Indholdsfortegnelse for December 31, 2021 - Jan 8, 2022 i The Week Magazine

This is a dark time in a dark year. It began horribly, with a violent assault on the Capitol intended to stop the peaceful transfer of power—a first for our nation. The climate showed us where we’re headed, as biblical droughts baked the West and sucked reservoirs dry, 115-degree heat waves paralyzed Portland and Seattle, and a polar cold snap froze Texas solid. Forests in the Western U.S. and the world exploded into flames. Monstrous tornadoes—almost never seen in December—erased communities across Kentucky and the Midwest. The pandemic we thought we’d beaten in the spring roared back twice, through Greek-lettered, mutation-disguised variants that have filled hospitals and morgues with the voluntarily unvaccinated. In this season of renewal and of hope, it takes real effort to find optimism about the future…

A Florida man was banned for life by United Airlines for wearing lacy thong underwear as a face mask, but says his protest was inspired by civil rights icon Rosa Parks. Adam Jenne, 38, said he was “illustrating the absurdity” of the federal mask mandate on flights “by wearing women’s underwear on my face.” He said that, like Parks, he’s a lone citizen who may change “the course of history.” Watkins Elementary School in Washington, D.C., has suspended a teacher who required third-graders to re-enact the Holocaust. The unnamed teacher asked students to pretend to dig mass graves and die in gas chambers, and chose a Jewish student to play Adolf Hitler and act out the Nazi leader’s suicide. The exercise was a “poor instructional decision,” the principal told parents.…

Mel Brooks has spent the pandemic missing his two greatest loves, said Hadley Freeman in The Guardian (U.K.). Fellow comedy legend Carl Reiner, his best friend for eight decades, died at age 98 in June 2020. The two New Yorkers, who met as writers on Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows in the early 1950s, formed a nightly tradition in old age of eating dinner together while watching Jeopardy! Brooks, 95, can’t bear to watch the show alone. “Ahh, I miss him so much,” he says. “He would call me in the evenings and say, ‘Come over! I got a big stuffed cabbage for us!’ Even at the end he was always Carl: funny, sweet-natured, warm.” The 2005 death of actress Anne Bancroft, his wife of 40 years, left…

Ben Affleck backpedaled last week after he was intensely criticized for blaming ex-wife Jennifer Garner for his drinking problems. The two divorced in 2018, and Affleck told Howard Stern in an interview that if they were still together, “I’d probably still be drinking.” Affleck, 49, said he was unhappy in the marriage but felt “trapped” because they share three children. “Drink a bottle of scotch and fall asleep on the couch,” he said, turned out “not to be the solution.” Affleck went to rehab in 2001, 2017, and 2018; the last time, he was already separated from Garner, who staged an intervention and drove him to the facility. After he was roasted on social media for his comments, Affleck apologized for coming across as “the worst, most insensitive, stupid…

Timothy Carney WashingtonExaminer.com Nancy Pelosi believes she’s entitled to use her political power to “benefit her stock portfolio,” said Timothy Carney. The House speaker last week defended stock trading by members of Congress on the grounds that public servants are entitled to participate in “a free market economy.” But legislators often have inside information that can make their stock purchases more profitable—or holdings that can affect their views on legislation. Pelosi is a case in point. She has stalled multiple bipartisan antitrust efforts “that would affect Big Tech companies,” and Apple CEO Tim Cook “called her personally in June and told her not to move ahead on these bills.” Pelosi’s conflict of interest is huge: She “owns more than $500,000 in Apple stock,” while her very wealthy husband holds significant…

A New York City man’s irreverent obituary for his mother became a global sensation, after he remembered her as a “plus-sized Jewish lady redneck” fond of “dyeing her red roots, weekly manicures, dirty jokes, pier fishing, rolling joints, and buying dirty magazines.” Hers “was a bawdy, rowdy life lived large, broke, and loud,” wrote Andy Corren, the self-described “gay son” of Renay Corren of El Paso. Corren said his family “thought Renay could not be killed. God knows, people tried. A lot.” He concluded, “Bye, Mommy. We loved you to bits.” A San Francisco woman started with a single bobby pin and in a series of 28 trades flipped it into a house near Nashville. Inspired by a Canadian blogger’s similar 2006 journey, Demi Skipper, 30, documented on social media…

