Trump, accused of paying hush money to a porn star, is the first former US president to be criminally prosecuted.

Beijing has condemned Tawain President Tsai Ing-wen's stop in the US, with a Chinese official pledging to 'fight back'.

A lawyer for Donald Trump said Thursday he's been told that the former president has been indicted in New York on charges involving payments made during the 2016 presidential campaign to silence claims of an extramarital sexual encounter.

Donald Trump has become the first former president in the US to face criminal charges after a five-year investigation, according to a scoop from the New York Times.

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The average annual Wall Street bonus fell to $176,700 last year, a 26% drop from the previous year's average of $240,400, according to estimates released Thursday by New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli.

Last week, a district court judge in New York ruled on Hachette Book Group, Inc. v. Internet Archive, a case that is likely to shape how we read books on smartphones, tablets, and computers in the future. Although the case hinged on technical details of copyright law, the source of the conflict is much less abstract. It’s a story about the halting, uneasy transition of books from paper to digital formats, and the anxiety of publishers and frustration of librarians about that change. The decision—which was in favor of the publishers—will add to librarians’ frustrations. It will impoverish readers across the country seeking access to digital books, and over time diminish the library as a democratic institution that provides broad collections to everyone.

In the spring of 2020, when nearly all libraries suddenly closed because of the coronavirus pandemic, the Internet Archive, a nonprofit that preserves and provides open access to a wide range of media online, and which is designated as a library in its home state of California, expanded a program that allows those who have registered on its website to electronically borrow scanned copies of printed books in its possession. Although many of these digitized books were still in copyright, the Internet Archive asserted the justness of this program not only by the special circumstances of shutdowns but also by appealing to a novel concept called Controlled Digital Lending (CDL).

CDL, developed as a legal theory a bit more than a decade ago by the Georgetown University professor and law librarian Michelle Wu, asserts that libraries have a right to create digital surrogates for their collections, enabling each library to loan out either the digital version or the hard copy of any material it owns (but not both at the same time). To its advocates, CDL represents an extension of normal library operations from the physical to the digital realm, and a helpful service to library patrons. For publishers, CDL represents an unruly library practice and a threat to their profits.

On Friday, the judge sided almost entirely with the publishers. The Internet Archive “argues that its digital lending makes it easier for patrons who live far from physical libraries to access books and that it supports research, scholarship, and cultural participation by making books widely accessible on the Internet,” Judge John G. Koeltl wrote in his pointed ruling. “But these alleged benefits cannot outweigh the market harm to the Publishers.”

The Internet Archive plans to appeal the ruling, but if the decision stands, libraries will lose the agency to digitize and lend the print books they have collected and stewarded, and instead will have to defer to, and pay, publishers for separate digital editions of in-copyright books. Over time, this ruling may change the very nature of libraries—how they operate, their finances, whom they are able to serve, and the breadth of their collections.

Nearly all forms of human expression are now consumed mostly via the transmissible bits that assemble themselves into the words you are reading. Vinyl may be having a vogue resurgence, but most music listeners use streaming services. Newspapers that survived the digital transition may still have a print edition, but most subscribers read their news in a web browser or on a handheld device.

Books, by contrast, have been stuck in a more partial metamorphosis. In 2021, about 30 percent of Americans reported that they had read an e-book, up from 25 percent in 2019. That represents a significant part of the market for books, but many people still find acquiring e-books hard, don’t like the current experience of reading them, or can’t find a desired book in a digital version.

[Read: E-books are an abomination]

If you want to read a physical book, you have many options: a local library, an independent bookstore, a Barnes & Noble, and many online booksellers, Amazon the largest among them.

If you want to read that same book in a digital edition, the options are far more limited. You can buy it in an instant from Amazon, which is even more dominant in e-books than print books, or you can borrow it from your local library, to which I say: good luck. Anyone who has used a library app such as Libby will be familiar with the long wait times for many e-books; hold queues stretch on for months—if a digital copy exists at all.

