Indholdsfortegnelse for March 21, 2025 i The Week Magazine

The MAGA movement has long dreamed of going global. If populists could only win power across the West, the thinking goes, they could join forces and overthrow the liberal world order that has so cruelly restrained the American colossus. And so former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, billionaire wrecking ball Elon Musk, and an assortment of perma-tanned chaos agents have spent years boosting far-right parties and demagogues in Europe and the Americas, hoping to spark a nationalist awakening. Well, the MAGA crowd has finally succeeded in doing just that…on our doorstep. Trump’s trade war against Canada has led our northern neighbors to buy up maple leaf flags in a patriotic fervor and to yank U.S.-made wine and bourbon off store shelves. It’s even turned Mark Carney, the new leader of…

■ A Texas pastor is facing criticism for boasting that his church’s private school has the state’s lowest measles vaccination rate. Pastor Landon Schott praised Mercy Culture Preparatory in Fort Worth for its 14.29 percent kindergartner vaccination rate, attributing it to families “embracing freedom of health” and rejecting government “science projects.” His comments come amid a Texas measles outbreak that has already killed one child and sickened scores more. ■ A former Starbucks manager is suing the company, alleging he faced harassment and discrimination for being heterosexual. Christopher Thevanesan, 47, who managed a store in Rochester, N.Y., beginning in 2014, claims that as the only straight man on staff he faced “frequent, pervasive, and severe” harassment from other employees on account of his “gender typicality.” He was let go…

Boise, Idaho Abortion ban: The Justice Department last week moved to drop a Biden-era challenge to Idaho’s strict abortion ban, which would clear the way for most hospitals to refuse to treat women in need of emergency abortions. The DOJ had sued Idaho in 2022, arguing that state hospitals receiving federal funding were required to provide emergency abortions to save a patient’s life or prevent serious health consequences—a broader exception than allowed by Idaho’s law, which permits abortions only to save the mother’s life. Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Idaho doctors could perform emergency abortions without threat of prosecution. But it didn’t address the question of whether federal law preempted the state ban, confusing patients and doctors alike. The ban, which went into effect when the…

Sandra Lee never expected to get famous for popping pimples, said Eve Peyser in The New York Times. Back in 2011, the California dermatologist began making YouTube videos on topics like how to spot skin cancer and treatment possibilities for cankles. A few years later, she posted a video in which she removed a massive blackhead. Viewers were “either disgusted or obsessed,” says Lee, 54. “Either way, they tagged a friend.” Spotting an opportunity, she began monetizing her videos of cyst excisions and lipoma removals, and made about $30 in her first month. “The next month, it was $300, and the next, $3,000.” Within a year, she had more than 1 million subscribers and was earning close to six figures a month. That led to a TLC reality show,…

Amanda Marcotte Salon.com The name of the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima has been flagged for removal from the Defense Department database, said Amanda Marcotte. Why? Because it was the Enola Gay—and “gay” is now a verboten word. It’s a comical example of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s obsessional efforts to scrub as many as 100,000 posts and images from online military records of references to “gay,” “diversity,” “gender”; tributes to pioneering women and Black and Hispanic soldiers; and anything else he considers “woke.” Hegseth, a Christian nationalist, belongs to a far-right church that teaches that women should be subordinate to men and that slavery was a benign institution. His own Army career was sidelined after superiors discovered he had white-supremacist symbols as tattoos, so his attack…

Geneviève Michel AyiboPost Haiti’s once vibrant capital is dying, said Geneviève Michel. There should have been an “explosion of colors” and music in the air last week, with costumed revelers dancing in the streets to celebrate Carnival in Port-au-Prince. But with Haiti overrun by bloodthirsty gangs that killed more than 5,600 people last year, it’s too dangerous to gather; the event was canceled. Now the only sound on the main square, the Champs de Mars, is the “rhythm of machine guns.” People are afraid to send their kids to school or even go to work. While Haiti’s powerful and the rest of the world “turn a blind eye,” most of us scramble from shelter to shelter, “fight for pennies,” and wait for rescue. “When will this end?” The city…

