Indholdsfortegnelse for February 17, 2023 i The Week Magazine

Both at home and abroad, the market for intolerance and illiberalism is as strong as ever. In Florida, there will be no AP African-American studies, lest high school students’ unformed minds be exposed to the curse of critical race theory (see Controversy, p.6). But on the other hand, make sure not to buy the new Harry Potter video game, Hogwarts Legacy, lest you seem to be endorsing J.K. Rowling’s ostensibly retrograde views on gender (Film, p.26). Do buy Salman Rushdie’s new novel, Victory City (Books, p.23)—it’s a great book, and the least you can do considering how many assassination attempts he’s survived since offending the wrong mullah. But wait! Don’t forget about the young people—both Muslims and Hindus—slaughtered and imprisoned by Hindu fundamentalists because they fell in love with someone…

Two Massachusetts lawmakers want to let prison inmates reduce their sentences by donating organs. A bill sponsored by Democratic Reps. Judith Garcia and Carlos Gonzalez would offer sentence reductions of up to a year for organ donations, thus “broadening the pool of potential donors.” Inmate advocate Romilda Pereira said “harvesting organs” just “doesn’t feel right.” The Florida High School Athletics Association may require female athletes to disclose their menstrual history, ostensibly to help doctors flag conditions that can make sports dangerous. Critics say the requirement will force trans students to out themselves and could be used to police abortions. State Democratic legislators say the “highly invasive” questions should be eliminated. In other news GOP subpoenas probe school threat response Escalating Republicans’ claim that federal law enforcement has targeted conservative parents,…

Wynonna Judd has stopped blaming herself for her mother’s suicide, said Grayson Haver Currin in The New York Times. The Judds, often mistaken for sisters, formed an iconic country singing duo. Naomi, who struggled for decades with severe depression and panic attacks, took her life last April, a day before they were to be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. After Naomi, 76, stopped performing three decades ago due to health issues, their fraught relationship deteriorated. (Her suicide note reportedly read, “Do not let Wy come to my funeral. She’s mentally ill.”) Naomi “desperately wanted to be on the road,” Wynonna says, and was intensely jealous of her career. “She was a good person—to everyone else.” Wynonna, 58, believes she could not have prevented her mother’s death.…

King Charles wants Prince Harry and Meghan Markle to attend his May coronation, despite their recent strong criticism of the British royal family in interviews, a Netflix documentary, and Harry’s best-selling autobiography, Vanity Fair reported last week. Harry has called Camilla, the queen consort, “dangerous” and a “villain,” and said his brother, William, physically attacked him in an argument about Meghan. Still, a source said, Charles “cannot imagine being crowned, the most important moment of his life, without both his sons witnessing the moment.” The royals are considering a “low-profile” role for Harry and Meghan at the coronation, and it’s been decided that they won’t join Charles, Camilla, Prince William, and Princess Kate on the balcony. William reportedly views his relationship with his younger brother as broken and fears…

Jim Geraghty National Review “No one wanted the first woman vice president to be mediocre or a flop,” said Jim Geraghty. But Kamala Harris has faded into irrelevance rather than blossoming into a star and likely successor to Joe Biden—and Democrats should have seen it coming. Harris was chosen only because as an “old white male,” Biden had to check his party’s identity box by promising to pick a “woman of color” as his vice president. He chose Harris despite her flailing performances in the 2020 presidential debates and primaries and reports of dysfunction and chaos on her campaign staff. Biden’s close advisers “vehemently opposed” her selection. Biden could have kept his promise by picking former Obama adviser Susan Rice, California Rep. Karen Bass, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance-Bottoms, or Florida…

JAPAN Makihara Izuru Nippon.com Japan is in an uproar over the ruling party’s ties with a foreign cult, said Makihara Izuru. Most Japanese didn’t realize the extent of the links between the Unification Church and the Liberal Democratic Party until the assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe last year. Abe’s killer, Tetsuya Yamagami, blamed the church for his family’s bankruptcy after his mother gave it her entire fortune. He “channeled his rage” at Abe because Abe was rumored to be close to the church. Now it turns out Abe’s party’s involvement with the church was extensive—and alarming. The Unification Church, founded by South Korea’s Sun Myung Moon, is not only a “predatory and fraudulent” outfit extorting money from its members, but also a “fundamentally anti-Japanese organization.” Moon, after all,…