Publishers seem to be doing just fine with this friction around digital library books. After a brutal decline following the Great Recession, print-book sales are up 33 percent in the past 10 years. If the high costs and complexity of the e-book market for libraries pushes more readers to purchase print books (or e-books), that is a feature, not a bug, for the publishers.

This is a challenging state of affairs for librarians, however, who seek to serve readers of all means in equitable ways. Libraries have dramatically increased their spending on e-books but still cannot come close to meeting demand, which unsurprisingly rose during the pandemic. Because publishers view each circulation of a library e-book as a potential missed sale, they have little incentive to reduce costs for libraries or make it easier for libraries to lend digital copies.

All digital transitions have had losers, some of whom we may care about more than others. Musicians seem to have a raw deal in the streaming age, receiving fractions of pennies for streams when they used to get dollars for the sales of physical media. Countless regional newspapers went out of business in the move to the web and the disappearance of lucrative classified advertising. The question before society, with even a partial transition to digital books, is: Do we want libraries to be the losers?

Unfortunately, it is looking like they will be, and this ruling represents another serious loss. Most libraries do not even own e-books in the true sense of ownership. The best they can do is to license e-books for a limited time, or for a limited number of circulations, before they have to pay again. Even with these restrictions, e-book prices for libraries are much higher than for individuals—up to four times as much for a two-year, rather than a perpetual, license. Librarians are thus forced to make painful decisions: Should the library have a diverse collection, with a wide variety of authors and genres, or license many copies of the most popular books to reduce those long wait times? The worst part is that if libraries stop paying each year to renew e-book licenses, those e-books will simply disappear, unlike the books on the shelves.

This led to the central question behind the lawsuit: Libraries have stored and cared for physical books for decades, and if readers are becoming more comfortable with online formats, why can’t a library digitize the volumes it owns and loan the digital copies in lieu of the physical ones?

Controlled Digital Lending emerged as a powerful, appealing answer to that question. Under CDL, libraries retain physical copies of books when the e-book edition is checked out, so it is as though only one copy exists, though it exists both digitally and physically, maintaining a 1:1 “owned to loaned” ratio. The e-books are wrapped in a digital lock to prevent further copying or distribution and self-destruct after the period of the loan is over.

CDL is useful for when a reader might be distant from a library or prefer a digital edition to a print one. A good portion of many large library collections, such as my own at Northeastern University, are stored in remote storage facilities these days, while many libraries serve widely distributed community members (we have 14 campuses in three countries). Scanning and transmitting a book file via the internet is more efficient and eco-friendly than shipping a print book both ways. (Northeastern also licenses well more than 1 million e-books.)

This theory was primarily academic—literally and figuratively—until the pandemic began and the Internet Archive enlarged its CDL program. Publishers had been uneasy about CDL since its inception, but notably, despite the Internet Archive’s use of CDL for years, including before COVID, publishers filed a lawsuit only when the Internet Archive briefly went beyond the 1:1 ratio, allowing multiple copies of each book it possessed to circulate. In their public statements and filings with the court, the plaintiff publishers—Hachette, HarperCollins, Wiley, and Penguin Random House—backed by the Association of American Publishers, nevertheless sought to discredit CDL entirely.

This framing and timing by the publishers and their lawyers was clearly designed to put CDL in the most negative light, but if we pull back the camera to observe the wider, rockier landscape for digital books, we can understand the discontent of libraries and their interest in CDL. Libraries paid for their print books and some now wish to use them in a different format, under the same rules, rather than pay for the books again in a new medium—or, really, to rent them. And because libraries generally do not take possession of the e-book files they rent from publishers, their crucial role as long-term preservers of culture has been severed from their role as institutions that provide democratic access—a striking change.

