Photographs by Lisette Model
“I was absolutely overwhelmed by jazz because I knew that was America,” the photographer Lisette Model once said. America is many things—joy and pain, freedom and repression—and Model’s photos of jazz musicians and their audiences captured the full range. Model, a Viennese Jewish émigré, is best known today for her street photography, but in the early 1950s, she set out to create a book of jazz pictures, with an accompanying essay to be written by Langston Hughes.

Visit the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore in the Italian town of Assisi, and you’ll encounter the life-size cutout of a teen boy: the soon-to-be Saint Carlo Acutis. His real body, encased in wax, lies nearby in a brightly tiled coffin with a glass panel in the center. He’s dressed as you might expect a kid his age would be, in jeans, a zip-up jacket, and Nikes. Stone panels behind the coffin depict scenes from his life with some symbolic flourishes.

The red carpet, if you can believe it, was once a fashion dead zone, a sequin-strewn wasteland where good taste went to die. For years, many stars served as their own stylist or whipped up their own clothes, with predictably patchy results. In 1989, when Demi Moore showed up to the Academy Awards in a spandex-bike-shorts-and-corset ensemble of her own design, Women’s Wear Daily called it an “Oscar Fright.

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The best line of Donald Trump’s three-hour-plus Cabinet meeting last week came not from the president but from Marco Rubio.

Every day, some 2 billion people around the world use privacy-protection tools supported by the Open Technology Fund. When people in China escape their government’s firewalls and censorship software—now so dense that the system has been called the “locknet”—or when users in Cuba or Myanmar evade cruder internet blocks, they can access material written in their own languages and read stories they would otherwise never see. Both the access and some of the information are available because the U.S.

Elon Musk still makes some of America’s best electric cars. Earlier this summer, I rented a brand-new, updated Tesla Model Y, the first refresh to the electric SUV since it debuted, in 2020. Compared with even just two years ago, when the Model Y became the world’s best-selling car, many companies make great EVs now. Some of them have the Model Y beat in certain areas, but for the price, the Tesla is still the total package.

Two and a half years ago, Ashish Jha was the White House’s COVID-19 response coordinator, a job that meant getting as much of the country as possible on board with the federal government’s approach to public health. For much of this summer, he’s been doing the opposite of that.
As Robert F. Kennedy Jr.