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Leo Hare, a pious Christian from Texas, recently joined the long list of foreigners who have been mugged by Russian reality over the decades. In 2023, disillusioned by his homeland’s perceived decadence (such as tolerance for gay people), he decided to move his family to President Vladimir Putin’s empire—a society that allegedly embodied solid Christian belief and traditional family values. The Russian government granted him asylum. How shocking, then, when Leo was swindled out of $66,000 by a Russian contact he trusted, leaving his family homeless. He also said that he became “increasingly concerned about the state of Russia’s economy…

Decades ago, the world of fashion was smaller and feistier, dominated by eccentric, visionary designers trying to express themselves. Sure, they wanted to make money, but many were also trying to change the world by changing how people dressed. The idea was to create something all new and excitingly “now.”These were not marketing-department drones. They were characters. Halston partied at Studio 54 until 4 or 5 a.m. then arrived at his office around noon to start work. In Paris, Karl Lagerfeld was locked in a feud with Yves Saint Laurent over their shared love interest, the French socialite Jacques de…

The Trump administration is dismantling a wide array of federal energy-efficiency programs at the same time that war in Iran is raising oil prices, climate change is fueling record heat that is driving up demand for air conditioning and new data centers are straining America’s electricity supply.“The turn away from efficiency has been oddly timed,” said Christine Egan, executive director of the Collaborative Labeling and Appliance Standards Program, a nonprofit group that works on efficiency policies worldwide. “Energy prices are going up, demand is going up, and you’d think we would want our products to be as efficient as possible.”The…

Today he is a progressive Democrat calling for “Medicare for all,” the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and a federal right to abortion.But Troy Jackson got his start in politics as a Republican who was opposed to abortion rights and same-sex marriage.Mr. Jackson, who is poised to become his party’s new nominee for Senate in Maine after Graham Platner’s departure, has completed a remarkable evolution on social issues since he started organizing fellow loggers in the state’s northern tip in the 1990s.As his political ambitions rose, Mr. Jackson, a former president of the Maine Senate, kept pushing his economic…

As the U.S. war with Iran spilled across the Middle East over the past five months, Yemen largely stayed on the sidelines.That was until Monday, when the Iran-backed Houthi militia, which controls a significant part of Yemen, declared a maritime blockade on Saudi Arabia, a U.S. ally. The move threatened to open a new front in the regional war and further disrupt global energy supplies.Here’s what to know about the rising tensions in Yemen.Will the Houthis enter the U.S.-Iran war?The Houthis, a rebel group from Yemen’s northern highlands, seized control of the capital, Sana, more than a decade ago with…

How about Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act?On June 30, 2025, the title of a White House news release claimed “The One Big Beautiful Bill Slashes Deficits, National Debt While Unleashing Economic Growth.”The reality:Just before Trump took office, the nation’s debt was $36.2 trillion, according to the U.S. Treasury Department. The debt is now more than $39.5 trillion, an increase of $3.3 trillion.I asked political and presidential scholars how they think Trump’s mind works. Most pointed to his seemingly exclusive reliance on his own judgment while rejecting expert advice.“Many presidents have made mistakes, but none have made mistakes so cavalierly…

Everyone wants to thrive in their careers. Those in the know — especially, as of late, in tech — are not just grasping for satisfaction. They are trying to enter what they call their “zone of genius.”The concept, popularized by Gay Hendricks in his 2009 self-help book, “The Big Leap,” describes the intersection between one’s skills and passions. When you’re in the zone of genius, “it’s not exactly creativity or workplace satisfaction,” he said in an interview. “It’s freedom, it’s zest, it’s energy.” Mr. Hendricks believes he was the first to use the term.Ideally, he said, one could find work…

In 2017, Emily Olson, a stay-at-home mom based in Boulder, Colorado, started selling prints and custom-made puppy portraits on Etsy.Her watercolors were simple and relatively cheap—images of saucer-eyed corgis and malamutes in mini-tuxes, which she sold for $75 to $300 each—but dog owners adored them: “They were a labor of love,” she says. In 2021, she says she made more than $40,000 off her Etsy store, and her social media following ballooned to 180,000 followers on YouTube.But in 2022, she noticed something odd: Her sales started precipitously declining. Competitors flooded the platform, and she kept finding copies of her work…

The math on solar panels is getting tougher.President Trump ended the federal tax credit last year, but the story goes back further than that. Over the last decade, more than a third of U.S. states have changed their rules to allow utilities to pay homeowners less for the energy they send to the grid.In some places, those changes have reduced savings for homeowners by hundreds or thousands of dollars each year, making solar a less appealing investment and dealing a blow to the industry.The changes all spin out from a simple fact: Solar generates most of its power in the…

To the sailors recruited from India, it was just another job. But the ship they boarded was a shadow fleet tanker destined for a war zone.The Settebello had spent at least five years moving Iranian oil that was under U.S. sanctions, often disguising its location, according to a maritime tracking firm. It hid again in early June in the Gulf of Oman, east of the Strait of Hormuz, where it loaded fuel from other ships at sea.On the morning of June 10, it became a target of the U.S. Navy.Shortly after 7 a.m., U.S. missiles blasted into the engine room…