A Jeep emplacou 10.464 unidades em setembro e registrou um crescimento de 16% em relação a agosto. Com esse número, a marca superou as 85 mil unidades vendidas em 2026. Com a chegada do novo Avenger ás concessionárias, o modelo acabou impulsionando as vendas da Jeep no mês de setembro, com 1.867 emplacamentos.
O Renegade emplacou 3.669 unidades em setembro, um crescimento de 21% em relação ao mês anterior. Desse volume, 53% são das versões híbridas MHEV. No acumulado do ano, o Renegade já soma mais de 30 mil vendas em 2026.
O Compass, por sua vez, segue como líder entre os SUVs médios do país no acumulado do ano, sendo o único da categoria a superar as 40 mil vendas em 2026. Em setembro, o modelo emplacou 3.867 unidades e já soma 40.302 emplacamentos no acumulado do ano.
O Commander segue crescendo no acumulado do ano e já soma 11.646 emplacamentos em 2026. Em setembro, o modelo emplacou 1.053 unidades e manteve a liderança entre os SUVs de 7 lugares no Brasil.
Ram cresce 22% entre as picapes
No mês de setembro, a Ram, marca pertencente ao Grupo Stellantis, que controla também a Jeep, apresentou crescimento de 22% em relação ao mesmo mês do ano passado. Destaque para a linha Heavy Duty, composta pelos modelos 2500 e 3500. No acumulado do ano, a Ram soma 24.538 picapes vendidas, aumento de 20% em relação ao mesmo período de 2025, quando emplacou 20.454 unidades.
A dupla de picapes a diesel mais potente à venda no Brasil, que leva sob o capô o motor Cummins® 6.7 Turbodiesel High-Output de 436 cv de potência e 1.458 Nm (148,7 kgfm) de torque e a nova transmissão automática de 8 velocidades, ocupa as duas primeiras posições do segmento de picapes grandes.
A 2500 foi a líder em setembro, com 187 unidades comercializadas, enquanto a 3500, a picape mais capaz no Brasil quando o assunto é capacidade de reboque, teve 156 unidades vendidas. Juntas, 2500 e 3500 alcançaram 63,9% de participação de mercado entre as picapes grandes no nono mês deste ano. Ao acrescentar a 1500, a picape a gasolina mais veloz e potente à venda no Brasil, a Ram conquistou impressionantes 78% do mercado de picapes grandes em setembro.
Entre as picapes médias, a Dakota registrou o melhor mês em vendas desde seu lançamento, no primeiro semestre de 2026. Foram 673 unidades, rendendo a quinta posição no segmento de picapes médias.
Já a Rampage segue firme na segunda posição entre as picapes intermediárias, com mais de 1.950 unidades vendidas no mês de setembro. No acumulado do ano, a primeira picape Ram desenvolvida e produzida fora da América do Norte soma 18.605 unidades vendidas, quase mil unidades a mais que o acumulado do ano passado, quando a picape alcançou 17.608 emplacamentos.
I primi notebook con NVIDIA RTX Spark N1X si possono già configurare e ordinare in Italia: per la nuova piattaforma NVIDIA si parte da poco più di 3.000 euro e si arriva a oltre 6.000, con la differenza di prezzo legata quasi esclusivamente alla memoria.... Leggi tutto
A Turkish court on Tuesday handed down prison sentences to two Kurdish journalists on charges of targeting a public official in their outlets reports alleging that a gendarmerie commander tortured civilians during a raid in southeastern Turkey,
C'est partage entre soulagement et dchirement que Sylvie Cathaly, 64ans, a trouv, il y a trois ans, une place dans une maison d'accueil spcialise pour son frre polyhandicap Gilles. Aprs une trentaine d'annes s'occuper de lui, dont sept temps
O Renault Boreal passa a ser o primeiro veículo produzido no Brasil a oferecer o Gemini de série. A inteligência artificial do Google amplia a experiência conectada a bordo, proporcionando interações mais naturais, intuitivas e personalizadas, transformando a cabine em uma verdadeira extensão digital da rotina dos ocupantes.
