Indholdsfortegnelse for January 27, 2023 i The Week Magazine

By deepening droughts and drying up lakes and rivers, climate change is creating growing conflict over fresh water in many parts of the globe. The water wars have come to the sun-scorched American Southwest, which heavily depends on the dwindling Colorado River. As seven states and 40 million people face 30 percent cuts in river-water allocations this year, Scottsdale officials just turned off all municipal water to about 700 desert homes in an upscale neighborhood recently built in the Rio Verde Foothills of Arizona. (See The U.S. at a glance, p.7.) Shocked residents are paying a fortune to truck in water, and their various adaptations—including skipping showers and peeing outdoors to avoid flushing—are not sustainable. Homes bought for $2.5 million are virtually worthless. “It would be crazy to buy our…

Good week for: Moving on, after 91-year-old media tycoon Rupert Murdoch—who divorced his fourth wife, model Jerry Hall, six months ago—was spotted on a beach vacation in Barbados with a new flame, Ann-Lesley Smith, 66, the widow of late country star Chester Smith. The Dancing Queen, after Sweden’s new government proposed repealing regulations requiring restaurants and nightclubs to obtain a permit to allow dancing. “It is not reasonable for the state to regulate people’s dance,” said Justice Minister Gunnar Strömmer. Obamacare, as the 2010 Affordable Care Act is known, with the news that 16 million people bought their 2023 health insurance through Healthcare.gov—the highest number since ACA became law. New federal funding has substantially reduced premiums. Bad week for: Privilege, after a police video emerged of Larry Ellison, billionaire founder…

Derek Jeter has always rubbed some people the wrong way, said Brett Martin in GQ. Beloved by his fans, the legendary New York Yankees shortstop—who retired from playing in 2014 after 20 seasons in pinstripes—was viewed by critics as a bland, calculating celebrity whose famous smile hid his unwillingness to reveal himself in any way. “Maybe it’s a character flaw, but it takes me a long time to trust people,” says Jeter, 48. “It’s gotten me to this point. You can’t turn off and on who you are, right? I’ve just always had trust issues.” That stems at least in part from his experience growing up biracial in Kalamazoo, Mich., four decades ago. “You get people laughing and whispering and pointing,” he says. “You walk into a room when…

Mark Gongloff Bloomberg To adapt to a changing climate, people will have to move out of places that have become “too dangerous for habitation,” said Mark Gongloff—and that includes large swaths of California. In just a few weeks, California has gone from “perilously dry” to being underwater, as a band of “atmospheric rivers” unleashed torrential rain and rampaging floods and mudslides. At least $1 billion in damage is expected. The current deluge “used to be seen as a once-in–1,000 years event,” but climate change has made extreme swings between severe droughts and floods “all too familiar.” In California and elsewhere, people prefer to live “near beaches, rivers, and unspoiled forests,” but the flooding and mudslides even threatened the million-dollar homes of Oprah Winfrey, Ellen DeGeneres, and Prince Harry in…

“Top-secret security clearance is held by about 1.3 million Americans, spread across the intelligence community, military, federal law enforcement agencies, State Department, White House, congressional oversight committees, personnel in other branches of the government—even the Commerce Department!—and contractors who handle classified information as part of their duties. With classified documents turning up in a Florida resort storeroom and a Delaware garage housing a vintage Corvette, maybe a better question than ‘Is this evidence of nefarious activity?’ would be ‘Is this evidence that the government classifies way too much information?’” Jim Geraghty in The Washington Post…

UNITED KINGDOM James Marriott The Times America’s culture wars are affecting British political attitudes, said James Marriott. People usually get more right-wing as they age, but surveys show that Millennials in the U.K. are bucking that trend and remaining on the Left. European Millennials, though, are following the traditional path and growing conservative, even voting in large numbers for far-right leaders, like Italy’s Giorgia Meloni. Why the difference? It’s likely because of English-speaking social media, which is dominated by U.S. arguments. Psychologically, many British people now effectively “inhabit an American world, obsessing over American politics, American injustices, and American Supreme Court rulings.” And because American Millennials—horrified by “the conspiracist, anti-democratic American right”—have remained progressive, so, too, have their British peers. The non–English speaking Europeans, meanwhile, have their own internet spaces…

