In 1963, standing before the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. reached for the language of banking to describe something much bigger than money. America, he argued, had made a promise to its Black citizens and failed to honor it. He called it a “bad check,” one returned because there were supposedly insufficient funds to pay what had already been promised.

King was speaking specifically about racial injustice in the United States, and that history should not be blurred into another struggle. But the idea behind his metaphor—the enormous distance that can exist between a promise made on paper and a promise experienced in real life—raises a difficult question when we look at the history of women.

What happens when women take their own promises to the counter?

Since the beginning of time, societies have spoken eloquently about the importance of women while simultaneously limiting what women could do. Women are praised as mothers while denied authority over important parts of their own lives. Their labor has helped build economies, yet much of it has been unpaid or unrecognized. Their intelligence is celebrated privately while some universities, professions, and institutions remained closed to them. Their sacrifices have always been expected; their ambitions are often treated with suspicion.

In that sense, women know something about a “bad check”.

The world has too often written one amount in its declarations and paid another in practice.

But across different periods and societies, a familiar contradiction repeatedly appears: women have always been indispensable to the functioning of society while being excluded from many of the places where society decided who held power.

And that contradiction did not disappear simply because the law eventually changed.

Consider something now regarded as ordinary: a woman voting.

Today, seeing women walk into polling stations attracts little attention in much of the world. Yet women had to organize for decades to secure that right in many countries. The same is true of higher education and professional life. Careers in medicine, law, science, finance and government that young women can now reasonably imagine were once deliberately restricted or culturally discouraged.

Women did.

They organized, wrote, marched, studied, sued, campaigned, built, and are still building businesses. Entered institutions that had not been designed with them in mind. Some challenged governments. Others challenged their families. Many simply refused to accept that the circumstances into which they were born had to determine the boundaries of their lives.

The result is visible everywhere today.

• Women run companies. They perform surgery. They lead research laboratories and universities. They build technology startups, report from war zones, fly aircraft, manage investment funds, write legislation and compete at the highest levels of professional sport.

• A girl growing up today can see possibilities that would have been unimaginable to many of her great-grandmothers.

That is real progress.

But progress presents its own danger: the temptation to mistake movement for arrival.

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The check has not completely cleared.

The modern conversation about women’s equality is more complicated than the old one.

The question is rarely whether women should work, study or lead. In many countries, those arguments have largely been settled in law and mainstream public life.

The harder questions now concern what happens after women enter the room.

1. Who gets promoted?

2. Who receives investment?

3. Whose expertise is assumed?

4. Who interrupts a career when a child is born or a parent becomes ill?

5. Who performs the work at home that makes somebody else’s paid work possible?

6. Who reaches the top—and what did it cost to get there?

These questions cannot be answered with a poster celebrating female empowerment once a year.

They require looking at how women actually live.

Take unpaid care.

Every economy depends on people cooking meals, cleaning homes, raising children and caring for relatives who are sick, elderly or disabled. Without that work, the formal economy could barely function. Yet because much of it happens inside homes and does not produce a salary, it can disappear from the way societies traditionally measure economic contribution.

Women have always perform a disproportionate share of that unpaid work globally.

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No law needs to explicitly prohibit her from succeeding for inequality to emerge.

That is what makes the modern version of the problem harder to see.

The barrier is not always a locked door.

Sometimes it is a thousand small calculations about time, money, expectations and responsibility.

Then there is money

Entrepreneurship is frequently presented as the great escape from traditional workplace structures: have an idea, build something, find investors and create your own future.

Women have long embraced that possibility enthusiastically.

But access to capital remains part of the conversation. Female founders have repeatedly raised concerns about receiving a relatively small share of venture investment, particularly in industries where large amounts of private capital determine which ideas have the chance to grow.

The significance goes beyond individual entrepreneurs.

Money decides which companies get built. It influences which technologies reach consumers, which medical ideas receive development, which businesses hire hundreds of employees and which founders eventually become investors themselves.

Capital is not simply a reward for success.

It helps determine who gets the opportunity to attempt success in the first place.

This is where the language of empowerment can become uncomfortable.

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Telling a woman to “believe in herself” is easy.

Asking whether the systems surrounding her give that belief a reasonable chance of becoming something tangible is harder.

Both matter.

Personal agency matters enormously. Women are not passive characters waiting for institutions to rescue them. History itself disproves that idea. Women have repeatedly created opportunity where little existed.

