Indholdsfortegnelse for May 27, 2022 i The Week Magazine

It’s fitting that fatigue is the most common symptom of long Covid, when we are all so very tired of this endless pandemic. Once again, America is in a Covid surge, with hospitalizations up 20 percent in just two weeks and daily new cases now breaking 100,000—and that’s the undercount. It’s impossible to say how many people are really infected, because many of us test positive at home and don’t report it to local health authorities, and plenty of counties have abandoned even trying to track weekly cases. Nearly a quarter of adults never got a single shot, and more than half aren’t boosted. This sneaky new Omicron variant, meanwhile, BA.2.12.1, is spreading rapidly, even among the vaccinated and boosted. But my fellow Americans just don’t want to hear about…

Five Black students are suing a Georgia high school for racial discrimination, alleging that white students re-enacted George Floyd’s death, wear Confederate symbols, and refer to them as “slaves” and the N-word. The plaintiffs say officials at Coosa High School in Rome—who deny any wrongdoing—ignored these incidents, suspended Black students for a silent protest, and forbade them from wearing “Black Lives Matter” shirts. Rep. Tony Cardenas (D-Calif.) has used campaign funds to pay his wife’s business $424,000 over the past eight years, The Daily Beast reports. His campaign pays his “wellness facilitator” wife, Norma, $4,400 every month as a consultant; she claims expertise in hypnotherapy, life coaching, and “primordial sound meditation.” In other news FEC deadlocks on Trump allegations The Federal Election Committee deadlocked 3-3 on a complaint that former…

Madrid Spain’s government this week greenlit plans to become the first European country to give unlimited paid menstrual leave. The draft bill, which includes a raft of women’s health measures, would also allow teenagers ages 16 and 17 to seek an abortion without parental consent. If parliament passes the bill, workers experiencing severe period pain could take paid days off with a doctor’s note. It is time to “discard taboos, stigmas, and guilt regarding women’s bodies,” said Irene Montero, Spain’s equality minister in the left-wing government of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. “The days of going to work in pain are over.” Only a few countries offer paid menstrual leave, including Japan, Indonesia, South Korea, and Zambia. Some feminists oppose the idea, saying it could discourage employers from hiring women.…

Kim Cattrall has no interest in ever playing Samantha Jones again, said Ramin Setoodeh in Variety. The 65-year-old actress, who played the sex-positive publicist on the seminal series Sex in the City, wasn’t invited to take part in HBO’s recent reboot, and she’s just fine with that. She’d invited the snub by refusing to sign on for an ill-fated third movie spin-off, and by speaking about her disinterest in keeping the series’ characters going. “It’s a great wisdom to know when enough is enough,” she says. “Can you imagine going back to a job you did 25 years ago? How are you going to progress with these characters? Everything has to grow, or it dies.” Nonetheless, she’s hugely proud of the series, which in Samantha Jones presented a novel…

Peter Wehner The Atlantic If Roe v. Wade is overturned and abortion laws are going to be debated in the states, said Peter Wehner, both sides should acknowledge “the inescapable ambiguities in this staggeringly complicated moral question.” As a Christian who believes Roe was wrongly decided, I see some inconsistencies in the absolutism of the pro-life side. If a fertilized egg is a full human being at the moment of conception, what is the meaning of the fact that about half of all fertilized eggs are “aborted spontaneously”? Are the deaths of those eggs comparable “to when a 2-year-old child dies? If not, why not?” Pro-choicers, on the other hand, are so adamant that abortion decisions belong solely to the woman and her doctor that they object to any gestational…

“If you’re not white, to millions of Americans, you’re something else—definitely not ‘legacy Americans,’ as Fox TV host Tucker Carlson says again and again. Instead, they consider me and my loved ones to be invaders and usurpers—or, as [Payton] Gendron’s manifesto deemed us, ‘replacers.’ What especially freaks out the Carlsons and Gendrons of this country isn’t that people like me are the inheritors of the American dream—it’s that we’re its inquisitors. We want a country truly based on the pledges of equality and freedom it was founded on. For too many white Americans, this is nothing short of a declaration of war.” Gustavo Arellano in the Los Angeles Times…