“The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.”Aldous Huxley, quoted in The Atlantic “It’s not what you don’t know that kills you, it’s what you know for sure that ain’t true.”Mark Twain, quoted in Clean Technica “Come celebrate / with me that everyday / something has tried to kill me / and has failed.”Poet Lucille Clifton, quoted in Elle “Bad times traditionally produce good books.”Salman Rushdie, quoted in the Financial Times “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”Richard Feynman, quoted in Big Think “If you are not consciously building your habits, they are unconsciously building you.”Writer Anika J. Green, quoted in The Good Men Project “People don’t want to…

How HP repossessed my printer I did not expect my printer “to shake me down like a loan shark,” said Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic. Soon after signing up for HP’s Instant Ink cartridge-refill program, I found “that my HP OfficeJet Pro had been remotely disabled by the company.” The reason? “The credit card I had used to sign up…had expired, and the company had effectively bricked my device in response.” Sure, “I did this to myself,” but nevertheless, this is “just one example of how digital subscriptions are blurring the lines of ownership. Even if I paid for it, can I really say that I own my printer if HP can flip a switch and make it inert?” This then raises an even broader, far-reaching concern: The convenience…

New research suggests that North America’s huge deer population has become a reservoir for Covid, reports The New York Times. A study published last week found that by December 2021, long after the Alpha and Gamma variants of the virus had stopped spreading widely among people, they continued to circulate in North American white-tailed deer. Previous research has shown that humans repeatedly introduced the virus into white-tailed deer populations, either by direct contact with the animals or through wastewater. The big question was whether those older variants were still spreading and evolving among the deer—and if so, whether a new mutation could jump back to humans. Scientists have already documented one suspected case of deer-to-human transmission, in Ontario last year. Study co-author Diego Diel, from Cornell University, says he…

Novelist, translator, and writing professor Heinz Insu Fenkl is the author of Memories of My Ghost Brother, a widely taught autobiographical novel. His new prequel, Skull Water, follows a boy named Insu who seeks a cure rooted in ancient Korean myth. The Secret of Zen by Ardent Hollingsworth (2021). This recent book is not the typical feel-good New Age Buddhist memoir. It’s a portrait of a spiritual quest carried out with uncompromising integrity. Hollingsworth’s story is not only edifying, it also exposes the hypocrisy of Buddhist masters and the West’s (perhaps willful) misinterpretation of Buddhism’s fundamental truths. Fourth Uncle in the Mountain: A Memoir of a Barefoot Doctor in Vietnam by Quang Van Nguyen and Marjorie Pivar (2004). For those who know Vietnam only in connection with the Vietnam…

At least the night started well, said Justin Curto in NYMag.com. “The easiest way to start at a 10 may be to book Bad Bunny as your opening artist,” and that’s just how this year’s Grammys telecast began, with the reggaeton boundary-pusher playing a medley that “got nearly everyone on their feet,” fellow superstars included. After Brandi Carlile “scorched her way” through “Broken Horses,” the night’s Best Rock Song winner, Stevie Wonder and Smokey Robinson made three Motown hits sound timeless. But the event exists to distribute awards, and it ended with “a massive snub” when Beyoncé failed, for the “billionth time,” to win Album of the Year, said Lorraine Ali in the Los Angeles Times. Earlier, the 41-year-old icon did collect her 32nd golden gramophone to become the…

Aspen, Colo., is a small town, yet it’s home to four ski mountains and “a glut of über-fancy restaurants,” said Amanda Faison in Outside magazine. Trying to choose a place to eat in this high-end enclave “can be overwhelming.” If you’re planning to visit before the ski season is over, these options won’t disappoint. Just know that reservations are “pretty much a must in this town,” and secure one as soon as possible. Bosq This local standout underwent big changes when the pandemic arrived. Chef Barclay Dodge put aside Bosq’s Spanish-inflected à la carte menu and now serves only a four-, five-, or seven-course tasting menu. The format showcases Dodge’s “immense talent” and “true dedication to the very best ingredients.” He “has a way with duck,” so don’t miss…

