James' World 2

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After spending just a few days together, New York Giants player Juju Smith-Schuster and fitness instructor Laura Kruk knew it was meant to be. The two first connected in January 2023 when the wide receiver was playing for the Kansas City Chiefs, and Laura lived in Arizona. “I went out to visit her on my playoff bye week,” Juju tells Vogue. “First time seeing her, I said, ‘Wow, you are so beautiful.’” On that trip, Laura took Juju to her favorite restaurants, introduced him to her friends, and even put him through a few workouts. “He’s been my best friend ever since,” she says.

Just nine months later, Juju knew the pair would remain best friends for life. So on September 7, 2023, the football player proposed to Laura on a surprise trip to the White Elephant in Nantucket. “It was such a peaceful, calm day,” remembers Juju. The two began by shopping around the town, enjoying oysters, and taking a boat out to explore the coastline. “With the lighthouse standing in the distance and the sky painted in the most breathtaking colors, it felt like time stood still. My heart was racing the entire time,” says Juju. “I was so nervous yet so incredibly excited, and I couldn’t stop smiling because I knew I was about to ask the love of my life the most important question I’d ever ask. It was a moment I’ll cherish forever.” At sunset, he popped the question, and Laura said “yes.” She adds, “It was a phenomenal day.

”The couple decided to enjoy the engagement period and chose to tie the knot at the Ritz-Carlton in Laguna Niguel, California, on July 10, 2026. “We wanted our wedding to reflect who we are as people and as a couple and to be one big party,” says the bride. The groom admits that Laura was the true star behind the planning process. “I was a great team player by helping with the DJ and saying ‘yes’ and ‘no,’” Juju says. Working with wedding planner Audrey Wood made the entire process seamless and helped Laura truly enjoy the journey. “She made it so easy, and no task was ever too big for her,” adds Laura. “We took our time with the process and really kept our guests and their experience in mind throughout.

”Both the bride and groom were lucky enough to find their wedding-day looks quite easily. Laura actually spotted her Steven Khalil gown online a few months before she went shopping. She knew she would have to try it on. “It was the second dress I stepped into, and although I continued shopping at a couple other boutiques, I knew it was the one,” she says. The style features a mermaid silhouette, detailed lace fabric, and a ruched tulle overlay. She paired it with a coordinated veil for her trip down the aisle, diamond studs, and a tennis bracelet. “The dress and veil were the moment, so for jewelry, I wanted to stay timeless and classic,” the bride shares.

Juju donned a custom double-breasted white suit by Julian Abdul Studios for the wedding day. “I had my stylist, Vick Michel of Upnxt, help me pick and show me options to decide on,” the groom explains. “What I wore was an easy decision for me.” He accessorized with Chanel glasses for the sunny California afternoon and Tom Ford shoes, a pocket square, and a bow tie. Adds Laura, “I loved that he kept his look a secret from me, so I was just as excited to see his outfit as he was to see mine.

”The wedding weekend began with a beachside welcome party in Laguna Niguel. The Hawaiian theme served as a perfect nod to the groom’s Samoan roots. “The guests enjoyed piña coladas in branded coconuts with our wedding logo on them and danced to good music all evening,” shares the bride. “We brought out Polynesian dancers halfway through the night and listened to speeches from our closest friends and family.

”The next day, the wedding ceremony was set on a lawn adorned with white and green florals overlooking the ocean. “It was the ceremony of my dreams,” shares Laura. “Guests were welcomed with Champagne upon arrival, and some of our favorite love songs played by a violinist.” All the bride’s nerves washed away when she arrived at the altar. “It truly felt like it was just the two of us in that moment,” she shares. Juju also felt a wave of calm when he saw Laura. “The moment I saw her walking toward me, I knew without a doubt that I was marrying the woman I had prayed for,” he says. “It still feels surreal finally having a ring on my finger—and for once, it’s not a Super Bowl ring.”

After the ceremony, guests, including Taylor Swift and former Kansas City Chief teammates Travis Kelce and Patrick Mahomes, enjoyed the cocktail hour while the newlyweds took a moment for themselves—and captured a few portraits with their photographer, Nicole Ivanov. Both the bride and groom describe the reception as unforgettable. “No phones were allowed during our wedding celebration, and everyone was so present,” says Laura. “Seeing all of our family and friends mingling and making new friends was so much fun.” Juju’s aunt Jane emceed the night and led the evening through dances and speeches. “She completely stole the show,” remembers Juju. “She had everyone laughing from beginning to end and made the night so special.”

