Indholdsfortegnelse for August 5, 2022 i The Week Magazine

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: There’s a great investment we’ve learned about that will let you double your money every four years—guaranteed. How does it work? You lend money to people who will borrow it to make even more money. But you don’t need to look too closely at that, because, as you know, your gains are guaranteed. Pretty much. Oh, wait, you say you have heard this? It sounds like Bernie Madoff? Or swampland in Florida? Well, don’t worry about that. Because this time (say it with me) it’s different. This time, you see, it’s all digital. And that changes everything. Except of course it doesn’t, as Bitcoin “banks” like Celsius (see Making Money, p.33) are shutting down, leaving depositors with locked accounts scouring fine print…

Cheetahs were once prevalent in India—the word “cheetah” traces its origins to Sanskrit—but in 1952, they were officially declared because of habitat loss and hunting. Now, after two years of negotiations, eight cheetahs will be brought to the South Asian country’s Kuno-Palpur National Park. They’ll be followed by 42 more, all hailing from Namibia, over the next five years. Conservationists hope the cheetahs can adapt to the transition from Africa, where the great cats, which can run at 70 mph, hunted on open grasslands. Alena Analeigh Wicker is working toward two separate undergraduate degrees—a monumental task for anyone. But even more impressive is the fact that Alena, who was recently accepted into medical school at the University of Alabama, is only 13 years old. “What is age?” asked Alena. She’s…

Librarians in Oklahoma risk termination, jail time, and a $10,000 fine if they help customers find information about abortion. Oklahoma’s Metropolitan Library System advised staff that with abortion now illegal statewide, they should avoid even speaking the word “abortion,” especially since patrons might try to trick them into using it so as to report them. One understandably anonymous librarian told Vice, “This is very dystopian.” A Cincinnati police officer caught on tape saying how much she hates “f---ing n-----s” is blaming her use of the slur on cultural influences. Officer Rose Valentino admits she repeatedly used the N-word after a Black pedestrian gave her the finger, but says that’s because she was “desensitized by music and hearing people talk on the street.” In other news Chief justice lobbied to salvage…

Christone “Kingfish” Ingram is widely hailed as the future of the blues, said Carlo Rotella in The Washington Post Magazine. The 23-year-old phenom has been annointed by Guitar World and Rolling Stone as a generational talent and successor to B.B. King and Buddy Guy, with the ability to mix acrobatic runs with an intuitive command of tone and phrasing that astonishes older guitarists. Ingram has also worked hard on developing his deep, soulful voice to convey vivid emotion. “For blues, you have to have that voice,” he says. “People come to hear shredding guitar, but I also want to do like Barry White, Luther Vandross.” Kingfish grew up in Clarksdale, Miss., and learned to sing in the Southern Black church style. “Church music has always been a big part…

Tesla CEO Elon Musk had a brief affair with the wife of a longtime friend, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, which led Brin to file for divorce in January, The Wall Street Journal reported this week. Musk’s fling with lawyer Nicole Shanahan, who’d been married to Brin for four years, reportedly began at Miami’s Art Basel. At a party earlier this year, the world’s richest man dropped to a knee in front of the world’s eighth-richest man and begged for forgiveness, the Journal said. Musk called the article “Total BS” and released a photo of himself and Brin partying together hours earlier. Shanahan’s lawyer said the claim of an affair “is not only an outright lie but also defamatory.” Over the past two months, Musk has been accused of exposing himself…

John DeVillars The Boston Globe In 1977, I joined other environmentalists in marching against the construction of nuclear power plants, said John DeVillars. But if I’d known then what fossil fuels would do to our world, my protest sign would have read “Better to Build It Today Than to Leave a Scorched Earth Tomorrow.” Time is running out to avert catastrophic warming, and zero-emission nuclear power has to be part of the solution. The 440 nuclear plants running around the world, including 54 in the U.S., must be kept online, while we accelerate the development of new nuclear technology—small, less expensive reactors that have cooling systems that make them very safe. Over 18,000 cumulative reactor years of nuclear operation, there have been two major accidents. Chernobyl and Fukushima caused…