Solomon Perel was 16 when he was stopped by a Nazi in what is now Belarus. A German Jew who had been sent to the Soviet Union to escape Hitler, he answered no when the officer asked if he was Jewish—and in a stroke of luck, he was believed. The Nazis first put him to work as an interpreter and then sent him back to Germany to join the Hitler Youth. He remained there for four years, struggling with his secret identity. By day, he wore a Nazi uniform and answered to Josef; by night he was Shlomo, weeping for his family. “To this day,” he said in 1992, “I have a tangle of two souls in one body.” Born in Peine, Germany, Perel grew up in a religious…

Zach Braff fooled himself into thinking he was like his best-known character, said Nadia Khomami in The Guardian (U.K.). His breakthrough role was as a quirky doctor in the 2000s medical sitcom Scrubs, which made Braff a new kind of heartthrob: a cute boy-next-door rather than a Leonardo DiCaprio. “I’m just like every other guy,” Braff repeatedly said in interviews at the time. It took him years to realize the real him isn’t so average. “I used to think everyone must be this anxious, battling depression and loneliness,” says Braff, 47. “But I don’t know that they do. I’ve met people that aren’t neurotic and in their heads all the time.” His depression took a dark turn in 2020, when—on the heels of the deaths of his father, sister,…

Zeynep Tufekci The New York Times Nobody wants to hear it, but we might be facing a “devastating pandemic” worse than Covid, said Zeynep Tufekci. The H5N1 bird flu has caused the deaths of 150 million U.S. egg-laying chickens, and so far, it has rarely infected humans. “But when it has, 56 percent of those known to have contracted it have died”—a mortality rate about 50 times higher that of early Covid. The bird flu currently doesn’t spread easily to people, but it has spread to migratory fowl and even to some mammals, including farmed mink. The risk is that as H5N1 spreads, it will mutate in mink, pigs, ferrets, and other mammals, acquiring new characteristics that enable it to easily bind with receptors in human respiratory tracts. “We could…

UNITED KINGDOM James Marriott The Times We British think we’re being so modest when we run ourselves down, said James Marriot, but our refusal to boast is actually self-serving. Take the neurosurgeon quoted in Kate Fox’s marvelous 2004 study of our national character, Watching the English, who characterized his job as “just plumbing, really, plumbing with a microscope.” Such faux humility simply shifts “the burden of self-congratulation” onto the person you’re talking to, who is expected to protest that you must surely be extremely intelligent and skilled. I did it myself when turning in this essay, telling my editor I just knew he’d hate what I’d written. It’s part of being English to enjoy that “half-second conversational pause as you wait for the praise you have elaborately refused yourself to…

Bivalent Covid booster shots cut the risk of getting the virus by about half, new research has found, even with infections caused by the fast-spreading XBB.1.5 subvariant. In the first major study on the efficacy of the inoculations, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control looked at nearly 30,000 test results from across the country between Dec. 1 and Jan. 13. They found that for adults up to age 49, the boosters cut the odds of getting a symptomatic infection from the BA.5 subvariant by 52 percent, and from the XBB or XBB.1.5 strains by 49 percent. Among those ages 50 to 64, the risk reduction was 43 percent and 40 percent, respectively; for over-65s, 37 percent and 43 percent. The researchers note that the protection against much worse…

(Liveright, $29) Though it’s billed as a novel, Selby Wynn Schwartz’s brilliant debut “can’t really be said to lodge in any one category,” said Rhoda Feng in NPR.org. “Narrated from a perspective that might be called the first person choral,” it weaves together true and fictional vignettes about various female writers, artists, and thinkers who, at the turn of the 20th century, channeled the spirit of the 6th-century Greek poet Sappho. The Italian writer Lina Poletti is a featured character. But After Sappho also sweeps Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Josephine Baker, and many others into a loose collective of kindred self-inventing spirits, and “to speak of any of them in isolation is to miss the point of this puckishly allusive book.” Despite how uplifting these women’s collective story feels…

