Indholdsfortegnelse for September 23, 2022 i The Week Magazine

The accolades pouring in this week for Queen Elizabeth II rightfully praised her deep sense of duty. They also mentioned her love of horses and corgis–possibly because, for Americans at least, that’s the main thing we knew about her. The late queen was a model of reticence, managing to be a very public figure for seven decades without commenting on issues of the day–except to say, sometimes quite movingly, that Britain would get through it all. Her life was an immense act of self-discipline (see Obituaries, p.39). It must have helped that she took on her role at a time when there was still considerable deference toward the ruling family, and reporters did not shove microphones in royal faces. Unlike his mother, though, King Charles III can’t simply disappear into…

The Alabama Department of Corrections has clarified its dress code for civilians witnessing executions. In July, the department made national headlines when it turned away a reporter because her skirt was too short. With Alan Eugene Miller scheduled to die this month, officials last week reminded journalists that skirts must extend below the knee, the “waist and chest area” must be covered, and witnesses must wear “a complete set of undergarments.” Warner Bros. has tweaked its popular MultiVersus video game so that Velma from Scooby Doo no longer summons the police for help. The change comes after complaints that the game had made Velma “a Karen,” by having a white woman call the cops on nonwhite characters, including Space Jam’s LeBron James. In other news Stock-trading conflicts rampant in Congress…

Kenton Cool is growing uneasy about guiding rich people up the world’s tallest mountains, said Simon Usborne in the Financial Times (U.K.). The British mountaineer has reached the summit of Mount Everest 16 times—a record for a non-Sherpa—and for about $300,000 he provides one-on-one guide services up Everest. “The day that I don’t go there,” says Cool, 49, “I will miss it like I probably would one of my own children.” But Himalayan mountaintops have become ever more crowded, with more peaks seeing the long queues of climbers that are now routine on Everest; since the beginning of 2021, nine climbers have died trying to scale the savage K2. “It’s my business to take people to these summits,” Cool says, “yet there is a conflict within me that’s really…

Britney Spears discharged a furious public blast last week at her teenage sons, whom she reportedly hasn’t seen in about six months. “I don’t understand how it’s so easy for them to just cut me off,” Spears, 40, said on Instagram. The boys—Sean, 16, and Jayden, 15—have been living with their father, Spears’ ex-husband Kevin Federline. In a recent interview, Jayden had defended his grandfather Jamie—who oversaw Spears’ conservatorship for 13 years—and said that he and his brother are upset about Spears attacking their family members on social media and posting seminude photographs. If that’s their stance, Spears said in response, “I have failed as a mother.” Although she said it feels like “a huge part of me has died” during the estrangement from her boys, she added, “I’m…

Helen Young The Conversation The uproar over multiracial casting in Middle Earth is more than simply the complaints of nerdy purists, said Helen Young. The Rings of Power, an Amazon series that premiered earlier this month, has drawn fire—including an online trolling campaign and negative “review bombing” of the Amazon Prime site—for using actors of color in prominent roles as Elves, Dwarves, and other denizens of a fantasy world based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. These criticisms don’t originate with ordinary Tolkien fans, many of whom “welcome the increased diversity.” They’re mostly from “far-right political actors” who are weaponizing the issue “to help get fascist talking points into the mainstream.” White supremacists have long claimed Tolkien’s work, pointing out that his good races, like Elves, are portrayed as…

A Wendy’s employee in Pennsylvania was arrested for sabotaging railroad equipment in a bid to disrupt traffic and ensure a quiet work shift. The 34-year-old was identified by coworkers after security cameras captured him, dressed in his Wendy’s uniform, installing a device designed to activate a crossing gate. He and an accomplice hoped “that would prevent people from getting to Wendy’s, and they could have a slow night at work,” said an officer with the Tilden Township police. The man was charged with criminal mischief and reckless endangerment. A Nebraska man set a world record by paddling 38 miles down the Missouri River in a hollowed-out giant pumpkin. Power-plant worker Duane Hansen, who grew the 846-pound gourd himself, completed the 11-hour voyage to mark his 60th birthday, battling cold, heavy…

