The Week Magazine April 21, 2023

After the 2020 election, Ginni Thomas was apoplectic. She spent weeks firing off texts and emails urging Donald Trump’s chief of staff and state legislators to overturn the results, saying Trump’s defeat would ensure “the end of America.” When the messages were later made public, Thomas insisted she had not discussed her belief the election was stolen with her husband and “best friend,” Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. That’s convenient, since the justice never recused himself from cases involving Trump, the election, or Jan. 6. Last week, we learned that Justice Thomas failed to report that he and Ginni have been vacationing like billionaires for decades on the private jet, superyacht, and lakefront resort of conservative megadonor Harlan Crow. Crow assures us that while he showered expensive freebies on Thomas…

What happened A legal battle over medication abortion appeared to be headed for the Supreme Court this week, after a conservative federal judge in Texas ruled that the Food and Drug Administration must reverse its approval of mifepristone, an abortion pill that’s been in wide use for 23 years. U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee, said the FDA overlooked “legitimate safety concerns” when it approved the pill, part of a two-drug regimen used in more than half of U.S. abortions. The ruling marks the first time a judge has revoked FDA approval of a specific medication, and contradicts more than 100 scientific studies and two decades of use that support the FDA’s finding that mifepristone is very safe. Kacsmaryk said the FDA failed to consider the drug’s “psychological…

What happened Two Black Democratic Tennessee state legislators returned triumphantly to office this week after their expulsion by the Republican supermajority provoked a national outcry and drew condemnation from civil rights leaders. Local officials in both districts unanimously voted to reappoint Rep. Justin Jones, representing Nashville, and Rep. Justin J. Pearson, representing a district in Memphis, to their seats in the Tennessee House of Representatives. The two men, along with Democratic Rep. Gloria Johnson of Knoxville, faced an expulsion vote last week after they joined protesters who had taken over the House chamber to call for stricter gun laws in the wake of the recent mass shooting at a Nashville elementary school. The Republican-dominated state legislature expelled Jones and Pearson but not Johnson, a 60-year-old white woman, who said…

When Carnegie Mellon student Nikolai Stefanov first heard about a school club that planned to send a rover to the moon, he knew virtually nothing about spacecraft and offered to fetch coffee for the team. Three years later, he’s the mission control director, responsible for ensuring the rover’s success after it hitches a ride on a commercial lunar lander next month. If successful, Stefanov and his 300-person team will be the first private group to land a rover on an extraterrestrial body—and will have beaten NASA’s own robot rovers to the moon. Thirty-one Ukrainian children were reunited with their families last week, months after they were forcibly sent to Russia and Russian-occupied Crimea. Thirteen mothers traveling in a group braved a complex and harrowing journey through Poland and Belarus to…

Clarence Thomas was already “the most plainly corrupt Supreme Court justice since…well, maybe since ever,” said Michael Tomasky in The New Republic. Now comes ProPublica’s bombshell report detailing how, for two decades, the far-right justice secretly accepted luxury travel and accommodations worth millions of dollars from conservative megadonor Harlan Crow, a billionaire real estate mogul. Thomas and wife Ginni—a keen if peripheral player in President Trump’s plot to steal the 2020 election—have been regular passengers on Crow’s private Bombardier jet. As guests on his fully staffed, 162-foot-long, fully crewed yacht, they’ve toured New Zealand and the islands of Indonesia. They summer every year at Crow’s estate in the Adirondacks, where there hangs an oil painting of Crow and Thomas smoking cigars with former Federalist Society head Leonard Leo and…

Good week for: Ancient scrolls, after golfer Jon Rahm, who won last week’s Masters tournament, revealed he posted on Twitter back in 2013 that he was “gonna win the masters!” That prophetic tweet included a photo of a Chinese cookie fortune that reads: “Your talents will be recognized and suitably rewarded.” Twelve-year-old boys, after Elon Musk—a big fan of breast jokes—painted over the “w” in the sign outside Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters so that it now reads, “@titter.” The porn industry, with revelations that “Claudia,” an attractive 19-year-old brunette who’s selling lots of nude photos of herself on the website Reddit, is the imaginary creation of an AI-powered image generator. Bad week for: Big Brother, after Llano County, Texas, officials responded to a judge’s order that they restore banned books…