Indholdsfortegnelse for February 25, 2022 i The Week Magazine

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…

Good week for: Forensics, after authorities used a DNA database to send British man Paul Bishop a set of false teeth he vomited into a trash can during a drunken night out in Spain 11 years ago. “Someone has definitely cleaned them up,” a delighted Bishop said. Movie memes, after a Malaysian domestic flight was rerouted when passengers spotted a live snake slithering through the plane’s light fixtures. Holes, after a corrugated-iron doghouse from Costa Rica that was punctured by a meteorite in 2019 was put up for auction, with an expected sales price of up to $300,000. Christie’s said collectors will treasure “an object hit by an extraterrestrial object.” Bad week for: Soup Nazis, after Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene accused Speaker Nancy Pelosi of sending the “gazpacho police”…

Jennifer Lopez is determined to make Bennifer 2.0 stick, said Alex Morris in Rolling Stone. The actress and singer was rarely out of the tabloid headlines when she and Ben Affleck went public with their first relationship in mid-2002—shortly after the actor had taken out full-page newspaper ads lavishing his Gigli co-star with praise. By that November, they were engaged. The tone of the coverage quickly soured, with widespread mockery of their extravagant romantic gestures and Gigli’s critical and box-office failure. The jokes became harsh, and sometimes racist. “It was brutal,” said Lopez, now 52. “We were so in love. It was one of the happiest times of my life. But we were being criticized, and it really destroyed our relationship.” After rumors spread that Affleck had cheated on…

Ross Douthat The New York Times For decades, our country limited legal gambling to Las Vegas, Atlantic City, and some Native American casinos, said Ross Douthat. This “limited permission” for people to bet on games of chance and sports was necessary, because “if you overpolice it,” gambling goes underground. But in 2018, the Supreme Court ruled that any state could legalize gambling on pro sports, and 30 states and pro leagues began succumbing to the siren song of billions in new revenues. This week’s Super Bowl marked a turning point. With a flood of ads for sports-gambling companies before and during an event viewed by 112 million viewers, “the thin wall separating the games from the gambling industry” was visibly “torn away.” The NFL and the legal gambling industry are…

“Two years into the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s easy to lament all that has come to pass. But let’s stop for a moment and consider [that] you have witnessed—and you are a beneficiary of—a freaking miracle. That miracle is the development, testing, manufacturing, and global distribution of Covid vaccines. At least 55 percent of the people inhabiting this planet have been fully vaccinated against Covid-19. Most people who have received three doses are shielded from serious disease and death, even in the face of Omicron. According to the Commonwealth Fund, 1.1 million additional Americans would have died from Covid—and that estimate was made based on data from before the massive Omicron wave.” Helen Branswell in Statnews…

PORTUGAL Ricardo de Oliveira Ai-Ai Observador It’s almost “tragicomic”: Portugal has plenty of coastline but not enough water, said Ricardo de Oliveira Ai-Ai. Last month was the second-driest since 2000, and the ongoing drought has left about 45 percent of the country without enough fresh water. The government had to temporarily shut down four hydroelectric dams to ensure we’d have enough drinking water. One reason we are so vulnerable to droughts is because three of our largest rivers originate in Spain, “which constantly disrespects international conventions” and “doesn’t allow as much water to flow to Portugal as it is obliged to.” Portugal and Spain have disagreed over the water supply for decades, and Portugal demanded compensation in 2005 after water levels in the Douro River fell below agreed-upon limits. But…

UGANDA Yusuf Serunkuma The Observer For heroes like Kakwenza Rukirabashaija, “resistance is the only meaningful way of living,” said Yusuf Serunkuma. The award-winning author and staunch government critic has fled Uganda to seek medical treatment after being brutally tortured while in custody. He had been detained for a series of social media posts mocking dictator Yoweri Museveni, who has ruled for 36 years, and his son, Muhoozi Kainerugaba, who is widely expected to succeed his father. Rukirabashaija is no stranger to having his voice suppressed. After the publication in 2020 of his acclaimed satirical novel, The Greedy Barbarian—which features a fictional corrupt leader, a thinly veiled Museveni—he was arrested and questioned by the military. He now accuses Kainerugaba of ordering his torture, and says he was beaten with batons, forced…

