For most of my life, of course, gambling was illegal, unless you went to Las Vegas. Even after the rise of FanDuel and DraftKings, I was never tempted. But now, prediction markets have arrived—and somehow, they feel different. They offer betting opportunities that go well beyond sports. After Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris, I wrote a story about a French investor who made $85 million betting that Trump would win. Needless to say, that piqued my interest.

Since then, prediction markets have only gotten bigger. In April, the two biggest players, Polymarket and Kalshi, processed $24 billion in trading volume—more than 10 times what they did a year earlier, according to the Pew Research Center. Some 40 percent of American men between the ages 18 and 34 are using prediction markets, an April survey found.

And the companies have been cutting deals with major media companies: New York–based Kalshi has agreements with CNN, CNBC, and Fox, while Polymarket, which is officially registered in Panama City, has partnership arrangements with The Wall Street Journal and Substack. The media companies see the prediction markets not just as lucrative sponsors, but also as a potentially more accurate alternative to polls, which have a checkered track record in recent elections.

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The looting in Khartoum, which was repeated at a smaller scale in provincial museums across Sudan, was widely reported. It was hardly an isolated instance. In recent years, significant looting has been reported in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Ethiopia, all places where war and breakdowns in civil order have created opportunities for thieves.

But with opportunities come problems: how to dispose of the loot. The thieves, after all, can’t just show up at an auction house or a major dealer with pieces obviously taken from a war zone. But there appears to be a significant black market—and enough avenues to launder the provenance of stolen works—to make such a heist worthwhile.

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We’re staring at a giant screen at the Ellipse, a park south of the White House fence, with some 80,000 other people, watching MMA fighters beat the hell out of each other on the White House lawn. The event is supposedly in honor of America’s 250th birthday, but it also happens to be the president’s 80th.

Waves of shirtless frat boys are wandering around, drinking $20 cocktails; dads in golf shirts are waiting in lines that seemed to stretch forever to buy merch, or AI-generated MMA posters featuring their own faces; America’s long-suffering girlfriends are loitering around in flip-flops and peering at the Budweiser Clydesdales. Shortly after my arrival, Logan Paul, a professional boxer, influencer, and energy drink entrepreneur who was a big booster for Trump in the 2024 election, took to the stage to hype up the crowd.

“This is insane! Republicans as far as the eye can see!” Paul yelled.

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That’s not to knock the action-movie elements. Those work fine. What doesn’t work is that this is one of those movies where Spielberg is indulging his intellectual pretensions. Or, rather, the intellectual pretensions he believes a man of his stature ought to have. And it could be, as some have theorized over the decades, that Spielberg is a certain sort of idiot savant: that he lives entirely in his own head, without much of what lies beyond his head ever making its way in.

Disclosure Day lends fresh support to this hypothesis. The story of a committed team of whistleblowers who finally reveal that the U.S. government has been hiding encounters with intelligent life beyond the stars, it’s being billed as a spiritual successor to Spielberg’s 1977 classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind. And it arrives in your local metroplex with exquisite timing: just as members of Congress are talking about alien bodies and secret UFO retrieval programs and the Trump administration is releasing gossipy documents and blurry videos. We can’t say definitively that any of this footage shows anything extraterrestrial, but some of it’s been interesting nonetheless.

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They were incredible, these girls. They were all wearing purple, all screaming and gasping and singing; they all had, as far as I could tell, about 17 legs apiece. When the subway doors opened, they poured out and roared away into the night, an undulating wave of miniskirts and glitter that consumed everything in its path.

All of which is to say, Olivia Rodrigo is an artist, and a phenomenon, for which I am most decidedly not the target audience. That also goes for her newest album, released on Friday; I was completely unaware of the massive buzz surrounding it until I searched Rodrigo’s name on Google last week and discovered a countdown clock and a bunch of dancing heart and flower emojis at the top of the results—which I assume mean something to the miniskirted legions; as an aardvark, I have no idea.

