Indholdsfortegnelse for October 21, 2022 i The Week Magazine

Most Americans manage to cook and eat without thinking all that much about where their food was grown. Our meat, in particular, usually comes packaged in styrofoam and plastic from a grocery store. Each animal we eat, though, had a life before it became our meal, and much of that life was unpleasant. A California law before the Supreme Court would change that, at least for pigs and chickens (see Best U.S. Columns, p.13). Most modern pigs are raised on factory farms, and the sows spend nearly their whole life confined in narrow wooden crates where they are artificially inseminated and then give birth, over and over and over again. These pigs never breathe outdoor air or stand on grass, or even on the ground at all, except when they…

The water superintendent in Richmond, Vt., has admitted to secretly lowering fluoride levels in the town’s water supply. Fluoridization is credited with a 25 percent national drop in tooth decay, but superintendent Kendall Chamberlin said he had concerns about the use of Chinese chemicals in fluoride, and that “to err on the side of caution is not a bad position.” New York University has fired a revered chemistry professor after students complained his course was too hard. Maitland Jones Jr., 84, wrote the seminal, 1,300-page textbook Organic Chemistry, but 82 students signed a petition complaining that their low grades did not accurately reflect “the time and effort put into this class.” NYU ended Jones’ contract, saying his work “did not rise to the standards we require.” In other news Biden…

Jeff Bridges has had a rough couple of years, says Tom Lamont in The Observer (U.K.). First the Big Lebowski actor got lymphoma. Then he became so ill with Covid, it made the cancer “look like a piece of cake.” Yet he has taken something positive from the ordeal. “Life is constantly giving us gifts,” he says. “They may be gifts that we don’t think we want. Who wants cancer? Who wants f---ing Covid, man? Well it turns out, I did. Because dealing with your mortality, it makes things more precious.” In particular, it intensified his love for his wife, Sue. They met in 1975: He was filming in rural Montana, and she lived nearby. “Love at first sight. Boom. Hit me like a ton of bricks.” The couple,…

Tom Brady and Giselle Bündchen have each hired divorce lawyers as their rift appears to be irreparable, but Brady doesn’t want their split “to be ugly,” a source tells People. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ star quarterback, 45, and the supermodel, 42, reportedly had “an epic fight” over his decision to un-retire from the NFL, but sources said the couple—who share two children and co-parent a third from Brady’s previous relationship—have been fighting over his career and other issues for years. In a recent interview, Bündchen called football “a very violent sport,” and she said that as a mother with her own career ambitions, “I would like him to be more present.” The source said “she is the one steering the divorce,” and that for Brady, “this really, really hurts.”…

Donald Moynihan Slate The proof is in: “Republicans have indeed been more likely to die because of Covid” than Democrats, said Donald Moynihan. A new study by Yale researchers examined “excess deaths” in Ohio and Florida before and during the pandemic—deaths that exceeded demographic and historical trends for these areas. They then matched 577,659 of the deceased to their party registrations. Correcting for age, the researchers found that in 2020 and 2021, the excess deaths among Republicans were an astounding 76 percent higher than those among Democrats. Tellingly, the big gap opened up “only after vaccines became widely available.” That’s because right-wing politicians and media chose to cast doubt on the safety and efficacy of vaccines, and disdained other mitigation measures such as masking and social distancing. “Once Joe…

AUSTRALIA David Estcourt The Age Australia is prosecuting the wrong people, said David Estcourt. Not the ones in our government who are doing terrible things, but the whistleblowers who call them out. Richard Boyle, a former worker in the Taxation Office, is facing jail time for exposing the predatory practices at his office. Tax agents were instructed to reach first for wage garnishment, snatching Australians’ savings to pay off back taxes. The office routinely siphoned thousands of dollars out of citizens’ bank accounts all at once, leaving them unable to pay rent. Supervisors, Boyle says, were heartless: One of them actually said, “For f---’s sake, I am sick of taxpayers threatening suicide.” Boyle tried to report through the proper channels, and when rebuffed went to the press. He is now…

