The red carpet, if you can believe it, was once a fashion dead zone, a sequin-strewn wasteland where good taste went to die. For years, many stars served as their own stylist or whipped up their own clothes, with predictably patchy results. In 1989, when Demi Moore showed up to the Academy Awards in a spandex-bike-shorts-and-corset ensemble of her own design, Women’s Wear Daily called it an “Oscar Fright.

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The best line of Donald Trump’s three-hour-plus Cabinet meeting last week came not from the president but from Marco Rubio.

Every day, some 2 billion people around the world use privacy-protection tools supported by the Open Technology Fund. When people in China escape their government’s firewalls and censorship software—now so dense that the system has been called the “locknet”—or when users in Cuba or Myanmar evade cruder internet blocks, they can access material written in their own languages and read stories they would otherwise never see. Both the access and some of the information are available because the U.S.

Elon Musk still makes some of America’s best electric cars. Earlier this summer, I rented a brand-new, updated Tesla Model Y, the first refresh to the electric SUV since it debuted, in 2020. Compared with even just two years ago, when the Model Y became the world’s best-selling car, many companies make great EVs now. Some of them have the Model Y beat in certain areas, but for the price, the Tesla is still the total package.

Two and a half years ago, Ashish Jha was the White House’s COVID-19 response coordinator, a job that meant getting as much of the country as possible on board with the federal government’s approach to public health. For much of this summer, he’s been doing the opposite of that.
As Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Donald Trump is a showman who likes flashy spectacles and heated controversies. He has chosen Cabinet nominees for their shock value, attacked famous American universities, mobilized the Justice Department against his political enemies, and sent troops into American cities, fully aware of how much these theatrics would enrage his opponents.
But even in a term marked by political performance art, Trump’s plan to rename the Department of Defense as the Department of War might be a new high—or low.