UNITED KINGDOM Ben Marlow The Daily Telegraph Boris Johnson excels at delivering “bombastic rhetoric,” said Ben Marlow, but his grand plans are “painfully lacking in substance.” The British prime minister delivered yet another example last month when he promised that, by hugely expanding capacity, Britain would “lead the world once again” in nuclear power by 2050. The claim was “pure fantasy.” Thanks to “our overreliance on foreign partners,” we can hardly maintain the existing capacity of our aging nuclear infrastructure, much less build anew. Under a 2015 deal struck by the government of David Cameron, China agreed to help develop a new generation of plants, starting in Somerset and Suffolk. And as a “quid pro quo” for agreeing to be a minority partner to the French nuclear developer EDF, China’s…

RUSSIA Anzor Maskhadov Open Caucasus Media (Georgia) The world may be shocked by Russia’s atrocities in Ukraine, but I’m not, said Anzor Maskhadov. We Chechens are acutely aware that “everything that is happening now has already happened before.” Russian troops slaughtered 300,000 Chechen civilians during two brutal wars in the renegade Russian province and then settled in for 30 years of what many Chechens call “totalitarian occupation.” Chechnya tried to declare independence on multiple occasions after the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union. When Russia first invaded in 1994, we naïvely assumed the world would stand behind us and “it would all stop.” Instead, “we were left to face Russia’s barbarism alone.” After Russian troops failed to defeat us in battle, despite their overwhelming advantages, they “began to take out…

Outlawing abortion would impose a profound economic burden on women who are forced to carry unwanted pregnancies, said Julianna Goldman in Bloomberg. That’s almost undeniable, yet Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen drew the wrath of the anti-abortion right last week after asserting that overturning Roe v. Wade would set working women “back decades.” Research backs her up, said Sarah Jones in New York magazine. The University of California, San Francisco’s “Turnaway Study” of 1,000 women who sought abortions found that those who were denied one were “much more likely to carry debt, to be evicted, and to declare bankruptcy.” Their health suffered, they were more likely to stay with abusive partners, and their children “were over three times as likely to live below the federal poverty level compared with the…

Our post-Omicron reprieve “seems to be over,” said Andrew Joseph in STAT. As the virus keeps evolving, subvariants such as BA.2.12.1 are proving to be even more infectious than the original Omicron strain and are racing through the U.S. population. Known new cases are exceeding 90,000 a day; “more worryingly, hospitalizations have started to increase,” and are up more than 20 percent in two weeks. Recent studies in South Africa and elsewhere suggest that infection by Omicron “does not provide much cross-protection from other variants,” and it’s becoming likely even vaccinated people will get Covid two or three times a year. Alas, most of America “simply no longer cares,” said Daniel Drezner in The Washington Post. Those polled by the Pew Research Center last week ranked Covid “dead last”…

(HarperOne, $29) “From the first page,” it’s clear that Viola Davis hasn’t written a typical celebrity memoir, said Barbara VanDenburgh in USA Today. The Oscar, Emmy, and Tony-winning actress opens with a double profanity, putting readers inside the mind of the 8-year-old she was: poor, angry, hungry, and abused, chased home from school every day by a gang of white boys who hurled rocks, bricks, and racist insults. She lived among rats. She wet her bed regularly and smelled like it. For this grade-school outsider living in Central Falls, R.I., “the humiliations were unending,” said Douglass Daniel in the Associated Press. Yet Davis not only survived. She has written a memoir that shows how she eventually found pride in overcoming those tests. “Finding Me is raw in its anger,…

In these troubling times, author Kim Stanley Robinson “stands as perhaps the last of the great utopians,” said Alexandra Alter in The New York Times. The award-winning science fiction writer, now 70, made his name by imagining reassuring distant futures, such as the long but successful colonization of our nearest planetary neighbor that he spun out in his acclaimed Mars trilogy. He can’t blame a few mega-billionaires if they want to chase that pipe dream—“I’m partially responsible for that fantasy,” he says. But recently, he has focused on more pressing challenges, transforming accidentally into an in-demand speaker addressing how the next generation or two might engineer their way out of impending climate disaster, as they do in his most recent novel, 2020’s The Ministry for the Future. Forget terraforming…

