Indholdsfortegnelse for January 20, 2023 i The Week Magazine

Roughly two decades ago, the Republican Party cemented the practice of never bringing any legislation to the floor of the House unless it was supported by a “majority of the majority.” The principle, known as the Hastert Rule, after House Speaker Dennis Hastert, essentially quashed any bipartisan legislation that wasn’t endorsed by House leadership—a predictable, if unfortunate, step in the polarization of Congress. Now the 118th Congress is starting with a new twist that turns that old rule on its head. It’s the “minority of the majority” rule: Nothing will happen in the House unless it gains the backing of the most extreme—and frankly, unhinged—faction of the majority party. Pundits used to decry the power of the House speaker to strangle new ideas in the crib. Most likely, in this…

The University of Southern California’s school of social work will no longer refer to the world beyond the classroom as “the field.” An email to staff and students explained that such terms as “fieldwork” or “going into the field” may have “connotations for descendants of slavery or immigrant workers that are not benign.” The new preferred term is “practicum.” A proposed bill in Arizona would ban teachers from using students’ preferred pronouns that differ from their “biological sex” without written parental consent. The bill’s sponsor, Republican state Sen. John Kavanagh, dismissed concerns that some students might find it hard to obtain consent for the new pronouns. Kavanagh said that parents “can’t be kept in the dark” about their kids’ gender issues. In other news Classified files found in Biden’s old…

Rowena Chiu spent just a few months working for Harvey Weinstein, but the experience changed her life, said Mark Smith in The Times (U.K.). She was a 23-year-old recent Oxford graduate when Miramax hired her to be Weinstein’s assistant in 1998. She soon learned she had to anticipate every need to keep him from flying into a rage. “If Harvey is leaving [his hotel], you need to have brought the luggage out and tipped the bellboy. The limo has to be arriving. The private jet has to be waiting. Otherwise he’s going to be shouting, ‘Where’s the f---ing limo?’” At the Venice Film Festival that year, Weinstein kept pushing her boundaries, insisting she be his “designated late-night person” in his hotel suite, then requesting a massage before attempting to…

Conservative leader Matt Schlapp, a prominent ally of former President Trump, was accused last week of sexually groping a male Republican aide in October. The aide, a former staffer on Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker’s campaign, said Schlapp bought him drinks after an event and on the ride back to the hotel began fondling his leg and “grabbed my junk and pummeled it at length.” The staffer, whose name was withheld by news outlets, said Schlapp then invited him up to his hotel room, but that he declined. The accuser made a video the next day, Oct. 20, to record and detail his allegations, told his wife and the Walker campaign at the time, and provided The Daily Beast with texts from Schlapp asking him to meet with him…

Timothy L. O’Brien Bloomberg No one was shocked when the tax returns recently released by congressional Democrats showed that Donald Trump paid little or no taxes from 2015 to 2020, said Timothy L. O’Brien. But the returns do contain some disturbing details, and not a few surprises. To avoid paying taxes, Trump took “hundreds of millions” in highly questionable deductions that an IRS audit would have almost certainly challenged. Incredibly, Trump maintained a bank account in China in 2015, 2016, and 2017. Over two years, he also had at least $100 million in income from more than 20 countries—creating major conflicts of interest for Trump’s foreign policy. Did Trump’s income, loans, and business deals with foreign entities, including Russia, create “a national security threat”? No wonder Trump refused to…

Florida man and woman were arrested after they called 911 to get help moving the contents of a home they’d broken into. Responding deputies from the Polk County Sheriff’s Office found the pair inside a home they’d entered through an unlocked door and recognized the man as the suspect in the burglary of a Dollar General store earlier that day. The woman explained that she’d called 911 hoping cops might help them move some large items from the house and give them a ride to the airport, so they could visit New York City for the weekend. The sheriff’s office said that deputies “DID give them a ride,” but “to the Polk Pokey.” A Japanese man spent 3 million yen ($23,000) on a handmade costume in order to fulfill his…

