movie for presenting one of literature’s greatest works as primarily therapy for two heartbroken parents. But Hamlet has never been just one story, said Bilge Ebiri in NYMag.com. During the final scene, “we view Hamlet as an effort by one grieving person to reach out to another,” and “the whole thing opens up in magnificent new ways,” helping us see the play’s multiple layers. By then, Mescal has already powered two of the film’s key scenes with “some of the best acting I’ve ever seen.” Viewed whole, Hamnet is simply devastating—“maybe the most emotionally shattering movie I’ve seen in years.”

‘Wake Up Dead Man’

Directed by Rian Johnson (PG-13)

★★★

Rian Johnson’s latest Knives Out entry “maintains the franchise’s undefeated record,” said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast. “Another intricate, rousing whodunit,” Wake Up Dead Man hands detective Benoit Blanc his toughest case yet: a homicide that brings the existence of God into play. At a Catholic church in upstate New York, a domineering monsignor played by Josh Brolin is killed moments after stepping off the altar, and the primary suspect is an assistant priest played by Josh O’Connor. But the suspect list is long and as star-packed as usual, this time including Andrew Scott, Kerry Washington, Thomas Haden Church, and a “scene-stealing” Glenn Close.

Daniel Craig, returning as Benoit, “reins in his urge to chew scenery, and instead he plays Blanc as a brilliant man whose latest case also humbles him,” said Alan Zilberman in Washington City Paper. The film also gets “a huge assist from O’Connor,” who plays the younger priest as a fundamentally decent man who winds up teaming with Benoit while the pair maintain a running debate about the role of faith in their lives. The Knives Out movies are “always a good time,” said Johnny Oleksinski in the New York Post. This one’s special. “It’s the darkest, scariest, and, undoubtedly, finest acted”; it “might boast the most laughs”; and it “builds to a solid and satisfying ending.”

‘Eternity’

Directed by David Freyne (PG-13)

★★

“Are we finally arriving in the promised land, where stand-alone commercial works of wit and invention can exist again?” asked Richard Lawson in The Hollywood Reporter. This new romantic comedy feels like a throwback, because it rests on a clever original idea. Elizabeth Olsen and Miles Teller play a husband and wife of 65 years who have recently died separately and discovered that they will spend eternity in their youthful prime. The catch: Olsen’s Joan must choose whether her forever will be spent with Teller’s Larry or her more dashing first husband, who had died in the Korean War and is portrayed here by Callum Turner.

The script gives Teller and Olsen “a relatively complex acting challenge,” said Benjamin Lee in The Guardian. They have to speak like young adults of the 1950s while conveying the emotional weariness of old age, and “they both manage incredibly well, with Teller “charming in ways we haven’t seen from him.” But while Eternity is “a film of big, audience-swaying emotional swings,” its last act “doesn’t quite reach the emotional highs we expect.” Though the movie and its afterlife world-building amuse for a while, the “cooked-up complications” that delay Joan and Larry’s happily ever after “begin to grow hollow and repetitive,” said Owen Gleiberman in Variety. In short, “Eternity should have been 90 minutes long, with more energy and more crackpot invention than it has.”

“Trump is unraveling,” said Brian Karem in Salon. The president recently posted an unhinged rant in which he called a group of six Democratic legislators “traitors” and accused them of engaging in “seditious behavior punishable by DEATH.” The legislators, who each served in the U.S. military or the intelligence community, had released a video reminding military officials they had an obligation to “refuse illegal orders” from the commander in chief. In their statement, Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin (a former CIA officer), Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly (a retired Navy fighter pilot and NASA astronaut), and four House members said the administration was “pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community professionals against American citizens,” and reminded these officials they had taken an “oath to protect and defend this Constitution,” not the president. After Trump posted his inflammatory ravings, the Pentagon announced that it was investigating Kelly, as a retired officer, for possible breaches of military law.

No question Trump is an “unhinged rageaholic,” said Jim Geraghty in National Review. But the lawmakers in the video didn’t specify any “solid and recent examples” of the president giving illegal orders. When a Fox News host asked Colorado Rep. Jason Crow—one of the video’s participants—for examples, he went back five years to Trump asking if soldiers could shoot Black Lives Matter protesters “in the legs.” That question, while alarming, was not an order. Perhaps not, but there’s “very strong” recent evidence of illegal commands, said Greg Sargent in The New Republic. A top military lawyer reportedly warned that the president’s bombings of supposed drug smugglers in the Caribbean is likely to be illegal. He was shunted aside, but Adm. Alvin Holsey, who oversaw naval operations in the area, resigned due to concerns that the strikes rested “on shaky legal ground.”

Trump has put our military “in an impossible situation,” said David French in The New York Times. As a former military lawyer myself, I am hearing from anguished current servicepeople involved in the Caribbean attacks, and “they feel real moral doubt” and “profound legal confusion.” How do individual service members know “which orders are illegal?” They often can’t, which is why the responsibility for that judgment belongs high in the military chain of command. Sadly for our nation and our sailors and soldiers, Trump is making the military’s “most senior leaders complicit in his unlawful acts.”

How much have coffee prices increased?

The average retail price of a pound of ground coffee has rocketed more than 40% over the past year, pushed up by economic, political, and environmental factors. An intense drought in Brazil, the world’s top coffee producer, and heavy rains in Vietnam, the second-largest producer, reduced the supply of beans last year. Then in April, President Trump slapped so-called reciprocal tariffs on almost all of America’s trading partners, causing prices to spike even higher. Coffee futures reached an all-time high in October, and on grocery store shelves, ground coffee topped $9 a pound. In a country that gets through some 3.5 billion pounds of coffee a year, and where two-thirds of the population drink at least one cup a day, that’s hard to ignore. Chuck Smith of Rochester, Ind., was stunned when he picked up a 38.2-ounce tub of Maxwell House at his local Walmart and noticed its price had nearly doubled in a year to $21.44. “It really caught me off guard,” he said. It’s “ridiculous.”

Does the U.S. produce much coffee?