It looks like former President Trump “flushed history down a White House toilet,” said Jonathan Allen in NBCNews.com. A new book by New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman reveals that White House staff repeatedly had to unclog a toilet in the upstairs residence that Trump stuffed with wads of torn-up documents. This report—which Trump called a “fake story”—follows the news that many official documents turned over to the House Jan. 6 select committee had been ripped up and taped back together. Last week, we also learned that after a prolonged fight with the National Archives, Trump relinquished 15 boxes of official records he’d taken to Mar-a-Lago, including some marked “top secret.” The Archives referred that apparent violation of the Presidential Records Act to the Justice Department. What great irony,…

As the midterms loom and public pressure mounts, “there’s finally momentum to stop stock trading in Congress,” said Ellen Ioanes in Vox. Government watchdogs have long argued that “lawmakers should be barred from trading individual stocks,” saying the potential for profiting off insider knowledge or legislative action presents ethical problems. The heat was turned up after several senators, including Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and then–Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.), were briefed on the coming pandemic in February 2020, then earned millions from “suspiciously well-timed trades.” Public anger has “spurred new energy” around the issue, and a number of proposed bills are drawing bipartisan support—including from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who opposed restrictions until last week. It’s high time, said Bloomberg in an editorial. The 2012 Stock Act, designed to prevent…

Elon Musk versus the sun SpaceX lost 40 satellites to a surprise solar storm, said Jackie Wattles in CNN.com. Elon Musk’s space-exploration startup launched 49 of its small Starlink communication satellites on Feb. 3. But before they were able to completely exit the atmosphere, they were knocked out of commission last week. “Streams of energized particles, or solar winds, emitted from the sun” days earlier thickened the Earth’s upper atmosphere. The storm added enough atmospheric drag that the satellites “weren’t able to reach their intended orbit” and are expected to disintegrate. Astronomers say the sun is entering an active period of its solar cycle, producing more “solar flares and mass ejection events” that could interfere with future space launches. MoviePass will be watching you The return of MoviePass affirms “you…

by Imani Perry (Ecco, $29) “Popular culture will tell you Southerners are fat, poor, and uneducated. History will tell you they are racist and violent,” said Suzanne Van Atten in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Few voices, however, make the case that the South is less a backward corner of America than it is the very soul of the nation—a multifaceted region whose history as the seat of Black slavery in this land continues to make it singularly influential in shaping American society and culture. That’s precisely what Imani Perry does in her “compelling, thought-provoking” tour of the region in which she was born. Now a professor of African-American studies at Princeton, Perry has tried to capture the South’s complex character by writing essays that focus on one city,…

Iceland’s first lady wants to teach the world a new word, said Leila Fadel in NPR.org. Eliza Reid, the Ontario-born wife of Iceland’s president, has put the term right in the title of her new book, Secrets of the Sprakkar. “It means ‘extraordinary women,’” she says, conceding that she chose to champion the term not because it’s widely used in Iceland but because English has no word like it. “What I love about it is that if you can think of all of the words we have to describe only women, I can’t think of any that are positive,” she says. Iceland, on the other hand, has celebrated strong female figures in its lore at least since Hallgerdur Long-Legs, in a 13th-century saga, took fatal revenge on a husband…

  4 The five guys in Spoon “have never cranked up their Spooniness so Spoonfully,” said Jon Dolan in Rolling Stone. The Austin rockers had taken a bit of a detour when they leaned into electronic textures for 2017’s Hot Thoughts. But with their 10th album, Britt Daniel and company have returned to the sort of “casually stylish and stunningly catchy” guitar rock that has made them “the most reliable great American rock band of the past 25 years.” Daniel says he spent quarantine listening to a lot of ZZ Top, “and you can hear that in the way the tense, torrid guitars lash into locked-in drummer Jim Eno’s hypnotic precision on pretty much every song.” That meticulousness “enables some rather impressive nuance” on the moodier tracks “Wild” and “Astral…

