Indholdsfortegnelse for June 17, 2022 i The Week Magazine

Vladimir Putin is a fortunate man. One hundred days into his genocidal assault on Ukraine, many important people in the West are fretting not that he’ll win his war—but that he’ll lose. It’s quite a diverse club. French President Emmanuel Macron, who fancies himself a Putin whisperer, warned again last week that “we must not humiliate Russia.” Instead, we must reward Putin’s pitiless efforts to erase a peaceful, democratic neighbor from the map by awarding him a nice chunk as a consolation prize: the Donbas and southern Ukraine along the Black Sea. Henry Kissinger, the ancient guru of realpolitik, has joined Macron in urging Ukrainian concessions. So has The New York Times editorial board, which recently advised Ukraine it will need to make “painful territorial decisions” in exchange for peace.…

Good week for: Cortisol levels, after new CNN boss Chris Licht informed staff that the network’s “Breaking News” banner will be reserved for actual breaking news. CNN has used the banner so routinely, Licht said, that “its impact has become lost on the audience.” The inked, with Virgin Atlantic’s announcement that it will no longer require cabin staff to cover up their tattoos, as part of “our focus on inclusion and championing individuality.” Mellowing, after “Johnny Rotten” Lydon of the Sex Pistols, 66, said he was “really, really proud” of Queen Elizabeth II for “doing so well” as she celebrated 70 years on the British throne. In the Sex Pistols’ 1977 hit, “God Save the Queen,” Rotten sang that the queen headed a “fascist regime” and “ain’t no human being.” Bad…

Guy Fieri didn’t wait around for the culinary world’s respect, said Matt Flegenheimer in The New York Times. The spiky-haired, red Camaro-driving host of the Food Network’s Diners, Drive-ins and Dives has gained wide popularity as the nation’s champion of unpretentious eating in hole-in-the-wall restaurants, which he lauds with exclamations such as “flavor jets, activate!” Raised on macrobiotic food by Northern California hippies, Fieri says he ate “enough bulgur and steamed fish to kill a kid.” He went into the restaurant industry and developed a taste for the homey ethnic food he features on his show. His 2005 audition tape for The Next Food Network Star offered an apt introduction: After promising to craft a convoluted terrine, he broke into laughter, said, “No, seriously, folks. Real food for real…

David French The Dispatch American gun culture is no longer focused on the right to defend yourself, said David French. Instead, it has devolved into belligerent and grotesque “gun idolatry.” My wife and I are gun owners and supporters of the Second Amendment, but the “gun fetish” that dominates our politics bears little resemblance to the gun culture that I grew up with, which emphasized the grave responsibilities of firearm ownership. Today, pandering politicians flippantly pose with AR-15s and fire weapons in campaign ads, and label themselves “pro-life, pro-God, and pro-gun.” A disturbing number of gun owners have adopted a “black gun” or “tactical” lifestyle, dressing in camo and tactical gear and brandishing the weapons they love wherever they go. At certain protests, “it’s now common to see men and…

“Two days after the school massacre in Uvalde, Texas, we had a 15-minute lockdown at the Los Angeles high school where I’m a teacher. The school administrator sent a text to us saying there was possibly a student with a gun at the school next door. Your heart pounds because there have been 27 school shootings this year. And you see the fear in your students’ eyes. Why does a teacher now have to figure out how to protect and save 30 kids because at any moment a gunman could walk into our school? It is too much. It is too much of a burden on all of us.” Marisa Crabtree in the Los Angeles Times…

SWEDEN Meryem Yebio Aftonbladet The internet recently discovered the Swedish custom of refusing to feed their guests, said Meryem Yebio, and the resulting furor brought back “parts of my childhood that I had buried deep.” It all started two weeks ago, with a Reddit post from a Swede who mentioned that when the kids have a friend over and dinnertime rolls around, the visiting child isn’t offered a plate but is told to go wait until the meal has ended. To Swedes, this is merely sensible: Parents have only budgeted for their own family, and they assume the other family has its own dinner plans. And while foreigners on Reddit and Twitter were appalled, most Swedes said they had no problem playing alone while the family dined. Not me, though.…

