5 h. ago Trump hates this ‘super bad’ photo of him in Time magazine. I almost feel sympathy almost | Emma Brockes

This is a man who once mocked the movements of a disabled reporter, so we’ll take what schadenfreude we can getIt is, in my experience, often the photo that does it. You can be nice or mean, bland or snide, accurate or wildly off-base. But none of what you write as a journalist matters much in comparison with the photo that runs alongside it. That’s the main determinant of how bitterly a subject will complain about a piece, or whether they will tip from mildly annoyed to actively raging. In this regard, Donald Trump, who went after Time magazine this week for using a photo of him on the cover he has called “super bad” and “the Worst of All Time”, has acted in a way that, unusually for the president, is in line with how other people act.Even more unusually, he’s not wrong. The Time cover, shot from below to give readers an unrestricted view up Trump’s nose, is extremely unflattering. His turkey wattle neck looks like a ski run after the snow has melted. His eye is reptilian. His hair...

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38 h. ago ‘Worst of all time’: Trump complains about ‘super bad photo’ on Time Magazine cover

Donald Trump concluded a whistle-stop tour of Israel and Egypt on Monday

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6 d. ago I never thought I'd say this, but I now understand the appeal of home schooling | Emma Brockes

More and more parents in England are opting their kids out of the education system. I could never do it, but ‘wellbeing days’ do sound niceIf you want to get rich, a friend of mine said recently, set up an exam centre. We were talking about her decision to home school – or unschool, or home educate, depending on your tribal affiliation – her two children, making her simultaneously part of a broader trend and also somewhat strange to herself. The cliche of home schooling still leans on the idea of a fringe choice made by fanatical parents who produce a poorly socialised child – if you said of a child: “They’re home schooled”, you’d trigger a knowing look that implied: “Say no more.”Well – maybe – all that is changing. Home schooling is still fringe, but the numbers are soaring. In 2024, UK councils received 66,000 notifications of children moving to education at home, more than double the number from 2020 and bringing up the total to some 111,700 children in England. Given that there...

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1 week ago There were two paths for America and Lilith Fair was one of them. Sadly it chose the other | Emma Brockes

The all-female tour was a counterpoint to the era’s misogyny. We could do with some of that promise todayThere’s an argument to be made that the first person in the US to spot the oncoming freight train of the Maga movement – fully 17 years before the first election of Trump – wasn’t a political forecaster or a bearded contrarian but the rock star Sheryl Crow. In 1999, Crow appeared at a press conference backstage at Lilith Fair, the all-women music festival, during which she was asked about a disastrous appearance she had recently made at Woodstock ‘99. This was the Woodstock reboot in upstate New York marred by violence, sexual assault and an angry male crowd that heckled the few female artists present with, “show us your tits.” Crowe, smiling bleakly, said, “I’m hoping it doesn’t represent our future as a nation or the youth of America.”Well, as they say: ha. Crow’s comments feature in Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery, a new documentary by Ally Pankiw on Disney+ and a mind-blowing...

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2 w. ago MAGA rages after NFL picks ‘Trump Hater’ Bad Bunny for 2026 Super Bowl halftime show

Announcement follows Bad Bunny’s decision not to tour in the U.S. over fears that Immigration, Customs and Enforcement agents ‘could be outside’ his concert venues

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3 w. ago Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir has raised eyebrows – but she always comes out on top | Emma Brockes

A new tale from the longtime purveyor of self-love is both horrific and poorly done, and nobody’s sure how to respondIf you are someone who reads multiple news sources a day, a fun way to occasionally spend your time over the last few weeks would have been to watch how critics and commentators have grappled with a hard problem. It is not, admittedly, as hard as the problem of grappling with consciousness. But it is hard enough that the famous assurance by Glennon Doyle, lifestyle coach and thought leader, that “we can do hard things,” remains relevant. I am talking about the problem of how we talk about All the Way to the River, Elizabeth Gilbert’s new memoir – specifically, how to be kinder and more measured about it than the book really deserves.As you may know if you are one of the 30 million people who bought Eat Pray Love, one of the tens of millions who have read Big Magic or one of her other novels, or simply one of her 1.2 million followers on Instagram, Gilbert recently pub...

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3 w. ago After quitting the US, Britain seemed like a sanctuary from Trump’s Maga movement. Now I wonder, for how long? | Emma Brockes

I was the envy of the friends I’d left behind. Now it seems prudent to assess how much that nativism will truly take root hereThis time last year, I had just moved back to Britain from the US and was enjoying the almost universal envy of American friends. While they were looking down the barrel of a second Trump presidency with its guarantee of chaos and division, we had elected Keir Starmer by a landslide and were feeling pretty pleased with ourselves. I remember people congratulating me on the prescience of my move, which I absolutely took even though politics hadn’t been part of my decision (not least because, for most of 2024, I had assumed Trump would lose). Anyway, here we are a year later and who’s laughing now?I guess the answer to that is Nigel Farage and his Reform UK party, which has somehow managed to harness the anger, disappointment and shame felt by large numbers of people who voted for and were then let down by Brexit, and are now in search of another fire to light. ...

Politics

3 w. ago I quit the US and Britain seemed like a sanctuary from Trump’s Maga movement. Now I wonder, for how long | Emma Brockes

I was the envy of the friends I’d left behind. Now it seems prudent to assess how much that nativism will truly take root hereThis time last year, I had just moved back to Britain from the US and was enjoying the almost universal envy of American friends. While they were looking down the barrel of a second Trump presidency with its guarantee of chaos and division, we had elected Keir Starmer by a landslide and were feeling pretty pleased with ourselves. I remember people congratulating me on the prescience of my move, which I absolutely took even though politics hadn’t been part of my decision (not least because, for most of 2024, I had assumed Trump would lose). Anyway, here we are a year later and who’s laughing now?I guess the answer to that is Nigel Farage and his Reform UK party, which has somehow managed to harness the anger, disappointment and shame felt by large numbers of people who voted for and were then let down by Brexit, and are now in search of another fire to light. ...

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