O SUV médio da Renault já havia elevado a experiência conectada a um novo patamar ao se tornar o primeiro veículo produzido no Brasil com Google Automotive Services (GAS), plataforma que integra Google Maps, Google Play e, agora, o Gemini como assistente virtual. O sistema substitui o Google Assistant e amplia suas capacidades com inteligência artificial generativa.
Agora, o Boreal dá mais um passo à frente com o Gemini. A tecnologia também está disponível como atualização opcional para os veículos Renault equipados com o openR link com Google integrado. Como evolução do Google Assistant, o Gemini amplia as capacidades do assistente virtual da plataforma, preservando todas as funcionalidades já disponíveis aos usuários e adicionando novos recursos baseados em inteligência artificial generativa.
Além de compreender contextos mais complexos e interpretar comandos mais naturais, o sistema passa a permitir o controle de um número ainda maior de funções do veículo por voz.
Além de realizar todas as tarefas já disponíveis com o Google Assistant, o Gemini integrado ao openR link amplia as possibilidades de interação com o veículo. Agora, os usuários podem controlar diretamente um número ainda maior de funções por comandos de voz, incluindo novas funcionalidades como abrir e fechar o teto solar e os vidros.
Com a nova tecnologia, o motorista não precisa mais recorrer a comandos específicos para interagir com o veículo. Em vez de dizer frases exatas, como “Ok Google, ligue o ar-condicionado”, basta utilizar a linguagem natural, por exemplo: “Ok Google, está muito calor aqui dentro”. O sistema compreende a intenção do usuário e pode ajustar automaticamente a climatização.
O comando de ativação por voz continua o mesmo. O Gemini pode ser acionado por meio das expressões “Hey Google” ou “Ok Google”, pelo botão de voz no volante ou pelo ícone do assistente na tela do openR link. Para iniciar uma conversa contínua com o Gemini Live, basta acionar o botão Gemini Live ou dizer: “Hey Google, vamos conversar” ou “Hey Google, vamos conversar ao vivo”.
O openR link com Google integrado é um sistema multimídia que oferece uma experiência conectada fluida, escalável e em constante evolução. O Gemini amplia ainda mais o conjunto de serviços disponíveis na plataforma, mantendo todas as funcionalidades já oferecidas pelo Google Assistant e adicionando novos recursos de inteligência artificial generativa e controle por voz.
Projetado para interagir de maneira mais natural com os ocupantes do veículo, ele é capaz de compreender o contexto das conversas, responder perguntas com maior precisão e lidar com solicitações mais complexas.
A atualização é gratuita, realizada remotamente por meio de tecnologia FOTA (Firmware Over-The-Air), e não altera a duração do pacote de conectividade. Sua implementação baseia-se em: – Conexão à conta Google no openR link utilizando a conectividade nativa do Boreal, sem necessidade de visita à concessionária. – Uma notificação na tela do openR link permite ao cliente decidir se deseja migrar para o Google Gemini. – Disponível para todos os veículos compatíveis, de acordo com os idiomas suportados e a versão do openR link.
O sistema multimídia aprimorado está disponível sem custo adicional para clientes conectados a uma conta Google em um dos idiomas compatíveis. O usuário escolhe se quer ativar o Gemini e também pode retornar ao Google Assistant a qualquer momento.
Como evolução do Google Assistant, o Gemini representa um grande avanço nos assistentes de voz embarcados. Alimentado pela tecnologia de IA do Google, ele é capaz de:
– Compreender o contexto da conversa e as intenções dos usuários. – Executar solicitações mais complexas. – Manter conversas naturais e contínuas. – Alternar idiomas durante a conversa.
Isso significa que os motoristas podem falar de forma natural, sem precisar memorizar comandos específicos. Os usuários também poderão ativar o Gemini Live para uma interação conversacional mais avançada. Esse recurso permite:
– Conversas livres e naturais. – Interromper o assistente a qualquer momento. – Fazer várias solicitações em sequência sem repetir a expressão “Ok Google”. – Alternar idiomas durante a conversa. – Uma experiência simplificada, projetada para segurança e conforto
Ao permitir tarefas mais complexas por comando de voz e reduzir a necessidade de interação por toque, o Gemini ajuda a:
– Minimizar distrações do motorista, mantendo o foco na estrada. – Ampliar e simplificar o acesso às funções do veículo por comandos de voz. – Melhorar o conforto e a praticidade no dia a dia.
