US public libraries at ‘breaking point’ amid ideological attacks, report finds

1 September 2026 at 15:30

PEN America study details verbal and physical threats to librarians, funding cuts and proliferation of book bans

Public libraries in the US are “at breaking point” because of an onslaught of political interference, harassment and ideological censorship, a new report published on Tuesday said.

Book bans, cancelled story hours, attacks on librarians, funding cuts and the undoing of libraries’ independent governance are examined by the free expression advocacy group PEN America in its study called Out of Circulation: Expanding Censorship in Public Libraries.

The man who shaped Trump: book sheds fresh light on ruthless Roy Cohn

The Guardian

By: Martin Pengelly in Washington

1 September 2026 at 14:00

American Scoundrel tells story of McCarthy attack dog, mob lawyer and Trump mentor – will the president be thumbing its pages?

Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark have written a book Trumpworld doesn’t want you to read. Published on Tuesday, American Scoundrel is a propulsive, horrifying biography of Roy Cohn, the New York mob lawyer whose extraordinary life charted, as the book’s subtitle has it, a “Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump”.

“I told my publicist to reach out to any of the Fox News hosts and reporters, to Joe Rogan, Steve Bannon,” Bird said. “We haven’t gotten a peep, other than Joe Rogan. He said he looked at the galleys, and he got back to my publicist and said, ‘I’m not interested.’ I’m kind of surprised. This is a serious biography of the president’s mentor, whom he publicly admires and says he still misses.”

The 100 Best Easy Dinner Ideas for Right Now

NYT > Top Stories

By: Emily Weinstein

1 September 2026 at 15:59

The Weeknight 100 is back, with so many fast, delicious dinner ideas for busy times.

Under Story by Chloe Benjamin review – this time-reversal melodrama is quantum hokum

The Guardian

By: Beejay Silcox

1 September 2026 at 11:00

A grieving couple who have lost their son find a way to a mirror universe where time runs backwards – but the narrative machinery is shonky and distracting

There is something farcical – grotesque, even – about life played in reverse. A child falling into a tree. A sandwich emerging from a mouth, bite by reconstituted bite. A doctor unstitching a wound. The world is strange in any order, but rewind helps us notice – makes the ordinary absurd.

Novels that pick a fight with forward momentum tend to harness this absurdity, revel in it. In The Cockroach (2019), Ian McEwan gives us a sneering Brexit fable about political nostalgia. If voters want to turn back the clock, let them. He unleashes “Economic Reversalism”, which sees employees pay for the privilege of work, and every pound sent back to where it came from. In Time’s Arrow (1991), Martin Amis inverts the Holocaust. Just imagine it, he dares us: a network of sanatoriums instead of death camps. A vast machinery of reparation run by benevolent Nazis. How monstrously laughable.

Wendell Berry, US author, farmer and environmentalist, dies aged 92

World news | The Guardian

By: Associated Press

1 September 2026 at 09:34

Author and Kentucky native, who celebrated the farming world of his home state and warned of the excesses of industrial society, died at home

Wendell Berry, the Kentucky-born author and agrarian whose poems, stories, novels and essays celebrated the farming communities of his native state and warned of the excesses and misjudgments of an industrial, commercialized society, has died aged 92.

His daughter, Mary Berry, confirmed on Monday that he died in his home in Port Royal, Kentucky.

Scaring monkeys? Detecting bedbugs? Meet the elite working dogs – in pictures

The Guardian

By: Mee-Lai Stone

1 September 2026 at 09:00

John Fabiano has travelled the globe photographing dogs with jobs – from Italian truffle sniffers and Greenlandic sled dogs to Perla the hotel receptionist in Cologne

Anita Brookner by Hermione Lee review – an enigmatic literary great given her due

The Guardian

By: Lucy Atkins

1 September 2026 at 09:00

This exhaustive biography of the Booker winner brings her properly out of the shadows for the first time

‘Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.” The first fictional sentence Anita Brookner ever published, aged 53, in A Start in Life, certainly set a tone. If people have heard of Brookner today, Hermione Lee says, they imagine a lonely, cardiganed woman yearning for an absent lover. “This,” says Lee (an emeritus English professor at the University of Oxford), “won’t do.”

The cardiganed image confuses the author with her protagonists. Of 24 novels written across 30 years, only the first four – A Start in Life, Providence, Look at Me and Hotel du Lac – are about a single woman pining for love. There is certainly a “Brooknerian” style, characterised by elegance, restraint and melancholia, but her fiction engaged with our emotional lives broadly, examining family, exile, home, trauma, ageing and much more.

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