Six great reads: gravity-defying boobs, an ayahuasca multinational, and Jesse Armstrong on tech bros
'Breasts,' wrote Jess Cartner-Morley, 'have always been political – and right now they're front and centre again. Is it yet another way in which Trump's worldview is reshaping the culture?'
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'His staff were underpaid and overworked, his manner overbearing. He built a hierarchical organisation that made him rich, while many of his employees went into debt with the company. He promoted ayahuasca as a panacea for all suffering, and despite having no training, practised a confrontational and sometimes cruel form of therapy on vulnerable people with serious trauma. Traditional practitioners and healers protested he was bringing their practice into disrepute. Ayahuasca was not something you could roll out on an industrial scale with minimal oversight, they said. Accidents would happen.'
Alberto Varela claimed he wanted to use sacred plant medicine to free people's minds. But as the organisation grew, wrote Sam Edwards, his followers discovered a darker reality.Read more
The Guardian reproductive health and justice reporter Carter Sherman has spent the past few years travelling the country and interviewing more than 100 teenagers and twentysomethings about their sex lives: 'It is true that they are having even less sex, less than millennials, but they are not uninterested in sex. Instead, many have understood, from an early age, something that eluded past generations: that sex, its consequences, and control over both are political weapons.' Here, she explores how they're resisting older definitions of sex and gender – in the face of the right's bid for bodily control.
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'From the road, it's barely visible; glimpsed, maybe, if peered at with cheeks pressed against the property's imposing iron gates. There is otherwise little out of the ordinary in this quiet Kent corner of London's affluent commuter belt – St Michael's has a village hall, a country club, a farm shop. But at the end of a snaking, hedge-lined driveway is an incongruous home: a sprawling, six-bedroom neo-Georgian mansion, almost every inch, inside and out, covered in the trademark black-on-white line drawings of its owner, Mr Doodle, the 31-year-old artist Sam Cox.'
Michael Segalov travelled to the Doodle House to meet Cox and his family and to talk about how, behind the scenes of creating this piece of giant liveable art, he was unravelling into psychosis.
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Armstrong is the master of ripped-from-the-headlines drama, a writer who skewers the billionaire class. As Mountainhead takes him into new territory, he told Danny Leigh about his nuanced view of the world's richest man: 'Musk has done huge damage in the world, particularly with Doge, but I have a lot of sympathy for him – this is a traumatised human being.'
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Once a hangout for sex workers and drug addicts, a parking lot in Medellín, Colombia, has been reborn as a green haven for all. Oliver Wainwright met the 'social urbanists' credited with reducing crime – and even temperatures.
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White House moves to calm bullion markets after tariff threat
The White House said on Friday night that it would clarify what it called 'misinformation' about import tariffs for gold bars that pushed gold futures to record highs on bullion markets during the day. A ruling on the US Customs and Border Protection service's website said on Friday that Washington may place the most widely traded gold bullion bars in the United States under country-specific import tariffs, a move that would cause disruption in the precious metal's global supply chains. The US border agency's ruling refers to cast gold bars from Switzerland, the world's biggest bullion refining and transit hub. The country is subject to White House import tariffs of 39 per cent. US gold futures pared gains after the White House comments and spot gold, the global benchmark, was up 1.1 per cent on the day at $3,439.10, its second highest close in history. The US agency said in a ruling letter that 1kg and 100-ounce gold bars should be classified under a customs code subject to tariffs, the Financial Times reported. The Swiss Association of Precious Metals Manufacturers and Traders said that the clarification applied to any country delivering these bars to America. 'The United States is a longstanding market for us, so this is a blow for the industry and for Switzerland,' Christoph Wild, president of the association, said. 'With a tariff of 39 per cent, exports of gold bars will be definitely stopped to the US.' • From Taco to Waco — is Trump's tariff strategy paying off? While Switzerland is the refining and transit hub, Britain is home to the world's largest over-the-counter gold trading hub, and South Africa and Canada are among major gold miners. Gold bars have in the past been exempt from tariffs. The global gold market has traditionally used futures on the US Comex exchange to hedge positions, under the assumption that the metal could be physically shipped to the US to physically settle contracts if needed. Swiss officials this week attempted to have the tariff increase overturned, but Karin Keller-Sutter, the Swiss president, appeared to be unsuccessful after meeting Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, in Washington on Wednesday. UBS bank said that about 78 per cent of Switzerland's gold exports to the US have been under the tariff-exempt 'unwrought' category for several years, which the new ruling appears to challenge. have fuelled a historic rally for bullion this year, and spot prices of the precious metal have risen by more than a quarter since the start of the year. Before 'liberation day' in April, traders rushed to bring gold to the US on the basis that the yellow metal might be subject to tariffs. However, when the levies were announced, exemptions covered certain types of bullion, which analysts believed at the time included gold bars. It remains unclear whether other types of bar, such as the 400 troy ounce bar used in London, would also be subject to tariffs. It is also unclear when tariffs on gold would come into force and if they apply to exports from all countries. Switzerland refines most of the world's gold STEFAN WERMUTH/BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGES Joni Teves, an analyst at UBS, said that the market could react by changing delivery standards, for example by allowing settlement of futures contracts in locations such as London. • 'In the long run, the existence of US tariffs on deliverable gold products raises the question of the role of futures trading in the US as a means to hedge and whether other centres eventually step up as alternatives,' Teves said. 'There is still a lot of uncertainty around all this, and until there is clarity, we expect the gold market and precious metals markets more generally to remain very nervous.'