ARGENTINA Sergio Zabalza Página 12 Argentine rugby has a violence problem, said Sergio Zabalza. Argentines may think of rugby players as “good kids from rich families,” but in reality, these private-school athletes regularly make headlines for “some outrage” or another, such as tweeting racist insults, starting bar brawls–or even committing murder. Right now in Buenos Aires, eight players from a regional team are standing trial for allegedly beating to death law student Fernando Báez Sosa outside a dance club in 2020; most were teenagers at the time. And they’re not the first: In 2006, three Argentine rugby players vacationing in Brazil allegedly killed an Argentine tourist but absconded before they could face justice. When was the last time you heard about a rabid band of tennis players, swimmers, volleyball players,…

“It’s one of those only-in-America stories,” said Jill Filipovic in CNN. Two weeks ago, a 6-year-old boy in Newport News, Va., took his mother’s legally purchased 9mm pistol to school in his backpack and fired a single round into his first-grade teacher, Abby Zwerner, wounding her seriously but not fatally. Police say the incident was not an accident—unlike the hundreds of shootings by young children that occur every year—and police took the boy into custody but didn’t charge him because of his age. The investigation is focused on how his parents stored the gun. Because of our country’s “insane gun culture,” Virginia, however, lacks any laws regulating how guns are secured in homes. Adults who do not lock up their killing machines “should be held liable for their negligence.”…

“Regardless of how you feel about the Internal Revenue Service,” said Alexis Leondis in Bloomberg, it’s “hard to refute” that “the current system to ferret out wrongdoers is terrible.” The underfunded, understaffed agency, which relies on woefully outdated IT, fails to collect at least $500 billion in owed taxes every year. For individuals making at least $1 million annually, the audit rate fell from 8.4 percent in 2010 to just 2.4 percent in 2019, while the corporate audit rate was cut in half. “In a move that would only make it worse,” House Republicans voted last week to block most of the $80 billion allocated last year to modernize the IRS and bolster enforcement over the next decade. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates the GOP plan would “increase…

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26) The very existence of a memoir by Janet Malcolm raises a question, said Charles Finch in The New York Times. “How could a writer so skeptical of subjective stories write an autobiography?” After all, the longtime New Yorker writer emerged alongside Joan Didion as one of the two most important long-form journalists of America’s postwar era because she routinely shed light on the unreliability of all narrative. Still Pictures, which arrives 19 months after Malcolm’s death, at 86, solves the problem her skepticism poses “with characteristic elegance.” In each short chapter, Malcolm shares a single photograph as well as stirred-up memories that she “heeds, repels, and bargains with in turn by subtle turn.” By the end, the most surprising thing about her fragmented self-portrait…

Stephen Markley wants to scare us, said Lenny Picker in Publishers Weekly. The Deluge, Markley’s new 900-page novel, has been described by Stephen King as a terrifying modern classic. But the book’s horror is rooted not in the supernatural but in the projected environmental consequences of climate change and Markley’s speculations about how society might unravel as a result. The story focuses on several activists, scientists, and spin doctors, tracking their intersecting stories from the 2010s to the 2040s, as the U.S. descends toward dystopia. Markley, the acclaimed author of 2018’s Ohio, says he wrote The Deluge because other climate-change warnings were having too little effect. “I watched no shortage of earnest environmental documentaries,” he says. “Many of them I don’t even remember.” Fiction, he decided, might more effectively…

Tasty eat-the-rich satires… The Menu Ralph Fiennes stars as a revered chef who has some nasty surprises in store for the elitist guests who gather on an isolated island to savor his latest $1,250 tasting menu. Anya Taylor-Joy and Nicholas Hoult co-star in the biting recent hit. HBO Max Triangle of Sadness Ruben Östlund’s acclaimed 2022 satire picks up the anti-elite spirit of The White Lotus and boldly turns up the dial. The privileged and beautiful hobnob on an ultra-luxury cruise until a storm reveals their animal frailty and the staff seizes the upper hand. $6 on Amazon Prime Bodies Bodies Bodies A Knives Out for the Gen-Z set, this recent horror comedy watches a group of rich 20-somethings unravel when they introduce a murder game into a party…

