The Washington Post’s Post

Joe Biden’s engagement with 20-something influencers underscores his imperative to connect with young voters, but creators face criticism for posting in support of him, particularly over Biden’s backing of Israel amid high civilian casualties in Gaza. 

After taking office in 2009, and almost every July since, Barack Obama has shared his summer reading with the public. It’s become something of an annual ritual in the publishing world; the former president’s literary endorsement boosts a book’s profile roughly as much as winning a National Book Award. This year’s predictions lean heavily on fiction, in part because Obama generally adds more nonfiction to his “best of” lists, posted in December. They’re also limited to books published this calendar year. 

President Biden told Democratic governors during a private meeting at the White House on Wednesday evening that he needed to get more sleep and that he had instructed his staff to avoid scheduling events for him after 8 p.m. The meeting was an hour-long discussion with the governors in which Biden was seeking to reassure them of his political standing, physical well-being and path to reelection. Biden’s comment that he needs more sleep marked one of several explanations he has offered for a debate performance in which he stumbled over words and sometimes struggled to complete sentences. He has attributed the performance to being sick, suffering from jet lag, having a mind crammed with numbers and not listening to his staff.

Keir Starmer will be the most working-class leader of Britain in a generation — coming in after a prime minister who by some counts was richer than the royals. He was a lefty lawyer who defended vegan anarchists before he was an editor of a Trotsky magazine in his youth, yet he delighted capitalists by putting “wealth creation” at the heart of the Labour Party platform this year. He was an anti-monarchist who was then knighted as “Sir Keir” and now will meet with the king once a week. It all makes for a complex, messy, real-life story. It also makes it tricky to anticipate what sort of prime minister Starmer will be.

Clare Staples was an entertainment producer in Los Angeles when she learned about a decades-long dispute involving the plight of wild mustangs. The controversy centered on whether wild horses should run free in western states. Advocates said herds should run free on federal lands, while ranchers complained the feral horses ruined grazing fields that are shared with cattle. Staples was immediately and firmly in the “run free” camp. With help from her husband, Staples started a nonprofit in 2016 and began taking in mustangs that were rounded up by the Bureau of Land Management, posting stories about them on Facebook and Instagram. 

President Biden, who at 81 is the oldest person ever to hold the office, has displayed signs of accelerated aging in recent months, said numerous aides, foreign officials, members of Congress, donors and others who have interacted with Biden over the last 3½ years. None of those who spoke to The Washington Post said they had seen Biden appear as lost and confused as he did at the presidential debate against Donald Trump on June 27, where his halting performance sent panic through the Democratic Party. Nevertheless, Biden has slowed considerably over the last several months, according to 21 people, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic and share candid assessments.

With 175 million active users and partnerships with A-list celebrities like Taylor Swift, Meta’s newest social network has the makings of a viable rival to Elon Musk’s X. But ahead of a presidential election that will play out partly on social media, one of the biggest obstacles to Threads’ relevance might be self-imposed. Its leader, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri, argues #Threads can surpass X without promoting the kind of content that made that app so influential in the first place: hard news, politics and hot-button social issues. The next four months will test that theory.

With his famous father watching intently from across the Los Angeles Lakers’ practice court, Bronny James held up his yellow jersey, featuring the No. 9 and “James Jr.” on the back, for a crowd of dozens of reporters. “I never really had a thought of me going to play with my dad,” Bronny James said. Bronny will be part of the NBA’s first father-and-son duo when he takes the court with LeBron James next season. “... [Playing with him] is for sure an amplified amount of pressure. I’ve already seen it in the media and on the internet, talking about how I might not deserve an opportunity. I’ve been dealing with stuff like this my whole life. It’s nothing different, but it’s more amplified for sure. I’ll get through it.”

The Sims isn’t like other video games. Instead of inviting players to explore faraway fantasy lands or fight in imagined battlefields, the world of The Sims hews closer to reality. But for a subset of players, it’s not just a game. They’re using it to practice for their real lives. Madelyn House first designed her greenhouse business, Prairie House Gardens, in The Sims. “The Sims lets you be imaginative and lets creativity flow in a way that's hard to do in real life,” she said. The virtual legwork paid off and her real-life plant business doubled its sales in two years. Here’s how nine people used The Sims to inspire their real lives.

Over the past 3½ years, MSNBC hosts reliably provided support for Biden and trained fire on his adversaries. But now, the network’s most prominent liberal personalities have criticized Biden’s debate performance and questioned his viability as a candidate.