Indholdsfortegnelse for August 12, 2022 i The Week Magazine

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…

Good week for: Birds, mice, and dogs, after the Polish Academy of Sciences officially classified cats as an “invasive alien species,” because they kill billions of birds and small mammals a year and have “a negative influence’’ on “native biodiversity.’’ Mick Jagger, who celebrated his 79th birthday on a European tour with the Rolling Stones that marks their 60th anniversary as a band. The great-grandfather of three partied with his ballerina girlfriend Melanie Hamrick, 35, who is the mother of their 5-year-old son. George Jetson, the hapless future-dwelling patriarch of the popular 1960s cartoon series, which indicated he was born on July 31 in the impossibly far-off year of 2022. Bad week for: Sequels, after President Biden’s physician said he is suffering a Covid rebound after taking the antiviral Paxlovid.…

Victoria, British Columbia A QAnon leader who calls herself Queen of Canada and says she is an alien space creature with supernatural powers has begun recruiting Americans to her cause. Philippine immigrant Romana Didulo was investigated last year after urging her followers to defy Covid lockdowns and “shoot to kill” vaccine workers. Didulo preaches that utilities are now free in Canada, and some of her 60,000 followers, including many elderly Canadians on fixed incomes, have had their water and power cut off for nonpayment. Last month, she said she was establishing a “Kingdom of America” and had appointed a deputy there to be U.S. commander. Already, followers have started contacting U.S. officials, warning them Didulo’s reign is about to begin. Don’t use AC Madrid To save energy as temperatures…

Alicia Vikander didn’t enjoy how success upended her life, said Jonathan Dean in The Times (U.K.). The raves she drew for the 2014 sci-fi thriller Ex Machina and the Academy Award she won for the 2015 transgender romance The Danish Girl changed the Swedish actress’ life, but not entirely in a good way. Making those movies kept her away from home, family, and friends for several months. “It was very lonely,” the 33-year-old says. Her Oscar led to roles in big-budget films like Jason Bourne and Tomb Raider, but Vikander felt even more lost. “When, in other people’s eyes, I was at my height of fame, I was the most sad. I kept telling myself, ‘Take it in. It is incredible.’ But I didn’t know what to do. There…

Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern Slate Justice Samuel Alito has made it clear that he views an “increasingly secular society” as a threat the Supreme Court must fight, said Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern. In a recent speech on religious freedom at an event sponsored by Notre Dame Law School’s Religious Liberty Initiative—which filed briefs arguing for overturning Roe—Alito quoted the Gospels while emphasizing the central role of religion in democratic governance. With characteristic sarcasm, he welcomed the disapproval of foreign critics of his abortion ruling, including Prince Harry, Boris Johnson, and the leaders of France and Canada, as proof his opinion was correct. In “economically advanced countries,” Alito warned, religious liberty is under threat from an “increasingly secular society” and its “new moral code.” That code includes women’s…

“Russia’s president would have the world believe that his country is guided by unifying ideas of cultural pride and conservative values, exceptionalism and splendid isolation. But in reality, [Vladimir] Putin’s Russia has no coherent ideology; it’s just a mess of contradictions: It is Soviet nostalgia and a cultural arrogance that glorifies the Russian empire. Putin’s success as president of Russia has rested for some time on his ability to mete out daily humiliations to Russians and then act as if he feels their rage as they do, as if he alone knows where to direct it—toward the West, toward Ukraine, anywhere except toward the Kremlin.” Peter Pomerantsev in The New York Times…

ROMANIA Magda Gradinaru Spotmedia The Romanian government wants to destroy the country’s academic reputation, said Magda Gradinaru. Its bill before parliament would dissolve our national academic accreditation council and grant amnesty to plagiarists after three years. Nobody asked for such a law: It is simply a naked attempt to protect Prime Minister Nicolae Ciuca, who was accused earlier this year of copying parts of his doctoral thesis in military science. Ciuca is willing to smear all Romanian intellectuals just to save his own skin. How will the rest of the Western academic world see us now? A “general amnesty” on plagiarism will cast “reasonable doubt, even if unfair, on every academic thesis written in Romania.” It’s not our first time catching a leader in an academic lie: Former Prime Minister…