CHILE Andrea Gartenlaub La Tercera Chileans want a new constitution, said Andrea Gartenlaub, but evidently not an ultra-left one. In 2020, an overwhelming 78 percent of Chileans voted to replace the 1980 constitution, drafted under the Pinochet dictatorship, with a new one. But far fewer turned out to elect the constituent assembly of regular people that was tasked with actually writing the new document. When leftist President Gabriel Boric took office earlier this year, he made passing an ultra-progressive constitution his personal mission, and the result was an unwieldy tome of nearly 500 articles that would have enshrined rights to abortion and housing, abolished the Senate, and woven the fight against climate change into every aspect of policy. Chileans, though, rejected the ambitious document by a resounding 62 percent. Pro-government…

In midterms this fall, 60 percent of American voters will have an election denier on their ballot running for House, Senate, or a statewide office such as governor or secretary of state. A survey of all 540 Republican candidates for major office found 199 who fully denied the legitimacy of the 2020 election, 118 of whom are all but guaranteed to win. Only 74 fully accepted the vote results; many others refused to say.FiveThirtyEight.com From the start of the pandemic through May, nearly 8 million children worldwide lost a parent or other primary caregiver to Covid, a new study found. Nearly half of those deaths occurred in India alone, while in Bolivia and Peru, Covid deaths partially orphaned about 1 in 50 kids.NPR.org This summer was Europe’s hottest on record,…

“There is always more waiting for you on the other side of fear.”Journalist Elaine Welteroth, quoted in Good Housekeeping “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”H.L. Mencken, quoted in FedSmith “Buy land. They ain’t making any more of the stuff.”Will Rogers, quoted in Yahoo Finance “A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.”Philanthropist John G. Shedd, quoted in Aish.com “Learn from the mistakes of others. You can never live long enough to make them all yourself.”Groucho Marx, quoted in The Economist “Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed so easily.”Journalist Dorothy Day, quoted in Catholic Courier…

DOJ lays out Google antitrust claims The Justice Department said Google spends “enormous sums” to buy exclusivity and maintain its dominance as the default search engine in the U.S., said Leah Nylen in Bloomberg. The contracts “form the basis of the DOJ’s landmark antitrust lawsuit” against Google, which isn’t expected to formally begin until next year. The Justice Department just laid out its views of Google’s business for the first time last week during a hearing in Washington. The agency focused on Google’s billion-dollar contracts that “ensure its search engine is set as the default and comes preinstalled” on almost all new phones. By contrast, Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, a distant rival, is set as the default only on its own Edge browser and Amazon’s Fire tablets. Kids’ device…

The Covid treatment Paxlovid significantly reduces hospitalizations and deaths among older patients, new research from Israel suggests. The study is one of the first to examine the drug’s effectiveness against Omicron, now the dominant variant around the world, reports The New York Times. The researchers examined the medical records of almost 110,000 people, all at least 40 years old and considered at high risk from the disease, with most having either been vaccinated or previously infected. Among over-65s, the patients who took Paxlovid had a 73 percent lower risk of being hospitalized and a 79 percent reduced risk of death. Surprisingly, though, the drug appeared to make no significant difference in outcomes for younger adults. That runs contrary to two other studies that showed Paxlovid helped those between 50…

Journalist Buzz Bissinger is the author of the sports classic Friday Night Lights. His new book, The Mosquito Bowl, focuses on Marines stationed in the Pacific in 1944 and a football game they played shortly before the invasion of Okinawa. Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo (2012). This is the best nonfiction book, of those I’ve read, of the past 35 years. Boo’s depiction of the Indian slum Annawadi, in the shadow of new hotels supposedly heralding Mumbai’s transformation, is unforgettable. The writing is elegant and sophisticated and the reporting absolutely mind-blowing. Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon (2010). Set at a down-and-out West Virginia racetrack, this is a tour de force, creating the atmosphere of a place no one cares about except the indelible characters consigned to…