A Missouri man has filed a $5 million class-action lawsuit against Bass Pro for failing to honor its lifetime warranty on socks. Kent Slaughter said that in past years he’d exchanged about a dozen pairs of his “Lifetime Guarantee All-Purpose Wool Socks” after they wore out. But when he tried to exchange four more pairs of the $11.99 socks last year, the outdoor outfitter indicated it had changed its policy, and replaced them with ones carrying only a 60-day warranty. “This lawsuit is about one simple principle: a corporation’s obligation to tell consumers the truth,” said his lawyers. A pair of Japanese companies plan to market vertical “nap boxes” for overworked office staff who want to grab a few winks while standing upright. The pods support the head, knees, and…

RUSSIA Ekaterina Sazhneva Moskovsky Komsomolets Western sanctions are having a “devastating” effect on Baikonur, the city in Kazakhstan that hosts Russia’s spaceport, said Ekaterina Sazhneva. The Baikonur Cosmodrome in the desert steppe launched Yuri Gagarin on the first human journey into space and was the site of many other rocket launches. But since February, many of its international space projects have been suspended, notably a joint venture with the European Space Agency that was to search for traces of past life on Mars. The spaceport is becoming deserted: Russian space workers are leaving in droves, while those who remain are being forced to take unpaid leave. A bombastic pledge at the start of summer by the head of Russia’s space program that at least 15 launches would take place this…

Though Florida’s law cutting off abortions at 15 weeks has gone into effect, the state still has more liberal abortion laws than its neighbors and remains a major out-of-state abortion destination in the South. Florida has the third-highest abortion rate among states.CBSNews.com Former first lady Melania Trump said she failed to denounce the Jan. 6 insurrection because she was “unaware” of it, having spent that day working on a photo shoot of several rooms in the White House. Her former chief of staff, Stephanie Grisham, has revealed texts in which she urged Melania to call for an end to the violence, to which Melania responded only “no.” She now says Grisham “failed to provide insight and information.”CNN.com Lake Mead, a water source for 25 million people across seven Southwestern states,…

“By failing to read or listen to poets, society dooms itself to inferior modes of articulation, those of the politician, the salesman, or the charlatan.”Joseph Brodsky, quoted in The Spectator World “In life as in dance, grace glides on blistered feet.”Poet Alice Abrams, quoted in Forbes “Having a million opinions about everything comes cheap and easy, whereas actually doing something can cost you quite a lot.”Writer Gary Indiana, quoted in Bookforum “The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago; the second-best time is today.”Chinese proverb, quoted in The New York Times “Failure is a detour, not a dead-end street.”Author Zig Ziglar, quoted in New Indian Express (India) “To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”Naturalist Aldo Leopold, quoted in the Los Angeles…

Facebook’s push to counter TikTok Facebook is overhauling its Home feed, said Naomi Nix in The Washington Post. The social media giant last week officially announced long-rumored plans to split up its main “home” section into two tabs. “The default screen, known as Home, will now display more entertaining posts from outside creators and provide easy access” to its two short-form video services, Reels and Stories. Those who want to see posts from friends, family, and groups will have to navigate to a different tab, Feeds. The redesign is part of an aggressive effort to bolster “video products to compete for young users against ByteDance’s TikTok.” That’s an increasingly urgent mission for Facebook, which in the last months of 2021 lost users for the first time in its 18-year…

As men get older, many lose not just their muscle tone or their hair, but also some of the Y chromosomes in their cells. A new study concludes that that loss may be detrimental to their health. Researchers used the gene-editing tool CRISPR to destroy the Y chromosome in the white blood cells of a group of mice. The rodents were fine when they were young, but as they aged they had worse health than their peers: They died earlier, had a buildup of scar tissue in the heart, and showed a stronger decline in heart function after heart failure. To see if the same might apply to humans, the researchers looked at health data from some 223,000 men in the U.K. between ages 40 and 69. They found…