The Diaries of Franz Kafka translated by Ross Benjamin (Schocken, $45) The new edition of Franz Kafka’s diaries, to its great credit, “scuffs him up and returns him to earth,” said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. Because it restores material that was originally excised by Kafka’s friend Max Brod, the newly translated volume delivers “revelation upon revelation.” Yes, Kafka was tormented. But he loved the theater, lusted after women and men, stuffed his diaries with letters and story drafts, and had an entertaining obsession with noses. Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Céspedes (Astra House, $26) Forbidden Notebook was a sensation in its era, and “70 years have scarcely dulled it,” said Toby Lichtig in The Wall Street Journal. The novel, published in Italy in 1952 and now…

Love, Janessa (BBC/CBC) “If catfishing mysteries like the viral 2021 true-crime podcast Sweet Bobby are your jam, then prepare to fall for Love, Janessa,” said Emma Carey in Esquire. Hosted by British journalist Hannah Ajala, this seven-part limited series tells the story of Janessa Brazil, an adult film actress whose photo likeness has been widely used by online scammers to bilk thousands of credulous men out of thousands to millions of dollars. The stories we hear about these marks prove to be “equal parts jaw-dropping and heartbreaking,” said Fiona Sturges in the Financial Times. Fortunately, this “queasily addictive tale” has an unusually capable host in Ajala, who treats her interviewees, including those who fell for the scam and those perpetrating it, with “nothing but empathy and kindness.” The entire…

Valentine’s Day dinner calls for sparkling wine, “but the bubbles needn’t burst the budget,” said Dave McIntyre in The Washington Post. Any of these superb wines will set a romantic mood, and also serve as a reminder that not every great sparkler hails from Champagne. 2019 Salvatore Martusciello Trentapioli Asprinio d’Aversa ($22). “A refreshing, slightly bitter, cider-like quaff,” this Italian wine is made from asprinio grapes pulled almost from the sky, because the vines climb tall poplar trees. Markus Molitor Brut Sekt ($22). Sekt, made from riesling using the Champagne method, is a fun wine. The “bright berry and citrus flavors” of this example, from Germany’s Mosel region, will prompt big smiles. 2017 Hermann J. Weimer Extra Brut ($38). This superb sparkling riesling from New York’s Finger Lakes offers…

Pittsburghers are rightly proud of their “highly livable” city, said Corinne Whiting in USA Today. Though not a buzzy destination, Pennsylvania’s second-largest city “maintains a power to delight visitors—and to keep them coming back.” The former industrial hub has reinvented itself as an epicenter of education, medicine, and technology (especially robotics). In warmer months, visitors who pedal around with a Bike the Burgh tour enjoy “soaking in Pittsburgh’s green hillsides along its many riverfront trails.” Alternatively, start with breakfast at Sally Ann’s, explore the nearby Cultural District, then experience “quintessential Pittsburgh” at shops in the neighboring Strip District. Each of Pittsburgh’s 90 neighborhoods has its own character, so consider venturing farther, “whether you head to Polish Hill for pierogies” or catch a concert in Lawrenceville or Millvale. In the…

Google this week unveiled its “answer to ChatGPT,” said Jeremy Kahn in Fortune. Google started testing a chatbot-based interface, called Bard, that uses the latest artificial intelligence technology to summarize internet search results. Microsoft countered a day later by launching “a chatbot interface” for its Bing search engine, “powered by a new model called Prometheus” developed by ChatGPT creator OpenAI. The “chatbot battle” in search is on, and if Microsoft manages to cut into Google’s dominance, “we could see the biggest realignment of Big Tech power in more than a decade.” Apple: Slow iPhone sales sink earnings Apple got “slammed by slack purchases of iPhones and Macs” at the end of 2022, said Davey Alba in Bloomberg. Apple reported last week that its revenue fell 5.5 percent to $117.2 billion…

A moment for active fund managers Stock pickers had a good run last year, said Suzanne Woolley in Bloomberg Businessweek. In 2022, 62 percent of active managers of large-company “core” mutual funds “beat the market,” delivering better returns than the benchmark S&P 500 index. “That’s the highest percentage of active portfolios to notch a win since 2005.” Most active managers still lost money, but they at least found ways to “limit the damage” as the S&P 500 plunged nearly 20 percent. “This development seems to affirm a favorite marketing line of fund companies: When times get tough, active management shines.” But anyone tempted to dump their index funds should remember that “stocks have more up years than down ones,” and in up years indexes rule. Retirement savers stay the course…