Fabulous makes time for self-care by helping users develop healthy habits. The daily planner “takes a gentle approach” to establishing new routines. WaterLlama reminds iPhone users to hydrate throughout a busy day. The reminders are “motivational but not too annoying.” Waterful does the same for Android users. Forks eases the transition to a vegetarian lifestyle with more than 600 plant-based recipes, 50 from top chefs. You can also use the free app as a meal and shopping planner. Canva, a graphic design app, offers free templates that will “give your résumé a professional look.” SmokeFree supports smokers who are trying to quit. When a craving hits, an AI-powered chatbot can counter it with evidence-backed tips. The dashboard charts days since the last cigarette and the resulting money savings and health…

Tesla sharply cut prices on its models last week as “traditional auto companies begin to claw away” at its lead in the electric-vehicle market, said Jacob Bogage in The Washington Post. Tesla slashed its baseline Model Y SUV by 20 percent to $52,990, and its loaded Model 3 sedan by 14 percent to $53,990. The vehicles now fall under the $55,000 cutoff to qualify buyers for a $7,500 tax rebate under the Inflation Reduction Act. Tesla has been trying to boost its slipping “lion’s share” of EV sales by appealing “to the mass market.” Retail: Inflation-weary shoppers cut back Shoppers cut spending in December as inflation and rising credit card rates took a toll, said Augusta Saraiva and Reade Pickert in Bloomberg. Retail sales decreased by 1.1 percent—the most in…

A deal to regret at JPMorgan JPMorgan Chase’s purchase of Frank, a college financial-aid business, went sour fast, said Melissa Korn and David Benoit in The Wall Street Journal. The bank bought Frank for $175 million in 2021 after a pitch from Frank founder Charlie Javice. Frank “offered a tool to simplify federal financial-aid forms”; Javice claimed it had 4.25 million users, but when JPMorgan sent out marketing emails to Frank’s customers, 70 percent bounced back. JPMorgan says Frank had fewer than 300,000 real users, and it is suing, saying Frank’s leaders “duped the bank by making up millions of fake student accounts.” Javice’s lawyer says JPMorgan “rushed” to buy the “rocketship business” but “realized they couldn’t work around existing student privacy laws, committed misconduct,” and turned on Javice…

Gina Lollobrigida made much of the world go weak at the knees. Humphrey Bogart said his sultry Italian screen partner in 1953’s Beat the Devil “made Marilyn Monroe look like Shirley Temple.” Billionaire Howard Hughes flew her out to Hollywood and badgered her to divorce her husband. And Prince Rainier of Monaco made passes at her in the presence of his wife, Grace Kelly. Yet Lollobrigida could be ruthless with men: After her affair with pioneering South African heart surgeon Christiaan Barnard, she dismissed him as a “cheap publicity seeker.” During a career that included more than 60 U.S. and European films, she often drew comparisons with another Italian screen siren: her rival, Sophia Loren. But “La Lollo,” as she was nicknamed, held herself in much higher regard. “We…

Lisa Marie Presley spent her life in the spotlight, but she could never escape the shadow of her father’s fame. The only child of Elvis Presley, the singer-songwriter released three rock albums and used her inheritance to become a philanthropist, but she was best known for her tumultuous personal life. She had four failed marriages, including to Michael Jackson and Nicolas Cage, and struggled with addiction. “I’m not perfect,” she said in 2018. “My father wasn’t perfect. No one’s perfect. It’s what you do with it after you learn, and then you try to help others with it.” Presley’s “life in the tabloids began, literally, at birth, with the first photos of her proud parents” at a Memphis hospital, said The Guardian. After her parents’ divorce, she moved to…

This week’s question: Males and females of a species of gibbon native to Southeast Asia have been observed singing duets in order to solidify social bonds. Come up with the title of a song that would suit the talents of these musically inclined apes. Last week’s contest: 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? THE WINNER: “Spare Me” Rick Torrence, The Village, Okla. SECOND PLACE: “Throne Under the Bus” Patty Oberhausen, Fort Wayne, Ind. THIRD PLACE: “Clearing the Heir” Jeff Jerome, Northampton, Mass. For runners-up and complete contest rules, please go to theweek.com/contest. How to enter: Submissions…

What happened The first major showdown between the new GOP majority in the House and the Biden administration loomed this week, as the federal government reached its debt limit of $31.4 trillion and Republicans demanded concessions in exchange for raising it and preventing a federal default. The ceiling is the maximum the government can borrow to fund its operations; it’s been raised over 90 times since 1960. In December 2021, Congress raised the cap by $2.5 trillion, but House Speaker Kevin McCarthy maintains he won’t agree to raise it again unless President Biden assents to cuts. Democrats, however, refuse to negotiate. “It’s not and should not be a political football,” said White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. “This should be done without conditions.” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said she…

