If there’s one message that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign to redefine healthy eating has imparted, it’s that Americans need to eat their beef. In January, the health secretary rolled out the new food pyramid—with a marbled rib eye in the pole position. Weeks later, Kennedy modeled good beef-eating behavior, posing for a pic on his 72nd birthday while tucking in to a bone-in steak decked out with candles.

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Donald Trump’s efforts to change the architecture of Washington, D.C. have included projects such as repainting the Reflecting Pool, tearing down the East Wing of the White House, and proposing the construction of a triumphal arch.

On a recent morning partway through France’s historic heat wave, Dhafer Kahri, an air-conditioning technician, let me join him on a house call to an apartment in Paris’s 16th arrondissement, where he was trying to bring a unit back to life. Kahri’s phone rang so often—several times an hour, all day long—that he worked with his AirPods in.

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For something that sounds so simple, leisure can be surprisingly difficult. Give people an hour with nothing scheduled, and many fill it with thoughts of to-dos: the unanswered email, the errand that’s been put off, the project due next week.

This article contains spoilers through the series finale of The Bear.
If an episode of The Bear were a dish being served at the show’s titular restaurant, the recipe would probably go something like this: In a saucepan, combine headache-inducing worry, financial pressure, and familial dysfunction. Stir vigorously until the mixture boils over and causes the staff to scream.

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If there’s one thing Donald Trump wants Americans to understand, it’s that he knows how to build.
At a Pennsylvania petrochemical plant in 2019, he told workers, “I was a good builder. I built good. I love building.” Talking to reporters in the spring: “What I do best in life is build.

Donald Trump cares deeply about the Justice Department, and he appears to care about exactly one thing: an attorney general who will do whatever he says, specifically in the realm of trying to lock up as many of his political enemies as possible.
William Barr, a former attorney general under Trump and an esteemed legal mind within the conservative movement, also cares deeply about the Justice Department, but for different reasons.

If you wanted to make an argument that we are all living in some cruel simulation, a key piece of evidence might be that the news keeps providing us with absurd, occasionally quite alarming metaphors for what it’s like to exist in 2026. To wit: The London School of Economics recently canceled an event on extreme heat because of an extreme-heat warning issued by the United Kingdom’s Met Office.