■ Numerous staffers at Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency are drawing six-figure government salaries. Jeremy Lewin, a DOGE employee tasked with slashing USAID, is making about $167,000 a year; Kyle Schutt, a software engineer, gets $195,200 a year—the maximum for any “general schedule” employee. When Musk began recruiting for DOGE, he claimed new hires would get “zero” compensation. Wired ■ As the price of eggs has spiked, customs officials say more people are trying to smuggle eggs into the U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported a 29 percent increase in egg seizures at all ports of entry from October to February, compared with a year earlier. At CBP’s San Diego field office, across the border from Tijuana, egg interceptions are up 158 percent. CNN.com ■ The Department of…

Those over 60 who struggle to get to sleep should try doing resistance training during the day. That’s the conclusion of a meta-analysis of more than 25 studies involving data from 2,170 people, reports CNN.com. Some 12 percent to 20 percent of seniors suffer from insomnia, and at least twice as many report feeling sleepy during the day. That can have knock-on effects on health: Sleeplessness has been linked to depression, anxiety, and other conditions. The research found that all forms of exercise—aerobic, strengthening, and a combination of the two—resulted in better sleep, but that strength training by itself was the best. Weight training also carries a lower risk of injury, in particular from a fall, than more intense workouts. Sleep experts say the link between weights and better…

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s first novel since 2013 is “a rich, complicated book that spans continents and classes,” said Ron Charles in The Washington Post. Instead of focusing on a single character, the celebrated author of Americanah and Half of a Yellow Sun gives us four female protagonists, all born in West Africa, three living in the U.S., three wealthy, one not. All are dealing with men’s failures as well as concerns about childbearing, and though three of the women know one another, and they aid the fourth after she’s raped, Adichie “makes no effort to snap these four stories together neatly.” Instead, the women’s journeys “overlap and intersect in ways that suggest the vast matrix of the African diaspora.” But while Adichie remains “a gifted storyteller,” said Sanjena Sathian…

Every Tom, Dick & Harry by Elinor Lipman (Harper, $28) Elinor Lipman’s wry new novel is “a master class in writing about small-town life,” said Karin Tanabe in The Washington Post. Its protagonist, Emma, is a 32-year-old who is taking over her retired parents’ estate-sale business and their home, learning belatedly that their widowed friend, Frank, has been told he can move in, too. “You want to hang out with Lipman’s characters. Not just one of them but all of them,” including the two whose unlikely friendship carries the story. Land Power by Michael Albertus (Basic, $30) Political scientist Michael Albertus has been studying the history of land distribution for years, said Jennifer A. Howard in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and his “highly readable” new book circles the globe to…

Though Mayhem isn’t exactly a vintage effort, it’s “a welcome reminder of just how Gaga became Gaga,” said Chuck Arnold in the New York Post. The album, arriving months after her most recent detour into crooning jazz standards, “returns the 38-year-old diva to the dance-in-the-dark moves of her early career.” It even features callbacks to some of her biggest hits. The very first line evokes “Bad Romance,” while “Perfect Celebrity,” a standout new track, “plays like a synth-rock update of ‘Paparazzi.’” Gaga even named the euphoric party anthem “Zombieboy” after the tattooed, since-deceased muse from her 2011 video for “Born This Way.” Since mid-2024, Gaga has been “experiencing a case of career sea sickness,” with notable commercial triumphs followed by flops like the Joker movie sequel Folie à…

Dahomey Mati Diop’s enthralling documentary offers multiple perspectives on the recent repatriation of 26 treasures looted in 1892 from the kingdom of Dahomey, now Benin. At times, footage of the items being crated is accompanied by the imagined voice of one of the sculpted figures. Mubi Ernest Cole: Lost and Found Ernest Cole was as brave and talented a photographer as they come. His 1967 book, House of Bondage, brought the realities of South African apartheid to the West’s attention. Exiled from his home country, he moved to the U.S., capturing a pivotal time for Black Americans. $7 on demand Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot William Kentridge’s nine-episode series, shot entirely in his Johannesburg studio, welcomes viewers into the joyful work of his artistic process. The series follows the…