Later in the evening, the couple performed a Samoan Taualuga dance, a traditional dance that serves as the grand finale of an important celebration. “This was my favorite part of the entire day,” shares Juju. “I knew my wife was nervous and stepping far outside of her comfort zone, but seeing her embrace my culture with such love and courage meant more to me than words can express. Watching her honor my family and our traditions made me incredibly proud and reminded me just how blessed I am to call her my wife.” The party then moved indoors, where guests sipped espresso martinis and danced until 2 a.m. “The after-party was the perfect ending to an unforgettable day,” notes Juju. “Watching everyone come together to celebrate our love is a memory I’ll cherish forever.”

Reflecting on their celebration, the bride says, “I couldn’t have asked for a more electric day, and the energy every single guest brought was on another level. The wedding was a perfect reflection of our relationship and love, and I can’t believe I am now married to the love of my life.” Adds Juju, “It was, without a doubt, the most unforgettable—and absolutely lit—day of our lives.”

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Photo: Nicole Ivanov

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Hmmmm … The Trump Administration is blindly following their leader over the cliff to cast doubt on the Midterms!

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President Trump used a lot of alarming words on Thursday night as he addressed the American people about threats to the integrity of elections in the United States: “Deep state.” “Rigged and stolen.” “Conspiring.” “Manipulation.” “Corrupt.” “Fraud.” “Cover up.”

But the bottom-line message he clearly wanted to leave with the public was this: He is not a loser, regardless of the result of the 2020 election. There were dark forces at work to thwart him. And if his party loses this fall’s midterm election, he intimated, that may not be an honest outcome either.

Mr. Trump’s prime-time speech from the East Room of the White House was an astonishing spectacle featuring a president intent on persuading the country that its elections cannot be trusted, at least not the ones where he or his allies fall short. He cited selectively declassified documents to make sensational claims about vulnerabilities of the election system, although nothing he revealed proved any outcomes were actually changed.

The exercise underscored how much Mr. Trump, in his second term, has come to be obsessed with relitigating the 2020 election and finding ways to cast doubt on the 2026 election. In the 18 months since he returned to office, he has installed election deniers in key positions, sought to change the rules to make it harder to cast ballots, seized voting records in a bid to prove his conspiracy theories, and purged officials who investigated his efforts to overturn his election defeat six years ago.

“It does feel a little like Captain Ahab in ‘Moby-Dick,’” said Trevor Potter, a Republican former chairman of the Federal Election Commission. “He is just fixated on his claim that he didn’t lose the 2020 election. Armchair psychiatrists can say he doesn’t like losing; he can never admit he lost anything. But it’s clearly become an important part of his psyche and in some ways an important part of this administration.”

On one level, according to people close to him, Mr. Trump’s fixation on rewriting the history of 2020 is about salving the wounded ego of a man who constitutionally resists ever admitting that he has lost anything. He has made it a litmus test for anyone working for him to accede to, or at least not contradict, the lie that he won back then, not Joseph R. Biden Jr.Mr. Trump has authorized investigations to revisit his many claims that have previously been debunked, inquiries seemingly aimed not at following wherever the facts may take them but in search of facts to back up his own unsubstantiated certitudes. It is hard to imagine that he would accept any investigation concluding that he lost fair and square.

But while part of this is about looking backward, it also is about looking forward. With Mr. Trump deeply unpopular, according to polls — just 37 percent approve of his performance in the latest Washington Post-Ipsos survey — his party faces a possible drubbing in congressional races in November. So Mr. Trump seems intent on laying a predicate that, at the least, could explain away a defeat and, at most, his critics fear, potentially justify direct intervention aimed at changing the results.“It’s the standard approach to cast doubt on the electoral rules of the game where many populist authoritarians feel threatened by unpopularity at the polls or if the results declare them the loser at the ballot,” said Pippa Norris, who has taught political science at Harvard University for three decades and was the founding director of the Election Integrity Project. “Indeed, it’s been a leitmotif which the president has used for more than a decade now.”

Mr. Trump’s allies insist that he has well-founded reasons for his election conspiracy hunt, that Democrats, the news media, career officials and foreign governments all had cause to try to stop him from winning a second term and then hide their tracks. A self-serving establishment, they say, is protecting its own power and eager to take down a disruptive outsider in the form of Mr. Trump.

“The president passionately believes he was wronged in the 2020 election,” said Christopher Ruddy, his friend and chief executive of Newsmax Media, “and I think he is motivated for two reasons: to get vindication and to prevent future election irregularities.”

But some Republicans wish Mr. Trump would move on, seeing the issue as politically unhelpful in a campaign season when voters are focused on the cost of living and other matters close to home.

An Economist-YouGov poll last month found that Mr. Trump has persuaded 50 percent of Republicans that the 2020 election was rigged, but that is more of an article of faith among the president’s base than the broader electorate. While 66 percent of self-identified MAGA Republicans share that view, just 32 percent of other Republicans do, and only 23 percent of independents.

