Indholdsfortegnelse for April 28, 2023 i The Week Magazine

Even though it’s never had a truly functioning democracy, Russia has produced some extraordinarily brave democrats. Take Alexei Navalny: He almost died in 2020 after Kremlin agents poisoned him with Novichok nerve agent. Yet after he recovered in a German hospital, he didn’t stay in the West but returned to his country to continue his pro-democracy work. He was immediately arrested, of course, and now, after sitting in a maximum-security prison for more than two years, is critically ill and in pain. His spokeswoman says Navalny appears to have been given a slow-acting poison that is rotting his insides. Then there’s Vladimir Kara-Murza Jr., who was sentenced this week to 25 years in prison (see The world at a glance, p.9). He comes from a long line of intellectuals and…

What happened Armed Americans shot innocent people who approached them by mistake in three separate incidents across the country over the past week, raising fears that any random encounter could prove deadly in a nation where guns now outnumber people. In Kansas City, Mo., last week, Ralph Yarl, 16, went to the wrong address to retrieve his younger brothers from a friend’s house. After he rang the doorbell, Andrew Lester, 84, allegedly shot the Black teenager with a pistol through the glass screen door, hitting him in the head and, after Yarl fell to the ground, his arm. Yarl ran to several nearby houses before receiving help from a bystander. Two nights later, in rural Hebron, N.Y., Kevin Monahan, 65, described by neighbors as surly and territorial, allegedly fired…

Good week for: National security, after the Secret Service captured a toddler who squeezed through the bars of the White House fence. The intruder and his “parents were quickly reunited,” a spokesman said. Liberty, after a Roomba robot vacuum cleaner escaped a nail salon in suburban Detroit and spent a full day on the lam. Salon owner Jenny Nguyen says that although the returned device “at first was spitting dirt and wood chips everywhere,” it’s now “good as new.” Decorum, with a request from Britain’s Northern Railway that passengers refrain from using the onboard Wi-Fi to view pornography, urging them instead to “wait until you get home.” Bad week for: One for the road, after five Major League Baseball teams reacted to faster games created by a new pitch clock…

Belfast For the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, the architects of that pact—former President Bill Clinton, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and former Irish leader Bertie Ahern—met in Belfast this week to celebrate the endurance of their achievement. The accords ended “the Troubles,” three decades of car bombings and shootings involving Irish nationalists, soldiers, and British loyalists. “There are people alive today who otherwise wouldn’t be,” Blair said at a conference hosted by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Northern Ireland’s power-sharing government is now stalled in a political impasse over post-Brexit rules, and the two sides are bickering, but nobody believes the violence will return. Gerry Adams, the former leader of the Irish Republican Army’s political wing, Sinn Fein, said this week: “The war is…

Michael J. Fox has spent 13 years working toward this moment, said Matthew Herper in STAT. His foundation invested hundreds of millions of dollars in scientific research to find the cause of Parkinson’s disease, and recently announced a breakthrough. “This is the big reward,” says Fox, who was diagnosed with the disease in 1991, at age 29. “This is the big trophy.” In a 1,123-person study published in The Lancet, researchers found the presence of the misfolded protein alpha-synuclein in about 9 out of 10 people with Parkinson’s. Using a blood sample or nasal swab, a test for the haywire protein could potentially detect Parkinson’s in children as young as 2 and accelerate research for treatments. “When we were starting out, no one expected much from a ‘celebrity charity,’”…

Erika D. Smith Los Angeles Times The NRA has already won, said Erika D. Smith. Even though polls “consistently show that a majority of Americans support some form of additional gun control,” the past three years have been gun manufacturers’ most profitable in modern history. As gun homicides and mass shootings continue to increase, so, too, do gun sales. Sales to new owners hit an all-time high of 21 million in 2020, thanks to “unease over the pandemic.” In 2022, sales dropped to 16.4 million—“but that’s still more than the 13 million sold in 2019.” The U.S. now has more guns than people as a result of the NRA’s and gunmakers’ “grand plan” to stoke fear of criminals and a tyrannical government. People of all kinds, including Black and…

