Protest criminality, not charity, says the former head of Lincoln Center

By Reynold Levy

The Whitney, M.I.T., the Museum of Natural History, Sloan Kettering, the Guggenheim, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Shed at Hudson Yards—these are just a few of the places under fire for their financial ties to individuals now deemed problematic. READ ON

In Asia’s posh postpartum hotels, new mothers are pampered while newborns are sequestered in the nursery

By Hannah Seligson

While it’s strange to think of women such as Ivanka Trump, Lara Trump, and Meghan Markle slumming it after giving birth, one only needs to look at the postpartum practices across Asian countries to start to feel just a wee bit sorry for the uncoddled American mothers who are expected to return to fighting form almost immediately. According to Instagram, the public (and often judgmental) diary of modern motherhood, Lara Trump was back on a horse less than a month after giving birth to her daughter. (She even appeared downright ecstatic about this development.) In 2016, a little more READ ON

The president of the U.K.’s Supreme Court tells the prime minister what’s what, and creates a legion of fans

By Deborah Ross

Welcome, everybody, to the first newsletter from the Lady Hale Fan Club, established just now after the landmark case, Lady Hale v Those Populists Who Say It’s All Just a Plot to Stop Brexit (When It’s Actually the Establishment Looking to Subvert Democracy), which ruled unanimously in her favour.

Lady Hale has endorsed the fan club and will keep us informed of all her activities — what brooch she’ll be wearing when — and will also share her favourite recipes for calling out liars and anyone who attempts to hustle through a strategy without properly consulting parliament. Such recipes, READ ON

Western feminists make the misogyny in Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments all about them

By Allison Pearson

Imagine a country where women have no jobs, no rights and are valued only for reproductive success. Imagine a country where girls aren’t taught to read in case they get ideas. Imagine those women and those girls having to cover themselves head to toe in restrictive red dresses and white bonnets in case men get ideas. Imagine public stonings and hangings of deviants to terrorise the populace into a state of paranoid purity. Welcome to the Republic of Gilead.

It is almost 35 years since Margaret Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale. The book envisaged the United States READ ON

On posh Brits and their unending love for the Colombian marching powder

By Anthony Sniffington

In the run-up to the recent prime-ministerial election, there was a brief but highly entertaining respite from the endless dirge of British politics. With tabloid guns squarely pointing at them, four of the Tory-party candidates—Rory Stewart, Jeremy Hunt, Boris Johnson, and Michael Gove—all fessed up that they had at some point, before taking political orders, done drugs. Stewart confessed to having smoked opium at a wedding in Iran; Hunt “thinks” he drank a cannabis-laced lassi while backpacking in India; and Michael Gove said he had done cocaine on “several occasions,” adding the caveat that it was “when I was working as a journalist.” The press had a field day. READ ON

As Brexit looms, cosmopolitan Brits now have yet another reason to fret. Badoit, the French water that comes from a naturally carbonated spring, has ceased exporting to the U.K. Due to concerns about how drought in France has affected this natural resource, the company has decided to limit its production. The spring that, according to Louis XVI’s physician, “made cheerful the spirit” was first bottled in 1837, and the brand now has a set of dedicated followers who crave its mildly carbonated mineral flavor. A supermarket chain in the U.K. has begun limiting how many bottles of the remaining stock customers may buy, and one shopper told READ ON

By George Kalogerakis

… mustaches, or at least for John Bolton’s, which was given an unceremonious bum’s rush right out of the White House, along with its owner—the newest former national-security adviser—who had the misfortune of being attached to it at the time. But any week that began with the news that the Palins were divorcing wasn’t going to be much fun regardless. (Where were you when you heard?)

Nor was it a very good week for Plácido Domingo or Boris Johnson. The former is being investigated by the opera performers’ union regarding sexual-harassment allegations, while the latter watched his agenda thwarted—by his READ ON

The BBC has produced a film for children ages 9 to 12 telling them there are more than 100 gender identities. According to The Times of London, in one scene a young boy asks his teacher, “What are the different gender identities?” She tells him this is a “really, really exciting question,” at which point the film cuts to a public-health teacher, who informs him, “We know that we have got male and female, but there are over 100, if not more, gender identities.” Britain’s Royal College of General Practitioners recognizes six genders: male, female, gender-neutral, non-binary, gender-fluid, and genderqueer.

