A crowd carrying a model of Iran’s first-ever hypersonic missile, Fattah, past a mosque during a gathering to celebrate the IRGC UAV and missile attack against Israel, in Tehran, Iran, on April 15, 2024 | Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via Getty Images Israel launched strikes in response to Iran’s retaliatory attack. Here’s what we know. Israel carried out a strike against Iran on Friday but, for now, appears to have averted opening a dangerous new phase of the wider conflict in the Middle East. Israeli drones reportedly struck near the central city of Isfahan Friday morning in retaliation for Ira ..read more

Former President Donald Trump appears in Manhattan criminal court on April 19 for jury selection in his hush-money trial. Trump faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. | Curtis Means/Getty Images Trump insists that his jurors can’t be impartial. Don’t believe him. As the Manhattan district attorney’s case against Donald Trump got underway this week — with the former president accused of falsifying business records to cover up hush-money payments — one question has so far haunted the proceedings: Can the court actually select an impartial jury for one of the most polarizing figur ..read more

Taylor Swift performs during the Eras tour at the National Stadium in Singapore on March 2, 2024. | Ashok Kumar/TAS24/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management The Tortured Poets Department sees Swift tormented by her boyfriends, her haters, and even her fans. Taylor Swift has spent the past two years on top of the world. Her worldwide Eras tour is the highest-grossing music tour of all time. It’s made her a billionaire. Her 2022 album, Midnights, won Album of the Year at the Grammys, making Swift the solo artist with the most wins of all time in that category. Her high-profile romance with footb ..read more

Plastic covers the exterior of the fuselage plug area of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 Boeing 737-9 MAX on January 7, 2024, in Portland, Oregon.  | Getty Images Noticing more problems with Boeing planes doesn’t mean there are actually more problems with aviation safety. Is it just me, or does it seem like a lot of bad things keep happening to Boeing airplanes lately? Ever since the shocking January 5 incident in which a door plug fell out of a Boeing 737 Max 9 in midair, leaving a gaping hole in the side of the plane, many fliers have been jumpy. Their fears have been fueled by news sites t ..read more

Taylor Swift on her Eras Tour in Singapore. | Ashok Kumar/TAS24/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management The Tortured Poets Department and the broken way we talk about pop music. Taylor Swift has always been a pop culture Rorschach test. Every song Swift releases, every single she performs or awards show she attends, every candid photo of her is up for everyone’s interpretation. What people see depends on how they feel about her. To some, she’s a ruthless capitalist who crisscrosses the Earth on her private jet, yells at her sweet professional football player boyfriend, and doesn’t have the inte ..read more

President Joe Biden visits the groundbreaking of a new Intel semiconductor plant on September 9, 2022, in Johnstown, Ohio.  | Andrew Spear/Getty Images Exaggerating the harms of inflation doesn’t help working people. American workers’ wages have been rising faster than prices for more than a year now. Their nation’s economy, meanwhile, is the envy of the wealthy world: Since the Covid recession, the United States has seen nearly twice as much growth as any other major rich country without suffering significantly higher inflation. And economic analysts expect that America will continue to ..read more

Jontay Porter of the Toronto Raptors fights for a rebound during the game between the Raptors and the Oklahoma City Thunder in Toronto, Canada, March 22, 2024. | Zou Zheng/Xinhua/Getty Images It’s a case that underscores how betting could continue to threaten the game. The NBA has banned Toronto Raptors player Jontay Porter for life after an internal investigation found that he placed bets on basketball and gave information to a bettor to improve their odds. The Porter fracas is the latest involving athletes and sports betting as the gambling industry has exploded in recent years and as such t ..read more

Dev Patel as Kid in his directorial debut Monkey Man. | Universal Pictures Dev Patel’s action-packed directorial debut also takes aim at contemporary Indian politics. Monkey Man, a gripping, blood-soaked action film from first-time director Dev Patel, has garnered acclaim for its fight scenes — including, famously, when the main character cuts a man’s throat open by holding the knife in his mouth. Undergirding all this action, however, is also an attempt at commentary about growing authoritarianism in India, and how political leaders leverage both religion and police to maintain their power ..read more

Ludo Studio Did you see a parent crying today? The brilliant kids’ TV show Bluey is why. If you happen not to have children or have been living under a rock, let me introduce you to someone. Her name is Bluey. She’s a 7-year-old who lives with her younger sister Bingo and her dad Bandit and mom Chili in the bucolic Australian city of Brisbane. Also, she’s a dog — a blue heeler, to be precise. And a cartoon. And she’s really, really big. The brainchild of Australian animator Joe Brumm, the kid’s cartoon Bluey premiered in its home country in 2018 before taking the rest of the world by ..read more

Paige Vickers/Vox; Jorm Sangsorn/Getty Images From kava to “sleepy girl mocktails,” can anything ever take the place of booze? The first time I did shrooms and actually felt something was probably my last time doing shrooms at all. The moment it hit I was in the middle of a round of Mario Kart and abruptly handed the controller to someone else and went downstairs, as far as possible from the screen that had suddenly become terrifying to me. A familiar panic was rising in my chest, and my solution was the only thing that I knew was foolproof: wine, two glasses of it, in rapid succession. After ..read more