President Donald Trump promised yesterday that peace is at hand in his trade war upon China. “We have agreed to a very large Phase One Deal with China,” he tweeted at 10:25 a.m. “They have agreed to many structural changes and massive purchases of Agricultural Product, Energy, and Manufactured Goods, plus much more.” Beijing also announced that the two sides had reached an agreement.

Yet the first reports on the details suggest something less than a “very large” deal—it seems more a pause and truce. Still, the world will be spared the round of United States tariffs that were scheduled for December 15. By 2020, Trump's trade wars could cost the global economy $700 billion, the International Monetary Fund estimates. More tariffs would have cost more still.

From the outside it looks steady.

It looks resolved. Sitting heavily in a chair, with settled opinions and stodgy shoes—there’s something unbudgeable about the middle-aged person. The young are dewy and volatile; the old are toppling into fragility. But the middle-aged hold their ground. There’s a kind of magnetism to this solidity, this dowdy poise, this impressively median state.

But on the inside … You’re in deep flux. A second puberty, almost. Inflammations, precarious accelerations. Dysmorphic shock in the bathroom mirror: Jesus, who is that? Strange new acts of grooming are suddenly necessary. Maybe you’ve survived a bout of something serious; you probably have a couple of fussy little private afflictions. You need ointment. It feels like a character flaw. Maybe it is a character flaw.

Half an hour down the highway from Topeka, Kansas, not far from the geographic center of the United States, sits the town of St. Marys. Like many towns in the region, it is small, quiet, and conservative. Unlike many towns in the region, it is growing. As waves of young people have abandoned the Great Plains in search of economic opportunity, St. Marys has managed to attract families from across the nation. The newcomers have made the radical choice to uproot their lives in pursuit of an ideological sanctuary, a place where they can raise their children according to values no longer common in mainstream America.

Most of the world’s seas are in some kind of environmental trouble, but few have declined as quickly or from such precipitous heights as the Mediterranean’s eastern edge. Although it midwifed some of history’s greatest civilizations, the eastern Med has become a grubby embodiment of the current littoral states’ failures. Where the ancients sailed, many of their successors now junk industrial waste. The accomplishments of the Greeks, Phoenicians, Romans, and pharaonic Egyptians, among others, have only accentuated their descendants’ political and economic rot.

In recent years, the eastern Med has come to something of a “now or never” moment to salvage, or savage, the sea once and for all. Big, new offshore gas finds have set the countries along its banks against one another as they jockey for a share of the riches. Renewed great-power games, particularly over Syria, have turned the sea into even more of a geopolitical battleground. In some parts of it, warships and air forces from as far afield as Pakistan warily crisscross its waters. With much of Europe fixated on migrant flows across the Continent’s southern border, there are more obstacles to addressing the eastern Med’s environmental woes than ever before.

Jesse Aguirre’s workday at Slack starts with a standard engineering meeting—programmers call them “standups”—where he and his co-workers plan the day’s agenda. Around the circle stand graduates from Silicon Valley’s top companies and the nation’s top universities. Aguirre, who is 26, did not finish high school and has so far spent most of his adulthood in prison; Slack is his first full-time employer. But in the few years he has been writing code, he has cultivated what is perhaps the most useful skill in any software engineer’s arsenal: the ability to figure things out on his own.

Aguirre, along with Lino Ornelas and Charles Anderson, make up the inaugural cohort of Next Chapter, an initiative launched by Slack, in partnership with the Last Mile, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and Free America, to help formerly incarcerated individuals land jobs in tech. Last year, when Next Chapter launched as an apprenticeship program at Slack—but didn’t guarantee full-time employment—Alexis C. Madrigal wrote in this publication, “Offering an apprenticeship rather than a permanent job may not seem like a huge distinction, but multiple advocates for formerly incarcerated people called attention to this part of the program design.”