But determination should not become an excuse for ignoring unnecessary barriers.

A woman can work on her confidence.

She cannot personally rewrite an employment law, create affordable childcare across an entire country or transform an investment industry overnight.

That requires institutions too.

A different conversation about power

There is also something changing beneath the statistics.

Women are increasingly questioning not only whether they can enter traditional structures of power, but whether those structures are the only ones worth entering.

Technology has changed the equation.

A writer can build an audience without first being hired by a major newspaper. An entrepreneur can reach customers without securing shelf space from a national retailer. A teacher can create an educational business from her home. A creator can speak directly to millions of people without a television executive deciding she deserves airtime.

None of this has eliminated inequality. Digital spaces have created their own forms of harassment, exclusion and economic instability.

But they have weakened some of the old gatekeepers.

And that matters.

For much of history, access was controlled by relatively small numbers of institutions. If those institutions said no, there were few alternatives.

Today, women are increasingly capable of building another door.

Perhaps that is one of the most consequential developments in the story of women’s progress.

Not simply being invited into existing institutions.

Creating new ones.

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So, What Would it Mean to Finally Honor the Promise?

It would not mean that every woman earns the same salary, chooses the same career or experiences the same life.

Nor does women’s advancement require diminishing men. Opportunity does not work like a pie where one person’s larger portion necessarily leaves somebody else hungry.

The more useful question is simpler: are women able to make meaningful choices about their lives without barriers that exist primarily because they are women?

That is a much harder standard than counting how many inspirational campaigns appear every March.

• It asks whether a girl can get an education.

• Whether a mother can return to work without motherhood being treated as evidence of diminished ambition.

• Whether an entrepreneur with a strong business can reach capital.

• Whether a woman can pursue leadership without being required to become a caricature of what leadership once looked like.

• And whether the work women perform—paid or unpaid—is recognized for what it contributes.

The story of women over the last century is not primarily a story of victimhood.

It is a story of movement.

Doors that were closed have opened. Laws that once restricted women’s choices have disappeared in many places. Expectations have changed. Millions of women have built lives that previous generations fought to make possible.

That deserves more than a passing acknowledgment.

But history also teaches another lesson: a promise should not be confused with its fulfillment.

1. The world can say women are equal.

2. Companies can say women are valued.

3. Governments can say opportunity belongs to everyone.

Those statements matter.

But eventually, the check reaches the counter.

And that is where rhetoric meets reality.

That gap has narrowed dramatically.

It has not disappeared.

Perhaps the next chapter of women’s progress will not be defined by another grand declaration. We already have plenty of declarations.

Perhaps it will be defined by something far less glamorous and far more consequential: making the words already written finally match the lives women are actually able to live.

Because after generations of promises, women should not have to keep returning to the counter.

The check should finally be good.

US consumer prices remained elevated in August, with rising energy costs linked to renewed conflict between the United States and Iran continuing to put pressure on American households.

Inflation stood at an annual rate of 3.4% in August, unchanged from July, according to data released Friday by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Although the headline rate has retreated from the three-year high of 4.2% recorded in May, inflation remains well above the levels seen before the war in Iran.

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More concerning for policymakers, core inflation — which excludes the often-volatile costs of food and energy — rose to 2.4% in August.

The figures suggest that inflationary pressures have yet to disappear, even as the Federal Reserve weighs whether the US economy needs higher borrowing costs or whether interest rates should remain where they are.

Energy costs squeeze American households

Energy has emerged as one of the biggest sources of pressure on consumer budgets following the collapse of the ceasefire between the US and Iran.

Diesel prices climbed above $6 a gallon on Friday for the first time, increasing costs for an economy heavily dependent on trucks, buses and trains to transport people and goods.

Gasoline prices have also risen sharply. The national average at the pump stood at $4.29 a gallon, according to AAA, about $1.10 more than Americans were paying at the same point last year.

Higher fuel costs can extend far beyond the gas station.

When businesses pay more to transport food, clothing, construction materials and other products across the country, some of those additional costs can ultimately be passed on to consumers.

That creates another challenge for households already struggling with the cost of everyday necessities.

Inflation becomes a political problem

Persistent price pressures are also becoming increasingly difficult for Republicans as the midterm elections approach.

Consumer sentiment has fallen to record lows, while Americans continue to express frustration over the cost of groceries, gasoline and other essentials.