SOUTH AFRICA Masixole Booi The Daily Maverick A recent spate of tavern killings focused the nation’s attention on the violence in the country’s townships, said Masixole Booi. In June, 21 Black youth died under mysterious circumstances at a tavern in the coastal city of East London. Two weeks later, 15 Black people were gunned down in a tavern in Soweto; that same weekend, six died in two other tavern shootings. Each slaying surely has different motives, but the underlying thread is that “townships are violent by design.” During apartheid, whites took refuge in gated communities, while most Black and mixed-race communities were “pushed into unsafe outskirts” and “informal settlements.” Armed gangs now control these townships. Residents face the constant threat of rape and robbery, and some have to pay protection…

The choice for red-state legislators now passing extremist abortion laws is between “cruel and crueler,” said Ruth Marcus in The Washington Post. With Roe v. Wade overturned, Republican lawmakers are now making “real-world, and politically dicey choices” about how far to go with restrictions. In Indiana’s state legislature, anti-abortion activists are calling the rape and incest exception a “loophole,” and are heartlessly insisting that to qualify, girls and women have to file police reports “under the penalties of perjury.” Other states’ laws have defined exceptions for the health and the life of the mother in “cramped and ambiguous” language, said Mark Joseph Stern in Slate. As a result, doctors and hospitals have “legitimate concerns that they will face civil and criminal penalties” if overzealous prosecutors disagree that the patient…

Every few election cycles, third parties spring up “like clockwork,” said J.D. Tuccille in Reason. The latest is the Forward Party, launched last week by former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, former Gov. Christine Todd Whitman (R-N.J.), and former congressman David Jolly (R-Fla.). Yang says Forward will represent “the moderate, common-sense majority” who crave solutions to problems instead of mindless partisanship. An appetite for an alternative does seem to exist, with a 2021 poll finding that 62 percent of Americans think the country needs a third party. But “when you dig deeper,” there actually isn’t a lot of support for “meh-style compromises” on such hot-button issues as abortion, gun safety, climate change, and voting rights. These are highly polarizing issues, with little middle ground. Forward’s earnest, wonky organizers, however,…

If you’ve ever found yourself saying “coochee coochee coo” to a baby, you’re not alone. A new study shows that using a singsong tone with infants appears to be a behavior universal to humans all around the world, reports The New York Times. Researchers analyzed more than 1,600 voice recordings from 410 parents on six continents, in 18 languages. The subjects were from all over: from hunter-gatherers in Tanzania to metropolitan moms in Beijing. In every one of those cultures, the parents spoke to their infants much differently from the way they talked to other adults. “We tend to speak in this higher pitch, high variability,” says lead author Courtney Hilton, from Yale, “like, ‘Ohh, heeelloo, you’re a baaybee!’” The researchers also found that these differences are perceptible to…

(Holt, $30) When 17-year-old Lanah Sawyer took her rapist to court in 1793, it “caused worlds to collide,” said Fergus Bordewich in The Wall Street Journal. The accused, Harry Bedlow, was a New York City wealthy rake. Sawyer was a seamstress whose stepfather, a harbor pilot, “represented the rising working and middle classes,” and it was a shock that the family fought back. But Bedlow had persuaded Lanah to join him for a stroll in Lower Manhattan and then dragged her screaming into a brothel and tore off her dress. The resulting trial “became a national sensation,” its outcome triggering rioting. Historian John Wood Sweet has now turned the tale into “a masterpiece of splendidly readable social history” that “opens a window on the tumultuous world of the early…

Safia Elhillo is talking back, and she doesn’t care who’s listening, said Jeevika Verma in NPR.org. The award-winning Sudanese-American poet started working on her new collection shortly after winning acclaim for her first, 2017’s The January Children. With the notoriety had come a wave of abusive online messages from men she didn’t know—many from her own Sudanese, Muslim, Arabic-speaking community. “I wasn’t saying much,” she says. “I was just existing on the internet as one does. And I would just receive the most disgusting DMs, like day-in and day-out.” Elhillo, now 31, realized that she had to begin writing poems that called out such misogyny, because playing the “purity game” had done her no good. Until then, she says, she believed “that if I was the correct kind of…