Not nearly enough to meet demand. In Hawaii, the only U.S. state with commercial coffee cultivation, some 650 small-scale farms grow about 3.8 million pounds a year of the Big Island’s prized, $30-per-pound Kona variety. A few million more pounds come from mountainous areas of Puerto Rico. But we remain reliant on countries in the so-called coffee belt, which stretches from the Tropic of Cancer—roughly 75 miles south of the Florida Keys— to the Tropic of Capricorn, which cuts through Australia. Arabica, the most popular coffee plant species, requires both humid tropical climates and the relative coolness of elevations above 3,280 feet. Because of those growing requirements, the U.S. runs a more than $1 billion annual deficit in the coffee trade. That wasn’t considered a problem until this spring, when President Trump declared U.S. trade deficits “an emergency” that required a sweeping regime of tariffs.

How steep were the tariffs?

Trump hit Vietnam and Colombia, which together account for nearly a third of U.S. coffee imports, with duties of 20% and 10%, respectively. Brazil, which accounted for a third of coffee imports last year, incurred even higher tolls, with the White House in July stacking a 40% tariff on top of a 10% reciprocal tariff because of the “drummed up” prosecution of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, a Trump ally accused of trying to stage a coup. Since then, Brazilian coffee shipments to the U.S. have sunk 55% and prices have rocketed up, adding to Americans’ affordability concerns. In mid-November, with a Fox News poll showing that 61% of Americans disapprove of how Trump is handling the economy, the president scrapped tariffs on imports of coffee and hundreds of other grocery basics in a bid to reduce the cost of living. “The prices of coffee are a little bit high now,” Trump said. “They’ll be on the low side in a very short period of time.”

Will prices drop substantially?

Probably not, because there are factors beyond tariffs on coffee beans keeping prices high. Roasters, cafés, and grocery stores across the U.S. are also dealing with higher costs for wages, rent, and utilities. Inflation either raises “the product costs of goods sold directly, or the cost of living of our employees, who in turn need better wages,” said Steven Sutton, founder of gourmet coffee chain Devoción. “All these factors are factored into the final coffee prices.” Then there’s the fact that global demand for coffee is spiking while supplies lag. In China, where workers in the traditionally tea-drinking society are increasingly seeking something stronger, coffee consumption has surged 150% over the past decade. The country now goes through about 833 million pounds of coffee a year. Consumption of premium coffee is also rising in the big producers, including Brazil, Vietnam, and Indonesia. “So there’s going to be less available coffee to export,” said California-based importer John Cossette, “and that’s going to make it more expensive as well.” Growers, meanwhile, are not reaping the benefits of rising coffee prices.

Why not?

Because they’re having to pay more for fertilizer and for laborers, and are increasingly struggling to find pickers who’ll work in the fields for as little as $2 a day—a wage that helps growers keep their product competitively priced. “A lot of producers are starting to lose hope,” said Honduran farmer Moises Herrera. And there’s another threat to supplies: climate change. Rising heat, extreme downpours, and the spread of pests and diseases that thrive in hot and wet conditions are reducing the number of cool mountainsides where the highland bean can thrive. By 2050, according to multiple studies, more than half of all areas now suitable for coffee growing may no longer be able to support the crop.

Will our cups go empty?

Not necessarily, but we may have to become less picky about what we sip. Climate change could open new regions, such as northern Argentina and China’s Yunnan province, to coffee cultivation. But growers may plant less arabica, which has trouble thriving if average annual temperatures go above 73 degrees Fahrenheit, and rely more on lower-grade robusta, which can withstand higher temperatures. Farmers are experimenting with other hardy, lesser-grown coffee plants such as liberica, which is native to tropical Central Africa. Prices will likely continue to rise in the coming years—possibly at a slower pace— but coffee insiders say that’s unlikely to cause many Americans to kick their java habit. “People forget that coffee is a drug, a legal drug,” said Brian Phillips, who sources beans for Anthem Coffee Imports in Kansas City, Mo. “Coffee consumption is not slowing down by any means.”

What happened

After eliminating multiple Russian demands from a peace plan backed by President Trump, U.S. and Ukrainian negotiators agreed this week in Geneva on the framework for a deal to end the Ukraine war—but Russia’s acceptance appeared unlikely. The framework is a heavily revised version of the 28-point peace plan that emerged last week from a secret meeting between White House special envoy Steve Witkoff, Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Russian negotiator Kirill Dmitriev. That plan set off a firestorm when it was leaked, with Ukrainian and European officials and many U.S. lawmakers criticizing it as a surrender requiring no concessions from Moscow. It would have forced Ukraine to cede not only Russian-occupied regions but territory it still controls in the Donbas, reduced and capped the size of its military, and barred Ukraine from NATO membership and having NATO peacekeepers on its soil. Trump issued an ultimatum to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to accept the deal or “continue to fight his little heart out” without U.S. support.

The ground soon shifted, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with Ukrainian and European negotiators in Geneva and removed nine of the most objectionable points from Russia’s plan. Rubio said he was “very optimistic” about the new, 19-point framework, which leaves the final territorial lines open to further negotiation. Zelensky asked to meet directly with Trump “as soon as possible” to lobby against any land concessions to Russia and finalize the amended plan. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said any meaningful changes to understandings reached between Putin and Trump would create “a fundamentally different situation.”

What the columnists said

The only explanation for this confusing series of events is that “rival factions” within the White House fought over the peace plan “and made a mess of it,” said Nick Catoggio in The Dispatch. Witkoff, Kushner, and Dmitriev “essentially laundered a Kremlin Christmas wish list,” triggering an uproar. Rubio then told a bipartisan group of senators that the 28-point plan came from Russia and was not the U.S.’s proposal. The secretary of state worked with Ukrainian and European envoys to shape a proposal that a relieved Zelensky is now endorsing while Moscow scowls.

The initial plan realized Ukraine’s worst fears, said Andrew C. McCarthy in National Review. Once again, Trump was “doing Russia’s bidding,” which became all the more obvious when he issued his “stark ultimatum” to Zelensky. Rubio was the game changer, said Jack Blanchard and Dasha Burns in Politico. When the White House cast the proposal “as a fait accompli,” he shifted the narrative, insisting Ukraine deserved a say. The longtime “Russia hawk” then forged a Ukraine friendly peace proposal in Geneva that he’s touting as the best “we have had in our entire 10 months of working on these issues.” Clearly, this “ultra-positive message was aimed at a certain Audience of One.”

Zelensky handled Trump shrewdly, showing he’s learned “since foolishly sparring with him in the Oval Office in February,” said The Washington Post in an editorial. Faced with the disastrous Russian plan Trump adopted, he “remained calm and offered to negotiate.” But the likely outcome of any plan that denies Putin his main goals is that Russia will fight on “no matter the human cost.”