Financial markets are showing signs of concern as well. Yields on some US Treasury securities have climbed to their highest levels since the 2008 recession as investors assess the possibility that inflation could remain elevated and borrowing costs could stay higher for longer.

The political consequences have not been lost on the White House.

On Wednesday night, President Donald Trump said Americans would receive a $5,000 “dividend” if Republicans secure a majority in the midterm elections. Critics quickly attacked the proposal, arguing that the promise amounted to an attempt to influence voters with a direct financial incentive.

But promises of payments do not resolve the more fundamental question facing policymakers: how to bring inflation back under control without inflicting unnecessary damage on the broader economy.

All eyes turn to the Federal Reserve

Attention will now shift to the Federal Reserve, which is scheduled to make its next interest-rate decision at its board meeting next week.

The central bank has one of the federal government’s most powerful tools for influencing inflation.

Changes in its benchmark interest rate eventually affect borrowing costs throughout the economy, including mortgages, auto loans, credit and some forms of student debt.

The August inflation report therefore leaves policymakers with a difficult choice.

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Keeping rates unchanged could give households and businesses some breathing room and avoid putting additional pressure on economic growth. Raising rates, however, could help restrain inflation if policymakers believe price increases are becoming entrenched.

Trump has publicly pushed the Fed in the opposite direction.

In a social media post last week, he urged the central bank to lower borrowing costs.

Inside the central bank, however, pressure for tighter monetary policy has been growing.

At the Fed’s July meeting, policymakers voted 9-3 to leave interest rates unchanged. It marked the first time in a decade that three members of the board dissented from a policy decision.

The lessons of the last inflation crisis

The Federal Reserve has faced this dilemma before.

US inflation surged to 9.1% in 2022, its highest level in four decades. The Fed responded with an aggressive series of interest-rate increases, eventually pushing its benchmark range to 5.25%-5.5%.

The strategy was painful for borrowers but helped cool demand across the economy.

By April 2025, inflation had fallen to 2.3%.

Interest rates have since been reduced and currently stand between 3.5% and 3.75%, roughly two percentage points below their level two years ago.

But the renewed rise in inflation has reopened the debate over whether the central bank loosened monetary policy too quickly.

Some Fed officials are now warning that another increase cannot be ruled out.

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Federal Reserve governor Christopher Waller said last week that policymakers face “considerable uncertainty about how military conflicts, trade policy, and artificial intelligence will affect prices and economic activity.”

Waller indicated that his position would depend heavily on what inflation does next.

“If there is continued progress toward our 2% goal, then I am willing to support holding the policy rate at its current level,” he said during a Reuters event. “But if inflation comes in hot, I would consider a rate hike.”

Warsh signals inflation fight is not over

Federal Reserve chair Kevin Warsh has also signaled that restoring price stability will remain a central priority under his leadership.

Speaking at the closely watched Jackson Hole economic gathering in Wyoming last month, Warsh warned that underlying inflation trends had failed to improve substantially during the summer.

“We must be confident that underlying inflation is moving to our objective, clearly and at sufficient speed,” Warsh said. “Otherwise, we have work to do.”

That message has become increasingly significant as the Fed prepares for next week’s meeting.

The central bank must now weigh several competing forces: inflation that remains above its 2% objective, expensive energy, uncertainty surrounding the conflict with Iran, fragile consumer confidence and the risk that higher interest rates could further weaken economic activity.

For American consumers, however, the debate in Washington ultimately comes down to something much simpler: what their money can buy.

Inflation may be below its recent peak, but households continue to encounter higher prices at grocery stores and gas stations. With diesel above $6 a gallon and gasoline averaging more than $4, the economic consequences of the war are increasingly being felt far from the battlefield.

And with the Federal Reserve preparing for one of its most consequential decisions of the year, August’s inflation report offers little reassurance that relief is just around the corner.

Donald Trump wants Americans to believe there is a lot riding on Republican victory in November. Their borders, their security, their wealth and perhaps even the future of the country are all supposedly at stake. Now the president has added something considerably more personal to that list: $5,000.

Speaking at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, Trump pledged that every adult US citizen would receive $5,000 if Republicans retain control of the House and Senate. It was the sort of announcement almost guaranteed to dominate headlines, not least because delivering it would cost the federal government more than $1tn. But the most remarkable part of Trump’s promise was not the staggering price tag. It was the condition he publicly attached to it.

“If the Republicans win, you win with us, and you get $5,000,” Trump told supporters.