3 Maggie Rogers’ second album delivers her “soulful pop” laced with a new “feeling of hopeful exuberance,” said Matt Collar in AllMusic. The 28-year-old singer-songwriter blew up in 2016 thanks to her viral folktronica single “Alaska,” but after her 2019 debut LP earned her a Best New Artist Grammy nomination, she took a break from recording to attend Harvard Divinity School. Now she’s back with “a big, hooky pop album” whose cathartic mix of “dance music, edgy alt-rock, and singer-songwriter lyricism” suggests spiritual transcendence by way of “thick, fuzz-tone basslines and crisp, sparkling guitar riffs.” Rogers “now seems leagues more comfortable in her own skin,” said Bobby Olivier in Spin, allowing herself playfulness and exploration in her songwriting. The seventh track, “Shatter,” for example, is “a rollicking rock banger…

Edge of Reality Audible Edge of Reality might make you think twice about your reality-TV habit, said Eloise Hendy in Dazed. “I usually hate the term ‘guilty pleasure’ for its snobby puritanism,” but listening to this podcast made watching Love Island feel “grubby” and toxic. In the eight-episode series, investigative journalist Jacques Peretti examines how cheap-to-produce reality shows like Survivor expanded “the parameters of culture and the meaning of celebrity.” But the podcast’s real subject is the genre’s collateral damage. By examining more than 40 suicides directly linked to the deceased’s experience with a reality program, the podcast serves as “an admission of guilt and an urgent, affecting request for change.” Listening to this podcast, “it’s hard to not to feel like a schoolchild learning about Victorian bear-baiting for…

“Corn whiskey is hardly new,” said Fred Siggins in Punch. But as craft distillers emphasize fine raw ingredients, whiskeys made from a mash bill that’s at least 80 percent corn are emerging around the world. Below are three to try. Balcones Baby Blue ($48). Balcones threw a spotlight on heirloom grains with the 2008 release of this whiskey made from Texas blue corn. The whiskey has “a rich buttery texture” with flavors of honey and banana bread. New Southern Revival Straight Bourbon Whiskey ($80). South Carolina’s High Wire Distilling Co. uses only Jimmy Red heirloom corn in this bourbon, which has “a nutty, dark chocolate character” and “a sweet tea finish.” Abasolo El Whisky de Mexico ($40). The unique character of nixtamalized Cacahuazintle corn “punches through” in this whiskey,…

The U.S. stock market in July delivered its best monthly performance since November 2020. The S&P 500 rose 9.1 percent in the month, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq recorded a 12.3 percent gain, its best showing since April 2020. In the first six months of the year, the S&P fell 21 percent and the Nasdaq 29. Financial Times Nearly $3.6 billion has been spent on political and issue ads so far this year, putting the 2022 elections on pace to obliterate 2018’s record as the largest midterm election year by ad spending. Axios The average cost for a family of four to attend a Major League Baseball game (including 4 tickets, 4 hot dogs, 2 beers, 2 sodas, and parking) is $204.76. Adjusting for inflation, that’s roughly double what the same…

Still a good time to switch jobs More Americans are switching jobs and reaping the benefits, said Julia Carpenter in The Wall Street Journal. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, wages have gone up about 4.7 percent for those who have stayed in their job for the past three months. By contrast, “those who switched jobs received a raise of 6.4 percent,” the largest gap in two decades. Despite recession fears, the labor market remains strong and those workers who “aren’t getting a large enough pay increase at their current job to keep up with inflation” are looking for better pay elsewhere. Hiring managers say there is “tacit acknowledgment” that new hires will require big raises. Companies are trying to offer alternative incentives, “but the question of…