3 Attention, Radiohead fans, said Ryan Dombal in Pitchfork. Thom Yorke and guitarist-keyboardist Jonny Greenwood have formed a new trio whose confident debut sounds “more like a proper Radiohead album” than any of the alt-rock icons’ past side projects. “We’ve got Greenwood’s lattice-like fingerpicking,” not to mention Yorke’s voice, at times “wailing like an angel in limbo”; at others “gnashing like a punk who woke up on the wrong side of the gutter.” Across 13 tracks, the album “alternately combats the horrors of modern life with roiling anger and Zen-like serenity.” The first several songs, in particular, are “delightfully weird,” said Kate Lloyd in The Telegraph (U.K.). Some offer “elements of trippy electronica”; others evoke 1960s prog-rock, and drummer Tom Skinner, of the jazz band Sons of Kemet, seems as…

Men This “button-pushing” film from Ex Machina director Alex Garland “seems designed more to start arguments than to tell any kind of cohesive or meaningful story,” said Tasha Robinson in Polygon. After a personal trauma, a young woman rents an English country house. But her retreat is repeatedly interrupted by unnerving encounters with strange men from the estate and surrounding village—all played by the same actor, Rory Kinnear. What does it all mean? Viewers will leave “full of strong opinions and emotions” but with few concrete answers. (In theaters only) R On the Count of Three Arriving more than a year after its debut at Sundance, Jerrod Carmichael’s directorial debut is “a minor effort from an artist who’s already moved on to bigger things,” said Alison Willmore in NYMag.com.…

The spy thriller library… Tehran This relentlessly pulse-quickening Israeli series follows the exploits of a young Mossad hacker, portrayed by Niv Sultan, who is operating behind enemy lines while being pursued by a dogged Iranian agent. Glenn Close, playing the heroine’s new Mossad boss, is a welcome addition in the new Season 2. Apple TV+ The Honorable Woman Maggie Gyllenhaal won a Golden Globe for her work in this slow-burning and richly rewarding 2014 British series about an Anglo-Israeli heiress who is trying to convert her family’s weapons firm into a communications company that advances Israeli-Palestinian peace. HBO Max Homeland Despite ups and downs, no spy series has been better than this one was at its best. Claire Danes stars as CIA officer Carrie Mathison, who in the 2011…

If you spend even $15 to $20 a bottle, “there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to indulge in some fantastic rosé this season,” said Samantha Maxwell in Paste. “There are plenty of affordable options that taste great and will offer the flavor profile you’re looking for,” including these widely available bottles. Castello Monaci Kreos ($16). Bolder than the average rosé, this dark pink southern Italian wine is “super juicy and acidic,” combining notes of watermelon, mango, and blood orange. Gérard Bertrand Côte des Roses ($17). An “ideal crowd pleaser,” this “lovely, fresh” Languedoc rosé delivers aromas of red currant and raspberry, followed by grapefruit on the palate. 2021 Willamette Valley Vineyards ‘Whole Cluster’ Rosé of Pinot Noir ($18). “A very versatile wine,” this rosé evokes a dry pinot noir…

The median pay package for chief executives of the biggest U.S. companies reached $14.7 million in 2021, setting a sixth-straight annual record. For the 25 top-paid CEOs—each of whose packages exceeded $35 million—equity accounted for 78 percent of their total compensation. The Wall Street Journal Not a single car was sold in Shanghai in April, when the majority of the city’s 25 million residents were locked down due to a Covid outbreak. Dealerships in the city sold 26,311 vehicles in April last year. Bloomberg An average of just 35 percent of U.S. office workers went to work on the typical Monday in March, said Kastle Systems, a security firm that monitors access-card swipes. Wednesdays topped the week, with 46 percent of workers in the office. The Wall Street Journal California…

About 50 million girls in sub-Saharan Africa do not attend school—when families are struggling financially, education for young girls is often sacrificed. But CAMFED (camfed.org) views girls’ education as essential for social justice, economic development, and climate action. For more than two decades, the organization has funded secondary-school costs for adolescent girls in Ghana, Malawi, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. These can include tuition fees, uniforms, a bicycle for getting to school, or help with the factors that often lead a student to drop out, such as chronic hunger and early marriage; the programs reach 7,018 schools across 166 districts in the five countries. CAMFED also offers support groups for parents, post-school transition guidance, and aid for female entrepreneurs. Each charity we feature has earned a four-star overall rating from…

