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‘Choosin’ Texas’: The music phenomenon that has conquered (most of) the world

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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© Taylor Hill (FilmMagic)

Ella Langley at a concert in Nashville, Tennessee, on June 4.
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Maxx yourself, squeeze yourself dry: The unhealthy obsession with optimizing everything

There was a time when moderation was a virtue and the middle ground, wisdom. Hyperbole was no more than a literary or rhetorical device. But not anymore. We live at the extremes. Raising everything to its highest possible level is the zeitgeist fate has handed us, and it comes with a suffix that colonizes the internet: maxxing. A highly versatile suffix: placed after the right word it means that, whatever you do, you are giving it your all.

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© CASSIDY ARAIZA ( New York Times / Europa Press / CONTACTO )

The influencer Clavicular in Arizona, last February.
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Johnny Cross, ‘the vegan butcher’: ‘I’ve been in the world 34 years and I’ve never eaten meat or fish, and I’m alive, I’m healthy’

Johnny Cross at his home in Seville.

In another life, Johnny Cross (Clovenfords, Scotland, 34) might have become a sports journalist covering British football teams, but an Erasmus year in Seville during his final year of university changed everything. There he met Marta, his partner, with whom he now has two children, and he decided to stay in Spain. He also realized sports journalism wasn’t for him, so he began teaching English to make some money — “very typical of the guiris [a Spanish term for British people] here,” he says with a laugh.

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Johnny Cross is known on social media as The Vegan Guiri or “the vegan butcher,” the title of the cookbook he published in 2025.
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