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0 Share Newsweek is a Trust Project member See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. July was a month about the script—the one everybody knows by heart, and what happens when nobody follows it.
In Venezuela, six months after American forces took Nicolás Maduro, the Iraq-and-Libya sequel that Washington’s foreign policy establishment had promised simply failed to arrive. Across 33,772 ZIP codes, Newsweek went looking for the American Dream that both parties have pronounced dead, and found it alive—just not where the obituaries said to look. And in Indiana, a WNBA player said the unsayable about trans athletes in women’s sport, then went back to work with her sponsorships intact.
The rest of the month was about the things people would rather not say out loud. A suspected Islamist attack on a Berlin Pride march forced a question that Western progressive coalitions have spent years walking around. Iran’s new supreme leader has not been seen since February, and the men who actually hold the guns appear to prefer it that way. And in Maine, a Nazi tattoo turned out to be survivable while something else was not—which tells you the standard was never really about the symbol.
Here are six of my favorite articles from the month that made sense of it all for Newsweek members:
When American forces seized Nicolás Maduro in January, the warnings arrived on cue: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan. Six months on, this cover story finds that the predicted chaos never came. At least 670 political prisoners have been released, exiled opposition figures are flying home, oil production has climbed from roughly 800,000 barrels a day in January to 1.1 million by June, and Shell and SLB have signed back in. Then the ground moved—twin earthquakes on June 24, magnitudes 7.2 and 7.5, 39 seconds apart—leaving a reconstruction bill far beyond what Caracas can finance alone. Washington’s $386 million response, against China’s $14.7 million, has bought extraordinary goodwill: 75 percent of Venezuelans told AtlasIntel they trust the United States to manage the recovery. The reporting refuses the victory lap, though, and gives the last word to a Bogotá researcher who calls what has emerged “an economic opening, not a transition to democracy.”
The American Dream is dead is the safest applause line in American politics, and both parties reach for it—Trump in 2015, Harris in 2024, Bernie Sanders and Tim Scott from their respective flanks. This cover story, built on Newsweek ’s new American Dream Index, takes the obituary apart. All 33,772 U.S. ZIP codes were scored across six pillars—economic mobility, housing access, employment quality, new business formation, education and skills, and cost of living—and deliberately weighted toward whether ordinary people can still climb rather than whether a place is already rich. The result is a rebuke to the coastal imagination: North Dakota first, Utah and Minnesota next, Massachusetts only fourth, and two rural Plains counties in South Dakota and Kansas sitting shoulder to shoulder with Loudoun and Fairfax. The conclusion is not triumphalism. The Dream has narrowed and dispersed—less photogenic, harder to finance, and rather more attainable than the declinists on either side will allow.
Everyone knows the script. A WNBA player says trans athletes should not compete in women’s sport; the sponsors flee, the league condemns, the team cuts her loose, and the apology tour begins. This Perspective runs through that sequence and then observes that none of it happened. Cunningham played 21 minutes in a 123-88 win over Connecticut, kept her European Wax Center campaign, and posted a glamour shot captioned “I said what I said.” The argument is that outrage has run out of currency—the denunciations are as loud as ever, but the machinery that converted them into professional exile has broken, as Rowling, Chappelle, Gillis and Wallen each found before her. It also places her, against her critics’ jibes, in the great American middle: roughly two-thirds of the public agrees with her on the sports question, while comparable majorities support legal protections for trans Americans. The point is the consequence gap.
A rented van was driven into a Christopher Street Day crowd near the Tiergarten, and the driver continued the attack on foot with a blade. One woman was killed and 29 people were injured; Germany’s interior minister said the evidence indicated an Islamist attack. This analysis treats the atrocity as three things at once—a security failure, a human tragedy, and a political gift to the AfD. Its central move is definitional: Hamas is not Palestine, Muslims are not Islamists, and collapsing those categories produces bigotry in one direction and denial in the other. The piece gives the strongest version of the Pride for Palestine case a full hearing, pinkwashing critique included, before landing its argument—that the problem is not concern for Palestinians but the reluctance to specify which Palestinian forces are being defended and which must be opposed. The warning it leaves is blunt: if the mainstream will not name Islamism, the far right will, and far more crudely.
Mojtaba Khamenei has been supreme leader of the Islamic Republic since February, when a U.S.-Israeli strike killed his father, and nobody has seen him since. Not at his own inauguration. Not at the state funeral. This reported analysis puts the question to three specialists and gets three answers that barely overlap. One argues that absence may confer power rather than drain it, in a country where the Twelfth Imam has been out of physical view for more than a millennium. Another dismisses him as an impotent cleric with “the charisma of a boiled potato,” whose disappearance suits the IRGC precisely because it leaves them a blank canvas. The sharpest observation is structural: his father spent six decades learning where every skeleton was buried...
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