Stephen Mihm Bloomberg Elon Musk is seeming eerily like Henry Ford, said historian Stephen Mihm. Like Musk, the world’s richest man and CEO of the most valuable auto company, Ford once “parlayed visionary ideas” about automotive manufacturing into “unimaginable wealth and global fame.” His ideas for producing the Model T made him “an American folk hero,” but the adulation he received transformed his personality. Obsessed with staying in the headlines, he pursued massive side projects like building an industrial metropolis in Alabama, launching an airline, and running a newspaper that published anti-Semitic screeds. He “spent a fortune building Fordlandia, a bizarre utopian city in the Brazilian rain forest.” But as Ford became increasingly distracted, many of his most capable lieutenants and engineers left, “replaced with sycophants.” Meanwhile, a rational…

Opera star Teresa Berganza often redefined the characters she inhabited, and she utterly owned the titular role in Georges Bizet’s Carmen. A mezzosoprano, Berganza was acclaimed for her rich vocal register—warm at its lower end, supple when higher—and for her charisma and sensuality on stage. A champion of Spanish zarzuelas and arias, the dramatic, darkeyed Berganza floored critics in Mozart’s Così Fan Tutte, Rossini’s Le Comte Ory and Il Barbiere di Siviglia, and particularly in Bizet’s Carmen, first taking the role in 1977 at the King’s Theater in Edinburgh. Conductor Herbert von Karajan declared her “the Carmen of the century.” “Encouraged by her mother,” said The New York Times, the Madrid-born Berganza “aspired to become a nun.” She studied piano, organ, cello, and singing at Madrid’s Royal Conservatory of…

What happened Advancing Ukrainian forces clawed back more territory this week, as British intelligence reported that Russia had lost a full third of its invading troops. Ukrainian fighters retook Kharkiv, the second-biggest city, and pushed northward to the Russian border. Russia, meanwhile, focused its firepower on the south and east, but with mixed results. In eastern Luhansk, Ukrainian artillery obliterated an entire Russian battalion that was trying to cross a pontoon bridge, destroying more than 70 military vehicles and killing nearly 500 Russian soldiers. In Mariupol, though, Russia claimed that 1,000 Ukrainians had surrendered, and Ukrainians reported that Russians hauled away more than 260 soldiers from the city’s last holdout, the Azovstal steelworks. The Kremlin insisted Russia would treat the soldiers—many of them badly wounded—in accordance with international law,…

Good week for: European unity, after Ukrainian band Kalush Orchestra won the Eurovision Song Contest, defeating 24 other European performers with the largest number of fan votes in the contest’s 66-year history. The winning song includes the line “I’ll always find my way home, even if all roads are destroyed.” Pay equity, after the U.S. Soccer women’s and men’s national teams agreed to new contracts that will pay male and female players equally, with the women’s team getting a 54 percent increase. Sen. Ted Cruz, after the Supreme Court’s six conservative justices sided with the Texas Republican, ruling his free speech rights were violated by a federal ban on influence-seeking donors repaying a candidate’s campaign loan to himself. Bad week for: Border walls, after border officials discovered yet another secret…

Graham Nash is still passionate about sex, drugs, and rock and roll at age 80, said Simon Hattenstone in The Guardian. “That’s what my life was. And is,” he says. Sex did much to launch a career that’s spanned more than six decades and two Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductions, as a member of Crosby, Stills and Nash and the Hollies. Growing up in England, he found that “Once I could play three chords on the guitar, my attractiveness to the ladies went up sky-high. I was like: ‘Oh, I see!’” When the Hollies hit the charts, opportunity abounded, and he indulged heavily in both the sex and the drug-fueled partying—a lifestyle he figures social media has ruined for today’s rock stars. “There is no privacy anymore.…

Britney Spears has announced that she suffered a miscarriage, a month after revealing that she was expecting her third child and first with fiancé Sam Asghari. “We have lost our miracle baby,” Spears, 40, and Asghari, 28, said in a joint statement on Instagram. “Perhaps we should have waited to announce until we were further along. We were overly excited to share the good news.” Last year, Spears alleged that the conservatorship that governed her life since her 20s prohibited her from getting married and having more children. The legal arrangement was dissolved late last year. “We will continue trying to expand our beautiful family,” Spears and Asghari said. Former first lady Melania Trump criticized Vogue last week for not putting her on the cover when her husband was…