BRAZIL Jamil Chade UOL Soccer idol Pelé, who died of cancer at 82 last month after watching one last World Cup, was Brazil’s “greatest ambassador to the world,” said Jamil Chade. During his two decades dominating “the beautiful game,” Pelé charmed prime ministers, queens, popes, and even two U.S. presidents with his warm smile, media-ready manner, and rags-to-riches tale—in fact, as a boy he learned to play soccer with a ball made of literal rags. He helped craft an image of Brazil as a “friendly nation” of “joy, art, and surprise.” This was, of course, “mere illusion”: The Brazil of the 1960s and ’70s was “an unjust, racist, and authoritarian country,” and Pelé endured monkey chants and other slurs. But he shrugged off the insults and forged a path for…

“I was born to play football, just like Beethoven was born to write music and Michelangelo was born to paint.” Pelé, quoted in WLFI.com “The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.” G.K. Chesterton, quoted in Atlantic Council “It’s not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.” Seneca, quoted in EastMojo “They say golf is like life, but don’t believe them. Golf is more complicated than that.” Golfer Gardner Dickinson, quoted in First Call Golf “Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right, from the frame of their nature to knowledge.” John Adams, quoted in Patch “The smallest act…

Competition grows in digital ads Google and Meta are losing their lock on digital advertising, said Patience Haggin in The Wall Street Journal. In 2022, the two giants accounted for 48.4 percent of the digital ad market, the first time their share fell below 50 percent since 2014. “The ad businesses of Google and Meta are still growing,” but the overall market for digital ads is slowing after a “pandemic bump,” as advertisers worry about a possible recession and users spend less time online. Meanwhile, competition is growing, especially from Amazon and TikTok—though the latter still accounts for just 2 percent of overall digital ad spending. Another ongoing challenge for Meta is Apple’s 2021 move forcing apps to allow users to opt out of tracking, which has hurt its…

Teenagers who use social media frequently experience changes in their brain not seen in those who don’t log on as often, a new study has found. Researchers at the University of North Carolina studied 169 middle schoolers between the ages of 12 and 15, a period of rapid brain development. They conducted three neurological scans, at approximately one-year intervals, while the subjects were playing a computer game that delivered rewards and punishments. The most regular users of Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat showed increased activation in three brain areas over the years: those used for reward processing, picking out what stands out in an environment, and regulation and control. Kids who used social media less, by contrast, showed less activity in those brain areas. The results suggest that “teens who…

Allegra Goodman’s best-selling new novel, Sam, is a portrait of a girl who loves to climb and doesn’t like to be told to plan for her future. Below, Goodman, the author of Intuition and Kaaterskill Falls, names six favorite recent discoveries. Women Talking by Miriam Toews (2018). Sarah Polley adapted Toews’ novel into a current movie, but you should read the book first. The women of a traditional religious community gather to debate what to do after suffering a series of brutal rapes. Should they stay or should they go? Submit or fight? This novel shook me. It’s strange, riveting, radical art. Thank You, Mr. Nixon: Stories by Gish Jen (2022). Witty, poignant, and prescient, these are stories of China and the Chinese diaspora. They are also stories of…

3 “At this point, being a King Gizzard fan is pretty much a full-time job,” said Stuart Berman in Pitchfork. The prolific psychedelic rock sextet from Melbourne released five albums in 2022, including three in October. The band’s firehose-level output and facility with countless styles—prog-rock, synth-pop, thrash metal, “even rap”—have turned the 25-album King Gizzard catalog into “the big-box one-stop for all your musical needs.” If you’re not sure where else to start with these genre benders, try this funky, far-reaching recent effort, which ranks as “one of the best front-to-back records in their catalog.” Though the seven songs stretch to between six and 13 minutes long, these people aren’t running out of ideas, said Tim Sendra in AllMusic. “They’ve never been tied to any rules,” and that’s what makes…

“If cabernet sauvignon is the movie star and pinot noir the indie fave, then a Rhone-based wine is the character actor that intrigues,” said Virginie Boone in Food & Wine. At least that’s the way it is in Napa or Sonoma, where wines like the three below are relative bargains, “offering complexity, savory spice, and brooding earthiness.” 2019 Gondak Campbell McKinney Vineyard Grenache ($28). In this Russian River Valley grenache, “persistent acidity lifts crisp flavors of cranberry and wild strawberry to new levels.” 2019 Ramey Sonoma Coast Syrah ($40). Ramey’s well-structured syrah “coaxes forest pine, white pepper, and decadent red fruit from a silky, supple palate.” 2019 Benovia Sonoma Mountain Grenache ($45). This true-to-the-grape grenache is “fruity and earthy in equal measure,” with notes of lavender and sage yielding…

