The Week Magazine May 13, 2022

The strange thing about high-profile leaks is that the most dramatic ones tend to tell us what everyone already suspects. The Pentagon Papers told us that we were losing the Vietnam War, Donald Trump’s tax returns that he hardly ever paid taxes. And now Justice Samuel Alito’s leaked draft opinion tells us—yes, as we already knew—that most of the Supreme Court is ready to dump Roe v. Wade. That’s as expected as can be, and yet there is a shock to seeing it on paper, and a shock to the form of disclosure. Having its deliberations bared, the Supreme Court is brought down to the level of everything else, a muddy arena of political polarization. It’s not really surprising that judges who believe that Roe was wrongly decided would reverse…

What happened A political earthquake shook the nation this week, as a leaked draft ruling revealed that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority is poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, enabling states to criminalize abortion for the first time in a half century. “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” wrote Justice Samuel Alito in the draft, and “must be overruled.” That majority opinion of the court, which lets stand a Mississippi law banning abortions after 15 weeks, asserts that the landmark 1973 ruling, and a subsequent ruling called Casey, invented a constitutional right to abortion and to privacy that’s not present in the document. If the ruling becomes law at the end of the Supreme Court’s term early this summer, states will be free to ban or severely restrict…

What happened Top Democrats vowed this week to make protecting abortion access a centerpiece of this fall’s elections, after news that the Supreme Court is on the brink of overturning Roe v. Wade upended midterm election assumptions. Eager to turn attention away from the economy, inflation, and the culture wars, Democrats hope that making the midterms a referendum on abortion will galvanize young voters and women who were lukewarm on President Biden. Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer accused Republicans of being careful not to celebrate the leaked opinion because they feared gutting abortion access would backfire politically. “They’re like the dog that caught the bus,” he said. Senate Democrats pushed for legislation codifying the protections of Roe, and blue state legislators are ramping up plans to provide sanctuary for…

What happened As Russian artillery hammered Ukraine’s south and east this week, Western officials warned that Vladimir Putin might use May 9, a major national holiday, to declare all-out war against Ukraine—and potentially the U.S. and its NATO allies. Facing losses of some 25,000 troops, Putin could use Victory Day, which commemorates the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany, to declare a fundamental shift in the conflict. British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace predicted a mass mobilization of Russia’s 2 million–man reserve pool and a declaration of war against what the Kremlin would describe as “the world’s Nazis”—potentially including NATO. Within Ukraine, Russian forces killed 21 civilians in a single day this week in Donetsk and continued to bombard several cities, renewing attacks on Lviv in western Ukraine and on…

“Putting electric cars on the road, sending rockets to space”—Elon Musk has achieved some incredible things, said Rachel Lerman in The Washington Post. But he sometimes doesn’t follow through on his “grand plans,” and there are many reasons his accepted offer to buy Twitter for $44 billion “could fall apart.” Vowing to open the site to more “free speech,” Musk has bet a huge chunk of his personal fortune on the deal—including a third of his stock holdings in his car company, Tesla, whose share price dropped 12 percent after the announcement. Moreover, Tesla builds half its vehicles in and gets a quarter of its revenues from China, whose authoritarian rulers may use that leverage to demand Twitter’s new owner take down posts about Hong Kong protests or Taiwan’s…

Good week for: Earplugs, after country star Garth Brooks and 102,000 fans at Louisiana State University’s Tiger Stadium hit 95 decibels while belting out “Callin’ Baton Rouge”—loud enough to register on a seismograph and to risk causing temporary hearing loss. Persistence, after Brazilian man Walter Orthmann set a Guinness World Record for working at the same textile company for 84 years. “You need to get busy with the present, not the past or future,” said Orthmann, 100. Meeting face-to-face, after a study found that workers think more creatively in person than in videoconferences. Researchers found that when people are free to look around a room, rather than stare at faces on a screen, they have more and better ideas. Bad week for: Typos, after a stock trader at Citi made…