The Week Magazine August 12, 2022

He would not “shut up and dribble.” Bill Russell was the most dominant basketball player of his era, leading the Boston Celtics to 11 NBA championships. But his experience as a Black athlete in the 1950s and ’60s was defined by Jim Crow segregation and vicious racial animosity, which he refused to swallow silently. In Boston, his own team’s fans shouted “Go back to Africa” and called him a “baboon” and the N-word. When he and his family moved to a Boston suburb, bigots broke into his home, painted racial slurs on the walls, and defecated in his bed. On the road, he was denied service in hotels and restaurants. A man who radiated fierce dignity, Russell said he used this hatred “as energy to fuel me, to work…

What happened Democrats pushed to bring their $433 billion climate, taxation, and health-care bill to the Senate floor this week, after a stunning turnaround by centrist Sen. Joe Manchin (D-​W.Va.) brought the seemingly dead package back to life. The bill, a key piece of President Biden’s domestic agenda and the most ambitious federal climate legislation ever, appeared to hit a dead end just two weeks ago after Manchin, a crucial vote in the evenly divided Senate, said he wouldn’t support it for fear it would worsen inflation. But he and Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer quietly resumed talks, and after inflation-hawk economist Larry Summers and corporate leaders told Manchin they supported a revised bill, Democrats announced agreement on a package, now dubbed the Inflation Reduction Act. The bill contains…

A restaurant patron in southwest China recently spotted what looked like giant footprints the establishment’s stone courtyard. Indeed, paleontologists confirmed they were footprints, and they belonged to a pair of sauropods—herbivorous dinosaurs with long necks and tails that roamed Earth 100 million years ago. Paleontologist Scott Persons regards dinosaur footprints as underappreciated discoveries. “That is the motion of a living animal,” Persons said. “And tracks are some of the only evidence that we have of dinosaurs’ social behavior.” In June, four women boarded a rowboat in San Francisco and set off into the deep waters of the Pacific. Thirty-four days later—through storms, sickness, and exhaustion—they arrived in Honolulu, breaking a new world record for the fastest women’s crossing of the 2,400-nautical-mile stretch from California to Hawaii. Rowing an average of…

What happened In a stunning upset, Kansas voters this week overwhelmingly chose in a referendum to continue the state’s guarantee of a right to abortion. The referendum—the first popular vote on abortion since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade—would have changed the state constitution to eliminate abortion rights, enabling state legislators to restrict or ban it. The vote in the conservative state, which last supported a Democrat for president in 1964, was expected to be close. But newly mobilized suburban moderates pushed turnout to more than twice the level of the 2018 midterm primaries, and the referendum was voted down by 59 to 41 percent. Kansas permits abortion for up to 22 weeks of pregnancy, and its clinics could soon attract patients from neighboring Missouri and Oklahoma, which…

What happened After years of searching, the U.S. killed al Qaida’s leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, this week in a Kabul drone strike. Considered more responsible for 9/11 than anyone besides Osama bin Laden, Zawahiri was on the balcony of a safe house in downtown Kabul when he was reportedly hit by two Hellfire R9X missiles, weapons designed to limit collateral damage by deploying six blades just before impact, rather than causing an explosion. Less than a year after the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, the strike gives a boost to President Biden, who views it as a success for his over-the-horizon strategy of protecting American interests without an on-the-ground military presence. Zawahiri’s successor may be his lieutenant, jihadist Saif al-Adel, a survivor of al Qaida’s founding generation who is believed to…

“The Jan. 6 committee has done its job,” said Noah Bookbinder in Salon, and now it’s “time for Attorney General Merrick Garland to do his.” Through videos, texts, and witness testimony from inside Trump’s White House, the committee laid out an “overwhelming” case for multiple criminal charges against Donald Trump. We now know for certain that Trump was repeatedly told by advisers, including then–Attorney General Bill Barr, that there was no election fraud, and that advisers who concocted a phony elector scheme knew it was illegal and sought a pardon. We know that Trump knew the rioters were armed, and further incited the mob even when Vice President Mike Pence’s life was in real danger. Now there are reports that the famously cautious Garland and his federal prosecutors are…