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In primary elections, politicians run to win over their party faithful, which is often a different demographic than those they need to appeal to in the general election. So strategists, consultants, and party leaders spend a lot of money trying to figure out what voters want—yes, what sort of policy they want on the economy or health care or education, but also what kind of person they want.

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Beachgoers rest on the beach of Moutchic on the shore of Lake Lacanau in Lacanau, southwestern France, on July 24, 2026, as clouds of smoke rise into the sky from the Gironde wildfire.Ana Beltran / Reuters
A tree burns during the La Mierla wildfire in Albendiego, Guadalajara, Spain, on July 21, 2026.

“A war. A man. A trick. A trick to break the walls of Troy. And burn it—screaming—to the ground.” Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey opens in the great hall of Ithaca, with a bard singing a hymn about the cunning of Odysseus, the hero of the tale, to the men who have overrun his house—courting his wife, menacing his son—while he is absent. A feast has been turned into a desecration.
The law these men broke was the most sacred in the ancient world: “xenia,” the law of hospitality.

Suavity is a sorely missed ingredient in the American presidency. The effortless charm of a Roosevelt or a Reagan, a Bush or a Clinton, projected a particular brand of power. Suave means a kind of athletic ease and self-command in difficult, spotlighted circumstances, the assurance that solutions are at hand if only we all hold our composure and act right-headedly.

Toward the end of Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus and Penelope finally see each other after 20 years apart. Odysseus, disguised as “an ancient old man” by the goddess Athena, tells Penelope that her husband will return to kill the suitors who have tormented her. “Not one will avoid his death and destruction,” he says. This is Homer’s protagonist: wily, aided by a god, and eager for revenge—reflective of a culture that prized honor, strength, and fealty to a set of interventionist deities.

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Americans have two stereotypes of Britain. The first is the cozy, parochial world portrayed in my country’s biggest cultural exports—the “soggy bottoms” of The Great British Baking Show, the boarding-school backdrop of Harry Potter, the aristocratic deference valorized by Downton Abbey.

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Travel has a way of making us curious. We wander unfamiliar streets, strike up conversations with strangers, linger in museums, and notice details that we’d otherwise rush past. But that mindset doesn’t need to be reserved for vacations.

Photographs by Klaus Galiano
It was probably inevitable that the Delaney Hall immigration detention center in Newark, New Jersey, would become a battleground in the broader fight over President Trump’s mass-deportation campaign. The privately run jail reopened last year as the only sizable facility of its kind in the New York City metro area, with capacity for 1,000 ICE detainees.