Queen Elizabeth II was Britain’s most steadfast public servant. During her seven decades on the throne, the longest-reigning British monarch in history was a bulwark of constancy through a time of extraordinary changes, including the reluctant relinquishing of African former colonies, the joining of the European Union, and the leaving of it in Brexit. Her governments spanned 15 prime ministers, from the elder statesman Winston Churchill to the newly elected Liz Truss, whom she welcomed just days before her death. Frugal, hardworking, and deeply religious, the queen studied her boxful of government documents with careful diligence every day and went to church faithfully on Sundays. She gave no interviews, and her private thoughts remained as unknown as the contents of her ever-present handbag. She was open only about her…

Memphis Outrage over the high-profile abduction and murder of kindergarten teacher Eliza Fletcher escalated further after the alleged killer was accused this week of a separate kidnapping and rape in the fall of 2021. Fletcher, 34, was out on her morning jog earlier this month when she was forced into an SUV, surveillance footage showed. Prosecutors charged Cleotha Henderson with first-degree murder after Fletcher’s remains were found blocks from Henderson’s brother’s apartment and DNA on shoes left at the scene matched Henderson’s. The 38-year-old has an extensive criminal record and was released from prison in 2020 after serving 19 years for aggravated kidnapping. Henderson was charged for the 2021 case after a rape kit linking his DNA to the crimes sat in storage for months. Days after Fletcher’s murder,…

Identical twins Jeremy and Josh Salyers grew up imagining they might one day marry identical twin sisters, said Cathy Free in The Washington Post. In 2017, the brothers, who lived in Tennessee, attended the annual Twins Days Festival in Twinsburg, Ohio, where they met identical twins Brittany and Briana Deane, lawyers who had similar dreams of marrying a set of identical siblings. “We’d decided that if we couldn’t find twins to marry, then we just wouldn’t get married,” said Jeremy, 38. “I was attracted to Briana and Josh was attracted to Brittany.” After a year of long-distance dating with the Virginia-based sisters, Josh and Jeremy proposed at the same time to Brittany and Briana—in matching outfits, with identical diamond rings, on Feb. 2 (2-2). The sisters recall saying “yes”…

Mark Joseph Stern Slate Placing a boss’s claims of religious objections ahead of access to lifesaving medication is “morally and intellectually repulsive,” said Mark Joseph Stern. But a federal judge’s ruling last week that the government can’t require employers to cover PrEP antiretroviral drugs, which prevent HIV, could portend something far worse: bans on mandates for “almost any preventative care.” A group of Texas plaintiffs argued that the Affordable Care Act’s rules made them complicit in potential “homosexual behavior,” drug use, and extramarital sex, violating their religious beliefs. District Judge Reed O’Connor, known for trying to strike down the entire ACA in 2018, endorsed that argument. But he also went further and ruled that the government agencies that decide on ACA requirements for preventive care lack authority to create such…

ROMANIA Cornel Nistorescu Cotidianul Romania’s celebration of “fools and stupidity” is no laughing matter, said Cornel Nistorescu. Our culture has always loved to make fun of the village idiot, with folk tales, songs, and jokes that mock someone’s inability to grasp a basic truth. These “quintessentially Romanian” themes have roots in old rituals to ward off evil spirits. But in modern times, we’ve taken it too far, until we have elevated what is essentially a “cult of the fool.” The wildly popular TV show D’ale lui Mitica, for example, mocks actual Romanian dolts, some of them bureaucrats clinging mindlessly to inane policies, but many others just ordinary people caught on camera. Each episode makes fun of some hapless citizen’s “ignorance and selfishness,” and above all his dubious grasp of grammar.…