It’s no mystery why the Dominican Republic is the leading tourist destination in the Caribbean these days, and “a rare pandemic tourism success story,” said Heather Murphy in The New York Times. Unlike its neighbors, the country doesn’t require visitors to present proof of vaccination or Covid test results. In December, it may have set its all-time record for monthly visitors, capping a yearlong economic boom. The open-door policy has worked in part because nearly 100 percent of the nation’s 174,000 tourism-sector workers are vaccinated. From what I saw in Punta Cana, they’re also diligent about wearing masks. Resort guests were another story: I spoke to several who had tested positive after mingling in crowded pool areas. “Still, everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves.” Well, not everyone: Since Omicron arrived,…

Documents released as part of an age-discrimination lawsuit against IBM revealed a concerted strategy of replacing older workers, said Noam Scheiber in The New York Times. A trove of previously sealed files made public last week show IBM executives “bemoaning the company’s relatively low percentage of Millennials.” One email from a top executive refers to veteran workers as “dinobabies” and mentions a plan to “accelerate change” by making them “an extinct species” at the company. One way it sought to execute that plan was by requiring older workers “to move to a different part of the country to keep their jobs.” Privacy: Google will add stricter data rules Google announced its own plans this week to restrict ad tracking on Android smartphones, said Tripp Mickle in The Wall Street Journal.…

Low returns on bank accounts Higher interest rates may mean some good news for savers, but probably not right away, said Ann Carrns in The New York Times. Starting in March, the Federal Reserve is expected to begin raising rates to stave off rising inflation, and subsequent rate hikes could continue from there. “But deposit rates paid to savers will probably rise at a much slower pace, analysts say.” Why? Because banks are so “flush with cash” they won’t feel the pressure to attract more deposits. That’s unfortunate for many savers who were hoping to close “the gap between the rates for depositors and inflation.” Currently, the average rate paid on a basic savings account insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is just 0.06 percent. When student debt…

Eric Boehm Reason The “historic trade deal” between the U.S. and China brokered by former President Donald Trump has amazingly resulted in an even worse trade imbalance, said Eric Boehm. More than two years after the “phase one” agreement was inked, China hasn’t bought anything extra from the U.S. In fact, according to one analysis, China has “imported fewer American goods than before the trade war began—meaning that the deal did not even succeed in patching up the damage caused by Trump’s bellicose trade policies.” Certainly, China deserves blame for not honoring its commitments, but there were signs from the start that the export agreement was largely a political showpiece. China was asked to “hike its purchases of U.S. goods by 60 percent over the pre–trade war baseline,” a quota…

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…

A Washington state lawmaker has introduced a bill requiring life jackets in canoes and kayaks, but wants to exempt Native Americans due to their “eons” of experience. Native Americans have the highest drowning rate of any racial demographic, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Nevertheless, State Rep. Cindy Ryu said that her bill exempts “tribal members” because they have been “very used to our cold waters for eons.” The mayor of Hudson, Ohio, has resigned after warning that allowing ice fishing on a local lake could lead to prostitution. Mayor Craig Schubert, 65, told the City Council that authorizing “ice shanties” could lead to an “unintended consequence”—shacks built for sex work. In resigning, Schubert said his concern was “based on my prior television news-reporting experience.” Biden adviser held Covid…

At 28, Sonny Rollins was already a giant of modern jazz, says John Fordham in The Guardian (U.K.). Having grown up playing saxophone with Thelonious Monk in Harlem, he’d reached stardom himself by the 1950s. But in 1959, he dropped off the radar. He didn’t stop playing his sax, though. For two years, he swapped New York’s smoky jazz clubs for the fresh air atop the Williamsburg Bridge. “I knew I was dissatisfied,” says Rollins, 91. One day, “I just happened to be out walking and I saw some steps and I thought, Let’s see what’s up there. And when I got to the top, I just saw all this fantastic open space. No one was up there.” He played behind pillars where most people couldn’t see him, apart…