Every year, from Nov. 30 to Jan. 9, the dozen or so residents of Wiseman, Alaska, never see the sun, said Katie Siber in Outside. Until I spent the winter solstice at America’s northernmost wilderness retreat, the idea of such sustained darkness unnerved me. I’d heard stories of people losing their minds in the long polar night. Fortunately, during my single week at Mollie and Sean Busby’s three-cabin Arctic Hive, “the darkness felt benevolent.” As my hosts and I explored with skis, snowshoes, and dogsleds, “long slow dawns bled into long luxuriant dusks,” and the limited natural light we had “made the forests and tundra appear soft-focus, like a dream.” Without the coming and going of full sunlight, “clock time began to feel less relevant,” and I slept for long…

U.S. auto sales fell to their lowest level in a decade in 2022 “after another year of dodging supply chain issues,” said Kalea Hall and Breana Noble in The Detroit News. Sales likely fell below 14 million vehicles last year from 17 million annually before the pandemic. With inventories low and interest rates at 20-year highs, dealers will have to “offer more incentives to get some product moving” to make 2023 any better. The average new-car loan rate reached 6.5 percent in late 2022, up from 4.1 percent a year earlier. Deposits on new vehicles rose to a record $6,780 as buyers struggled to keep monthly payments affordable. Amazon: Job cuts to reach 18,000 as growth stalls Amazon confirmed this week that it was laying off more than 18,000 employees,…

FTC targets noncompete clauses Federal regulators have a plan to “raise wages and increase competition among businesses” by banning noncompete agreements, said Noam Scheiber in The New York Times. Such employment clauses, which prevent employees from leaving to work for a rival, now cover everyone from business consultants to nurses to fast-food workers. Studies show they make it harder for startups to challenge established companies, and they “hold down pay, because job switching is one of the more reliable ways of securing a raise.” Proponents of banning noncompetes say wages could increase $300 billion a year. The Federal Trade Commission has begun the process of public comment on the proposed rules, which could still be “vulnerable to legal challenges.” No protection for crypto accounts Customers who deposited cryptocurrencies with…

Alan S. Blinder The Wall Street Journal “What if inflation suddenly dropped,” asked economist Alan S. Blinder, “and no one noticed?” That’s not an abstract question: In fact, it’s close to what’s happening. We now have five months of data from the second half of 2022, and for those months inflation was down to 2.5 percent, almost back to the Federal Reserve’s target of 2 percent. It’s easy to miss “this stunning development” because most people concentrate on price changes measured over 12-month periods. Normally, that’s the right thing to do. But when the numbers change abruptly, 12-month averages can leave you watching recent history rather than current events. Today is one of those times. The Federal Reserve can’t relax yet; there are some catches. First, this represents just five…

This week’s question: Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, has titled his new tell-all book about the royal family Spare. If Prince William, Harry’s brother and the likely future king, were to respond with his own book, what should he title it? Last week’s contest: A Chinese gamer said two families recently paid him to outscore their children so decisively that they would abandon their dreams of a pro gaming career and refocus on school. Come up with a job title for someone who specializes in crushing kids’ dreams of gaming glory. THE WINNER: “The End Gamer” Skip Flanagan, Roseville, Calif. SECOND PLACE: “Game Over-lord” John Bregoli, Weymouth, Mass. THIRD PLACE: “The Terminator” Richard Wolf, Westminster, Md. For runners-up and complete contest rules, please go to theweek.com/contest. How to…