But I listen to her music anyway. Partly out of sheer enjoyment—her songs hit the same propulsive sweet spot, sound-wise, as the pop punk anthems of Veruca Salt, No Doubt, and Elastica that I thrashed around to in my own youth—but also because I believe she might be Gen Z’s greatest documentarian. Not just an artist but a scribe, who captures the experience of being alive and young in America in a way that both makes people of her own generation feel seen and also makes their experiences legible to other people, older people. People who know the feeling of being 22, but not how it feels to feel it in 2026.

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It was 1986, and I was a high schooler, no longer a sophomore but not quite a junior, working in a restaurant kitchen where one of the tasks was to run down “the line.” On one side there was a monster stove bank pulsing heat, on the other a stainless steel counter of hot plates. In between, a trio of fast-moving guys—sous-chefs—twirled skillets of hot fat in a kind of frenetic dance as they prepared foie gras and ocean scallops, which they deftly transported from stove side to counter side, before clattering used skillets into bus pans tucked under the stove. It was my job to get those pans out.

To do this, I was meant to yell, loudly, confidently—to bellow, really—“COMING IN!” and then dart through the chaos, skirting the chef’s bodies, avoiding the impossibly expensive dishes, and crouch down, grab a bus pan full of still-sizzling dirty skillets, and race back out without hurting myself or, more importantly, causing undue disruption to the highly serious business of feeding the monied diners of Nantucket, Massachusetts.

A few times, I’d stood at the edge of the line, feeling the heat pulse at my face—and hesitated for too long. “I’ll do it,” a co-worker would say, pushing past me, shouting deeply down the line as he barged in. At 16, I wasn’t sure which part was more intimidating: the risk of colliding with one of the flying skillets or the embarrassment of shouting authoritatively to a group of men.

My colleagues in the dish pit were an old Portuguese man whose name I can’t remember, a young black guy named Columbus who was always spectacularly late and finally got fired, and a blond kid named Hank who had a Roman numeral after his name and went to one of the better private schools in the Northeast. Hank’s father required him to work summer jobs to build his character, he informed us, even though he’d probably follow in that father’s footsteps and land the kind of corporate career that would one day allow him to buy a house of his own on Nantucket. My own father hadn’t said anything about my character, but I was required to contribute $1,000 to my tuition at a much less esteemed private school than the one Hank went to.

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The New York Philharmonic’s official season ended last weekend, and after its ceremonial final concerts in the city’s parks—occurring as we speak—the storied orchestra will go dark until September.

But we won’t be missing much. New York’s music scene, I’m sorry to say, has suffered decades of systemic abuse.

Take, for example, the newly renovated David Geffen Hall, the physical home of the New York Philharmonic. A decade and $550 million later, it has all the worldly charm of an airport lounge in Dubuque. Actually, strike that: The good folks in Iowa decorated their regional transportation hub with fetching wood ceilings and stone walls, a much more attractive proposition than the cigarette ash–gray carpets and doctor’s office–chic chairs that currently adorn New York’s premier temple of classical music. And the acoustics in any given Iowa airport are better than Geffen Hall’s, too.

And if, for whatever reason, you entered Geffen Hall at any point in the last seven years, the music you experienced was likely just as flat as the building. Approaching the Philharmonic like a certified public accountant approaches a corporate balance sheet, its director, Jaap van Zweden, fashioned an orchestra that was technically proficient, accurate, and mind-bendingly soulless. Under van Zweden’s baton, quipped the critic Daniel Gelernter, “the orchestra is no longer sloppy. Now it’s merely unmusical.”

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Twice a week—once for practice, once for a game—my parents shuttled me to the small field behind our elementary school, dropped me off wearing a jersey and hand-me-down cleats, and watched me scamper toward the other girls, while the coach (usually somebody’s dad) fruitlessly attempted to corral us into formation.

The games lasted an hour or so. Parents lined the sidelines in folding chairs, displaying varying levels of engagement: Some followed every touch and shouted instructions, as though hapless 5-year-olds understood what a “through ball” was; most of the others made small talk, occasionally flitting their eyes toward the field.