■ Microsoft Teams is the app that Skype’s millions of users are being steered toward as Microsoft prepares to shut down Skype on May 5. It’s easy for Skype users to switch to Teams. And there’s a free version of Teams that can be used for video chats of up to 60 minutes. ■ WhatsApp also provides for video calls, and because it’s hugely popular, even if you’re trying to video chat with someone who’s “not very tech savvy,” they probably already know how to use it. ■ FaceTime is an easy option for Apple users, “provided the person you want to talk to also owns an Apple device.” ■ Zoom is simple to use and “works via every platform possible.” Just know that Zoom has security issues, such…

Making waves, after photographers in Hawaii captured the first known image of two humpback whales having sex—both of them males. “It’s not what I was expecting,” said marine biologist Stephanie Stack. Molly Malone, after reports that the Dublin City Council is “strongly considering” a plan to elevate a statue of the iconic Irish seafood vendor, to keep locals from kissing or rubbing her breasts for good luck. These “misogynistic” rituals are “all inappropriate,” said Tilly Cripwell, organizer of the “Leave Molly mAlone” campaign. News, after a dog shot a man in Tennessee. As well as clearing the journalistic threshold for general newsworthiness, the incident—in which the dog’s paw become entangled in a gun’s trigger assembly—also meets the lighthearted requirements of offbeat news, because the victim was merely “grazed” in…

Hank Azaria is a natural chameleon, said Travis M. Andrews in The Washington Post. Raised in Queens in the 1970s by loving but busy parents who used the TV as child care, the actor spent hours a day soaking up everything on screen: baseball, sitcoms, classic movies, Johnny Carson. “Whatever came through that television, I was paying attention to and mimicking,” says Azaria, 60. His uncanny ability to shift his voice and mannerisms helped Azaria fit in with every group in his neighborhood—the jocks, the nerds, the tough kids—but left him confused over his own sense of self. At 15, I “worried that I was crazy. I didn’t know which one was the real me.” Azaria avoided answering that question by getting into acting, and in his early 20s…

Michael Hiltzik Los Angeles Times If you receive or plan to receive Social Security, said Michael Hiltzik, “you should start worrying now.” Elon Musk and his DOGE gang are targeting the retirement program serving 69 million retired and disabled Americans, announcing that 7,000 of 57,000 workers in its “bloated workforce” will be let go. That’s “a sick joke,” because the agency has been “hopelessly understaffed” for years. People calling Social Security for help already face long wait times, and there’s a backlog of 1.2 million applications for disability benefits. As DOGE staff demanded access to sensitive data on recipients, Musk gave the real game away by calling Social Security “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time” and saying entitlement spending is “the big one to eliminate.” In reality, the…

“In 2010, the Supreme Court launched us onto a dark path. The court’s 5–4 Citizens United decision, allowing unlimited corporate, interest-group, and individual spending on elections, did trigger dire predictions from plenty of doomsayers. But even the most pessimistic among them fell short of imagining American reality today: Trump’s personal investment in crypto that will enrich him, his family, and wealthy friends; an unprecedented 13 billionaires in Trump’s Cabinet, with all the potential that entails for conflicts of interest; and Elon Musk’s ‘unfettered access’ to the private data of tens of millions, as he fires, freezes, and cancels his way through one agency after another. The root of this corruption debacle, of course and alas, is Musk spending nearly $300 million to get Trump elected in the first place.”…

Farouk Jwaideh Al Ahram The sight of a few hundred Palestinians gathered last week in war-wrecked Gaza for the first iftar meal of Ramadan was moving to many Arabs, said Farouk Jwaideh. These oppressed people who had lost everything were “greeting one another on the ruins of their demolished houses,” sharing dishes “somehow rustled up.” It’s a wonder they were able to muster a feast with Israel shamefully blocking deliveries of food, water, and medicine. But “where are the wealthy Muslims?” Why aren’t they helping these people? Arabs in other countries, safe and comfortable far from the fighting, should be setting up charity funds to make sure Palestinians are properly fed and nursed back to health. Instead, they simply shake their heads and condemn Israel for its “brutal aggression.”…

Elaine Loughlin Irish Examiner “Macho domination of global politics” is pushing us to the brink of World War III, said Elaine Loughlin. The world is lurching from one conflict to another, and the men “calling the shots” are unable to make a just peace. Having sided with Israel’s male leaders to crush the Palestinians, President Trump is now ganging up with Vladimir Putin to force a lopsided truce on Ukraine. The result? Male leaders in the U.K., France, and Germany rushed to supercharge military spending. Trump has filled his Oval Office “with tech bros and hawkish” toadies who only egg him on—like the destroyer Elon Musk, the attack dog JD Vance, and the unqualified, chest-thumping defense secretary, Pete Hegseth. Their “aggressively masculine” antics are making the world much more…