A harrowing accident nearly disfigured Jay Leno for life, said Aili Nahas in People. The comedian and former Tonight Show host is a fanatical car collector, and last November he was working on the undercarriage of an antique car when it leaked gasoline all over his face. “I knew how close I was to the pilot light, and I thought ‘Uh oh,’” said Leno, 72. A spark set his face and much of his upper body alight. “I’m not a panicky guy, but I knew if I breathed in, I could scorch my lungs.” It took 10 seconds for a friend to pull him out and help him smother the flames with a shirt. “Any longer than that,” he said, and “I could have lost my eye.” His extensive…

Fareed Zakaria The Washington Post After years of dominating politics around the world, “populism is flailing,” said Fareed Zakaria. The U.S. House of Representatives just went through “a nervous breakdown in full public view,” as a far-right populist faction blackmailed and weakened new House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. In the U.K., Brexit—“perhaps the ultimate populist cause”—has wrought economic chaos and havoc within the Conservative Party, which has suffered through five prime ministers in six years. Britain now has the most anemic economy of any country in the G-7. In South America, both left and right populism has failed miserably: The Trump acolyte Jair Bolsonaro was just ousted in an election, whereas in Chile 62 percent of voters rejected a new constitution created by far-left populist politicians. “Populism thrives as an…

SWITZERLAND Matthias Benz Neue Zürcher Zeitung What if you can no longer count on skiing in the Alps? asked Matthias Benz. What will be “the economic future for Swiss mountain regions?” That’s the question many Swiss are asking this week as we gaze on the appalling sight of green mountainsides in the middle of ski season. The country began 2023 with the warmest New Year’s Day temperatures ever recorded, with the mercury soaring to a record 68 degrees in the Alpine town of Delemont. There’s simply no snow, and with global warming only increasing, this could be the new normal. Still, we “shouldn’t panic.” In the short and medium term, “ski areas can manage by turning on the snow cannons.” Events for skiing’s World Cup in Adelboden, for example, were…

Mosquitoes are developing resistance to the potions we use to kill them, reports The Washington Post. In a study in Cambodia and Vietnam, 78 percent of mosquitoes sampled by researchers had a genetic mutation that made them resistant to permethrin, a common insecticide. This mutation has been seen previously, but never in such high proportions. In the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, one insecticide used killed only 10 percent of mosquitoes, and another didn’t get rid of any. The researchers say the mutation is confined to Southeast Asia for now, but that the mosquito in question—Aedes aegypti, which carries dengue, yellow fever, chikungunya, Zika, and other diseases—is a hardy traveler. “They like artificial water containers, including jars, used tires, plastic cups, basins, and pods,” says lead author Shinji Kasai, from…

(Riverhead, $30) “All hail the new Puzo!” said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. In a New Delhi–set modern crime epic that recalls Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, author Deepti Kapoor proves herself a natural storyteller with “a cinematic eye” who piles in enough status details and “crunching fight scenes” to earn forgiveness for going so light on subtlety. The protagonist is a poor kid from rural northern India who after being sold as a servant becomes right-hand man to Sunny Wadia, the semi-enlightened playboy scion of a powerful criminal family. Of course, “everyone is gorgeous,” including the journalist who begins an affair with Sunny while investigating his family. Kapoor clearly intended her sophomore work to be half gangster thriller, half social novel, said Lorraine Berry in the Los…

A Dangerous Business by Jane Smiley (Knopf, $28) “Jane Smiley clearly knows her way around a story,” said Cory Oldweiler in The Boston Globe. In the Pulitzer Prize winner’s latest novel, a young prostitute in Monterey during the waning days of the California Gold Rush decides to investigate a string of murders of fellow sex workers. Though the tale can feel “incongruously cozy,” it “brims with delightful little touches,” and its concern for the dangers that all women face is “as resonant in Smiley’s Wild West as it is in today’s United States.” The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks-Dalton (Grand Central, $28) “Lily Brooks-Dalton has a different sort of vision for the post-apocalypse,” said Amy Rowland in The New York Times. The author’s second novel imagines a Florida so…