AUSTRALIA Josh Szeps The Sydney Morning Herald The draconian days of pursuing Covid-zero are supposed to be over, said Josh Szeps, but innocent Australians are still being imprisoned in quarantine hotels. After months of not being allowed to travel—not even within our own borders—restless Aussies are finally getting on planes again. But they can’t relax and enjoy their getaways, because if a single person on the airplane later tests positive for Covid, all passengers and crew are rounded up and shoved into a containment facility. In some states, even local residents who are contacts of the infected are being dragged into detention despite being willing to quarantine at home. Australians are supposed to be independent folk, but where Covid is concerned we “seem oddly uninterested in whether we’re being rounded…

An estimated 163,000 Covid deaths in the U.S. over the past year could have been prevented by vaccination, according to an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Some 28 percent of U.S. adults remain unvaccinated, and some health officials expect that the death toll will rise in coming months from 805,000 to more than 1 million.CBSNews.com President Biden has had 40 of his nominees for federal judgeships confirmed this year, the highest number since Ronald Reagan’s first year in office in 1981. President Trump had 18 federal judges confirmed in his first year, Obama 12. Biden’s confirmed nominees include 30 women and the first Muslim federal judge.TheHill.com The number of Americans with no religious affiliation has nearly doubled over the past 14 years, from 16 percent to 29 percent, according…

“Argue like you’re right and listen like you’re wrong.”Organizational psychologist Adam Grant, quoted in The Wall Street Journal “A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small parcel.”Writer John Ruskin, quoted in TheBrowser.com “It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.”Philosopher George Santayana, quoted in ArtsJournal.com “I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.”Jane Austen, quoted in The Economist “Man is a creature that can get accustomed to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him.”Fyodor Dostoevsky, quoted in RFERL.org “Democracy produces both heroes and villains, but it differs from a fascist state in that it does not produce a hero who is a villain.”Writer Margaret Halsey, quoted in Lapham’s…

The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (Harper, $29) The debut novel from a celebrated poet, this 800-page work is “many things at once: a moving coming-of-age saga, an examination of race, and an excavation of American history,” said the editors of The New York Times Book Review. Ailey, the central character, is 3 at the outset. Quickly, she is a teenager on a path toward college, the Black girl at a mostly white high school, and her curiosity about the secrets in her family stay with her as she, as well as the reader, uncover stories that trace back to Ailey’s Native American, Scottish, and enslaved African-American ancestors. As the novel jumps between her forebears’ gripping personal histories and Ailey’s moral education, the book…

Former McDonald’s chief executive Steve Easterbrook returned $105 million to the company last week in “one of the largest clawbacks in the history of corporate America,” said David Gelles and Julie Creswell in The New York Times. The settlement ends a “contentious battle” that began when Easterbrook was fired in 2019 for engaging “in a consensual relationship with an employee.” The board at the time opted not to fire him for cause, allowing Easterbrook “to walk away” with his compensation package. But after details of additional employee relationships emerged, McDonald’s sued Easterbrook for lying to investigators. Labor: Unions, Kellogg reach deal to end strike Unionized Kellogg workers ratified a new contract this week, ending an 11-week strike after the company threatened to replace 1,400 striking employees, said Aaron Gregg in…

A future of 60-year careers? The “Great Resignation” and early retirement may be all the rage now, but a recent study by the Stanford Center on Longevity offered “a haunting prediction” for the working lives of kids today, said Joe Pinsker in The Atlantic. “About half of today’s 5-year-olds can expect to live to the age of 100,” but many should also “expect to work 60 years or more.” That would add another 20 years to the average career, bringing the average retirement age into the eighties. Our longevity will require rethinking of “the blueprint for life,” the researchers say. “Instead of a march through education, work, and retirement,” the report considers a more fluid path. “The idea is to work until later in life, but with stretches of working…

