“In mid-May, at about ten thousand feet above sea level, a rocky mountainside in the Swiss Alps gave way and tumbled onto a field of ice called the Birch Glacier. Half a mile below, in the Lötschen Valley, lay Blatten, a picturesque village of centuries-old wooden houses. The following night, Blatten’s mayor, Matthias Bellwald, heard crashing noises from the mountain. He quickly arranged for a helicopter to fly him and a local official who monitored natural hazards up to the site. Although the mountain, the Kleine Nesthorn, was still covered with snow, they could tell that something deeply unnatural was happening. ‘I saw that, on the mountain, cracks had formed,’ the Mayor told me. ‘At first, it was just one, then several more.’ Since the nineties, the Birch Glacier, which covered an area of about fourteen city blocks, had been behaving strangely. Unlike many Alpine glaciers, which have receded as the planet warms, it had advanced down the slope, probably because of periodic rockfalls that weighed it down. As a result, Swiss authorities kept the section under constant surveillance. On Saturday, May 17th, after sensors detected more instability, the village government ordered the evacuation of what is known as the shadow side of the village, which is closest to the Kleine Nesthorn. Lukas Kalbermatten, the owner of a local hotel, told me that some village residents moved from their homes and into his property. Soon, a crack, which was perhaps several feet wide and a hundred feet deep, was spotted between the Kleine Nesthorn and the mountain range it was a part of—suggesting that the peak itself was unstable. ‘The whole mountain was moving,’ Kalbermatten told me. By Monday morning, experts from the canton of Valais, which encompasses Blatten, estimated that up to three million cubic metres of debris could rush down the mountain, over a nearby dam, and into the village. This time, all of Blatten’s three hundred residents, including Kalbermatten, were required to leave within twenty minutes. Officials counted them individually as they left.” (Daniel Gross/TNY)
“Despite the occasional urge, I’ve chosen not to write about Bari Weiss for ten years now, and I still don’t feel like doing it. Whatever my views of Weiss’s work, I don’t do hit pieces, and I don’t attack other journalists. But the rumored ascendancy of Weiss to be editorial director of CBS News is all that’s on my journalistic mind right now. So I’m going to write about it. Why do I care about this? First, I have many close friends and colleagues who think that Weiss really is who she says she is —an aggrieved centrist-liberal who finds herself ‘politically homeless’ — instead of who she actually is, which is a lifelong conservative whose heavily-subsidized endeavors push a consistently right-wing, anti-liberal line. They trust someone who has consistently betrayed that trust. Second, as I wrote about a year ago, I have seen firsthand how the rage and hyperbole that Weiss promulgates drives people apart and contributes to the Putinesque free-for-all that has come to dominate our culture. Her publication is degrading our public discourse: exaggerating, misleading, and enraging. She really is doing harm. And she is soon, it seems, to have an even larger platform to do so.” (Jay Michaelson/Both And)
“In almost every area of the energy transition, one country dominates: China. Wind power, where the People’s Republic still has less than half the global market, is a rare exception. President Donald Trump is doing his best to change that. The administration last month cancelled an Orsted A/S project off the coast of Rhode Island that’s 80% complete and large enough to power 350,000 homes. It’s also working to stop a project off Maryland, roughly twice the size and due to begin construction next year. A third development offshore from New York was halted for a month earlier this year before a deal was agreed to restart it. On his first day in office, Trump banned all leasing of the US seabed for wind and excluded the technology from the government’s definition of ‘energy.’ The sector has taken this unnatural disaster remarkably well. With the exception of Orsted, whose issues go far deeper than its battles with the Trump administration, shares in all the major players in Europe and the US have risen since his election. Nordex SE and Vestas Wind Systems A/S have gained 64% and 9.8%, respectively, while GE Vernova Inc. and Siemens Energy AG have doubled — buoyed, in the latter two cases, by gas-turbine businesses more favored in Washington. That shouldn’t be too surprising. The engineering firms, utilities and turbine manufacturers that constitute the wind-power industry spread their revenues across numerous markets and have order books stretching years into the future. Trump's crusade against offshore wind in the US — a relatively marginal market, even under President Joe Biden — isn’t sufficient to deal a direct killer blow. It’s the indirect damage that’s more worrying.That’s because he’s striking at a time when Chinese companies, which for many years have struggled to compete outside their home market, are finally on the brink of breaking through. By weakening the US and European wind industry at such a critical time, Trump may guarantee that developed economies lose their early lead in wind power as decisively as they did with solar energy, batteries and electric cars.” (David Fickling/Bloomberg)