3 Iggy Pop’s latest album “bristles with wild-eyed energy,” said A.D. Amorosi in Variety. Now 75 yet “filled with his usual lust for life,” the godfather of punk almost sounds like he’s returned to his Detroit teenhood, “singing at his juvenile-delinquent finest” on the manic opener, “Frenzy,” before applying his “lizardy charms” to the more melodic rockers that follow. But the whole project feels “oddly unnecessary,” said Kitty Empire in The Guardian. Surrounded by stars who idolize him, including producer Andrew Watt, drummer Chad Smith, and bassist Duff McKagan, “Pop is impersonating himself” rather than continuing with the more interesting musical experimentations he’s pursued in recent years. Every Loser is “a perfectly serviceable, pacy rock record,” but not much else. Still, the album “emphasizes all of the things the man…

Recent sports documentaries… Break Point The producers of F1: Drive to Survive offer a grit-and-grind inside look at the potential next-generation stars of tennis, including players like Iga Swiatek, who won last year’s U.S. and French opens, and Nick Kyrgios, who lost to Novak Djokovic in the men’s Wimbledon final. Netflix Pelé The recent death of soccer’s GOAT is reason enough to revisit this 2021 documentary, which celebrates the Brazilian legend’s skills and achievements on the pitch without devolving into hagiography. Netflix Boys in Blue A new four-part docuseries from Friday Night Lights director Peter Berg settles in at a majority-Black high school in North Minneapolis to follow the football season that unfolds in the wake of protests over the police killing of George Floyd. As always, the team…

The S&P 500 fell 19.4 percent for 2022, the biggest decline since 2008, and most investment analysts are not predicting a strong recovery for 2023. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley project little change over the year, with end-of-2023 targets of 4,000 and 3,900 for the index—close to its current level of 3,960. JPMorgan Chase projects a slight uptick to 4,200. Fortune Total tax revenue on marijuana from the first legal pot sales through the first three months of 2022 hit $11.2 billion. By the end of year, marijuana use was legal in 21 states, D.C., and two U.S. territories. The Washington Post The World Bank cut its forecast for global growth in 2023 from 3 percent to 1.7 percent. That would represent the worst performance in three decades, except for…

Close to 2 billion people worldwide don’t have safe drinking water, a human rights violation that WaterAid (www.wateraid.org) is working to solve. Active in more than 30 countries, the nonprofit helps communities access water for drinking, sewage, and washing. With the help of local partners, the organization has improved more than 60 health centers in Zambia and allowed more than half a million Madagascans with disabilities to access sanitized water in 2021. Additionally, WaterAid has provided decent toilets for 374,000 people in India and challenged taboos about hygiene during menstruation. In many communities, WaterAid wells have improved the lives of women, eliminating the hours each day that they spent bringing water for their families from distant sources. Each charity we feature has earned a four-star overall rating from Charity…

Good week for: Hawaiians, who once again lead the national life-expectancy rankings, according to a new study. The average Hawaiian can expect to live 80.7 years—8.8 years longer than the average person in Mississippi, which ranked last. Baby steps, after Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene—who has promoted conspiracy theories such as the claim that Jewish-owned “space lasers” cause wildfires—acknowledged that she may have “gotten sucked into some things I had seen on the internet.” Rebranding, with the news that the U.S. State Department will start referring to that nation as “Turkiye.” Professor Erdag Goknar of Duke University explained that the association of the country with the bird was “a denigrating legacy” of the colonial era. Bad week for: Rebranding, after the Jan. 6 committee released an internal White House email relaying…

Paris The French government is rushing aid to bakers to stave off a mass closure of bakeries. Energy prices have shot up because of the war in Ukraine, while inflation has pushed up the cost of ingredients. One Parisian baker said his $12,780 monthly electricity bill was almost as much as his bakery earned in a month, and that to pay it he’d have to triple the cost of his baguettes from 1 to 3 euros. To prevent such a horror, the government says, it will lean on energy companies to renegotiate energy bills and allow bakers to pay in installments. “A baguette isn’t merely water, yeast, flour, and salt,” said French President Emmanuel Macron. “It’s also a lot of savoir-faire, an ancestral method jealously guarded.” Foreigners barred from…