Meg Gardiner, an Edgar Award–winning thriller writer, has collaborated with Michael Mann to co-author Heat 2, a novel that builds on Mann’s classic 1995 crime film. Below, Gardiner recommends six other books about crooks and their hunters. Norco ’80 by Peter Houlahan (2019). This stunning true-crime book delivers both a riveting account of a wild Southern California bank robbery and an astonishing courtroom story. The robbery’s haunting effect on victims, witnesses, and police officers is movingly portrayed. Blacktop Wasteland by S.A. Cosby (2020). “Drive it like you stole it.” Beauregard “Bug” Montage is a street racer, mechanic, family man, and the once and future king of getaway drivers. This novel is a gritty, dazzling take on a classic crime tale: a man lured back into the Life. It’s full…

3 Some TikTok-famous bands really do deserve the spotlight, said Ilana Kaplan in Rolling Stone. Beach Bunny blew up overnight in 2019 when teens discovered the Chicago rockers’ year-old single “Prom Queen.” Millions more fell in love with 2020’s “Cloud 9.” And no wonder: Bubbly lead singer Lili Trifilio writes “openhearted, plainspoken” lyrics that address problems all young women can relate to. Beach Bunny’s second album is all about embracing big emotions without shame, and its burst of “jangly power pop” plays like “’90s rom-com core at its finest.” During the Covid shutdown, Trifilio expanded her sonic palette by studying production, said Lindsay Zoladz in The New York Times. “The bold, self-assured sound of Emotional Creature shows how far she’s come, from the explosively catchy leadoff track ‘Entropy’ to…

Gin and tonic is a summer classic, yet the principal ingredient is too often “a total afterthought,” said Jim Vorel in Paste. But are tonic waters truly interchangeable? We subjected eight to a blind taste test and found that bargain store brands are “aggressively bland,” while Schweppes suffers from a mild synthetic note. Below, our top three: Navy Hill Soda + Tonic A dry blend of tonic and club soda, this was the “most nuanced” mixer in the tasting, delivering notes of pine resin, citrus, floral blossom, and fresh ginger. Fever-Tree Premium Indian Tonic Water The brand that elevated tonic drinkers’ expectations makes a mixer that’s “spicy and complex,” evocative of pink peppercorn, pine resin, and orange pith. Canada Dry Tonic Water “Sweet and soda-like” but rounded out by…

To fully enjoy Vancouver, you need to get outside “as much as humanly possible,” said Christopher Muther in The Boston Globe. When I recently made my first visit to British Columbia’s largest city, “walking around felt like entering some kind of CGI fantasy dreamscape,” because “no matter where you turn, there are mountains, beaches, rain forests, public art, and parks.” I stayed in the West End near Stanley Park, a 1,000-acre wilderness right on the harbor. A 6-mile bike ride along the seawall took me past beaches, bays, and the celebrated First Nations totem poles at Brockton Point. The next day, I rode a free shuttle to North Vancouver, where the Capilano Suspension Bridge Cliffwalk put me up in the canopy of another urban rain forest. I enjoyed learning about…

The Federal Reserve agreed to another aggressive rate hike this week as it seeks to tame inflation, said Howard Schneider and Ann Saphir in Reuters. For a second consecutive meeting, the central bank lifted its federal-funds rate by 0.75 percentage points. Before last month, it hadn’t raised rates by that amount since 1994. The ramp-up represents one of “the fastest-ever gear changes in U.S. monetary policy.” Chairman Jerome Powell said the Fed would persist with rate hikes until there was “compelling evidence” that inflation is falling. Crypto: Tesla sells off Bitcoin at a loss Tesla said last week it sold 75 percent of its Bitcoin holdings, said Jordan Novet in CNBC.com. It marked “a rapid retreat for Tesla and CEO Elon Musk,” who touted the “long-term potential” of the digital…

Making your pool pay off The “Airbnb of swimming pools” lets homeowners rent out their backyard oasis, said Megan Sauer in CNBC.com. Jim Battan in West Linn, Ore., says he has earned $177,000 in revenue in less than two years through a platform called Swimply, which connects more than 25,000 privately owned pools in all 50 states with renters looking for somewhere to take a dip. Battan says he “books about 26 visits per week” to his luxury pool and spa, charging $70 per hour in the summer, “a rate that rises with additional people and longer durations.” He even keeps the pool heated for off-season bookings. Swimply takes a 15 percent cut. It extends hosts a $1 million liability insurance policy and “up to $10,000 to cover costs…