Totalmente integrado ao veículo e ao ecossistema Google, o Gemini consegue responder a situações reais e executar várias tarefas em sequência sem necessidade de novas interações. Navegação inteligente com compreensão de contexto:
“Ok Google, leve-me para o centro de São Paulo, mas evite a Rebouças.” → O Gemini analisa o contexto e sugere uma solução adequada.
Controle por voz das funções do veículo:
“Está frio aqui dentro.” → O sistema ajusta automaticamente a climatização, elevando a temperatura da cabine.
Acesso a informações e conteúdos durante a viagem (modo Gemini Live):
“Ok Google. Está muito quente hoje. O que economiza mais combustível: abrir as janelas ou ligar o ar-condicionado?”
“Conte uma história sobre carros e dinossauros para meu filho de 8 anos.” “Crie um quiz sobre a história do Brasil para adultos e adolescentes.” | “Quais foram os resultados dos jogos do Brasileirão de ontem?” → O sistema consegue responder perguntas abertas, além de fornecer informações gerais, notícias e conteúdos de mídia.
O openR link com Google integrado é um sistema multimídia evolutivo que proporciona uma experiência conectada cada vez mais rica e intuitiva em qualquer lugar do mundo. Desde o lançamento, o Gemini oferece suporte a 16 idiomas, entre eles inglês, espanhol e português.
O Gemini contribui para uma experiência conectada consistente para clientes Renault em todos os mercados onde o sistema está disponível.
Os clientes Renault continuarão recebendo melhorias ao longo do tempo por meio de atualizações remotas, sem necessidade de levar o veículo à concessionária. Como plataforma de IA escalável, o Gemini recebe: – Atualizações contínuas e automáticas. – Capacidades e competências linguísticas ampliadas. – Novos recursos ao longo do tempo.
Few Reconstruction figures have faded from public memory as completely as Franklin J. Moses Jr. Moses entered South Carolina history under a cloud of scandal and left it in disgrace. As governor, he accepted bribes, traded favors, and misused public funds. His obscurity, however, conceals a more consequential story. Moses ranked among the most outspoken...
A man walks into a restaurant. He doesn’t have a reservation, but that shouldn’t be a problem; there are ample seats at the bar, visible just over the hostess’s shoulder. “Of course,” she says, smiling. “We can seat you right away.” As she gathers menus, he absorbs the pleasant hum of a busy dining room, breathes in the tantalizing smells from the semi-open kitchen. Then, the hostess stops, Columbo-like, to interrupt with one more question: “And what’s your phone number?”
The man was me. The restaurant was the Kingsway, a newish, Michelin-recommended spot in New Orleans. I’m not going to give you my phone number, but I gave it to the hostess, almost without thinking. And then, I did think about it: a lot. Throughout the meal, and for a long time afterward. There had been no reservation to check, no rewards program, no waiting list. So why the automatic ask?
Let me say quickly that I liked the Kingsway very much. It’s coolly fancy, with a pan-Asian menu evoking the journey of the chef-owner Ashwin Vilkhu’s family from South Asia to the Gulf South. The result brings to mind an earlier era’s scruffy raiding of the global pantry, but this time executed with thought, technique, and precision. As I tucked into a tangle of Singapore-style chili-crab noodles, the term stoner soigné passed through my head.
But that very first interaction with the hostess colored my meal. I brooded. What if I had just wanted to sit at the bar anonymously? Was that not one of life’s great pleasures? (I was working up a head of steam.) Was there no place in this enshittified world where a man could get a break?
It mattered little that I knew the answer. Like pretty much everyone else, I am well aware that my information is strip-mined wherever I go, in more ways than I can count and in many that I will never know. Like everyone else, I spend my days downloading apps to operate things such as toothbrushes, unsubscribing from marketing lists by somehow giving up more personal information, rejecting cookies like I’m on a gluten-free diet.
Nor am I overly romantic about restaurants, which I know have been collecting data for years. The reservation platform OpenTable began making algorithmic recommendations to users as early as 2014; by 2017, TheNew York Times reported that Big Data was “staging an intervention” to save the restaurant industry, which was suffering from stagnating growth and flattening profits.