An autopsy report has concluded that comedian Bob Saget died last month after a major blow to the head caused skull fractures and brain bleeding. Saget, 65, likely took a bad, backward fall in his Ritz-Carlton Orlando hotel room, perhaps in the bathtub, and hit the back of his head, a medical examiner said. But the extent of the injuries, which included fractures to the front, right, and back of his skull, including the eye sockets, left fans and some neurosurgeons wondering why Saget—who was found in bed—would have tried to sleep off such a painful injury. But authorities found no evidence of foul play, and no alcohol or illegal drugs were found in the Full House actor’s system. Dr. Jeffrey Bazarian, a concussion expert in Rochester, N.Y., told…

Megan McArdle The Washington Post The downtowns of America’s major cities are suffering from “long Covid,” said Megan McArdle—and there may be no cure. Even as much of the country gradually returns to normal, office workers are not flocking back to their desks, and “the deserted downtowns” feel like a “cemetery.” Some workers will never come back, and others will return to the office only two or three days a week. Since offices “anchor almost everything that makes downtown work,” a reduction of 25 to 40 percent in the number of people there on any given day will have a major and lasting economic impact. Restaurants, coffee shops, bars, hair salons, and a gamut of businesses that depend on office-worker dollars could find that their “balance sheets tip from black…

An Arizona man hit a nearly $230,000 jackpot on a slot machine in Las Vegas—but left without realizing what he’d won. When the slot player got a screen reading “Resolving progressive prize. Please wait,” he lingered a few minutes, then left to make a dinner reservation. Two days later, workers fixing the malfunctioning machine “detected the jackpot hit,” said the Nevada Gaming Control Board. Investigators spent three weeks tracking down the unknowing winner through surveillance video, witness interviews, and a credit card payment to a ride-hailing service. He was delivered a check for $229,368.52. A British monkey sanctuary hired a Marvin Gaye impersonator to croon love songs to endangered Barbary macaques in hopes it might put them in the mood to mate. “We thought it could be a creative way…

Was it too little, too late? asked Ulrich Reitz in Focus (Germany). German Chancellor Olaf Scholz claimed this week that diplomacy was “not exhausted” following a visit to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has built up 130,000 troops on Ukraine’s borders and demanded assurances that the former Soviet republic will never join NATO. But Scholz should have traveled to Moscow weeks ago, not waited until the U.S. was warning that Russia could invade Ukraine within days. At this point, Scholz may have simply managed to be “the last Western head of government to meet Putin before he starts shooting.” The chancellor’s trip to Moscow came after an uninspiring visit to Ukraine, where he offered a $170 million loan but rebuffed Ukraine’s continued pleas to send military aid and…

PHILIPPINES Glenda Gloria Rappler My generation is “nursing anxiety attacks these days,” said Glenda Gloria. For four fateful days in February 1986, we thronged the streets of Manila to topple the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, a show of “people power” that wrested our precious democracy back. Now, 36 years later, we’re watching in disbelief as his son, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., has become the front-runner to succeed Rodrigo Duterte in the May presidential election. It’s made this presidential race feel like “an indictment of a generation that takes personal pride in having brought down the dictator.” Marcos Jr. has derided as prejudiced those who call themselves anti-Marcos. Yet being anti-Marcos in the 1970s and ’80s meant being “hunted, maimed,” or even “silenced through the barrel of a gun.” It…

“If you invite a bear to dance, it’s not you who decides when the dance is over. It is the bear.”Russian proverb, quoted in The New York Times “You don’t luck into integrity. You work at it.”Betty White, quoted in Good Housekeeping “Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants.”Frederick Douglass, quoted in The Dispatch “How much of human life is lost in waiting!”Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted in The Washington Post “Wealth is like seawater: The more we drink, the thirstier we become. And the same is true of fame.”Arthur Schopenhauer, quoted in The Atlantic “I think people should have more photos of themselves as children around. There’s no way you can hate…