James Surowiecki The Atlantic “Listen to Americans right now, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that when it comes to the economy, Joe Biden is the worst president since Herbert Hoover,” said James Surowiecki. The reason for this is inflation. “Americans hate high prices, and high gas prices in particular.” But our obsession with inflation has come to distort almost everything. “Historically, the unemployment rate played a big part” in how people gauged the health of the economy. Today’s unemployment rate is 3.6 percent, roughly the lowest it has been for decades. So why is the Biden administration getting no credit? It is possible most people believe that “recovery was inevitable” after the pandemic, though that was hardly the case. There’s another argument, recently laid out by Darren Grant, an…

Emilie Brzezinski’s family grew accustomed to the sound of a chainsaw. Initially known as the wife of Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter who became an elder statesman before his death in 2017, Brzezinski came to be renowned in her own right for hewing towering sculptures from tree trunks using chisels, axes, and chainsaws. Arch in Flight, her 14-foot bronze casting of a piece of wood shaped like the mathematical symbol for pi, stands near Washington’s Corcoran Gallery. Brzezinski said she was drawn to those trees—especially the ones stunted or struck by lightning—that have “a story to tell.” Emilie Benes was born in Geneva, said The Washington Post, to a Czech diplomat father from a prominent family; her great-uncle was a Czech president. After World…

The bristlecone pines of the American West are among the oldest living things in the world, said Sarah Kaplan in The Washington Post. Will they survive human-caused climate change? The trees had stood for more than 1,000 years. Their sturdy roots clung to the crumbling mountainside. Their gnarled limbs reached toward the desert sky. The rings of their trunks told the story of everything they’d witnessed—every attack they’d rebuffed, every crisis they’d endured. Weather patterns shifted; empires rose and fell; other species emerged, mated, migrated, died. But here, in one of the harshest environments on the planet, the bristlecone pines survived. It seemed they always would. Until the day in 2018 when Constance Millar ascended the trail to Telescope Peak—the highest point in Death Valley National Park—and discovered hundreds of dead and dying…

Linda Hoover’s album is arriving 52 years late, said Peter Jones in The Guardian (U.K.). The unknown singer’s debut, I Mean to Shine, is not like the typical dud that collects dust at a record label—it features backing performances from future Steely Dan members Donald Fagen, Walter Becker, and Jeff “Skunk” Baxter. Five of the songs were written by Becker and Fagen. “I was not emotionally prepared when I was told the album was being shelved,” Hoover says. “I was rolling along on the high of highs and suddenly it was over.” In the 1960s, Hoover was an aspiring singer in New Jersey when future Steely Dan producer Gary Katz discovered her at a talent show. She landed a record deal in 1970, and went to work with the…

Paul Krugman The New York Times As prices at the pump plunge, Republicans’ obsession with pinning $5-a-gallon gas on President Biden “is coming back to bite them.” Prices have been dropping for weeks, and are down more than 50 cents a gallon. Should Biden get credit for that? In truth, Republicans’ relentless focus on gas prices was always “profoundly stupid.” Presidents have almost no impact on the cost of gas, which hinges on crude oil prices that are set by global markets in response to a complex interplay of supply and demand. In 2020, gas prices plummeted because the pandemic caused a massive drop in driving and energy use. When demand soared again this year and the war in Ukraine took some Russian oil off the market, prices went…

AUSTRIA Michael Völker Der Standard “We all need vacations,” said Michael Völker, but Austrians have bullied our chancellor out of going on his. Karl Nehammer has not only nixed his planned visits to the arts festivals in Bregenz and Salzburg this summer, he’s even canceled his family’s holiday in Greece. His official explanation is that he wants to focus his attention on the security threats from Russia’s war in Ukraine and the resulting energy shortage. But it’s obvious that the real reason is the furious and unrelenting criticism from the opposition and some in the media that he has been “abroad too much.” He was recently in Israel and in Cyprus on official business, and a few months ago he was in Moscow. While it’s certainly fair to criticize Nehammer…