When the NFL commissioner, Roger Goodell, declared yesterday that the league had “moved on” from the embattled quarterback Colin Kaepernick, the finality of Goodell’s tone answered the question about whether Kaepernick would ever play professional football again.

Kaepernick became persona non grata in the National Football League after the 2016 season, during which he protested police violence against African Americans by kneeling during the national anthem. The league then spent more than two years trying to make him go away, but seemed to relent by scheduling a workout for him last month in Atlanta. But that proposed session didn’t happen on the NFL’s terms, and Goodell, in his first public comments about the matter, implied yesterday that Kaepernick had blown his last chance.

The Britain that has emerged today is different from the one that came before, its old political map erased, its economic model upended, its prospects uncertain—even its very unity in doubt. The Britain built by Tony Blair is gone, fatally undermined by David Cameron’s Brexit referendum and now swept away in a provincial tide of support for Boris Johnson’s Conservatives.

To understand the scale of what has happened, remember that less than four years ago, Johnson was still London’s mayor and undecided about whether to back Leave or Remain in the referendum; Cameron was prime minister, with the first Conservative majority in more than 20 years; and Britain’s economy was among the most dynamic in Europe. A poll carried out the day before Johnson announced that he supported Brexit showed Remain running 15 percentage points ahead of Leave.

Sherwood Eddy was a prominent American missionary as well as that now rare thing, a Christian socialist. In the 1920s and ’30s, he made more than a dozen trips to the Soviet Union. He was not blind to the problems of the U.S.S.R., but he also found much to like. In place of squabbling, corrupt democratic politicians, he wrote in one of his books on the country, “Stalin rules … by his sagacity, his honesty, his rugged courage, his indomitable will and titanic energy.” Instead of the greed he found so pervasive in America, Russians seemed to him to be working for the joy of working.

Above all, though, he thought he had found in Russia something that his own individualistic society lacked: a “unified philosophy of life.” In Russia, he wrote, “all life is focused in a central purpose. It is directed to a single high end and energized by such powerful and glowing motivation that life seems to have supreme significance.”

Minutes after last night’s exit poll indicated that Boris Johnson’s Conservatives would win an 86-seat majority, a friend turned to me and said: “The Tories just won the 2024 election.” This was not merely a defeat for Labour and its left-wing leader, Jeremy Corbyn—it was an annihilation. The party, which has been in opposition since 2010, now faces another decade out of government.

When Corbyn was elected Labour leader four years ago, he was often compared to Michael Foot, who led the party to a crushing defeat in 1983 against Margaret Thatcher. Back then, Foot’s left-wing manifesto was described as “the longest suicide note in history.” Corbyn’s manifesto was nearly three times as long, and even less successful: he has led Labour to its worst showing since 1935. “In the past hundred years no opposition has lost seats after 9 years in opposition. None,” observed the former Labour adviser Torsten Bell.

Yesterday’s general election in the United Kingdom was a triumph for Brexit and Prime Minister Boris Johnson—and an unmitigated disaster for the Labour Party and its far-left leader, Jeremy Corbyn.

On paper, the conditions were ripe for a Labour victory. The Conservative Party has been in power for nine years. Johnson is controversial; according to most polls, his popularity ratings are significantly underwater. Although he promised to lead the country out of the European Union by October 31, alienating the half of the country that would like to remain in the EU, he failed to do so, disappointing the half of the country that wants to leave.

But when the day of the election came, Labour won its fewest members of Parliament since 1935. Strikingly, it lost scores of working-class constituencies it had held for generations, turning over large parts of its northern heartland to the Conservative Party. Rother Valley, a mining community in South Yorkshire, had been in the party’s hands since 1918; in 1966, the Labour candidate won it with a staggering 77 percent of the vote. Sedgefield, a proletarian town in England’s northeast, had been held by Labour since 1935; in 1997, Tony Blair won this constituency with 71 percent of the vote. Both are now in the hands of the Tories, who had long been known, simply, as the “nasty party” in those parts of the country.