Six great reads: gravity-defying boobs, an ayahuasca multinational, and Jesse Armstrong on tech bros
'Breasts,' wrote Jess Cartner-Morley, 'have always been political – and right now they're front and centre again. Is it yet another way in which Trump's worldview is reshaping the culture?'
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'His staff were underpaid and overworked, his manner overbearing. He built a hierarchical organisation that made him rich, while many of his employees went into debt with the company. He promoted ayahuasca as a panacea for all suffering, and despite having no training, practised a confrontational and sometimes cruel form of therapy on vulnerable people with serious trauma. Traditional practitioners and healers protested he was bringing their practice into disrepute. Ayahuasca was not something you could roll out on an industrial scale with minimal oversight, they said. Accidents would happen.'
Alberto Varela claimed he wanted to use sacred plant medicine to free people's minds. But as the organisation grew, wrote Sam Edwards, his followers discovered a darker reality.Read more
The Guardian reproductive health and justice reporter Carter Sherman has spent the past few years travelling the country and interviewing more than 100 teenagers and twentysomethings about their sex lives: 'It is true that they are having even less sex, less than millennials, but they are not uninterested in sex. Instead, many have understood, from an early age, something that eluded past generations: that sex, its consequences, and control over both are political weapons.' Here, she explores how they're resisting older definitions of sex and gender – in the face of the right's bid for bodily control.
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'From the road, it's barely visible; glimpsed, maybe, if peered at with cheeks pressed against the property's imposing iron gates. There is otherwise little out of the ordinary in this quiet Kent corner of London's affluent commuter belt – St Michael's has a village hall, a country club, a farm shop. But at the end of a snaking, hedge-lined driveway is an incongruous home: a sprawling, six-bedroom neo-Georgian mansion, almost every inch, inside and out, covered in the trademark black-on-white line drawings of its owner, Mr Doodle, the 31-year-old artist Sam Cox.'
Michael Segalov travelled to the Doodle House to meet Cox and his family and to talk about how, behind the scenes of creating this piece of giant liveable art, he was unravelling into psychosis.
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Armstrong is the master of ripped-from-the-headlines drama, a writer who skewers the billionaire class. As Mountainhead takes him into new territory, he told Danny Leigh about his nuanced view of the world's richest man: 'Musk has done huge damage in the world, particularly with Doge, but I have a lot of sympathy for him – this is a traumatised human being.'
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Once a hangout for sex workers and drug addicts, a parking lot in Medellín, Colombia, has been reborn as a green haven for all. Oliver Wainwright met the 'social urbanists' credited with reducing crime – and even temperatures.
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Daily Mail
40 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Elon Musk faces glaring hurdle as he forms new America Party after Trump feud
Elon Musk could be facing a major challenge as he works to launch his new 'America Party'. The former 'First Buddy' announced the foundation of the new party on his X social media platform on Saturday. However, there currently exists a bureaucratic obstacle to Musk getting the new movement off the ground: the Federal Elections Commission. The FEC states that 'new party organizations must register with the FEC when they raise or spend money over certain thresholds in connection with a federal election.' So far, it appears no such registration has been made by Musk, as The New York Times reported the Tesla CEO's game plan to this point has been 'more conceptual than pragmatic.' Even if he had, however, there may be no potential approval coming from the FEC in the near future by design. The agency is meant to be run by six commissioners, appointed by the sitting president. Right now, there are three empty seats on the FEC, not enough to form what's known as a quorum necessary for governing. Three commissioners have stepped down since the president began his second term in January, leaving it essentially defunct until Trump makes those appointments. Trump has yet to name any potential nominees and the White House has yet to address Musk's intention to form a new party. has approached the White House for comment. Democrat Ann Ravel, who served on the FEC from 2013 to 2017, believes Trump may already want to leave it in shutdown mode for his own motivations. 'Clearly, there is no doubt that President Trump wants to purposely leave the FEC without a quorum,' she claimed to Open Secrets. The America Party's founding came after Musk created an online poll on July 4 asking his followers whether to establish the new party. The results came back 65.4 percent in favor, leading Musk to make the announcement. 