Trump and Putin hoped that a “weakened” Zelensky would have to swallow a bad deal, said Yaroslav Trofimov in The Wall Street Journal. Rocked by a corruption scandal that has ensnared top ministers and “sparked fury across Ukraine,” he’s on shakier ground politically than at any point during the four-year war. But that makes him actually less likely to give ground in a conflict “many Ukrainians view as existential.” Despite brutal losses, they are in no mood to surrender.

Nor is Putin about to bend, said Paul Sonne in The New York Times. He would gladly have taken as a win a “Kremlin-friendly peace plan that enshrines Ukraine’s perpetual subordination.” But he’ll also see “a failed process” as a victory if it leads Trump to “pull remaining support for Ukraine.” With his economy struggling and his troops mired in a slow advance that’s had a steep cost in “lives and matériel,” Putin’s capacity for continued war “isn’t limitless.” But he believes “time is on his side,” and his goal hasn’t shifted: He “wants to break Ukraine.”

★★

“Bring earplugs! Bring Kleenex! Prepare to succumb!” said Naveen Kumar in The Washington Post. The musical Chess is back on Broadway for the first time since it flopped in 1988, and its “belty and synth-tastic score,” written by lyricist Tim Rice and two members of ABBA, has probably never enjoyed a louder or more spirited performance. Lea Michele, Aaron Tveit, and Nicholas Christopher co-star as the three points in the story’s central love triangle, and all three deliver in the handful of “blow-your-hair-back, 1980s-style rock ballads” that most ticket buyers come to hear. Still, Chess has always been “a concept album in search of a script,” its score generating two 1984 pop hits before anyone ever attempted to put it onstage. Rice’s “obviously bizarre” concept will always resist a sensible staging.

Not sure what to make of a musical about a Soviet-American championship chess match between two men in love with the same woman? asked Tim Teeman in The Daily Beast. “Chess doesn’t care. It’s here to pulverize you with high-stakes passion, possible global apocalypse, and blazing over-emotion.” Danny Strong’s rewrite embraces the faults in the premise and pushes onward, making the story less about chess than the possibility of nuclear destruction. When the efforts of a CIA officer and a KGB agent to fix the chess match go nowhere, the focus shifts to the love triangle, only to stall because of “a stark lack of chemistry in each coupled combination.” Even so, the show works in fits and starts. “It is, like many spectacles, good, bad, needily insistent, and unapologetically exhausting.”

While parts of the show are “absolutely thrilling,” others are “aggressively dumb,” said Elisabeth Vincentelli in The New York Times. Bryce Pinkham, filling a narrator role, delivers jokey asides about Joe Biden and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “that would mortify a third-rate comedian.” Even so, every time you begin to lose patience with the entire endeavor, “another great song comes along.” The show’s rendition of “One Night in Bangkok,” the score’s biggest 1980s hit, proves to be “such a ridiculous rush that it pretty much justifies the whole project,” said Sara Holdren in NYMag.com. Yes, the show is ludicrous even at its best. That also makes it “more fun than most things on Broadway.”

‘Notes on Being a Man’ by Scott Galloway

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

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

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

‘Bread of Angels: A Memoir’ by Patti Smith

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

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

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

Ulster Park, N.Y.

The Old Toll House is in the Hudson Valley, minutes from New Paltz and less than two hours from Midtown Manhattan. The 1775 stone three-bedroom centers on a kitchen with an oversize hearth, barrel ceilings, and herringbone brick floors; a formal dining room has its original fireplace and wood ceilings with hand-carved beams.

The roughly 1.5-acre lot includes stone walls, mature trees, and a detached garage. $799,000. Sally Sprogis, Four Seasons Sotheby’s International, (845) 464-5867

East Haddam, Conn.

Clover Hill Farm, a 1737 estate, is on 11.5 acres about 45 minutes from New Haven. The expanded seven-bedroom Colonial has six fireplaces and antique beams, and additions that include a chef’s kitchen with a double Viking range, a stone-floor sunroom, and a dining room.

The property includes pastures, a barn, a pool with a pool house, and 1,000 feet of frontage on Eightmile River. $1,799,000. Allyson Cotton, William Pitt Sotheby’s International Realty, (860) 227-6016

Salisbury, N.H.,

The Robie House was built in 1753 on a knoll overlooking the property’s 74-plus acres. The four-bedroom Colonial has original beams, wide pine floors, paneled doors, and a beehive oven, and additions include a reclaimed country kitchen with a corner banquette and a primary bath with a marble vanity and a jetted tub.

Outside are fruit trees, flower gardens, a pond, horse and equipment barns, and pastures. Concord, the state capitol, is 30 minutes south. $1,595,000. Kristin Claire, LandVest, (603) 494-9448

Rappahannock Academy, Va.

Rose Hill Estate is a Federal-style home built circa 1798 and restored in 2011. The expanded four-bedroom features a grand central hallway, a kitchen with a marble island, a dining room with replica historic French wallpaper, and a music room.

The property’s more than 352 acres include a guest house, gardens, a stocked pond, a barn gym, plus a tennis court, trails, and a working barn with cattle. $9,000,000. Charlotte Rouse, Coldwell Banker Elite, (540) 419-9206

Southport, Conn.

Built in 1720, the Sherwood Farmhouse is on about a half-acre in coastal Connecticut. The two-bedroom’s original elements include wide-plank wood floors, millwork, and a primary room with exposed, hand-hewn trusses and a large fireplace.

Among the modern updates are a new bath with a soaker tub and floating sink, and a galley kitchen with black appliances. The lot has gardens, yards, and a new barn made from the property’s 200-year-old trees. $1,249,000. Amy Waugh Curry, BHHS New England Properties, (203) 913-8744

York, Pa.

The Peter Wolf House, a restored, expanded stone Colonial about 15 minutes from downtown York, was originally built around 1730. The five-bedroom has its original wood floors and milk-paint foyer walls, eight fireplaces, raised paneling, and an eat-in kitchen with a wood-burning stove and space for a harvest table.