Some Republican lawmakers in Wyoming want to phase out electric vehicles. Citing the “proud and valued” history of fossil-fuel production in Wyoming, the resolution sponsored by Rep. Jim Anderson would end the sale of electric vehicles in the state by 2035. Anderson says the resolution sends a message to progressive states: “If you don’t like our petroleum cars, well, we don’t like your electric cars.” An atheist activist wants to install a 6-foot-tall sculpture of a pink penis in nine Florida cities that have annual Christmas displays. Chaz Stevens argues that the First Amendment requires them also to display his penis sculpture, which he says is inspired by Shinto “Steel Phallus” fertility festivals. If the cities refuse, he says, he will sue them for religious discrimination. In other news GOP…

Iranian activist Masih Alinejad is never truly safe, said Janice Turner in The Times (U.K.). A prominent critic of Iran’s oppressive laws for women—the impetus for feminist protests sweeping the country—Alinejad, along with her husband and stepson, has lived in roughly nine FBI safe houses, most recently in Manhattan. “It’s heartbreaking my country is trying to kill me, and my adoptive country is trying to protect me,” says Alinejad, 46. There have been at least three plots against her in as many years. One time, the government pressured her Iranian relatives to lure her to Turkey for a reunion, where her brother tipped her off that it was a trap. Another time, four Iranian spies planned to abduct her in New York. Most recently, last summer, an Azerbaijani man…

King Charles and Prince William are open to “peace talks” with Prince Harry ahead of Charles’ coronation in May, sources close to the British royals told The Times (U.K.) last week. Although William reportedly is “burning inside” over his younger brother airing the family’s dirty laundry in his autobiography and media interviews, their father would be open to reconciling, a source close to Charles said. The source said that “both sides need to hold their hands up and admit we didn’t get everything right, and we got a lot wrong.” In that scenario, Charles and William would tell Harry, “We understand the pain you’ve been through,” the source said, while Harry would also need to admit mistakes. Harry recently said that his royal relatives have shown “absolutely no willingness…

Jonathan Chait New York magazine Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is offering Republicans “a step-by-step blueprint to turn the state into a political weapon,” said Jonathan Chait. His latest foray into Viktor Orban–style authoritarianism is to remake the New College of Florida, a public liberal arts school, into an overtly conservative institution, by appointing a half-dozen cronies and far-right ideologues to the school’s board of directors. Among them is “anti-woke” culture warrior Christopher Rufo, who said “restructuring” the college is a first step for conservatives to “reconquer public institutions all over the United States.” A DeSantis aide said the goal is to remake New College into “the Hillsdale of the South”—quite a goal, given that Hillsdale is a private, Christian, conservative college in Michigan. DeSantis is not merely trying to…

A woman was prevented from boarding a flight in Tampa after security workers found she was concealing a boa constrictor, which she insisted was her “emotional support pet.” When the coiled 4-foot-long snake showed up on an X-ray scan of her carry-on bag, the woman told TSA agents that its name was Bartholomew and that she could not travel without it. The agents contacted the airline, “which ruled that there was not going to be a snake on their plane,” said a TSA spokesperson. A pair of head-banging lovebirds in Idaho Falls held a heavy-metal wedding where they exchanged electric guitars instead of rings. Madi Danger and Jay Aspen, both 26, who bonded over their love of ’80s metal and hairstyles, walked down the aisle to the Ozzy Osbourne song…

NIGERIA Hakeem Baba-Ahmed Vanguard Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari is “tired of leading the nation,” said Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, and the feeling is mutual. At 80, he now does little but complain that he can’t wait for his second term to be over in May, claiming “he has not been as appreciated as he should have been.” Yet what, exactly, should we be thanking him for? Buhari will leave behind “a record of spectacular failure that will take the best part of the next decade to reverse.” Our oil-dependent economy is flagging, unemployment is soaring, and we’re currently one of the world’s most dangerous countries, battling both the Biafran separatists in the south and the Islamist terrorists of Boko Haram in the north. None of that seems to faze Buhari. The former…