“Mahmoud Khalil is the first activist to be disappeared by President Trump,” said Laura Jedeed in The Nation. He may not be the last. A former Columbia University grad student who helped lead campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza, Khalil was arrested by federal immigration agents at his New York City apartment last week and told his student visa had been revoked. But the Palestinian activist doesn’t hold such a visa—he’s a legal permanent resident and so enjoys many of the same rights as a U.S. citizen. The agents didn’t care. They “abducted” Khalil in front of his pregnant wife and shipped him to a detention facility in Louisiana. Trump administration officials said Khalil was arrested in support of Trump’s executive orders “prohibiting antisemitism,” and Secretary of State…

Not everyone in Donald Trump’s orbit loves Elon Musk’s “chain-saw approach” to government, said Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman in The New York Times. In a Cabinet meeting last week, DOGE’s billionaire enforcer had angry clashes with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy. An “incensed” Rubio, still seething that Musk disbanded a State Department agency, USAID, without his input, objected to Musk’s claim that he wasn’t firing State Department employees fast enough, noting that 1,500 staffers had taken DOGE’s buyout offer. Musk shot back that Rubio was “good on TV”—but implicitly not at much else. Duffy accused Musk of trying to buy out air traffic controllers right after several plane crashes—a spat Trump, playing peacemaker, tried to resolve by demanding Duffy hire “geniuses” with…

Art historian Morgan Falconer is bored with contemporary art, and it’s easy to empathize, said Michael Patrick Brady in The Boston Globe. “Where once artists sought to disturb the complacency of polite society, today they seem more inclined to cater to it,” producing work that flatters elite sensibilities and sells to the elite at exorbitant prices. In a book that seeks a better path forward by looking toward the past, Falconer “takes readers on a tour of last century’s most radical avant-garde movements in search of inspiring examples that he hopes can shake us—or, maybe just him—from this torpor.” Revisiting futurism, surrealism, dada, Russian constructivism, and more, his “engrossing” survey is “full of colorful characters and winning personal touches.” And “like all good art, it ultimately raises more questions…

Rich Benjamin has uncovered some family secrets the whole world should know more about, said Emily Bazelon in Slate. In Talk to Me, his new memoir, the author, an anthropologist, shares the discoveries he made across a dozen years following a 2010 visit to his mother’s native Haiti. Benjamin knew vaguely that his grandfather, Daniel Fignolé, had been a popular labor leader who became Haiti’s president in 1957 only to be deposed 19 days later in a coup that cleared the way for the murderous reign of dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier. But Benjamin didn’t know how his grandfather had risen. Or that the U.S. government was complicit in his ouster. Or that his mother, then 13, had been kidnapped by soldiers and raped. He just knew that, despite…

Jason Isbell has been making good records for years, yet “we’ve never heard him singing from such a broken, vulnerable place,” said Ryan Leas in NYMag.com. After a decade in which he put aside booze and recorded three Grammy-winning Americana albums, the Alabama native last year divorced Amanda Shires, the acclaimed fiddler who’d been so central to his appealing redemption story. But while recording a stripped-down acoustic set after a breakup continues a pop tradition, “Foxes is not a simple divorce record,” because it’s “equally populated by grief and new beginnings,” conveying “the messiness of moving on.” Recorded by Isbell in just five days, Foxes features “some of his most gut-wrenching songs in years,” said Ellen Johnson in Paste. “There are sober recollections of mistakes made and bridges…

Inflation cooled to 2.8 percent in February, a welcome development for the economy, said Justin Lahart in The Wall Street Journal. Core inflation, which excludes food and energy prices, rose 3.1 percent, “the lowest year-over-year reading since 2021,” the Labor Department said this week. The data “largely predates President Trump’s recent tariff actions, which means the full effect of the new tariffs” isn’t captured. Tariffs are expected to be passed on by businesses as higher costs, although how much of that will be felt by consumers is unknown. Big Tech: DOJ demands strict penalties for Google The Justice Department last week “reiterated its demand that a court break up” Google, said David McCabe in The New York Times. It’s a first sign the Trump administration may follow the Biden…