Just over 1 acre, the lot has a fenced yard and a courtyard with an 18th-century-inspired herb garden. $450,000. Cynthia Forry, Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Homesale Realty, (717) 451-6786

President Trump ran in 2024 on the promise that he’d tame prices. Now he has “finally admitted his tariffs do the opposite,” said Schuyler Mitchell in Mother Jones. Scrambling to tackle the affordability crisis that drove voters to Democrats in this month’s elections, Trump announced that he was exempting more than 200 agricultural imports—including staples like beef, coffee, and bananas—from the reciprocal tariffs he “proudly implemented in April.” Those import tolls, which range from 10% to 50%, have helped push up the price of numerous groceries: Coffee is up 19% over the past year and beef 16%. Of course, Trump didn’t concede outright that his signature policy is stoking sticker shock, and his administration continues to insist that foreign companies, not American consumers, pay tariffs. “But if tariffs had no impact on consumer prices, then Trump would not now find the need to roll them back.”

While tariffs do raise prices, this reversal “probably won’t make your life more affordable,” said Elisabeth Buchwald in CNN.com. That’s partly because many of the goods on Trump’s list are subject to his other tariffs. In July, for example, he slapped an extra 40% duty on Brazil—the world’s top producer of coffee beans—over the trial of his ally, former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro. That tariff remains in place. Then there’s the fact that retailers may not pass on the savings from tariff reductions to consumers and could instead use them to pad their bottom line or cover other costs. But even “a limited, begrudging retreat from a foolish, expensive policy is still a step in the right direction,” said Eric Boehm in Reason. And perhaps Trump will now ponder this question: “If reducing tariffs provides relief to consumers who eat bananas and drink coffee, what would removing other tariffs do for American manufacturing?”

If he’s lucky, the Supreme Court will step in and “save Trump from himself,” said Eric Levitz in Vox. The justices heard arguments earlier this month over the president’s power to unilaterally impose tariffs and a majority appeared primed to rule against Trump. He might even “welcome an excuse to scale back his self-sabotage”—his net approval on inflation is now 33 percentage points underwater, down from plus 5 points after his inauguration. A repeal of Trump’s tariffs would lift the average household’s annual income by more than $1,000. That would be a meaningful victory for affordability, at least until Trump finds a new rationale for “deliberately driving up the cost of living.”

What do the numbers show? 

That antisemitism is surging. According to FBI data, there were 2,086 anti-Jewish hate-crime incidents in 2024—up 4% from 2023 and the highest number since records began in 1991. While Jews make up only about 2% of the population, 17% of all reported hate crimes last year were against Jews. But the FBI data doesn’t capture the full scale of the spike in antisemitism, because it includes only crimes reported to authorities. The Anti-Defamation League recorded more than 9,000 incidents of harassment, vandalism, and assault in 2024—the highest number since it began tracking data in 1979. And a report published by the organization last month found that 57% of Jewish Americans believe antisemitism is a now normal part of Jewish life in the U.S. For decades, most antisemitic incidents in the U.S. stemmed from old conspiracies and tropes, such as a 2019 attack on a California synagogue by a gunman who believed Jews controlled the news media. But since Oct. 7, 2023—when Hamas attacked Israel and sparked the Gaza war—a larger share of perpetrators has cited Israel or Zionism. “For antisemites,” said Oren Segal of the ADL, “the Israel issue has been a convenient tactic to pile onto the Jewish community.” 

Did antisemitism increase significantly after Oct. 7? 

In the three months after Hamas’ attack, antisemitic incidents were up 361% compared with the same period a year earlier, according to the ADL. The organization counted 3,291 incidents in that period, including bomb threats against synagogues, swastikas spraypainted onto Jewish schools, and 56 physical assaults. The violence seemed to intensify this year. In April, a man set fire to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s residence as Shapiro, who is Jewish, and his family slept inside. The attacker said he was motivated by Shapiro’s support of Israel. The next month, two young Israeli embassy aides were shot dead as they left an event at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C.; the alleged gunman told police, “I did it for Palestine.” Eleven days later in Boulder, Colo., a man shouting “free Palestine” threw Molotov cocktails at demonstrators calling for the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza. An 82-year-old woman later died of her wounds. “People like me made arguments for years about how you should be able to criticize Israel and not be seen as antisemitic,” said Joel Rubin, a deputy assistant secretary of state under President Barack Obama. “That’s collapsed, and attacks on Zionism now target Jews.” 

What’s behind the spike in attacks? 

Some experts argue that antisemitism on the Left is being driven by ideas about “settler colonialism,” an academic theory that divides the world into foreign colonizers and Indigenous peoples, oppressors and the oppressed. Under this theory, Jews “are not a historically oppressed people” with historical ties to Israel, said Harvard Law School professor Noah Feldman, but instead are imperialists “and even white supremacists” who have stolen Palestinian land. Under such an ideology, violence against any “oppressor” can be justified. Some researchers argue that criticism of Israel is too often conflated with antisemitism by the ADL and others, and note that antisemitism was rising in the U.S. before 2023. “To lump as antisemitic all people who don’t believe in Zionism is just wrong,” said Kevin Rachlin of the Nexus Project, a nonprofit that combats antisemitism. Still, he adds that antisemitism has “unequivocally” increased in the U.S. since 2023. And that bigotry is gaining traction on the Right as well as the Left. 

What’s happening on the Right? 

A growing number of “America First” figures are embracing old antisemitic tropes. Nick Fuentes, a 27-year-old white supremacist influencer, has blamed “organized Jewry” for sowing division in the U.S. and claimed American Jews put Israel’s interests “before the interests of their home country.” Conservative writer Rod Dreher said he was told by a Washington insider that “30% to 40%” of young GOP staffers in D.C. are Fuentes fans. Candace Owens, one of the nation’s most popular podcasters, claims the U.S. has a “Zionist occupied government” and has dismissed accounts of the torturous experiments conducted by Nazi scientists on Jewish and other prisoners during World War II as “bizarre propaganda.” Tucker Carlson, the top right-wing podcaster in the U.S., has hosted Fuentes on his show as well as Nazi apologist blogger and Holocaust denier Darryl Cooper, whom Carlson called the “most important popular historian working in the United States today.” 

Are many Americans receptive to these messages? 

Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, who formerly employed Owens at his Daily Wire site and is a frequent target of antisemites online, said there’s a ready audience for anti-Jewish conspiracies among young people who feel the economy is against them. They are told their troubles “can be solved by externalizing those problems onto a different group,” said Shapiro, who adds that social media algorithms incentivize such conspiratorialism. “You get a lot more likes and clicks if you are promoting an anti-Israel, anti-Jewish agenda than if you are doing the opposite.” Research shows that antisemitism is blooming on the major social media platforms, most of which have dialed back content moderation in recent months. An Israeli study found a 41% increase in antisemitic posts on TikTok from 2020 to 2021, a 912% increase in antisemitic comments, and a 1,375% increase in antisemitic usernames. Another study, by the Center for Countering Digital Hate and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, identified nearly 679,600 antisemitic posts on Elon Musk’s X platform over 11 months that garnered a combined 193 million views, despite being in violation of X’s own antisemitism policies. “Antisemitic conspiracy theories and hate that were once fringe have been wholly normalized,” said Amy Spitalnick, head of the JCPA. And they’re “thriving in plain sight.”

“Marjorie Taylor Greene just wrecked the cult of Trump,” said Greg Sargent in The New Republic. Standing outside the U.S. Capitol last week with a group of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims, the GOP representative slammed the president for calling her a “traitor” and a “ranting lunatic” because she helped force a vote on releasing government files on the deceased sex trafficker. In a barb clearly aimed at Trump—who reversed his opposition to releasing the files as it became clear he couldn’t stop the congressional effort—the Georgia Republican said a traitor “serves foreign countries and themselves” while a patriot serves “Americans like the women standing behind me now.” This “rift is a big deal,” said Nick Catoggio in The Dispatch. That a “notorious Trump-slobberer” like Greene would openly resist the man who coined the phrase “Make America Great Again” is significant. But she’s also doing it while promoting the radical idea that MAGA “has discrete ideological content beyond the president’s whims and daily political needs.” If this notion catches fire on the Right, Greene could find herself leading “the first meaningful right-wing rebellion against autocracy of this era.”

The “MAGA crackup” goes far beyond Epstein, said Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times. In recent weeks, Greene has chided Trump for being too focused on striking foreign deals while ignoring “the five-alarm fire” of affordability and health-care costs. Other MAGA types have been infuriated by the president’s un–America First defense of skilled foreign worker visas, which he told Fox News are needed because Americans lack “certain talents.” A few days later, Trumpist influencer Mike Cernovich was raging online about “how overt the corruption” is within this administration. It was against this backdrop of spreading disaffection that Trump rebuked Greene—rebukes she said led to death threats against her and her family. “Many right-wing influencers reacted with unusual fury” to Trump’s jabs. Some even posted images of burning MAGA hats, a sign “that the MAGA coalition is fragmenting.”

Perhaps, said Joan Vennochi in The Boston Globe. But if the last decade has taught us anything, it’s that Trump’s “base sticks with him,” no matter what, and so far there’s little reason to think that this time will be different. True, Trump’s average approval rating— about 40%—is at a second-term low. But it’s only down some 2 points from September, which hardly signals some imminent sea change in his political fortunes. Trump’s Epstein-files “U-turn” may read as weakness to D.C. insiders, said Jack Blanchard in Politico. But it could be a “path to redemption” with his base. If Trump fulfills his promises and now delivers “an all-out blitz on ‘affordability,’” slashing tariffs and mailing out $2,000 “rebate checks,” MAGA might forget its “disenchantment.”

But Trump isn’t “losing control of MAGA” because of the growing incoherence of his policies, said Jeet Heer in The Nation. Figures like Greene are breaking with Trump, and MAGA is “splintering,” because the GOP’s voters, donors, and leaders are already looking past Trump to 2028, when the party will need a new standard bearer. Can a political coalition “created and unified by a cult leader” survive “without that cult leader”? asked Andrew Sullivan in his Substack newsletter. We’re about to find out. It’s less than a year until the 2026 midterms and perhaps only months before Donald J. Trump, as a political force, finds himself “quacking lamely in the rearview mirror.”

The 15-day standoff between Disney and Google could change the media landscape forever, said Lukas I. Alpert in MarketWatch. The media giant struck a deal last week to finally get its television channels, including ABC, National Geographic, and ESPN, back on Google’s YouTube TV streaming service, where they had been blacked out since Halloween. Terms of the deal weren’t publicized, but Disney, which was losing $4 million a day in ad revenue, agreed to make its full lineup of sports available on YouTube TV, a substantial concession. The lengthy stalemate “represented a modern twist on an old kind” of media fight—and one that’s happening more often. “Disputes over carriage fees,” or what distributors have to pay TV companies for the rights to show their programming, are a holdover from the cable days. But “the prime battleground today” is streaming— and the streamers “appear far more willing to flex their muscle as their command of audiences continues to grow.” YouTube TV’s market share remains below traditional cable operators like Comcast, Charter, and DirecTV, “but it is fast catching up.” In the entertainment business, “with the eyeballs goes the power.”

Media companies like Disney have fought back against cord-cutting “by squeezing existing pay-TV customers for more money,” said James Faris in Business Insider. It has created “a vicious cycle where fewer people have a pay-TV subscription, except for die-hard fans of sports or cable news.” At some point, pay-TV customers will likely “balk at how high their monthly bills have gotten.” That gives the big streaming platforms an advantage that they can continue to press in future negotiations. This heavyweight battle suggests there will be more such fights “between those who make the content and those who control the pipes,” said Sujeet Indap in the Financial Times. Google, a $3.5 trillion behemoth, clearly isn’t afraid to stand firm on prices. This is the fourth carriage dispute that YouTube TV has been involved in this year alone.

Meanwhile, cord-cutters are being forced to shell out ever more for streaming services, said Melissa Korn in The Wall Street Journal. Since 2019, the monthly price of a Disney+ subscription has gone up 172%, while AppleTV+ has spiked 160% and Peacock 120%. This “streamflation” adds up, because the average U.S. household pays for about 4.5 streaming services. As prices have risen, so have the work-arounds. There are now “more options to switch to lower-cost ad-supported tiers,” if you’re willing to sit through commercials. And some of the streaming companies have started bundling their products again: You can buy a combo of Peacock and Apple TV, or one of ESPN and Fox. All the package deals could save you some money—or, just like in the old cable days, leave you paying for content you never watch.

