There are half-filled reporter notebooks, an old film canister, a walkie-talkie, and a half-burned candle used to offset the smell of the office cats—including a black tabby named Typo who got her name from sitting on people’s keyboards. The landline rings while Newton is in the middle of editing a story about the town’s softball team. It’s a subscriber calling: Her paper didn’t show up on the doorstep last Thursday. Newton realizes her subscription has lapsed, and helps her renew it.

“I’ve never owned a business,” said Newton, who admitted he barely graduated from college. Now he’s managing a three-person staff, plus a handful of freelancers and contract delivery people. “This is all learning in real time.”

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So it goes when the unstoppable force of political ideology crashes into the immovable object of the god’s honest truth. It doesn’t matter if you know the former thing to be false; you have to believe it. And not only that, you want to, if only because you’ve seen what happens to people who don’t, and so you know what a profoundly cold comfort it would be to maintain your grip on reality when tribal belonging demands you let go. The people who guard the door to the clubhouse have declared that two plus two is five, that we have always been at war with Eastasia, and—to borrow from another cautionary tale about the dangers of conformism—that the emperor is not, I repeat, not parading around with his wiener out, but rather wearing a pair of pants so innovative they are beyond the ability of ordinary people to comprehend or even perceive.

This is what all right-thinking people believe—and now all the right-thinking people are looking at you, because you are one of us, aren’t you?

Aren’t you?

Aren’t you?!!

For a certain amount of time, in certain political climates, this will be enough to produce the appearance of a consensus. But even the most successful campaign of forced conformity to falsehoods cannot last forever—which brings me to the curious case of Indiana Fever player Sophie Cunningham.

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The camera advances toward a finely dressed couple kissing in Central Park. They smile, and the man, dressed in a blue suit, tries to shoo the intruding TikToker, Jay Guapõ, away.

Guapõ, who has a history of antagonizing strangers for online clout, refuses. “Don’t touch me, don’t touch—if you touch me I’ll have to touch you.”

The man and woman start to look nervous. They ask Guapõ to put the phone down again. He doesn’t. It becomes clear, very quickly, they have something to hide.

The video was released Thursday. Within hours, internet sleuths figured out that the two are colleagues at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, a white-shoe law firm in Manhattan. The man, Nathaniel D. Cullerton, is 45 and a partner. The woman, Kelsey Borenzweig, is 29, and an associate. Cullerton is married. Everyone from the Daily Mail to Above the Law covered the scandal, and the video has since amassed more than 5 million views.

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It was one of the most clarifying moments of the anti-woke era—an obvious sign that the pendulum had swung too far—and the story should have ended there. But unfortunately, it didn’t—and now, overzealous prosecutors in Rochester have turned Hendrix into a bona fide free-speech martyr.

In the days and weeks that followed the incident, local activists, including the local NAACP chapter, organized protests and town halls demanding that Hendrix be arrested and charged—despite the fact that the incident never escalated to physical violence. A few months later local prosecutors obliged, and Shiloh Hendrix was charged with two misdemeanor counts of disorderly conduct. Last week, she was found guilty on one count (related to her racially insulting the man who filmed her), fined $1,000, and sentenced to probation and community service. The reaction from the far right was exactly what you’d expect.

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Infamous as these offenses are, they became so because they were rare. For most of American history, it has been difficult and risky for a professional athlete to place a major bet on his own games.

But with the legalization of sports betting in most U.S. states—touched off by the Supreme Court’s overturning of a federal ban in 2018—we are now entering a darker era. With online betting legal and frictionless, athletes need only a few seconds on their smartphones in order to place a bet (or better yet, get a friend or family member to do the same). And they need not do anything as noticeable as throw a game. A professional basketball player, for instance, can simply bet on individual elements of their personal statistics line (called a “player prop” bet), and then subtly alter their play without drawing unwanted attention.