MEXICO Gibrán Ramírez Reyes Milenio Mexico’s water shortage is becoming a “national emergency,” said Gibrán Ramírez Reyes. It is worst in the border state of Nuevo León, which is in the thick of an extreme drought. The capital city there, Monterrey, has now restricted daily water access to just a six-hour window, from 4 a.m. to 10 a.m. But in at least 10 other states, more than 80 percent of cities are also suffering moderate to severe droughts. There, poorer people are already reusing water in ways that are “still unthinkable for the privileged classes”—some of them bathe, do laundry, then do dishes with the same tubful of water. The unfairness of unequal access to this basic need is already causing Mexicans to turn on one another. Last week, an…

About 100 Americans die on average every day from gun violence. Currently 60 to 100 Ukrainian soldiers are dying daily in the war, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky recently estimated.The New York Times In the first eight months of 2021, the NRA spent just $13,900 on School Shield, the program it launched to promote school safety after the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. Last year the gun rights group had revenues of $282 million.Popular Info About 1,000 migrants a day who are allowed into the U.S. to await immigration or asylum hearings are being issued a special phone and an app that require them to regularly check in with the government and respond to monitoring calls from authorities. Nearly 250,000 migrants are currently being tracked by…

“Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”Dwight D. Eisenhower, quoted in The Washington Post “Ambition is at the very core of success and extraordinary achievement. Unlike greed, it’s a powerful, creative, and constructive force.”Entrepreneur Jim Rohn, quoted in Kenyans.co “Fake news is bad, but a Ministry of Truth is worse.”Estonian lawmaker Andrus Ansip, quoted in Noema “It’s utterly ridiculous that powerful, resilient women are portrayed as dangerous, whereas in my experience it’s the predatory men who are the real threat.”Joan Collins, quoted in The Times (U.K.) “Tell people there’s an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure.”George Carlin, quoted on Next Draft “The person who does…

Musk: Get to the office, or quit Tesla CEO Elon Musk told employees they must return to work in the office full-time if they want to keep their jobs, said Chris Isidore in CNN.com. In emails to Tesla executives last week, Musk said Tesla’s office workers could no longer work full-time from home and that the office “must be the employee’s primary workspace” for “at least” 40 hours a week. When asked about the policy on Twitter, Musk said workers who disagreed “should pretend to work somewhere else.” Twitter, which Musk agreed to buy, told its employees they could work from home “forever,” but that could change under Musk. In April, he joked that he might turn the company’s headquarters into a homeless shelter “since no one shows up…

Older adults were taught in school that dinosaurs were cold-blooded, like modern reptiles, while following generations learned they were warm-blooded, like birds and mammals. A new study suggests that both are correct, reports The New York Times. Researchers analyzed the remains of more than 50 extinct and modern vertebrates, including mammals, lizards, birds, and 11 non-avian dinosaurs. Using new technology, they identified a molecular marker of metabolic stress that correlates with how much oxygen the animal breathed, and thus the speed of its metabolism. As expected, they found that most dinosaurs—including long-necked sauropods and Tyrannosaurus rex—were warm-blooded. Yet they also found that some herbivorous dinosaurs, such as Stegosaurus and Triceratops, evolved over tens of millions of years to be cold-blooded. Like modern reptiles, the animals would have had to…

Sloane Crosley’s new novel, Cult Classic, follows a New Yorker whose encounters with multiple exes lead her into a Lower East Side cult. Below, the best-selling author of I Was Told There’d Be Cake recommends books seeped in downtown culture. Low Life by Luc Sante (1991). This should be required reading for anyone who signs a lease below 14th Street. I like to think I have a unique connection to this book, having discovered it after nearly moving into a former brothel, once known as McGurk’s Suicide Hall, that Sante details. The building was never granted landmark status. It’s a community garden now. Glamorama by Bret Easton Ellis (1998). This is a controversial recommendation because the “correct” answer to Ellis’ Best Portrait of New York is American Psycho. But the string…

  3 This debut album “doesn’t just revive a certain sound; it revives the idea of mystery and tension in rock ’n’ roll,” said David Browne in Rolling Stone. Though singer-guitarists Nora Cheng and Penelope Lowenstein and drummer Gigi Reece are still in their teens, their music will make you feel as if you’re “standing in a crammed basement club circa 1993, immersed in beautiful sonic squalor.” And this Chicago trio isn’t just goofing around: “There’s nothing cute or even borderline novelty” about songs like “Dirtbag Transformation (Still Dirty),” a “thunderous” tune whose typically elliptical half-buried lyrics sketch a portrait of a fractured family. This promising 12-track set “strings together the best bits of shoegaze, jangle, grunge, and alt-rock,” said Rachel Aroesti in The Guardian. The sweetness of the vocal…

