unraveling

Any profession can corrupt its practitioners — and arts critics are no exception. Are they enlightened standard-setters dragging us back from a cultural abyss — or deformed exiles from the arts who, with sharpened pens and bent backs, are ready to pounce on plot-holes and devour careers at a moment’s notice?

If Charlotte Runcie’s debut novel, “Bring the House Down,” is anything to go by, it’s a bit of both. The book centers around four heady weeks at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which begins the unraveling of two newspaper critics who have traveled up from London to cover the sprawling performance art event. Runcie, a former arts columnist for the Daily Telegraph, has created something so delightfully snackable that you may, as I did, gulp it down in two or three sittings.

Runcie’s anti-hero is theater critic Alex Lyons. Alex gives everything he reviews either one star or five, and the latter are vanishingly rare. He bemoans a world of “online shopping reviews,” where “five stars has come to mean the baseline, rather than outstanding,” and so insists on panning almost everything he sees. What’s bad for artists is good for him: His reviews become desperately sought-after career makers or breakers. “The paper didn’t allow Alex to award zero stars. Otherwise, he’d do it all the time.”

“Bring the House Down”

(Doubleday)

We learn about Alex’s story through our narrator Sophie Ridgen, his colleague who, despite being in her mid-30s like Alex, is on a very different track. Alex rose quickly through the newspaper’s ranks, and his reviews are featured on the front page almost daily. Sophie continues to toil as a junior culture writer, picking up whatever scraps nobody else wants. Sophie is also a new mom, overworking to compensate for time lost to maternity leave. She feels uncomfortable in her post-pregnancy body, exhausted and frustrated with her husband. Alex, on the other hand, finds it “embarrassingly easy” to get laid.

But Alex’s glory days are numbered. Early on at the Fringe, he sees a one-woman show that, unsurprisingly, he hates. He writes a review as devastating as it is personal (calling the star a “dull, hectoring frump,” her voice a “high-pitched whine”). All of this would be business as usual for Alex except for one problem: After quickly filing his review of the show, he bumps into Hayley Sinclair, its creator and star, in a bar. He takes her home and sleeps with her. He knew the one star was waiting for her; she did not.

When she finds out, there is hell to pay. Hayley transforms her nightly show into the “Alex Lyons Experience,” collecting testimony from his ex-girlfriends and lovers, or even those who have simply received bad reviews from him. Over the following weeks her show swells into a Greek chorus of one man’s wrongs. The whole nation, including members of Parliament, have hot takes (the performance is livestreamed). It doesn’t help his case that Alex is a bit of a nepo baby, as his mother Judith is an actor whose name would be recognized in most British households.

Sophie, living with Alex in the company-rented flat, has a front row seat to his public unraveling. She watches the livestreams with guilty awe, stalks Alex and Hayley compulsively online, and feverishly scans social media for the latest gossip (Runcie is great at writing a fake mean Tweet/X dispatch). She starts missing calls with her husband and their toddler son, as she becomes fully obsessed with the drama unfolding in Edinburgh.

As she continues to inhabit the same flat as her colleague, Sophie is increasingly questioned by others as to whose side she’s on, Alex or Hayley’s. For much of the book, she seems unable to make up her mind. She refuses to give up on Alex, and increasingly becomes his only source of companionship, which she can’t help but find flattering. But she also finds herself sympathetic to and magnetized by Hayley, whose popularity is blossoming on the Fringe circuit and beyond.

While Alex and Hayley both appear to possess other-worldly levels of charisma, one flaw with Runcie’s novel is that this is something we are repeatedly told, rather than shown. Alex spends most of the book being condescending to Sophie, and yet she is transfixed by him. “He had the strange ability to make you feel as if you were the only person who was in on a joke, the only person who understood some fundamental truth about the world that escaped other people.” This feels unsatisfyingly generic, like something you might find in an online wedding vows template.

We are at least given more backstory and a more plausible explanation for Sophie’s fascination with Alex: the ego trip. Having been dragged down by motherhood, a rocky marriage, and grief over the death of her own mother, Sophie enjoys Alex’s increasing dependence on her, a lone rock of support amid an ocean of alienation. There is something undeniably delicious in watching someone you revere fall to their knees, and Sophie begins to see in Alex “a tiny flickering of fear, at first only visible as a barely perceptible interruption to his arrogance, like a power cut that dims the lights for just a hundredth of a second.”

Hayley, unfortunately, never quite comes to life in the same way. And it remains unclear why her show, which is essentially a litany of (legitimate) complaints about a real-life terrible man with some added pyrotechnics, takes Edinburgh and the entire country by such storm. “I find I can’t explain why it had the effect that it did,” Sophie tells us. “This wasn’t theater, not really; it was a happening. The audience weren’t spectators anymore, but a silent, connected web of righteous energy.” Without more to go on, we have no choice but to take her word for it.

The result feels like a missed opportunity to interrogate some important questions. How much does the identity (gender, race, or class) of the critic matter when it comes to their ability to judge art? What about the identity of the artist themselves? In other words, who shall criticize the critics? Readers may leave Runcie’s novel feeling that some of these questions go unanswered, but this deeply entertaining novel is nonetheless well worth the price of admission.

Mills is a writer and human rights researcher who has worked for Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Wall Street Journal and Associated Press. She lives in New York.