A recent spate of shark attacks and sightings on U.S. coasts may represent a new normal, as populations of the predators increase. Over the past few weeks there have been five attacks on Long Island, N.Y., and several sightings off the coast of Cape Cod in Massachusetts. In Monterey Bay in California, an attack by a great white left a 62-year-old swimmer with major injuries. Christopher Paparo, manager of the Marine Science Center at Stony Brook University, says that while the Long Island incidents are alarming, the chances of encountering a shark remain “very low.” The bites were likely accidental, with the sand tiger sharks, sandbar sharks, and dusky sharks mistaking humans for fish. “They don’t have the teeth or jaw structure where they could eat a person even…

(Knopf, $28) Video-game fans have long deserved a novel like this, said Tom Bissell in The New York Times. An “absorbing” tale about two brilliant but damaged friends who slowly grow apart, it “accepts as a given” that game designers are creative artists of the highest order, and focuses instead on how their art and personal struggles intertwine. Sadie and Sam, who met at age 11 and have become best friends by the time they launch their business during college, achieve early success with their innovative creations. But happiness proves elusive, and Gabrielle Zevin’s often whimsical story becomes “a smiling, bright-eyed march into pitch-black narrative material.” The “spell of her narrative,” sadly, is broken by “a random explosion of violence,” said Sam Sacks in The Wall Street Journal. Zevin…

Why Didn’t You Tell Me? by Carmen Rita Wong (Crown, $28) Carmen Rita Wong’s riveting memoir “asks what it means to lose one strand of your biography,” said Gabrielle Glaser in The New York Times. Growing up, the future CNBC host had a Dominican-born mother and a Chinese-born father, but she learned in adulthood that her mother had lied about her origins. The issues Wong tackles are weighty, but she “tells her story in vivid conversational prose that will make readers feel they’re listening to a master storyteller on a long car trip.” Growing Up Getty by James Reginato (Gallery, $28) The Getty family couldn’t ask for a more sympathetic portrait, said James Sullivan in the San Francisco Chronicle. In this history of oil magnate J. Paul Getty and…

3 Steve Lacy’s “delightfully quirky” sophomore album is even better than its Grammy-nominated predecessor, said Mark Richardson in The Wall Street Journal. The neo-soul experimentalist from Compton, Calif., first made his mark as the guitarist for the alt-R&B band the Internet, yet “he’s equally proficient in folky indie-rock and warbly lo-fi pop.” Like touchstone influences Stevie Wonder and Prince, the 24-year-old leans into his “genre-fluid” talents as a record producer on Gemini Rights, a mostly breezy breakup album animated by “the try-anything spirit of youth.” Lacy isn’t a first-rate singer, but he sometimes makes a playful conversational style work, said Stephen Kearse in Pitchfork. His lyric writing also “doesn’t always succeed at being intimate.” But as Lacy “sashays between relief, regret, longing, and resentment,” he’s at least expressive. The…

Stories from the missing persons files… D.B. Cooper: Where Are You?! In 1971, a man known as D.B. Cooper hijacked a plane, collected a $200,000 ransom, and parachuted out somewhere between Portland and Reno. He’s never been found. This brilliantly entertaining four-part series lays out the case anew, introduces some promising suspects, and, no surprise, comes up empty. Netflix Girl in the Picture If you haven’t yet watched this viral new true-crime thriller, strap in: The story of Tonya Hughes, aka Sharon Marshall, aka Suzanne Sevakis, who was abducted as a child by a monster named Franklin Floyd, is full of unbelievable twists. Netflix Have You Seen Andy? Melanie Perkins was 9 when she left her friend Andy Puglisi behind at a public pool in 1976 on the last…