Treating heavy drinkers with psychedelics in conjunction with psychotherapy sharply improves their chances of cutting back on booze, a new study suggests. Researchers recruited 93 men and women, ages 25 to 65, who met the clinical criteria for alcohol use disorder. Roughly half were given a pill containing psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, followed by another a month later; the other half received a placebo. Both groups were given counseling before, during, and after the medication sessions. By the end of the eight-month trial, the psilocybin group reported an 83 percent reduction in heavy drinking; the control group, in contrast, saw a slight increase in their consumption. Nearly half of those given the psychedelic stopped drinking entirely, in some cases for years, compared with only about a…

(Little, Brown, $28) “Very few readers have been praying for a novel like this,” said Ron Charles in The Washington Post. Set in A.D. 600, it focuses on a priest and two monks who attempt to build a monastery on an isolated rock off Ireland’s coast. But Emma Donoghue, the author of Room, excels at stories that unfold in spare spaces, and this story “creates an eerie atmosphere that should resonate with anyone willing to think deeply about the blessings and costs of devoting one’s life to a transcendent cause.” As the trio’s leader, Artt, pushes his charges to put piety above survival, the possibility of looming tragedy “starts to haunt these pages like the coming winter.” Donoghue “wrings plenty of narrative sustenance from her barren landscape,” said Paraic…

Behind Their Screens by Emily Weinstein & Carrie James (MIT, $28) Here, at last, is a truly useful guide for “any parent constantly arguing with their teens about screens,” said Oliver Mulvihill in the San Francisco Chronicle. Written by two Harvard researchers who interviewed teenagers to understand how young people use social media and what help they’d welcome in limiting its pull, the book “reads like a message from young people to adults.” Kids aren’t blind to the hazards that adults worry about, and for that this book’s authors “give teens the credit they deserve.” Slenderman by Kathleen Hale (Grove, $27) It’s a story that “still mystifies,” said Nathan Smith in the New York Observer. In 2014, two preteen Wisconsin girls, inspired by internet tales about a mythic figure…

If you’ve never heard of sotol, you’re not alone, said Danielle Dorsey in Thrillist. Overshadowed by tequila and mezcal, the Mexican spirit is distilled from the spiky desert plant it’s named after, a cousin of agave, and it has been made for hundreds of years. If you can track some down, try it neat before letting its distinctive sweetness shine through in a margarita. IZO Sotol ($65). The cores of wild-grown sotol are slow-roasted in fire pits to create this “grassy and earthy” sotol with a “smooth and clean finish.” Desert Door Sotol ($37). This Driftwood, Texas–produced sotol is “reminiscent of a bourbon, with spiced cinnamon, oak, and vanilla flavors.” Los Magos Sotol ($65). Ideal for use in craft cocktails, this sotol “lands soft on the palate, with a…

  “The Meeker Classic is a gathering place for what some might consider an obscure interest,” said Andria Hautamaki in Afar. Each September, however, thousands of spectators flock to Meeker, Colo., to watch a sheepdog competition that’s one of the most challenging in the world. Sheepdog trialing tests the skills of herding dogs and their handlers, who use whistles and vocal commands to communicate with their canine partners from afar. “For many of these handlers, working with a dog to gather and move livestock is a way of life.” The contest’s tough, mountain-grazed ewes are new to interacting with dogs, though. The canine competitors must assert themselves as they fetch a flock, drive it toward the handler, separate the sheep, then help enclose five of them in a pen. Last…

Activist investor Daniel Loeb said this week he would stop pushing Disney to spin off ESPN, said Erin Hudson in Bloomberg. After acquiring a $1 billion stake in Disney last month, “Loeb suggested spinning off ESPN would allow the company” to reduce debt. ESPN, known as “the worldwide leader in sports,” is facing new threats in the competition for sports-broadcasting rights, including from Apple and Amazon. Disney chief Bob Chapek confirmed reports that Disney had received inquiries from “interested parties” about the sports network, but Loeb tweeted he now has “a better understanding” of ESPN’s growth potential. Goldman: High defaults for Apple Card users Goldman Sachs’ foray into credit-card lending is becoming riskier, said Hugh Son in CNBC.com. A report last week found that 2.93 percent of Goldman’s card customers—most…