Leonard Pitts Jr. Miami Herald I have a serious question for Justice Clarence Thomas, said Leonard Pitts Jr. “Have you ever met your wife?” Thomas had the gall to complain in a speech before a conservative group last week that progressives are trying to bully the Supreme Court and are unwilling to “live with outcomes they don’t agree with.” Thomas, of course, was referring to the outcry over a leaked Supreme Court draft opinion overturning Roe. But he seems to be forgetting that his “bride of 35 years,” Ginni Thomas, is a “stop the steal” conspiracy theorist who sent a slew of emails to Donald Trump’s chief of staff urging him to find a way to overturn the 2020 election and keep Trump in power. Only a man of “deep…

A retired Indian couple are suing their son and daughter-in-law, demanding that they deliver a grandchild within a year or pay them 50 million rupees (around $675,000). “We need a grandchild, but these people have an attitude that they don’t think about us,” said co-plaintiff Sanjeev Ranjan Prasad, a 61-year-old retired government officer. Prasad said he had spent his “life’s earnings” on his only child’s upbringing and education, only to end up grandchild-less six years after his son’s marriage. “I feel very unlucky,” he said. The Parisian luxury fashion house Balenciaga is marketing a new line of “full destroyed” sneakers priced at $1,850 a pair. The scuffed, ripped, dirty footwear—produced in a limited edition of 100 pairs—costs more than double the non-distressed version of the company’s high-top sneakers, which can…

HONG KONG Cheryl Arcibal South China Morning Post For years, the “nano-flat” has been a fixture of Hong Kong life, said Cheryl Arcibal. The city’s mini-apartments of some 250 square feet or less—smaller than two local parking spaces—have become the norm for first-time buyers facing some of the world’s highest housing prices. Eager builders have cashed in, constructing more than 10,000 such apartments over the past decade. Lax building codes allow these flats to be built without much natural light, let alone enclosed kitchens or bedrooms. In many of them, “dark toilets,” with no windows and little ventilation, are common. But an overhaul of Hong Kong planning laws in February has dictated that all new private homes must now measure at least 280 square feet. The change has caused a…

“Remember to look up at the stars and now down at your feet.” Stephen Hawking, quoted in the Squamish Chief (Canada) “Copyright is for losers.” Banksy, quoted in Highsnobiety “Mothers are like glue. Even when you cannot see them, they are still holding the family together.” Canadian author Susan Gale, quoted in The Standard (Kenya) “The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.” Economist Ezra Solomon, quoted in The Hill “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.… We look for the sermon in the suicide.” Joan Didion, quoted in The Guardian “Our children may learn about heroes of the past. Our task is to make ourselves architects of the future.” Former Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta, quoted in the Sunday Times (South Africa) “It’s a…

E-reading apps face new bans E-reader apps are being dragged into the crossfire of the culture war, said David Ingram in NBCNews.com. In several states, parents have “pushed schools and libraries to shut down their digital programs” because they might allow kids to download books “supporting LGBTQ pride” and material from other “diverse voices.” Trisha Lucente, the president of a conservative group in Tennessee, said she supported a recent week-long ban of the Epic e-reader app in her school district because “kids should never have anything at their fingertips to prompt questions” about sexuality and religion. “More liberal jurisdictions are pushing back.” The New York Public Library system recently launched its own “nationwide programs to provide access to books that other places have censored.” Court upends online content rules…

The quest for eternal youth may be heading to a strange place: the can. New research on rodents shows that fecal transplants—excrement transferred from one body to another—can reduce the effects of aging. The theory, reports the New York Post, is that replacing old gut bacteria with new may help lower inflammation. The study divided rodents into three groups by age: three months, 18 months, and two years. Each group was fed an unpleasant-sounding “fecal slurry” made from the dung of younger or older peers. The older mice fortified with younger poo proved to be better protected against inflammation-related illnesses, particularly those affecting the brain and eyes. Meanwhile, the younger group given an older poop transplant developed inflammation in the brain and showed early signs of aging. “We hope…