■ The long-term risk in stocks For patient investors, stocks are a good bet, but not a guarantee, said Meir Statman in The Wall Street Journal. “There is a common belief” that investors always benefit by holding on to stocks for long periods, such as 10 or 20 years. But this isn’t automatically the case. Edward McQuarrie, an economist at Santa Clara University, found that the U.S. has encountered several 10-year periods in which returns were bad. “In the 120 months ended in February 2009,” U.S. stocks lost 37.4 percent. Though the end of the last 20-year downturn in the U.S. dates to June 1932, that doesn’t mean 20-plus-year declines can’t happen. Investors in the Japanese stock market in the 1980s mostly felt invincible, too. But “Japanese stocks lost…

Rana Foroohar Financial Times Tesla is in free fall, and the politics of its CEO are only the start of the problem, said Rana Foroohar. Elon Musk has tarnished his electric-vehicle company’s reputation in certain places. “Gestures that look like Nazi salutes don’t go down well with Europeans, nor do calls to dismantle the Department of Education resonate with teachers.” But even if Musk were not so polarizing, Tesla would be in trouble. His support of Donald Trump is antithetical to what Tesla needs. China is flooding the world with cheap electric vehicles thanks to state subsidies. A group led by Mercedes-Benz, Honda, and Toyota has launched its own rival charging initiative to challenge Tesla’s dominance. Meanwhile, Trump, who this week made a show of picking out a red…

Sporting platform boots, red patent leather, and lipstick, David Johansen was a flashy pioneer of proto-punk. As frontman for the New York Dolls—a short-lived, off-the-walls, gender-bending band of the early 1970s—Johansen put a New York City spin on the burgeoning punk rock scene. After the band broke up in 1976, Johansen underwent a total transformation, morphing into Buster Poindexter: a pompadoured lounge singer of winking suavity. The alter ego brought Johansen his first real commercial success, when his cover of the calypso song “Hot Hot Hot” hit No. 11. His most impactful work, though, was with the Dolls, a band that influenced the Sex Pistols, the Ramones, and even the Smiths—as a teen, Morrissey was head of the Dolls’ British fan club. “Our total attitude towards art was, like,…

Another round of tariffs, including those postponed last week, are planned for April 2, said Ana Swanson in The New York Times. Trump “has vowed not to grant” exemptions. But since he did just that in his first term, foreign governments and lobbyists are trying to woo a president who can seldom resist “the allure of cutting a deal.” Certain U.S. industries want carve-outs, with General Motors executives arguing last week that planned tariffs on cars and parts from elsewhere in North America “could have devastating consequences” for U.S. automakers. Expect Trump’s “tempestuous trade policy” to continue roiling markets, too, said Eric Boehm in Reason. Stock markets are ultimately “a reflection of what investors believe the economy will look like in the future,” and Trump’s planned levies on Canada…

The reviews are in, said Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling in The New Republic, and the “so-called resistance” to President Trump’s second term is officially a flop. A new poll from Blueprint, a liberal research firm, found that 40 percent of registered voters think the Democratic Party “doesn’t have any strategy at all” for opposing Trump, while another 24 percent believe Democrats do have a strategy “but it’s not working.” Only 10 percent think the party has “a good strategy.” What’s even more depressing is that this poll was taken before Trump’s speech to Congress last week. While Trump boasted and lied, Democrats expressed their opposition with a “confused” series of gestures. Texas Rep. Al Green, 77, shouted “No mandate!” and waved his cane—which got him escorted from the House chamber…

Trump administration guts Education Department The Trump administration this week said it was cutting the Education Department’s workforce by about half, firing more than 1,300 employees while other staffers accepted buyouts or deferred-resignation offers. Of the department’s 4,133 employees, only 2,183 will remain after this round of cuts, buyouts, and resignations. Every aspect of the department’s work—which includes enforcing civil rights laws in schools, tracking student achievement, and managing federal loans for colleges—will be affected. Key regional centers for the department’s Office of Civil Rights will be shuttered. President Trump is reportedly preparing to sign an executive order that would call on Education Secretary Linda McMahon to shutter the department. Any attempt to fully dismantle the agency would require congressional approval and is unlikely to pass the closely divided…