Editorial The Washington Post The airline industry needs to learn from this summer’s travel meltdown, said The Washington Post. According to the travel data company FlightAware, 22 percent of flights by U.S. carriers in the past two months—more than 260,000 flights in total—have been delayed. More than 30,000 flights were canceled just between Memorial Day weekend and mid-July. Inclement weather isn’t that persistent. Airlines themselves are the biggest culprit here. They got $54 billion in pandemic aid to keep workers employed. Still, “overestimating how long it would take for travel to scale back up” after pandemic fears receded, “they offered older employees retirement packages and gave many workers temporary leaves of absence.” Now they are struggling to bring them back. It’s a good time to reevaluate how to retain…

Just a year after taking the role of Lt. Uhura, Nichelle Nichols decided she’d had enough of Star Trek. While she liked playing the Enterprise communications officer, one of the first Black female television characters in a leading role, she had viewed the part as a stepping-stone to other work—preferably on Broadway. And star William Shatner’s ego was already grating on her. But at an NAACP fundraiser, the organizer introduced her to someone he called “your biggest fan.” A smiling Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of how much he and his family admired her work on the show. When she said she was leaving the cast, his face fell. “You can’t do that,” she recalled him saying. “Don’t you understand, for the first time we’re seen as we…

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…

Alabama prison officials told a reporter she couldn’t witness an execution because her skirt was too short. Ivana Hrynkiw said she had to borrow fisherman’s waders to cover her legs and sneakers to replace her open-toed shoes to do her job. Her editor filed a complaint, saying the officials’ demands were “sexist and an egregious breach of professional conduct.” Amid rising threats of violence, members of Congress are being given $10,000 each to upgrade their home security. The plan comes after GOP Rep. Lee Zeldin was attacked onstage at a campaign stop, and a man making death threats was arrested at the home of Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal. Johns Hopkins political science professor Liliana Mason said it’s clear that “the norms around anti-violence are eroding.” In other news GOP drops…

Dr. Caitlin Bernard has found herself at the center of the nation’s new abortion wars, said Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Ava Sasani in The New York Times. The obstetrician-gynecologist recently performed an abortion on a 10-year-old rape victim from Ohio, after the girl had to travel to Indianapolis because abortion is banned in Ohio after six weeks, even in cases of rape or incest. Bernard immediately started receiving harassment and threats from abortion opponents, and Indiana’s attorney general said he would investigate her, accusing Bernard of using the girl’s “personal trauma” to “push her ideological stance.” There’s no doubt Bernard supports abortion rights: She’s protested outside the statehouse and has a tattoo that says “Trust women” next to a wire coat hanger. “The politicization of me, and of the…

Actor Will Smith publicly apologized last week to comedian Chris Rock for slapping him in the face at the 2022 Oscars ceremony, offering a personal meeting “whenever you’re ready to talk.” In a video, Smith said he acted impulsively when Rock told a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith’s short hair—she suffers from alopecia—and that “I wasn’t thinking about how many people got hurt.” He said that he has spent three months struggling to come to terms with how his “unacceptable” behavior let his family, friends, and fans down. “Disappointing people is my central trauma,” Smith said. Rock, who has made sarcastic references to the slap in his comedy routines, did not respond. Smith said that he’s been told by people close to Rock that “he’s not ready to talk,…

David French The Dispatch “What if Mike Pence had said yes?” asked David French. What if he’d caved in to ex-President Trump’s pressure and declared him the winner of the 2020 election? “America probably would have survived that moment, but the key word there is probably.” Now we have proposed legislation that would address the key reason that Trump and his corrupt “cadre of loyalists” were able to put Pence in that position: the Electoral Count Act of 1887. The convoluted wording of the act “is worse than a mess.” It gives Congress the right to object to electoral votes “on flimsy or nonexistent pretexts” and “overturn a presidential election upon a simple majority vote.” It also vaguely defines the vice president’s role in counting the votes. To rectify these…

An artist is asking for $6,300 for an artwork in a New Zealand gallery consisting of a slice of pickle from a McDonald’s hamburger flung onto the ceiling. Matthew Griffin’s work Pickle, at the Michael Lett Gallery in Auckland, is a deliberately “provocative gesture,” said his representative, Ryan Moore of Fine Arts in Sydney. The piece is “a sculptural gesture,” Moore said, which examines “the way value and meaning is generated between people.” Belgian scientists are investigating a report that different styles of music affect the behavior of pigs. The study was inspired by farmer Piet Paesmans, who noted that his pigs grew animated when his son started singing in the barn during an insemination session. He began playing them a curated soundtrack, with energetic music when he wants them…