There was little ambiguity in the political message. Republicans win the midterms, and Americans get the money. Republicans lose and, according to Trump’s formulation, they don’t.

Politicians have always promised economic benefits during election campaigns. Democrats campaign on healthcare spending, social programs and tax credits; Republicans campaign on tax reductions, deregulation and other measures they argue will leave Americans richer. There is nothing inherently corrupt about telling voters that electing one party will produce economic policies that benefit them.

Trump’s formulation, however, deserves much closer scrutiny because it was so explicitly transactional. He did not simply unveil a $5,000 proposal and ask Congress to consider it on its merits. He presented the payment as something Americans would receive if Republicans win.

For a president already notorious for his unwillingness to accept an electoral defeat, that distinction should set alarm bells ringing.

There is no evidence in Trump’s Dallas speech that he is secretly altering ballots or manipulating vote counts, and accusing anyone of literally stealing an election requires evidence. But cheating democracy can involve more than fraudulent ballots. The more immediate concern raised by Trump’s remarks is whether the enormous powers, promises and resources associated with the presidency are being increasingly treated as instruments for keeping one political movement in control.

His $5,000 offer brings that concern into unusually sharp focus.

• If Americans deserve the money, why should Republican victory determine whether they receive it?

• If the proposal is legitimate economic policy, why not introduce it regardless of who controls Congress after November?

• And if the administration has identified more than $1tn that can responsibly be distributed to American citizens, where is the detailed proposal explaining how it will be financed?

Those questions matter because public money belongs to the American people. It does not belong to Donald Trump, the Republican Party or whichever political movement happens to occupy the White House. A president suggesting that citizens will receive a substantial financial benefit if they deliver his party an electoral victory risks turning government policy into something resembling a political reward.

That is precisely where Trump’s rhetoric becomes dangerous.

The president did not stop with the promise of money. During his nearly two-hour address, he repeatedly presented the midterms as an existential choice between Republican rule and national disaster, warning that a Democratic victory would cost Americans their border, tax cuts, security and wealth.

“If we lose, you’re going to lose your border, you’re going to lose your tax cuts, you’re going to lose your safety and security, you’re going to lose your wealth,” Trump said.

He warned of America going through “hell” and declared that Republicans would “defeat communism in America”.

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Taken together, the political strategy was difficult to miss. Trump offered voters a potentially enormous financial reward if Republicans win while painting the alternative as economic and national catastrophe.

It is a remarkable combination of incentive and fear.

And behind it lies an uncomfortable political reality: Republicans have reason to worry about November.

The party holding the White House historically faces difficulties in midterm elections, and Republicans are fighting to retain control of Congress at a time when Trump remains deeply unpopular with a large portion of the electorate. Some Republican politicians in competitive races stayed away from the Dallas gathering altogether, an indication that the president who remains dominant inside the Republican Party can still become a liability when candidates have to appeal beyond his most loyal supporters.

Trump’s solution appears to be to make the election even more about himself.

“Pretend that I’m on the ballot,” he urged voters.

That request may have revealed more about the stakes of November than much of the rest of his speech.

Trump is not on the ballot, but his power effectively is. A Republican Congress would give his administration considerably greater freedom to pursue its agenda during the remainder of his presidency. A Congress controlled in whole or in part by Democrats could bring investigations, subpoenas, aggressive oversight and legislative resistance.

Trump therefore has an enormous personal and political interest in the outcome.

None of that is unusual by itself. Every president wants congressional allies. What makes Trump’s situation different is his history of treating electoral defeat not simply as rejection by voters but as evidence that the democratic process itself must somehow have failed.

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After losing the 2020 presidential election, Trump refused to concede in the traditional manner and spent weeks promoting allegations of widespread fraud. His campaign and allies pursued legal challenges that failed to produce evidence sufficient to overturn the result. Trump pressured officials as he attempted to remain in power, while allies pursued an alternative-elector strategy. The effort culminated in the extraordinary events of 6 January 2021, when his supporters stormed the US Capitol as Congress met to certify Joe Biden’s victory.

That history cannot simply be erased when evaluating Trump’s behavior around another consequential election.

It does not prove that Trump is currently rigging the 2026 midterms. But it provides ample reason for journalists, election officials and voters to scrutinize attempts to change election rules, manipulate political institutions or condition government benefits on partisan victory.