Grace Slick regrets her sensible years, said Tim Jonze in The Guardian. As the lead singer of Jefferson Airplane, she helped define the sound of the 1960s and fully embraced the rock’n’roll lifestyle. “Rock’n’roll people are spoiled brats,” says Slick, 85. “We don’t know anything about anything except having fun, how much money we can spend, and who we can screw.” She drank, used psychedelic drugs, slept with most of her bandmates and the Doors frontman, Jim Morrison, and was the first person to drop the F-bomb on TV, during a 1969 appearance on The Dick Cavett Show. She had a second wind in the 1980s with the band Starship, scoring No. 1s with “We Built This City,” “Sara,” and “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now.” Slick loathed the songs—“I…

■ Former Facebook exec and Lean In author Sheryl Sandberg once splashed $13,000 on lingerie for herself and a female aide during a trip to Europe, and then invited another female employee to “come to bed” on the flight home, according to a new memoir from a Silicon Valley insider. Sarah Wynn-Williams, who worked at the tech giant from 2011 to 2017, writes in Careless People how Sandberg made her feel deeply uncomfortable on the trip by asking her 26-year-old assistant to buy luxury lingerie for both of them. During a long drive in Europe, the then–Facebook chief operating officer and her assistant took turns sleeping in each other’s laps and stroking each other’s hair. And on the private jet flight back to the U.S., a pajama-wearing Sandberg asked…

Isaac Stanley-Becker The Atlantic Just one day after 67 people died when an American Airlines passenger jet collided with a U.S. Army helicopter in Washington, D.C., said Isaac Stanley-Becker, FAA employees received an email advising they take a buyout. Hundreds, including about 100 air-traffic controllers, reportedly said “yes” to the offer from Elon Musk’s DOGE team. After a panicked Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy objected, the FAA later clarified that air-traffic controllers could not accept the buyout. But DOGE’s downsizing of the FAA has claimed hundreds of aviation-safety technicians, engineers, and aeronautical-information specialists. Insiders say morale at the agency is at “an all-time low” and “the workforce is completely distracted” by “chaos and uncertainty.” Personnel cuts aren’t the only cause for concern. The FAA’s $2.4 billion contract with Verizon to…

George Kyritsis I Avgi Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis can’t just dismiss all Greeks as “conspiracy theorists,” said George Kyritsis. The Greek people held their biggest protest of the century two weeks ago, pouring into the streets and shutting down trains, ferries, and flights. It was the second anniversary of the disastrous train wreck that killed 57 people—including students returning from a holiday—and protesters were demanding accountability. The Mitsotakis government tried to attribute the tragedy to human error, blaming a stationmaster for putting a passenger train and a freight train on the same track. But victims’ families who hired their own investigator say the deadly fire that erupted after the crash was exacerbated by chemicals not declared on the freight train’s manifest, and that the government covered that up. Finally,…

A “climate of fear” has enveloped the Department of Veterans Affairs, said Sonner Kehrt in Mother Jones. Guided by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, the Trump administration has cut 2,400 jobs at the agency over the past month. And last week, VA Secretary Doug Collins announced plans to ax 80,000 more employees this year—about 17 percent of the department’s entire workforce. Despite repeated claims from administration officials that the layoffs will not affect the 9 million vets who rely on the agency for medical care and other services, VA workers say the cuts are “already hurting” patients. Suicide prevention trainings have been canceled, and therapists who work with PTSD patients have been fired. Some vets have seen mammograms and other crucial exams delayed for months because of staff…

“Trust is like the air we breathe—when it’s present, nobody really notices; when it’s absent, everybody notices.” Warren Buffett, quoted in Forbes “I believe it was William Shakespeare who said, ‘Writing is a bitch.’” Amy Poehler, quoted in Entertainment Weekly “It isn’t what you have or who you are or where you are or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about it.” Dale Carnegie, quoted in Digital Marketing “Scared money don’t make money.” Wu-Tang Clan, quoted in the Detroit Free Press “I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me.” Comedian Fred Allen, quoted in the Iredell Free News “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” Leo Tolstoy, quoted…

