In Garfield, Washington, the second of three
speed-trap towns cutting over into
Idaho on the way home from Spokane,
there is a gray-going-white basketball
furred from use and exposure, deflated
only enough to discourage prolonged play,
in the grass by the public court, beside
the little park’s restroom, the simplest soonest
option en route. It pleases me again
to spot it and, before returning to the car,
to shoot two or three baskets.

Donald Trump’s favorite movie is Sunset Boulevard. That movie tells the story of an aging silent film star, Norma Desmond, who has locked herself away from the real world so that she can endlessly replay past glories until she loses her mind entirely. In his Independence Day speech, Donald Trump indulged in his own protracted Norma Desmond moment.
The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence has been a Trump-made fiasco from start to end.

One evening in May, passengers boarded United Flight 661 from Newark, New Jersey, to Chicago. As the plane readied for takeoff, a thunderstorm swept in, grounding the plane. The storm, which produced winds upwards of 50 miles an hour, was fast moving and cleared a few hours later. And yet, seven hours after Flight 661 first left the gate, it was still on the tarmac, passengers crammed inside. Around midnight, the flight was canceled.

On Juneteenth, I watched Doug Jones, the Democratic nominee for Alabama governor, deliver a speech at the Scottsboro Boys Museum, in the northeastern corner of the state. I found myself thinking of the 1960s civil-rights rallies that I’d covered as a young reporter, and that many of the older Alabamians in the packed venue had attended. A former U.S.

This past May, the globally famous pop star Lizzo was spotted on the side of a busy road in Los Angeles, putting up her own posters. Wearing a white crop top and a tiny skirt, she dipped a long brush into a bucket of paste and then used her body to press her new album cover onto a wall. A passing car stopped, and its driver told her that his mom was a big fan.

Updated at 5:01 p.m. ET on July 4, 2026
President Trump is set to mark the 250th anniversary of the United States today with an elaborate celebration in Washington, D.C., featuring military flyovers and a fireworks display that organizers say will break world records. America’s other global leader, however, has chosen to spend Independence Day quite differently.

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In his 2022 essay on how to want less, Arthur C. Brooks recalls a line from Ralph Waldo Emerson about the dangers of thinking that a new place or shiny thing will fix life’s problems.

Two hundred years ago, on July 4, 1826, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died within hours of each other. Today, this is usually recalled, when it’s recalled at all, as trivia. But it was far from trivial when it happened. Americans were stunned that the two men most responsible for the Declaration of Independence—Jefferson its author, Adams its chief advocate—died on the same day, and that this day was the Fourth of July, and that this Fourth of July was the 50th anniversary of the Declaration.

George Washington, this nation’s first general, its inaugural president, the eponym of its capital city, left one of his most indelible marks on America from afar. Not one for a grand speech, Washington printed his Farewell Address in Philadelphia’s American Daily Advertiser on September 19, 1796, the same day he announced that he would voluntarily relinquish his power, departing the then-seat of government for his homestead at Mount Vernon.