'By a factor of 2 to 1, you want a new political party and you shall have it!' Musk wrote. 'When it comes to bankrupting our country with waste & graft, we live in a one-party system, not a democracy. 'Today, the America Party is formed to give you back your freedom.' Musk had been elevated to a prestigious role within the White House acting as a special advisor to the president and overseeing the Department of Government Efficiency. But in recent months a rift has emerged and the two former friends have been embroiled in embarrassing public spats played out over social media. Many had predicted that Trump and Musk's rosy bromance wouldn't last long and some pointed to betting markets on when they would turn on each other. Betters heavily favored a fallout before July 1, 2025, less than six months after Musk joined Trump's administration as a special advisor. In just a matter of months Musk went from spending $288 million for Trump's election campaign, to slinging insults about him online. The bust up occurred after Musk stepped down from DOGE over Trump's 'Big Beautiful Bill' which ends tax breaks for electric vehicles, which are Tesla CEO Musk's passion project. Musk also argued that the bill undercut DOGE's cost-cutting efforts by increasing the deficit. The rift deepened after the president rescinded his nomination offer to Musk-ally Jared Isaacman for NASA administrator over donations he made to the Democrats. Since then Trump and Musk have engaged in public mudslinging against each other. Musk accused the president of ingratitude and claimed he would have lost the election without him, while Trump branded him 'crazy '. Since their public break-up, Musk has threatened to start a new, third political party and buttress the reelection campaign of Republican Rep. Thomas Massie, one of the no votes on Trump's big bill. Trump recently outed himself as the person who leaked details about Musk's alleged drug use, according to author Michael Wolff, who penned the eye-popping book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House. The New York Times reported that during the 2024 presidential campaign, the billionaire used so much ketamine he was having bladder problems and also used Ecstasy, psychedelic mushrooms and what appeared to be Adderall.
The Independent
40 minutes ago
- The Independent
Even over the Fourth of July weekend, ICE officials didn't stop their raids in LA: ‘Troubling reminder of federal overreach'
Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained several people in the Los Angeles area on Independence Day. The agency has detained more than 1,600 people in the region in recent months, according to the Los Angeles Times. Among those arrested on the Fourth of July were two car wash workers who had been employed there for decades and a beloved food vendor who runs a birria stand, the outlet reports. A man whose father was detained, who asked to remain anonymous, told NBC 4 LA that he was unsure what prompted the raids. 'He's not a criminal,' he said. 'He wasn't doing anything he wasn't supposed to. He came in to work on the Fourth of July.' West Hollywood officials were also critical. 'On a day meant to honor the ideals of liberty, democracy, and freedom from oppression, we instead confront a deeply troubling reminder of federal overreach. Independence Day should be a time for reflection and reverence, not fear and persecution,'' they said in a statement on the city website. Anti-ICE protests also continued on the holiday. The Los Angeles Police Department arrested five people in connection with downtown demonstrations, the Los Angeles Times reports. Fans of the Los Angeles Galaxy soccer team walked out of the stadium on Friday in protest against the owners' lack of public support for immigrants. Fans also held up a banner that read: 'Fight Ignorance, Not Immigrants.' Earlier in the week, ICE raided three Los Angeles-area Home Depots and arrested a total of 37 people, KTLA reports. President Donald Trump also signed his sweeping spending and tax bill into law on Independence Day while attending a picnic for military families. That bill will provide ICE with roughly $45 billion over the next four years to spend on detaining undocumented immigrants. This comes as part of Trump's promise to carry out the 'largest deportation program in American history.' The new funds make ICE the 'single largest federal law enforcement agency in the history of the nation,' Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council told Democracy Now!. 'We're talking nearly 20 years' worth of detention funding to be spent only in a four-year period, and an increase to ICE's enforcement budget beyond anything we've ever seen before, allowing the agency to expand mass deportations over the next four years to every community nationwide,' he said. Trump has also praised a new ICE detention center in Florida, dubbed 'Alligator Alcatraz.' The president visited the site on Tuesday, saying it will soon house 'some of the most menacing migrants, some of the most vicious people on the planet.'
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
The UN is our best defence against a third world war. As Trump wields the axe, who will fight to save it?