British novelist and essayist Charlotte Mendelson is the author of Almost English, When We Were Bad, and Rhapsody in Green. Her latest novel, The Exhibitionist, was longlisted for the U.K.’s Women’s Prize for Fiction. The Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard (1990–2012). A panoramic unpacking of the intimate lives of three generations of one privileged family, Howard’s intricate, painful, expansive sequence of five novels is usually, stupidly, dismissed as “domestic,” a “historical saga” about the English middle class in the 1930s through ’50s. Fools: It’s a masterpiece. If the author were male, we’d all take it seriously. Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin (1956). James Baldwin, a gay Black man, knew Otherness; his writing about race is electrifying, but this short, harrowing novel about an American man’s affair with an…

3 “The riffs come fast and furious” on the Black Keys’ “superb” 11th album, said Hal Horowitz in American Songwriter. Fame and fortune haven’t dulled the arena-packing duo from Akron, Ohio. Singer-guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney paid tribute to their influences with last year’s Delta Kream, a collection of raw hill-country blues covers, and Dropout Boogie finds them once more “wading into the banks of the muddy Mississippi.” This stripped-down set of blues rock “feels like it’s live in some juke joint”—partly because Auerbach “sings with soul and zero pretense.” The album’s collaborative efforts are “uniformly excellent,” said Joe Gross in Rolling Stone. Garage-rock savant Greg Cartwright co-wrote the lead single, “Wild Child,” while ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons delivers a “perfectly Top-tastic” guitar solo on “Good Love.” The…

Look inside. Check to see if the hem and seams have been sewn down securely. Short stitches are a good sign, “because they’re more durable than long ones, which are a giveaway that a garment has been made quickly.” Inspect the seams. The seams in well-made clothing hide the fabric’s raw edges. Make sure the grain of the fabric is aligned, too, especially when there’s a pattern. Feel the fabric. Pull the cloth between your thumbs to see if it stretches or holds its form. “High-quality fabric will feel better on your skin and wear better.” Move around. “A well-constructed garment should not restrict your movement.” In the changing room, sit down and try reaching above your head. Make note of any tightness. “A good shirt will have a back…

Elon Musk has cold feet, said Rishi Iyengar and Allison Morrow in CNN.com. The world’s richest person raised doubts this week about his commitment to the $44 billion takeover of the social media company Twitter, saying the deal “cannot move forward” until the company provided proof that less than 5 percent of Twitter accounts were fake. But this issue is not new; Musk has “repeatedly spoken out against bots and spam accounts.” In fact, he has said solving the issue was a reason he was buying Twitter. Musk’s sudden antagonism, and suggestions that Twitter’s numbers were fraudulent, signals he is seeking a do-over, with Twitter’s stock “trading well below his offer price of $54.20 per share.” Legally, Musk can’t just announce that a done deal is “on hold,” said…

The collapse of the cryptocurrency market is testing the faith of those who drank the Kool-Aid, said Katie Martin in the Financial Times. “A trickle in the price of Bitcoin from its peak of $68,000 turned into a flood” last week “in part because of cracks in the so-called stablecoins that glue the market together.” Stablecoins, which are generally pegged to the dollar, let digital currency investors move in and out of currencies like Bitcoin without converting their investments into cash. They can also be lent out, often at high rates of interest. A run on these tokens has cast a much wider chill on the crypto market, including Bitcoin, which fell as low as $27,000. Investors were “lured in by claims that these lines of code could become…

Erin Griffith The New York Times The party is over for tech startups, said Erin Griffith. The “easy-money ebullience of the last decade” has turned into “fear and loathing.” Even inside the relentlessly optimistic tech world, there is “the sense that the startup world’s frenzied behavior of the last few years is due for a reckoning.” A record $131 billion in funds was raised by startups last year, according to PitchBook, and up until a few months ago, “investors were still begging founders to take more money and spend it to grow faster.” But Wall Street has soured on such unprofitable and risky bets, and numerous high-profile startups that went public in recent months have gotten hammered in the stock market. So far this year, venture funding has dried…