Daniel Craig wanted to kill off James Bond for years, said Jonathan Dean in The Sunday Times (U.K.). On a drive back from the 2006 Berlin premiere of Casino Royale, his first turn as 007, he realized with some unease that he’d made a long-term commitment. “I had genuinely thought I would do one Bond movie, then it would be over,” he said. “But by then we knew we had a hit on our hands.” [SPOILER ALERT] He asked the film’s co-producer how many more installments he should expect to do. “Four,” she replied. “I said, ‘OK. Then can I kill him off?’ She said, ‘Yes.’” Executives at MGM balked—“[They] were, like, ‘What are you talking about? Are you out of your minds?’”—but in Craig’s fifth Bond film, 2021’s…

Noah Smith Noahpinion.Substack.com Climate change is too important a problem to leave to the “prophets of enviro-doom,” said Noah Smith. Biologist Paul Ehrlich appeared on CBS’s 60 Minutes last week to talk about climate change, and the 90-year-old biologist echoed some of the dire warnings he made in his 1968 best-seller The Population Bomb—even though those predictions were “spectacularly wrong.” Ehrlich warned of unchecked population growth creating massive global famines in the 1970s and 1980s; instead, we had exponential increases in crop yields, lower fertility rates, and a steep decline in malnutrition deaths. Ehrlich’s simplistic “line go up” thinking—that extrapolating current data predicts the future—failed to account for human ingenuity. That same fallacy is being repeated by today’s “de-growther” movement, which insists the only solution to climate change is…

“Ending the war would be a blessing to the Russian people and Putin’s budget, but it would also crystallize Russia’s status as a ramshackle power. Russia’s intrinsic vulnerabilities would be thrown into relief: its backward and shrinking population, its unwieldy geographic expanse, its shaky imperial rule over distant and diverse populations who have no reason to love Moscow. The Russian Federation would be seen anew through the prism of Ukraine’s national rise. How exactly the war might yet play out is far from certain, but the world now knows it will be managing the demotion of Russia from putative great power to the sick man of Eurasia.” Holman W. Jenkins Jr. in The Wall Street Journal…

TURKEY Celal Baslangic Arti Gercek No one yet knows who will take on Turkey’s powerful leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in June’s presidential election, said Celal Baslangic, and that’s just as well. Whoever the opposition names as candidate will face a vicious smear campaign and likely political persecution as Erdogan brings all the apparatus of the state against him. Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, for example, one of Erdogan’s “strongest opponents,” was recently sentenced to more than two years in prison for “insulting public officials”—he had described those responsible for canceling the first round of the 2019 municipal elections, which he won, as fools—and that’s before he even declared himself to be running. Days later, paramilitary leader Sinan Ates was assassinated, and government interference with the investigation strongly implies that the state…

INDIA Flavia Agnes The Wire India’s Hindu nationalist government is using a “gruesome,” high-profile crime as an excuse to stop Hindu women from marrying Muslim men, said Flavia Agnes. Last year, a 28-year-old Muslim chef-blogger named Aaftab Poonawala allegedly killed his live-in girlfriend, Shraddha Walkar, a Hindu, and sawed her body into pieces. Poonawala is now on trial for murder. The tragic case ought to have galvanized the government to take action against domestic abusers. But rather than go after the very real problem of violence against women, the Maharashtra state government is targeting the imaginary problem of Hindu women being lured away from their faith by Muslim men. This “conspiracy theory,” called “love jihad,” is being promoted by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. Maharashtra authorities have announced a panel…

One major political reality became clear during the “disastrous” House speaker battle, said Charles M. Blow in The New York Times. “Republicans are putting Donald Trump out to pasture.” Facing multiple investigations and reeling from “a staggering string of losses” by his handpicked candidates in the midterms, Trump suffered the public humiliation of seeing 20 far-right hard-liners ignore his pleas to drop their opposition to Rep. Kevin McCarthy. “Vote for Kevin, close the deal,” Trump beseeched the holdouts—but for days and multiple votes, they shrugged him off. Trump’s hold on the GOP has been broken, said Charlie Sykes in MSNBC.com. Rebel Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) and Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) “were his people”—but said Trump was wrong to back McCarthy. Gaetz “actually mocked” the ex-president, cracking that choosing personnel “wasn’t…