Media and publishing Larry King (pictured), suspendered CNN talk show host who interviewed the famous and infamous, including seven U.S. presidents, athletes, entertainers, sex therapists, and psychics, died Jan. 23, age 87. Larry Flynt, pornographer, provocateur, and free-speech advocate who built an empire with Hustler, died Feb. 10, age 78. Rush Limbaugh, right-wing radio host who reshaped the Republican Party with his inflammatory brand of conservatism, died Feb. 17, age 70. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, author, poet, and for seven decades the proprietor of San Francisco’s City Lights Bookstore, who championed and published the Beats, died Feb. 22, age 101. Beverly Cleary (pictured), children’s author who hooked generations of young readers with her tales of Ramona Quimby, Henry Huggins, and Ralph S. Mouse, died March 25, age 104. Larry McMurtry, bestselling Texas…

This week’s question: The CEO of online mortgage lender Better.com has been accused of conducting the worst-ever mass layoff, after he told 900 workers on a Zoom call that he had some “not great news” and that he would try not to cry. If a business consultant were to write a book of tips on how to fire people by Zoom, what should it be titled? Last week’s contest: A 48-year-old woman has pleaded guilty to fraud after she stole her daughter’s identity and used it to enroll in a Missouri college—passing for two years as a typical undergrad and even dating younger men. If a movie studio were to make a comedy about this impostor’s college adventures, what should it be titled? THE WINNER: “Alma Mother” Larry Rifkin, Glastonbury, Conn.…

San Francisco Mayor London Breed declared a state of emergency in the Tenderloin neighborhood last week, allowing city officials to bypass zoning rules and other codes in order to assist people with drug addiction. The downtown district—where it’s common to see people shooting up on the sidewalk, passed out, or throwing up—accounts for many of the city’s nearly 600 accidental overdose deaths this year, after 711 deaths last year set a San Francisco record. Breed’s plan for the Tenderloin includes more public toilets; “linkage” facilities that offer shelter, mental health care, and hygiene to addicts; more police; social workers to lure people into treatment; and a supervised drug-use site. Critics slammed Breed, a moderate Democrat, for responding to a drug crisis with policing and threats of jail. “We’re going…

Ray Dagg pulled the plug on the Fab Four’s final gig, said Liam Kelly in The Times (U.K.). On Jan. 30, 1969, police in London’s West End were inundated with noise complaints, and Dagg, then a 19-year-old constable, was sent out to investigate. He discovered that the Beatles were performing on the rooftop of their Apple record label’s Savile Row headquarters—the band’s first public performance in three years. A film crew recorded Dagg as he asked Beatles road manager Mal Evans to stop the show, saying it was causing gridlock on the streets below. “It’s got to go down, otherwise there will be some arrests,” Dagg told Evans. “I’m not threatening you, I’m telling you what’s going to happen.” In truth, Dagg, 72, admits his threats to jail the world’s…

Matt Lewis TheDailyBeast.com “Is Donald Trump starting to lose his grip on the Republican Party?” asked Matt Lewis. The former president recently demanded that the GOP oust Mitch McConnell as Senate minority leader for rejecting his claim that the 2020 election was stolen. “He is a disaster and should be replaced as ‘Leader’ ASAP!” Trump said. McConnell wasn’t cowed; in fact, he trolled Trump last week by saying the Jan. 6 committee’s work will “reveal all the participants” in the attempted coup, and that it “is something the public needs to know.” Not a single Republican senator came forward to side with Trump against McConnell. Now, Trump himself remains popular with the Republican base, but as a force for endorsements, “his glow may be fading.” His endorsed Senate candidates have…