Congressional districts can be aggressively redrawn for partisan advantage. Voting rules can be rewritten. Registration and voter-roll policies can become political battlegrounds. Particular methods of voting can be restricted or expanded. Government institutions can be deployed in ways that benefit the party controlling them. Politicians can also spend months convincing supporters that an election is illegitimate unless their side wins, ensuring that defeat itself becomes supposed evidence of cheating.

Not every one of those actions is illegal, and both major parties have fought aggressively over election rules and redistricting. But legality is not the only measure of democratic health. A political system can remain technically within the boundaries of law while becoming progressively less fair, less trusted and more vulnerable to manipulation.

That is why Trump’s $5,000 promise deserves more than ridicule.

Imagine for a moment that a Democratic president had made precisely the same announcement. Imagine Barack Obama or Joe Biden standing before a Democratic convention and telling the country that if Democrats retained the House and Senate, every adult American would receive $5,000.

Republicans would almost certainly call for investigations. Conservative media would spend weeks debating whether Democrats were attempting to buy an election with taxpayers’ money. Questions about bribery, abuse of power and election interference would dominate Washington.

Trump should not receive a different standard simply because Americans have grown accustomed to behavior from him that would once have been considered politically extraordinary.

The question is not whether voters can legally support Republicans after hearing the proposal. Of course they can. Nor does promising an economic benefit automatically amount to buying votes. The question is whether a president should explicitly condition a massive government payout on voters delivering congressional power to his political party.

If Trump’s proposal is good for America, he should make the case for it as policy rather than as a prize for Republican victory.

The atmosphere surrounding the Dallas convention made the president’s desperation to project political strength even more striking. Trump boasted about the success of his second term and presented himself as the indispensable figure in Republican politics, yet visible sections of the convention hall remained empty. He nevertheless claimed the arena was packed and asserted that an equal number of people were outside, something reporters at the event said they did not observe.

It was a small episode, but a familiar one: Trump’s political power has long depended on his extraordinary ability to insist upon his version of reality even when observable facts complicate it.

• That tendency becomes considerably more consequential when elections are involved.

• An empty seat can be declared occupied without much consequence. An electoral defeat cannot.

America learned that after 2020.

That is why the months between now and November deserve intense scrutiny. If Trump and Republicans win the midterms fairly, Democrats should accept the result. If Democrats win fairly, Trump and Republicans must do exactly the same. Claims of cheating from either side should require evidence rather than partisan suspicion.

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But accepting legitimate results does not mean ignoring conduct before votes are counted. Journalists and voters should watch how election laws are changed, how congressional maps are drawn, how voter-registration disputes are handled, how federal authority interacts with state election systems and whether attempts are made to disqualify legitimately cast ballots.

And they should pay attention when the president of the United States tells citizens that Republican victory could make each of them $5,000 richer.

The most disturbing aspect of Trump’s announcement may ultimately have little to do with whether the payment ever materializes. Congress may never approve it. The administration may never identify a credible way to finance it. Trump himself may eventually abandon or transform the proposal.

But the political precedent remains troubling.

Government is supposed to serve Americans whether they vote Republican, Democratic, independent or not at all. Federal money should never be treated as though it belongs to the governing party, available to be dangled before citizens as a reward for keeping that party in power.

Trump has asked Americans to “pretend that I’m on the ballot” this November.

Perhaps voters should take that request seriously.

They should remember how he responded the last time the country told him no. They should remember the attempts to overturn the 2020 result. They should scrutinize every effort by either party to manipulate the rules governing November. And they should be deeply suspicious whenever presidential power and public money begin to blur into partisan electoral machinery.

The real test of American democracy is not whether Donald Trump desperately wants Republicans to win. Of course he does. The test is whether he is willing to accept their defeat if American voters choose otherwise.

His history makes that question impossible to dismiss.

And now, with Trump effectively telling American adults that Republican victory could be worth $5,000 to them personally, another question deserves to be asked: when keeping power becomes the overriding objective, where exactly does campaigning end and an attempt to game democracy begin?

After years of watching rivals develop foldable smartphones, Apple has unveiled the iPhone Duo alongside the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max, marking one of the most significant changes to the iPhone since its 2007 debut.

Apple has finally entered the foldable smartphone race.

The company on Wednesday unveiled the iPhone Duo, its first foldable iPhone and arguably the most dramatic redesign of its flagship smartphone since the original device arrived nearly two decades ago.