Laura Forman The Wall Street Journal “No matter what it sees as its future,” Meta showed investors last week that it “knows it must live in the present,” said Laura Forman. A year ago, Meta reported the first-ever decline in daily active users on Facebook, cratering its share price. The falloff in users, coupled with the perplexing “pivot” to being a “metaverse first” company, gave investors the impression Meta’s days “atop the social media heap were numbered.” Now, though, the decline looks like “it could have been a mere blip.” Meta’s stock price surged after the company lowered its estimates for capital spending by $4 billion, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared 2023 “the year of efficiency”—a strong sign that Meta was turning down the fire hose of spending on…

Good week for: Disgust, after Republican Sen. Mitt Romney chastised serial liar Rep. George Santos for grinning and shaking hands in the front aisle of the House chamber before the State of the Union speech. “You don’t belong here,” an indignant Romney told him. “You ought to be embarrassed.” Self-esteem, after the rapper and producer Dr. Dre was awarded the first annual “Dr. Dre Global Impact Award” at the Grammys. “Never compromise your vision at all,” Dre told the audience, holding the Dr. Dre award aloft. The quiet life, after Boris Johnson, the disgraced former British prime minister, revealed he is spending his days mastering the art of drawing cows, who “are actually far more difficult to draw than you think. Next stop, the horse.” Bad week for: Reviews, after…

London Prime Minister Rishi Sunak welcomed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to the U.K. this week with a promise to train Ukrainian military pilots to operate advanced fighter jets. Sunak’s announcement implies that NATO countries might yet agree to provide such jets to Ukraine, something they’ve so far refused to do. Plans for Zelensky’s London trip were kept top secret, as they were when the wartime leader visited Washington, D.C., in December—the only other time he has left Ukraine since Russia’s invasion one year ago. Zelensky thanked British lawmakers in a speech to Parliament. “London has stood with Kyiv since day one,” he said. “You extended your helping hand when the world had not yet come to understand how to react.” Snow on the Parthenon Athens A multi-day snowstorm this…

Jane Fonda has survived a battle with cancer, and at 85 is busier than ever, said Rebecca Keegan in The Hollywood Reporter. Fonda was diagnosed last year with the blood cancer non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The chemotherapy “really hit me hard,” she says. “Sometimes my energy just gave out. Normally, I can hold a push-up for a couple of minutes. When the chemo was in me, after 30 seconds, I’d collapse.” She’s now in remission, with her career commitments back in full swing. “Even at the height of my career, I never had three movies in one year,” as she does in 2023, she says. “So I feel pretty lucky.” Known for her toughness—whether through her acting, activism, or famous workout regimen—Fonda says the person behind the public persona was insecure…

Ruth Marcus The Washington Post Does a man involved in five shooting incidents in six weeks and under indictment for assaulting an ex-girlfriend have a constitutional right to own a gun? asked Ruth Marcus. Sure he does, the über-conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last week, in vacating Texas resident Zackey Rahimi’s conviction for illegal gun possession. Rahimi, the court conceded, may not be a “model citizen,” but despite his frequent misuse of guns and domestic abuse, he is “entitled to the Second Amendment’s guarantees.” This is “the insane state of Second Amendment law” in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Bruen ruling last year. In striking down New York state’s licensing standards, the court’s six conservative justices introduced a new, history-based standard—“a straitjacket, really”—to determine the constitutionality…

“Since the Spanish flu, we’ve seen the emergence of diseases come faster and faster. Diseases are jumping from animals to humans because of climate change—people are moving into areas that have never been inhabited before. Also, animals like mosquitoes are geographically shifting. Humans are able to travel more than ever, and so viruses will just be introduced into places that they’ve never been before. So there’s no question we’re going to have another pandemic in the coming years. The biggest question is how much we do to prepare.” Epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina in New York magazine…