“Produced by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), the Global Peace Index (GPI) is the world’s leading measure of global peacefulness. This report presents the most comprehensive data-driven analysis to-date on trends in peace, its economic value, and how to develop peaceful societies. The Global Peace Index covers 99.7% of the world’s population, and is calculated using 23 qualitative and quantitative indicators from highly respected sources … There are currently 59 active state-based conflicts – the most since the end of WWII, with 152,000 conflict-related deaths recorded in 2024 … The number of globally influential countries has nearly tripled since the end of the Cold War, rising from 13 to 34 by 2023. Conflicts are becoming more internationalised, with 78 countries involved in conflicts beyond their borders in 2024 … 97 countries deteriorated in peacefulness, more than any year since the inception of the Global Peace Index in 2008. Conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine were the primary drivers of the global fall in peacefulness, as battle deaths reached 162,000 in 2023 … First of its kind military scoring system suggests that US military capabilities are up to three times higher than China … 110 million people are either refugees or internally displaced due to violent conflict, with 16 countries now hosting more than half a million refugees … Iceland, Ireland, Austria, New Zealand, and Singapore are the top 5 most peaceful countries in the world in 2024.” (Vision of Humanity)
“In his speech to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting this week, Chinese President Xi Jinping stated that ‘we should contribute to safeguarding world peace and stability. . . . We should set an example in championing the common values of humanity.’ Two days later, Xi had played host to a crowd of foreign leaders at a military parade in Beijing, which, according to the Chinese Communist Party(CCP), was to commemorate ‘the 80th anniversary of the victory of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War.’ The reality is that the parade had three more vital objectives for Xi. The first was to reshape narratives about the role of Russia and China in winning World War II, and to downplay to very significant role played by allied fighting forces and industry. The second was to act as a mega–arms bazaar, demonstrating China’s latest advanced weaponry to potential buyers, particularly those who no longer wish to rely on Russian equipment or want cut-price versions of the latest generation U.S. weapons. Finally, and most importantly, the parade sought to project China’s strength and its inevitable and unstoppable rise through a demonstration of large-scale and high-technology military power. The parade, along with the recent three-way handshake between the leaders of China, India, and Russia, was a rebuke with Chinese characteristics to current U.S. economic and security policy objectives in the Indo-Pacific, and potentially heralds a very different political, economic, and security environment for all of us who live and work in this dynamic region of the world.” (Mick Ryan/Futura Doctrina)
“Israel faces a stark choice. It will either need to make a sincere bid for compromise and peaceful coexistence with the Palestinians or risk losing the international support that its long-term well-being requires. Although the two-state solution has become anathema to many Israelis, it remains the best hope for their prosperity and security. That having a state of their own would be good for the Palestinians goes without saying. But it would also be good for Israel; indeed, helping to bring about a Palestinian state has the potential to serve Israel just as much as it would serve others. The Israelis and the Palestinians have come close to reaching a land-for-peace agreement on more than one occasion. But over the course of the past three to four decades, diplomacy has failed, in large part because Palestinian leaders—Yasir Arafat, the former president of the Palestinian Authority, and also his successors—were unwilling or unable (owing to political weakness) to accept what Israel offered in terms of territory, the status of Jerusalem, and the ability of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes. Hamas’s opposition to peace was and is more fundamental, because it would require acceptance of the Jewish state as a permanent part of the region. The costs of this Palestinian rejection of a compromise-based two-state solution have been high. More than five million Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza continue to live under Israel’s control rather their own. And it has become far more difficult to reach a diplomatic outcome comparable to what the Palestinian leadership rejected in the past.This is in large part because the situation on the ground has changed. There are now many more obstacles to peace—in particular the some 140 Israeli government–authorized settlements in the West Bank (and another 200 unauthorized outposts) that are home to more than 500,000 Israelis. Each settlement and outpost makes implementing territory-for-peace and building a viable Palestinian state more difficult; every additional settler creates political resistance to such a trade and raises the economic costs of relocating people. Israeli politics have also changed. Parties on the political left have waned, and those on the right have strengthened.” (Richard Haass/Foreign Affairs)