The U.S. national debt has topped $31 trillion for the first time, a milestone that comes amid rising interest rates that will increase the cost of carrying that debt. America’s debt climbed $7.9 trillion during the Trump administration, and has increased another $3.3 trillion during the first two years of the Biden administration. CNN.com Covid-19 vaccines prevented up to 370,000 Covid deaths and 700,000 hospitalizations last year, a new Department of Health and Human Services study found. Vaccines saved the country more than $16 billion in medical costs. CBSNews.com More than 150,000 Venezuelans have arrived at the southern U.S. border this year after a trek of over 2,500 miles. Although more than 6.8 million people have fled Venezuela since 2015, only about 100 per year came to the U.S. border.…

“If you’ve lived all your life in a prison camp, when you are let out, you do not become free. That’s not what freedom is. You’re just in another space.” Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich, quoted in the Los Angeles Review of Books “The whole point of art is to ask, Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” Writer Nada Alic, quoted in The Millions “The older we get, the more we appreciate the continuity of friendship—the fortunate gift of sharing the present with the nostalgia.” Artist Helen Frankenthaler, quoted in LitHub “Nobody drowns in sweat.” Coach Dick Vermeil, quoted in Profootballhof.com “Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, but your government only when it deserves it.” Mark Twain, quoted in the New Hampshire Union Leader “Education should not be intended…

Amazon pulls back on delivery robots After three years of testing, Amazon “is shutting down tests of its home-delivery robot,” said Spencer Soper and Matt Day in Bloomberg. The 400-person team that had been working on the slow-moving, “cooler-size” bot, called Scout, will be broken up and offered other jobs in the company. A “skeleton” crew will “continue to consider the idea of an autonomous robot,” but Amazon has decided “the current iteration isn’t working.” The robots were designed to eventually roll to a customer’s front door, but in tests they were accompanied by human minders. Scout was one of several “radical experiments”—including cashier-less stores and delivery drones—that Amazon has backed with the expectation they could take years to deliver viable results. But the company now appears to be…

A mother’s exposure to toxic “forever chemicals” during early pregnancy may increase the chances of her son having a lower sperm count and diminished fertility in later life. PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a class of about 12,000 chemicals used in thousands of everyday products to make them resistant to water, stains, and heat. These compounds do not naturally break down, and have been linked to health problems including cancer, birth defects, and liver disease. For the study, researchers examined the semen and reproductive hormones of 864 young Danish men, along with blood samples taken from their mothers in the first trimester. The men whose mothers had higher exposure to seven PFAS chemicals had lower sperm counts and higher levels of sperm that swam poorly or not…

Gregory Maguire is the author of Wicked, the revisionist Wizard of Oz tale adapted into a long-running Broadway musical. His new novel, The Oracle of Maracoor, continues the adventures of Rain, granddaughter of the Wicked Witch of the West. The Once and Future King by T.H. White (1958). In the 1970s, teen geek readers swore either by J.R.R. Tolkien or T.H. White. I chose White’s tragicomedy of the education, rise, and death of King Arthur. The story is audaciously retold, as if the Arthurian cycle were not already one of our foundational myths. It probably inspired me to risk my own appropriation of Oz. Higglety Pigglety Pop! Or There Must Be More to Life by Maurice Sendak (1967). A Sealyham terrier, Jennie, adventures into the trippy afterlife to find…

The IPO market has vanished, said Drew Singer in Bloomberg. So far this year, total proceeds from U.S. initial public offerings have fallen more than 95 percent. And the drought is worsening. “Just 64 companies filed for potential initial public offerings during the third quarter, the fewest in any quarter since 2009.” After “record levels of IPO activity” last year, “many of the companies that were planning to go public in 2022,” including big names like Reddit, ServiceTitan, and Chobani, have “shelved the idea.” In the past three months, “new issues raised just $2.7 billion, the lightest third quarter since 2008.” A big reason is that U.S. tech listings have dried up, said Gaurav Dogra and Patturaja Murugaboopathy in Reuters. “Only 14 tech companies have floated their shares on…

Judy Tenuta preferred to be carried on stage, ideally by a bodybuilder or atop the shoulders of a few men. A 1980s stand-up comedian who wore Grecian gowns, played the accordion, and referred to men as “pigs,” she’d introduce herself as a wallflower before yelling, “Let’s party! You know you’re begging for abuse from the Goddess of Love.” With a combination of physical humor and piercing wit, she insulted celebrities of the age, from Vice President Dan Quayle to Yoko Ono. A two-time Grammy nominee, she promoted a religion called “Judyism” in her act. “In my religion, I’m the only one that gets to complain,” she said. “The really nice thing about my religion is you can forget all about your problems and think about mine for a while.”…