The latest in horror… Mad God Special effects guru Phil Tippett spent three decades on his dialogue-free stop-motion magnum opus, which follows a character known as the Assassin through an insane hellscape. Its streaming premiere arrives June 16, a week after the theatrical debut. Shudder Evil The series about a skeptical psychologist and a Catholic seminarian who team up to investigate paranormal activity shed some inhibitions and grew stronger when it moved from CBS to streaming last year. Season 3 arrives this week. Paramount+ The Sadness Buckets of gore and black humor mark this recent Taiwanese horror flick, which follows a young couple trying to reunite while a virus is turning everyone in their city into sadists. Shudder Blood Conscious In this twist on the cabin-in-the-woods trope, three young…

Housing affordability fell 29 percent between March 2022 and the year earlier, the sharpest decline on record, according to the National Association of Realtors. With mortgage rates soaring and home prices staying elevated, the monthly principal and interest payment on an average-priced home, by a buyer who puts 20 percent down, has gone up by roughly $600—44 percent—since the start of the year. Axios The average sales price of manufactured homes has risen nearly 50 percent during the pandemic, from $82,900 to $123,200, compared with a 22 percent increase for average new homes. About 20 million Americans live in mobile homes, which make up about 6 percent of U.S. residences. The Washington Post In addition to $385 million in career earnings in the NBA, LeBron James’ business interests have made…

More than a quarter of India’s 1.3 billion–plus people are under age 15, and many of those young people lack the resources needed to succeed at school. Founded in 1991, Asha for Education (ashanet.org) sees education as a prerequisite to socioeconomic change and aims to increase access for underprivileged children throughout India. The California-based charity, whose name means “hope” in Hindi, has over 50 chapters and 1,000 volunteers in India, the United States, Canada, and Europe. Asha chapters join with local community groups to support projects that range from vocational training and internships to providing special-needs resources and funding emergency Covid relief. Since its founding, Asha for Education has contributed to more than 400 projects in 24 of India’s 28 states. Each charity we feature has earned a four-star…

Scott Lincicome The Dispatch Withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership was “the most boneheaded U.S. policy move of the last decade,” said Scott Lincicome. The 2008 free-trade agreement between the U.S. and 11 other nations was a political lightning rod. But since former President Donald Trump abandoned TPP on his first day in office, “we’ve unfortunately re-learned why people supported TPP in the first place.” The rest of the TPP parties “moved on without us and inked” their own trade agreement, cutting the U.S. off from increasing trade with “large, up-and-coming Vietnam and Malaysia.” China grabbed the chance to forge its own regional trade deal, offering improved access to its vast market. This has increased China’s influence in the region while reducing the “obvious enticement with which Washington can sway…

What happened Voters in two of the country’s most liberal cities rallied behind law-and-order messaging this week, sending a stark warning to Democrats about police reform’s diminishing appeal. In San Francisco, District Attorney Chesa Boudin was recalled by a 60-40 margin, just three years after his election energized the “progressive prosecutor” movement as Boudin promised to send fewer people to prison. His reforms drew mounting backlash as homelessness, burglaries, car thefts, drug use, and overdoses soared. Liberals signaled a similar change of heart in Los Angeles, where Rick Caruso, a billionaire mall developer who ran as a crime fighter, forced a runoff in a mayoral race against Rep. Karen Bass, once on the short list to be President Biden’s vice president. Outspending Bass 10 to 1, Caruso, who recently…

A California court has ruled that bees are fish. Seeking to have bumblebees protected by the Endangered Species Act, environmental lawyers argued that because the law defines “fish” to include any “invertebrate,’’ this should include bees, who lack spines and are therefore “invertebrate.” A state appeals court agreed—while conceding that “the term fish is colloquially and commonly understood to refer to aquatic species.” Elvis Presley’s estate is cracking down on Elvis-themed Las Vegas weddings. The estate has warned several Vegas chapels to stop using the late singer’s name and likeness in their branding and ceremonies. “This could be very damaging to our industry,” said Melody Willis-Williams, president of Viva Las Vegas Weddings. “We’re up against a superpower.” In other news Novavax could be fourth U.S. Covid shot A panel of…