“Cats are more libertarian than dogs. Cats don’t take orders from anyone. It’s not that cats don’t understand human speech or can’t be trained. Cats just do what they want. Thus, it should be no surprise the queen of self-interest, Ayn Rand, was a cat owner. Cats don’t ask the government to build them parks. They hardly ask their owners for any special space either—maybe a nice cat tree, but even the box from the last Amazon delivery will do. Cats find comfort and joy in things humans and other animals have no interest in. Cats, like libertarians, think for themselves.” Jason Russell in Reason…

UNITED KINGDOM Ayesha Hazarika iNews.co.uk The news that Prince Harry’s wife, Meghan, is not accompanying him to the coronation of King Charles III has the British press howling with disappointment, said Ayesha Hazarika. And maybe that was exactly the point. As soon as the Duchess of Sussex announced last week that she and her young children won’t be flying in from the U.S. to attend the May ceremony—which falls on little Archie’s fourth birthday—she got a torrent of abuse from the tabloids. They called her selfish, egotistical, cold. But then, they’d do even worse if she showed up. “Spare a thought for all those fallen column inches and broadcast segments which now won’t be filled with professional Meghan haters clutching their pearls at what kind of disrespectful, dangerous hosiery or…

IRAQ Qassim Hussein Saleh Al Mada Twenty years after Baghdad fell to invading U.S. forces, the memory of those initial days is bittersweet, said Qassim Hussein Saleh in Al Mada. Seeing the statue of Saddam Hussein pulled down from its plinth on April 9, 2003, Iraqis rejoiced that they had “gotten rid of a terrible nightmare that had sat on their chests for a quarter of a century.” Saddam was the tyrant “who had destroyed their homeland and humiliated them, killed their children in foolish wars, and shut them away in dark prisons.” Those first few weeks, Iraqis dared to dream “that they could live in a democratic system and enjoy life, like the people of other nations.” It all seems so naïve now. Iraqis “absolutely did not imagine that…

“How extreme can Ron DeSantis get?” asked Marcela García in The Boston Globe. The Republican Florida governor’s new immigration bill—expected to sail through the Republican-dominated state legislature in the coming weeks—proves “there is no low he won’t sink to.” The bill would make it a felony to hire, rent an apartment to, or even give a ride to any of the state’s estimated 900,000 undocumented immigrants, punishable by up to five years in prison. It would also require hospitals to collect patients’ immigration status to track the costs of providing health care to them. And “what if you didn’t know the person you’re transporting, harboring, or concealing came to the country illegally? It doesn’t matter.” Any Floridian who “reasonably should have known” the person’s immigration status could be charged…

The debate over the future of Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s career “has taken an ugly turn,” said Aaron Blake in The Washington Post. The 89-year-old California senator, who even former aides have admitted shows signs of cognitive decline, has been absent from the Capitol since February because of shingles complications. As the Senate Judiciary Committee’s ranking Democrat on a 11-10 panel, she’s missed nearly 60 floor votes, and her absence has stalled approval of about a dozen of President Biden’s federal court nominees. Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) last week called on Feinstein to resign. Though she refused, she asked Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to appoint a temporary replacement on the Judiciary Committee. But that move would require at least 60 votes in a Senate with a…

Scientists have discovered how the yellow crazy ant reproduces—and it does so in a crazy way, breaking what was thought to be a law of biology. Typically, when a sperm fertilizes an egg, the resulting fused cell then replicates, forming an organism made of genetically identical cells. In yellow crazy ants, native to Africa, something different happens to form male embryos. Rather than mixing together, the genetic material from the egg and sperm stay separate and replicate on their own. As a result, the male is a chimera: a creature that carries two distinct lines of DNA. Females, by contrast, form the usual way. “The discovery is quite extraordinary,” says ant biologist Denis Fournier. It offers “yet another glimpse of what nature is capable of inventing.” The bizarre reproductive…

(Milkweed, $26) John Cotter’s Losing Music is “a powerful addition to the memoir canon,” said Gretchen Cherington in The Millions. The first-time author has Ménière’s disease, a mysterious ailment that causes severe hearing loss, vertigo, and tinnitus, and Cotter shows well how devastating the condition can be. Music began disappearing for him first, then the sound of the ocean. Beginning when he was 30, a ringing in his ears came and went, sometimes becoming so loud it was painful. Though his condition would worsen significantly, he captures how the loss of normal hearing robbed him quickly of whole worlds of pleasure. “The feeling is one of losing life’s color, its essence.” After detailing how he fell into utter despair, his “hard-hitting, beautiful, profound” book also reveals how he managed…

