The Week Magazine November 4, 2022

The nature of the news business is that much of what you read is bound to be bad. The market for “everything is going well” stories is small. In its earliest days, USA Today tried to put a good spin on the news (“Miracle: 327 survive, 55 die” was one famous early headline about a plane crash). No one has repeated the experiment. If you want to look around the world, there is a lot to be depressed about. Russia and China top the news; both are slipping back into the darkest days of totalitarianism—and in the case of Russia, starting a conflict in Europe beyond anything the USSR dared. But rather than writing about China and Russia, I thought I’d note a couple of the extraordinary and offbeat stories…

What happened Chinese President Xi Jinping secured an unprecedented third term as head of the ruling Communist Party this week, cementing his status as the most dominant figure in Chinese politics since Mao Zedong. Xi’s ascension to a third five-year term upended a two-term limit that was written into the party constitution in 1982 to prevent a return to the one-man rule of the Mao era; Xi had that limit removed in 2018. He further tightened his grip on the world’s most populous nation by overhauling the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee, forcing out market-friendly moderates and promoting allies and protégés—though, conspicuously, none young and experienced enough to be marked as a potential successor. In a speech to the National Congress, Xi, 69, touted China’s growing “international influence,” saying its…

Kendell Cummings was hunting with three friends from his wrestling team when he heard a peculiar crash in the forest ahead. The Northwest College sophomore quickly discovered a grizzly bear pummeling his teammate, Brady Lowry. Cummings leaped in and grabbed the grizzly, allowing Lowry to escape, then played dead to stop the bear’s attack—a tactic endorsed by the National Park Service. “If we all didn’t have these friendships and each other,” Cummings said, “we would not have come off that mountain alive.” Italian doctors successfully removed a brain tumor from a patient who was not only fully conscious but also played his saxophone throughout the nine-hour procedure. The 35-year-old, identified as C.Z., played the sax during the surgery so that the 10-member team could map various sections of his brain,…

What happened Prime Minister Rishi Sunak took office this week in a Britain reeling from financial crisis and political turmoil. The 42-year-old former chancellor of the exchequer, whose parents are of Indian descent, is the country’s first nonwhite leader—and its third leader in two months. After Boris Johnson resigned under a pile of scandals, Sunak lost the leadership race to Liz Truss, in a vote put to the Conservative Party’s 172,000 dues-paying party members. But then Truss, too, quit in just 45 days, after her program of unfunded tax cuts tanked the British pound, jacked up the country’s budget deficit, and required the Bank of England to intervene to prevent complete financial meltdown. Those horrors were exactly what Sunak had predicted when he debated Truss. So while Johnson initially…

What happened As Ukrainian forces advanced toward Kherson and Russian troops dug in for what could be a major battle for control of the strategically valuable port city, Russia this week warned the United Nations that Ukraine plans to detonate a dirty bomb, which could provoke “uncontrolled escalation.” The U.S., France, and Britain swiftly challenged the idea that Ukraine would detonate a dirty bomb—a conventional explosive wrapped in radioactive waste—in its own territory. Instead, Western leaders said Russia could be contemplating a “false flag” attack. With its proxy officials fleeing Kherson, Russia also claimed Ukraine was plotting to blow up a crucial dam in the region. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that in fact Russia had mined the dam, planning to blame a catastrophic explosion on Ukraine. While the…

In the closing days of this midterm election campaign, the mood among Democrats is “apocalyptic,” said Bess Levin in Vanity Fair. A voter backlash against the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision seems to be fading, and the latest polls have led FiveThirtyEight.com to estimate that Republicans have an 81 percent chance of regaining control of the House of Representatives, and a 45 percent chance of winning the Senate. A GOP-held House would mean total obstruction of Joe Biden’s agenda, of course, and “round-the-clock hearings about Hunter Biden,” the president’s wayward son. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy—who is in line to become Speaker—is already planning a host of other Benghazi-like committee investigations. They will include probes into how the Biden administration ended the Afghanistan War, its border policy, and the FBI…