'Wicked: For Good'

Directed by John M. Chu (PG)

★★★

John M. Chu’s highly anticipated second installment of Wicked “delivers what we might call the ‘whew factor,’ as in: Thank goodness, he didn’t blow it,” said Peter Debruge in Variety. But the film also does more. After last year’s Part 1 "succeeded in wowing audiences," racking up $750 million worldwide, it would have been enough to follow up with a merely solid rendition of Act 2 of the stage musical based on Gregory Maguire's revisionist Oz-set novels. Instead, this movie addresses a common complaint about the show's back half, giving green-skinned Elphaba and her former roommate Glinda more scenes together and adding enough story content that Act 2 "now feels like a robust tale unto itself."

To me, this chapter of the tale still makes "little emotional sense,” said Jesse Hassenger in A.V. Club. As it opens, Cynthia Erivo’s Elphaba has been unfairly vilified as the Wicked Witch of the West and Ariana Grande's Glinda is trying to defend her friend while serving as a spokeswoman for Oz's increasingly autocratic government. But that premise requires that viewers ditch their warm feelings for the original Wizard of Oz, and here, when the arrival of Dorothy's tornado-tossed house sets the 1939 film's plot in motion, "the fun really drains from the movie." Yes, this is an "altogether darker" work than Part 1, said Bilge Ebiri in NYMag.com, but that's a strength. As Glinda gradually realizes that she has to move past her people-pleasing tendencies, For Good becomes a "surprisingly relatable portrait of how the world eventually forces us all into dark corners." In this part of the tale, Glinda takes center stage, and a "shocking amount of the picture plays out on Grande's face."

'Rental Family'

Directed by Hikari (PG-13)

★★

Rental Family is a nice movie of the kind that’s “lit brighter than a dentist’s office” and “aimed toward a heart-stirring conclusion about the power that we all have to affect each other’s lives,” said David Ehrlich in IndieWire. The movie can get “treacly,” but it’s also unsentimental enough at heart to recognize that true human connection and performance aren’t so easily separated. Oscar winner Brendan Fraser plays a struggling American actor living in Tokyo who begins working for a rental family service—one of the many in real-world Tokyo that hires out actors to temporarily fill roles in customers’ lives. And while the premise suggests “a banal family comedy,” said William Bibbiani in The Wrap, Rental Family is actually “a love letter to humane performances, the type of roles Fraser always excels at.”

His character, ­Phillip, portrays a mourner at a funeral, a groom at a fake wedding, and a young girl’s long-absent father. The sum of those scenes is “a complex conversation about the craft of acting,” one that doesn’t ignore fakery’s hazards. And while these provocations are interesting, “it’s easy to struggle with how exactly we’re supposed to feel about all this.” Most surprisingly, Rental Family “displays an almost admirable amount of restraint in its tear-jerking,” said Esther Zuckerman in The Daily Beast. The movie is “so restrained,” in fact, that it barely sketches out Phillip’s character. “You leave itching for more of his inner life.”

“Lux” by Rosalía

★★★★

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

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

“Sad and Beautiful World” by Mavis Staples

★★★

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

The battle over the future of web browsing is here, said Shirin Ghaffary and Matt Day in Bloomberg. Amazon last week sued the artificial intelligence startup Perplexity because its new AIpowered web browser, Comet, can “make purchases on a real person’s behalf.” The world’s largest online retailer says this amounts to “computer fraud” when not disclosed. The clash between the two companies offers “an early glimpse into a looming debate” over “agentic artificial intelligence.” Perplexity is among several tech firms, including Google and OpenAI, racing “to rethink the traditional web browser around AI,” with automated agents that can complete tasks like emailing or shopping. Amazon, which is developing its own AI-powered shopping agents, has reason to worry: If more bots do the shopping for humans, that poses “a significant threat to Amazon’s lucrative advertising business.”

It makes sense for AI companies to jump into the browser game, said David Pierce in The Verge. Your browser holds “a vast trove of data about you”—including everywhere you go online, and what you do there—which can used to precisely target ads that generate revenue. And it also “contains the most important input system on the internet,” a box to do Google searches. “If AI interactions are going to usurp Google searches, they have to be that easy.”After testing several AI browsers, I’m a convert, said Nicole Nguyen in The Wall Street Journal. The best part of such a browser is that it has “a built-in chatbot that can see what’s open in your tabs.” You can type questions, like “Is this the best price?” and it will “instantly understand the context” and complete tasks based on the answers. I’ve even let OpenAI’s new browser, Atlas, shop for cheap flights on its own “while I did other stuff.”

It’s risky “letting AI this deep into your life,” said Geoffrey A. Fowler in The Washington Post. AI agents “are still prone to mistakes—and when an agent has access to a browser with your login credentials and payment info, that’s a lot of power to hand over.” It also “brings privacy risks that are hard to understand, much less control.” OpenAI’s Atlas “doesn’t just log which websites you visit; it also stores ‘memories’ of what you look at and do on those sites,” going a step beyond traditional cookies. Such agentic systems are ripe for abuse by cybercriminals, said Hiawatha Bray in The Boston Globe. All a hacker needs to do is “hide malicious code inside a webpage” that a bot might pull up. If the code tells my browser to open my password management system, thieves could have “total access to my banking and credit accounts.” For now, “sticking to my dumb old browser seems like the smart move.

Dick Cheney turned the vice presidency from a punch line into a powerhouse. Having been a right-hand man to multiple Republican presidents before running with George W. Bush in 2000, he knew his worth. When a former veep, Dan Quayle, warned him the job mostly involved attending openings and funerals, Cheney replied, “I have a different understanding with the president.” A proponent of a strong executive branch, he rejected the idea that protecting civil liberties outweighed the imperative to prevent another 9/11. Instead, he became the architect of the War on Terror, crafting and promoting the administration’s rationale for invading Iraq in 2003. That conflict, in which nearly 5,000 U.S. service members and some 200,000 Iraqi civilians were killed, grew increasingly unpopular once it became clear that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction. Cheney, though, professed no regrets—and didn’t even object to being portrayed as a behind-the-scenes Machiavelli. “Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole?” he mused in 2004. “It’s a nice way to operate, actually.”