At halftime, we enjoyed orange slices. After the final whistle, if we were lucky, an indulgent parent emerged with a cooler full of freeze pops.

And so it went, year after year. Our skills improved—though not by much. Practices multiplied, games lengthened, and the freeze pops went away (though the orange slices remained). Gradually, season by season, more and more kids dropped out. By high school, only the truly dedicated players were left; I myself made it only through freshman year.

If you’re an American who grew up in the suburbs, this probably sounds familiar. Suburb culture revolves around soccer: weekends at the fields, friend groups shaped by whichever team you happened to be assigned. The reality is that soccer, played by almost a quarter of American children who participate in sports, is among the most popular youth games in the country.

Which is why I’m dismayed by the lack of enthusiasm for this year’s World Cup, which begins on Thursday and is being hosted right here on North American soil—in the United States, Mexico, and Canada. Fifty-four percent of Americans have already deemed themselves “not at all interested” in the World Cup, while 59 percent say they probably won’t watch a single match.

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Ten years ago, the most dramatic denouncement to take place in the Love Island universe was Miss Great Britain getting stripped of her beauty queen crown after having sex in the show’s Hideaway—which is separate from the main villa—with a scaffolder named Alex. The pageant organizers stated that public shagging went against their requirements for a “positive role model,” and that was that.

But in the decade since, the colosseum has opened its gates, and the spectators have decided that they no longer wish to watch beautiful people kiss and couple up. They want to watch them bleed. The latest season of Love Island USA—which will air on Peacock six days a week for the next month or so—hadn’t even begun when they claimed their first scalp.

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Warning to children and needy husbands everywhere: If your mother or wife is missing this summer, she’s likely off watching Off Campus. The college romance series centered around an ice hockey team and the women who love them is the third most popular Prime Video debut ever (the show is based off Elle Kennedy’s young-adult romance novels). And it’s taken millennial moms by storm. This isn’t the first time that a bunch of 30- and 40-year-old women have gone wild for a teen romance tale—it was only last September that the final episode of The Summer I Turned Pretty aired and I spotted a grown woman in New York City sporting a “Team Conrad” T-shirt.

There’s a different sort of rabidness to Off Campus’s fan base, though. Yes, our hearts ached for the love triangle in The Summer I Turned Pretty (two brothers, Conrad and Jeremiah, pining for the same childhood friend—imagine the drama!). But the Summer I Turned Pretty boys were narrow-shouldered, effeminate Gen Zers with floppy hair. When their emotions got too heavy, they ran away.

The Off Campus actors are unabashedly men. There’s a feral quality to the show: The boobs are big and the abs are, well, hard. And while the script isn’t necessarily Emmy-worthy, that’s not the point. In one scene, the lead, star hockey player Garrett Graham, played by Belmont Cameli, finds out he’s playing against the guy who raped his girlfriend years ago, and he pummels him. Appropriate? No. But sort of hot.

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Or do you have to suffer like the Spanish tennis great Rafael Nadal, for whom pain was a constant companion throughout a professional career that began when he was 15 and ended a year and a half ago, at the age of 37?

During the course of that career Nadal won 22 Grand Slams, the second most of any player in history, and was ranked in the top 10 for 912 consecutive weeks—that’s 18 years straight, an astonishing feat. Along with Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic, Nadal was one of the “Big Three” who dominated tennis for most of this century. He played in a handful of the greatest matches ever played. He won the French Open 14 times, a record that is unlikely to ever be broken.

He had, in other words, a career like few others.

Nadal was relentless on the court and a gentleman off it, and we fans loved him for both those qualities. What we didn’t see—because he tried to hide it from us—was how much suffering he endured to play at that level, and for that many years. And in Rafa, the new four-part Netflix documentary, it is his threshold for pain—his belief that suffering was required for him to achieve greatness—that writer and director Zach Heinzerling was most interested in exploring. To Heinzerling, the question wasn’t only why Nadal was willing to endure it but also: Was it worth it in the end?