Erin Jackson has found Olympic glory to be fleeting, said Bryan Armen Graham in The Guardian (U.K.). A onetime inline roller skater who first stepped on the ice in 2016, the Ocala, Fla., native became the first Black woman to win a Winter Olympics individual gold medal, in Beijing last February. Her victory in the 500-meter race earned her a burst of media attention, including interviews with Oprah Winfrey and Michelle Obama. But since then, even with two World Cup wins in March, she has received no new sponsorship offers. “How do I say it diplomatically? People don’t care a whole lot as soon as the Olympics are over,” said Jackson, 29. “It’s tough. Where’s the money coming from? How are we going to keep paying rent? Because it…

Ezra Klein The New York Times Is it moral to have children in a warming world? asked Ezra Klein. It’s a question I hear constantly, and a growing number of people are deciding that it’s not. But “nothing in our near future looks so horrible that it turns reproduction into an immoral act.” That’s not to dismiss the very real suffering that climate change will unleash, and that today’s children will confront. But there’s growing reason to hope humanity will avert “apocalypse,” and limit warming to 2 to 2.7 degrees centigrade rather than the 5 degrees predicted just a decade ago. Costs for solar energy are plummeting, and both government policies and the free market are leading to the rapid development of green energy and innovation. In the zero-emissions future,…

RUSSIA Anastasia Mironova Gazeta Think ordinary Russians are angry about the international sanctions targeting their countrymen’s yachts? Think again, said Anastasia Mironova. Most of us are actually delighted by Western efforts to financially “disembowel our oligarchs.” That’s because we’re still traumatized by the economic chaos the oligarchs helped unleash following the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. A tiny minority of Russians used that period to acquire huge wealth, buying up state assets at knock-down prices. For most Russians, though, the 1990s were a time of desperation, when people were “killed in the alley for a fur hat” or driven to suicide by poverty. Anyone old enough to recall that period can now only “rejoice” at the sight of oligarchs getting their comeuppance. Similarly, ordinary Russians are “hooting triumphantly” at…

Many people slow down somewhat as they age, as joints get creaky or achy. But new research shows that those who both walk slower and perform worse on cognitive tests are more likely to develop dementia. These “dual decliners,” who lose both speed and mental acuity, are at greater risk than those who lag in either category alone. The study, reports CNN, followed a group of Americans over 65 and Australians over 70 for seven years. Every other year, the participants took cognitive tests, and twice every other year they were assessed for the speed of their gait. The results are so convincing, said Dr. Joe Verghese, a professor of geriatrics at New York’s Albert Einstein College of Medi-cine who was not involved in the study, that screening for…

(Scribner, $27) Tom Perrotta’s sequel to Election is “even more piercing than its predecessor,” said Molly Young in The New York Times. That 1998 Perrotta novel introduced readers to Tracy Flick, an unpopular high schooler who was running for class president and would soon be immortalized by Reese Witherspoon in the film adaptation. In the new book, Tracy is an assistant principal who aspires to the open top job but, despite her obvious qualifications, has no support. She remains, in short, “an underdog cursed to be construed as an infuriating alpha,” an intriguing character surrounded here by “exquisitely drawn” secondary figures. Perrotta is more clearly on Tracy’s side this time, said Judith Shulevitz in The Atlantic. He’s most interested, in fact, in examining bro culture—the world of boys and…

Desperate Remedies by Andrew Scull (Belknap, $35) Andrew Scull’s fascinating history of psychiatry in America suggests that the field may have hit a dead end, said Richard McNally in The Wall Street Journal. We tried asylums that devolved into prison-like institutions, scored one true breakthrough with a syphilis cure, and then recklessly experimented before turning decisively to pharmacology, which has proved of limited use. To Scull, it’s not clear that psychiatry even has a future, but his account of where it’s been is “an indisputable masterpiece.” The Ceiling Outside by Noga Arikha (Basic, $29) Consciousness remains such a mysterious phenomenon, said Claire Messud in Harper’s. In this “wide-ranging and engrossing” book, historian of ideas Noga Arikha strings together case studies of patients in a hospital’s neuropsychiatry unit to examine…

  3 Though Angel Olsen could easily become a breakout indie star, “she seems to have other things on her mind,” said Mark Richardson in The Wall Street Journal. The restless singer-songwriter, now 35, makes a stylistic detour with each new album. But her sixth turns out to be an “excellent” entry point to her catalog, because half of it appealingly evokes “the lush and atmospheric sound of early-’70s countrypolitan” and the other leans toward the “tense chamber pop” of 2019’s acclaimed All Mirrors. Altogether, it’s “a bighearted record that achieves thrilling grandiosity and cheek-warming intimacy, sometimes in the span of a single song,” said Katie Presley in NPR.org. “Olsen is no stranger to grappling with grief in her music,” and she recorded this album shortly after both of her…