Much of the data collection has been justified in the name of customer service—a way to track allergies, preferences, birthdays, and so on, thus bringing technological efficiency to a job previously handled by a heavily notated reservation book or the encyclopedic mind of a gifted maître d’. “We try to build a database on everybody and get as much information as possible,” Vilkhu told me when I called him a few weeks after my dinner. His restaurant uses OpenTable, and he knew, for instance, which bartenders had served me, the friend who had joined me, that I had complimented the cocktail list and enjoyed the crawfish dumplings. This information, he assured me, was shared with the Kingsway’s sister restaurant but nobody else: “We just want to be able to curate the experience as best as we possibly can.”
I believed him. But I was nevertheless a little shocked to go to the websites of the big reservation companies and see how they sold the impulse to care for guests to restaurants (which, in case it’s not clear, are their customers). At best, the sales pitches were dispiritingly cold, with talk of CRMs, GRMs, CDPs, and integrated tech stacks. At worst, they spoke of “capturing” guests’ data, “fostering loyalty,” and “upselling 24/7.” The “AI powered hospitality platform” Loyalist promised “a 360° view of every guest across dine-in and event spend,” itself a sentence seemingly powered by AI. The sales decks were like those optical illusions that turn from adorable to sinister when hit with different colored lights, flipping the language of care and hospitality to the language of surveillance and theft.
Most striking was OpenTable’s promotion of a feature, currently in beta, called Global Insights. Until now, as Vilkhu had told me, whatever data a restaurant collected through the reservation platforms remained confined to that restaurant or restaurant group. Global Insights, which is available to OpenTable Pro subscribers, is the first feature to jump that garden wall and allow other restaurants access to the same information—in OpenTable’s words, to “get an idea of how your diners behave at other restaurants across the OpenTable Diner Network.” With an account, any restaurant can identify big spenders, diners who tend to linger at a table, diners who order a lot of drinks, frequent late-cancelers, and chronic “no-showers,” which I initially read as being about personal hygiene.
My outrage at this new invasion of privacy was accompanied by a pang of embarrassment: This is one of those times in history when it’s easy to get old fast, to wake up one morning and find yourself appalled by norms that everybody around you seems to take for granted. (For instance, the notion that one’s phone number remains a piece of intimate information.) Still, the idea of a restaurant I’d never been to using a dossier on me to decide, say, where I should sit, what I was likely to order, even whether I should be given a reservation at all, gave me chills.
Curious to see what insights on me OpenTable might share with that hypothetical restaurant, I sent the company a request for my personal data. To its credit, the company makes this easy with an online form; less than 24 hours later, a zip file arrived. (Resy requires a request by email; a week later, I was told that it was “under review” and have heard nothing since. SevenRooms, another reservation platform, says that it is merely a processor of data and suggested that I contact individual restaurants.)
The OpenTable file was 48 pages, in the monospaced typeface of computer code. Much of it was indecipherable, aside from dozens of instances of my phone number (aha!) and semi-redacted credit-card information. Despite its length, the document contained only a fraction of the reservations I’ve made over the years. The Kingsway wasn’t in there; neither was the first OpenTable reservation I can find in my records, at Zenkichi, a Japanese restaurant in Williamsburg that I visited in 2008. The file had a note that read “GIN,” which I grant was on the money about my inclinations, but it wrongly identified my home market as Austin. If this was truly the sum of OpenTable’s knowledge, I had less to immediately worry about than I’d anticipated.
At the same time, seeing the traces of past meals emerge from the sea of characters was eerie. Many I remembered; plenty I had not thought about since. Next to many of the restaurant names was appended a note: “Permanently Closed.” Lowlife, Church & State, Hunky Dory, La Mangeoire—all no more. Others didn’t have the tag, but I knew they were gone too. Like ghosts, they swam through the mists of the OpenTable servers, rattling chains forged of bad leases, unruly food costs, fickle trends, misbegotten dreams, and a thousand other maladies. I could almost hear them wail, “Doooooon’t judge ussss … We just wanted to stay aliiiiiive …”
Indeed, restaurants are often asked to bear a moral and behavioral burden not generally placed on other small, low-margin, independent businesses. The more the public has learned about how restaurants work, the more they have scrutinized the ways in which they handle all sorts of social issues, such as racial and gender equity, climate change, and, yes, data privacy. These are all great and worthy considerations, but they do illustrate a gulf between how some customers (and many food writers) see restaurants and how many chefs and restaurateurs do: The former might like them to, you know, just solve the problem of ethical consumption under late-stage capitalism, while the latter are preoccupied with how to lower the cost of a lamb chop by 20 cents so they can pay that month’s electric bill. In the bigger picture, both diners and restaurateurs are reckoning with the same systemic forces.