Minden, Nev. Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama suggested last week that descendants of slaves are predisposed to commit crimes, saying Democrats want to pay out reparations “because they think the people that do the crime are owed that.” The first-term senator made the remark at a rally featuring former President Trump, his close ally, and was seeking to paint Democrats as soft on crime—a major talking point among Republicans ahead of the midterm elections. “They’re pro-crime,” said Tuberville, a former football coach at Auburn University. “They want crime because they want to take over what you got. They want to control what you have.” Tuberville punctuated his statement with “Bullshit,” drawing cheers. Following Tuberville, Trump himself accused of Democrats of fomenting crime in cities “drenched in blood.” NAACP…

Whoopi Goldberg isn’t going to change for anyone, said Jazmine Hughes in The New York Times. The Oscar-winning star, now 66, has been through three marriages—the first with the drug counselor who helped her get sober at 25—and many more romances, including with fellow actors Frank Langella and Ted Danson. But these days, though you might occasionally find her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchild milling around her summer home on the Italian island of Sardinia, virtually everyone else is relegated to the guesthouse. Whoopi now lives alone and likes it that way. “I don’t want somebody in my house,” she has famously said. “I’m not looking to be with somebody forever or live with someone.” The kitchen is decorated with pop-culture artifacts, including some racist depictions of Black people from…

Mark Essig The New York Times “Pig farming doesn’t have to be this cruel,” said Mark Essig. The Supreme Court will soon hear a case in which the National Pork Producers Council is challenging California’s constitutional right to set humane standards for how pigs are raised, which is likely to affect pig farming throughout the nation. In a 2018 referendum, 63 percent of California voters approved a proposition “which effectively bans the sale of pork from farms that use gestation crates”—tiny wooden pens that leave sows “unable to even turn around.” In modern, industrial pig farms, pigs—which are “intelligent, social creatures”—are condemned from birth to a miserable existence in these crates, with no dirt to root in, no straw bedding, no access to the outdoors, and endless pregnancy through…

KOSOVO Shkumbin Sekiraqa Koha Ditore “He came from the U.S. full of enthusiasm,” said Shkumbin Sekiraqa. An émigré since the 1980s, Dr. Rifat Latifi was a big-name surgeon in New York, a professor at New York Medical College and head of surgery at Westchester Medical Center. The Kosovar Albanian thought he could remake Kosovo’s flailing health ministry and halt the brain drain that has sent our best doctors abroad, where they earn vastly more money. His approach to his new job as health minister was to treat the post as more of a “travel minister,” flying off to the U.S., Austria, and Greece as often as possible in an effort to round up doctors and tout opportunities in Kosovo. Yet all those conferences he attended and meetings he chaired made…

The oil industry’s practice of burning off unwanted methane to prevent it from leaking into the atmosphere is much less efficient than previously assumed, a new study has found. Researchers examined flaring at three of the largest oil and gas basins in the U.S., reports NPR.org. They found that the practice often doesn’t completely burn off the methane, a potent greenhouse gas sometimes emitted during oil production, and that in many cases the flares are extinguished but not reignited—meaning all the gas escapes into the atmosphere. Based on these findings, the researchers say the practice releases about five times more methane than previously thought. They estimate that improving the efficiency of the burning process, and making sure the flares remain lit, would result in annual emissions reductions equivalent to…

(Doubleday, $29) Kate Atkinson’s latest “casts a jaundiced eye at one of London’s historic heydays while slipping the reader a flask full of Jazz Age thrills under the table,” said Laura Miller in Slate. In this “big, rewarding” puzzle of a novel, nightlife impresario Nellie Coker runs a series of shady but thriving clubs in post–World War I London. But Coker, rather than being a standard protagonist, “serves as the hub for a collection of fascinating spokes.” The tale spreads out to include 15 points of view, including those of two runaway girls, a former combat nurse trying to find them, and a detective investigating a murder spree. This “rather Dickensian” novel is “filigreed with the improbable coincidences of a Victorian serial,” said Leah Greenblatt in The New York…