Mr. Trump’s repeated forays into election denialism this term also reflect the change in his inner circle. While there were powerful voices in his first term who told him that his claims of election fraud were not true, most notably William P. Barr, then the attorney general, Mr. Trump, this time, is surrounded by advisers who either cheer him on or keep quiet.

“Clearly, there’s nobody in the White House who can say no to him; there’s no adult in the room,” said former Representative Barbara Comstock, Republican of Virginia and a longtime Trump critic. “They won’t say to him, ‘Mr. President, you lost the damn election. Why are we doing this again?’”

Indeed, would-be administration officials at the start of this term were asked point-blank during job interviews if they believed Mr. Trump won the 2020 election. Those who said no were generally not welcomed into the fold. Conversely, Democrats have now made a point of asking the same question during confirmation hearings of Trump nominees, leaving them struggling to find an answer under oath that does not anger the president.

“Do you deny that Joe Biden won the 2020 election?” Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, asked Jay Clayton, the president’s nominee for director of national intelligence, during a hearing this week.

“Senator, I’m not an election denier,” Mr. Clayton responded. “Joe Biden was certified as the president of the United States.”

Democrats noticed the use of the word “certified,” as opposed to “elected” or “won.” That has become an escape word for Trump nominees. Even the president does not deny that Mr. Biden was certified; he just claims that he should not have been.

Senator Jon Ossoff, Democrat of Georgia, tried to pin Mr. Clayton down. “Who won the 2020 election?” he asked directly.

“I’ve answered it,” Mr. Clayton said. “I’ve answered it.”

“Isn’t it humiliating to be unable to answer this question, to have to indulge the president’s delusions?” Mr. Ossoff replied.

Mr. Trump’s laser focus on 2020 was evident in his speech on Thursday night. As he spun out assertions of Chinese hacking, illegally registered voters, and cover-ups, Mr. Trump referred seven times to the 2020 election that he lost, albeit without an explicit claim that he won. He offered no concerns about the validity of the 2016 or 2024 elections that he won.

And while he suggested that China intervened in the election six years ago because it “wanted me to lose,” he made no mention of Russia’s intervention four years before that on his behalf. He used the words “China” or “Chinese” 20 times and mentioned Russia only once as part of a list of nations that have the capacity to hack election machines.

In fact, U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that while China made nascent efforts to influence American opinion during the 2020 election, it largely stayed on the sidelines, while Russia mounted an expansive and aggressive campaign to help Mr. Trump win in 2016.

With just less than 16 weeks until the next election, the pressing issue is where Mr. Trump plans to take the matter. He used the speech to announce that he has ordered the F.B.I. and other agencies to investigate election interference. He also pushed Congress again to pass legislation to require proof of citizenship to register and photo identification to cast ballots. But Senate Republicans have made clear to him again and again that there are not enough votes to pass it.

The idea that Mr. Trump might opt to take action if the election does not go the way he wants it to is not unthinkable. In an interview with The New York Times in January, Mr. Trump said he regretted not heeding advisers who urged him to order the National Guard to seize voting machines in swing states that he lost in 2020.

“Great damage has been done to our country,” he said on Thursday night. “Our elections were left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen, and the trust of the American people was lost. This cannot be allowed to continue.”

The question for many Americans will be whom do they trust.

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President Trump seen on a screen inside the White House briefing room as he addressed the nation on Thursday night. Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

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This massive dinosaur skeleton sold for more than $50.1 million on Tuesday

A Tyrannosaurus rex fossil named “Gus” became the most expensive dinosaur ever to sell at auction on Tuesday.

Gus sold for $50,130,000—far above the estimated $20-million to $30-million price tag that had been set earlier by the auction house Sotheby’s.

The skeleton stands about 12.5 feet (3.8 meters) tall and is approximately 38 feet long—the dinosaur’s skull alone is some 4.5 feet long, according to Sotheby’s, and weighs so much that it must be handled separately. (The skull mounted on the fossil skeleton that is currently displayed at the auction house is a replica.) The skeleton is estimated to be about 61 percent complete, and Sotheby’s said this makes it among the most complete T. rex fossils ever found.

Gus is unusual, according to the auction house, because the fossil retains some bones called gastralia. Also known as “belly ribs,” gastralia are free-floating bones located in the abdominal wall. Today they are still found in certain reptiles, such as crocodiles and tuatara.

The fossil was discovered in 2021 on a South Dakota ranch. It is believed to be roughly 67 million years old. The bones bear evidence of bite marks from other tyrannosaurs, and Sotheby’s said these may have been “sustained by either combat or post-mortem scavenging.” Gus also shows signs of “injuries which occurred during the life of the individual, with fractured and healed bones discernable in several ribs and gastralia,” according to the auction house.