“The scene opens confusingly. The camera zooms too close to the president’s face; the table at which the tech executives are seated seems far too long. Mark Zuckerberg is there, and Bill Gates and Tim Cook and Satya Nadella and Sam Altman and on and on, a baker’s dozen or so of Silicon Valley’s most powerful people—cutthroat competitors all—united here to pledge allegiance to Donald Trump … Trump loves a banquet, which presumably means he loves a seating chart. Zuckerberg sat directly to Trump’s right, while Gates scored a chair next to Melania Trump on the left. Sergey Brin and his ‘really wonderful MAGA girlfriend’—Trump’s words—Gerelyn Gilbert-Soto sat directly across from the president. (Gilbert-Soto comes by that praise honestly; in addition to being an ardent supporter of Trump online, she has posted on X that ‘This world is a spiritual battlefield built on pagan roots, you can’t escape it,’ specifically calling out Burning Man, Halloween, Christmas, and the US government as evil. This was on Wednesday.) Emily Post fans will have already read into the significance of who sat where. ‘The host or hostess of an official luncheon or dinner seats the guests according to rank,’ according to the etiquette guide. ‘Guests who have no protocol ranking are seated according to the unspoken rank the host assigns to them.’ Pity Nadella, seated in the table’s hinterlands.” (Brian Barrett/WIRED)
“In one of his earliest insane acts in public office, two weeks after his first inauguration, President Trump dispatched his former NYPD bodyguard to ‘raid’ the office of his Upper East Side doctor and seize his medical records. The doctor had made the fatal mistake of revealing he’d prescribed hair growth drugs to the newly installed Leader of the Free World. Poor Dr. Harold Bornstein told reporters he felt ‘raped, frightened and sad’ when Trump goon Keith Schiller and another ‘large man’ came to his office to rifle the files and collect the records. Despite that mobsterish incident, much reliable public reporting exists that Trump has resorted to hair plugs, baldness surgery and diet pills over the years to maintain his signature look. One former producer on The Apprentice, Noel Casler, has even insisted that Trump regularly snorted Adderall to stay focused. But the rest of his self-care regimen is more murky. Did a doctor ever step forward to explain what really happened to his earlobe after the shooting in Butler? Did the public even see those medical records? Why, no! After weeks of speculation about the Presidential cankles, the White House announced that he had been diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency, a fairly common condition that can also lead to amputation and death. All we know for sure is that a steady diet of red meat and a little golf have apparently been sufficient to fuel production of the liters of bile required for hourly acts of vengeance. For the last three days, social media was a-sizzle with macabre speculation about President Trump’s death. Granted it was a slow end-of-summer news weekend and people had a lot of time for wistful musing. He hadn’t looked well recently, his signature word salad was getting way more pronounced and there’s that weird bruise on his paw.” (Nina Burleigh/American Freakshow)
“Worrying about the AI innovations that aren’t happening may seem backward. But since at least last year, some scientists have been warning that the current strategy for making the large language models that power products such as ChatGPT is already yielding diminishing returns. Such pessimism seemed to be validated in early August when OpenAI released GPT-5, the long-awaited update to its main line of LLMs. The new model was expected to be a major advancement, but most people in the field considered it an incremental improvement. On one closely tracked test for AI models, GPT-5 didn’t even beat all the AI models that were already on the market. Some experts viewed this disappointment as an indication that OpenAI was having trouble executing and that it might be losing ground to its main competitors. Others saw a more sweeping challenge. Gary Marcus, a prominent AI scientist and a caustic critic of OpenAI, argued that the company had consistently inflated expectations about the power of LLMs. In his eyes, the company’s stumble proved that it was time for top AI labs to shift gears and experiment with different approaches. ‘It turns out that attention, the key component in LLMs, and the focus of the justly famous Transformer paper, is not in fact ‘all you need,’’ he wrote on his Substack.” (Julia Love/BusinessWeek)
“But maybe the most ominous development of the week doesn’t concern the Trump administration at all. It’s the news that Bari Weiss is apparently about to become the head, or something, of CBS News. This is bad for CBS, sure. But it’s a lot bigger than that: It is the securing for the right wing of another key beachhead in the American media landscape, which, as I’ve warned repeatedly, will within a generation (or sooner) consist of a lot of large, noisy, avowedly right-wing outlets and a small handful of mainstream outlets that are too weak and feckless to defend what remains of our democracy—and will thus be acting as the handmaidens of their own destruction, if they aren’t already. This is certainly an ‘only in America’ story, but I do not mean that in the normal, heroic sense. I mean it in the creepy, corporate, it’s-all-about-profit sense. CBS began life in 1927 as a radio network, expanding into television as that medium grew. It had entertainment and news divisions, and later sports; its news division was considered the best in the United States, and, along with the British Broadcasting Corporation, a model for mainstream media standards in democracies. It wasn’t being ‘liberal’ when Edward R. Murrow helped take down Joe McCarthy. It was acting in defense of democracy against a sinister and dishonest demagogue.” (Michael Tomasky/TNR)
