Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth’s Warped Vision of the Iran War
The two men might wish that they lived in a world where whoever dropped the most bombs got whatever he wanted. But the war has shown that this isn’t true. By Benjamin Wallace-Wells
Why Are People Injecting Themselves with Peptides?
Health and wellness influencers are hawking unapproved treatments on the gray market. The future of the F.D.A.—and the health of consumers—is at stake. By Dhruv Khullar
Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted?
New interviews and closely guarded documents shed light on the persistent doubts about the head of OpenAI.
Nasa’s moon mission has captured a view immortalised by Apollo astronauts in 1968, but its quest to beat China to the lunar surface is now under threat from Trump By Giles Whittell
White House chaos intensifies after Iran downs two US warplanes
Desperate search for missing US pilot caps a week of confusion for the president as he loses his grip on the conflict
‘Forty-eight hours before all hell will rain down’: Trump warns Iran over Hormuz
As the US president ups the ante, allies discuss using minesweepers to clear the strait and Tehran imposes new transit fees on shipping
Has Trump’s unpredictability broken the oil market?
How could rising gas prices affect the EV market?
Just because gas is up doesn’t mean EVs will take over
Trump’s White House Makeover Halted: A federal judge ordered a work stoppage on a $400 million ballroom project intended to replace the demolished East Wing, ruling the project lacked Congressional approval. The Reinvention of War: The editor’s letter and lead features examine how cheap, deadly drones in Ukraine and Iran have transformed combat, turning sophisticated hardware into “knights in shining armor” vulnerable to modern technology. Supreme Court Blocks Conversion Therapy Ban: The Court overturned a Colorado law prohibiting conversion therapy for minors, focusing on freedom of speech for mental health professionals. Social Media Liability Inflection Point: Coverage of landmark jury awards in Los Angeles and New Mexico against Meta and Google for failing to protect children from psychological harm and online predators. The Cicada Covid Variant: A new variant of Covid-19, dubbed “Cicada,” is reported to be spreading across the United States. The German Deepfake Scandal: An investigative look into a scandal in Germany that has brought the issue of “virtual rape” and deepfake technology into the international spotlight. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
Without exploitation, “Love on the Spectrum” captures the triumphs and travails of dating. It has become one of Netflix’s most popular shows. By Anna Peele
In a landmark case, a California jury last week found social media companies Meta and YouTube liable for deliberately designing addictive products. The ruling came the day after Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, was ordered to pay $375m after a jury in a separate trial in New Mexico found it misled consumers about the safety of its platforms.
Meta, YouTube, Snapchat and TikTok are facing thousands of similar lawsuits in US courts, while governments around the world are starting to introduce measures to curb social media’s grip on children’s attention.
Guardian technology editors Dan Milmo and Robert Booth assess whether what has been called a “big tobacco” moment for the industry will lead to significant change. And in our opinion section, Jonathan Freedland argues that the court verdicts must be just the start of a global fightback.
The big story | A war of regression Weeks into a war that was going to take days and has cost billions, Donald Trump has bombed the US into a worse position with Iran, writes Patrick Wintour
Science | ‘On the shoulders of giants’ Plant specimens and teaching materials that inspired Charles Darwin have been unearthed and will be used for the first time to teach contemporary students about botany, Donna Ferguson reports
Feature | Circuit training After touring 11 Chinese companies making humanoid robots, Chang Che asks: just how close are we to a robotic future?
Opinion | Labour needs a thinker Ed Miliband’s stock is rising in a party in need of an old-style intellectual heavyweight, argues Gaby Hinsliff
Culture | Gimme shelter Catherine Slessor visits Henry Moore’s former countryside home Hoglands, now home to studios and a vast sculpture garden, to learn about a new exhibition of the drawings he made as a war artist, capturing people as they took sanctuary from the blitz
The subject of this excellent biography wished to be remembered as Jan ‘Empire’ Morris, author of the great imperial trilogy Pax Britannica, but she correctly predicted that the valedictory headlines would read ‘Sex Change Author Dies’. As James Morris, he had won early fame as the Times reporter who broke the news of the conquest of Everest on Coronation Day, 1953. And Morris’s real distinction, as Sara Wheeler affirms, was as a travel writer. It was a term she loathed. (Wheeler follows Morris’s own lead in using male pronouns for the author’s early life and female ones after 1970, when transition was nearing completion.) But as a young man James had immersed…
Stalin’s Apostles: The Cambridge Five and the Making of the Soviet Empire By Antonia Senior
It may be thought that the notorious Cambridge spies – the majority of them members of the Apostles, that university’s secretive, elitist society – had been written out. But, as Stalin’s Apostles makes clear, such is not the case. Most of the books on what the KGB later called their ‘Magnificent Five’ – Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross – have dwelt …
We Know You Can Pay a Million: Inside the Dark Economy of Hacking and Ransomware By Anja Shortland
Not so long ago, stories about powerful computer viruses apparently spreading around the world and threatening to bring modern life to a halt regularly filled the news. These days, cybercrime rarely makes the headlines, and most of us have become inured to warnings that our passwords have been found in a data leak. Yet ..
How Milan is refashioning itself as a contemporary art hub
The city has long been synonymous with finance, fashion and design, but it is increasingly banking on art too
The dangers of playing the ‘beautiful’ game
The idea of the beautiful and the damned is a longstanding one, but a problematic one – in art as well as life
Restoring Dresden’s crowning glory
The city has been rebuilding the Residenzschloss, home of its one-time ruler Augustus the Strong, since the Second World War – and the results are worth the wait
Simply red: a short history of Shiraz
The Shiraz grape is native to France, but it has longstanding links with Persian courtly life and culture
The present mess has roots in two entangled, defining White House projects: DOGE and the mind-bending expansion of ICE. By Benjamin Wallace-Wells
Trump’s War Hits the Chaiwalas
Restrictions and attacks in the Strait of Hormuz have made fuel prices rocket. Just ask the roadside tea venders in New Delhi. By Nathan Heller
He Helped Stop Iran from Getting the Bomb
A former C.I.A. officer says that he recruited scientists as part of the United States’ effort to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program. By David D. Kirkpatrick
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE: The 3.29.26 Issue features Blair Braverman on leaving her life of dog sled racing; Maggie Shipstead on bringing her mother’s ashes to Antarctica; Kevin Fedarko on the Grand Canyon’s North Rim; Taffy Brodesser-Akner on teaching her son to take a vacation; and more.
It’s blunt instead of vague, brash instead of evasive, bold instead of cautious. And yet the word obfuscates as much as old defense jargon. By Nitsuh Abebe
Forty-three current and former C.D.C. employees on the changes they say are replacing science with ideology — and making Americans more vulnerable. By Jeneen Interlandi
The Epstein Scandal Has Reached the Far-Right Meme Stage
Once the Epstein files transitioned from an abstract concept to a real-world event, it became more difficult for fringe conspiracy theorists to control the story.
News, Views and Reviews For The Intellectually Curious
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