Tesuque Tucked into a wooded cul-de-sac, this four-bedroom Pueblo Revival is close to dining, shopping, the Shidoni sculpture garden, and the Santa Fe Opera. The renovated 1993 house has diamond-finish plaster walls; kiva fireplaces; viga and latilla ceilings; built-ins and wall niches; granite, stone, and tile bathrooms; custom kitchen; and doors to the landscaped grounds from all bedrooms. Outside are a waterfall, stream, ponds, patios, and gardens surrounded by aspens, cottonwoods, pines, and fruit trees. $2,776,000. Deborah Bodelson, Santa Fe Properties/Luxury Portfolio International, (505) 660-4442 Canada Ancha From a hilltop in a community near downtown, this four-bedroom house looks out on the Sangre de Cristo mountains. The 1991 Spanish Colonial features hand-troweled adobe stucco exterior walls, carved doors, six fireplaces, Mexican tiles, and viga, latilla, and cove ceilings; a…

In 2021, a record 887 “superyachts”—those longer than 250 feet—were sold worldwide, nearly twice the previous year’s total, with more than 1,000 new super-yachts on order. The number of these megaships that have U.S. owners has grown from fewer than 10 in 1990 to more than 170. The New Yorker Millennials, those born between 1981 and 1996, more than doubled their total net worth in the past two years, reaching $9.38 trillion in the first quarter of 2022, up from $4.55 trillion in 2019. Millennials’ average net worth jumped to $127,793 from $62,758. CNBC.com As of June, there were 1.57 million real estate agents in America, an increase of roughly 150,000 from January 2020. In 2000, the median realtor brought in $76,400, adjusted for inflation, according to the National Association…

Tropical rain forests are the most diverse ecosystems on the planet and absorb and store more carbon dioxide than other forests, but deforestation and climate change are threatening their survival. For more than 30 years, the Rainforest Foundation (rainforestfoundation.org) has partnered with Indigenous peoples to protect crucial rain forest environments and combat the climate crisis. Working in Peru, Brazil, Guyana, and Panama, the charity helps Indigenous tribes secure and control the natural resources necessary for the long-term well-being of their people and land. These efforts include territorial monitoring, land management, land titling—granting legal recognition of land that Indigenous peoples have traditionally lived on—and targeting the main drivers of deforestation, such as mining, agribusiness, land grabbing, oil extraction, and illegal logging. Each charity we feature has earned a four-star overall…

This week’s question: Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez recently got married in a Las Vegas wedding chapel, 18 years after breaking off their hyper-publicized first engagement. If a rom-com were to be based on “Bennifer’s” on-again, off-again romance, what should it be called? Last week’s contest: An unknown bomber has partially destroyed the Georgia Guidestones, an anonymously built monument engraved with Ten Commandments–style advice to humanity. In seven or fewer words, please provide your own inscription-worthy counsel to the world for these turbulent times. THE WINNER: “Hide Not Thy Head Up Thy Backside” Drew Bennett, Rogers, Ark. SECOND PLACE: “At Least Humor Your Father and Mother” Ken Liebman, Williston, Vt. THIRD PLACE: “Don’t Expect Cats or Kids to Listen” Barbara James, Bedford, Mass. For runners-up and complete contest rules,…

Good week for: President Biden, who tested negative after a six-day bout with Covid that included a fever, body aches, and congestion. Biden, 79, was treated with the antiviral drug Paxlovid, and his doctor said the president’s symptoms are “almost completely resolved.” Tigers, after a new study by the International Union for Conservation of Nature put the number of living wild tigers at 5,578—40 percent higher than previously believed. Tigers remain well within the “endangered” range, however. Leaving it at the office, after Republican Rep. Glenn Thompson attended his son’s wedding to another man three days after voting against a bill protecting same-sex marriages. Thompson was “thrilled to attend” the wedding, his staff said. Bad week for: Mime, after police charged Edward William Rodriguez of Florida with robbing his local…