The salad below delivers “a classic Southeast Asian flavor combination”: sweet, hot, and savory, said J. Kenji López-Alt in The New York Times. Feel free to swap out the watermelon for other summer fruit. But try to use palm sugar rather than brown and make the effort to find fried shallots at an Asian store. Fried shallots are a staple condiment of Southeast Asian cuisine, and keeping the ready-made variety on hand is “a move that can infuse so many dishes with flavor and crunch.” 4 medium garlic cloves • 2 to 12 fresh Thai bird’s-eye chiles, stems trimmed • 3 tbsp palm sugar • ¼ cup fish sauce • 3 tbsp freshly squeezed lime juice • ½ cup store-bought fried shallots • 3 lbs seedless watermelon, rind removed,…

How will history judge the onetime tech superstar who told American women to “lean in” to their careers? asked Shira Ovide in The New York Times. Well, it’s complicated. Sheryl Sandberg, Meta’s departing chief operating officer, “shares in the credit (or blame) for developing two of the most successful, and perhaps least defensible, business models in internet history.” Before joining Facebook (now Meta)—which she announced last week she is leaving after 14 years—Sandberg helped Google build a digital ad business that became indispensable to every marketer. When she was hired by then-23-year-old Mark Zuckerberg in 2008, she designed an even “more sophisticated” and precise system that could be scaled to reach billions of users. Now we know the darker side of this strategy, which enabled personal data to be…

New Lisbon, Wis. A retired circuit judge was assassinated in his home last week, and law enforcement said the alleged murderer had a list of suspected future targets in his car, including Wisconsin Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, Michigan Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (who was the target of a separate alleged kidnapping plot in 2020), and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. John Roemer, 68, was found in his house shot dead and zip-tied to a chair, and after an hours long standoff, police found Douglas Uhde, 56, in Roemer’s basement with a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Roemer had sent Uhde to prison for armed burglary in 2005. Uhde escaped from prison briefly a year later and was released in 2020. On Facebook, he frequently posted profane pro-Trump and anti-Democrat memes, along…

Selma Blair finally understands why she’s been in pain much of her life, said Wendy Kaur in Elle. The actress, 49, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis only four years ago. But her body hurt since childhood, and as the youngest daughter of a Jewish family in Michigan, she began sneaking sips of seder wine at age 7 to blot out the pain. By eighth grade, she started experiencing crushing headaches and fatigue, and her binge drinking worsened. “As sad as it sounds, I think that maybe I wouldn’t have survived those years without alcohol,” she said. “Now I know I had MS symptoms and that I was trying to self-medicate with booze.” She managed to keep her drinking in check when her acting career took off in her 20s,…

Kyle Smith National Review With “great sorrow and reluctance,” Hollywood is finally starting “to detach its tongue from the Chinese Communist Party’s boots,” said Kyle Smith. For years, major movie studios have censored any images or themes China’s government deems forbidden, so as to have access to the lucrative Chinese audience. But “under the increasingly dogmatic rule of Xi Jinping,” China’s censorious demands have escalated to an absurd degree, even to the point of banning depictions of “sissy” men. So Hollywood has come to “the sad realization that pursuing Chinese money is not worth the creative and moral cost.” The new Top Gun sequel, starring Tom Cruise, will not be released in China; Beijing apparently found the film “too jingoistic about the U.S. military.” In an early trailer for the…

SPAIN Miguel González El Pais Spain has a policy of refusing to sell weapons that may kill civilians in war zones, said Miguel González. But what about in a country not technically at war? More than 17,000 people, including nearly 650 children, have died from firearms so far this year in the U.S., a daily rate five to 20 times those of European countries. If any African country had so much domestic carnage, the EU would surely be considering “an embargo on arms sales.” Spanish and EU law limit foreign arms sales that might “aggravate tensions or existing conflicts in the country of final destination,” including ending up in the hands of terrorists. Isn’t that exactly what happened when a white supremacist terrorist “shot indiscriminately” at Black supermarket shoppers in…