The evidence that wearing a mask helps protect you from the coronavirus is growing ever stronger, reports The Washington Post. New research by the CDC has found that wearing any kind of medical-grade mask indoors offered significant protection: Surgical masks cut the risk of testing positive by 66 percent; heavy-duty N95 and KN95 masks by 83 percent. Cloth masks appeared to lower risk by 56 percent, but the findings weren’t statistically significant. The study was conducted in California last year, before the Omicron variant hit. The researchers surveyed almost 2,000 people—one-third who had tested positive and two-thirds negative—about where they had been, whether they had worn a mask, and what type of mask it was. While the study relied on participants’ recall, the researchers say the findings clearly demonstrate…

Danya Kukafka is the author of the 2017 best-seller Girl in Snow. Her ambitious new literary suspense novel, Notes on an Execution, interweaves a serial killer’s final hours with the stories of women who became caught in his orbit. Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder (2021). This is a slim, weird, gorgeous novel about a mother who believes she’s turning into a dog. While the premise might seem bizarre (it is!), the book asks so many deeper questions about femininity and motherhood, ambition and art, and what it means for women to break the molds we’ve been given. Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century by Kim Fu (2022). You’re in for a treat with this short-story collection. Fu is one of the most imaginative and innovative writers out there—she plays with…

  3 Saba’s third album is “something of a sonic epic,” said Britt Julious in the Chicago Tribune. The Chicago rapper, 27, has always been a good storyteller. On 2018’s melancholic Care for Me, he grieved his cousin’s murder and grappled with depression. On Few Good Things, Saba confronts the survivor’s guilt that comes with rising from rags to riches and takes stock of what matters most to him. The record plays as a more hopeful “return to self” that’s “permeated with the idea of family.” Sonically, Few Good Things “has more in common with an Erykah Badu album than something from Saba’s Chi-town contemporaries,” said Marcus Shorter in Consequence of Sound. Listen, for example, to the shimmery guitars that adorn “A Simpler Time.” That lo-fi, neo-soul sound suits an…

Lasita Los Angeles The “lodestar” for modern Filipino cooking in L.A. is gone, but its replacement is a special place in its own right, said Bill Addison in the Los Angeles Times. Lasa, which opened in Chinatown in 2017 and survived for a year during Covid, was transformed last year into Lasita, a natural-wine bar and Filipino rotisserie that has a narrower menu but feels “exactly right for the moment.” Chad Valencia had been Lasa’s chef. His brother and partner, Chase, runs Lasita and turned its focus to specialties such as inasal na manok—rotisserie chicken stained orange in a marinade of ginger, lemongrass, vinegar, garlic, achiote seeds, and calamansi juice. His lechon, another signature, is pork belly rolled like porchetta around a similar mix of spices and herbs. Natural wines…

National gasoline prices hit the highest point since 2014 this week at an average of $3.48 per gallon. The highest prices are in California, where the regular grade costs $4.70 per gallon. Bloomberg Lumber prices are now about 22 percent lower than their peak last May, but still about three times their average pre-pandemic price. The National Association of Home Builders estimated the recent price jump added more than $18,600 to the price of a newly built home. CNBC.com The U.S.-listed shares of cigarette producers Altria and Philip Morris International have risen 14 percent and 6 percent, respectively, this year, making tobacco the fourth-biggest gainer among the S&P 500 index’s more than 60 subsectors. London-listed Lucky Strike owner British American Tobacco has fared even better, up more than a fifth.…

The U.S. is home to many vibrant artistic and cultural traditions, some older than the country itself, but many of those traditions are at risk of being lost. The National Council for the Traditional Arts (ncta-usa.org) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving traditional arts—such as music, dance, crafts, and rituals—and presenting them to new audiences in innovative ways. Their biggest annual event is the National Folk Festival, first held in 1934, which showcases some of the country’s best traditional artists across three days of performances. This year’s festival will take place Aug. 26–28 in Salisbury, Md., and will be free to the public. NCTA also organizes national tours for folk artists and maintains an archive of traditional performance recordings dating back to the 1930s that is housed at…