The scandals are now coming so frequently that it is hard to keep track of them. Just last Friday, the NFL suspended Arizona Cardinals executive Ryan Gold for allegedly betting on his team’s games. A few weeks prior, former NBA player Malik Beasley was indicted for allegedly manipulating his play in at least four 2024 NBA games in coordination with a group of bettors.

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But for the past two years, “happy” is not the impression of Usha you would get from certain corners of the internet. Since her husband took office, progressives have insisted that the Second Lady is actually miserable, held hostage in her own marriage.

Online, their relationship is always doomed. Anytime the Vances post a picture of themselves together, #FreeUsha comments follow. Divorce rumors never stop, sparked by everything from Usha being photographed without her wedding ring last November to the way J.D. hugged Erika Kirk on stage at a Turning Point USA event fewer than two months after the assassination of her husband, Charlie. “He’s throwing his wife under the bus. Poor Usha,” Joy Reid said at the time, wondering if the vice president would ditch his “brown Hindu” wife for a “white queen.”

In 2024, The Cut asked in a headline, “What Is Usha Vance Thinking?” while Slate wondered what goes through her mind “when her idiot husband says he loves his wife,” then concluded that progressives ultimately need to accept her fate, even if “we just don’t like it, and we want to give her more chances to escape.” Even MSNBC host Jen Psaki said in 2025 that Usha is afraid of her husband. “I always wonder what’s going on in the mind of his wife. Like, are you okay? Please blink four times. We’ll come over here. We’ll save you.”

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Thousands of parents across the nation have put their children on buses and planes in recent weeks, sending them far from home for the first time ever for that most American coming-of-age experience: camp.

One of those parents is our very own Peter Savodnik, who writes today about getting the “I don’t know anyone” text from the wilderness—how it reminded him of what it felt like to be 10 years old, tucked in the top bunk surrounded by kids he’d never met.

A version of that now-familiar feeling has returned throughout his career, his travels, his life—and, he writes, though it’s always uncomfortable, camp prepared him for it. —The Editors

Last week I deposited my 11-year-old daughter, Josephine, at Boston’s Logan International Airport, and she flew to Minneapolis alone, then boarded a bus and was driven five hours north to the sleepaway camp where she will be for the next month.

Before she left, Josie was excited to go: Her oldest cousin is a counselor at the camp, and she had heard stories about canoe trips and polar-bear plunges and late-night campfires, and she was eager to get away from her little brother, always bouncing on her bed, and her parents, always telling her to clean up her room or clear the dinner table or practice her violin.

After I watched Josie board her plane I shuffled off, feeling empty and kind of rudderless. Then I grabbed a coffee, picked up a rental car, and drove up to Portland, Maine, to report on the Senate race there. I reassured myself that, however much I missed her, she wouldn’t miss us. She would be distracted, having fun.

That evening, after having spent the better part of the day interviewing people demonstrating against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who had fatally shot a Colombian man in Biddeford, I was about to grab a pizza and a beer when I felt my phone buzz. It was Josie calling on the flip phone we had given her for her birthday. By this point, I figured, she should be nearing camp after a long day.

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That world is gone today. The institutions that sustained it have lost public trust, not entirely without warrant. Not only are official voices not trusted, but being in a position of authority today often makes the skeptical trust you even less.

People today feel left to their own devices in picking the voices they should listen to. Influencers and outsider voices are now often the authorities of choice, whether that be on personal health, relationships, or media. Even when those people are part of a major legacy institution, it’s as individuals that people trust them.

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At 17, Holden’s age as the novel begins, he was better read than I. He is already reading Isak Dinesen, enjoys Ring Lardner, and admires the novels of Thomas Hardy. My own chief reading during my teenage years was of novels about working-class young men attempting to get a hold on life: Irving Shulman’s The Amboy Dukes; Harold Robbins’s A Stone for Danny Fisher; Willard Motley’s Knock on Any Door. The motto of the hero of Knock on Any Door is “Live fast, die young, and have a good-looking corpse.” On page 129 of The Amboy Dukes (if, after all these years, I remember that page correctly), female breasts are described as “jugs,” a small porno touch for the day. In Catcher in the Rye, Holden calls them “knockers.”