Those of us in academic libraries have seen this film before. Two decades ago, we started to shift our collection spending to digital versions of scholarly resources. Physical journals on the shelves turned into e-journals; buying became renting. Then the publishers raised the prices for these licenses year after year, and the cost of digital surrogates quickly became a significant budget line, then a majority of spending on collections, then 90 percent or more of what a research library spends in a year for academic materials. This shift in our financial spreadsheets happened in tandem with a shift in what we have and what we do as librarians. E-journals, especially those in the scientific, technical, and medical fields, with exorbitant licenses, crowded out resources in other fields, such as the humanities.

This story arc is now being replicated at public libraries with e-books. As they argued in court, publishers believe that libraries should simply spend more on licenses. But public libraries have highly constrained budgets, and in the pursuit of shorter hold queues, this spending will naturally gravitate toward multiple copies of the same e-books, a sliver of the book market—high-demand genres, recently released books, and best sellers—thereby reducing the library’s scope.

Why not spend collection funds instead on print books? Doesn’t most of the public still prefer print to digital? That may be true for now in public libraries, but look at what has happened in academic libraries: The books on the shelves have largely turned into wallpaper as students and faculty have become more comfortable with digital formats. If public libraries follow the same trajectory, in the future they will become shells of their former selves: renters of small collections rather than owners of large ones.

In short, if Controlled Digital Lending sought to provide an alternative pathway for the possession and use of digital books, it did so only after a new, highly constrained marketplace arose that disadvantages the mission of libraries. The frustration libraries feel about this state of affairs has reached a high enough level that bills are making their way through a number of state legislatures trying to regulate the library-e-book market. Last year also saw the launch of a library-centric nonprofit marketplace for e-books, The Palace Project.

Libraries and librarians are not rule breakers, but they are passionate about their mission, and these initiatives are a sign of the intensity of their dismay. The Internet Archive is as close as we get to the aggressive Silicon Valley stereotype of asking for forgiveness rather than permission. But it is worth remembering that had the Internet Archive not started copying and preserving websites in the 1990s without such permission, a significant part of human expression over the past three decades would have been lost forever. Undoubtedly many writers use the riches of the Internet Archive for their own work and value the access it provides to multiple media. If the Internet Archive slightly overstepped in this case, suing it in response seems like an even bigger overstep, using the lawsuit to permanently discredit CDL, which some libraries see as helpful for their scattered patrons.

[Xochitl Gonzalez: The librarians are not okay]

Right now even the most retiring librarian will tell you that the ecosystem for books is out of balance, and CDL is one small attempt to level the playing field between those who produce and distribute books and those who steward them for many years after publication. A sensible compromise would be to permit the original, modest version of CDL while restricting multiple simultaneous circulations from one physical copy. With its PDF scans and broad focus, including on the long list of books that do not have digital surrogates, a library-based program for digitized books is not much of a threat to the modern, tailored e-book formats that readers prefer for recent works.

State-based legislative attempts to make the e-book market more reasonable for libraries may also fail—a Maryland bill was struck down by a federal judge last year after publishers furiously objected. Last week in court, a lawyer for the publishers argued that libraries could always go to the U.S. Congress to change the law in their favor, which seemed especially cold. Perhaps a library-e-book rider could be tucked into a bill to raise the debt ceiling? Should the publishers win across the board, publishers’ profits may improve slightly, and writers may see some incremental income.

In the long run, however, maybe not. After all, libraries are where the love of reading is inculcated, and hurting libraries diminishes the growth of new readers, which in turn may reverse the recent upward trend in book sales. This will be particularly true for communities with fewer resources to devote to equitable access. Ultimately, we should all seek to maximize the availability of books, through as many reasonable methods as we can find. The library patron who is today checking out an e-book, or a digitized book through Controlled Digital Lending—should the practice be upheld on appeal—will be the enthusiastic customer at the bookstore tomorrow.

Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen arrived in New York vowing en route not to let external pressure prevent the island from engaging with the world.