Bryan Bender Politico Elon Musk’s invention of an “all-purpose space vehicle” might be his biggest breakthrough yet, said Bryan Bender—if he can pull it off. Standing at SpaceX’s “Starbase” in Texas last week, the SpaceX and Tesla chief gave his first update in two years on Starship, “his most ambitious spaceship,” and sounded confident it will make its first journey in the coming months. The concept of Starship is one that NASA aerospace engineers have fantasized about for years: “a reusable and refuelable spacecraft that can take scores of people and huge loads of cargo from Earth directly to the moon and eventually Mars—and do it over and over again” at a radically lower cost. NASA officials are now watching Starship’s progress “with a mix of awe and horror.” The…

Betty Davis was ahead of her time, captivating crowds with her raw funk grooves, towering Afro, and explicitly sexy persona. Almost all her music was released between 1964 and 1975, culminating with Nasty Gal, in which Davis growled and teased through lyrics she wrote herself. “You said I love you every way but your way,” she sang, “and my way was too dirty for you.” She posed in lingerie and performed in Afrofuturistic outfits, including thigh-high boots and short shorts. Although she never landed a hit song, her liberated approach inspired musicians for decades to come, from Prince and Madonna to Erykah Badu and Janelle Monáe. Her marriage to jazz legend Miles Davis lasted just a year, but it was long enough for her to introduce him to rock music.…

This week’s question: The Razzie Awards, which recognize the cinematic world’s least impressive efforts, created the category “Worst Performance by Bruce Willis in a 2021 Movie” and awarded Willis eight trophies. Please come up with a new Razzie category honoring the worst of Hollywood. Last week’s contest: Using a food-reward system, a Swedish town has trained crows to pick up cigarette butts in the streets. If the birds were to strike out on their own, what should they call their waste-disposal service? THE WINNER: “Rooks in Crannies” Kenneth Burgan, Grass Valley, Calif. SECOND PLACE: “Garbage? Nevermore!” Ivan Kershner, Salem, S.C. THIRD PLACE: “Caw & Order” Janine Witte, Doylestown, Pa. For runners-up and complete contest rules, please go to theweek.com/contest. How to enter: Submissions should be emailed to contest@theweek.com. Please include your…

Huntington, W.Va. More than 100 students chanted “Separate the church and state” during a walkout protest after their classmates were sent to a Christian revival assembly in the public high school’s auditorium. Cameron Mays, 16, says students were told by their teacher that they must attend the assembly, where an evangelical preacher asked teens to raise their arms in prayer and give their lives to Jesus. Those who didn’t, preacher Nik Walker said, would go to hell when they died. Huntington High said the assembly was organized by the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, and instead of using a voluntary sign-up sheet, two teachers mistakenly brought their entire class. But some parents and students said no religious revival should be happening during school hours. Senior Max Nibert said the assembly…

Joseph Baena could have ended up resenting his famous father, said Andrew Heffernan in Men’s Health. The product of a 1997 affair between Arnold Schwarzenegger and his housekeeper, Baena was a 13-year-old growing up in Bakersfield, Calif., when his grandmother told him the truth. His initial reaction? “Cool!” But later that year—during Schwarzenegger’s final year as governor of California—the news became public and reporters descended on Bakersfield. “I was in the eighth grade,” he recalled. “I get called out of class to leave. And my mom’s there, and she’s like, ‘We gotta go—everyone is finding out about you and who your father is.’” After hiding out in Texas, he returned to school feeling conspicuous and self-conscious, unsure of whom to trust. But joining the swim team helped him rebuild his…