What could possibly go wrong? A Russian nuclear plant is on the move: the Akademik Lomonosov, the first floating nuclear reactor, is in the East Siberian Sea, headed toward the Russian outpost of Pevek. After a 3,000-mile voyage, the plant will be installed in an Arctic mining town, where it is expected to provide power for 12 years, according to The Moscow Times. Dubbed a “Chernobyl on ice” by Greenpeace, the plant will be removed from Pevek at the end of its run, so its spent nuclear fuel can be unloaded.

By Alex Oliveira

In China, celebrating the Mid-Autumn Festival—which is a bit like Thanksgiving READ ON

By Ash Carter

Eighty years after the start of World War II, France still struggles with READ ON

In the rush to sabotage American election systems, it seems the Russian government

Thirty years after the Berlin Wall fell, new—and more beneficial—barriers are going up in the city. READ ON

The mystery of teenage confidence in Euphoria

By Cazzie David

There was one thought that came to mind as I watched every episode of Euphoria this summer. (Well, one thought besides Whoa, this looks really beautiful, but is definitely gratuitous and also making me nauseous.) It was: How do these teenagers, albeit fictionalized, have more confidence than I do at 25 years old? The HBO series, adapted from an Israeli show, follows a group of deeply troubled adolescents struggling with sex, drugs, and gender.

What makes Euphoria (an intentionally hyper-realized show) so unreal to me isn’t the neon pink lights in every room, or the whip pans in READ ON

For one corrupt Chinese official, it wasn’t just about the money; he put his family first. READ ON

An impassioned plea to prioritize sexual well-being

By Liz Goldwyn

You’ve got a fridge full of celery juice to cleanse your colon, a beauty cabinet stocked with CBD products to optimize your sleep, and a travel bag packed with Naomi Campbell’s favorite anti-bacterial, cashmere, flight face mask. But have you achieved peak wellness if you haven’t had an orgasm today?

Gurus, celebrities, and fashion magazines promise a happier future with glowing skin through a well-being market that is expected to top $4 trillion by 2020. If we buy into the idea of holistic wellness, we need to normalize sexual health the same way we do physical and mental health.

Masturbation should be touted with just as much zeal as READ ON

If you’ve been in France recently, you may have seen military kiosks READ ON

In the past four years, Germany has cut its use of plastic bags by 64 percent. That’s not enough for Svenja Schulze, minister of READ ON

A boutique London hotel, 1 Lexham Gardens, has repeatedly refused to erect READ ON

In which Boris Johnson threatens to take back the dead cat that is the U.K. economy

By Andrew O'Hagan

My only real encounter with Boris Johnson, the new British prime minister, was at the Republican National Convention in 2004. I found him standing alone at a party being held in Gotham Hall, where blue martinis were doing the rounds. I went up to him, and we had a perfectly pleasant conversation. James Wood, who overlapped with Johnson at Eton, describes him as being “flamboyantly convictionless,” and that’s his schtick, but he asked me that evening if I could introduce him to fellow guests Grover Norquist and Phyllis Schlafly, at that time among the most virulently right-wing people in America. To Johnson it was all jolly good fun, but I wasn’t sure, and I saw a certain steel in his gray eyes. READ ON

The only thing prospering in Kazungula is the AIDS pandemic

By Tom Freston

With its crocodiles, hippos, and cobras, the Zambezi River in Southern Africa makes for a secure border. Swimming is verboten, and there are few bridges to cross. What you need is a boat. And, if you hop on one headed east toward Mozambique, at a narrow stretch you’ll come across a remote spot called “the Four Corners of Africa.” There are no signs declaring that this is “the World’s Only International Quadripoint,” but that’s what it is. It’s here that Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe all touch each other in a small single spot, the remnant of some long-ago colonial wheeling and dealing. READ ON

By George Kalogerakis

… the Chosen One, who, having announced that he would raise tariffs on Chinese goods and referred to President Xi Jinping as the “enemy,” in short order declared that Xi was in fact “a great leader” and that, anyway, he was having “second thoughts” about those tariffs. Or was he? White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said the president’s remarks had been “greatly misinterpreted.” This seems plausible: “second thoughts” implies there were first thoughts to begin with, and there’s never been much evidence of that.

But the misunderstanding did get the G7 meetings off to a rollicking start, and over several days in Biarritz, READ ON