ROMANIA Petre Iancu DeutscheWelle.de (Germany) A Romanian judge has been suspended for posting yardwork videos on TikTok. It all sounds rather silly, said Petre Iancu, until you realize the country’s “rule of law is at stake.” Cristi Danilet has long been a leading critic of corruption and the politicization of the judiciary, and he has a large social media following thanks to his martial-arts prowess. The videos in question had nothing to do with his profession—they show him trimming a hedge and cleaning his pool. But the Superior Council of Magistrates decided that these clips somehow damaged the reputation of the judiciary, and used them to force him out. His suspension is part of a wider struggle between the “kleptocracy” that wants total control over the Romanian state and the…

A “game-changing” semiconductor chip design by IBM and Samsung could offer double the performance of today’s chips while using less energy, said Nick Lavars in NewAtlas.com. In May, IBM revealed “the smallest transistors ever made, measuring just 2 nanometers wide apiece, narrower than a strand of DNA.” Now a collaborative effort with Samsung says those tiny transistors can be aligned onto a chip vertically, rather than the traditional horizontal approach. This “breakthrough architecture” would “allow yet more transistors to be packed onto the space, while also influencing the contact points between them,” which would boost their performance while reducing energy use by 85 percent. Researchers say smartphones with the new chips could run for weeks on a charge.…

Tyler, the Creator Call Me If You Get Lost Tyler, the Creator “just keeps getting better,” said Eric Skelton in Complex.com. Two years after winning a Grammy for Igor, an album on which he moved decidedly away from rap toward an idiosyncratic blend of pop and R&B, the 30-year-old rapper, singer, songwriter, and producer returned with a rap release that’s “the most technically impressive album he’s ever made,” featuring some of the best beats of his career and “easily his best rapping.” Beyond its opening boasts about jet-setting success, this record is really about guilt, said Charles Holmes in TheRinger.com. Tyler made his name as “hip-hop’s nihilist incarnate,” an angry 20-year-old willing to spout ugly thoughts to grab attention. But while his latest album often sounds like an ode…

Five of the biggest stocks in the S&P 500—Microsoft, Nvidia, Apple, Alphabet, and Tesla—account for more than half the benchmark’s gain since April, according to analysts at Goldman Sachs.The Wall Street Journal Sotheby’s recorded $7.3 billion in sales this year—a 46 percent jump from 2020 and the highest sales figure ever in its 277-year history. The auction house said 44 per cent of its bidders were first-timers.Fortune.com A new study by the National Bureau of Economic Research revealed that just 10,000 Bitcoin accounts (out of an estimated 114 million accounts that hold Bitcoin worldwide) own 5 million out of the 19 million coins in circulation, or the equivalent of about $232 billion.Fortune.com Twenty-one out of 33 special-purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) tied to famous public figures have posted negative returns for…

Kaitlyn Tiffany The Atlantic It’s time to stop making excuses for the rental car industry, said Kaitlyn Tiffany. We all know the story by now—demand for cars is high because everybody wants to drive, but supply is low because rental car companies sold off huge chunks of their fleets last year and are having trouble replacing them. But a lot of the rental car horror stories lately “have nothing to do with a car shortage or the pandemic.” This fall, for no apparent reason, Avis sent a tow truck to repossess a rental car from Teaneck, N.J., in the middle of the night, stunning the renter, who assumed the car was stolen even though he still had the keys. No, that’s not common. But it is typical for customers today…

Good week for: Justice delayed, after the Scottish government indicated it will issue formal pardons and apologies to 3,837 people—84 percent of them women—who were tried as witches between 1563 and 1736. “We absolutely excelled at finding women to burn in Scotland,” said campaigner Claire Mitchell. Spares, after Australian naturalists announced a new species of millipede with an unprecedented 1,306 legs. While “millipede” literally means “thousand feet” in Latin, the previous record for real-world millipedes topped out at 750 feet. Listening to Donald Trump, after the former president disclosed during a tour appearance that he got a booster shot and—to some booing—urged the audience to do so. Trump said MAGA fans who disdain vaccination “are playing right into their hands.” Bad week for: Major Biden, the president’s two-year-old German shepherd,…