Richard Branson dropped out of school at age 15, barely able to read or write, said Rachel Sylvester in The Times (U.K.). The British billionaire is severely dyslexic, but he wasn’t diagnosed until his 20s, after he’d already opened Virgin Records. His earliest memories of school, he says, are “looking at a blackboard and seeing mumbo jumbo.” During the 1950s, before dyslexia was widely understood, his struggles to learn were considered a form of misbehaving. “I got beaten for not performing,” says Branson, 72. “In those days it was pajama bottoms down and a stick. Those are unpleasant moments for any kid, but for me, it was strangely the best thing that happened to me.” It forced him to forgo mainstream success and sparked his entrepreneurial spirit. Now Branson…

Charlie Sykes MSNBC.com “Maybe this is how MAGA ends,” said Charlie Sykes. “Not with a bang, but with humiliation.” Long after he resigned from his official White House position in 2017, Steve Bannon, “the ex-president’s evil genius” flaunted his “cloak of impunity.” The nihilist often called “Trump’s Rasputin” correctly presumed that Donald Trump would pardon him for bilking MAGA supporters who sent money to Bannon’s phony build-the-wall scheme. He helped design Trump’s multipart coup attempt after the 2020 election, predicting on Jan. 5 “all hell is going to break loose” the next day; then he spent months “giving Congress the middle finger” by refusing to testify before the House Jan. 6 committee. But last week, after offering to testify to head off prosecution, Bannon was convicted of two counts…

“Everything is economics, which is to say that everything is psychology. A dollar has value because people believe that it has value. Similarly, a political system is stable only so long as people believe that it is stable. Instability happens the moment someone comes along and demonstrates that the system can be overturned. Trump demonstrated that the Constitution was run on the honor system and that the strictures of liberalism were brittle. Trump showed people that they could have the politics they wanted. I’m not sure there’s any going back.” Jonathan Last in The Bulwark…

IRELAND Lorraine Courtney Irish Independent Irish schools claim to be “about nurturing the individual, about encouraging creativity,” said Lorraine Courtney. But how can they be, when the students are made to dress in identical, English-style uniforms? My 4-year-old, who is just discovering self-expression, has spent the summer joyously “rotating a Moana costume and a pink tutu.” When she goes off to school in September, though, she will be “forced into navy-and-blue conformity,” and it breaks my heart. Few of us Irish look back fondly on dressing for school, “getting up on cold, dark, wet mornings” only to pull on that “uncomfortable tie and scratchy kilt.” Proponents of uniforms say they level the playing field for poorer children who can’t afford cool clothes. But of course students have plenty of other…

IRAN Shahriar Heydari Shargh Iran’s nuclear talks with the West have stalled. Food prices are sky-high. Yet to hear officials talk, you’d think that the real emergency in the country is women’s clothing, said Shahriar Heydari. Ahead of Hijab and Chastity Day in July, the president, Ebrahim Raisi, ordered a crackdown on “bad hijab,” the crime of displaying hair or wearing makeup under a headscarf. Women were arrested in the street, banned from entering banks, even suspended from government jobs. Where are our leaders’ priorities? The precepts of Islam “pay the most attention to economy, security, and prosperity,” while hijab is merely a “recommendation.” During his election campaign, Raisi promised to focus on economic issues—in fact, to end poverty within two weeks. Yet after a year in office, many Iranians…

Georgia’s Herschel Walker isn’t just “a flawed candidate,” said Amanda Carpenter in The Bulwark. The former NFL star and Donald Trump–endorsed Republican Senate nominee has emitted “a steady stream of lies,” falsely claiming to be a college graduate and former FBI agent; he recently had to admit he has fathered three children out of wedlock whom he rarely sees. Incoherent to a startling degree, Walker has said climate change is happening because “our good air decided to float over to China’s bad air.” But “the really crazy part” is that Walker isn’t necessarily the craziest Republican seeking high office. Accused sexual predator Eric Greitens, who is seeking a Senate nomination in Missouri, aired an ad in which he threatened to shoot “RINO” Republicans. Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance, Ohio’s…