“Thousands of self-described ‘moldies’ can be found seeking help in Facebook groups, gathering on sub-Reddits, or posting under the TikTok hashtag #toxicmoldillness. It seemed every part of their bodies was vulnerable to mold: Their symptoms were anything from brain fog and fatigue to weight gain and joint pain to itchy skin and hormonal imbalances. Some experienced something called ‘mold rage,’ or sudden mood swings into uncontrollable anger: countertop-pounding tantrums, episodes of road rage, even the resurgence of ‘haunting’ repressed memories. Others, like Gaskin, have also claimed that behavioral symptoms mimicking obsessive-compulsive disorder in their children are due to mold exposure, which they say causes inflammation in the body and brain. ‘The way I’ve started describing it to people is, ‘Imagine a leech that is growing on you, inside you,’ says Taylor Gonzales, a 29-year-old former college athlete from Topeka, Kansas, who spent a year battling unexplainable ailments before finding mold behind her bed in 2024. ‘Its entire purpose is to live, right? It’s prioritizing its own well-being, its own proliferation, its own growth.’ Most recently, mold communities have been backed up by celebrity accounts from people like actress Tori Spelling, who has snapped pictures of herself and her children in an Urgent Care from alleged toxic-mold exposure; Real Housewives star Brandi Glanville, who claimed she and her children had ‘black mold poisoning from a toxic house’; and Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, who was allegedly struck down by a mold-induced illness in mid-August. In recent months, their views appear to have finally gone mainstream through the MAHA movement, which is ever eager to identify new toxins. Google searches for ‘black mold’ have skyrocketed to their highest-ever levels in the United States; earlier this year, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. named mold as one of the potential environmental ‘toxins’ responsible for rising autism diagnoses.” (Jessica Lucas/The Cut)
“Twenty years after Ralph Lauren became the first official apparel sponsor and outfitter of the US Open, America’s Grand Slam has become one of the most important fashion moments of the year, with athletes donning labels on the court that are so unexpected, they challenge our idea of what sportswear is and can be. But what’s clear after this year’s US Open: there’s no fashion house off limits for tennis stars. Boosted by a rise in tennis popularity and its convenient scheduling in the weeks leading up to New York Fashion Week, this year’s event has seen a flood of fashion brand involvement across categories and price points. While all four Grand Slams are now seen as key marketing opportunities for the fashion industry, experts say the US Open’s less traditional roots make it particularly appealing to brands. ‘Wimbledon and Roland Garros tend to follow a more heritage-led playbook, whereas the US Open has more freedom and often acts as the platform for more experimental collaborations where brands can innovate tennis style away from its legacy of country club aesthetics,’ said Victoria Buchanan, the co-founder and insight director of sport research and strategy studio Non Sweat. This presents opportunities for both mainstay brands and newcomers. Adidas replaced its typically basic, solid-colour kits with an edgier collection from its Yohji Yamamoto-led sub-brand Y-3, featuring shirts and shorts with Japanese-inspired ink prints designed to look like fossilised amber. The stylist Ronald Burton put his client, Venus Williams, who returned to the US Open for the first time since 2023, in a series of different looks from decidedly unsporty brands like Khaite, Pucci, and 3.1 Phillip Lim. Even Nike, which has faced criticism for its uninspired kits in recent years, still went all out for Naomi Osaka with custom day and night kits — bubble-hemmed dresses in red and purple with matching sparkly zip-up jackets. In 2024, the event set multiple records when it surpassed one million attendees for the first time and engaged 2.3 billion people via social media, a 39 percent increase from the year prior. Underscoring its cultural pull, it also hosted a record 500-plus celebrities and VIPs on its ‘blue carpet’. As consumer interest in the sport has peaked, so has the fashion industry’s.” (Jessica Schiffer/Vogue Business)
“Sorry, Donald, you’re not reading the room. Not the Oval Office you were sitting in Wednesday when you called the Jeffrey Epstein case a ‘hoax,’ but the psychic room the rest of us were occupying, after watching the Capitol Hill press conference with nearly a dozen women Epstein had abused, who called for Congress to flush out all the files still under wraps by the federal government. (Less than 1% of the files have been released, according to Rep. Ro Khanna, a sponsor of the ‘discharge petition’ to make the files public.) After years of being depicted as degraded waifs, discarded runaways, or terrified Jane Does, one after another, they came to the mic to show they were no longer those powerless fourteen-year-old girls caught in a sick degenerate’s big bad world. Energized by each other and by the insuppressable MAGA clamor to free up the files, the women were credible, vivid, tough, and determined. ‘I'm no longer weak. I am no longer powerless, and I'm no longer alone,’ said the dazzling blonde Anouska de Georgiou, who was sucked into Epstein’s web as a teen model … Cut to Trump, not the champion they had expected from his campaign days, but a sulphurous sack of curdled testosterone, blowing off their calls for justice and transparency. It would have been easy—and smart—for him to appease MAGA with some words of empathy for the irreparably harmed women who had the courage to speak out. But, seated against a background of the Oval’s new imperial gilt decor (musician Jack White recently likened it on social media to ‘a gaudy professional wrestler’s dressing room’), Trump belittled the ‘Epstein whatever’ as a tactic ‘to get people to talk about something that’s totally irrelevant to the success we’ve had as a nation since I’ve been president.’” (Tina Brown/Fresh Hell)