CHINA Danai Howard South China Morning Post In June, a group of men brutally attacked a woman in a restaurant in the northern Chinese city of Tangshan, said Danai Howard. When she resisted their drunken advances, they grabbed her by her hair, kicked her, and broke bottles over her head. Women who intervened were also beaten, while male bystanders stood around and did nothing. CCTV footage of the event went viral, and many hoped it would mark a watershed in attitudes about violence against women. It didn’t. In response to the outcry over the Tangshan incident, the Chinese Supreme Court ordered prosecutors and judges to crack down on organized crime and guns—but it barely mentioned violence against women. This is a trend: In high-profile cases where women are victimized, such…

Fox News has gone more than 100 days without featuring an interview with Donald Trump, a once-ubiquitous presence on the conservative network. Fox has failed to show nearly all of his rallies this year, and FoxNews.com recently ran a segment of interviews with Trump voters saying he was “too polarizing” to run again.The New York Times Five years after the nation’s first openly transgender state legislator was elected, in Virginia, a record 55 trans candidates are running for public office this year. There are also 20 gender non-conforming candidates running and 18 non-binary candidates.The Washington Post An unnamed buyer paid $6.1 million for a 22-foot-long Gorgosaurus skeleton–one of only 20 known to exist—at a Sotheby’s auction last week. The 77 million–year-old specimen was unearthed in Montana in 2018 and was…

“I am always realizing how very little I know. Never call yourself an expert and never claim to write the complete book of anything.” Cookbook author Diana Kennedy, quoted in the Los Angeles Times “There are no dangerous thoughts for the simple reason that thinking itself is such a dangerous enterprise.”Hannah Arendt, quoted in The Guardian “Aren’t all orchestras just giant cover bands?”Comedian Micky Overman, quoted in The Telegraph (U.K.) “When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you; but when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it’s your laugh.”Nora Ephron, quoted in The New Statesman “A work of art is never finished. It is only abandoned.”Leonardo da Vinci, quoted in History of Yesterday “Freedom is a fragile thing, and it’s never more than one…

Two flights up, one flight… One reason that air taxis have been slow to get off the ground? They keep crashing, said Alan Levin in Bloomberg. New electric-powered, vertical-takeoff vehicles, or eVTOLs, from companies like Boeing, Joby, and Lilium, promise “to whisk people and cargo across traffic-choked cities.” But their safety record is checkered with accidents, meaning “the road to government approval and public acceptance won’t be easy.” As recently as February, “a component on Joby’s six-propeller craft broke in midair.” In 2019, a prototype built by a Boeing subsidiary suffered a software malfunction that turned off its engines. In addition, eVTOLs are powered by lithium-ion batteries, which have an unfortunate tendency to burst into flames. Advocates say things will be fine in the end, and “accidents are a…

If you don’t want to age prematurely, stick to five drinks a week or fewer. That’s the conclusion of a large new study by scientists at the University of Oxford, reports The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). They found that more than 170 ml of pure alcohol—roughly five large glasses of wine or pints of beer—in a single week takes a toll on telomeres, the caps on the end of our chromosomes. Telomeres naturally shorten as people age, a process that has been linked to Alzheimer’s and cardiovascular disease. The researchers examined genetic data from almost 500,000 people in the U.K. They searched for telltale markers that showed how much alcohol each person drank, then measured their telomere length from a DNA swab. Interestingly, those who drank fewer than 170 ml…

Kevin Nguyen is the features editor at The Verge and the author of New Waves, a novel, now out in paperback, about friendship, grief, and the internet. Below, he recommends six other books that are both funny and ambitious. The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories by Jamil Jan Kochai (2022). I remember reading “Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain” and wondering how a story about a kid losing his mind playing a video game made it into The New Yorker. Three years later, the rest of Kochai’s inventive collection, which excavates the emotional side effects of the war in Afghanistan, has the same stunning, darkly comedic effect. Memorial by Bryan Washington (2020). This slacker novel splits its time—and its central characters, Benson and Mike—between Houston…