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
I know the truth about the revolting sex smear spat between the Fox starlet and MAGA tradwife... nobody is going to be happy to hear this: KENNEDY
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The Independent
2 hours ago
- The Independent
As electric bills rise, evidence mounts that data centers share blame. States feel pressure to act
Amid rising electric bills, states are under pressure to insulate regular household and business ratepayers from the costs of feeding Big Tech 's energy-hungry data centers. It's not clear that any state has a solution and the actual effect of data centers on electricity bills is difficult to pin down. Some critics question whether states have the spine to take a hard line against tech behemoths like Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta. But more than a dozen states have begun taking steps as data centers drive a rapid build-out of power plants and transmission lines. That has meant pressuring the nation's biggest power grid operator to clamp down on price increases, studying the effect of data centers on electricity bills or pushing data center owners to pay a larger share of local transmission costs. Rising power bills are 'something legislators have been hearing a lot about. It's something we've been hearing a lot about. More people are speaking out at the public utility commission in the past year than I've ever seen before,' said Charlotte Shuff of the Oregon Citizens' Utility Board, a consumer advocacy group. 'There's a massive outcry.' Not the typical electric customer Some data centers could require more electricity than cities the size of Pittsburgh, Cleveland or New Orleans, and make huge factories look tiny by comparison. That's pushing policymakers to rethink a system that, historically, has spread transmission costs among classes of consumers that are proportional to electricity use. 'A lot of this infrastructure, billions of dollars of it, is being built just for a few customers and a few facilities and these happen to be the wealthiest companies in the world,' said Ari Peskoe, who directs the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard University. 'I think some of the fundamental assumptions behind all this just kind of breaks down.' A fix, Peskoe said, is a 'can of worms" that pits ratepayer classes against one another. Some officials downplay the role of data centers in pushing up electric bills. Tricia Pridemore, who sits on Georgia's Public Service Commission and is president of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, pointed to an already tightened electricity supply and increasing costs for power lines, utility poles, transformers and generators as utilities replace aging equipment or harden it against extreme weather. The data centers needed to accommodate the artificial intelligence boom are still in the regulatory planning stages, Pridemore said, and the Data Center Coalition, which represents Big Tech firms and data center developers, has said its members are committed to paying their fair share. But growing evidence suggests that the electricity bills of some Americans are rising to subsidize the massive energy needs of Big Tech as the U.S. competes in a race against China for artificial intelligence superiority. Data and analytics firm Wood Mackenzie published a report in recent weeks that suggested 20 proposed or effective specialized rates for data centers in 16 states it studied aren't nearly enough to cover the cost of a new natural gas power plant. In other words, unless utilities negotiate higher specialized rates, other ratepayer classes — residential, commercial and industrial — are likely paying for data center power needs. Meanwhile, Monitoring Analytics, the independent market watchdog for the mid-Atlantic grid, produced research in June showing that 70% — or $9.3 billion — of last year's increased electricity cost was the result of data center demand. States are responding Last year, five governors led by Pennsylvania's Josh Shapiro began pushing back against power prices set by the mid-Atlantic grid operator, PJM Interconnection, after that amount spiked nearly sevenfold. They warned of customers 'paying billions more than is necessary.' PJM has yet to propose ways to guarantee that data centers pay their freight, but Monitoring Analytics is floating the idea that data centers should be required to procure their own power. In a filing last month, it said that would avoid a "massive wealth transfer' from average people to tech companies. At least a dozen states are eyeing ways to make data centers pay higher local transmission costs. In Oregon, a data center hot spot, lawmakers passed legislation in June ordering state utility regulators to develop new — presumably higher — power rates for data centers. The Oregon Citizens' Utility Board says there is clear evidence that costs to serve data centers are being spread across all customers — at a time when some electric bills there are up 50% over the past four years and utilities are disconnecting more people than ever. New Jersey's governor signed legislation last month commissioning state utility regulators to study whether ratepayers are being hit with 'unreasonable rate increases' to connect data centers and to develop a specialized rate to charge data centers. In some other states, like Texas and Utah, governors and lawmakers are trying to avoid a supply-and-demand crisis that leaves ratepayers on the hook — or in the dark. Doubts about states protecting ratepayers In Indiana, state utility regulators approved a settlement between Indiana Michigan Power Co., Amazon, Google, Microsoft and consumer advocates that set parameters for data center payments for service. Kerwin Olsen, of the Citizens Action Council of Indiana, a consumer advocacy group, signed the settlement and called it a 'pretty good deal' that contained more consumer protections than what state lawmakers passed. But, he said, state law doesn't force large power users like data centers to publicly reveal their electric usage, so pinning down whether they're paying their fair share of transmission costs "will be a challenge.' In a March report, the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard University questioned the motivation of utilities and regulators to shield ratepayers from footing the cost of electricity for data centers. Both utilities and states have incentives to attract big customers like data centers, it said. To do it, utilities — which must get their rates approved by regulators — can offer 'special deals to favored customers' like a data center and effectively shift the costs of those discounts to regular ratepayers, the authors wrote. Many state laws can shield disclosure of those rates, they said. In Pennsylvania, an emerging data center hot spot, the state utility commission is drafting a model rate structure for utilities to consider adopting. An overarching goal is to get data center developers to put their money where their mouth is. 'We're talking about real transmission upgrades, potentially hundreds of millions of dollars,' commission chairman Stephen DeFrank said. 'And that's what you don't want the ratepayer to get stuck paying for." ___