Bliss Montage by Ling Ma (FSG, $26) The stories in Ling Ma’s collection “use fantastical situations to address the absurdity of being confined by labels,” said Michele Filgate in The Washington Post. One of her female protagonists lives with 100 exes. Another takes cigarette breaks by stepping through a closet into another dimension. Ma’s hit apocalyptic office novel, Severance, did something similar: The concepts are surreal, but “the genius of Ma’s stories is in how she stretches the boundaries of the world while zooming in on the details that matter most.” I Walk Between the Raindrops by T.C. Boyle (Ecco, $29) “Few authors can match T.C. Boyle’s ability to nail humanity’s talent for scuppering itself,” said Christian House in the Financial Times. His 12th story collection once again features…

“America is obsessed with serial killers, but we need to be honest about the consequences,” said Evette Dionne in MSNBC.com. Netflix recently achieved its most-watched series debut ever with its new, 10-part drama about the cannibalistic murderer Jeffrey Dahmer, and relatives of Dahmer’s victims have been calling out the streaming service and the show’s producers for forcing them to relive the trauma of their losses without ever seeking their input. Netflix isn’t alone in pushing the true-crime craze into uncomfortable territory. Over the past several years, notorious killers have been “widely romanticized and fetishized by Hollywood.” But Netflix also isn’t new to the game, either. Before Evan Peters was cast as Dahmer, Zac Efron, another handsome actor, played Ted Bundy in a Netflix movie. Predictably, young fans of the…

Don’t overthink the details with greens powders, said Ali Francis and Aliza Abarbanel in Bon Appetit. For anyone ready to join the health trend and start stirring powdered greens into a glass of water or morning smoothie, “we’d argue that the best greens powder is the one that you’re actually going to drink.” Below, some taste-test findings. AG1 ($99 for 30 servings). This “nutritionally dense” powder from Athletic Greens is “a little bit sweet” and “a little bit earthy and grassy.” Its graininess is less pleasant. Amazing Grass Greens Blend ($40 for 60 servings). Though one of the sweetest powders we tried, tasters liked this powder for its “hints of matcha” and “raspberry iced-tea vibe.” The Beauty Chef Cleanse Inner Beauty Powder ($65 for 30 servings). More subtle than…

Jackie Robinson was more than the man who broke major league baseball’s color barrier 75 years ago, said Bill Shaikin in the Los Angeles Times. An “inspirational” new museum in downtown New York City honors Robinson’s athletic achievements, but fittingly, it also celebrates Robinson’s “amazing life off the field.” The first room provides an overview of his many non-baseball roles: Army officer, civil rights activist, screen actor, entrepreneur, and more. The museum’s 4,500 artifacts include a bat and Brooklyn Dodgers jersey from his 1947 rookie season, as well as the typewritten testimony he delivered on Capitol Hill in 1949 when called upon to speak about the appeal of communism to Black America. Another exhibit lays out his contributions to various causes—fair housing, equal pay, drug policy reform, ending police…

Job growth fell slightly in September but remains too hot for investors’ comfort, said Sydney Ember in The New York Times. The Labor Department said last week that “employers added 263,000 jobs on a seasonally adjusted basis,” the lowest monthly total since April 2021. However, the figure was “still solid by pre-pandemic standards,” and the unemployment rate dipped to 3.5 percent. While this may sound like good news, the market fell sharply because it “increases the prospect” that the Federal Reserve’s effort to cool the economy and subdue inflation “will be more extended.” Reversals: More layoffs as Peloton restructures Peloton laid off 500 more workers last week in what the struggling fitness brand and pandemic favorite said was the end of its restructuring, said Mike Calia in CNBC.com. In a…

Wire-transfer real estate frauds Potential homebuyers have a new scam to worry about, said Natalie Wong in Bloomberg Businessweek: hackers stealing their down payments. Real-estate wire fraud is on the rise, with hackers targeting “random players involved in any real estate transaction—lawyers, brokers, title agencies, mortgage lenders.” Once inside a company email system, thieves may “monitor correspondence about a specific transaction for months.” When it’s time for, say, an eager homebuyer to wire a down payment, the thief will send “a fraudulent email to the buyer, pretending to give official instructions from the real estate or title agent.” Danny Gonzales, a homebuyer in Texas, mistakenly wired $123,500 to thieves who had accessed his title agent’s system. The thieves’ email, which came from a Gmail account, “looked identical to hers,…