National Gallery, Washington, D.C., through Oct. 31 “Of the exhibitions generating buzz this summer, The Double is particularly special,” said Maya Garabedian in MutualArt. Doubles forms—split images, reflections, diptychs, dual portraits, and other ways of dividing the image and the viewer’s attention emerged in the 20th century as “a prevalent feature of modern and contemporary art.” Surprisingly, “no such exhibition has come before this, which inevitably gives the show a lot to unpack.” The National Gallery’s groundbreaking exhibition is up to the challenge. Consisting of more than 120 works showcasing the variety of ways artists have used doubling in their work since 1900, this showstopper invites patrons to “consider how and why artists have made use of doubled formats to explore and depict perceptual, conceptual, and psychological themes.” “The…

4 Amanda Shires is something of “a modern-day country outlaw,” said Lindsay Zoladz in The New York Times. The “wildly underrated” singer, songwriter, and fiddle player doesn’t shy from speaking her mind about women’s rights—even if doing so means that country radio denies her airtime. “If there’s any justice in the world, or maybe just in Nashville,” the veteran alt-country musician’s “electrifying” seventh solo album will make her a household name. A “misty melancholy” permeates the record, especially in songs about marital strife. That “raw, unfiltered truth” is “goosebump-inducing” on “Fault Lines,” the album’s centerpiece ballad, said Andrew Sacher in Brooklyn Vegan. Shires’ husband, Jason Isbell, plays guitar throughout, while indie-pop producer Lawrence Rothman concocts “a casually genre-defying mix of earthy folk, horn-fueled soul, jazzy balladry, swaggering rock, and…

For climate dispatches… The Last Tourist Global tourism is beyond broken, as this alarming documentary shows. Visiting dozens of spectacular destinations, the film exposes the economic and environmental damage wrought by cruise lines, luxury resorts, and voluntourism, then offers a few ideas about how travel can change. Hulu The Human Element Photographer James Balog once aspired to focus on nature’s wonders. He pivoted, though, when he realized that humanity can’t be written out of any portrait of life on our planet. This arresting documentary follows Balog as he catalogs the changes we’ve wrought and how they impact our lives. Tubi 2040 Worried about the future awaiting his 4-year-old, filmmaker Damon Gameau used this 2019 documentary to travel the world talking to people who are pioneering environmental solutions capable of…

AllTrails charts more than 300,000 trails around the world for hiking, running, or mountain biking. More than 35 million people use the app to log their travels, share tips, and recommend routes. The $30-a-year pro version lets you view maps offline. FarOut features an array of detailed guidebooks for thru-hikers and other long-distance backpackers. Guides are purchased individually and downloaded for offline use. Some are free; others cost up to $80. Cairn focuses on hiker safety by making it easy to share plans and location data with your emergency contacts. The app can send you alerts about trail hazards, and it provides cellular service maps that help when you need to make a call. PeakVisor uses augmented reality to help users visualize their adventures. “Just point your camera at surrounding…

Capping a contentious takeover battle, JetBlue reached a deal to buy Spirit Airlines after convincing shareholders to reject a rival offer from Frontier, said Niraj Chokshi in The New York Times. JetBlue said last week it will pay $33.50 per share in cash, “significantly more than Spirit’s current price.” Spirit’s board had pushed for a merger with Frontier, consolidating two low-budget carriers, but the offer “fell short of JetBlue’s by about $1 billion.” A merger would create the nation’s fifth-largest airline, although regulators, “who have taken an aggressive stand against corporate consolidation,” could still block the deal. The long game: Uber turns the corner on cash flow After more than a decade in operation, Uber is finally taking in more money from customers than it spends to drive them around,…