Nearly half a decade has elapsed since I last worked in the fashion industry, but one thing from my previous career remains a compulsion to this day: I look at people’s purses. In the brain space that might otherwise be occupied by dear childhood memories or the dates and times of future doctor appointments, I tend to an apparently undeletable mental spreadsheet of who is carrying what. Bottega Veneta Cassette, green padded leather, Soho, 20-something woman. Louis Vuitton Pochette Métis, logo canvas, Hoyt-Schermerhorn subway stop, 40-ish woman. For 10 years, these data points informed my obsessive, detailed coverage of the luxury-handbag market. Now they just accumulate. Rarely do I see something I can’t place.

Over the past year or two, though, something largely unprecedented has been happening on people’s shoulders. Old bags are back. A significant—and growing—number of fashion-conscious people appear to be mining the depths of their closets or scouring secondhand marketplaces for designs released in the past decade or so. These women aren’t merely hunting down vintage styles of historical fashion significance, or the timeless classics that a wealthy mom might pass down to her daughter. Instead, many of them are carrying precisely the bags that should be at the nadir of popularity: one-off seasonal releases, designs whose trendiness peaked in the 2010s, and other bags that would otherwise scan as outdated to anyone in the know. One of fashion’s most basic rules is that nothing is less cool than the recent past, yet here are trendy people parading around like it’s 2015.

Signs of wear on these bags are no dealbreaker. As The New York Times recently noted, some Hermès Birkin buyers are now looking for older, broken-in bags in order to cultivate a more relaxed vibe. They’re also a (relative) bargain. Data from the secondhand luxury marketplace The RealReal suggest that this trend extends across the handbag market. Demand for like-new versions of recent releases has eased in favor of older, used designs, including those with obvious imperfections. Sales of designer bags in “fair” condition, which can have scuffed corners or other highly visible markers of use, nearly doubled in 2022.

This shift in consumer desire would be easy to dismiss as a whim of the market—we’re talking about the vagaries of fancy handbags, after all, and fashion is a cyclical business that constantly refers to its own history in new products. Within this shift in demand, though, is a signal that something larger may be afoot. Fashion, as an industry, may have started to butt up against the limits of a buying public that it has pushed to exhaustion. What does it mean when people begin to tire of novelty itself?

Handbags have a unique place in the fashion industry because they are so ludicrously marketable. They’re what you might call a trophy purchase: something easily recognizable to people who have even a passing interest in fashion, which enhances their desirability as potent status markers. (Though as one unfortunate Tinder date learned on the most recent episode of Succession, it is entirely possible to spend three grand on a purse and signal precisely the wrong status, depending on your audience.) Bags are also more practical than party dresses or high heels, and they avoid the fit issues of clothing. A $3,000 bag is still impossibly expensive for the average person, but it’s something that many, many more people can (and do) mentally justify putting on their credit card than a similarly expensive sweater. As a result, handbags are among the most important financial engines of the luxury sector, with a growing global market worth tens of billions of dollars annually. For many designer brands—and especially those with wide name recognition outside the industry—bags are the business, no matter how many other kinds of products they might produce.

For years, this has been a splendid state of affairs for luxury brands, but things between brands and buyers have lately become a little tense. The first major problem is that prices have skyrocketed. Designer handbags have always been very expensive—that is sort of their defining feature, if we’re all being honest—but according to a 2022 market analysis by Business of Fashion, the average price for a designer handbag in the United States had increased by 27 percent since 2019. For some of the most highly prized bags, the number is even more outrageous—the Chanel Classic Flap bag, for example, saw a price hike of 60 percent in roughly the same period. Those sudden, sharp hikes come after years of smaller, steadier increases, which had already doubled the price of some bags in the space of about a decade.

The second major problem: Even as prices climb, the handbag market has become oversaturated and its products overexposed. Designers are pushed to produce more frequent and larger product releases—the old industry standard was two collections a year, in spring and fall, and now most big brands produce five or six. And brands have become more risk averse when it comes to new design ideas; bags’ centrality to the businesses’ bottom line means there’s vanishingly little patience for designers who create things that are too forward-thinking to catch on instantaneously.

