Mike's Blog Round Up

If you are the kind of person who overreacts and rushes in, I get it. You might think you can bypass the pain of what you are experiencing by getting super-proactive and taking control. I used to overreact, but the problem was it never seemed to help. Instead, it always made things worse because it brought about more drama, stress, confusion, and chaos.

Tom Cruise cares deeply about your popcorn bucket. The actor is famously obsessed with facilitating the optimal moviegoing experience. So, of course, for the final installment of his long-running Mission: Impossible franchise, he is embracing the breakout movie theater trend that asks audiences to stick their hands inside some outlandish orifices to retrieve their snack.

Every year the TIME photo department sits down to curate the strongest images that crossed our path over the previous 12 months. And every year, sitting with the images, we find ourselves mulling the ways this collection feels heavier than the last, how the year produced images unlike what we’ve seen before.

MELBOURNE, Australia — How do you remove children from the harms of social media? Politically the answer appears simple in Australia, but practically the solution could be far more difficult. The Australian government’s plan to ban children from social media platforms including X, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram until their 16th birthdays is politically popular.

This article is part of The D. C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox. Around this time eight years ago, a whole lot of time went into cobbling together what would come to be known as The Resistance. As the country—and the world, really—started to come to understand the incoming Trump administration’s plans, an unlikely cooperative of folks—feminists, scientists, immigration activists, traditional Republicans—found common ground in their shared sense of dread.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] FIUGGI, Italy — The European Union’s top diplomat said Tuesday there were “no excuses” for Israel to refuse to accept a ceasefire with the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, saying all its security concerns had been addressed in the U. S.-French-brokered deal. Josep Borrell, the outgoing EU foreign policy chief, called for increased pressure on Israel to blunt extremists in the government who are refusing to accept the deal.