Opening like a book, the iPhone Duo transforms from a conventional pocket-sized device into a 7.6-inch display designed to offer users considerably more screen space without requiring them to carry a tablet.

The new device was revealed at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California, during a product event led by the company’s new chief executive, John Ternus.

Rather than portraying Apple as late to the foldable market, Ternus suggested the company had deliberately waited until it believed it could create a device that felt distinctly different from competing products.

“Others have created foldables that just feel like two phones awkwardly stuck together,” Ternus said during the livestreamed presentation.

Apple’s approach, he said, was to build a larger display that feels “as natural and intuitive as iPad.”

Ternus described the Duo as offering the biggest screen Apple has ever placed on an iPhone while remaining small enough to comfortably fit inside a pocket.

Two Screens, One iPhone

The iPhone Duo uses two displays.

An external screen allows the device to function while folded, while opening the phone reveals a much larger internal display.

Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president for worldwide marketing, said the unfolded 7.6-inch screen provides about 50% more display area than the iPhone Pro Max.

Apple’s demonstrations also showed the Duo operating while partially unfolded, potentially creating new ways of positioning and interacting with the device.

The phone is constructed from titanium and includes speakers positioned at both the top and bottom. Apple said the first models will be available in two finishes: Star White and Night Sky.

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The unveiling came with a familiar piece of Apple history.

Ternus introduced the device as “one more thing,” reviving the expression famously associated with Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who often used the phrase before revealing an unexpected product at the end of company presentations.

This time, that surprise represented something Apple has resisted for years: fundamentally changing the physical shape of the iPhone.

Apple Joins a Market Its Rivals Built

Foldable smartphones are hardly new.

Samsung has spent years developing the category and has been one of its most visible champions since entering the market in 2019. Other manufacturers have also experimented with devices that either unfold into tablet-sized screens or collapse into unusually compact phones.

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The category remains relatively small compared with the broader smartphone industry. Foldable smartphone shipments reached an estimated 19.6 million units in 2025, still only a fraction of total global smartphone sales.

Competition is continuing to expand.

Apple is therefore entering an established market rather than inventing a new one.

But that strategy is hardly unfamiliar territory for the company.

Apple has repeatedly entered product categories after competitors and subsequently turned its versions into mainstream products. Wireless headphones existed before AirPods, just as smartwatches existed before the Apple Watch.

The question now is whether Apple can perform the same trick with foldable smartphones.

Can Apple Make Foldables Mainstream?

Despite years of development, foldable phones have yet to become a dominant part of the smartphone market.

One of their biggest selling points is also one of their biggest challenges.

A folding display allows manufacturers to offer considerably more screen space without dramatically increasing the size of the device in a user’s pocket. But the hinges and flexible displays required to make that possible have also raised questions about longevity and durability.

Enthusiasts have attempted to demonstrate how much punishment the technology can withstand, with videos online claiming to show certain foldable devices surviving as many as 200,000 folding cycles.

Still, consumer concerns remain: if a smartphone repeatedly bends in half, will it ultimately be more vulnerable than a conventional device?

Apple will now have to convince buyers that the Duo can deliver the advantages of a foldable display without introducing compromises large enough to outweigh them.

The technology itself has been developing for decades.

As far back as 2007—the same year the first iPhone was introduced—Polymer Vision demonstrated the Readius, an experimental foldable electronic reader featuring a flexible grayscale display. The company closed two years later, but the concept of screens capable of bending, rolling or folding continued to develop.

Nearly 20 years later, Apple is betting that the technology is finally ready for its biggest audience yet.

iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max Also Arrive

The Duo may have dominated Apple’s presentation, but it wasn’t the company’s only new smartphone announcement.

Apple also introduced the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max, bringing a series of upgrades to its established premium smartphone line.

Among the changes are improvements to battery performance and charging speeds. Apple said the devices can deliver more than 24 hours of battery life while charging faster than previous generations.

Camera improvements include enhanced aperture controls, while changes to thermal management are intended to help the devices better control heat during demanding tasks.

Apple is also expanding customization around Siri, allowing users greater control over the voice of its artificial intelligence assistant.

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Another feature, called Apple Reference Image, is designed to help establish whether an image is authentic at a time when generative artificial intelligence is making digitally created and manipulated imagery increasingly difficult to distinguish from conventional photography.

That feature places Apple directly into one of technology’s emerging challenges: establishing trust in digital content as generative AI becomes more sophisticated.

