THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE: The latest issue features “EMPIRE OF GRIFT” – Anne Applebaum examines how hardened ideologues and opportunistic profiteers are bending American diplomacy to advance an antidemocratic agenda—and their own financial interests. For our cover, the illustrator Ben Hickey created an ominous image of figures in shadow arrayed around a map of the world, evoking the war-room scenes from Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
John Goodall finds a moving monument to Katherine Parr, the last wife of Henry VIII, at Sudeley Castle, Gloucestershire
Are you local?
How many generations does it take for a dynasty to be bona fide rather than blow-in? Mary Skipwith visits five Cotswolds estates in search of the answer
Property market
Renovated Cotswold manor houses with light-filled interiors and contemporary layouts catch the eye of Penny Churchill
Properties of the week
Julie Harding scours all corners of the Cotswolds as she show-cases a selection of the latest honey-hued homes for sale
Paint your garden
Tiffany Daneff is charmed by the colourful, considered palette of an artist’s garden at Ham Court in Gloucestershire
Jeremy Finnis’s favourite painting
The GWCT chairman chooses a purple-tinged landscape that evokes the spirit of the Highlands
A golden fleece
An array of parish churches are an enduring legacy of the wealth generated by Cotswolds sheep farming, reveals John Goodall
The legacy
Julie Harding travels back in time with the poetic prose of Laurie Lee’s classic Cider with Rosie
The artist’s way
The redstart’s striking looks and talent for mimicry make it a favourite for Mark Cocker
Don’t follow the lights
John Lewis-Stempel tries to avoid that sinking feeling as he ponders the precarious future of Britain’s precious peat bogs
Luxury
Justine Picardie celebrates the enduring appeal of the Burberry trench and Amie Elizabeth White rests easy with sleep essentials
Interiors
Amelia Thorpe reveals how to cook up an elegant kitchen look
Countryside mystery
John Wright debunks the myth surrounding the water-retention miracle of manmade dew ponds
Travel
A revived Ottoman masterpiece is the perfect retreat on Teresa Levonian Cole’s Greek odyssey
In a league of their own
Claire Jackson peers into curious British collections dedicated to everything from dog collars to canals and cuddly toys to clocks
Strike a posy
The Victorians were the original experts at saying it with flowers. Ashleigh Arnott reads the signs
It’s a stitch up!
Julie Harding traces the tale of the needle, a darn good creation made with pin-point precision
Arts & antiques
Feats of clay will always catch the eye of Will Gompertz, as he explains to Carla Passino
The play’s the thing
Turgenev and Sir Alan Ayckbourn supply the on-stage standouts for Michael Billington this month
California’s Big Sur coastline is often called a slice of heaven. But this year – beset by wildfires, road closures and disruptions to tourist amenities – it has endured a long summer of hell. Now questions are being asked about how many visitors it can sustain in the face of the climate crisis.
For our big story this week, Andrew Gumbel visits Big Sur, where the tourist industry accounts for about 90% of the local economy, to hear why the community fears its ethos is under threat.
The UN has warned that the El Niño climate phenomenon is “supersizing before our eyes”. Environment editor Damien Carrington reports on the latest forecasts, which predict the event is near certain to shatter temperature records.
Then, the mayors of Paris, Milan and Phoenix write about how their cities are learning from each other on responding to the heat crisis. “How do you protect millions of people,” they ask, “when extreme heat is no longer an exceptional event, but an increasingly familiar part of summer?”
Spotlight | ‘It breaks my heart’ Kate Connolly reports from Magdeburg, the capital of Saxony-Anhalt, where voters are digesting the far-right Alternative für Deutschland’s state election triumph
Science | Forbidden planet Since it was stripped of planetary status, Pluto’s defenders have been fighting the decision – and they’re only getting more passionate, writes Tim Dowling
Feature | Your lying AIs LLMs have an alarming tendency to deceive and manipulate their users. As they become ever more embedded in society, the race is on to find out why – and stop them doing it. Snigdha Poonam explains
Opinion | The route to a brighter future The world is being driven to the brink by thugs and dictators, says Simon Tisdall, but ordinary people have more power than we think
Culture | A stitch up As the Bayeux tapestry goes on show in London, cartoonist Edith Pritchett offers an alternative 21st century take, capturing today’s battles, while art critic Jonathan Jones reviews the British Museum’s blockbuster exhibition of the original masterpiece
As AI erodes our attention spans and expressiveness, philosophers like Simone Weil and Arthur Schopenhauer offer profound insights on what it means to be an individual.
In The Diversity of Morals, Steven Lukes attempts to reconcile philosophical arguments that there is one morality despite cultural differences with empirical studies that suggest it’s all relative.
The ancient capital has plenty of artwork and fossils, if that’s what you like. Or tour the writing rooms of a Nobel winner, the fortified home of an exiled Russian revolutionary and towers of skulls
Before they become sandy souvenirs, the baubles in the bubbles of the shoreline serve as a veritable fortress for creatures like clams, mussels and conchs
Over the last week, the world has watched with horror the scenes from the Tibet-Nepal border where a devastating torrent of mud, water and ice tore along the Bhotekoshi River, destroying entire communities and leaving more than 1,000 people dead and several thousand more missing.
From the Nepali town of Devighat, our south Asia correspondent Hannah Ellis-Petersen describes a nightmarish scene of overflowing mortuaries and unidentifiable bodies, as shellshocked survivors of the flood slowly return to the ruins of their homes.
The disaster happened after the collapse of a glacier – and while global heating has not been definitively attributed as the cause, it is undeniable that steep mountain slopes and valleys are especially vulnerable to flooding and landslides, while extreme weather events such as monsoons and melting glaciers have become more common because of warming due to human-caused climate breakdown, as our global environment writer Jonathan Watts explains.
Then columnist Nesrine Malik paints a wider picture and argues that while for many people these floods may feel as though they have happened a world away, the climate crisis is coming for us all, one way or another.
Spotlight | Mark Carney shows combative nature in face-off with Trump The Canadian PM is one of the few world leaders to stand up to the US president. Former colleagues say they are not surprised. Leyland Cecco, Heather StewartandKalyeena Makortoff report
Science | The robots are coming! …Or are they? As entrants at the World Humanoid Games lurched from triumph to farce, Robert Booth finds that a robotics revolution may not be as close as it first appears
Interview | Gordon Brown on Burnham, billionaires – and a better Britain The former UK prime minister is still shaping politics (even if he doesn’t want to interfere). He tells Charlotte Edwardes about keeping his temper, staying fit – and why he won’t splash out for a Scotland football shirt
Opinion | The tech titans must be stripped of their power, and soon Those who said Meta harms children struck a blow, but the ability of big tech to gouge profits and cause harm is barely diminished. That’s the battle to come, argues Jonathan Freedland
Culture | Dolly Parton’s peerless career turned country music cliches inside out Beneath the wig and rhinestones, the late US country singer was the genius behind strings of classic songs that continue to inspire new artists, says Alexis Petridis
News, Views and Reviews For The Intellectually Curious
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