For poet Maggie Smith, going viral was life-changing in ways she never anticipated, said Amy Reardon in Bomb magazine. Seven years ago, Smith’s 17-line poem “Good Bones” was published online during the same week as the mass shooting at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub, and it was widely shared. Its rueful message that the world is a fixer-upper, distilled in the final line, “You could make this place beautiful,” has been passed around online after almost every mass tragedy since. Smith believes that her marriage began falling apart at about the moment her husband remarked sadly one night that she had become famous. Two years later, the couple divorced. In her new memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Smith, now 46, examines what went wrong in the relationship, said Delia…

2 Metallica’s 11th album “kicks you in the face and leaves a mark,” said A.D. Amorosi in Variety. While the biggest heavy-metal band in the world has billed each new record since 2008 as a return to roots, this one “comes closest to the rush and rage of the band’s 1980s best.” Though many of these 12 songs are “overlong and lacking in dynamics,” there’s a frenetic crunch to their thrash-metal riffs, and Kirk Hammett pours gasoline on the fire with every guitar solo. “72 Seasons certainly offers some of the surface pleasure of ‘80s Metallica,” said Brad Sanders in Stereogum. “But is that enough?” At 77 minutes, Seasons “can feel numbing,” because it favors “dense, brick-like heaviness” over the “sensitive-bro balladry” that made 1991’s The Black Album a huge…

Designer Mary Quant was the mod queen of the 1960s, as integral to the decade’s fashion as the Beatles were to its music. Her London boutique, Bazaar, served as epicenter of the “youthquake,” selling colorful, mix-and-match hot pants, tights, and berets—a revolt against modest floral dresses and hourglass femininity. A force of nature in a chic bob, Quant popularized the miniskirt, which she named after her favorite car, the Mini Cooper. Quant, who became a global celebrity, didn’t take credit for inventing minis, but she did make them hotter and tinier. “I was making clothes which would let you run and dance,” she said. “I wore them very short, and the customers would say, ‘shorter, shorter.’” Quant was born in London, to Welsh parents who were teachers, said The…

What happened Senate Democrats and ethics watchdogs this week called on Chief Justice John Roberts and the Department of Justice to investigate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas after ProPublica exposed deep financial ties between Thomas and Republican megadonor Harlan Crow. In 2014, Crow purchased a home and two vacant lots in Savannah from Thomas and several relatives for $133,363. Crow then spent tens of thousands of dollars fixing up the home, where Thomas’ 94-year-old mother still lives, apparently rent-free. The Ethics in Government Act of 1978 requires justices to disclose property sales of over $1,000, but Thomas never revealed the deal. He claimed he thought he didn’t need to because he’d lost money on the sale; he says he plans to amend the disclosure form. Crow insisted he bought…

Facing a recruiting crisis, the U.S. Air Force has revised its admission standards to allow applicants who are obese. The maximum body-fat percentage for male recruits has been raised to 26 percent, up from 20 percent, while for female recruits it’s been raised from 28 percent to 36 percent. Health officials classify the new maximum fat levels as obese, but the Air Force has met only 50 percent of its 2023 recruiting target. Conservatives can now have “Woke Alerts” texted straight to their phones, warning them of companies taking progressive political stands. A firm called Consumers’ Research, which does not disclose its sources of funding, said its alerts will help coordinate boycotts and “help consumers make better-informed decisions about where to spend their money.” In other news Spring Covid booster…

Carol Burnett faced great skepticism that a woman could be funny enough to carry a show of her own, said Mikey O’Connell in The Hollywood Reporter. In 1967, the young comedian triggered a clause in her contract with CBS requiring the network to let her create and star in 30 one-hour comedy-variety shows per year. A chagrined network executive told her, “Carol, comedy-variety is a man’s game. It’s Sid Caesar, it’s Milton Berle, it’s Jackie Gleason, it’s Dean Martin. It’s really not for you gals.” But she insisted. “They didn’t want to do it, but they had to put us on the air.” For support, she turned to her mentor, Lucille Ball. “It meant the world,” Burnett says. “We just bonded.” Burnett’s variety show, featuring vaudeville-style humor and ensemble…