“Suffering is a part of the human condition and must be borne. But misery is a choice.” Cormac McCarthy, quoted in LitHub “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.” William Gibson, quoted in Law.com “I long for a day of judgment when the plotlines of our lives will be neatly tied, and all puzzles explained, and the meaning of events made clear. We take to fiction, I suppose, because no such thing is going to happen.” Fay Weldon, quoted in The Washington Post “It is better to act and repent than not to act and regret.” Niccolo Machiavelli, quoted in the Cumberland, R.I., Valley Breeze “There is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought.”…

The disappointing 5G reality “I turned off Verizon 5G on my iPhone—and barely noticed a difference,” said Joanna Stern at The Wall Street Journal. Sixty-one percent of U.S. cellphone users accessed 5G networks in 2022, but speed differences for everyday streaming and browsing are barely noticeable. “That’s because, unlike the 4G that brought Uber, streaming Netflix, and more, 5G’s killer app isn’t even for smartphones. It will more likely foster emerging technologies.” The main improvement of 5G over 4G is “lower latency, the time it takes for data to travel from one point to another. That’s important for drones, self-driving cars, and other devices that aren’t your phone”—though 5G may mean better phone speeds in some crowded settings, such as concerts and sporting events. Tesla’s ‘phantom braking’ problem Newly…

Some animals—like rats and coyotes—have changed their behavior to adapt to human cities. In the case of the Puerto Rican crested anole, a lizard that once lived only in forests, the change is genetic. Researchers found that those crested anoles that scurry around towns and cities have developed special scales that help them cling to smooth surfaces like walls and windows. They’ve also grown larger limbs for sprinting across large open spaces like streets and parking lots. Co-author Kristin Winchell, from New York University, and her colleagues collected 96 of the lizards, an exercise that involved trying to grab them by hand or using a fishing pole with a tiny lasso. “It takes some practice,” Winchell tells NPR.org. After comparing the appearances of the city slickers and their forest-based…

Novelist De’Shawn Charles Winslow is the author of In West Mills, which won a 2020 American Book Award. His second novel, Decent People, is set in 1976 in a segregated North Carolina community rocked by an unsolved triple homicide. Tar Baby by Toni Morrison (1981). In Morrison’s captivating holiday-season novel, a wealthy couple await the homecoming of their only child, Michael, while readers also get to know the unforgettable members of the household staff. Tar Baby shines a bright light on class, trauma, and the nuances of parenthood and marriage. It asks us to not judge people based what they do or do not have. Paradise by Toni Morrison (1997). When a group of ostracized women are murdered in their place of peaceful refuge, members of the community are…

Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, through March 12 One of Joan Brown’s painting teachers once remarked that the young San Francisco native was either a genius or very simple, said Peter Plagens in The Wall Street Journal. Whatever your own final verdict, the current retrospective in Brown’s hometown “clearly demonstrates that she was one of the Bay Area’s best painters.” Born in 1938, Brown was a star soon after she graduated from the storied San Francisco Art Institute in 1960, even scoring an Artforum cover in 1963. At the time, her paintings were a friendly combination of blurry figurative images and thick, “no-holds-barred” paint application. But she was about to intentionally turn away from that lucrative path. After a three-year hiatus, she returned in 1967 with an exhibition…

Microsoft, facing a post–pandemic boom slump for personal computers, announced this week it will lay off 10,000 workers, in the latest sign the tech industry’s job cuts are accelerating. Reuters Hourly wages have risen about 15 percent in the U.S., on average, since just before the coronavirus crisis. The jump is the biggest in a three-year period since the early 1980s. The Economist Apple CEO Tim Cook’s target compensation for 2023 is $49 million, a 40 percent drop from last year’s $84 million. Cook said he took the cut voluntarily; last year’s pay package was backed by 64 percent of shareholders, down from 94 percent the previous year. The Washington Post Public affairs executive Geoff Morrell started working for Disney in January 2022 and left four months later after a…

Forced from their homes or left without power by historic floods, many Californians are in dire need. To help with the recovery efforts, GlobalGiving (globalgiving.org) is raising money while providing food and emergency supplies through local organizations. Since 2002, GlobalGiving has assisted thousands of nonprofits locally and globally, helping them trigger change in countries from India to Morocco. In 2021, GlobalGiving’s Disaster Response Team raised close to $530,000 after Haiti’s 7.2 earthquake, and helped Madagascar deal with an intense famine through a fund of $179,000. Currently, they have more than 1,000 open projects that need funding, including supporting at-risk youth in Detroit, providing urgent medical care in northern Syria, and protecting coral reefs in Malaysia. Each charity we feature has earned a four-star overall rating from Charity Navigator, which…