The value of Gus eclipses that of “Stan,” another T. rex fossil found in South Dakota, which was sold for $31.8 million in October 2020 and is now in a history museum in Abu Dhabi, and the Stegosaurus “Apex,” which was bought for $44.6 million by billionaire Ken Griffin in 2024. Gus went to an unknown phone bidder.

Scientists have long criticized the practice of auctioning off dinosaur fossils like these. Researchers have argued that allowing private buyers to own such specimens deprives paleontologists the opportunity to study them. And the extreme prices the fossils command mean most museums or academic institutions can’t compete in a bidding war.

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On the gay internet, the death of Sen. Lindsey Graham was met with a smirk. Memes and posts suggested that the longtime South Carolina lawmaker, who unexpectedly died on Saturday, was gazing on a Provincetown cruising spot from the afterlife, flamboyantly courting Ronald Reagan’s attention in hell, and being honored at Grindr headquarters with a flag flown at half-staff.

Though Graham maintained throughout his life that he was not gay, his sexuality was an open question in Washington. It’s not just that he had what some deemed an effeminate air and was never romantically linked with a woman, though that certainly fed the rumors. There were also multiple public accounts from men who said Graham had paid them for sex, claims he also denied. Still, nothing ever erupted into a full-blown scandal. And until his death, Graham remained a staunch opponent of LGBTQ+ rights.

This apparent hypocrisy made Graham a ripe subject of debate on the ethics of outing anti-gay public figures. One line of thinking holds that everyone has a right to sexual privacy so long as all participants are adult and consenting. Others believe that political officials who enjoy a private gay life while working to enshrine LGBTQ+ people as second-class citizens deserve no privilege of discretion. Graham’s alleged homosexuality was wielded as a weapon by both Republican opponents and left-leaning critics, leading some queer people to argue that invoking his sexuality in an insult amounted to outright homophobia.

But as LGBTQ+ advocates have grown less compromising and more confrontational in service of their cause, the pro-outing position has largely won out in popular discourse. For Graham—a supposedly closeted politician whose sexuality never became a major story—this situation was one of the last of its kind, a holdover from an era when being gay was a political death sentence, and it was still common for public figures to deny it for life.

The buzz about Graham’s sexuality simmered for years before boiling over in 2020, when gay porn star Sean Harding tweeted, of a Republican senator with the initials L.G., “Every sex worker I know has been hired by this man.” The nickname supposedly given to Graham by the sex workers he had employed, “Lady G,” began making its way around social media. A couple of days later, another man wrote on Medium that Graham had hired him for a tryst at a Baltimore hotel, which led to a memorable anecdote about the clusters of moles Graham allegedly called his “ladybugs.” Upon his death, another person came forward with a tale of gay sex with Graham: trans author Jesse James Rose, who wrote on Instagram that Graham had paid her a “fat stack of cash” while she was a “twinky pre-transition college student” to perform sex acts on him while he wore red lingerie. She didn’t know he was a senator, she wrote, until other sex workers outed Lady G on social media.

The 2020 allegations bobbed around for a bit, but they never led to a major exposé or any further corroboration, likely because there was never any proof beyond the testimony of sex workers, who were apt to be met with distrust. And while Graham would occasionally bat down the rumors, sometimes with a joke, he seemed wholly unbothered by the accusations. Same with his fellow conservatives, who defended him by calling his critics homophobic when they hinted at his sexuality. Maybe it never blew up because Graham and his colleagues didn’t make a big thing of it, because Graham always denied it, or because there was no scorned wife for whom to feign empathy. Or perhaps it was because Graham was never a foaming-at-the-mouth bigot, never the loudest voice against marriage equality or nondiscrimination protections, even as he toed the GOP party line on LGBTQ+ issues at every opportunity.

It’s hard to imagine a gay Republican rising through the ranks today with the Graham playbook. There is less reason to hide now that openly gay men are all over the GOP, and it’s much harder to keep a private life private when you came of age in the camera-phone era. But Graham’s life still offers an important lesson about the nature of right-wing politics.

It’s expected, at this point, that family-values leaders will cheat on their wives, encourage their girlfriends to have abortions, indulge in the pleasures of cross-dressing, sexually harass their staffers, and solicit men for gay sex. With a few possible exceptions (if a Mitt Romney sexting scandal breaks, I’ll eat my iPhone), the sexual morals espoused by conservatives are a whole lot of posturing that readily subsides when personal interest strikes.

A punitive stance on nonnormative sexuality is useful for the GOP insofar as the party can use it to rile up its anti-LGBTQ+ base. But so long as gay and transgender Republicans are loyal soldiers who don’t threaten the gender hierarchies the right is invested in upholding, they pose no danger to the right-wing project. They can even help legitimize it, as when Caitlyn Jenner advocated against trans girls in school sports. If Graham was gay, it was isolated to the arena of sex practices, rather than the weightier realms of identity and politics in which queer activism lies.