Mortgage rates highest since 2008 Mortgage rates have climbed back up to a 14-year high, said Rob Wile in NBCNews.com. The average fixed rate on a 30-year mortgage hit 5.89 percent last week, the highest since 2008. After surging this spring as the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates, mortgage rates “briefly declined for a period this summer” as mortgage applications dipped. Higher mortgage rates, which have now nearly doubled since January, have significantly impacted potential homebuyers and are beginning to bite sellers, too. “For the first time in nearly 18 months, the average U.S. home sold below its asking price, according to Redfin.” The median home sale price in August was $370,000, down 6 percent from June. A job deficit for recruiters Tech-job recruiters have quickly gone from…

Paul Demko Politico You might think it’s a golden age to be in the marijuana business, said Paul Demko, but most weed companies are “hemorrhaging red ink.” Nineteen states have now legalized the sale of recreational weed, including major new markets like New York, New Jersey, and Virginia last year. Industry revenues are projected to hit $32 billion in 2022, “more than double what sales were just three years ago.” You would think that would translate into profits, but it does not. Two dozen of the largest publicly traded U.S. operators “collectively lost more than $550 million in the first six months of this year.” The biggest culprit, by far, is the federal tax code. It still prohibits cannabis companies from writing off any business expenses—a relic of a…

This week’s question: To help certain patients overcome their fear of vomiting, a phobia clinic in Amsterdam wants to hire someone who can regurgitate on command. What should that person’s job title be? Last week’s contest: A Detroit man had a tattoo parlor implant a chip in his hand that unlocks and starts his Tesla. What would you call a company devoted solely to microchipping people who want to move through the world without keys, phones, or other portable devices? THE WINNER: “Silicon Valet” Tim Nicholson, Glen Ellyn, Ill. SECOND PLACE: “Tag! You’re It.” Marcus Richardson, Picayune, Miss. THIRD PLACE: “Armed Fobbery” Laurel Rose, Pittsburgh 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,…

Good week for: Higher consciousness, when San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to decriminalize magic mushrooms, peyote, ayahuasca, and other plant-based psychedelic drugs. Supervisor Dean Preston said the board was simply “following science and data.” Do-overs, with the release of iOS 16, a software update that will give Apple iPhone users up to 15 minutes to edit typos from sent text messages. Users prone to attacks of late-night nostalgia can even delete sent messages entirely, though the window to “Undo Send” is a cruelly short two minutes. Lunch, with a new study suggesting that eating only during daylight hours can substantially decrease symptoms of depression and anxiety. Bad week for: Inclusivity, when progressive Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) marked the anniversary of 9/11 with a tweet remembering the “2,996 people…

Mindy Kaling loves mining her private life for creative material, but there’s one story she’s not ready to tell, said Neha Prakash in Marie Claire. The actress and writer still hasn’t disclosed the father of her two children, even to close friends. “The choice to have a child—by yourself, on your own terms—was the best part of my life,” says Kaling, 43. She’s protective of her children’s privacy, opting not to post photos of her 4-year-old daughter, Katherine, and 2-year-old son, Spencer, on social media. For more women to take control of their career and family timelines, she says, it would help if freezing eggs were cheaper. “I wish every 19-year-old girl would come home from college and that the gift—instead of buying them jewelry or a vacation or…

Ruth Marcus The Washington Post Chief Justice John Roberts knows his conservative colleagues have gone on an activist tear, even if he won’t say so publicly, said Ruth Marcus. “The court’s approval rating has tanked”—just 1 in 4 Americans has confidence in the court, per Gallup—and Roberts is blaming the public for misunderstanding the role of judges. Disagreeing with an opinion, he said last week, “is not a basis for criticizing the legitimacy of the court.” That “convenient framing” misrepresents why so many people are fed up with the court’s façade of political neutrality. Americans understand that right-wing activists stacked the court to guarantee outcomes like the Dobbs abortion decision. The new conservative supermajority “abandoned normal rules of restraint, twisted or ignored doctrine, and substituted raw power to achieve its…