But the question remains. Knowing all of this—not to mention with a plate of crawfish dumplings before me—why was I so rankled that night when asked for my number? Maybe because it’s exhausting, these constant micro-negotiations between dignity and grift. Exhausting, and lonely: Most people know that completely opting out of data collection isn’t an option, short of walking into the woods. So we’re left to improvise which of the numberless small violations are worth summoning the energy to resist: when we’re willing to have an awkward interaction, how embarrassed our companion will be, which employee might get in trouble, whether making a scene is worth the hassle. Like so many things, we’re on our own.
And maybe I am romantic about restaurants. About a 10-minute drive from the Kingsway is another restaurant, Crescent City Steakhouse, which opened in 1934. It features four booths along one wall that are outfitted with curtains that can be drawn for maximum privacy. A server once told the local paper that they were for “shady politicians, secret lovers, and people who put ketchup on their steaks.” I am none of those things, but I like to think I could be if I wanted. The idea that restaurants should be exempt from the pressures of modern society might be a fantasy, but I don’t think it’s an idle or shameful one. It is a large part of why people love restaurants, and, I have to assume, why people open them too. We want restaurants to be a respite from the world, or at least a plausible illusion of one. We want them to be the woods.
Paul Spong’s life has been entwined with whales for nearly six decades. In the 1960s, Spong, who hails from Aotearoa New Zealand, moved to the U.S. to study physiological psychology at the Brain Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles. Then, in 1967, he entered the world of cetaceans when the Vancouver Aquarium in Canada hired him to study the behavior of a once-wild orca (Orcinus orca) named Skana, who’d been captured from Puget Sound that same year. While conducting behavioral, visual and auditory experiments on Skana, Spong quickly noticed the orca’s high intelligence and self-awareness, and advocated for her release. But the aquarium, which didn’t renew Spong’s contract, held onto Skana until her death in 1980. After his experience with Skana, Spong decided to investigate orcas in their natural habitat. In 1970, he landed on Hanson Island, off the northeastern coast of Vancouver Island, in British Columbia, Canada, with a tent and hydrophone, intending to study the local whales over the Northern Hemisphere summer. But his project stretched out longer than a single season, and by the late 1970s, Spong had founded a permanent research facility on Hanson Island, known today as the OrcaLab. Spong and his wife, whale researcher Helena Symonds, now serve as co-directors of the organization. Northern resident orcas near Hanson Island in British Columbia. Image courtesy of OrcaLab. Spong and Symonds made a conscious decision to take a hands-off approach, only observing the orcas using land-based hydrophones and cameras, rather than tracking them…This article was originally published on Mongabay
As NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte and European leaders increasingly warn of a looming Russian threat, Vladimir Putin used the Valdai Discussion Club to deliver a very different message: Europe is feeding an escalation spiral it may no longer be able to control. Europe is being told to prepare for war, and the rearmament is […]
“Are you sick of depending on your inner beauty?” a brunette newscaster asks, as the camera zooms in on a frizzly, pimply woman wearing glasses, looking so dejected she may as well be posing for a mug shot. “The Fox series The Swan is looking for new contestants.” The footage, included in the new Hulu documentary The Swan: Behind the Mirror, dates from sometime around the early 2000s, post-9/11 and pre-Instagram, when reality television was in its human-experiment era and body positivity was barely a twinkle in a Unilever advertising executive’s eye.
In that particular media moment, gossip magazines routinely sneered at celebrities for having visible breakouts or the shadow of a thigh dimple, and beauty was widely understood to be synonymous with happiness, virtue, and wealth. “This show, if anything—don’t shoot me!—it was empowering,” the cosmetic surgeon Randal Haworth, who operated on contestants on both seasons of The Swan, explains in Behind the Mirror. “Because it shows you that beauty is power.”