Not that Catcher in the Rye is in any way pornographic, though its language is risqué; lots of “pain in the ass,” “goddamn,” and the occasional “fuck you.” The word moron comes up a lot. Holden also uses the word flit—a new one for me—for homosexual. But the one word without which the novel would cease to exist is phony, which appears at least 300, perhaps 400, times throughout.

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Nolan doesn’t do that. He takes plenty of departures from the source material, but he stays pretty true to its overarching structure and spirit. To his great credit, his blockbuster film adaptation—released in theaters worldwide on Friday—largely lets Homer be Homer.

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To American ears, of course, this has always sounded ridiculous. Raised on a steady diet of freedom, in a country that was born a democracy, the American public has long viewed the Windsor stiff upper lip not as dignity but as repression. Which is why the United States so enthusiastically latched on to the man who defied his family—by doing a lot of complaining and a lot of explaining.

For six years, the American public has gobbled up the transatlantic fairy tale of Henry Charles Albert David Windsor, a.k.a. the Duke of Sussex, a.k.a. Prince Harry. He was the ultimate victim, the enlightened noble hounded by a predatory British press, fleeing across an ocean to find sanctuary in California. But following last week’s conclusion of Harry’s botched court case against the publisher of the Daily Mail, that fairy tale has finally run out of road. In fact, it might go down in history as a cautionary tale about why the royal maxim is essential, the fable of the prince who complained too much.

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In October 1997, my father, Kim Wyman, then 59 years old, made a pilgrimage to Prague, the city of his birth. He had spent his childhood there, under Nazi occupation, before emigrating to Australia in 1951 with his mother when he was 13. He hadn’t been back since.

The primary purpose of Kim’s trip was to find the gravestone of a father he had never known. His mother, Truda, had divorced Milan Janota when Kim was 2 years old. In 1948, the Communist Party took over Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet-controlled government had refused to let Milan emigrate. He’d had no contact with his son. When Kim traveled to Prague, he had little knowledge of his father’s life, beyond his name and the fact that he had died.

For a month, Kim scoured cemeteries in both the Czech Republic and Slovakia—the “Velvet Divorce” had taken place in 1993—but with no success. At one cemetery in Slovakia, he left his business card with the caretaker, a Mr. Labuda, printing his father’s name on the back. Then he returned home to Australia, certain he had failed in his quest.

A year and a half later, back in Slovakia, Labuda ran into a former classmate named Zorka Václavová. In the course of their conversation, Milan somehow came up. Astonished to hear his name, Václavová told Labuda that she was Milan’s niece. Equally astonishing, Labuda still had my father’s business card, which he handed over to her.

After this incredible twist of fate, Václavová reached out to Kim. My parents flew back to Slovakia, where they met her in the small town of Čadca, about 250 miles east of Prague. It was here, she told them, that Milan was buried.

This was not the only revelation. During the visit, Václavová handed Kim a small bundle of worn document cases, tied with string like an old parcel. Milan had left them with her in 1956, the year before his death, and she had held onto them for 43 years—waiting, she said, for his son to come to Slovakia to claim them.

“Your father hoped we would meet one day,” she told him.

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As indeed we do. To be sure, the frenzy over Nolan’s new movie—which began at the end of 2023 when he announced the project, and has been mounting steadily ever since, as each tantalizing trailer has been released—owes something to the director’s own popularity. (His Dark Knight Batman trilogy alone has earned nearly two and a half billion dollars worldwide.) But Nolan’s film is, in fact, the second Odyssey movie to appear in the space of just a few years (The Return, with Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, came out just weeks after Nolan announced his version). And those are just two of nearly 30 new adaptations and translations of the epic, including my own, that have appeared since 2000 alone.

That, together with the centuries-long list of literary adaptations, from James Joyce’s Ulysses to Derek Walcott’s Afro-Caribbean riff Omeros to Margaret Atwood’s feminist Penelopiad, reminds you that, perhaps more than any other work of antiquity, the story of Odysseus has never stopped speaking to us.