Richard Bruce Cheney was born in Lincoln, Neb., and spent his adolescence in Casper, Wyo. His parents, both Democrats, “boasted that their son had been born on Franklin Roosevelt’s birthday,” said USA Today. In high school, Dick was captain of the football team—his future wife, Lynne Ann Vincent, was homecoming queen—and won a scholarship to Yale University. But he dropped out and “floundered for a time,” racking up two drunk-driving arrests before starting political science classes at the University of Wyoming in the mid-1960s. By the end of the decade, he was working for “an up-and-coming staffer in the Nixon White House named Donald Rumsfeld,” who would become his mentor. In the Ford administration, 34-year-old Cheney was named the youngest chief of staff in history when Rumsfeld left the post. He had his first heart attack (he’d have five) at 37 while running for the U.S. House, where he spent 10 years. When President George H.W. Bush nominated him for secretary of defense, he was unanimously confirmed despite questions over his multiple draft deferrals. “I had other priorities in the ’60s than military service,” he said.

Cheney “won plaudits for low-key but firm leadership,” said The Wall Street Journal, a style that helped him form an international coalition to oust Iraqi troops from Kuwait in the first Gulf War. When the next President Bush wanted a seasoned Washington insider on his ticket, he asked Cheney to compile a list of VP candidates; Cheney did, but then selected himself. Cheney’s “defining moment” arrived on Sept. 11, 2001, said The New York Times. The planes hit when Bush was away in Florida. Cheney quickly ordered that any other hijacked plane be shot down—which proved unnecessary—and persuaded Bush to authorize “enhanced interrogation,” or torture, of terrorist suspects, including waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and rectal force-feeding. A “powerful advocate” for the invasions of Afghanistan in October 2001 and Iraq in March 2003, he insisted there was “no doubt” Saddam was stockpiling WMDs and that U.S. troops would be “greeted as liberators.”

“Events would prove Cheney wrong,” said The Washington Post. The Iraq conflict birthed insurgencies and extremism, and photographs of detainees tortured at Abu Ghraib prison drew global condemnation. By Bush’s second term, Cheney found himself increasingly sidelined. His nadir came in 2006, when he accidentally blasted a hunting buddy in the face with birdshot. Yet though the U.S. “was poorer, weaker, more divided, and less globally popular” when he left office in 2009, said Foreign Policy, “it also had not suffered another 9/11-like attack.”

Out of office, Cheney was “one of the most strident GOP critics of President Barack Obama,” whom he saw as weak, said CNN.com. Though Cheney endorsed Donald Trump as GOP presidential nominee in 2016, he broke with Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot. After his daughter, then–Rep. Liz Cheney, helped investigate Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, Trump pushed supporters to oust her and fantasized about her facing a firing squad. Cheney stood with his daughter and “in an ironic coda” voted for Democrat Kamala Harris in 2024. “There has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” he said. “He can never be trusted with power again.”

Edwards, Colo.

On a hill in central Colorado, this 2000 mountain home is about 30 minutes west of Vail. The seven bedroom features a living room with a floor-to-ceiling rock fireplace, a sit-down wet bar; and a lower level with a theater, billiards, and a wine cellar with tasting room.

The two-acre lot includes balconies with Gore Range views, a hot tub, covered patio, and yard. $5,995,000. Brooke Horan-Kates, Slifer Smith & Frampton Real Estate/Luxury Portfolio International, (970) 376-5149

Palm Springs, Calif.

Architect John Walling designed this 1975, one-story home with glam modern interiors, indoor-outdoor dining and lounge areas, and a sunken wet bar. The three-bedroom also features floor-to-ceiling glass walls with mountain views, a gas fireplace, and a renovated kitchen with a double oven.

The corner lot includes a pool and spa, pass-through window to the covered patio, a firepit, and space for al fresco dining. $2,837,430. Marc Lange, Equity Union Real Estate, (760) 834-5484

New Hope, Pa.

The Glass Barn, a 1987, modernist five-bedroom revamped in 2020, features a great room with heated concrete floors and a concrete fireplace, and a paned gable wall, connecting to a kitchen with soapstone counters, a seating area, and a wine room.

Entertaining continues in the 6+-acre lot's heated greenhouse with two fireplaces and dining space. Outside are a pool and spa, pickleball/tennis court and a two-acre wildflower field. $6,250,000. Chris Preston, Kurfiss Sotheby's International Realty, (215) 262-9609

Shorewood, Minn.

In a Twin Cities suburb, this six-bedroom, 1964, midcentury modern home, updated in 2019, features an open-plan great room with a dining area that opens to a screened porch and a terrace.

The organic-modern kitchen includes zellige tiles, knotty white oak cabinets, a walk-in pantry, and a banquette. A new pool and kitchen cabana fill out the two-acre lot. Lakes are nearby and Minneapolis is about a 25-minute drive. $2,995,000. Gary Petersen, Coldwell Banker Realty, (952) 451-0284

Clayton, Mo.

This full-floor, penthouse apartment near St. Louis has multiple terraces, a high-end chef's kitchen with a butler's pantry, a black lacquered bar, and 500-bottle wine room. The 2003 three-bedroom features walnut and ebony chevron floors, a Venetian-plastered living room with French doors, and a windowed dining room with city and tree-top views.

Building amenities include 24-hour door staff, a gym, a dog park, and a pool. $7,495,000. Alex Thornhill, Janet McAfee Real Estate/Luxury Portfolio International, (314) 983-2130

San Antonio, Texas

Once the 1913 Peden Iron & Steel building, this two-story, open-plan condo in Southtown’s Steel House Lofts has an eat-in kitchen, a deck, and shared pool and BBQ areas.

The 2015 two-bedroom has original concrete floors and posts, vaulted ceilings with exposed ducts, a kitchen with granite counters and stainless appliances, and a primary suite with a sitting zone. Downtown, Riverwalk, shops, and dining are a short drive. $535,000. Shail Patel, Kuper Sotheby's International Realty, (210) 454-2904

President Trump wants to “make America slim again,” said Kara Kennedy in The Free Press. Standing beside drug execs in the Oval Office earlier this month, Trump announced deals with Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk that will cut the price of their GLP-1 weight loss medicines, Zepbound and Wegovy, in return for a three-year exemption from his 100% pharmaceutical tariffs. Medicare recipients will pay a $50 monthly co-pay for the drugs, which will also be available on TrumpRx.gov—a government-run site—for $350 a month. That’s a steep discount on current list prices, which top $1,000, and will expand access to the “single most effective intervention we have against obesity,” a disease that kills up to 500,000 Americans and costs the U.S. health care system some $173 billion every year. With Trump, “it’s always hard to separate hype from substance,” said Larry Edelman in The Boston Globe, and wide coverage gaps remain. Medicare is barred from covering weight loss drugs, so patients must have a related health condition such as prediabetes or hypertension to be eligible. Still, Trump “deserves credit” for tackling the cost issue.

