The Week Magazine October 7, 2022

For many years now, work has taken up a greater and greater part of Americans’ mental space. First there was the era of corporate retreats and endless evangelizing about turning your corporate team into an entrepreneurial powerhouse. Then there was “hustle culture,” the idea that having just one job couldn’t possibly be enough. And now, there is the latest wrinkle, the “bring your whole self to work” movement, which The New York Times’ Pamela Paul wonderfully skewered last week (see Best Columns: Business, p.38). It’s the natural evolution of the idea that life should be centered on the workplace. With fewer outlets for face-to-face self-expression—also known as “social life”—it was probably inevitable that the next step in the transformation of work was moving life wholesale to the office. Let the…

What happened The Kremlin ordered a major escalation of the Ukraine war this week, calling up 300,000 conscripts and staging sham referendums in occupied regions of Ukraine so it could annex and claim them as Russian soil. After five days of voting during which residents reported soldiers going door to door with guns, Russian officials said residents in the Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Luhansk, and Donetsk regions had shown as high as 99 percent support for joining Russia. The vote was widely dismissed as a farce. “They’re doing it in their Russian style, just for pictures,” said Serhiy Ivaschenko, a Ukrainian official in Kherson. Russian President Vladimir Putin was expected to announce the regions’ annexation this week, and Russia’s parliament may take up formal annexation legislation next week. Border crossings were…

When he was 22, Mike Huss took an overnight job as a janitor at Ione Elementary School near Sacramento—the same school he’d attended as a child. Eventually, he earned an education degree and become a full-time faculty member. Now, after 14 years as a janitor and 19 as a teacher, he’s been promoted to principal. While students sometimes forget the details of their lessons, Huss says, they’ll always remember how a teacher made them feel. “Teachers don’t realize they have that power; they impact a student’s life forever.” At 49, Ray Ruschel knows he’s an unusual sight at the North Dakota college where he studies business management. But when he found out that the two-year school had a football team, he decided to try out anyway. “I got to thinking…

What happened NASA completed a planetary defense test against a “mass extinction event” this week by crashing a small spacecraft into an egg-shaped asteroid called Dimorphos to nudge it into a new orbit. It will take two months to determine if the crash of the refrigerator-size spacecraft at 14,000 mph successfully shifted the asteroid into a new course, with astronomers using telescopes on all seven continents to chart its path. Located about 7 million miles from Earth, Dimorphos is 525 feet across and orbits a larger asteroid, Didymos. Part of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), the $300 mission is the first step of a program to develop the means to deflect asteroids and comets that could cause massive damage or even wipe out human civilization if they hit…

What happened Thousands of Iranians took to the streets this week, burning headscarves and shouting “Death to the dictator” in the most serious challenge to the country’s theocratic regime in years. The protests, sparked by the death of a 22-year-old woman detained by the morality police, spread to all 31 of Iran’s provinces. Mahsa Amini, a Kurdish woman arrested in Tehran and sent to a “re-education center” for wearing her headscarf loosely, died on Sept. 16 in police custody. Iranian authorities blamed her death on a heart attack. But witnesses said police had beaten her, and CT scan images reportedly showed signs of skull fracture. Police have responded with live ammunition, clubs, and tear gas, killing at least 76 protesters—including a young woman who appeared in a viral video…

For most people, being accused of “staggering” fraud by the New York attorney general would be “a terribly ominous development,” said Steve Vladeck in CNN.com. For Donald Trump last week, it “wasn’t even the worst legal news he received.” First, New York Attorney General Letitia James unveiled her $250 million lawsuit against Trump and three of his children—Don Jr., Ivanka, and Eric—for allegedly inflating the family’s assets in applying for loans and reducing them when paying taxes. Then the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed key portions of Judge Aileen Cannon’s controversial ruling in the Mar-a-Lago documents case, allowing the Justice Department to resume its criminal investigation of the removal of at least 100 classified documents to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. In withering language, the panel of three judges—including two…