After his 6-year-old son was murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, Lenny Pozner wondered if images of the horrific damage an assault rifle did to his child might change minds about gun laws. “It would move some people,” he thought—followed by “Not my kid.” After another school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, left the nation embroiled in another debate over gun violence, said Elizabeth Williamson in The New York Times, some advocates of gun restrictions are asking: Would images of child victims “jolt the nation’s gridlocked leadership into action?” Throughout history, shocking photos have served to sway public opinion and create political pressure for major change. In 1955, published photos of 14-year-old Emmett Till’s mutilated face helped launch the civil rights movement. In 1972, a photo of a…

(Ecco, $30) Dennis Hopper and Brooke Hayward were, throughout most of the 1960s, “the hipster power couple,” said Ty Burr in The Wall Street Journal. Though the two young Hollywood-based actors didn’t make many movies or bankroll many creative ventures of any kind during those years, they occupied the hub of the era’s counterculture, making the introductions that spun out endless innovations and provocations in film, art, music, and photography. He was a mercurial Method actor from Kansas; she was the cool, confident offspring of Hollywood royalty, and in this “exceptionally well-researched and well-written book,” they are the VIPs who usher readers into every corner of the decade’s cultural revolution. “Who isn’t in this book?” It’s hard to say, because Hopper and Hayward “seem to have known everyone.” “That…

David Sedaris isn’t ready to give his father the benefit of the doubt just because the old man is now dead, said Terry Gross in NPR.org. Lou Sedaris, according to his son, told outrageous lies, beat his kids, cheated them the same way he cheated other people who worked for him, and made sexual comments about his own daughters. “My father was a perfect preparation for having Donald Trump as president,” David says. “It’s been the driving force in my life: the animosity, the war that my father and I started when I was young and fought every day of our lives.” But when Lou died last year, at 98, David didn’t celebrate. As certain as the best-selling humorist was that his father was not truly a good man,…

  3 The new Fantastic Negrito album “can best be described as a combination of Frank Zappa and Prince,” said Hal Horowitz in American Songwriter. While the three-time winner of the Grammy for Best Contemporary Blues Album has always been hard to nail down, this audacious record addresses a weighty subject with music that “whiplashes around like a frantic amusement park.” The songs address his ancestry, starting with a white Scottish indentured servant who lived in an illegal common-law marriage with an enslaved Black man in 1750s Virginia, and every track is more interesting than the last. Musical genres “crash together with spectacular narrative-enhancing results,” said Ellie Rogers in Total Guitar. “Venomous Dogma,” for example, “transitions from dreamy pop to ominous blues rock riffage” to capture the trauma of his…

Batman Unburied (Spotify) The very latest reimagining of the Batman myth landed in “a very fitting new home: audio drama, where audiences have an endless appetite for grisly murder,” said Gavia Baker-Whitelaw in The Daily Dot. In Spotify’s hit 10-episode series, Bruce Wayne is a forensic pathologist who’s hunting an organ stealing serial killer named the Harvester. And while many have played the Wayne/Batman character before, Black Panther star Winston Duke “quickly makes the role his own,” creating “a gruffly amused loner” who helps freshen up a battle of wits that’s otherwise derivative of similar thrillers. Fortunately, the series “experiments in ways that previous adaptations of the character haven’t,” said Kai Grady in the Los Angeles Times. The majority of the cast is nonwhite, including Hasan Minhaj as the…

The bitters revival has gotten out of hand, said Brad Thomas Parsons in Punch. Every cocktail enthusiast should still stock the two major brands that once were all you could find: Angostura and Peychaud’s. But with dozens of brands now producing hundreds of flavors, there’s “need of a serious culling.” Below, three that have become deserving bartender staples: Regans’ Orange Bitters No. 6 ($12). You do need an orange bitters, and Gaz Regan’s concoction has become the benchmark. Its spicy profile “helped ignite the bitters boom.” Bittermens Xocolatl Mole Bitters ($19). Bartenders love Bittermens products, including the brand’s mole bitters, which feature cacao and cinnamon, and are “at home among dark spirits, rum, and tequila.” Scrappy’s Celery Bitters ($20). Add a vegetal snap to a tequila, gin, or vodka…

There’s no such thing as flyover country, said Rebecca Powers in The Washington Post. Last year I drove coast to coast, and of all the dramatic landscapes I saw, “the plains, prairies, and grasslands are what have stayed with me.” Wide-open spaces “put things in perspective,” and the broad vistas of the Great Plains “offer opportunities for tourists to feel the essence of the land and its history.” The 350-mile Native American Scenic Byway follows the Missouri River through tribal lands in the Dakotas, taking travelers past monuments, museums, and sacred sites. In Nebraska, pioneers’ wagon ruts still scour the earth at the California Hill National Historic Trail. The Great Plains “offer lessons in ecology” too. “Prairies are alive with native plants.” Some 2,500 bison roam Oklahoma’s Joseph H. Williams…

