The final bell tolls on primary school this week, and while the children are thrilled to move on, their parent is having an existential crisis about the passage of time and the looming loss of school gate rituals. No more WhatsApp groups coordinating volunteers, no more mandatory morning departures from the house. The silver lining, or so the thinking goes, is entry into what might charitably be called a Miss Havisham period of isolation and declining cardiovascular health.
American schools have turned the end of each grade into a full ceremonial production, starting in nursery and continuing through high school graduation. The formality can be surprisingly moving. At a fifth-grade elementary school graduation near Times Square, children wore ties and dresses while deliberately tear-jerking songs played, culminating in the principal performing a number from Wicked. Back in London, the transitions are quieter and less theatrical, though the cultural messaging remains clear: this is a major life milestone.
The peculiar thing about marking the end of primary school so heavily is that it obscures a harder truth: the children are not actually leaving home. They will require micromanaging through college and beyond. A friend with a son in his second year of university reports that her summer will be spent helping him revise for resits, a vision that somehow reassures rather than terrifies. There is still a decade or more of dependence ahead.
Trump's reckoning arrives
After years of fighting the verdict, Donald Trump has been forced to pay E Jean Carroll 5.6 million dollars, a sum held in escrow since a 2023 civil case that found him liable for sexual abuse and subsequent defamation. The Supreme Court rejected his appeal, leaving him no legal avenue to avoid the payment this week. Being held to account appears to be a sensation nearly foreign to him.
Trump's response lacked any grace or contrition. Aaron Harrison, a spokesperson for his personal lawyers, issued a statement calling the cases a Democrat-funded travesty and referring to the Carroll lawsuit as a hoax. Meanwhile, Carroll's legal team is already looking ahead to the 83.3 million dollar judgment from a separate 2024 defamation case, awaiting resolution in her favor.
A minefield of hazards awaits travelers
A trip to the United States next week feels like Russian roulette with infectious disease. Pick your poison: legionnaires' disease has sickened at least 28 people in Manhattan, possibly spread through bacteria in cooling towers. A cyclosporiasis outbreak, transmitted via bagged lettuce and leafy greens, has infected thousands in the midwest and hundreds in New York. Massive toxic clouds drift down the eastern seaboard from Canadian wildfires.
New York salad chains like Chopped have been swarmed by reporters asking whether lettuce remains on the menu. Most diners exiting with bowls of greens said they would take their chances. This column will not. The parasitic threat provides long-overdue validation for the conviction that lettuce is not actually food, merely a placeholder. Spinach is acceptable, kale manageable with dressing, but a bowl of lettuce for lunch amounts to a sentence of hard labor with minimal nutritional reward for the effort.
The Netflix remake of Little House on the Prairie arrived this week as a soothing visual experience: big skies, long skirts, men sawing wood for log cabins. It functions best as background ambience while vacuuming, not as something demanding full attention through all eight episodes. The show's path to screens was complicated by former Fox News host Megyn Kelly warning Netflix against woke-fying the story, apparently concerned that the narrative might suggest America's foundations involved anything other than wholesome collaboration and traditional gender roles.
The series plays as melodrama, which helpfully lowers expectations. By introducing a neighboring Osage family, it manages to feel slightly more aligned with 2024 than either the 1970s television version or the 1930s original novel.
Britain's top tourist attractions have launched a campaign demanding more nuanced weather icons on forecasting apps. The tiny raincloud symbol costs these venues thousands in revenue whenever it appears in the daily summary, even when rain is forecast for just 15 minutes at 11 p.m. A 50% drop in visitors can result from a single raincloud icon, a psychological blow that extends beyond commercial concerns. Glancing at a week ahead filled with tiny rainclouds is an efficient mood killer. The campaign will culminate in a summit at Chester Zoo to address the problem.
Author James Rodriguez: "The salad scare is the universe's way of telling Americans what they already know: lettuce deserves to be avoided."
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