Why?

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Not that I was judging. I was there because I know that my phone makes me jealous, depressed, overstimulated, and anxious—and yet I keep using it, virtually every waking moment of my life. And I am not alone. Forty-six percent of Americans say they’re addicted to their phones, according to a study published earlier this year. We’ve known for years that the devices can increase our anxiety, and that social media makes people unhappy. More recently, we’ve been bombarded with stories about how artificial intelligence—an industry global capitalism is betting everything on—is causing “existential anxiety” and “chatbot psychosis,” and could potentially cause massive job displacement.

All of this is to say that the Luddites I met aren’t radical in their belief that too much technology is bad for you. They’re just radical in their optimism that something can and should be done about it. But, as I’d soon learn, nobody seemed exactly sure what exactly that something should be.

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“SELL OUT,” one commenter wrote on Clavicular’s Kick livestream chat.

Within minutes, dozens of other messages appeared disparaging his trip to Israel: “fuck israel,” “KISS THE WALL GOY,” and “Shabbat shalom nigga.” His “manosphere” peers, including Adin Ross, Myron Gaines, and Sneako—many of whom have made names for themselves with anti-Israel and antisemitic content—questioned Clavicular’s integrity and whether he’d been captured by shadowy figures in Israel in the lead-up to his trip.

“Clavicular bruh, what happened to you?” Sneako asked during his Wednesday livestream, after an AI-generated photo of Clavicular kissing the Western Wall surfaced on X. “Free Clav.”

Their surprise seems warranted given that fewer than six months ago Clavicular, the 20-year-old looksmaxxing figurehead, made international headlines for partying to “Heil Hitler”—a widely banned Kanye West song that samples audio of an Adolf Hitler speech—alongside pals like far-right streamer Nick Fuentes. Looksmaxxing, a male-dominated subculture obsessed with improving one’s physical appearance by any means necessary, has traditionally been covered as a right-wing phenomenon that originated on incel message boards. But Clavicular told me that he’s “not a political guy.”

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Steve-O might seem like an odd crush for a tween girl, or for anyone. The hyperactive problem child of a high-up executive at PepsiCo, Steve-O graduated from Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College before he turned to gross-out stunts and made a career of getting hit in the nuts in various creative ways. But to me, he was reckless and dangerous. He looked like Alfred E. Neuman if he spent time in a state penitentiary, but in a good way. You could tell that the party was wherever Steve-O happened to be, and that he would do anything for a laugh—or a gasp. And together with the rest of the cast of Jackass, Steve-O made one of the best TV shows and movie series of the early aughts.

So I knew I would see the most recent Jackass installment, which debuted in theaters on June 26, and probably love it. Best and Last, the allegedly final installment of the franchise, brings together the old Jackass crew, with some newer, younger additions, performing stunts, pranks, and dares that range in complexity and vulgarity. These are interspersed with iconic old videos as well as unseen clips from previous years and new material.

The first scene in this last movie is a clip of the first ever Jackass stunt—the Big Bang of the Jackass universe—performed in 1998 by Johnny Knoxville, who would become the group’s ringleader, on assignment for the skateboarding magazine Big Brother. The premise is that he offered to review self-defense equipment by testing it on himself. In the video, he and friends drive into the California desert so he can shoot himself with a .38-caliber revolver while wearing a bulletproof vest stuffed with, for whatever reason, a bunch of copies of Hustler magazine.

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For years, it was the perfect metaphor for American soccer: well-meaning, polite, subdued and, above all, a pale imitation of football culture in the rest of the world. In England, where I’m from, American soccer fans have been the butt of the joke for years. In the U.S., soccer fanatics are a rounding error in opinion polls, an aberration in a sports landscape dominated by the NFL, NBA, and MLB. Sports pundit Jim Rome declared that he’d rather give his son “ice skates and a shimmering sequined blouse” than let him play soccer. This was not a minority opinion.