Formerly known as The Actors Fund, the Entertainment Community Fund (entertainmentcommunity.org) has been helping to meet the needs of the country’s performing artists—on stage and screen, as well as behind the scenes—since 1882. The charity offers services including emergency financial assistance, affordable housing, health care and insurance counseling, secondary career development, and senior care to people working in theater, film, television, radio, music, dance, opera, and circus. The Entertainment Community Fund aims to provide a safety net for performing arts and entertainment professionals. In the first year of the pandemic, the fund distributed more than $19 million in direct cash assistance to over 15,000 individuals, with an additional 25,000 artists receiving other forms of assistance. Each charity we feature has earned a four-star overall rating from Charity Navigator, which…

Michael Hiltzik Los Angeles Times Ransomware attacks on small businesses don’t attract headlines. But for victims, they are life-changing events, said Michael Hiltzik. Fran Finnegan, 71, never imagined he’d be a target of digital extortion. For the past 25 years, he’s been the sole proprietor of a utilitarian website, SEC Info, that provides subscribers with all the financial documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission in a searchable and well-organized form. But starting last June, “hackers pinged his system 2.5 million times with stolen Yahoo passwords, finally hitting on the right one.” Once inside, the attacker encrypted all his files—more than 15 million SEC filings dating back to 1993. Though his data was stored on a cloud server, that was no help against hackers using his password. They…

Bill Russell was basketball’s first Black superstar—and the most prolific winner in the game’s history. Over a 15-year period beginning in 1955, the goateed, 6-foot-9-inch center won two NCAA championships and an Olympic gold medal, then led the Boston Celtics to an astounding 11 NBA championships in 13 years—the last two while serving as both a player and the league’s first Black coach. In the process, the five-time MVP transformed the game, leveraging his preternatural shot-blocking and rebounding ability to “control a game defensively” in a manner until then “completely foreign to the NBA,” said former Celtics teammate Tommy Heinsohn. A target of virulent racism in Boston, Russell distinguished himself off the court with his outspoken support for civil rights. In the late 1950s, he accused the NBA of…

Kellyanne Conway hated being in the middle of a Washington soap opera, said Josh Glancy in The Times (U.K.). A loyal aide to former President Trump, Conway grew furious as her husband, the conservative lawyer George Conway, repeatedly mocked the Trump administration on Twitter, on TV, and in newspaper columns. Trump returned fire, tweeting that George was a “stone cold LOSER” and “a husband from hell.” Kellyanne, 55, hated the drama. “If this was all done for show, please remove me from the starring role, cancel the rest of the season, and refund the audience’s money. Put your popcorn down. It’s not a show, it’s my life.” When Trump was elected, George was considered a possible pick for solicitor general, but he quickly decided that Trump was a lawless…

Editorial The Washington Post The “Fauci ouchie” was a miracle that saved “millions of lives,” said The Washington Post. But now we need another urgent effort to produce new vaccines to fight Covid. The existing shots continue to do a good job of preventing serious illness and death. But the dominant Omicron variant, BA.5, now infecting millions of Americans every week is essentially a different virus from the one that originally emerged from China, with so many mutations that it can elude antibodies from both vaccines and prior infection. A booster tailored to BA.5 may be available by September, but rejiggering vaccines to “chase variants” is not sustainable. At a White House summit on Covid last week, Anthony Fauci, who heads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said…

FINLAND Esa Mäkinen Helsingin Sanomat Since Finland lifted Covid travel restrictions last month, our country has been awash in Russian tourists, said Esa Mäkinen, and many Finns don’t want them here. Finland is the most “convenient gateway to Europe for Russians,” because it’s easy to get a Schengen visa there that allows them to go on to nearly any EU country. But it feels wrong to look up from a paper in which we read about dead Ukrainian children and see a happy group of vacationing Russians at the next café table. The “contrast between the sunny tourist circuit and the darkness of Ukraine” is too much to bear. Finland’s four largest parliamentary groups now say they support keeping Russian tourists out entirely, to punish Russia for its invasion. But…

The potency of marijuana has been rising since the 1970s, with levels of THC—the chemical responsible for the drug’s psychoactive effects—increasing by an average of 0.29 percent a year. Now a new study suggests that the THC boost has made cannabis more addictive and more dangerous, reports NBCNews.com. Researchers examined data from 20 studies involving a combined total of nearly 120,000 marijuana users. They found that those who had been using products with higher levels of THC were much more likely to have experienced episodes of psychosis, and to have become addicted, than those using the lower potency stuff. One study showed a nearly sevenfold increase in risk of psychosis, another a similarly large increase in risk of addiction. “We know from animal studies that higher doses of THC…

