There is less than a month left until the midterm elections on November 3. The outcome will determine which party controls both houses of Congress and begin shaping the post-Donald Trump era.

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Édgar Vázquez Silva’s worst fears came true. His boss at the Stone County sheriff’s office in Mississippi called him and asked him to turn in his badge and uniform. The order was clear: all department officers had to be U.S. citizens or, at minimum, permanent residents.

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In early 2025, Donald Trump became the first sitting president to attend the Super Bowl. He had just returned to the White House and his approval ratings were higher than ever. A few months earlier, he had won the election with a 12-point lead among male voters, which encouraged him to embark on something of a tour of some of the principal cathedrals of American men’s sport: on December 14, he attended the traditional Army-Navy college football game; on February 9, he was at the Super Bowl; on February 16, he attended the NASCAR Daytona 500; and on June 8, he was present at UFC 316, shortly after which he announced that he would stage a UFC fight at the White House to celebrate his 80th birthday.

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Between global warming, a rampant inequality whose clearest expression is the housing crisis, and artificial intelligence (AI), much of the world lives with a sword of Damocles hanging over its head. No wonder. The era we live in is seasoned with forest fires that make even the most stubborn believe in a climate hell, professionals who fear imminent replacement by server farms that neither get sick nor protest, young people moving back in with their parents because they cannot afford their own homes, billionaires talking about sending us to Mars, and a global south of 3.5 billion poor people who increasingly have less to lose.

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As Mary Beard writes in her highly entertaining book on the Parthenon, it is the monument that has moved more people to tears than any other, perhaps second only to the Taj Mahal.

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This past summer has been, for Europe, “the summer of truth,” as Ursula von der Leyen said a couple of weeks ago in her State of the Union debate speech. The president of the European Commission was warning about the consequences of global warming, which has again struck the continent hard. And the Copernicus Climate Change Service quantifies this sweltering summer in its seasonal assessment, published on October 2. The season in Europe was marked by heatwaves that were unusually intense and early (the first arrived in May). Across the continent this was the third-warmest summer on record. But focusing on western Europe, the summer of 2026 was the worst on record. It surpassed 2003, which shocked many EU countries with tens of thousands of deaths linked to extreme heat.

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Zhong Zihao, 20, has heard that the area around Chijian Lake, in southeast China, was farmland before the rice paddies gave way to factories. It is hard to imagine that landscape among the industrial sheds, bridges, roads and buildings that now rise on the reservoir’s shores. Zhong knows his hometown used to be one of the poorest and least industrialized corners of Fujian province, but now, he says with pride, “when I introduce myself, I only have to say I’m from Ningde, the CATL place.” “For a small town to be remembered because of a company is a huge boost to local confidence,” he says.

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Yumi Nu is one of the world’s most sought-after models. An American citizen of Dutch and Japanese descent, and the niece of DJ Steve Aoki, she has appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated and walked for L’Oréal and Victoria’s Secret. On September 22, at Vogue World in Milan, Nu shared the runway with a group of inexperienced intruders: four humanoid robots built by the Chinese company Unitree Robotics.

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The music phenomenon of the moment is called Choosin’ Texas, an apparently innocuous country-pop song performed by Ella Langley, a 27-year-old artist from Alabama. The track, which tells the story of a love triangle in which someone inevitably gets hurt, has spent 24 weeks as the best-selling song in the United States. No song has stayed that long at number one on the Billboard Hot 100, the country’s official chart, which is calculated using a formula that incorporates streaming, download sales, and radio airplay.

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