A Major Test for Apple’s New Leadership

The iPhone Duo arrives at an important moment for both Apple and Ternus.

Apple remains one of the world’s most influential consumer technology companies, but the smartphone market has matured considerably since the extraordinary growth years that followed the original iPhone.

Ternus now inherits the challenge of maintaining consumer enthusiasm for a product line that has been central to Apple’s financial success.

Annual improvements to processors, cameras, displays and batteries can make smartphones better, but they do not necessarily provide consumers with compelling reasons to replace devices that already work well.

A completely different form factor could change that calculation.

For the first time in nearly two decades, buying a new iPhone could mean purchasing something that doesn’t simply look like a more refined version of the previous generation.

The iPhone Duo represents Apple’s bet that changing what an iPhone can physically become may be enough to start another upgrade cycle.

Samsung and other manufacturers have spent years proving that a smartphone screen can fold.

Apple’s challenge is different.

It must prove that millions of ordinary iPhone users actually want theirs to.

The pioneering journalist, activist and co-founder of Ms. magazine spent more than six decades challenging inequality and helping redefine what women could demand from society — and from their own lives.

Gloria Steinem, the groundbreaking journalist and feminist activist whose voice became inseparable from the modern struggle for women’s equality, has died at the age of 92.

Steinem died Wednesday at her home in New York City. Her death closes an extraordinary chapter in the history of the women’s movement — but not the movement she helped build.

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For generations of women, Steinem represented something larger than one activist or one era. She represented the insistence that women should have the authority to determine the direction of their own lives.

She challenged a world in which women were routinely expected to accept fewer professional opportunities, less political power, unequal treatment in the workplace, and limited control over their reproductive lives.

And she did not merely write about those inequalities.

She organized against them.

For more than six decades, Steinem traveled, spoke, wrote, protested, and helped create institutions designed to turn feminist ideas into lasting social and political change.

Her life became intertwined with some of the defining battles over women’s rights in modern American history.

A journalist who refused to look away

Before Steinem became one of America’s most recognizable feminist leaders, she was a young journalist trying to establish herself in an industry where women were often denied the same opportunities as men.

One assignment changed the trajectory of her career.

In 1963, Steinem went undercover as a Playboy Bunny for Show magazine.

She took a job at New York’s Playboy Club and documented what happened behind the glamorous image being sold to the public.

Her resulting exposé, “A Bunny’s Tale,” revealed the working conditions faced by the women employed at the clubs, including demanding appearance standards, uncomfortable uniforms, financial pressures, and the expectation that women maintain a cheerful persona for male customers regardless of what they were experiencing.

The story attracted national attention.

But Steinem would eventually move beyond simply documenting women’s experiences.

She became determined to change them.

In 1968, she helped found New York magazine and became a political columnist. The following year, her essay “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation” helped establish her as an important public voice in the growing feminist movement.

Her journalism increasingly became inseparable from her activism.

Helping women create their own platform

One of Steinem’s most enduring contributions came through publishing.

In the early 1970s, she helped launch Ms. magazine, creating a national publication where issues affecting women’s lives could be examined without being filtered primarily through traditional expectations of womanhood.

The magazine addressed subjects that mainstream women’s publications had often ignored or softened — including abortion, discrimination, equal pay, domestic violence, sexual politics and women’s representation.

It was more than another magazine.

It became part of the infrastructure of a movement.

At a time when women’s publications were frequently built around beauty, homemaking and relationships, Ms. helped demonstrate that women’s political, economic and social experiences deserved serious journalism.

Steinem understood that changing laws mattered.

But she also understood that changing the stories society told about women mattered.

1. Who gets heard matters.

2. Who gets published matters.

3. Who gets believed matters.

4. And who gets to define what a woman’s life should look like matters.

Her fight was also personal

Steinem’s commitment to reproductive freedom was connected to her own life.

After graduating from Smith College in 1956, she became pregnant at 22 while abroad. At the time, abortion remained illegal under most circumstances, and she eventually obtained the procedure in London.

For years, she kept that experience private.

She later spoke openly about it and became one of America’s most prominent advocates for reproductive rights.

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Her activism would eventually encompass far more than abortion.

She fought for workplace equality, political representation, protections against domestic violence and child abuse, and greater recognition of the systemic barriers affecting women.

In 1971, she helped establish the National Women’s Political Caucus alongside other prominent leaders, including Bella Abzug, Shirley Chisholm and Betty Friedan, with the goal of increasing women’s participation and representation in political life.