Elon Musk reiterated his threat to walk away from his planned Twitter purchase over Twitter’s fake accounts, said Kurt Wagner and Maxwell Adler in Bloomberg. Musk filed a letter to regulators this week asserting that the company is committing “a material breach” of its obligations under the $44 billion takeover deal “by not meeting his demands for more information” about bots, and he reserves the right “to terminate the agreement.” But legal experts say the filing “wasn’t necessary” and was likely done to put public pressure on Twitter. Behind the scenes, “both sides have been meeting regularly and sharing information.” Tariffs: U.S. opens door to more solar panel imports The Biden administration declared a two-year freeze on tariffs for solar panels imported from four Southeast Asian countries, said Jeff…

Individual investors flock to bonds Government bonds are the new meme stocks, said Sam Goldfarb in The Wall Street Journal. Seeking safety from a turbulent market, from the end of April to late May investors poured $20 billion into mutual and exchange-traded funds that focus on buying ordinary U.S. Treasurys, “the largest infusion over a four-week span in at least 29 years.” So many orders have been placed for inflation-linked “I bonds” paying an initial interest rate of 9.62 percent—available only to individual investors, through the Treasury Department—that the agency had to shift staff to a call center. Purchases of these bonds, which are limited to $10,000 per investor, have totaled “$14.9 billion since November, about $6 billion more than the previous 20 years combined.” Undercounting subscription bills Most…

Paul Krugman The New York Times Last week, the Federal Trade Commission reported that cryptocurrency scams now account for “about 1 of every 4 dollars reported lost to fraud,” said Paul Krugman. That’s underselling them—by a huge amount. Those are just the losses to outright fraud reported to the FTC. It doesn’t count “the money invested in assets that existed, sort of, but were fundamentally worthless,” a situation we’ve seen again and again in the crypto world. A recent example is TerraUSD, a so-called stablecoin that collapsed last month and lost $18 billion in value, “in some cases consuming people’s life savings.” Stablecoins, which are supposed to be pegged to a currency like the dollar, have lured in investors because they “seem high-tech and futuristic.” To me, what they resemble…

Ann Turner Cook carried a secret almost from birth. As a high school English teacher in Tampa, Cook feared ridicule if her students learned the truth: that her infant likeness was the most recognizable baby face on Earth. Cook was the Gerber baby, a fame she gained when a neighbor in Connecticut submitted a charcoal sketch of her at five months in response to a 1928 contest seeking an image for a marketing campaign. The neighbor, Dorothy Hope Smith, promised to complete the illustration if it were chosen, but Gerber executives took one look at the picture of the cherubic, wide-eyed infant and said that no embellishment was necessary. Over the next 90 years, the image would be reproduced billions of times on products from strained peaches to infant…

Sophie Freud was decidedly not a Freudian. Sigmund Freud’s last surviving grandchild studied human behavior as a social worker and psychology professor at Simmons University in Boston. But she forcefully rejected her famous grandfather’s approach to therapy, calling psychoanalysis a “narcissistic indulgence” and saying his theories about transference between male therapists and female patients whitewashed a harmful phenomenon. She even once compared him to Adolf Hitler, saying both men were “false prophets of the 20th century.” Still, the professor, who escaped Austria in 1938, acknowledged that the family name probably saved her life. Her brother, she recalled, once told her, “Without Grandfather, the Nazis would have made lampshades with your skin.” Sophie was raised in Vienna in the “turbulent household” of Sigmund Freud’s eldest son and his estranged wife, said…

This week’s question: In a survey of 500 delivery drivers, 4 out of 5 admitted to eating part of customers’ orders at some point. What would you call a delivery app that acknowledges this unsavory reality? Last week’s contest: Flocks of jackdaws have been observed squawking their way toward consensus on where to collectively fly and roost next. If these loud, crow-like birds were to form a movement to spread their democratic values, what should they call it? THE WINNER: “Flock the Vote” John Parry, Eldersburg, Md. SECOND PLACE: “Common Caws” Mike Reiss, New York City THIRD PLACE: “Freedom Flies” Joe Ayella, Wayne, 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 name, address, and…