With respect to Haworth, which I don’t think he deserves, only power is power. The best that beauty can offer is attention, which is why our current social-media ecosystem is so fixated on it, offering up “Get ready with me” reels and product reviews and close reads of celebrity faces with joyless frenzy. More quaint is that, when The Swan debuted in 2004, many contestants had heard about the show via a radio ad. “Have you ever looked in the mirror and wondered how it would feel to finally become the person you’ve always imagined?” a gentle voice inquired. “Have you dreamed of plastic surgery but never thought you could afford it?” Listening in their cars, women all over America pondered the question, and 16 were eventually selected each season to appear on a series now understood to be one of the most monstrous ever made.
The Swan wasn’t the first show to subject individuals with self-esteem issues to total physical overhaul while the cameras rolled—that was ABC’s Extreme Makeover, which debuted as a one-off special in late 2002 to more than 13 million viewers, prompting executives to book a full season. Critics were horrified—“American television bosses desperate for ratings are being accused of turning mutilation into entertainment,” The Guardianreported—but the show’s success spawned a wave of copycats. On MTV’s I Want a Famous Face (2004), young people obsessed with celebrities underwent multiple surgical procedures to look more like aughts icons. But The Swan gave the makeover-under-anesthesia an evil twist: After contestants were isolated from their families for three months and subjected to surgeries, low-calorie diet plans, and severe workout regimes, they were forced to compete, pageant-style, against one another to see which one was deemed to have become the most beautiful.
Behind the Mirror doesn’t delve too deeply into the reality-TV landscape in the moment The Swan premiered, possibly because the access that the director, Erin Lee Carr, received to former contestants, producers, and even doctors offers up a trove of such astonishing anecdotes that there wasn’t space for much else. When the contestants first arrived in the show-sponsored, mirror-free apartments, they were given a pile of celebrity magazines and told to make inspirational binders of how they wanted to look. In one scene, filmed during surgery, Haworth jokes with another doctor about “the size of my wand” while he brandishes an oversize syringe—you get the sense that they’d high-five about the tag-teaming of it all if they weren’t wearing surgical gloves. Several women recount how, while they were recovering from multiple surgeries simultaneously, there was, at one point, only one nurse to check on the 16 of them. And if we never hear the words lipo leak in a documentary again, let’s take it as progress.
But beyond the fat-shaming (The Swan’s creator, Nely Galán, who reportedly warned one contestant that she’d be “a tub” if she didn’t stop eating, wisely refused to participate), the performative cruelty, the resplendent tackiness of every visual aspect of the series lies an awkward kind of realization: This show was horrific, yes, but it was also honest. Neither Galán nor Haworth nor the then–Fox uberproducer Mike Darnell made any attempt to disguise their conviction that physical beauty is worth going to extreme measures for. “Plastic surgery is barbaric,” Haworth can be heard saying in a voice-over as the documentary begins. “You’re putting a cold scalpel onto flesh, and certain things fail.” The Swan reveled in scenes of women trussed from head to toe in bandages, grotesquely swollen, and seemingly so doped out on painkillers that they had to be propped up for interviews. This was the process—a particularly American confluence of suffering, aspiration, and surveillance. No pain, no gain.
Consumer beauty culture now tends to be more evasive. For all of the buzzwords that have entered common parlance, the “deep-plane facelift” (in which someone’s skin, fat, and muscles are repositioned and lifted as one composite piece) and the cutesy “bleph” (cutting off loose eyelid skin), there’s much less analysis of how brutal cosmetic surgery is. (On Reddit’s community-driven plastic-surgery page, by contrast, people can be much more honest and frequently overwhelmed by how painful recovery is.) People pore over celebrity faces with the zeal of medical professionals—I recently saw someone comment blithely about a laundry list of imaginary procedures one actress had supposedly had when all I could ascertain was a haircut—but in fixating on the results, we miss the process.
The writer Jessica DeFino has argued that modern beauty culture has “lobotomized us all” by reducing the complexity and richness of human life to a single question: Do I look hot? We use words such as liberating and choice to obscure the stark physical reality of procedures that pass down pretty privilege and ageism as burdens to the next generation. And rarely, if ever, do we publicly debate whether it’s a good thing that women are having their faces essentially cut off and reattached to look 10 years younger. Or whether erasing all signs of aging in the pursuit of perpetual girlishness is limiting women’s ability to convey qualities such as maturity, experience, and expertise—attributes that mass culture has not historically wanted to associate with women in the first place.