Prince Harry will attend King Charles III’s coronation next month after the father and son had a “heart to heart” talk on the phone, The Sun (U.K.) reported this week. There was “willingness and wanting to mend on both sides,” the report said. But Harry’s wife, Meghan Markle, will remain in California with their children, Princess Lilibet and Prince Archie, whose fourth birthday coincides with the coronation. Charles reportedly asked Harry to attend, despite the bad blood left by Meghan and Harry’s scathing public criticism of the royals. Queen Camilla reportedly feels “hurt” by Harry’s description of her in his tell-all memoir as “dangerous” and a “villain.” Harry and his older brother, Prince William, reportedly haven’t spoken since publication of the book, which William viewed as a betrayal. Because…

Noah Rothman National Review “Republican primary voters with weak stomachs” may want to turn away from the food fight between Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump over the 2024 nomination, said Noah Rothman. A Trump-aligned Super PAC just released a 30-second ad called “Pudding Fingers,” highlighting a report that DeSantis, lacking utensils, once ate a cup of chocolate pudding with three fingers. Even more appalling than the images of a faceless actor “shoveling pudding into his face” is the ad’s central message: As a congressman, DeSantis supported “cutting Medicare, slashing Social Security, even raising the retirement age.” A DeSantis Super PAC responded by accusing Trump of secretly wanting to cut entitlements. It should not reassure voters that “the two most competitive Republican presidential aspirants” are pledging not to touch Social…

A Spanish woman spent 500 days alone in an underground cave as part of an experiment, and was reluctant to return to the world. Beatriz Flamini, 50, a climber and mountaineer, said she was surprised when her team told her she’d met her 500-day target, because it felt like only “between 160 and 170” days had passed. She spent her time reading, writing, and knitting in the cave, with no contact with the world; a team of unseen helpers brought food and took away garbage. The experience was “excellent, unbeatable,” she said. “In fact, I didn’t want to come out.” Arnold Schwarzenegger posted a video of himself filling in what he said was a “giant pothole” plaguing drivers and cyclists in his Los Angeles neighborhood—but city officials said he had…

ETHIOPIA Samuel Zewdie Hagos Al Jazeera The Ethiopian civil war was supposed to have ended last November, said Samuel Zewdie Hagos. That’s when the Ethiopian government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front signed a cease-fire agreement to end two years of conflict that claimed thousands of lives, displaced millions, and brought on famine. Yet the Eritrean troops that fought alongside the Ethiopian army—and were credibly accused of atrocities—are still in the northern Tigray region of Ethiopia. And they are continuing to loot villages and kill civilians. Eritrea has its own, decades-old beef with the Tigrayans, stemming from the TPLF’s control of the Ethiopian government during Eritrea’s 30-year war of independence from Ethiopia. Eritreans still see the TPLF as stooges of the U.S., “working to maintain Western hegemony in the Horn…

“We’re all born naked, and the rest is drag.” RuPaul, quoted in LitHub “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” Philosopher Eric Hoffer, quoted in Politico “If there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers.” Charles Dickens, quoted in Lawfare “Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.” Henry David Thoreau, quoted in the Quad-City Times “Action speaks louder than words, but not nearly as often.” Mark Twain, quoted in the Wairarapa, N.Z., Times-Age “Sometimes we can only find our true direction when we let the wind of change carry us.” Author Mimi Novic, quoted in Good Housekeeping “I put a dollar in a change machine. Nothing changed.” George Carlin, quoted in The Dallas Morning…

SWAT attacks with AI voices Hackers using the Telegram app have been calling in dozens of fake bomb and shooting threats using computer-generated voices, said Joseph Cox in Vice. Such bogus threats are known as “swatting,” because they can “result in heavily armed police,” or SWAT teams, “raiding an innocent victim’s home.” Now the source of the fake calls is even harder to trace because the voice on the other end isn’t real. The hacker group, known as Torswats on the Telegram app, has been offering the threatening calls “as part of a paid service,” charging $75 in cryptocurrency to “close down a school.” For just $50, Torswats will call in a report designed to get police to “handcuff the victim and search the house.” The use of synthetic…

