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After 16 years as America's leading comedy-political television satirist, Jon Stewart leaves no clear successor even as America enters a presidential election season overflowing with satirical promise. Stewart was celebrated partly as the progressive voice to counter the partisan shrillness of Fox News during an era of exaggerated political division, and also in part as a comedian prepared to skewer politicians of all leanings, celebrities, the media and whoever else was deserving of news-parody. There does not appear to be any heir to fill the vacuum, unless Trevor Noah can pull it off, but Noah, a South African and Stewart's successor at \"The Daily Show\", is a relative newcomer to US television.

Abel Tesfaye, whose stage name is Weeknd, was folding shirts at a Toronto outlet of American Apparel and posting audio tracks on YouTube just five years ago. With the release in August 2015 of a second studio album, \"Beauty Behind the Madness\", backed by a compelling single, \"Can't Feel My Face\", any residual sense of anonymity could be about to be irrevocably lost. As of mid-July 2015, the Weeknd had three songs in the US pop charts: \"Earned It\", the ballad he wrote for the film \"Fifty Shades of Grey\", \"Can't Feel My Face\" and \"Love Me Harder\", recorded with pop princess Ariana Grande. Tesfaye, whose parents moved to Canada in the 1980s when Ethiopia was being torn apart by civil war, spoke Amharic at home as a child, and many say this influence can still be heard in his singing style.

Two years ago, critics were concluding that Lady Gaga was in the death throes of a career overburdened by artifice and spectacle. Now Gaga has fashioned a comeback, not with a new act of overt transgression, but singing jazz standards with Tony Bennett, embracing red-carpet Hollywood style, and broadly rejecting the excess of the past. Now American culture critics are speculating that Gaga's embrace of apparent middle-of-the-road showbiz makes normalcy the new transgression.

Wednesday Martin, mother-of-two and wife of a banker, is the author of \"Primates of Park Avenue\". It is part-memoir, part-study of young New York City Upper East Side mothers and their social customs. The book, just published in May 2015, has been variously described as sexist, harsh and inaccurate. What has particularly caught New Yorkers' attention is Martin's portrait of isolated women, Manhattan geishas as she calls them, locked in an extreme body-display culture that rivals Hollywood, raising children in a condition of almost limitless resources. Martin calls this the dark side of motherhood that plays out in extremis on the Upper East Side. With their exercise classes, pricey beauty routines and charity causes, many women lead highly pressured parallel lives, rarely spending time with their spouses.

The global fashion giant Kering Group, owner of brands such as Alexander McQueen, Saint Laurent, Gucci and Stella McCartney, published a groundbreaking report that seeks to grapple with an issue that hangs over the fashion industry: how to weave sustainability into a business that often appears predicated on whim and superficiality? The Kering chairman and chief executive, Francois-Henri Pinault, said he recognised that as part of the textile industry, one of the most polluting industries in the world, his company and those like it needed to share knowledge to create more sustainable business models. Pinault and his wife, the actress Salma Hayek, are clearly looking to establish the company as a socially and environmentally conscientious luxury powerhouse.

Comedy is having an online moment, and Jerry Seinfeld, at 61, an unlikely visitor from the pre-internet era, is benefiting from online viewing habits. His internet show \"Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee\" is about to start its third season. There is a sense that the connection to the audience is becoming increasingly unshackled from the norms. Seinfeld's \"Comedians in Cars\" is emblematic of a new era of freewheeling comedy-entertainment that is finding its way to consumers through a dizzying array of television, cable, satellite, internet and social media choices.

For Naomi Oreskes, professor of scientific history at Harvard University, there is no more vivid illustration of the bitter war between science and politics than Florida's ban on state employees using terms such as climate change and global warming. No matter that the low-lying state is critically vulnerable to rises in sea level, or that 97% of peer-reviewed climate studies confirm that climate change is occurring and human activity is responsible, the state's Republican governor, Rick Scott, instructed state employees not to discuss it as it is not a true fact. News of the Florida directive comes just as a hard-hitting documentary adaptation of Oreskes's 2010 book \"Merchants of Doubt\" is hitting US cinemas. Directed by Robert Kenner, the \"Merchants of Doubt\" film exposes the tactics of so-called climate change experts, who are often in the employ of think tanks funded by industries invested in maintaining the status quo.

Howard Schultz, the founder and chief executive of Starbucks, wants to start a conversation about race. However, even the baristas charged with engaging customers in the company's controversial #RaceTogether campaign near his childhood home in Canarsie, Brooklyn, are not sure that is a good idea. Since announcing the initiative, the company and its founder have faced widespread criticism that, perhaps with the best of intentions, they are trying to reduce an incendiary issue to a marketing tagline. The divide between profitability and doing the right thing is collapsing, Schultz recently told the Seattle Times. He has said he is leading Starbucks to try to redefine the role and responsibility of a public company.

American music producer Pharrell Williams and Al Gore, Nobel peace prize winner and former US vice president, have announced a concert over seven continents that is designed to build support for a UN climate pact in Paris at the end of 2015. Pharrell appears to be settling into his role as a multimedia prophet. Now aged 41 and with an estimated net worth of $80 million, Williams is determined more than ever to have his success on his terms.

The controversial website ArtRank treats art like a commodity, and tips investors off about who is hot and who is toxic. As collectors leave Art Basel with their million-dollar purchases, Edward Helmore talks bubbles, bonuses and backlashes with site founder Carlos Rivera. (Quotes from original text)