In life and in death, gay commentators have portrayed Graham’s reportedly closeted life as sad and lonely. But I doubt he felt much regret, shame, or sadness about his choices. Like many of his Republican peers in the Trump era, he had stated values that swayed this way and that with the shifting tides of power. Graham appears to have been far more motivated by his own capacity for political influence—and by seeking displays of dominance through unrelenting hawkishness—than by personal integrity or any solid sense of self. He might not have even thought himself to be gay in the sense of a sexual or romantic identity, as opposed to a man who craves gay sex. For Graham, alleged secret paid sex and a direct line to the president might have been a dream come true.

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China’s economy last quarter grew at the slowest rate in three years, reflecting a broader slump that the country’s leaders signaled earlier this year when they set the lowest growth target in more than three decades.

On Wednesday, that National Bureau of Statistics said that the economy expanded by 4.3 percent in the second quarter, compared to a year ago, down from a 5 percent pace in the first quarter and short of economists’ expectations.

Although China’s factories are churning out chips and electric cars to supply a global boom in artificial intelligence and energy-saving products, many Chinese people are feeling squeezed at home.

A long-running property crisis has no end in sight, with steep declines in construction dragging down economic growth. Jobs outside of factories are hard to come by, and paychecks are not growing. Retail sales of consumer goods have been choppy. They fell in May, for the first time since the end of Covid-19 lockdowns in late 2022, before recovering somewhat in June.

That is in stark contrast to China’s relentless strength in manufacturing and trade, with a government report released on Tuesday showing China’s exports surging by 27 percent in June compared with a year earlier, driven by shipments of chips, batteries and cars. China’s trade surplus in June, at more than $125 billion, was second largest on record.

In other words, China’s mighty export machine is masking weaknesses elsewhere.

“You get this A.I. boom, which is a global thing, and China is part of the leading nations on the frontier,” said Yu Song, the chief China economist at UBS Securities. “Without this, China’s economy would be in a much worse state.”

When measured on a quarter-to-quarter basis, China’s economy expanded by only 0.9 percent in the second quarter. When projected out for a year, the second-quarter data implies that the economy was growing at an annual rate of 3.6 percent, sharply down from a pace of more than 6 percent in the first quarter.

The second-quarter annualized rate also missed official targets. Shortcomings in China’s economic growth drivers prompted the ruling Communist Party earlier this year to set the lowest annual growth target in decades, with a goal of between 4.5 percent and 5 percent this year.

Stepping back to consider the trends in the first half of the year, economists say that China’s manufacturing and export prowess, however robust, cannot carry growth on its own.

Industrial production rose by 5.4 percent in the first six months of the year, versus the same period last year. High-tech manufacturing rose by more than 13 percent over that period. But fixed asset investment — which includes infrastructure, property construction and manufacturing — fell by 5.7 percent. Real estate development dropped 18 percent.

The value of China’s exports surged by more than 20 percent in the first half. But consumer spending, which a Moody’s Analytics report said “remains the economy’s weakest link,” faltered. Retail sales of consumer goods increased by 1.3 percent over the first half of the year.

The effects of the war in Iran have pinched Chinese households, with rising fuel prices prompting them to drive and fly less, at a time when many were already worried about the economy and choosing to save more.

China has softened the blow of rising fuel costs by controlling the price at the pump, but the cost of filling up for drivers is still double-digit percentages higher than a year ago.

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Shoppers at an electric car showroom in Shanghai. Chinese consumers have embraced a culture of thriftiness, as many are not feeling the benefits of economic growth. Credit…Qilai Shen for The New York Times

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It’s boiling hot in the U.S. Midwest—which means it’s time for “corn sweat” to hit the headlines, drawing ire from millions sweltering under sky-high humidity and adding insult to heat-wave injury. Cities that include Minneapolis, Des Moines and Indianapolis will wilt under heat index temperatures nearing or even exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit for most of the week.

The phenomenon of corn sweat has only gone mainstream within the past decade, although farmers and meteorologists based in the so-called Corn Belt—centered around Nebraska, the Dakotas, Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois—have long recognized the increased humidity that can occur over farm fields. But agricultural scientists say it’s time for the slander to stop: corn doesn’t “sweat” any more than other major crops. Rather, the issue is the sheer amount of acreage that has been carefully managed to maximize yields.

Corn “sweat” isn’t really sweat; instead, it is water vapor that corn releases through a phenomenon called transpiration. “This is a natural mechanism,” says Bruno Basso, an agricultural systems scientist at Michigan State University. “Plants have to transpire.”

