The end of a month is a fitting opportunity to take stock of things.

Here’s a smart summary on the state of media, borrowed the Economist’s Bagehot columnist, in a broader view of the still new UK government’s struggle between chaos and calm:

Declining circulations mean newspapers today offer only a pastiche of popular opinion; broadcasters reach far fewer people than they once did; deranged TikTok videos will determine the next election as much as what leads the evening news. Where there was once a discernible set of narratives, whether positive or negative, there is now chaos.

And, here’s the Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein, commenting on the most important group of eligible voters in the forthcoming US election (that may as well sum up the state of the entire contest):

In the end, however, neither party expects too many of the voters who are telling pollsters today that they might switch to the other candidate to actually do so. The bigger prize for the two campaigns is the irregular voters who are, as [Sarah] Longwell put it, deciding “whether they are going to get off the couch” to vote at all.

My favourite tell in a review is an early pivot, from the subject or product at hand, to something either more personal to the reviewer or tangentially related, like an earlier work by the same artist. Sometime’s it’s less a pivot than a whole platform, like this review from the Telegraph’s Robbie Collin, who has used the occasion of a new George Clooney vehicle to remind us of perhaps the greatest of all: Tony Gilroy’s film Michael Clayton (2007).

Here’s wishing the Spectator’s Lionel Shriver a swift and full recovery.