Jeff Jacoby The Boston Globe Invariably after any terrible disaster “experts pop up to label it an economic boon,” said Jeff Jacoby. Since Hurricane Ian hit the Florida coast, there has been no shortage of such experts. The Wall Street Journal promises it will “nudge up economic output.” That’s right in line with the journalists who promised that Hurricane Sandy would spur a “huge economic boom” and the economists who called California wildfires a “stimulus.” Don’t believe any of it. This old canard has been with us since the 19th century, and it was already expertly demolished in 1850. The French economist Frédéric Bastiat wrote about what happens when a shop window gets broken. “As the merchant sweeps up the shards of glass, dejected over his loss, onlookers attempt to…

Good week for: Endurance, after Irishman Damian Browne arrived in his native Galway after rowing across the Atlantic from New York in 112 days. “It’s nice to be alive,” said Browne, 42, who capsized three times during the 3,450-mile voyage, and cannot swim. Starting fresh, after supermodel Gisele Bündchen was photographed having her SUV spiritually cleansed by a holistic practitioner waving a stick of burning sage. Bündchen reportedly is seeking a divorce from NFL legend Tom Brady. Climate action, after New Zealand proposed taxing the burps, farts, and urination of its 36 million farm cows and sheep to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Bad week for: Bugs, with reports that the new Apple iPhone 14, which alerts 911 if it detects the user has been in a car crash, is having…

Vienna Austria has filed a lawsuit against the EU over Brussels’ classification of nuclear power and natural gas as sustainable forms of energy production. “What I am resisting with all my strength is the attempt to greenwash nuclear and gas through the back door,” said Austrian Environment Minister Leonore Gewessler. “Tying a green bow around polluting gas for electricity production is misleading.” The European Commission last year designated as climate-friendly renewable electricity production methods such as solar power, hydropower, and wind power. Starting in January, gas- and nuclear-powered facilities will also be classified as sustainable, which allows them access to preferred-investment status. Austria relies on hydropower for more than half of its energy needs, but much of the rest of the EU uses natural gas. Pope lambastes Europe over…

Melinda Gates’ life was turned upside down by her divorce, said Michal Lev-Ram in Fortune. In 2019, a Microsoft engineer alleged that she and company co-founder and former CEO Bill Gates had once had an affair; two years later, amid reports he’d made overtures to other female employees and maintained a friendship with sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, Melinda, now 58, decided to end their 27-year union. “I just couldn’t stay in that marriage anymore,” she says. “There just came a point in time where there was enough there that I realized it just wasn’t healthy, and I couldn’t trust what we had.” The process was “unbelievably painful,” and she made it a priority to shield their three grown children from the fallout. She actually found the pandemic helpful, because it…

Nick Catoggio The Dispatch “The Republican civil war” over Ukraine is coming, said Nick Catoggio. Though polls indicate that the U.S.’s $67 billion in aid to Ukraine thus far still has bipartisan support, “hairline cracks” within the GOP are widening. Polls indicate only a slim majority of Republicans—51 percent—think the U.S. should maintain support until the Ukrainians reclaim all their territory. And 43 percent say the U.S. has already given Ukraine too much aid. In Congress, establishment Republican hawks are being challenged by an isolationist, “America First” wing that “punches above its weight.” Rep. Roger Williams of Texas, for example, contends that the military equipment being sent to Ukraine “should be down at the border,” repelling Venezuelans and Central Americans; some MAGA Republicans view Vladimir Putin sympathetically, as a…

“Today’s Democrats have a bit of a problem with patriotism. It’s kind of hard to strike up the band on patriotism when you’ve been endorsing the view that America was born in slavery, marinated in racism, and remains a white supremacist society, shot through with multiple, intersecting levels of injustice. Progressive activists’ attitude toward their own country departs greatly from not just that of average Americans but from average nonwhite Americans. Black, Hispanic, and Asian Americans, in fact, are highly likely to say they would still choose to live in America if they could choose to live anywhere in the world.” Political scientist Ruy Teixeira in his Substack newsletter…

CANADA Andrew Phillips Toronto Star Far be it from me to engage in Quebec bashing, or “as it’s known in French, le Québec bashing,” said Andrew Phillips. But the French-speaking province seems to be pursuing policies destined to doom it to recession. This week, Quebec voters “gave an overwhelming majority” to a party, François Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec, that “openly played on fears about immigration.” Legault said allowing too many non-Francophone immigrants would be “suicidal” for the French character of the province. The problem, of course, is that Quebec needs workers. Companies there are refusing contracts for lack of labor, so Legault has already caved and issued a raft of temporary work visas. “You can call that pragmatic or you can call it hypocritical,” but at least it is an…