Specifically, plants have to transpire because photosynthesis converts carbon dioxide and water into sugar plus oxygen and water. “This is a simple equation,” says Avat Shefooka, a crop physiologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Under ideal conditions, the amount of water that a particular plant loses through transpiration is determined primarily by its total leaf area and the density of the small pores called stomata through which the plant takes in carbon dioxide and releases water vapor and oxygen. A larger leaf area—corn has a larger leaf area compared with those of other crop plants, such as soybeans—and more stomata mean higher water loss.

Of course, conditions in the field are often not ideal. High temperatures, low humidity, wind, and sunlight all leave the local atmosphere thirstier, which pulls additional water through any plant, not just corn, like sucking on a straw, says Meetpal Kukal, an agricultural hydrologist at the University of Idaho Boise. The only way to cut off excess transpiration is to reduce the amount of water a plant can access in the soil—creating a drought, which hurts both the plant and a farmer’s yield. Farmers tend to do the opposite: irrigating crops to ensure plants have all the water they need to produce as much as possible.

That’s particularly true of corn, which covers the largest share of irrigated cropland in the U.S.—comprising a huge volume of plants with access to plenty of water for the atmosphere to suck up. Moreover, there is a lot of corn—as of the end of June, corn covered about 95 million acres of the U.S.—4 percent of the nation’s total land area. Soybeans, by contrast, cover less land, and less of that acreage is irrigated, which, at this scale, matters more than the quirks of individual plants.

Those statistics are why Kukal says corn sweat isn’t really about corn—it’s about agriculture’s scale and yield-optimization practices. “A hundred years ago, all of this was grasslands and prairies,” he says. “We were not pumping feet and feet of water on this land.” He also notes that, in recent decades, breeders have engineered corn plants to stand more upright, allowing farmers to pack plants closer together and resulting in more water vapor transpired per field.

All that water vapor becomes most problematic during a heat wave, when an area of stagnant, high-pressure air traps any water vapor released, says Amir Souri, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Because water vapor is a greenhouse gas, “it can act as a blanket,” raising temperatures further, he says.

That trapped heat exacerbates the fact that increased humidity makes any given temperature feel hotter to humans than a thermometer indicates. The result is sweaty humans ready to blame something, anything—even corn that’s just doing its thing.

“This is a sign of a healthy corn crop,” says Jake McNeal, an agronomist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, of the much-maligned corn sweat. “If you want corn to sweat less, plant less corn or give it less water,” he adds—but either way, know that you’ll pay the price in corn.

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Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Kenny Holston/Pool/Getty Images and Getty Images Plus.

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On the 136th day of his war against Iran, President Trump came up with a new plan. He would impose tolls on ships traversing the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for protecting them from Iranian forces.

But that was then. On Day 137, he had another new plan. No tolls after all.

Mr. Trump’s 180-degree reversal on Tuesday in the face of protests from his Arab allies, who were not so excited about paying tolls, reflected how adrift he seems to be in prosecuting his war against Iran. What was supposed to be a clean four-to-six-week operation is now in its messy 20th week. Improvisation and impulse are not working.

A president who has made flexing his power on the world stage a hallmark of his second term has found in Iran an opponent that so far will not bend to his will and a geopolitical conflict that cannot be won through nasty social media posts or tariff threats. The memorandum of understanding that he brokered with Tehran last month to halt the fighting turns out to have been a memorandum of misunderstanding, and Mr. Trump now seems to have neither a clear military nor diplomatic strategy.

“He’s encountered a country that is not willing to play by his set of rules, which is you bend and kiss the ring and tell him how great he is and try to get whatever concession he’s willing to give,” said Vali Nasr, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies who has advised presidents and secretaries of state on the Middle East.

Mr. Trump’s no-end-in-sight venture in the Middle East has become a fresh lesson in why the region has been a sinkhole for presidential ambition for generations. The instruments of power that help advance U.S. interests elsewhere around the globe do not necessarily work there, as many of Mr. Trump’s predecessors have discovered.

It has been especially frustrating for Mr. Trump, who has reveled in getting his way since returning to office last year and even boasted that he might be the most powerful man in world history. But while he has successfully pressured NATO allies into increasing military spending, extracted concessions from trading partners, and essentially took over Venezuela with a one-night surgical commando raid, it is not clear that he can get his way in the Persian desert.

“Trump’s forceful approach to the world in his second term has benefited from some luck and the occasional willingness of other states to facilitate an off-ramp,” said Suzanne Maloney, vice president and director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. “Nothing in the past 47 years should have led him to believe that Tehran would follow that route.”

John Hannah, a former national security adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney and now a senior fellow at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, in the past has supported the limited use of military force to stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon. But he said that by going for “a massive decapitation strike,” Mr. Trump had clearly underestimated the theocratic power structure that took power in the 1979 Iranian revolution and overestimated American capacity to topple it.