The way these problems were created is largely a story of consolidation—a phenomenon not unique to the fashion industry. Once upon a time, high-end fashion was the province of family-owned businesses that employed skilled artisans in European workshops, piecing together leather goods according to the old methods. Now most major brands are owned by luxury conglomerates that mass-produce much of their inventory, the biggest and most valuable of which are LVMH and Kering. Those two companies oversee almost all the heavy hitters in the accessories industry: Louis Vuitton, Dior, Gucci, Bottega Veneta, Fendi, Celine, Balenciaga, and Saint Laurent, among others.

When a business becomes a subsidiary of a public company, which LVMH and Kering are, some expectations are predictable. Shareholders want profitability and growth, so designers produce more and take fewer risks. To goose sales figures, there’s nothing quite as quick and dirty as simply raising prices, which can have the benefit of making a bag seem all the more exclusive. Although brands offer various rationales for their increases—fluctuations in currency exchange, higher manufacturing prices, supply issues—in my experience, the most common reason for an increase is the belief that the market will bear it.

So far, this belief has panned out. During the pandemic, well-off people in most global fashion markets saved money by taking a year or two off from travel, dining, and other expensive pursuits, and many of them, bored at home and looking for a little stimulation, used the extra cash to buy things like expensive watches and designer handbags. But as consumer markets have begun to normalize, we now have a fire hose of inescapably common, exorbitantly priced handbags that aren’t particularly singular or compelling. There is an unresolvable tension between being told that the thing you’re buying is expensive because it is rare and special and will last a lifetime, and seeing that thing become near-instantly ubiquitous among celebrities, Instagram influencers, and half the girlies at brunch, just to get ditched wholesale a few months later for something newer and shinier, if only slightly different. This tension has always existed, but social media and online shopping have accelerated the trend cycle so much that one of the industry’s best sleights of hand no longer feels quite so magical. At this point, showing people that it still works on you might even feel a little embarrassing.

It’s no wonder that shoppers are summoning the ghosts of handbags past. For a business predicated on moving people efficiently forward to new ideas and new products, fashion seems content to do little more than play the hits right now. Meanwhile, shoppers at all price levels are in thrall to a years-long retro revival, mining resale platforms and thrift stores for things more unique or whimsical than what’s newly available. Designer bags have been part of that trend, particularly those from the It Bag era of the mid-2000s, when Chloé’s Paddington and Silverado bags inspired long waitlists and the Fendi Baguette bag and Hermès Birkin both got their own story lines on Sex and the City. Many of that period’s designs were genuinely interesting attempts to rethink the category’s aesthetic conventions—in other words, precisely the kinds of designs that big brands now generally decline to create, mortgaging their long-term relevance in a bid for short-term financial returns.

You can tell that this phenomenon is more than just an era-specific trend, because growing interest in older bags extends far beyond that time to similarly distinctive pieces from much of the past 20 years, including bags such as the Proenza Schouler PS1 and PS11, which hit their peak popularity in the mid-2010s—much too recently to be retro. Most of these styles are abundantly available on resale websites for a couple hundred bucks, a far cry from the thousands of dollars that the same designers charge for new pieces.

As shoppers have made older bags popular, brands have looked at this phenomenon and learned the wrong lessons. In the past few years, they’ve reissued many of these old designs in an attempt to capture existing nostalgia, but most of the pieces, which were never affordable to begin with, are now far more expensive. And even if the reissued bags help keep sales up for another quarter or two, they’re not a solution for malaise among buyers, who seem to be growing tired of both gimmicky logo-mania and the same old timeless, neutral classics. More than anything, they might be sick of the relentless pressure to keep buying, and to spend ever more money to do little beyond prove that they still can. For fashion customers, there’s something to be gained from the industry’s creative stalemate, even if it’s just the realization that the things you actually want to wear or carry right now might already be in your closet.