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If you’ve spent any time consuming feminist discourse online, you’ve no doubt seen this quote, which is supposed to convey how much higher the stakes are for women in negotiating heterosexual partnerships, how much more dangerous and terrifying their lives are. If you are a man, your fear of women is ridiculous; if you are a woman, your fear of men is existential. We are not the same, and ladies, woe betide you if you make the wrong choice.

I’ve seen it said that the new horror movie Obsession is one such cautionary tale, an illustration of just how dangerous men and their desires are even to the women they supposedly love. In fact, I think it’s something deeper: a lesson for everyone about how love makes fools and prisoners of us all, and how a life sentence with the wrong person can eclipse death as a thing to be feared.

The movie’s thesis, put another way: If women are afraid men will kill them, men are afraid that women will make them wish they were dead.

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So when his eldest turned 9, he took him right to the range to learn how to shoot a bow and arrow.

But his son ran into a problem. Despite hours of after-school lessons in their neighborhood of Austin, Texas, and ample tutoring from his father, he could never get a handle on the complicated vocabulary of the shooting range. Until one day, around 2023, Scharf finally tried a technique that the loincloth-clad archers of old never would’ve dreamed of.

“I literally just threw it into Chat and said: Can you explain ‘The range is hot’ to a 9-year-old?” said Scharf, who’s a biotech professional. “It worked like a charm. All of a sudden, he got it.” They moved onto the next phrase he’d had trouble with.

Soon, Scharf’s son knew all about the terminology he needed to understand—plus the mechanics of a long bow, and what separates it from a recurve. Now, three years later, artificial intelligence has taken over his family’s life—and nothing feels impossible.

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The latter was supposed to be a full season of streaming television on Disney+; it became, instead, a disorganized jumble of spare plot parts that landed with a clatter in theaters over Memorial Day weekend. Meanwhile, Backrooms, a small-budget picture by a young internet creator, has done handsomely. The movie earned $81.5 million domestically at its opening last weekend—eight times what it cost to make, which, astonishingly, was one-sixteenth of what The Mandalorian and Grogu cost.

So, is the age of the spin-off dead? It’s deader than dead, in fact: It’s soulless, empty-eyed, and ripe with the stench of decay, stumbling along like some hideous monster assembled from the chewed-up corpses of beloved ’80s and ’90s classics. Nostalgia has its time and place, but the public is clearly a bit glutted with comic book and sci-fi retreads. One night of reheated leftovers can be fun; a steady diet of recycled meat loaf gristle has got to be unhealthy. At the Mandalorian and Grogu screening I went to, the trailers were 30 minutes of advertisement for yet more retreads. There was something unbearably sad about sitting in a sparsely populated theater on a Friday night amid other aging millennials, panning the shallow dregs of our collective childhood for one last nugget of movie magic.

So it’s exciting to see 20-year-old YouTube sensation Kane Parsons find success with a commentary on remake culture itself. The genius of Backrooms is in its dark satire of the compulsive repetitions and reboots that have dominated theaters since he was a child. The monster at the heart of the movie is the literal embodiment of all those childhood keepsakes, hoarded mementos, and worn-out tropes that we feel tempted to redigest and mush together time and again. Parsons has turned an online legend into a metaphor for our zombified age.

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The Luce doesn’t resemble any other Ferrari in the company’s 79-year history. It looks pretty much like every other electric four-door sedan on the market, only worse. The button-free interior, with its bright colors and blank screens, looks uncomfortably like the evil digital tablet in the upcoming Toy Story film. The back of the car looks like it’s giving birth to another, smaller car.

The day that Ferrari’s USA Instagram account introduced the Luce, Instagram followers left more than 1,500 comments on the post. I read all of them, so you don’t have to. There was not a single positive response. Nearly 60 of the comments were some variant of the idea that the new car is a betrayal of the company’s founder: “Enzo Ferrari is rolling over in his grave.” The other reactions ran the gamut from comedy (“Can you darken the pictures more so I can’t see the car?”) to outright insult (“Piece of shit”) to fear (“As a shareholder, this concerns me”). And that shareholder was right to be concerned: The day after the reveal, Ferrari’s stock price slumped 8 percent in Milan and 5 percent in New York.