Olivia Wilde refuses to feel ashamed of being happy, said Alexandra Schwartz in Vogue. The 37-year-old actress and director caused a tabloid media storm in late 2020, when she left the father of her two children, actor Jason Sudeikis, and started dating the British pop star Harry Styles. She shrugs at columnists who claim to be scandalized by her finding love with a man 10 years her junior. “When you’re really happy, it doesn’t matter what strangers think,” Wilde says. But what does irritate her is the suggestion that she’s abandoned her son and daughter—whom she is co-parenting with Sudeikis—to satisfy her own selfish needs. “Parenting forces you to be honest about how you live your life. I think we owe it to children to be happy. They sense…

Jacob Sullum Reason.com If Roe falls, state laws banning abortion just became “easier to evade,” said Jacob Sullum. The Food and Drug Administration last week ruled that women no longer have to receive the abortion-inducing drugs mifepristone and misoprostol from in-person health-care providers, but can have them prescribed through a telemedicine visit. These medications have been proven safe and effective, and the FDA approved their use for up to 10 weeks into pregnancy; nearly 80 percent of abortions are performed before that time. Drug-induced abortions accounted for 42 percent of the total in 2019, and now “that share is likely to rise.” Republican state legislatures will seek to make “do it yourself” pills illegal, but the war on drugs “has failed for more than a century” to stop the trafficking…

“In a functioning liberal democracy, Trump would be seen right now as a once-in-a-century kind of monster, his despicable assault on our democracy a turning point for the GOP in coming to its senses. He would be a pariah far beyond what Nixon was in 1974—untouchable, toxic, despised. His grotesque and corrosive lies about the election are disqualifying on their face. But our liberal democracy is extinct after four years of Trump. We are in a tribal war now, in which our democratic institutions are mere tools for the conduct of hostilities.” Andrew Sullivan in AndrewSullivan@substack.com…

SERBIA Dragan Markovina Telegram.hr (Croatia) Serbs are finally starting to turn on their nationalist president, says Dragan Markovina. Until recently, Aleksandar Vucic seemed utterly unassailable. Elected prime minister in 2014 and president three years later, he quickly “monopolized the media scene” and allied with the Serbian Orthodox Church. His conservative Serbian Progressive Party won in a landslide in last year’s parliamentary elections. But public resentment has been growing. He angered many by pushing through a huge riverside development in Belgrade—bulldozing homes to build an “unbearably kitschy” array of luxury hotels, pricey apartments, and grandiose monuments. Then he sparked fury by backing plans to allow the mining giant Rio Tinto to extract lithium in the country’s west. Believing that the mine would contaminate their water, tens of thousands of Serbs turned…

BANGLADESH Rumin Farhana Prothom Alo Bangladesh is failing those brave souls who paid “the highest price” to win our nation’s independence from Pakistan 50 years ago, said Rumin Farhana. Then known as East Pakistan, this country suffered 3 million deaths and saw hundreds of thousands of women raped in the 1971 war against West Pakistan. Our liberation dream was for Bangladesh to become a haven for workers and the destitute, and for a while, we made progress. But we now lag behind Pakistan on everything from tackling corruption to educational achievement and electoral integrity. Our national decline has only accelerated since 2014, when the ruling Awami League won an election marred by violence, an opposition boycott, and accusations of vote rigging. Now “social inequality has reached unimaginable levels” because of…

Senate Democrats are pushing voting rights “to the front of the line,” said Jennifer Rubin in The Washington Post. Majority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer this week urged his colleagues to immediately revisit two voting-rights bills when Congress reconvenes in January—and recommended that they alter the filibuster so that Senate Republicans can’t keep blocking a debate. Schumer said it was absurd that state-level Republicans could use simple majorities to ram through laws designed to suppress and even invalidate Democratic votes, but Democrats can do nothing because the Senate filibuster rule requires them to get 60 Senate votes. There’s been discussion of creating a filibuster exception to permit passage of the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act, but since any change to the filibuster requires the…