CZECH REPUBLIC Tobias Eish Landesecho We have met the Russians’ preposterous claims on four Ukrainian territories with our own land grab, said Tobias Eish. Why not split the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad between Poland and the Czech Republic, and “finally give the Czechs access to the sea?” The territory, a little spit of land currently wedged between Poland and Lithuania and bordering the Baltic Sea, was founded as Königsberg in 1255 in honor of Bohemian King Premysl Otakar II. That means the Czech claim on it goes back much farther than the Russian (the Soviets captured it at the end of World War II). It makes so much sense, in fact, that what started out as a gag on Czech Twitter—“Make Kaliningrad Czech again!”—spread quickly to become a nationwide game.…

A “seismic shift” on drug policy is underway, said Joey Garrison in USA Today. Last week, President Biden announced he was pardoning most past federal convictions of “simple possession” of marijuana. Only 6,500 people of the millions with marijuana-possession arrests on their record will immediately benefit, since possession is most often prosecuted at the state or local level. But Biden also called on state governors to use their own pardon power similarly and asked federal agencies to “expeditiously” review marijuana’s Schedule I classification, which categorizes it (along with heroin and LSD) as a drug with no legitimate medical use and “a high potential for abuse.” Though nearly three-quarters of states now permit medicinal or recreational use of cannabis, it remains illegal at the federal level. Biden’s big step toward…

“Big Covid waves may be coming,” said Gretchen Vogel in Science. Several “new and highly immune-evasive strains” that have evolved from the Omicron variant have scientists fearing another big Covid surge as winter approaches. While new cases, hospitalizations, and deaths have plateaued in the U.S., cases are once again rising in Europe—usually a harbinger of things to come on this side of the Atlantic. Early testing has provided troubling evidence that two emerging subvariants, BA.2.75.2 and BQ.1, have “a striking ability to evade antibodies” from vaccination and previous infections. This potential new wave is building even as only 4 percent of eligible Americans have gotten the new, bivalent booster, which should provide some protection against whatever is circulating this winter. “Once more people become infected with the new strains”…

Robotics engineers have found the perfect solution to make tiny sensor devices mobile, said Pranshu Verma in The Washington Post: Madagascar hissing cockroaches. Japanese researcher Kenjiro Fukuda has strapped sensors to the backs of the insects, with “a Bluetooth sensor for remote control and specialized computers that connect to the cockroach’s abdomen and send tiny shocks to direct it left or right.” Fukuda envisions cockroaches equipped with cameras and carbon dioxide sensors searching for survivors after disasters. Other scientists are also drawing inspiration from insects. An MIT professor, Kevin Chen, is working on tiny robots that “mimic the ways lightning bugs move, communicate, and fly.” Chen says the “complex structures” scientists can now create at insect scales would have been dismissed as science fiction just 10 years ago.…

New photos of Europa, Jupiter’s moon, add to evidence that it has an ocean under its icy surface—meaning it could harbor life. The close-up images were taken by NASA spacecraft Juno, which has been orbiting Jupiter since 2016. One photo shows long fractures crisscrossing the surface—fractures that may have been caused by rising and falling tides in a subterranean ocean. This adds to other data, such as magnetic field measurements indicating the presence of salty water, that suggest that Europa is indeed home to liquid water. As such, it remains one of the most likely candidates to harbor life in our solar system, along with some of Jupiter’s other moons and those orbiting Saturn. “I would not say there was some feature that we were like, ‘Oh, my God,…

(Seven Stories, $19) The affair described in Annie Ernaux’s Getting Lost, like those in Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary, “should be counted as one of the great liaisons of literature,’’ said Ankita Chakraborty in The Guardian. Ernaux, who last week was awarded a Nobel Prize for her full body of work, wrote about the relationship in her heralded 1991 novel, Simple Passion, and followed it up with this even more interesting account. Ernaux was 48 when she and a married 35-year-old Soviet diplomat began sleeping together in 1988, and Getting Lost, which is newly translated into English, consists entirely of her contemporaneous journal entries. This is not a love story; it’s a portrait of the author consumed by desire. “She is on her knees from the first page, in…