Leonid Kravchuk’s political conversion changed the world. Before becoming the first democratically elected president of Ukraine in 1991, he had spent the previous 30 years as a powerful Communist functionary. As leader of the Ukraine Soviet Socialist Republic, he decried the “emotional nationalism” that flourished during the glasnost years. But whether because of a genuine change of heart or because the politician nicknamed the “wily fox” saw an opportunity, Kravchuk eventually embraced nationalism. He resigned from the Communist Party shortly after the failed August 1991 hard-line coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. That December, he met up with Russian President Boris Yeltsin and Stanislav Shushkevich of Belarus to pronounce the Soviet Union officially dissolved. To his people, he declared, “A new Ukraine has been born.” “Kravchuk’s life story followed his…

This week’s question: Balenciaga is selling “full destroyed” high-top sneakers—complete with scuffs, graffiti, and artfully placed tears—for $1,850 a pair. If the Paris fashion house were to launch an entirely new line of pricey, tattered clothing, what should it be called? Last week’s contest: After their flight to Las Vegas was delayed, an eloping Oklahoma City couple enlisted the help of an ordained minister to get married midflight. If a new airline were to dedicate itself to providing onboard wedding ceremonies at 30,000 feet, what name could it adopt? THE WINNER: “Cupid’s Aero” Marjo van Dijck, Durham, N.C. SECOND PLACE: “Aer Link Us” Kenneth Burgan, Grass Valley, Calif. THIRD PLACE: “Mergin’ Air” Mary Ann Cooper, Asheville, N.C. For runners-up and complete contest rules, please go to theweek.com/contest. How to enter:…

Brian Johnson is known to 3 million social media followers as the Liver King, said Madeleine Aggeler in GQ. The 45-year-old Texan has earned fame on TikTok and Instagram with a ripped, bulging physique and his proselytizing for “the ancestral lifestyle”—a return to the virtues of caveman life. It involves following nine “ancestral tenets,” including an excruciating level of physical activity and eating raw liver, which he consumes at the rate of about a pound a day. Johnson learned the transformative power of muscle building as a skinny kid pushed around by bullies in San Antonio. But his lifestyle conversion came decades later, as the father of young sons beset with debilitating illnesses and allergies. “We cut out all the processed foods, the liquid calories, the seed oils. We…

Pamela Paul The New York Times “Let actors act,” said Pamela Paul. That should be a given, but now that Hollywood and Broadway have “wisely moved on” from stereotypical portrayals of Black, Asian, gay, and other marginalized groups, they risk “ricocheting to the other undesirable extreme”—limiting actors to roles that correspond with their real-life identities. Earlier this year, Helen Mirren was accused of engaging in “Jewface” by portraying late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in an upcoming film. Even Tom Hanks’ Oscar-winning portrayal of a gay AIDS patient in 1993’s Philadelphia “no longer plays so well in some quarters.” Some progressives now insist that actors can’t possibly do justice to a role they haven’t lived. But by definition, good actors are artists who “are able to find a way…

CROATIA Goran Vojkovic Index Viktor Orbán is “an arrogant fool,” said Goran Vojkovic. The Hungarian prime minister, who is already blocking the EU’s oil embargo against Russia, has now decided to revive “centuries-old tensions” with Croatia. In a recent radio interview, Orbán said sanctions hurt landlocked countries like his that cannot import oil by tanker. “If they hadn’t taken it away from us,” he added, referring to Croatia, “we would also have a port.” The Croatian coastline was once ruled by the Kingdom of Hungary, and Orbán dreams of restoring his country’s pre–World War I borders. Two years ago he posted on Facebook a map of Hungary “that includes part of Croatia,” and he did so again a few months ago. Croatians have ignored the affront and have been “living…

Hypertension patients, take note. Using ibuprofen in combination with drugs that are commonly prescribed to treat high blood pressure could lead to permanent kidney damage, a new study suggests. Researchers at the University of Waterloo used computer-simulated drug trials to examine the potential effects of combining the over-the-counter painkillers with diuretics and renin-angiotensin system inhibitors, also known as RSA inhibitors, both of which are used to treat hypertension. They found that the three-medication therapy, which doctors often prescribe as a “triple whammy,” appeared to present a 31 percent higher risk for acute kidney injury compared with simulated patients given diuretics and RSA inhibitors alone. The mock trials suggest that certain individuals could be particularly susceptible, including those with an impaired myogenic response—the mechanism that regulates the diameter of blood…