But the times, they are a-changing. This summer, America has become a soccer country. It began a few weeks ago, when states across the country began welcoming teams from across the globe. In a peculiar turn of events, the Algerian national team ended up in a small Kansas town, 40 miles outside of Kansas City. And what did the good people of Lawrence, Kansas, do? They commissioned artwork to support the team; they learned the national anthem; they swarmed in the thousands to cheer the players on at training camp, learning everything they could about a small country 5,000 miles away. The energy felt different—and it’s only gotten better. For weeks, brands and politicians and Americans of all stripes have followed along as the German fan “Freddy” travels through the country, falling in love with Buc-ee’s and Bass Pro Shops and the vast beauty of the American interior. Meanwhile, U.S. jerseys are sold out everywhere, and bars are packed to the brim. It feels like the USA has dipped its toe in the soccer culture that all of us abroad already know and love.

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The newlyweds are a famous example of an exploding trend. Whereas in 2010 only about 3 percent of Americans said they had a prenup, by 2023, 47 percent of millennials and 41 percent of Gen Zers who were engaged or married had these agreements in place. In a similar trend, married couples are increasingly likely to keep separate bank accounts—up from about a sixth to almost a quarter since 1996, according to the Census Bureau.

This boggles the average Boomer or Gen Xer mind. Negotiating your divorce before your wedding and making sure your spouse can’t touch your savings seems to many like a terrible strategy to build trust and intimacy. But hey, maybe the young folks are onto something. Come to think of it, when my wife, Ester, and I combined our households in the late 1980s, we had a resource asymmetry very similar to Swift and Kelce’s: I had two cardboard boxes of belongings and 50 bucks in my checking account; she had at least five boxes of stuff and a cool $250. She’s just lucky I wasn’t marrying her for her money.

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We took it seriously. When the morning bell rang, we’d climb the wide stone steps that led from the playgrounds to the school buildings, hang up our jackets and store our lunch boxes in the cloakroom (why cloak? Had that, too, been explained in first grade?), and then hustle over to our desks for duty. Each week there was a different Pledge of Allegiance monitor, and that person walked importantly to the front of the room and stand beneath the flag. The monitor’s hand was placed (more or less) over the monitor’s heart, a signal for all of us to look alive. A single clap rang out as 22 small hands clapped (more or less) over 22 hearts. The monitor started and we all joined in.

We looked at the flag and said the Pledge, and it was similar to saying prayers you’ve learned by heart. Any single day might not have an effect, but day after day, the words soaked into me. They taught me that I was an American; that America was a good place; and that the flag—our flag—was to be respected.

This wasn’t taking place in some deep red state; this was Berkeley, California, in 1968. All around us, in the city and the country, adults were losing their minds, but up there at Cragmont School, the children were holding it down.

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As the genial repairman at my apartment complex in suburban Birmingham, Alabama, was fiddling with the wonky dial on my washing machine, I couldn’t help complaining.

“I just got back from Publix,” I whined. “Came out of there with three little bags. Not even any meat! Cost me $114. Can you believe that?”

He stood and smiled. “Welcome home.”

After four years living in Europe—in Hungary, the cheaper side of the continent—the cost of living in America has been the most shocking thing. Everybody talks about it, and I mean everybody. The Iran war? Mass migration? No, man, it’s all about the grinding cost of daily life.

As I was packing my bags in Budapest, I imagined that after landing in America, I would lease a European sedan, as befits my middle-aged writerly dignity. Ha! After two days of hearing my buddies gripe about spending over a hundred bucks every time they fill up their Tahoes or F-150s, I bought a Honda Civic hybrid. It gets 46 miles per gallon—a generous compensation for my aesthetic loss, I tell you what.

The second thing I did: motored over to Costco and got a membership. Since the World Cup games started, my X feed has been filled with European tourists marveling at everyday life in the consumer’s paradise we call home. Taste this barbecue—mein Gott! Can you believe this Walmart?! And so forth.

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