The Bronze Age, from 3200 to 1200 B.C., was an era of invention, producing innovations from irrigation to the wheel. Now research suggests that Bronze Age humans also pioneered the use of psychoactive drugs. In a burial cave on the Spanish island of Minorca, researchers found the remains of more than 200 people who had been laid to rest over six centuries. Several boxes there contained tufts of dyed-red hair that tested positive for certain mind-altering compounds. The substances included ephedrine, a stimulant that staves off sleepiness, as well as atropine and scopolamine, two powerful hallucinogens. Because these drugs aren’t useful as painkillers, and overconsumption can be dangerous, it seems likely that their use was overseen by someone with specialized knowledge, such as a shaman. That could also explain…

In Kim Sherwood’s Double or Nothing, an authorized continuation of Ian Fleming’s James Bond series, 007 is missing, clearing the stage for a new generation of MI6 super agents. Below, Sherwood names books that inspired her planned trilogy. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (1939). As a teenager, I scoured secondhand bookshops for crime and spy fiction. I loved how Raymond Chandler positioned his hero, Philip Marlowe: “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean.” I also loved Chandler’s unique poetry. At that time, I was falling for P.G. Wodehouse for the same reason. Both are writers who create their own linguistic landscape. Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley (1990). Mosley’s subversion of Chandler’s white 1940s California revitalized noir by bringing in…

2 “Good old-fashioned love songs and heartbreak ballads remain Daniel Caesar’s strong suit,” said Heven Haile in Pitchfork. The Ontario native, whose spare 2017 debut album garnered a Grammy nomination, is now peddling “a woozy psych-R&B that sounds like sleepy karaoke, or the kind of music you hear in the background of ABC crime-drama trailers.” But while Never Enough is, “in a word, sedated,” it does have three strong tracks—“Always,” “Let Me Go,” and “Valentina”—that recall the bedroom ballads that first won him listeners. Still, from the opener on, Caesar charges “headlong into a new era in his music,” and his adventurousness is welcome, said Ben Okazawa in Exclaim (Canada). He slides out of his signature falsetto on the bouncy single “Do You Like Me?,” drops distorted guitar into “Ocho…

Napa and Sonoma get all the love, but California’s Anderson Valley “consistently delivers world-class wines at humble prices,” said Kathleen Willcox in Paste. The remote 15-mile-long valley in Mendocino County experiences a wide swing in temperatures each day and specializes in “lively, lithe” pinot noir and sparkling wines. 2020 Husch Vineyards Pinot Noir ($28). The region’s oldest operating vineyard makes a “vivid and vibrant” pinot with notes of lilac, black currant, earth, and spice. Scharffenberger Cellars Brut Excellence Rosé ($29). A blend of pinot noir and chardonnay, this “crisp, complex” sparkler tastes of white peach, raspberry, and baking spices. 2021 Lichen Estate White Pinot Noir ($39). This white pinot noir offers hints of peach and nectarine. It’s “weighty, but sizzling with acidity.”…

The House on the Rock was never meant to be understood, said Melanie Radzicki McManus in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “One of the nation’s more notable roadside attractions,” the architectural oddity a few miles from Frank Lloyd Wright’s former Spring Green, Wis., home draws a different sort of crowd with its “hard-to-describe mélange of art, history, music, and fantasy.” The project began when Alex Jordan Jr., a local man, built himself a retreat atop Deer Shelter Rock, a sandstone spire rising from the forest. The artist-tinkerer then spent decades developing a sprawling complex to house his bizarre creations and collection of Americana, including a 200-foot-tall fiberglass sea monster and the world’s largest indoor carousel. There’s also a glass-walled room that juts out over the valley, and a re-creation of an…