“Three years into the pandemic, the coronavirus continues to impress virologists with its swift evolution,” said Carl Zimmer in The New York Times. The new Omicron subvariant XBB.1.5 is the most transmissible version yet. It now accounts for more than a fourth of Covid cases nationwide and over 70 percent of cases in the Northeast. The subvariant’s “potent array of mutations” enables it to better evade antibodies from prior infection and vaccination and attach to cells. After more than a month of holiday travel and indoor gatherings, Covid hospitalizations have increased 81 percent since Thanksgiving, with people age 70 and over most likely to get seriously ill. The good news is that XBB.1.5 does not produce more-serious illness, said Jacob Stern in The Atlantic. “Vaccines and boosters still offer…

A “bike desk” unveiled this week comes with a twist: As you pedal, it captures your kinetic energy “to allow you to work, exercise, and generate your own clean electricity all at once,” said Justine Calma in The Verge. Produced by Acer, a company known mainly as a computer maker, and called the eKinekt BD 3, the bike has an app (of course) to track calories burned, time pedaled, and watts generated. Don’t expect to power your house with it: Using Acer’s own numbers, by pedaling for an hour “you might prevent emissions equivalent to walking rather than driving 0.132 miles in a gas-fired car.” Made largely out of recycled plastic, the device will retail for $999 when it becomes available in Taiwan this April and worldwide in June.…

(Pegasus, $28) “Children’s authors are, to say the least, complicated people,” said Michael Dirda in The Washington Post. Roald Dahl, author of such beloved classics as Matilda, The BFG, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, remains, more than 30 years after his death, a hard character to pin down. At times kind, “irresistibly charming,” and “outrageously funny,” he could also be controlling, “waspishly opinionated,” and “swaggeringly” offensive. His finest fiction for children, while often advocating kindness and displaying “tractor-beam” narrative power, also exhibits an uncomfortable enthusiasm for depicting humanity’s savagery and cruelty. Matthew Dennison’s “succinct” new portrait of the British author won’t supplant two longer previous biographies, but it captures Dahl’s mercurial nature, delivering “just enough information” for “all but the most ardent Dahl devotee.” Dennison’s version of the story…

Art Spiegelman can’t seem to get away from Maus, said Alexandra Alter in The New York Times. After a Tennessee school district banned his Pulitzer-winning graphic novel last January, the 74-year-old author and comics artist spent much of his year answering requests to defend the book that had already overshadowed everything else he’s done. Maus, which first appeared in serialized form from 1980 to 1991, depicts Nazis as cats and Jews as mice while it recounts the harrowing experiences of Spiegelman’s parents during the Holocaust. At a time of rising censorship and anti-Semitism, Spiegelman felt it was important to speak out against parental attempts to sanitize history. “They want a kinder, gentler, fuzzier Holocaust,” he says. But he sometimes also wishes he could continue creating with the freedom he…

3 On her surprise new release, Little Simz “has a lot of important stuff to say,” said Andrew Sacher in Brooklyn Vegan. Following up on 2021’s Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, which was “one of the most ambitious rap albums in recent memory,” the acclaimed British rapper is in a more solemn mood on this “atmospheric” record, which blasts the music industry for undervaluing artists and laments the taboos in the Black community that surround mental health. No Thank You offers “gorgeous production, samples, and backing vocals,” but coming as it does from a major talent who canceled a 2022 U.S. tour citing financial and psychological strain, it’s an album that “asks you to listen to every word.” More than that, it’s an “unexpected gift,” said Ludovic Hunter-Tilney in the…

David Zipper Slate A century ago, a single company dominated the auto industry more thoroughly than Tesla dominates electric cars, said David Zipper, with a founder just as central to the “national zeitgeist” as Elon Musk. We’re talking, of course, about Henry Ford. Ford transformed American life—and then went on to inflict damage that’s hard to overstate on “both his company and his country.” Ford turbocharged auto production with interchangeable parts and the assembly line. “At one point, over half of all cars in the world were Model Ts.” On top of that, Ford raised wages and “produced a true vehicle for the masses”—something Musk has not come close to doing. Then things went sideways. Ford bought a newspaper and turned it into a vehicle for his “vicious anti-Semitism.” Musk,…