(Pantheon, $28) Summarizing the plot of an Ali Smith novel is “not only a challenge but some-what beside the point,” said Lauren LeBlanc in the Los Angeles Times. Smith’s latest is “a clever, humane portrait of our intense contemporary moment” that improbably begins when middle-aged painter Sandy Gray receives an out-of-the-blue phone call. The caller has been detained in customs while transporting a centuries-old lock, but her plea is about something else instead: deciphering a word riddle. From there, Smith knits together everyday pandemic concerns with flights of consciousness into art, memory, and history, “showing again what exceptional fiction can do that nothing else can.” By the time Sandy is visited by a medieval female blacksmith with a bird on her shoulder, the story is “already pretty strange,” said…

My Old Kentucky Home by Emily Bingham (Knopf, $30) It’s time to retire Kentucky’s state song, said Rebecca Gayle Howell in The Washington Post. This “riveting” new book details the racist history of “My Old Kentucky Home,” which began as a minstrel-show staple performed in blackface before it was embraced and disseminated by Kentucky Fried Chicken and the Kentucky Derby. Author Emily Bingham, a native Kentuckian, rejects the notion that the song has transcended its racist roots. “Ignorance, she intimates, is not an option for the patriotic.” Shine Bright by Danyel Smith (Roc Lit 101, $28) Danyel Smith’s new hybrid memoir “tackles one of pop music’s core truths—that without Black women, there is no genre,” said Jon Mael in The Boston Globe. The former editor of Vibe and Billboard,…

3 Kendrick Lamar’s long-awaited fifth album is “clearly the work of a genius,” said Andrew Barker in Variety. A 73-minute reckoning with the gap between the flawed man he is and the moral force listeners expect him to be, “it’s the sound of one of America’s foremost poets offering an all-access visit to the darker corners of his mind.” No pop artist, let alone a rapper, had ever won a Pulitzer Prize until Lamar did so with 2017’s Damn. But while this follow-up is often awe-inspiring in its “far-out lyrical virtuosity,” it’s also “consciously difficult,” packed with provocations and music that “moves in fits and starts.” Lamar “has clearly grown weary of his role as an anointed genius, and his cynicism bleeds into the music,” said Sheldon Pearce in The…

Audible is the best-known audiobook app, “if only because it’s owned by Amazon.” Plans start at $8 a month and grant unlimited access to more than 10,000 audiobooks. You can also purchase titles à la carte. Audiobooks.com, which is both an app and a website, has a library of more than 300,000 audiobooks, 10,000 of which are free. A $15-a-month subscription buys a user one new release a month, much like Audible’s premium plan. Apple Books and Google Play Books don’t require subscriptions. Instead, you buy audiobooks individually, often at higher prices. Libby lets library-card holders borrow audiobooks (and e-books) from their local branch. “It works with about 90 percent of the libraries in North America.” Hoopla partners with fewer libraries than Libby, but its audiobooks will stream immediately, and availability…

The Dow Industrial Average fell more than 1,100 points in one day this week, led by disappointing earnings from big retailers, said Orla McCaffrey and Caitlin Ostroff in The Wall Street Journal. “Major retailers said their profits were hurt by rising costs, sluggish sales, and supply-chain disruptions.” Target and Wal-Mart both posted their worst one-day stock drops since the Black Monday crash of 1987, with Target losing a quarter of its value in one day. The precipitous decline prompted Wall Street “to wrestle anew with the idea that the global economy could be headed for a recession.” Airlines: JetBlue seeks to force Spirit to merge JetBlue is attempting a hostile takeover of Spirit Airlines, said Allison Morrow and Chris Isidore in CNN.com. The airline this week launched a new offer…

The meaning of ‘historic drop’ It’s been the worst year for the bond market since 1842, said Jason Zweig in The Wall Street Journal. That’s not a typo. Not since the bottom of a pre–Civil War depression has the broad bond market performed worse in a complete year than what’s happened so far in 2022. “Inflation is like kryptonite for bonds, whose interest payments are fixed and thus can’t grow to keep pace with rises in the costs of living.” As a result, prices for bonds have fallen 10 percent this year. But many investors “may be too pessimistic.” The intricate math of bonds means that yields rise as prices fall, and some yields are currently brushing their highest levels in years. “Over the long run, the total return…