Ronald Brownstein The Atlantic The Supreme Court is on a “collision course” with a “demographically and culturally changing America,” said Ronald Brownstein. The court’s conservatives—especially the five to the right of Chief Justice John Roberts—represent the tip of the spear of the conservative “coalition of restoration,” which aims to undo much of legal precedent of the past 50 years. Clearly allying themselves with a shrinking group of mostly white, rural, Christian conservatives, the five justices appear poised to declare affirmative action unconstitutional, uphold state restrictions on voting rights, strike down environmental and workplace regulations, expand gun rights in blue states, weaken church-state separation, and dramatically roll back abortion rights. This exercise in “raw power” will create great conflict and turmoil: In a recent PRRI poll, for example, 63 percent of…

GERMANY Christian Böllhoff Der Spiegel Think the pandemic labor crisis is bad? asked Christian Böllhoff. That will soon become Germany’s everyday reality when Baby Boomers retire en masse, creating an estimated shortage of 3 million workers by 2030. Germans have been grumbling about the temporary, Covid-induced inconveniences of infrequent buses, delayed deliveries, and under-staffed salons. The labor gap that’s coming, though, “will have effects similar to those of the virus, only this time permanently.” The difference: While the virus came out of nowhere, our looming shortfall of workers “has been well known for decades.” Yet Germany has done almost nothing to replace the soon-to-be retirees. The state of Bavaria alone will see shortages in two-thirds of key sectors that require vocational training, including construction, health care, and engineering. There’s plenty…

Russian skater Kamila Valieva “performs so effortlessly that she appears born to do it,” said Juliet Macur in The New York Times. But in “one of the biggest scandals in recent Olympic history,” the 15-year-old tested positive for trimetazidine, a banned heart medication that athletes have used to increase blood flow and stamina. Valieva’s positive test in December was revealed only after she totally dominated the team competition last week, with a sublime, balletic performance highlighted by two quadruple jumps—the first quads ever landed by a woman in competition. Citing a provision that protects minors, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) let her continue to compete, though the International Olympic Committee (IOC) ruled that if Valieva wins events, there will be no medals ceremony. China’s Zhu Yi…

The International Space Station will fire its boosters one last time in January 2031, then make a dramatic descent to Earth to its final resting place—the middle of the Pacific Ocean. This is the plan, unveiled by NASA earlier this month, to decommission the aging spacecraft, reports The Guardian (U.K.). The station’s grave will be in the area known as Point Nemo, which the space agency describes as “pretty much the farthest place from any human civilization you can find.” Some 1,655 miles from land, it’s already the repository for nearly 300 other pieces of space debris, including five space stations. The ISS has hosted more than 200 astronauts from 19 different countries since its launch in 1998. NASA says switching from a permanent base to piggybacking on commercial…

by Julia May Jonas (Avid Reader, $27) “What is more delicious,” asked Jessica Ferri in the Los Angeles Times, “than the despicable narrator?” In her debut novel, Julia May Jonas introduces a new variety: a postmenopausal woman with lust in her heart and disdain for her husband’s former female students who slept with him and now want him punished. But this unnamed 58-year-old, a professor herself, has poise and charm. “When she does things that are malicious, dangerous, and, yes, predatory, we only want her to do them again.” Vladimir, the object of her erotic obsession, is a younger colleague whose memoirist wife adds a fourth writer to the story’s central quartet, said Jean Hanff Korelitz in The New York Times. “This foursome of scholar-writers will flirt, cajole, deceive, harm,…

Eating to Extinction by Dan Saladino (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30) Touring the globe with Dan Saladino can be “both disturbing and enchanting,” said Molly Young in The New York Times. In Eating to Extinction, the BBC food journalist calls attention to the marvelous diversity of plant and animal life that people eat around the world, often bringing out a “soul-deep” connection between a community and its food. But this “passionately pedagogical” book is also a warning about the homogenization of our food sources, “a form of dark tourism, with doom hovering over each edible miracle.” Otherlands by Thomas Halliday (Random House, $29) This riveting reverse tour through Earth’s history is “more literature than traditional popular science,” said Amy Brady in Scientific American. “Writing with gusto and bravado,” paleontologist Thomas…