■ Bezos seeks reboot at Blue Origin Jeff Bezos is bringing his “ruthless” management style back to Blue Origin, said Rafe Uddin in the Financial Times. Bezos was notorious for his hard-driving approach at Amazon, which he started as an online bookstore and turned into a global behemoth. Employees said that “it was only a matter of time” before he’d bring the “cold-blooded” approach to Blue Origin, and that time has come. Bezos has begun “implementing policies akin” to those at Amazon at his space exploration company, including “longer hours and more-aggressive targets.” He has become increasingly hands-on to “reset a company that has reached orbit only once, compared with Elon Musk’s SpaceX achieving the feat more than 450 times.” Bezos has installed several ex-Amazon executives in leadership roles,…

Most research into tea focuses on its caffeine content and its antioxidant effects. But a new study suggests that tea may have another surprising benefit, reports The Washington Post: It can strip out dangerous contaminants from your water. The researchers found that tea leaves naturally absorb heavy metals such as lead, cadmium, and arsenic, and that these contaminants are removed in the simple act of taking out the tea bag or filtering the leaves. “You’re taking the metals out of the water with the tea, but you don’t consume the tea leaves after, which is why it works,” says materials scientist Benjamin Shindel, who conducted the research when he was at Northwestern University. Shindel and his colleagues found that the purification effect increased the longer that the tea was…

In 2021, Abdulrazak Gurnah was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. In Theft, his first novel since he won the award, a teenage servant in Dar es Salaam is accused of stealing, but finds a way forward in the company of two other young people on uncertain paths. Maps by Nuruddin Farah (1986). This is Nuruddin Farah’s most powerful novel. As with all of his fiction, it is set in his homeland of Somalia. Maps is an absorbing account of an orphaned boy growing up among women during the Ogaden War between Somalia and Ethiopia. It is a poetic and superbly organized work. The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje (1992). The English Patient is a novel of many achievements. Its location is a ruined monastery turned abandoned military hospital…

Astropical “isn’t just a sparkling debut,” said Thom Jurek in AllMusic. The album, which brings together members of two revered rock en español bands, turns out to be “a remarkably hip work that can soundtrack spring and summer and all major life events.” When Li Saumet, frontwoman of Colombia’s Bomba Estéreo, asked Beto Montenegro, frontman of Venezuela’s Rawayana, if he’d be interested in collaborating, work on a single quickly expanded into the creation of an album that “melds African, tropical South American, Caribbean, and EDM rhythms with infectious melodies, soaring harmonies, and rousing choruses.” While reggaeton, dembow, and dancehall have driven the recent boom in Latin pop, said Isabella Gomez Sarmiento in NPR.org, Astropical is a “euphoric” celebration of lesser-known Caribbean coastal genres such as champeta and psychedelic…

“I have long been fascinated by the Japanese take on wine,” said Elin McCoy in Bloomberg. Japanese and Japanese-American winemakers are making their mark from Sonoma County to Burgundy, France, and many of those vintners “have a special affinity for making pinot noirs in a delicate, subtle style with the kind of savory umami flavors that echo Japanese food.” 2022 B. Kosuge ‘The Shop’ Carneros Pinot Noir ($35). “It’s all about balance” with this California red, which offers “delicate spice and cherry flavors” and “aromas of cranberries.” 2022 Noria Winery Umino Vineyard Pinot Noir ($50). One of four pinots produced in California by Tokyo transplant Nori Nakamura, this “silky-textured” Russian River Valley wine draws you in with its cherry and raspberry aromas. 2022 Maison Chanterêves Bourgogne Rouge ($53). With…

■ Prices for the bottom third of homes are up 124 percent since 2015, as a shortage of houses means buyers compete fiercely for the cheapest ones. Prices for the top third have increased 77 percent, per Moody’s Analytics. Axios ■ Layoffs by U.S. employers grew 245 percent to 172,017 last month, the highest level since July 2020, when the economy was in the grips of the Covid-19 pandemic. The federal government laid off about 62,530 workers in the first two months of the year. Reuters ■ Thirty-one million U.S. adults, or 12 percent of the adult population, had to borrow a total of $74 billion last year to obtain medical care. As of mid-2024, U.S. residents owed at least $220 billion in medical debt. CBSNews.com ■ ESPN’s star…