James Surowiecki Fast Company Bed Bath & Beyond is in a “death spiral,” and we might finally be seeing the last gasp of “one of the most pointless bubbles in market history,” said James Surowiecki. The theater chain AMC, GameStop, and Bed Bath & Beyond were the three improbable “meme stocks” that defined the frenzy of 2021. While some people got rich selling in time to the credulous, many investors “got caught up in the hysteria” and “got crushed.” Over the decades, we’ve seen stock market bubbles inflated by hype and optimism about the future—the infamous dotcom bubble of the 1990s, the telecom bubble, even the bowling stock bubble of the 1960s. This was different. It was essentially an attempt by investors “to collectively game the system” by buying stock…

Jeff Beck was a guitarist’s guitarist with a restless musical spirit. After coming to prominence in the 1960s as a member of the British blues-rock band the Yardbirds, where he used feedback, distortion, and Eastern scales in innovative ways, Beck proved unable to sit still for long. He influenced the birth of heavy metal with the blistering attack of the Jeff Beck Group, put jazz fusion on the charts with the instrumental Blow by Blow (1975), played rockabilly, funk, and electronica, and collaborated with Luciano Pavarotti and Wynonna Judd. Balancing aggression with ethereal lyricism, sometimes within the same phrase, Beck could make his Fender Stratocaster squeal, bark, whisper, and growl. A mercurial figure who preferred tinkering with cars to touring, he disdained industry conventions. “I don’t care about the…

Katie and Annie Carrmax were walking on the beach with their two young daughters when they came across a bottle with a note inside, which included a name, Troy Heller, and an address in Louisville. A web search found Heller, now living in Mount Washington, Ky. Heller ignored a call from the unknown Florida number, but a text with an image of the bottle soon grabbed his attention. Heller was 10 years old when he tossed the Pepsi bottle into the ocean during a trip to Vero Beach, Fla., in 1985. “I thought I’d just throw it out in the ocean and just see where it went, you know?” he says. “It’s just amazing that it finally found its way back.” As the proprietors of a dog-walking business in Skagway,…

Kathleen Turner was at the height of her acting career when her health sabotaged her, said Ann Lee in The Guardian (U.K.). Turner had been “having a ball,” she says, acting in a string of box office hits after her 1981 breakout, Body Heat. Then she was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, a painful autoimmune disease that attacks joints and organs. While filming a movie in 1993, Turner realized her feet were too swollen to fit into her shoes. It got worse. “I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t hold a glass. The only way I could go up and down stairs was on my butt, pushing myself,” says Turner, 68. She tried hiding her illness while turning down lead roles and opting for less demanding parts. Steroids and pain medication made…

Quin Hillyer Washington Examiner “‘Aloha,’ ‘Hola,’ and ‘Shalom’ to all you readers, from whatever field where you toil or during whatever picnics you enjoy,” said Quin Hillyer. I use these greetings at my peril, since “language scolds” now warn us that it is disrespectful or even mockery for people who are not Hawaiian, Spanish, or Jewish, respectively, to use them. “Field” is also verboten, because it might evoke slavery, while “picnic” could be associated with lynching parties. To the scolds, “it matters not if the actual derivation of the word has no remotely offensive origin, much less whether the word’s user means absolutely no offense.” If someone, somewhere might be offended, then we must erase commonly used words from our vocabulary and replace them with awkward jargon. It’s true that…

FRANCE Michel Guerrin Le Monde French audiences are returning to the movie theaters, but not to see French films, said Michel Guerrin. It takes a big-budget epic like Avatar 2, which opened late last year, to make us “want to leave the sofa and go to the cinema.” By last week, James Cameron’s underwater science-fiction sequel had sold 10 million tickets in France and was attracting 500,000 people a day, putting it on track to outpace even the first Avatar. Such figures would seem to “herald the total return of cultural outings after three rough years.” Alas, the pandemic changed how people go out. They are “more selective” now and “decide at the last moment” to leave the house. And they want “safe bets,” not “atypical and risky works.” If…