“Former White House staffer Steve Bannon turned himself in to New York authorities [last] Thursday morning to face a set of charges that should be intensely familiar to him: money laundering, scheming to defraud, and conspiracy. Bannon’s legal fate is a portent for his former boss. It indicates that even if Trump had issued himself a ‘self-pardon’ in the closing days of his term, as he reportedly considered, it wouldn’t protect him from the state and local investigations into him and his businesses. As he prepares to take another run at the presidency, Trump is likely to become more convinced than ever that only the Oval Office can provide the legal safety he craves.” Hayes Brown in MSNBC.com…

GERMANY Thomas Jansen Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Poland says Germany should pay for Polish suffering under the Nazis, said Thomas Jansen, but how much more can Warsaw actually expect? The Polish government said last week it estimated Poland’s World War II losses at some $1.3 trillion and would demand an unspecified amount of “German reparations.” Soon after the war, Poland waived direct compensation from Germany in favor of a proportion of Germany’s payout to the USSR. It may be true that Poland was under intense pressure from its Soviet paymasters when it made that deal, and it’s unclear how much money Moscow ultimately transferred. Still, it is undeniable that Poland has “received a lot of money from Germany over the years.” In 1972, for example, West Germany gave Polish victims of…

CANADA David Butt The Globe and Mail “How could these attacks have happened?” asked David Butt. All of Canada is asking the same question after two men stabbed 10 people to death and wounded 18 others in and near the James Smith Cree Nation reserve in Saskatchewan over Labor Day weekend. There can be no trial, as both suspects are dead: Damien Sanderson was found stabbed to death last week, and his brother Myles died in unclear circumstances days later after police ran him off the road. We can, though, have a public inquiry to determine why Myles, a Cree man with “a history of violence”—including against his in-laws, who were among the victims—had not been under better supervision. Myles had a shocking 59 convictions yet was released in February…

The U.S. has become the “death trap of the wealthy world,” said Derek Thompson in The Atlantic. Americans born in 2021 can expect to survive to age 76.1, the lowest U.S. life expectancy since 1996, the National Center for Health Statistics reports. That’s a 2.7-year plunge since 2019, “the largest two-year decline in nearly a century.” Covid, of course, caused about half of the drop—and because of our shameful vaccine hesitancy, more Americans succumbed to Covid after the vaccines were available than before. But our mortality crisis goes much deeper than the pandemic. Americans are more likely than Europeans to die as babies, teenagers, and adults. The most obvious reason is our three outliers of “guns, drugs, and cars.” We have vastly more gun deaths and more overdose deaths…

Vladimir Putin is trying to “weaponize winter” in retaliation for Western sanctions, said Martin Sandbu in the Financial Times (U.K.), and the energy crisis we’ve long been warned about “is now a reality.” Europe has let itself become dependent on Russian gas imports; that “has allowed the Kremlin to drive up power prices to extreme levels.” Russia has cut off gas supplies to the Continent through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, although some gas continues to flow from Russia to Europe through Ukraine. Now European governments are urging residents to turn down the heat if they hope to avoid rationing in the colder months. “Millions of energy users are facing serious hardship” as the cost of living escalates, factories shut down, and cries for government action strengthen. But “if…

