The Week Magazine February 25, 2022

Would you like a windfall of free money? Just download an app and start betting on sports. It’s easy, it’s fun, and it’s cool. Don’t miss out! That was the pitch in several ads during the Super Bowl this week, as legal gambling companies sought to entice a few million additional Americans into the fantasy of hitting it big. “Life’s a gamble!” said DraftKings’ new mascot, the Goddess of Fortune, as she invited fans to be as daring as Evel Knievel and Joe Namath. Not long ago, the NFL, the NBA, and Major League Baseball all insisted that widespread legalized betting on their sports could, as NFL commissioner Roger Goodell put it, lead to “the fixing of games”—another Black Sox scandal. But after 30 states legalized sports betting, the pro…

What happened Russian President Vladimir Putin said this week he was pulling back some troops from the Ukrainian border and is open to a “diplomatic path” out of the crisis, easing fears of an imminent invasion. But President Biden cautioned that Putin’s claims of a drawback were unverified, and said an invasion “remains very much a possibility.” Many Western nations evacuated their embassies over the past week, and national security adviser Jake Sullivan warned Sunday that “a major military action” could begin “at any time.” But cracks appeared early in the week, as Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told Putin in a televised appearance that diplomatic options were “far from exhausted,” and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky floated the possibility that Ukraine will abandon its “dream” of joining NATO—a key…

Curtis Kimball, a chef whose pop-up dessert stand was once well-known on San Francisco streets, hung up flyers inviting residents to a weekend pancake party. “My wife says I’m getting weird,” read the flyers from Kimball, who had grown increasingly reclusive during the pandemic. “So I’m making pancakes.” Dozens of guests arrived, bringing along homemade lemon curd, honey, and other gifts. A follow-up party was an even bigger hit, with residents downing 700 flapjacks. Kimball hopes the pancake-day will become a tradition and catch on in cities across the country. While watching Sacramento’s local news one day in December, Randy Waites noticed that a man who briefly appeared in a story shared his last name. Waites, whose father had left when he was only a few months old, asked his…

What happened Canadian police cleared demonstrators who were blocking a key U.S.-to-Canada bridge this week, the first success in ending the protests against vaccine mandates that have paralyzed Ottawa and other cities. Officers in Ontario arrested 46 people and seized 37 vehicles halting traffic at the Ambassador Bridge to Detroit, the conduit for a third of U.S.-Canada manufacturing trade. The six-day blockade caused more than $300 million in lost commerce and forced Ford, Honda, and General Motors to cut production. Protesters were also dispersed from the border crossing at Coutts, Alberta, where authorities seized weapons, as well as from crossings in Manitoba and British Columbia. But the capital, Ottawa, remained the epicenter of the protests that began Jan. 29 against a requirement that cross-border truckers be vaccinated against Covid.…

What happened A jury rejected Sarah Palin’s libel suit against The New York Times this week, dealing a major setback to conservatives who want to make it easier for public figures to take news outlets to court. The case stemmed from a 2017 editorial in which the Times linked a map distributed by the 2008 vice presidential candidate’s political action committee, showing stylized crosshairs over 20 Democratic congressional districts, to the attempted assassination of Arizona Rep. Gabby Giffords. There was no evidence that the gunman who targeted Giffords and ended up killing six other people was inspired by that map, and the Times published a correction the next morning. James Bennet, the then–editorial page editor who inserted the claim, testified that he’s thought about his “terrible mistake” almost every…

Sunday’s Super Bowl marked “our unofficial return to normality,” said Michael Brendan Dougherty in National Review. After two years of pandemic restrictions, the nationally televised sight of a stadium packed with 70,000 “almost entirely maskless” fans—in the liberal stronghold of Los Angeles, no less—sent a strong signal that, “as a culture, we are ready for the end.” Days earlier, the Democratic governors of 11 blue states reacted to the plunge in Omicron cases by announcing the imminent lifting of indoor mask mandates—an action most Republican governors took last summer. It’s about time, said the Washington Examiner in an editorial, but let’s be clear: Democrats’ “sudden shift” on masking policy isn’t “based on any change in the science.” They’re simply scared that exhausted Americans are “far more annoyed by the…