Like so many stories about Donald Trump, this one begins with a tweet.
More than a decade ago, Trump mused about whether Vladimir Putin would attend a beauty pageant that Trump was sponsoring in Moscow and, if so, whether Putin would “become my new best friend.

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Paul Walczak didn’t have a plausible defense, but he did have a backup plan. As a Florida nursing-home executive, he’d defrauded taxpayers out of almost $11 million, using it to fund a lavish lifestyle.

Boredom can sometimes feel like a bygone luxury in an age of screens and constant distractions—yet even with all the content in the world at our fingertips, tedium manages to creep in. Not only does it sneak up on us in waiting rooms or on airplanes; we also encounter it while scrolling idly at home. In the face of repetitive Instagram posts, cookie-cutter TV episodes, and exhausting group chats, the mind goes blank just as reliably as it might while staring out of a window.

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The month of May marks the first anniversary of my college graduation—or, as I call it, the inevitable and dreaded start of my adulthood.

Alexandre Agrusti / AFP / Getty
This photograph shows the remaining buildings of the village of Blatten, in the Swiss Alps, buried by a landslide, on May 29, 2025. Blatten residents were evacuated last week after several smaller landslides, but one person remains missing. Rising floodwater from the blocked Lonza river is now inundating the few surviving buildings and threatening downstream villages.