Doctors have developed a test for autism in young kids that uses a single strand of hair, reports NBCNews.com. The test, developed by New York startup LinusBio, fires a laser at the hair to turn it into a plasma for analysis, then uses artificial intelligence to look for evidence of exposure to certain heavy metals that are linked to autism. In an initial study, it predicted the condition accurately about 81 percent of the time. “The technology is incredibly novel,” says Andrea Baccarelli, from Columbia University, who wasn’t involved in the study. “It’s groundbreaking.” The test would be used only as a diagnostic aid, not as the sole means of diagnosis; the causes of autism remain a mystery, with risk factors ranging from pollution to changes in the uterine…

(Scribner, $28) Tom Crewe’s debut novel is “nothing less than remarkable,” said Michael Schaub in The Boston Globe. A “beautiful, brave” work inspired by a true story, it follows two men in 1890s London, writer John Addington and sexologist Henry Ellis, as they collaborate on a daring book that argues against treating homosexuality as a crime. Addington is gay but married to a woman; Ellis is heterosexual but weds a woman who, on the couple’s honeymoon, takes up with another woman. As Ellis and Addington risk social ruin by pursuing their project, The New Life reveals itself to be “at heart a moral novel, suffused with a simmering anger.” Just when the pace of the tale slackens, “Crewe deftly flicks the reins,” and the narrative bolts forward, said Hamilton…

Beaverland by Leila Philip (Twelve, $30) Leila Philip’s ode to the beaver is “as full of charm as its beguiling protagonist,” said Richard Adams Carey in The Wall Street Journal. Philips claims that the humble rodent “made America,” justifying the claim by explaining how beaver dams create rich habitats for plant and animal life, then showing how the pursuit of beaver pelts jump-started our national economy. “The book’s ultimate—and unanswered—question is whether this continent’s two engineering species can coexist with each other.” Pests by Bethany Brookshire (Ecco, $29) “With its modest title, Pests might be mistakenly shelved with mouse-proofing guides,” said Michael Sims in The Washington Post. But Bethany Brookshire’s “lively” book is “something far more ambitious”: an exploration of how humans, through their own actions, turn animals such…

Bone Valley (Lava for Good) Author Gilbert King “knows how to paint a picture in your head,” said Laura Jane Standley and Eric McQuade in The Atlantic. In this “true-crime marvel,” one of the best podcasts released in 2022, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author aims to free Leo Schofield, a Florida man who has been imprisoned for nearly 35 years, by proving that another man killed Schofield’s 18-year-old wife in 1987. While the nine-episode series “has important things to say about redemption, forgiveness, and prosecutorial misconduct,” the storytelling pulls you along. Each major scene in King’s retelling “will enter your mind’s eye with the power and vividness of a great novel.” In its comprehensiveness alone, Bone Valley “makes other true-crime podcasts look lazy,” said Miranda Sawyer in The Guardian. Rest…

“Many want to drink, but not everyone wants to get tipsy,” said Kat Odell in Bloomberg. Sales of nonalcoholic wine were up 23 percent last year, reflecting Americans’ increased focus on healthier lifestyles. Fortunately, with the drive to win market share inspiring innovation, some new options “taste remarkably like wine.” Boisson Blanc ($16). The house white of Boisson, a booze-free beverage retailer, “tastes an awful lot like a classic riesling.” Credit its German winemaker and the Rheingau-sourced grapes. Studio Null Sparkling Verdejo ($36). “You could easily mistake this 2019 vintage bubbly for Champagne.” Produced in Spain, it’s “almondy and lemon-forward.” Non 7 ($29). Non, an Australian brand, produces wine alternatives, This one’s like a “tart and spicy” lambrusco—with an ingredients list that included sour cherry, coffee, and garam masala.…

Jason Zweig The Wall Street Journal Struggling to earn their investors a decent return in traditional markets for stocks and bonds, some financial firms “are pile-driving their clients into assets that have no market,” said Jason Zweig. Over the past two years alone, an astonishing $878 billion has been plowed into these so-called Regulation D private offerings of debt and equity that don’t trade, even though many are issued by “dodgy brokers” with egregious conflicts of interest. The investments come with minimal disclosure and broker fees as high as 10 percent. “To be blunt, they are often dreck.” As there is no market for these private corporate offerings, their reported prices fluctuate less. Thus investors believe they are beating the market—until they try to sell, which frequently turns out to…