“In retrospect, this was clearly a war based on fatally flawed assumptions,” Mr. Hannah said, “none more damaging than the president’s apparent conviction that Iran’s revolutionary regime was a flimsy house of cards ready to collapse in a hail of American airstrikes and bellicose Truth Social posts.”

“Compounding the error,” he added, “there was no rigorous national security apparatus around the president prepared to speak truth to power and subject his wrongheaded assumptions to systematic questioning based on the knowledge and experience of real foreign policy, defense and intelligence professionals.”

The cease-fire that has now collapsed amid nightly strikes was not even a particularly far-reaching agreement. It was meant to be a stopgap to quiet the guns for 60 days so that the two sides could negotiate the truly thorny disputes, particularly the future of Iran’s nuclear program. If a temporary deal cannot last, it is hard to see how the two sides can get to a permanent accord requiring painful compromises.

Mr. Trump seems uncertain how to proceed. He has turned back to the use of military force and ordered the resumption of a naval blockade in the Strait of Hormuz. He has threatened to take “a nice, big fat shot” at Pickaxe Mountain, a fortified site near one of Iran’s main nuclear facilities. But with popular opinion against the war, he has given little indication that he is willing to resume the sort of full-fledged bombardment that marked the beginning of the war.

At the same time, he has suggested there will be further negotiations but has not articulated how talks that failed before could succeed now. In fact, he has expressed deep skepticism that they could, although of course that might simply be a way of lowering expectations. Instead, Mr. Trump seems to think that he can outlast the Iranians because their economy is in dire shape, while the Iranians seem to think that they can outlast him because of the politics of gas prices heading into midterm elections at home.

Trump’s in a box, and he’s facing a brutal and tenacious adversary whose objectives — maintaining leverage over the strait and a newfound desire for hegemony over the Gulf — now hold him hostage,” said Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East peace negotiator who served presidents of both parties and is now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“Iran consumed and tarnished the legacy of one president,” he added, referring to Jimmy Carter and the 1979-81 hostage crisis. “And the way it appears now, with time on Iran’s side, not on Trump’s, it could very well tarnish or ruin the legacy of another.”

Other foreign policy experts rejected the analogy and cautioned against overstating the impact of the Iran war on Mr. Trump’s presidency.

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A banner in Tehran last week threatening President Trump. Credit…Arash Khamooshi/Polaris for The New York Times

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On June 17, 1775, some 1,000 rebel colonial troops faced down the British war machine on a hill on a peninsula north of Boston, allegedly conserving scarce ammunition by waiting to fire until they could see the whites of the redcoats’ eyes.

The Battle of Bunker Hill, as it became famously—albeit misleadingly—known, happened as the revolutionaries were looking to keep British troops contained in the city and had scrambled to fortify its surroundings. Though the British ultimately won the battle, but they suffered heavy losses, leaving George Washington time to eventually roust them from the region the next spring.

Though the battle became part of Revolutionary War lore, being widely known is no guarantee of being fully understood. That’s why archaeologists decided to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary with a new excavation at the battle site using much more detailed radar scans than were available during a previous survey in the 1990s. The dig focused on the “Rebel Redoubt” fortification patriots had constructed on Breed’s Hill—the actual site of the Battle of Bunker Hill. Scientific American spoke to Joe Bagley, Boston’s city archaeologist, about what the team found.

What did you find at the site? Was there anything particularly exciting?

From the actual battle itself, we found seven musket balls and three gunflints. The gunflints could have been from either side, because they used the same gunflints. The musket balls are both provincial (or the American side) and British, based on their size. We have an expert that’s going to be studying them each very carefully and give us a full report of who shot it, what happened, how was it fired, what did it hit—that kind of thing. We’ll have an exact accounting of all of that.

The other thing that was really exciting was that we started to find a lot of tea ware, such as broken teacups and bowls—things that would be in a dining set, a fairly fancy one. We found wig curlers—which would have been a men’s object—and really fancy buttons. So there’s all this really nice stuff. From the June battle through March the following year, there were about a hundred soldiers and six officers stationed at the redoubt, so it looks like we’re finding stuff from them. Were they taken from nearby houses? Were they brought overseas with the troops? That’s some of the research that we still need to do.

There’s a lot more stuff on the site than we were really expecting, and our job is now going to be going through all of it. We have to wash it, we have to sort it, we have to catalog it, and then we have to figure out what it says about the site. That’s going to be a minute to go through.

What big questions about the battle were you hoping the dig could shed light on?

One of the big questions that we have is basically: How structured was the effort going into the battle from the folks that were organizing what they didn’t realize was going to be the first battle of the Revolution?