Republicans are “squirming” over an upcoming Senate vote on same-sex marriage, said Jeremy Stahl in Slate. Last week, House Democrats and 47 Republicans passed the Respect for Marriage Act, which would codify the Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision, making marriage equality the law of the land. Democrats say the bill is necessary after the court struck down Roe v. Wade, with conservative Justice Clarence Thomas urging the court to “revisit” same-sex marriage and other cases since the conservative majority has ruled that a right to privacy does not exist in the Constitution. That created an opening “for Democrats to actually put Republicans on the back foot for a change.” Two-thirds of Americans oppose banning gay marriage, but the GOP base is split. That leaves many Republicans awkwardly…

(Bloomsbury, $27) “If you’re looking for a book about what’s wrong and right with American men, you could do a lot worse than Dirtbag, Massachusetts,” said Michael Ian Black in The New York Times. Isaac Fitzgerald’s new memoir in essays is an “endearing and tattered catalog of one man’s transgressions”—including day drinking, drugging, scrapping, and briefly working in porn—while he struggles, as many men do, to make sense of himself. Fitzgerald has been prominent in the online literary world for more than a decade—serving as a co-founder of Rumpus and the founding editor of BuzzFeed’s books vertical. But he reveals himself here as belonging to a long line of “hard-drinking but softhearted” male writers whose misbehavior makes for good reading. This is a writer who’s “clearly as talented as…

Youthful obliviousness has clearly served Rafael Agustin well, said Dave Davies in NPR.org. Born in Ecuador, he arrived in the U.S. at 7 but didn’t realize until he applied for a driver’s permit that he had entered the country illegally. Finally, his parents sat him down for “the Talk,” as he calls it. “It wasn’t about the birds and the bees,” the 41-year-old TV writer says. “It was about Uncle Sam.” Agustin’s parents had been doctors in Ecuador. Here, they worked initially at a car wash and a Kmart, and were forced to move abruptly several times. Agustin, happily soaking up sitcoms most nights, knew nothing. “I was able to grow up an oblivious, stupid American kid,” he says. Agustin’s new memoir, Illegally Yours, turns briefly urgent after his…

3 Jack White “somehow continues to remain as interesting as ever,” said Jonah Krueger in Consequence of Sound. The 47-year-old former White Stripes frontman was at his most cacophonous on April’s Fear of the Dawn, but he sounds “calmer than ever” on his second album of 2022—a collection of acoustic love songs that “reminds us of his range.” At one point he even playfully evokes early-’70s Paul McCartney. Unless you’re a devotee, though, Entering Heaven Alive “fails to leave any sort of impression,” said Grant Sharples in Paste. “The arrangements may be tasteful, but the execution is often mundane.” Still, it is nice to hear White emerge from the fog of digital effects that has smothered his recent work, and the best songs here thread bits of weirdness into…

Sold at nearly every outdoor market in Nice, France, the pan bagnat is “essentially a Niçoise salad in sandwich form,” said Justin Chapple in Food & Wine. Here, the tuna is pureed with vinegar, olive oil, anchovies, and garlic, creating a tangy spread that should soak into the bread before the sandwich is served. 4 large eggs • 14 oz canned tuna in olive oil, drained • ½ cup red wine vinegar • ½ cup extra-virgin olive oil • 4 anchovy fillets, drained • 2 medium garlic cloves, smashed • kosher salt • black pepper • 1 ciabatta loaf, split horizontally • 1 cup multicolored pitted olives, halved if large • 2 beefsteak tomatoes, cored and sliced crosswise • 1 small red onion, halved lengthwise and thinly sliced crosswise…

Allison Schrager Bloomberg Globalization isn’t going away, nor should it, said Allison Schrager. The decades following the Cold War “favored all things global,” and in fact the era “delivered on many of its promises.” Goods and services are much cheaper, and “more than a billion people no longer live in poverty.” In recent years, however, populist politicians have latched onto some of the problems, particularly the manufacturing jobs lost to cheaper countries. The pandemic “added to the disenchantment” when globally integrated supply chains buckled. Now both parties in the U.S. are pushing aggressively to subsidize domestic manufacturing. Many economists have come to believe “globalization has peaked.” That thinking, though, can quickly change if globalization reverses, and we start missing its benefits. We are already “seeing how disruptive and painful the…