SPAIN Editorial CTXT The law on sexual consent is this Socialist government’s greatest achievement, said CTXT in an editorial, yet the Socialists are now being gaslit into believing they have to amend it. The “Only Yes Means Yes” law—which says that sexual consent must be actively affirmed, not assumed through silence—was introduced after a notorious 2016 gang-rape case in Pamplona. Because the victim did not explicitly fight back, the men were initially convicted only of the lesser crime of sexual abuse, which does not involve violence. The new law eliminates the distinction between rape and sexual assault, so it has a lower minimum sentence. Since it was passed, some “sexist judges” have ruled that sentences of already convicted rapists should be revised to reflect the new penalties, and dozens of…

URUGUAY Fabricio Vomero and Nicolás Mederos La Diaria Carnival has always been about exploding norms and poking fun, said Fabricio Vomero and Nicolás Mederos. So why are Uruguayan conservatives suddenly so thin-skinned? This year, right-wing commentators and politicians have been grumbling that our murgas—the comedic musical routines performed by competitive theater troupes—have “gone too far” in mocking our leaders, fretting that showing President Luís Lacalle Pou as Pinocchio, for example, is an insult to the office. Frankly, there’s a lot to lampoon: Lacalle Pou’s former security chief is currently in prison for providing fake birth certificates to Russians so they could get Uruguayan citizenship, and he’s under pressure to prove he didn’t know of the scheme. But the specifics of the criticism are almost beside the point. If leftists were…

The only thing certain about the 2024 GOP presidential primary is that it won’t be “a coronation,” said Nick Catoggio in The Dispatch. Weeks after Donald Trump officially declared his candidacy, Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor who served as U.N. ambassador in the Trump administration, plans to announce her candidacy next week. She will join Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, and secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, as Republicans showing obvious interest in running, along with Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin. Although Haley in 2021 said she was “disgusted” with Trump’s behavior after his election defeat, Trump appeared to welcome her candidacy, suggesting he hopes Haley pulls votes from his chief rival, DeSantis. “Polls are exceptionally divided”…

Come May 11, we’ll be entering a “new world order, one where Covid is treated like any other infectious disease,” said Lisa Jarvis in Bloomberg. The Biden administration announced last week that the public health emergency that’s been in effect since March 2020 will be allowed to expire in May, but whether the emergency has truly ended is debatable. About 500 Americans are still dying from Covid every day—a rate of about 180,000 deaths a year. When the emergency ends, so, too, will free access to most pandemic-related health care. Vaccines will remain free for people on Medicare and Medicaid, but for everyone else, private insurance will determine the costs of vaccines and anti-viral treatments. The poor and uninsured may be left to fend for themselves. Still, “this is…

Lenovo is taking a new approach to the foldable laptop, said Scharon Harding in Ars Technica. While several manufacturers have experimented with a single folding screen, Lenovo’s aptly named Yoga Book 9i offers two 13.3-inch OLED panels connected by the soundbar hinge, avoiding “the crease that can visibly run down” foldable screens. The laptop comes with a detachable Bluetooth keyboard—or you can turn the lower screen into a virtual keyboard. The latter, though, may “be an acquired taste, especially for those who prefer a tactile keyboard.” Though questions remain around “practicality, battery life, and performance,” this “consumer-oriented” laptop is for “users with large budgets seeking a premium system with a unique form factor” and plenty of screen real estate.…

(Dey Street, $30) “The bullet points that make up Pamela Anderson’s life are a matter of public record,” said Zoe Guy in NYMag.com. A Playboy model turned Baywatch star, she was victimized at the height of her 1990s fame by the distribution of a stolen sex tape she made with her first husband, rocker Tommy Lee. Married five more times, “the last reigning blond bombshell” has never disappeared from the public eye. But until now, she had also never written an autobiography without a ghostwriter, said Jane Mulkerrins in The Times (U.K.). Her version of her life story “reliably delivers” the tales of youthful lust and celebrity excess you hope for. The surprise is that she displays a “breezy, gracious acceptance” of all the good and bad that’s befallen…