You will search in vain for anyone who is particularly excited about the Ferrari Luce. I took my best shot, which was calling a high-net-worth Ferrari collector who has bought more than $10 million worth of cars from the brand. “It’s the worst,” he said. “I really hope I don’t have to buy one. Please don’t use my name.”

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We are living through an age of political violence. Presidential assassination attempts. Lethal assaults on places of worship. An arson attack on a governor’s mansion. The murder of a conservative activist. And on and on. The motives in these cases matter: Some are explained by hate-filled fringe ideologies, some by religious extremism, others by poisonous hyper-partisanship. But more often than not, these cases share a common feature: a young man driven to threaten or carry out violent acts. How does that radicalization happen? And who is most susceptible to it? Those are the questions at the heart of Maya Sulkin’s important story today. It’s about a boy who at only 14 was found to be plotting a violent terror attack. Isolated, autistic, and targeted by jihadist extremists online, the teen fits an increasingly recognizable mold of who gets indoctrinated online—and what happens after. Read the full investigation, and watch the accompanying video. — The Editors

Angela and Marcus Reed live in a small Ohio town, in a neighborhood strung together by seemingly endless cul-de-sacs and perfectly manicured lawns. Staked next to the pathway to their brick colonial, there’s a “Believe” sign and a weather vane. It’s the kind of place where the biggest crimes are speeding tickets and double-parked cars.

Angela, a 44-year-old marketing executive, and Marcus, a 47-year-old stay-at-home dad, are high school sweethearts who have three boys and go to church every Sunday. They give to charities. They have family game nights. When their youngest son has nightmares, his 21-year-old brother sleeps beside him so he feels safe.

And yet, sitting at their dining room table, where the Reeds had set out flowers alongside mushroom pasta and tiramisu from a local Italian restaurant, Angela told me that, in December of 2023, “terrorists broke into our home,” through their computer screen, in the middle of the night. They wanted “to destroy our family, destroy our son, and destroy our community,” she said.

Their target was her middle child, Caleb, then 14.

Growing up, Caleb was like most kids in the neighborhood, though on the quiet side. He didn’t like cartoons, preferring documentaries, even when he was a toddler. He had obsessive-compulsive tendencies—he would pour out all the crackers from the box to inspect them, only eating the ones without cracks. Like any good American boy, he went through a football phase, memorizing every player and statistic. He had a few friends at school who invited him over to play, and he was always well-liked by his teammates.

When the pandemic hit in 2020, Caleb was 10 years old. His after-school activities came to a halt. His football practices ended. He no longer saw his friends. He felt like everything had been taken away from him overnight.

His parents started noticing changes in his behavior. Certain sounds, such as a person clearing their throat, would cause him to bang his head against a wall. Caleb’s OCD became more severe. He spent more time alone in his room, skipping family dinners.

At one point, Angela asked Caleb the last time he ate, and he told her it had been three days. Angela and Marcus sought out doctors to see if Caleb might have autism, but they were told his behavior could be stemming from all sorts of issues, like anxiety, puberty, or depression. Then, in late 2023, just before Caleb turned 14 years old, he announced he was converting to Islam. He was comforted by the religion’s strict rules, he told his parents, adding that it “just made more sense” to him, Angela recalled.

Angela and Marcus, devout Christians, were shocked. They had baptized Caleb in their own backyard. But when we spoke, Angela was surprisingly accepting of her son’s religious epiphany.

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This year’s competition, which featured nine finalists, was hosted by ESPN’s Mina Kimes, fresh off her recent Celebrity Jeopardy! victory. The winner of the night was California eighth-grader Shrey Parikh, who aced 18 rounds of regular spelling before shocking the crowd in the last lightning round by correctly spelling 32 words—including chikungunya and bromocriptine—in 90 seconds.