(Knopf, $29) Casey Parks’ searching new memoir “opens with the anecdote that launched a thousand questions,” said Ilana Masad in NPR.org. Parks, a reporter from rural Louisiana, recalls being shocked in 2002 when her grandmother—after witnessing the protests of Parks’ inconsolable mother—passionately defended Parks’ right to live as a lesbian and then sat down to explain. Parks’ grandmother had once been best friends with a person known as Roy Hudgins, “a woman who lived as a man,” as she described him, noting that neighbors readily embraced Roy as the kind, gentle person he was. Intrigued that a non-cisgender person had found acceptance in the Deep South of the 1950s, Parks vowed to find out what happened to Roy. Freely blending memoir and reportage, her book proves “a wonderful addition…

Maggie O’Farrell clicked with Lucrezia de Medici from the moment the best-selling novelist first laid eyes on the 16th-century teenage bride, said Elizabeth Harris in The New York Times. O’Farrell, who in early 2020 was about to score a global hit with Hamnet, a novel about William Shakespeare’s doomed son, was musing about the subject of a 19th-century poem when she turned to her smartphone and came across a striking portrait of Lucrezia. Married at 15, this child of Florentine royalty would be dead a year later, rumored to have been poisoned by her husband, the Duke of Ferrara. Now Lucrezia was staring back at O’Farrell across 500 years. “I knew, as soon as I saw her face, that I had my next book,” the Irish-born author says. “I…

Pizza, tacos, and more… Chef’s Table: Pizza One of TV’s best food series is devoting its new season to a topic that fires real passion. The six-episode survey of the art of pizza making visits the kitchens of such contemporary greats as Minneapolis’ Ann Kim, Phoenix’s Chris Bianco, and Rome’s Gabriele Bonci. Netflix Best in Dough There’s no explaining why it’s taken so long for someone to cook up a pizza-baking competition series. But there’s one here now, and it delivers the works, including pizza chefs ridiculing certain regional styles and saucy grandmothers drawing the line when challenged to create a “pizza cupcake.” Hulu The Pizza Show In this series, Brooklyn pizzaiolo Frank Pinello serves as your guide to the best spots in pizza towns from New Haven, Conn.,…

Including sports rights, Amazon is projected to spend $15 billion on programming for its Amazon Prime Video streaming service this year. Netflix is expected to spend about $13.6 billion, Disney+ $9.5 billion, and Warner Bros. Discovery $6.5 billion. Bloomberg Corporate travel bookings grew 73 percent in August from July, and business-travel bookings for trips starting between Sept. 1 and Nov. 19 have increased nearly sixfold compared with a year ago. Team off-site retreats now represent 38 percent of business travel. Axios More beef cows were slaughtered in July than in any month since recordkeeping began in 1986, according to the USDA. Farmers are sending cows to slaughter earlier due to severe drought, which is affecting 60 percent of the nation’s cattle herds. NPR.org The Census Bureau said median household income…

According to the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, brain tumors strike approximately 2,500 children in America every year. Since 1991, the Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation (www.curethekids.org) has sought to improve the lives of these vulnerable patients. The nonprofit has funded research, therapy, and cures to fight the deadliest form of childhood cancer and has allocated close to $50 million to innovation in the diagnosis, treatment, and early detection of tumors. Additionally, the foundation supports families through initiatives like the Butterfly Fund, which grants emergency financial aid for expenses such as transportation and rehabilitation. PBTF has also developed a Peer to Peer Mentoring program to provide emotional connections for parents, teens, and young adults dealing with a rare—and deeply challenging—diagnosis. Each charity we feature has earned a four-star…

Catherine Rampell The Washington Post Poor pay and high stress are making government jobs ever harder to fill, said Catherine Rampell. “The private sector has already recovered the jobs lost early in the pandemic,” and then some. The public sector? It’s still down 647,000 from February 2020. Teachers account for roughly half that decline, “causing major disruptions as children return to school.” But other shortages are starting to take their toll. In Indianapolis, for instance, “trash isn’t getting picked up.” A school-bus driver shortage in Franklin County, Wis., is leaving students in the lurch. Last week, Florida’s state legislature approved a plan to activate the National Guard to mind its state prisons due to the dearth of correctional officers. It’s hard to blame workers when “public-sector jobs already paid…