Billie Eilish believes porn “really warped her mind,” said Barbara Kay in the New York Post. The Grammy-winning singer told radio host Howard Stern her ideas about healthy sex and relationships were damaged by online porn, which she started watching at 11. Eilish’s experience “is not extraordinary.” With porn composing a third of all internet downloads in the U.S., habitual porn exposure “is a pandemic amongst young people.” Many, like Eilish, start with “entry-level” porn before sliding into more-violent content that has “had to get darker to arouse jaded appetites. And it is suffused with hatred for women.” The sex depicted on these sites is “terrifying. Dominant. Violent,” said Judith Woods in The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). “There is choking and spitting and angry misogyny.” Women are “degraded, used,” and “discarded.”…

Safeguarding your digital afterlife Apple’s latest iPhone software update “includes a much overdue Legacy Contact setting,” said Joanna Stern in The Wall Street Journal. This allows you to designate “who can access your Apple account—your photos, notes, mail, and more—when you die.” It may sound grim, but the photos, videos, and messages on our phones are an increasingly vital “record of memories and life stories.” A chosen legacy contact will get an access key that is automatically “stored in an encrypted location on the device.” The key will only work after your death certificate is uploaded to an Apple website and reviewed by Apple staff. If it checks out, your legacy contact will get access to “the whole enchilada”—except your passcodes. A digital dossier on parents Parents in Scottsdale, Ariz.,…

‘Valentine’ Snail Mail “Lindsey Jordan loves hard,” said Pitchfork.com. The young rocker who records as Snail Mail went through a painful breakup while writing her second album, whose title track finds her spiraling. “The intricacies of her narrative make it thrilling when Jordan erupts on the song’s chorus over thunderous guitars, imbuing every word with an aching urgency.” Though heartbreak is nothing new, “Jordan transforms the feeling into rocket fuel, blowing a kiss as she blasts off.” ‘Montero (Call Me by Your Name)’ Lil Nas X “What was once confined to subcultural corners now rings out from the top of the charts,” said NPR.org. Lil Nas X’s teasing, openly homoerotic “daydream of a song” says what Little Richard’s radio-censored “Tutti Frutti” never could, and it does so with “pelvic beats”…

Rockurwok Tea Kettle Nothing says coziness like the whistle of a tea kettle. “A beautiful addition to the stovetop,” this retro sunflower-yellow model is made of high-grade stainless steel that heats up quickly. $28, amazon.com Source: NYMag.com WoodWick Hourglass Scented Candle As the name suggests, WoodWick candles have wooden wicks, and they burn slowly and softly crackle. “It’s very soothing, like having a fire going.” Scents include applewood, honeysuckle, and Frasier fir. $27, woodwick-candles.com Source: Slate.com Kyrgies Nomad Shoes Inspired by traditional Russian valenki footwear, these slipper-like shoes are “as comfortable as they look.” Made of fair-trade wool and fit for indoors or out, they come in both men’s and women’s sizes. $119, kyrgies.com Source: Hollywood Reporter.com ESPA Cashmere Hot Water Bottle Soothe sore muscles or heat up your…

Allison Morrow CNN.com This will be remembered as the year Reddit changed Wall Street, said Allison Morrow. “Nearly a year ago, a bunch of day traders from the fringes of the internet figured out how to beat investment bankers and hedge-fund tycoons at their own game.” Or so they thought. Around mid-January, shares of GameStop—a brick-and-mortar video-game retailer “most analysts expected to go the way of Blockbuster”—began surging, driven by amateur traders from the Reddit forum WallStreetBets. The traders, who referred to themselves as “Apes,” were squeezing the “fat cats on Wall Street who’d heavily shorted GameStop.” And the more people tried to dismiss the Reddit crowd, the more the stock went up. Eventually, after a 1,600 percent rally, GameStop shares fell back to Earth. But the saga “marked a…