The lightning round, as well as Kimes’ role as host, are new additions to the spelling bee this year, made in an effort to boost viewership after years of declining audience numbers. It’s unclear if it worked—viewership last year was less than half of its 2012 peak of 1 million, and this year’s numbers haven’t been published—but those who did watch Parikh storm through the final round would find it hard to disagree with sports writer Rodger Sherman, who called it the “new greatest athletic accomplishment of 2026.” (Even if Bee purists, myself included, are critical of the newfangled lightning round.)

But some viewers were less than impressed. As Parikh dominated the competition, someone wrote on X, “What is this skill going to help you accomplish in life?” The post went viral, and Kimes took to X herself to answer it.

“Shrey knew those words because he’s spent countless hours studying them—not just how to spell them, but what they mean, and how they’re put together,” she wrote. “The @ScrippsBee is a testament to not only the power of hard work, but also a reminder of what the HUMAN brain is capable of.”

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Burden first told her story in a viral New York Times Modern Love essay in 2023; the book-length version, released this year, has been a massive bestseller. No surprise there: Burden, a willowy blonde with a socialite’s pedigree, makes for a compelling cautionary tale about how even the most accomplished and desirable woman can fall victim to a financially abusive adulterer, trapped in a life built on lies. I listened to the audiobook a few months ago and found it riveting, even as I wondered what might be missing from the narrative—if only because when it comes to a memoir of marriage as experienced by one of the spouses, something always is.

Now the answer to that question has arrived, but not, as one might have expected, in the form of a competing tell-all by Burden’s now ex-husband Henry P. Davis. Instead, we got a New Yorker investigation into Burden’s divorce documents that shed light on the financial aspect of her story, revealing that its shocking account of a woman driven to the edge of ruin by her conniving, greedy spouse was, in reality, a great deal more complicated.

The controversy centers largely on two properties purchased by Burden for her family during her marriage: a multimillion-dollar apartment in New York City’s Tribeca neighborhood, and a house on a lake on Martha’s Vineyard. (Slumming it, they were not.) In her book, Burden claims that the money for these homes came from two trusts left to her by her parents and grandparents, which she liquidated in their entirety. She also described listing her husband on the deeds out of a naive desire to demonstrate her love and commitment—which he then cruelly leveraged in the divorce, laying claim to his stake in the properties in full knowledge that his wife could not afford to buy him out. It’s only an hour before their trial, having dragged Burden right up to the precipice of humiliating ruin and dangled her over the edge, that her husband suddenly and inexplicably concedes his share in the properties.

The New Yorker’s reporting uncovered multiple discrepancies between this account and reality, including that what Burden described as a “trial” was actually a much lower-stakes proceeding called a “status conference”; no actual trial date had been set. The bigger revelation however was that despite depicting her financial state as dangerously precarious, Burden reported an $800,000 income the year before her divorce—as well as assets in excess of $10 million over which her husband had no claim.

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It was just too bad that my parents clearly hadn’t enjoyed the movie very much, seeing as they were both crying.

Such is the magic of the family film: It can move adults of all ages, while delighting any children they may or may not be chaperoning.

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The supposed problem is that Cooper has not practiced what she has spent years preaching on the podcast, which is raunchy in a Carrie Bradshaw millennial girl boss kind of way. The premise of the show is that women should spend their 20s sleeping around and finding themselves. Alex tells women to have sex on the first date, not to settle down, and that men are trash. She urges her female followers to embrace and partake in ghosting potential partners, and to use men before they use you.

Her content is wildly popular with young women—her podcast, between deals with Spotify and SiriusXM, is now worth around $185 million—but now, people are calling her a hypocrite.

“She has opened the trap door and escaped at least some of the consequences of her lies by doing the very thing she profits from encouraging women not to do: getting married and becoming pregnant right away,” wrote Ashley McGuire of the Institute for Family Studies. “These two things are luxuries for young, beautiful, educated, and wealthy women still in their fertile years. But unfortunately for the countless women who follow her advice, when the bill comes, they will have nothing but heartache and regret.”

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