Farmers marched to the site, having no idea that they were going there to build a fort, and they had absolutely no idea that the next day they were going to be starting a massive battle with the world’s biggest army. What were they being asked to do, and how big of an ask was it? Was it just like, it’s the middle of the night, we’re going to try to fortify this hill? Were they trying to go for a really structured fort, or were they trying to just bang it out?

“When the first gunflint came out, it drove home the horror of the whole thing”—Joe Bagley, Boston’s city archaeologist

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An earlier version of the survey that happened up there concluded that the fort was basically a sloppy oval on the top of the hill, and then every map after that was drawing these crisp little squares and angles, like they were out there with a protractor making the fort. The results that we’re seeing from the radar really do look like they were building this much more structured, designed, angular fort, and I think that just speaks to the ambition of folks in this early phase.

It’s also just trying to have an accurate representation of what actually happened up there. For me, when the first gunflint came out, it drove home the horror of the whole thing. There’s this tendency to romanticize and dramatize things, but the reality is this was hell. These folks were scared—they were brave, but they were terrified. [The British] set fire to [nearby Charlestown], so there was this black column of smoke that went up and over the actual battlefield by hundreds of feet, probably thousands of feet. The sounds of all the muskets going off, the cannons, the screaming. It was a bloody, gory war. And hundreds of people were killed—people were walking and slipping in blood.

We were basically digging on the site of a massacre, and I think that’s an important part of the story that people need to remember. If we’re just talking about the heroism of the whole thing, it downplays the reality of how tough it is.

What was it like to excavate there?

I’m not a big military buff, but I knew that was a place where people died, and that is a huge responsibility. To know I’m going to be trying to tell the story of people who didn’t get to tell their story after that day—that’s a heavy thing. To be there on that day with them when you find the musket ball that went through them or the gunflint that was in their pocket that slipped out as they were running for their lives—it’s like you’re right there. The last time this interacted with another person was the day that the person that put it in their pocket died or fled for their life. It’s a tingling moment.

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The death of Senator Lindsey Graham has triggered a dual-track process in South Carolina to fill his vacant seat in the chamber and his spot as the Republican nominee on the November ballot.

Graham, a prominent foreign policy hawk who served in the Senate since 2003 and became one of President Donald Trump’s closest allies, died Saturday night following what his office described as a “brief and sudden illness.” He was 71.

The fourth-term senator had secured the GOP nomination for a fifth term in the state’s June 9 primary. His death introduces sudden political uncertainty just months ahead of the November midterm elections, where Republicans are fighting to protect a narrow 53-47 Senate majority.

Trump paid tribute to Graham early Sunday, calling him “one of the greatest people and Senators I have ever known” and a “true American Patriot.”

Graham, who served as chairman of the Senate Budget Committee at the time of his death, first entered federal politics in 1994 when he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.

Newsweek has contacted the South Carolina governor’s office and South Carolina’s State Election Commission for comment outside of office hours.

Appointing a Temporary Successor

The path forward to replace Graham follows two distinct avenues under South Carolina law: an interim appointment to the active Senate seat and a separate process to name a new nominee for the upcoming general election.

Republican South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster praised Graham as “the fiercest of fighters for South Carolina and America — and a loyal and steadfast friend.”

McMaster will hold the authority to make an immediate, temporary appointment to fill the vacant seat. Under the South Carolina code of laws, the governor can appoint a successor to serve until January 3 following the next general election.

However, that appointment is strictly temporary and does not automatically grant the appointee the Republican nomination to face Democratic challenger Annie Andrews in November.

A Special Primary Timeline

Determining the permanent Republican nominee will require a separate process dictated by South Carolina Code § 7-11-55.

The statute mandates that the death of a nominee selected through a primary election creates a vacancy that must be resolved through a special primary election.

• Filing Period: The filing window for candidates seeking the nomination opens on the second Tuesday following the vacancy, which places the opening date on July 21.
• Filing Close: The filing period remains open for one week, closing on July 28.
• Special Primary: The special primary election will be held on the second Tuesday following the close of filing, scheduling the vote for August 11.
• Run-Off Election: If no candidate secures a majority, a run-off election must be held two weeks later, on August 25.

State law requires the final nomination to be officially certified no less than two weeks before the general election, establishing an October 20 deadline. If certification occurs later than that window, the office must be filled via a separate special election held the month after the general election.

Ballot Management

Because election logistics are already underway, the statute addresses the potential complications of printed ballots. Election officials are not legally required to reprint ballots that have already been finalized, though they are permitted to reprint them or cover the deceased candidate’s name where feasible.

Under South Carolina Code § 7-13-370, votes cast for a deceased candidate whose name remains on a printed ballot will automatically be counted for the newly certified nominee.

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U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, is seen during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on Capitol Hill on May 12 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.)

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