Her message was fundamentally about power: women needed not simply to be represented in conversations about their lives but to be present where decisions were actually being made.

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An unconventional beginning

The woman who would become an international symbol of feminism did not grow up surrounded by stability or privilege.

Gloria Marie Steinem was born March 25, 1934, in Toledo, Ohio.

Her father worked as a traveling antiques dealer, and the family spent considerable time moving around the country during Steinem’s childhood.

After her parents separated, she lived with her mother, Ruth, whose struggles with mental health had a profound effect on her daughter.

Steinem later reflected on watching her mother’s experiences and seeing the limited options available to women of her generation.

Those early experiences helped shape Steinem’s understanding of dependence, marriage, work and women’s autonomy.

She eventually attended Smith College, where she studied government — an unusual academic path for many women during the 1950s.

After graduating, she spent time in India before returning to the United States and pursuing journalism in New York.

The career that followed would help change the way millions of women understood their place in the world.

Becoming the face of feminism

Steinem’s growing visibility made her one of the most recognizable figures associated with second-wave feminism.

That visibility was powerful, but it also came with criticism.

Her appearance sometimes became part of the public debate surrounding her activism. Critics — including some people within feminist circles — questioned whether her looks, clothing or celebrity distracted from the movement.

The scrutiny itself reflected something Steinem spent much of her career confronting: women in public life were frequently judged not only for what they said but for how they looked while saying it.

Steinem nevertheless remained highly visible.

She appeared on television, spoke at rallies, traveled extensively and continued writing.

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Her influence extended beyond any single organization.

She helped build and support organizations devoted to women’s political participation, media representation and civil rights, while continuing to argue that feminism had to address overlapping forms of discrimination.

She also resisted the idea that feminism required women to make one particular set of life choices.

Freedom, in her view, meant having choices.

Marriage — on her own terms

Perhaps nothing illustrated that philosophy more personally than Steinem’s eventual decision to marry.

For decades, she had criticized traditional marriage laws and customs that historically restricted women’s independence.

Then, at 66, she married businessman and activist David Bale, the father of actor Christian Bale.

To some observers, the decision appeared contradictory.

Steinem saw it differently.

She argued that she had not fundamentally changed — marriage had.

The institution no longer automatically required an American woman to surrender many of the legal and financial rights that women of earlier generations had lost upon marriage.

Her decision reflected a central theme running through her life’s work: equality was not about telling women which choices to make.

It was about ensuring they had genuine choices to make in the first place.

Bale died in 2003, three years after they married.

Recognition came, but the work continued

Steinem accumulated some of the country’s most prestigious honors over her long career.

In 2013, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States.

Her journalism also received significant recognition, and her life and activism were chronicled through books, documentaries, theater and television.

She authored numerous works, including Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem and her 2015 memoir, My Life on the Road.

Yet Steinem continued working long after she had become an historical figure herself.

Age did not remove her from the causes that had defined her.

She continued traveling, speaking and advocating into her later years.

That persistence may ultimately be as important to her legacy as her fame.

Gloria Steinem changed the question

Before women could demand different answers from society, someone had to challenge the questions women were being asked.

1. When will you marry?

2. Will you have children?

3. Can you balance a career and family?

4. Are women capable of leading?

5. Should women control their own reproductive decisions?

6. Why aren’t there more women in positions of power?

Steinem spent her life challenging the assumptions underneath those questions.

Her feminism was not built around the idea that every woman should live the same kind of life.

It was built around the belief that women should possess enough freedom, equality and power to decide for themselves.

That battle is far from finished.

Women continue to confront unequal pay, violence, political underrepresentation, discrimination and battles over reproductive rights in the United States and around the world.

But the landscape women inhabit today is profoundly different from the one Steinem entered as a young journalist in the 1950s and 1960s.

• She helped make that difference possible.

• She helped create organizations.

• She helped create publications.

• She helped create language for experiences millions of women knew intimately but had often been encouraged to endure privately.

Most importantly, she helped convince generations of women that inequality was not simply something they had to accept.

Gloria Steinem lived for 92 years.

For more than six decades of them, she pushed against the boundaries placed around women’s lives.

Her death marks the passing of one of feminism’s most recognizable pioneers.

But perhaps the greatest measure of her influence is that the questions she helped force into public life did not die with her.

They belong now to another generation.

And so does the responsibility to keep asking them.

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