If you spend much time scrolling through certain swaths of social media, you might be inclined to think that everyone, everywhere is at least injecting their face with neurotoxins and filler (not actually true), if not getting an eyelift, or even having their ribs broken for a more angular silhouette. Plastic surgeons, perhaps the most savvy self-marketers since P. T. Barnum, now seem to spend more of their time making TikTok content than they do seeing patients. And celebrities, wisely deducing how pointless it is to deny something a thousand MD influencers will identify on YouTube, have taken to radical transparency.
Earlier this year, the actor Denise Richards shared the story of her facelift with the beauty magazine Allure, including pictures pre-op of her face marked up like a crime scene and post-op bruised like a soft fruit. And last year, the reality star turned entrepreneur Kylie Jenner, who sparked a 3,233 percent increase in searches for filler when she confessed, at the age of 17, to having had her lips plumped, caused a minor ruckus by revealing the exact specifications of her breast implants (“445cc, moderate profile, half under the muscle!!!!!”) and the name of the surgeon.
During the 2000s, when many fans expressed their devotion to celebrities by seeking to emulate them, Single White Female–style, this attitude of openness might have provoked a frenzy of patient inquiries. And the most popular doctors today will tell you that it has: Thanks to stars, according to one Vogue analysis, having cosmetic work done is getting destigmatized the more popular it becomes as content. “The trend of judgment is lessening,” one surgeon told the magazine. All of the experts surveyed agreed that “interest in plastic surgery is only going to grow.” Facelifts, “especially good ones, spread like a contagion,” a story in The Cut—that in turn propagated like knotweed among women my age—argued last year.
But is it actually happening? Despite the spate of recent viral articles lamenting our surgery-saturated social environment, the number of cosmetic surgical procedures performed in the United States in 2025 declined by 9 percent compared with the previous year for patients aged 18 to 25 and by 5 percent for patients 26–35, per a report released by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. A recent search for #facelift on TikTok brought me almost 450,000 posts, but fewer than 78,000 procedures were actually performed in 2025—roughly half as many as in 2004, the year The Swan aired. The business of cosmetic surgery is currently being driven by seniors and by people wanting to address excess skin and sunken cheeks after substantial GLP-1-associated weight loss, not by Gen Zers coveting a snatched jawline.
This is in part because the gargantuan beauty industry has sprawled out in so many other directions: neuromodulators such as Botox, fillers, lasers, LED masks, and microneedling, not to mention an endless array of consumer products. But the visible overuse of filler on celebrity and civilian faces seems to have prompted a backlash. The total transformation proffered by shows such as The Swan—in Behind the Mirror,one contestant recalls being reunited with her son after three months apart and multiple surgeries, and how he failed to recognize her—is no longer the goal. Instead, beauty culture now promises that we can look like the best version of ourselves—sculpted, rested, forever young. It’s a message even more insidious than the outright brutality of The Swan, because it keeps us in a perpetual state of want, convinced that the one product or procedure that might actually work is just a click away.
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Last week, EU member states reached a common position on the European Commission Omnibus X ‘Food and Feed’ proposal, in a bid to simplify regulation of pesticides. In reality, however, it will weaken protection against pesticides’ negative effects in Europe. The proposal pleases the chemical industry but goes against the wishes of a vast majority of citizens and many scientists who value people’s health, clean drinking water and biodiversity.
A hearing in the European Parliament on 3 September highlighted the real problem. Under the guise of a ‘discussion with experts’ in the field of health and environment, the parliament handed the megaphone to lobbyists representing a broken, toxic agricultural model.
Representatives of industrial agriculture – sugar beet, apple and cereal growers – parroted industry arguments, justifying their demands to stop banning pesticides that are toxic to public health, the environment and pollute our water resources.
Despite Europe witnessing massive droughts, extreme heatwaves leading to countless deaths, wildfires destroying biodiversity, and devastating crop losses, it seems that a significant share of MEPs are ready and willing to accelerate the degradation of European’s wellbeing and natural resources.
