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Donald Trump traveled to Alaska yesterday to meet with Vladimir Putin. In the brief remarks that followed the summit, Trump acknowledged that he and the Russian president had not reached a deal to end the war in Ukraine.

When news broke this week that Sherrod Brown would run next year to reclaim a Senate seat in Ohio, Democrats cheered the reports as a huge coup. Before losing a reelection bid last year, Brown had been the last Democrat to win statewide office in a state that has veered sharply to the right over the past decade. His entry instantly transforms the Ohio race from a distant dream to a plausible pickup opportunity for the party.

On the subway a few weeks back, I noticed an ad for a “buy now, pay later” service from Cash App. It read: “Little payments are so much cuter.” This ad wasn’t made for men, I thought.
“Buy now, pay later” is promoted as interest-free borrowing, which many people, frightened by the idea of going into debt, see as safer. But miss a payment, and the late fees kick in—$8 here, $6 there. Miss payments on a few different orders, and the fees add up fast.

So what was that all for?
President Donald Trump emerged today from his summit with Russia’s Vladimir Putin without a deal and without much to say. Trump rarely misses a chance to take advantage of a global stage. But when he stood next to Putin at the conclusion of their three-hour meeting, Trump offered few details about what the men had discussed. Stunningly, for a president who loves a press conference, he took no questions from the reporters assembled at a military base in Alaska.

“You know the LIBS are seething over this,” Joe Kinsey, an editor at the sports website OutKick, wrote on X while reposting a video of sorority girls doing a choreographed dance. Many of the girls were wearing red-white-and-blue outfits, though some were dressed as hot dogs. They waved American flags in front of a banner that read We Want You Kappa Delta. “Credit to these ladies for pumping out patriotism to kick off the 2025 school year,” Kinsley wrote.

This article contains spoilers for the movie Weapons.
The most daring aspect of Weapons is that it answers all of its big questions. The sleeper-hit horror film, written and directed by Zach Cregger, has a distressing but undeniably hooky premise: One night, at 2:17 a.m., all but one student in the same third-grade class got up out of their beds and ran out of their suburban homes with their arms outstretched, vanishing into the night.

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
The most recent issue of The Atlantic taught me that the Scottish author Muriel Spark had, according to Judith Shulevitz, “a steely command of omniscience,” and frequently played with “selective disclosure, irony, and other narrative devices.” I knew that Spark was funny, and that her work was highly recommended by people whose taste I respect.

During Donald Trump’s first term, his top advisers attempted to run a traditional process for shaping foreign policy, tapping experts from the White House’s National Security Council, debating recommendations from across the government, and steering the president away from decisions that they feared would damage America’s interests. But Trump was deeply mistrustful of the NSC, which he saw as too big, too cumbersome, and too attached to Republican orthodoxy.