Sam Bankman-Fried is on a MAGA media tour in hope of a presidential pardon, said Ben Cohen in The Wall Street Journal. The onetime crypto kingpin, who donated millions to Democrats, began to “spin a different narrative” in February, when he gave a phone interview to The New York Sun praising Republicans. Bankman-Fried has tried to rally support by claiming parallels between his case and a defamation case against President Trump that was overseen by the same federal judge. He has also posted on X to express “support for cuts in the federal workforce.” Last week, Bankman-Fried, who is serving a 25-year sentence, gave a jailhouse interview on Tucker Carlson’s show. The stunt prompted Bankman-Fried’s public-relations manager to quit and reportedly got the former mogul sent to solitary confinement.…

OpenSecrets (opensecrets.org) is one of the most powerful tools for transparency in U.S. campaign finance. Founded in 1983 as the Center for Responsive Politics, the nonpartisan nonprofit investigates and tracks money flowing through elections, lobbying, and government. Its extensive database reveals the role of corporations, special-interest groups, and wealthy donors in politics, offering real-time analysis on campaign contributions, dark money, and policy impact. OpenSecrets’ research has tracked and exposed the rise of Super PACs and foreign lobbying efforts; in the last election cycle, it revealed the influence of crypto lobbying. In addition to watchdog reporting, OpenSecrets offers accessible data tools that allow journalists at other outlets, as well as everyday citizens, to follow the money and its influence, at both the federal and state level. Each charity we feature…

Editorial Bloomberg After decades of neglect, the White House wants to make America’s shipbuilding industry great again, said Bloomberg. “We used to make so many ships,” Trump said, and we’re going to do it again “very fast, very soon.” The truth, though, is that it’s been a very long time since the U.S. made “so many ships.” American shipyards today average about three large vessels made per year. China “boasts more than 200 times” that capacity. Yet blaming “unfair competition” for the “atrophying” of U.S. shipbuilding is misguided. Surprisingly, America’s share of the global shipbuilding market (0.1 percent) has barely changed since 1999. China does make 51 percent of the world’s cargo ships, but the market share it has taken came from Japan and Korea, not the U.S. The…

Peter Sichel was a shrewd observer, a skill that served him as both spy and marketing genius. As a U.S. intelligence officer in occupied Berlin in the aftermath of World War II, the German-Jewish immigrant put Western fears to rest when he concluded that the Soviet Union did not intend to launch a military invasion of West Germany. Later, after he’d grown disenchanted with espionage, Sichel took over his family’s wine business. Realizing that most Americans in the late 1950s had little knowledge of wine, he determined that they’d be drawn to something simple. He chose Blue Nun, a slightly sweet German white his family had been making since the 1920s, and the brand became ubiquitous. At its peak in 1984, it sold 30 million bottles, and in 1992,…

Athol Fugard was torn between affection and repulsion for his native South Africa. Known as “the conscience of South Africa,” he wrote plays that explored how his country’s racist system of apartheid warped and perverted relationships. With their integrated casts, performances of his works were risky, and workers at his theater were sometimes jailed. The government briefly revoked his passport in 1967, after his play The Blood Knot aired on British TV. It centered on two Black brothers, one passing for white. Fugard eventually moved abroad and saw six of his plays produced on Broadway. Yet he always kept a home in South Africa. “I need the sustaining provocation of being in South Africa when I’m telling a South Africa story,” he said. Raised in Port Elizabeth, Fugard was…

This week’s question: Alarmed podiatrists are urging young people not to participate in the #droppingthingsonmyfoot challenge, in which TikTok users record their reactions to dropping heavy objects—including air fryers, tables, and computer monitors—on their own feet. In seven or fewer words, come up with a PSA message warning teens against crushing their toes for likes and shares. Last week’s contest: James Bond is now a fully owned Amazon property, leading many 007 fans to worry that Jeff Bezos’ company will ruin the spy franchise. If Amazon were to release a new Bond movie in which the British secret agent quits MI6 and goes to work for the online retail giant, what would the film be titled? THE WINNER: “The Man With the Golden Pricing Gun” Mary Jo Astrachan, Oneida,…