(Del Rey, $28) Silvia Moreno-Garcia will never be able to actually write a 19th-century novel, but she’s created “a flawless replica,” said Colleen Abel in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. In this “ingenious” reworking of H.G. Wells’ 1896 sci-fi classic, The Island of Doctor Moreau, Moreno-Garcia keeps the period setting but relocates the action to the war-torn Yucatán Peninsula and recenters the story on Moreau’s teenage daughter, Carlota. As in Wells’ story, the mad scientist is using vivisection to create human-animal hybrids, but by bringing out the racial and colonial implications of Moreau’s research, Moreno-Garcia “enlarges Wells’ moral message.” Moreno-Garcia’s imagination is “a thing of wonder,” said Danielle Trussoni in The New York Times. Imagining Carlota as one of Moreau’s experiments, a child kept alive by injections drawn from jaguars,…

A Factotum in the Book Trade by Marius Kociejowski (Biblioasis, $19) “Used book dealers, in my experience, tend to be darkly witty,” said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. Antiquarian bookseller Marius Kociejowski is no exception. In this “dyspeptic” memoir, he describes his career in rare books, recalling famous customers while skewering obnoxious ones. “Like the kinds of bookstores Kociejowski admires, his book has a lot of nooks and crannies,” and it’s also “an account of a life well, happily, and grouchily lived.” How to Read Now by Elaine Castillo (Viking, $27) “How to Read Now is not for everybody, but if it is for you, it is clarifying and bracing,” said Zan Romanoff in the Los Angeles Times. In eight essays that “burn bright and hot from…

3 All those rumors about Beyoncé “making a disco, dancehall, and/or house album were true,” said Allegra Frank in The Daily Beast. The 28-time Grammy winner spent her pandemic downtime delving into the history of club music. Her “hyper-detailed” seventh LP—the first of a planned trilogy—is “an ode to the Ballroom scene of the 1980s” that pays homage to various styles of dance music rooted in queer Black subcultures. Beyoncé mostly shirks the sort of personal narratives that grounded her 2016 masterpiece Lemonade, but her more celebratory new record will no doubt provide “the soundtrack to every party for the rest of 2022.” Yet this is not simply mindless background music, said Jumi Akinfenwa in Stereogum. It’s “Beyoncé at her most playful,” giving “a call to arms for joy…

Igloo KoolTunes Party like it’s 1989 with Igloo’s classic boombox cooler, which returned this year with Bluetooth connectivity. The 5-watt, water-resistant speakers are “surprisingly loud,” and they “deliver good audio quality with punchy bass.” $150, igloocoolers.com Source: GearHungry Cressi Palau SAF Set Skip the resort rentals with a snorkel set that’s “solid, simple, and robust.” The short, adjustable fins are “easy to travel with,” and the “highly functional” snorkel does a great job of keeping seawater out of your mouth. $85, scuba.com Source: Wirecutter Discraft UltraStar Sportsdisc Move over, Frisbee. The official flying disc of USA Ultimate is “loved by both professionals and beginners alike.” At 175 grams, it’s lightweight, yet hefty enough to fly straight, and it’s available in 13 colors. $13, discraft.com Source: Sports Illustrated Premier Kites…

This week’s question: An Indiana-based personal trainer runs on all fours like a dog for at least 30 minutes a day, a routine he says has left him “crazy ripped.” If he wanted to popularize this workout routine among other humans, what should he call it? Last week’s contest: Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez recently got married in a Las Vegas wedding chapel, 18 years after breaking 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? THE WINNER: “The Wedding Re-Planner” Syl Zucker, Ashland, Ore. SECOND PLACE: “Return Engagement” Pierre Nizet, Santa Barbara, Calif. THIRD PLACE: “Bennagain” LeRoy Gaintner, Paradise Valley, Ariz. For runners-up and complete contest rules, please go to theweek.com/contest. How to enter: Submissions should be…