Ann-Helén Laestadius finally has the world’s attention just where she wants it, said Lisa Abend in The New York Times. In Stolen, her first novel for adults and first international best-seller, the 51-year-old former Swedish crime reporter uses the killing of reindeer to throw light on the plight of an Indigenous population of which she’s a member. The Sámi, who number about 80,000 and inhabit a vast swath of the Arctic, have been subjected to racist repression for generations, and their dependence on reindeer herding has itself been targeted. In 2020, when Sweden’s supreme court granted the Sámi exclusive rights to manage hunting on a strip of land along Norway’s border, malicious reindeer killings spiked. “They kill our reindeer because they can’t kill us,” Laestadius says. She opens Stolen…

Convention-breaking romantic movies… A Love Song Character actors Dale Dickey and Wes Studi aren’t typical romantic leads, but that only makes them compelling in this spare, beautiful 2022 drama about weathered Westerners who reunite decades after they became schoolhouse sweethearts. $3 on Amazon Prime Ali & Ava Unconventional casting also pays off in this 2022 dramedy about middle-aged romance. Adeel Ahktar plays a music-loving Pakistani immigrant and Claire Rushbrook a white working grandmother; the two wade toward a chance at love at a time of life when they least expect it. Showtime I Want You Back The premise suggests broad comedy: Two jilted lovers hatch a plot to help each other win back their exes. But the always wonderful Jenny Slate and Charlie Day, plus some excellent writing, make…

The total U.S. trade deficit increased by $103 billion, or 12.2 percent, last year to a record $948.1 billion. High inflation and energy prices contributed to the increase, which came as U.S. companies responded to supply chain disruptions by shifting some sourcing from China to Mexico, South Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan, and other countries. The New York Times The annual inflation rate for used cars surged from negative 2.7 percent in the summer of 2020, early in the pandemic, to record highs of more than 40 percent in 2021 and 2022. It has since plunged to negative 8 percent, near a record low. The Atlantic Uber said this week its ride-hailing service provided 2 billion trips in the fourth quarter of 2022, a first. That was up from 1.7 billion a…

With 356 million children in extreme need, according to UNICEF, Children International (www.children.org) is working to end the cycle of generational poverty. Since its founding in 1936, the nonprofit has supported more than 1 million children in 10 countries, from Honduras to the Philippines, through 67 community centers that offer medical and dental services, homemade food, libraries, computer labs, and playgrounds. Last year, CI invested more than $80 million in services aimed to empower children, youth, and their communities, including tutoring programs, scholarships to attend vocational school, and technical training for their future job placement. With a monthly contribution of $39, funders can also sponsor individual children, establishing a relationship through regular letters. Each charity we feature has earned a four-star overall rating from Charity Navigator, which rates not-for-profit…

Michael Hiltzik Los Angeles Times Five years ago, Barnes & Noble was “on the glide path to extinction,” said Michael Hiltzik. The 106-year-old chain had reported “its seventh quarterly loss in a row,” fired “its fourth chief executive in four years,” and was “shrinking its retail footprint” in response to seemingly “inexorable” competition from Amazon as well as “a shift among readers to e-books.” In 2019, the hedge fund Elliott Management bought it and installed as CEO James Daunt, who had previously turned around the Waterstones bookstore chain for Elliott in his native Britain. Unlike so many other hedge-fund buyouts, this one seems to be saving the business, not gutting it. Daunt promptly removed “a ton of completely irrelevant products” such as batteries, chargers, and water that “you’d find…

This week’s question: Marie Kondo, the home-organization guru who is now the mother of three children, recently admitted she has “kind of given up” on her once relentless pursuit of tidiness. What should she call a new book that reflects her messier new reality? Last week’s contest: A 45-year-old software tycoon’s expensive anti-aging regimen involves dozens of nutritional supplements, a low-calorie vegan diet, a team of 30 doctors, and a constant battery of MRIs and other tests. What should he call a self-help book promoting his grueling program for pursuing eternal youth? THE WINNER: “Dorian Gray’s Anatomy” Peter Wilander, Brevard, N.C. SECOND PLACE: “How to Make Life Seem Longer” Matthew Lane, Emporia, Kan. THIRD PLACE: “Don’t Cheat Death, Buy Him Off” Daniel Hicks, Randolph, Mass. For runners-up and complete…