Listening to them raises a fundamental question: Do farmers truly want to rely on a cocktail of toxic chemicals to maximise yields at low market prices, destroying their own health and local ecosystems in the process? Or do they wish to make an honest living, producing quality food in balance with nature for a fair income?
CAP subsidies
To better grasp this contradiction, we must look at what is actually at stake here.
Agrochemical corporations seek their share of the Common Agriculture Policy (CAP) cake – a colossal €58bn budget, accounting for one third of the EU’s total budget.
Their own survival is reliant on keeping as many farmers as possible dependent on pesticides, fertilisers and industrial seeds. By diverting public CAP funds through farmers into the pockets of their shareholders, these companies ensure their long-term profitability.
Many farmers’ unions also represent agri-cooperatives that profit significantly from selling pesticides, which raises questions about whether they truly represent farmers’ long-term interests, or those of the pesticide industry.
Since the European Commission published its ‘simplification’ proposal in December 2025, proponents of pesticide-intensive farming have presented a series of flawed arguments that in fact reveal the dead-end to which intensive agriculture has led us.
Firstly, farmers’ organisations complain about a “lack of pesticide substances” on the market.
Currently around 450 different pesticide active substances are approved in the EU, from insecticides to fungicides, and herbicides. If 450 different options are insufficient, does this not signal an unhealthy addiction rather than a shortage?
Lobbyist groups, furthermore, claim that pest resistance to synthetic pesticides would inevitably lead to dramatic yield losses and hunger, arguing for even more pesticides with diverse modes of action.
And yet, according to scientific research, the multiple chemical strategy that has been applied for more than 40 years is the very cause of the appearance of resistance. This problem cannot be solved with the mindset that caused it. The only scientific solution is, therefore, not more chemistry but prevention, and the use of alternative methods.
Thousands of farmers across the EU and the rest of the world are already proving this by switching towards Integrated Pest Management (a strategy for low-pesticide-input pest management) or organic practices to reduce pesticide inputs.
Who bares the cost
The call to keep all pesticides on the market – and potentially even use some of the banned ones – serves only the short-term interests of the pesticide industry, not of the farmers.
Destroying soil life – the basis of soil fertility – with chemicals, and killing insect populations that naturally control pests and pollinate crops, jeopardises the very basis of farming and long-term food security.
The societal costs of this pesticide-dependent model are staggering. Citizens are the ones who bear the healthcare costs for chronic diseases such as cancer and Parkinson’s, which impact not only farmers but also residents of agricultural areas.
We face water pollution that has become nearly impossible to remediate. Fewer pollinators means fewer healthy fruit and vegetables. These ‘externalities’ far outweigh any short-term benefits.
This is the reason why the Paris and Munich water companies financially support farmers in protecting the groundwater, because doing so is up to 45 times cheaper than depollution.
In the meantime, the agrochemical industry enjoys huge profits from pesticide sales, largely supported by CAP subsidies, while society foots the bill for the damage. It is indeed a perfect business model…for them.
Lobbyist circus
The spectacle witnessed in the alleged House of European Democracy is testament to the state of our political world; one that is dominated by corporate interests over citizens and farmers’ wellbeing.
We witnessed the desperate battle of a toxic agricultural model that struggles to survive, and resists being replaced by sustainable farming methods.
The lobbyist speakers in the European Parliament hearing more or less gave the diagnosis to the current pesticide-intensive agricultural system: it is simply broken.
Citizens have repeatedly expressed their concern on the impact of pesticides on their health and biodiversity. They have also expressed the need that public support for agriculture serves the common good.
The pesticide Omnibus X proposal is merely an attempt to maintain a detrimental status quo that favours the pesticides industry.
What is needed now is a new blueprint for a system which financially supports farmers to implement practices that improve soil and plant health, favour beneficial insects, accelerate the availability of alternatives to pesticides such as biocontrol products, and rapidly phase out toxic synthetic pesticides to protect our health, water resources and biodiversity.
Only then can we ensure a sustainable future for European agriculture and our children. Only then, will a greater share of the CAP remain in the hands of farmers who feed us and protect our nature.
Sorkin's latest film follows Mark Zuckerberg as his company fights lawsuits and whistleblowers after modifying its algorithm to promote reshares, which overwhelmingly tend to be divisive.
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