WASHINGTON — A Starship spun out of control in suborbital flight on Tuesday, failing to meet critical testing goals set by SpaceX in its plans for a mission to Mars. A poll released last week showed the national brand reputation for Tesla, once revered, had cratered. And later that same day, House Republicans passed a bill that would balloon the federal deficit.

It has been a challenging period for Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who not long ago thought he had conquered the private sector and could, in short order, do the same with the federal government. That all ended Wednesday evening with his announcement he is leaving the Trump administration.

“As my scheduled time as a Special Government Employee comes to an end, I would like to thank President @realDonaldTrump for the opportunity to reduce wasteful spending,” Musk wrote on X, his social media platform.

The mission of the program he called the Department of Government Efficiency “will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government,” he added.

Musk’s departure comes on the heels of a ruling from a federal judge in Washington on Wednesday questioning Musk’s initial appointment as a temporary government employee and, by extension, whether any of his work for DOGE was constitutional.

“I thought there were problems,” Musk said in a recent interview with the Washington Post, “but it sure is an uphill battle trying to improve things in D.C., to say the least.”

Growing conflicts with Trump

Musk’s role as an omnipresent advisor to President Trump began to wane weeks ago, amid public backlash against DOGE’s cuts to treasured government programs — from cancer research to the National Park Service — and after Trump bucked Musk’s counsel on economic policy, launching a global trade war that jolted supply chains and financial markets.

But the entrepreneur has grown increasingly vocal with criticism of the Trump administration this week, stating that a megabill pushed by the White House proposing an overhaul to the tax code risks undermining his efforts to cut government spending.

Musk responded to a user on X, his social media platform, on Monday lamenting that House Republicans “won’t vote” to codify DOGE’s cuts. “Did my best,” he wrote.

“I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not decrease it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,” Musk explained further in an interview with “CBS Sunday Morning” later in the week. “I think a bill can be big, or it can be beautiful, but I don’t know if it can be both. My personal opinion.”

The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” would increase border security and defense spending, renew tax cuts passed in 2017 and extend a new tax deduction to seniors, while eliminating green energy tax benefits and cutting $1 trillion in funding to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

Despite the cuts, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates the bill would add so much money to the debt that Congress may be forced to execute cuts across the board, including hundreds of billions to Medicare, in a process known as sequestration.

Hours after the CBS interview aired, the White House appeared to respond directly to Musk with the release of a press release titled “FACT: One, Big, Beautiful Bill Cuts Spending, Fuels Growth.” And Trump responded directly from the Oval Office, noting Democratic opposition and the challenges of unifying a fractious GOP caucus. Negotiations with the Senate will result in changes to the legislation, Trump said.

“My reaction’s a lot of things,” Trump said. “I’m not happy about certain aspects of it, but I’m thrilled by other aspects of it.”

“That’s the way they go,” he added. “It’s very big. It’s the big, beautiful bill.”

Cuts in question

It is unclear whether Musk succeeded in making the government more efficient, regardless of what Congress does.

While the DOGE program originally set a goal of cutting $2 trillion in federal spending, Musk ultimately revised that target down dramatically, to $150 billion. The program’s “wall of receipts” claims that $175 billion has been saved, but the Treasury Department’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service has documented an increase in spending over last year.

“DOGE is just becoming the whipping boy for everything,” Musk said in the Post interview this week. “So, like, something bad would happen anywhere, and we would get blamed for it even if we had nothing to do with it.”

Musk had been brought into the Trump administration designated as a special government employee, a position limited to 130 days that does not require Senate approval.

But the legal case making its way through the Washington courtroom of U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan is questioning the entire arrangement.

The White House attempted to “minimize Musk’s role, framing him as a mere advisor without any formal authority,” Chutkan wrote, while granting him broad powers that gave him “unauthorized access” to “private and proprietary information,” like Social Security numbers and medical records. Those actions, Chutkan added, provide the basis for parties to claim Musk inflicted substantial injury in a legal challenge.

‘I think I’ve done enough’

Musk was scheduled to speak on Tuesday after SpaceX’s Starship test launch, setting out the road ahead to “making life multiplanetary.” But he never appeared after the spacecraft failed early on in its planned trajectory to orbit Earth.

The SpaceX Starship rocket is launched Tuesday in Texas. It later disintegrated over the Indian Ocean, officials said.

(Sergio Flores / AFP / Getty Images)

Starship is supposed to be the vehicle that returns Americans to the moon in just two years. NASA, in conjunction with U.S. private sector companies, is in a close race with China to return humans to the moon for the first time since the end of the Apollo program.

But none of Musk’s endeavors has suffered more than his electric car company, Tesla, which saw a 71% plunge in profits in the first quarter of 2025 and a 50% drop in stock value from its highs in December. An Axios Harris Poll released last week found that Tesla dropped in its reputation ranking of America’s 100 most visible companies to 95th place, down from eighth in 2021 and 63rd last year.

The reputational damage to Tesla, setbacks at SpaceX and limits to his influence on Trump appear to be cautioning Musk to step back from his political activity.

“I think in terms of political spending, I’m going to do a lot less in the future,” Musk told Bloomberg News on May 20, during the Qatar Economic Forum. “I think I’ve done enough.”

What else you should be reading

The must-read: 217 days and counting: Trump’s rules slow the release of migrant children to their families
The deep dive: Villaraigosa, despite climate credentials, pivots toward oil industry in run for governor
The L.A. Times Special: Supreme Court clears way for massive copper mine on Apache sacred land

More to come,
Michael Wilner

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