Lower GLP-1 prices “could benefit millions of Americans,” said The Washington Post in an editorial, but this is the wrong way to cut costs. Trump’s ultimate goal is to peg U.S. drug prices to “the lower levels seen in other developed countries.” That “might sound appealing,” except that if a government has a heavy hand in drug pricing and distribution, it can also ration who gets it. In the U.K.’s socialized system, for example, obesity meds cost under $200 a month—but “your BMI must hit 40, and you must have an additional four health conditions, to become eligible.” And it’s easy to imagine a future Democratic president using the TrumpRx precedent to force companies to adopt “their own ideological agenda.” That would be “a disaster for innovation and consumer choice.”

For Americans forced to pay out of pocket, “any price cut is welcome,” said Lisa Jarvis in Bloomberg. And getting Medicare to cover obesity drugs, even in a limited way, “is a positive step toward acknowledging and treating obesity as a disease,” not a lifestyle choice. But even $149 a month, the advertised price for a starting dose of a still-in-development GLP-1 pill on TrumpRx, will be too big a burden for the many Americans “struggling to afford groceries.” For now, it’s too early to tell whether this deal “will actually change people’s lives” or whether the balance of benefits will ultimately favor Big Pharma or patients and taxpayers.

What is a ‘Kavanaugh stop’? 

The name derives from a September ruling by the Supreme Court, which by a 6-3 vote lifted a lower-court order barring immigration agents in Los Angeles from stopping people based solely on several factors, including race. The original case was brought by plaintiffs who argued agents conducting immigration sweeps targeted L.A. residents just for being working-class Latinos. Such profiling has been barred since 1975, when the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that California border agents who stopped a car because its occupants looked Mexican violated the Constitution’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. In the L.A. case, a federal judge ruled that agents needed more than a combination of a person’s race or ethnicity, the fact that they spoke Spanish or accented English, the type of work they do, and where they were found to justify detaining someone. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority reversed the ruling—opening the door, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a dissent, to “a country where the government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low-wage job.” The majority issued no explanation for its decision, but Justice Brett Kavanaugh laid out his reasoning in a concurring opinion.

What did Kavanaugh say? 

He said it was constitutionally permissible—and indeed “common sense”—to target people due to “apparent ethnicity” combined with other factors, such as speaking Spanish or being at a car wash or bus stop. Being stopped on such grounds is a minor inconvenience, wrote Kavanaugh; any questioning is “typically brief” and U.S. citizens and legal residents will “promptly go free.” Immigration lawyers and rights groups reacted with alarm to the ruling. The court “greenlit racial profiling,” said Jennifer Bade, an immigration attorney in Boston. “This effectively makes us a ‘show your papers’ nation where appearance and language is going to make everyone a suspect.”

Has racial profiling increased? 

Residents of Chicago and other areas where the Trump administration has launched an immigration crackdown say roving patrols of federal agents are increasingly stopping anyone who looks Latino and demanding ID. In numerous cases, U.S. citizens have been handcuffed, questioned, and held for hours or even days before agents confirmed their status. “We have never seen this type of enforcement on the streets ever,” said Mark Fleming, an attorney at the National Immigrant Justice Center. Maria Greeley, 44, a Chicago restaurant worker, said she was zip-tied by three federal agents on her way home from work. She showed her passport but was questioned for an hour by the agents, who insisted she didn’t “look like” a Greeley and called her a liar. It was “terrifying,” she said. “I am Latina and I am a service worker. I fit the description of what they’re looking for now.”

How many citizens have been detained? 

There’s no official number, but news organization ProPublica has documented more than 170 cases this year where federal agents held citizens against their will. Some were tackled, beaten, and tased; about two dozen said they were held for more than a day with no chance to call a lawyer or family member. At least three were pregnant, and nearly 20 were children. In many cases, administration officials claimed the detainee had assaulted or impeded agents, but charges were often not filed or cases were dismissed. It happened to Javier Ramirez, 32, an auto shop owner in Montebello, Calif. He says agents entered his business, wrestled him to the ground, held him at gunpoint, and took him to a detention center where he spent five days before being released. Homeland Security said he assaulted officers; security footage shows no assault and charges against him were later dropped.

How are Latino communities responding? 

Raids are creating a “culture of fear” that’s causing even citizens to stay home for fear of being detained, said Mario Trujillo, a councilman in Downey, Calif., a heavily Latino L.A. suburb. Many citizens in targeted areas now carry passports everywhere they go, including members of other minorities. “Now the onus is on anyone who’s not white, male, and MAGA to prove they belong in this country,” said Paul Liu, a Chinese American in Fresno, Calif. Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin insists that ICE operations are “highly targeted” and calls allegations of racial profiling “categorically false.” But top Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino has admitted his agents consider appearance when arresting someone. One factor, he told a white reporter, is “How do they look compared to, say, you?”

Do citizens have recourse against such arrests? 

The question of whether agents can legally use race as the basis for a stop isn’t fully settled. The Supreme Court ruling was issued through its emergency “shadow docket,” and lawsuits from plaintiffs who claim their civil rights were violated by racial profiling are working their way through the judicial system and could eventually be heard by the high court. One suit was filed by Leo Garcia Venegas, 26, a U.S.-born citizen who was detained twice by federal agents while working at construction sites in Alabama; in one instance, he was wrestled to the ground, told his REAL ID was fake, and held for over an hour before being released. He said the agents did not question any white or Black workers. It’s possible such a case may produce a different outcome at the Supreme Court, but given the earlier ruling and the deference the conservative majority has shown to the administration, it’s not considered likely. In the meantime, the indiscriminate stops are having what activists believe is the desired effect: spreading fear. “I cannot work in peace anymore,” said Garcia Venegas. “I am always nervous.” What is a ‘Kavanaugh stop’? The name derives from a September ruling by the Supreme Court, which by a 6-3 vote lifted a lower-court order barring immigration agents in Los Angeles from stopping people based solely on several factors, including race. The original case was brought by plaintiffs who argued agents conducting immigration sweeps targeted L.A. residents just for being working-class Latinos.