The United Nations and its agencies have long struggled with funding shortfalls. Now an entrenched problem is becoming an acute crisis in the shadow of Donald Trump's executioner's axe. The US is the biggest contributor, at 22%, to the UN's core budget. In February, the White House announced a six-month review of US membership of all international organisations, conventions and treaties, including the UN, with a view to reducing or ending funding – and possible withdrawal. The deadline for decapitation falls next month. Trump's abolition of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and scrapping of most aid programmes, has already badly damaged UN-led and UN-backed humanitarian operations, which rely on discretionary funding. Yet Trump's axe symbolises a more fundamental threat – to multilateralism and the much-battered international rules-based order. The basic concept of collective responsibility for maintaining global peace and security, and collaboration in tackling shared problems – embodied by the UN since its creation 80 years ago last week – is on the chopping block. The stakes are high – and Washington is not the only villain. Like the US, about 40 countries are behind in paying obligatory yearly dues. Discretionary donations are declining. The UN charter, a statement of founding principles, has been critically undermined by failure to halt Russia's illegal war of aggression in Ukraine (and by last month's US-Israeli attack on Iran). China and others, including the UK, ignore international law when it suits. The number and longevity of conflicts worldwide is rising; UN envoys are sidelined; UN peacekeeping missions are disparaged. The security council is often paralysed by vetoes; the general assembly is largely powerless. By many measures, the UN isn't working. A crunch looms. If the UN is allowed to fail or is so diminished that its agencies cannot fully function, there is nothing to take its place. Nothing, that is, except the law of the jungle, as seen in Gaza and other conflict zones where UN agencies are excluded, aid workers murdered and legal norms flouted. The UN system has many failings, some self-inflicted. But a world without the UN would, for most people in most places, be more dangerous, hungrier, poorer, unhealthier and less sustainable. The US is not expected to withdraw from the UN altogether (although nothing is impossible with this isolationist, ultra-nationalist president). But Trump's hostile intent is evident. His 2026 budget proposal seeks a 83.7% cut – from $58.7bn to $9.6bn – in all US international spending. That includes an 87% reduction in UN funding, both obligatory and discretionary. 'In 2023, total US spending on the UN amounted to about $13bn. This is equivalent to only 1.6% of the Pentagon's budget that year ($816bn) – or about two-thirds of what Americans spend on ice-cream annually,' Stewart Patrick of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace noted. Economic development aid, disaster relief and family planning programmes would be gutted. The impact is potentially world-changing. Key UN agencies in the firing line include the children's fund, Unicef – at a time when the risks facing infants and children are daunting; the World Food Programme (WFP), which could lose 30% of its staff; agencies handling refugees and migration, which are also shrinking; the International court of justice (the 'world court'), which has shone a light on Israel's illegal actions in Gaza; and the International Atomic Energy Agency, which monitors Iran's and others' nuclear activities. Trump is already boycotting the World Health Organization, the Palestinian relief agency (Unrwa) and the UN Human Rights Council, and has rescinded $4bn allocated to the UN climate fund, claiming that all act contrary to US interests. If his budget is adopted this autumn, the UN's 2030 sustainable development goals may prove unattainable. US financial backing for international peacekeeping and observer missions in trouble spots such as Lebanon, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Kosovo, currently 26% of total spending, will plunge to zero. The withdrawal of USAID support is already proving lethal, everywhere from Somalia and Sudan to Bangladesh and Haiti. UN officials describe the situation in post-earthquake, conflict-riven, aid-deprived Myanamar as a 'humanitarian catastrophe'. Research published in the Lancet found that Trump's cuts could cause more than 14m additional deaths by 2030, a third of them children. The WFP, the world's largest food aid supplier, says its projected $8.1bn funding deficit this year comes as acute hunger affects a record 343 million people in 74 countries. And other donor states are failing to fill the gap left by the US. So far in 2025, only 11% of the $46.2bn required for 44 UN-prioritised crises has been raised. The UK recently slashed its aid budget by £6bn, to pay for nuclear bombs. UN chiefs acknowledge that many problems pre-date Trump. António Guterres, the secretary general, has initiated thousands of job cuts as part of the 'UN80' reform plan to consolidate operations and reduce the core budget by up to 20%. But, marking the anniversary, Guterres said the gravest challenge is the destructive attitude of member states that sabotage multilateral cooperation, break the rules, fail to pay their share and forget why the UN was founded in the first place. 'The charter of the United Nations is not optional. It is not an à la carte menu. It is the bedrock of international relations,' he said. Guterres says the UN's greatest achievement since 1945 is preventing a third world war. Yet respected analysts such as Fiona Hill believe it's already begun. The UK and other democracies face some pressing questions. Will they meekly give in to Trump once again? Or will they fight to stop this renegade president and rogue states such as Russia and Israel dismantling the world's best defence against global anarchy, forever wars and needless suffering? Will they fight to save the UN? Simon Tisdall is a Guardian columnist