  4 “This band is on fire,” said Chris DeVille in Stereogum. Big Thief, a “consistently compelling” folk-rock quartet, had appeared to reach its creative peak in 2019, when it put out two acclaimed albums and backed those recordings with even better live shows. But the Brooklyn band has now made an even bigger statement with a 20-track double album whose lengthy title “perfectly encapsulates the spirit of this project: earthy, empathetic, loosely fantastical, earnestly optimistic, lightly preposterous.” Lead singer Adrianne Lenker is folding more humor into her songwriting, turning even “Spud Infinity,” a hillbillyish jaunt, into “a good-natured stroll from the dirt to the cosmos,” said Andy Cush in Pitchfork. However ambitious the music gets in its stylistic reach, “it also sounds animated by a newfound sense of childlike…

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, through June 5 At 69, Charles Ray is having a moment, said Sebastian Smee in The Washington Post. “One of the most acclaimed sculptors alive,” the Los Angeles–based artist has two current museum shows in Paris and another in New York City, where 19 works occupy an unusually vast gallery at the Met. Often, Ray creates incredibly faithful renditions of human figures while playing with scale, and “he can be amazing.” Family Romance, from 1993, is a queasy-making but “very funny” quartet of mannequin figures that depict a father, a mother, and two young children—except all nude and all the same size. Another nude, Boy With Frog (2009), rates as “a thought-stopping masterpiece.” Unfortunately, Ray’s more recent works, though popular, simply repeat past…

Oscar-nominated shorts… The Long Goodbye 2021 Oscar nominee Riz Ahmed (Sound of Metal) co-wrote and stars in this violent nightmare come true. A South Asian family is preparing for a wedding when armed white militiamen storm their modest suburban London home. Vimeo The Dress Tadeusz Lysiak’s heartbreaker of a 30-minute drama follows a motel maid with dwarfism whose longing for intimacy focuses on a truck driver who is a frequent guest. YouTube The Queen of Basketball This favorite to win the Oscar for short documentary spotlights Lusia Harris, a Mississippi-born basketball force of nature who, when she was selected by the New Orleans Jazz in 1977, became the only woman ever drafted by an NBA team. YouTube Audible It doesn’t take long to get into the world of Amaree McKenstry-Hall,…

“American brewing excels at extremes,” said Joshua Bernstein in The New York Times. Super-hopped IPAs, bold stouts, and even quality nonalcoholic beers are now easy to find. Recently, a middle ground has grown richer too, as more craft brewers develop compelling beers that punch in at 3 percent alcohol or less. Hermit Thrush Brewery Party Guy ($13 per 16-oz four-pack). A best-seller from Vermont, this “lemony and lively” sour ale makes an ideal aperitif. Live Oak Brewing Company Grodziskie ($9 per 12-oz sixpack). Great with barbecue, this Texas treat is inspired by an ancient Polish beer and showcases oak-smoked malted wheat. Bell’s Brewery Light Hearted Ale ($11 per 12-oz six-pack). A sibling to Michigan’s Two Hearted Ale, this pine-scented beer has a modest 3.7 ABV count.…

Ivan Reitman didn’t traffic in subtleties or arch bon mots. The director and producer made his name with a string of broad, irreverent comedies that harnessed the anarchic energy of Saturday Night Live stars John Belushi, Bill Murray, and Dan Aykroyd. These films included the bawdy fraternity send-up Animal House (1978); Meatballs (1979), featuring Murray as a counselor at a nutty summer camp; and Stripes (1981), a Murray vehicle set in the army. His biggest success, though, was 1984’s Ghostbusters, starring Murray, Aykroyd, and Harold Ramis as parapsychologists who start a ghost-removal business. Combining madcap humor with horror and offbeat special effects, it was an international smash, launching a TV spinoff and a pair of sequels. Reitman said he had an inkling the film would strike gold the first…