For Elissa Bassist, learning to speak out was a cure in itself, said Megan Broussard in NYMag.com. In late 2016, the essayist, humor writer, and Rumpus editor began experiencing a debilitating headache that triggered a two-year ordeal during which she saw 20-plus medical professionals and was subjected to misdiagnoses, misguided medication regimes, and many rude dismissals. “Communicating with doctors often felt like a bad date,” she says. Finally, an acupuncturist suggested that the spreading pain might be caused by “caged fury”—and Bassist bought in. She began writing about the many ways in which she’d been cultured as a young American woman to choose silence rather than ever risk being considered annoying, belligerent, emotional, or uncool. As she wrote, the pain lifted. And a book was born. Bassist’s debut, Hysterical,…

On the witch watch… You Won’t Be Alone This thought-provoking, hallucinatory debut feature from director Goran Stolevski is a singular work of folk horror. In 19th-century Macedonia, a mother promises her child to a witch who returns when the girl is 16. Transformed, the girl discovers she can inhabit the bodies of others, and does so, discovering what it is to be human. $6 on demand Hellbender It’s a good year for new witch movies. This lo-fi offering, a 2021 festival release made by an upstate New York family, is the spellbinding deep-woods tale of a teenager who discovers that her mother has been concealing that both of them are creatures who thrive on other beings’ blood. Shudder Hocus Pocus 2 Maybe something lighter? Almost three decades after the…

More than 2,600 officials who worked across 50 federal agencies between 2016 and 2021 disclosed stock investments in companies while those same companies were lobbying their agencies for favorable policies. Over 1,800 federal officials reported owning or trading at least one of four major tech stocks: Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon. The Wall Street Journal TikTok is facing questions about how much it takes from gifts donated through its platform. As a test, BBC staff in London sent digital gifts worth $106 to a reporter based in Syria through his TikTok livestream. At the end of the livestream, the balance of the Syrian test account was $33. TikTok had taken 69 percent of the value of the gifts. BBC.com The average starting salary of workers who graduated with a bachelor’s…

Southwest Florida has begun the work of recovering from one of the worst hurricanes in recent American history, and Mercy-USA (mercyusa.org) is already bringing relief to stricken residents of affected areas. Last week, it began delivering urgently needed supplies, including clothing, diapers, and wheelchairs, to the hard-hit community of Fort Myers, working with local shelters for those whose houses have been destroyed. Flood response is at the center of Mercy-USA’s mission, and it has cooperated with local organizations all around the world, from Kentucky to Pakistan. In 2021, Mercy-USA provided more than $58 million in food and shelter alone. It has also engaged in longer-term projects, such as irrigating farmland in Kenya and building a secondary school in Pakistan. Each charity we feature has earned a four-star overall rating…

Matthew Townsend Bloomberg Businessweek It turns out Americans aren’t ready to do all our shopping online after all, said Matthew Townsend. In the first waves of the pandemic, when physical stores shut down, the almost universal assumption was that having gotten used to the ease of online shopping, consumers were ready to permanently change their habits. That was wrong. The “e-commerce wave has receded,” and in some categories, such as clothing, online’s share of sales is back to what it was before the pandemic. That has devastated businesses who relied on the conviction that shopping had changed forever. “Amazon is scaling back its sprawling delivery operation”; other companies, such as Shopify and Wayfair, are “issuing public mea culpas” for projections that proved to be way off. Overall online sales growth…

This week’s question: The joint winners of an Ohio bass-fishing tournament were stripped of their prizes when the bass they caught were found to have lead weights inside their stomachs. Please come up with a name for a true-crime film about these fishing fraudsters. Last week’s contest: A Welsh woman who was jilted by her boyfriend of four years on her wedding day cheered herself up by going through the whole ceremony and reception without him. Please come up with a name for an unexpected wedding for one. THE WINNER: “Better Halved” Martha Herp, Cocoa Beach, Fla. SECOND PLACE: “Near Mrs.” Phyllis Klein, Forest Hills, N.Y. THIRD PLACE: “The Princeless Bride” Jay Detweiler, Goshen, Ind. For runners-up and complete contest rules, please go to theweek.com/contest. How to enter: Submissions…