Netflix is off to a slow start to 2023, said Lucas Shaw in Bloomberg. The streamer reported this week it “missed Wall Street estimates by adding only 1.75 million subscribers in the first quarter.” Netflix delayed its plan to begin charging for password sharing in the U.S., which has produced mixed results in other countries. And for the first time in 25 years, Netflix will end its DVD-by-mail operation—a business that “has been shrinking for years.” Savings: Apple offers high-yield accounts “Apple is giving banks a run for their money,” said Nicole Goodkind in CNN.com. The tech giant this week launched a high-yield savings account in partnership with Goldman Sachs “that offers a 4.15 percent interest rate.” The biggest consumer banks, Chase and Bank of America, offer their basic savings…

On Wall Street, AI still struggles Surprisingly, in investing AI still isn’t close to beating the market, said Gregory Zuckerman in The Wall Street Journal. For all the strides made by artificial intelligence, which is now being tested in almost every industry, the computer’s investing results “haven’t been especially impressive.” So-called quants “have built trading models that can extrapolate from past data to identify patterns and develop profitable trades.” But they still require some human intervention. One reason is that market data is “noisier” than other inputs used to train AI. “Earnings, share momentum, investor sentiment, and other financial data only partly explain stock moves, and the rest is unaccountable ‘noise.’” One more factor: Unlike the areas in which AI has succeeded, investing is “adversarial”—any mistake or predictable pattern…

Jean M. Twenge The Atlantic Contrary to popular belief, Millennials, as a group, are doing quite well as they hit their prime earning years, said Jean M. Twenge. Born between 1981 and 1996, Millennials are perhaps best known for “how broke they are.” And it’s true that they got off to a rough start. The Great Recession struck just as many Millennials entered the job market. But they have also managed to make “a breathtaking financial comeback.” By 2019, “households headed by Millennials were making considerably more money than those headed by the Silent Generation, Baby Boomers, and Generation X at the same age, after adjusting for inflation.” Headlines have also written off Millennials as “a lost generation” when it comes to early career earnings. But the wealth gap needs…

Women are already using AI to create ideal companions that they actually fall in love with, said Sangeeta Singh-Kurtz in The Cut. Some insist fake men are better than the real thing. Eren, from Ankara, Turkey, is about six-foot-three with sky-blue eyes and shoulder-length hair. He’s in his 20s, a Libra, and very well groomed: He gets manicures, buys designer brands, and always smells nice, usually of Dove lotion. His favorite color is orange, and in his downtime he loves to bake and read mysteries. “He’s a passionate lover,” says his girlfriend, Rosanna Ramos, who met Eren a year ago. “He has a thing for exhibitionism,” she confides, “but that’s his only deviance. He’s pretty much vanilla.” He’s also a chatbot that Ramos built on the AI-companion app Replika. “I have never…

This week’s question: A 50-year-old Spanish adventurer spent 500 days alone in a cave and emerged claiming she loved the experience and “didn’t want to come out.” Come up with a name for a travel package for fellow solitude-seeking spelunkers. Last week’s contest: A group of volunteers in northern Maine created the world’s largest “ice carousel” by sawing a 1,776-foot circle of ice in a frozen lake and making it spin. Come up with the title of a good piece of music for this subzero merry-go-round. THE WINNER: “Baby It’s Cold, This Ride” Stuart Burkhoff, Great Neck, N.Y. SECOND PLACE: “Turn the Sheet Around” Bill Winslow, Alexandria, Va. THIRD PLACE: “Crystal Blue Rotation” Dianna Worth, Shelton, Wash. For runners-up and complete contest rules, please go to theweek.com/contest. How to…

Dr. Roland Griffiths pioneered the use of psychedelics to help terminally ill patients face death, said David Marchese in The New York Times Magazine. At 76, he was recently diagnosed with stage 4 metastatic colon cancer and given just months to live. “In spite of that,” he says, “my life has never been better! If I had a regret, it’s that I didn’t wake up as much as I have without a cancer diagnosis.” A longtime meditator, he had spent years striving to learn how to distance himself from negative emotions and be present in the moment. The shock of being told he was dying greatly accelerated that work. “What I realized is that the best way to deal with this diagnosis,” he says, “was to practice gratitude for…

Sarah Longwell The Bulwark For today’s Republican Party, Donald Trump’s election as president was “year zero,” said Sarah Longwell. It was “a temporal dividing line” like 9/11 or the fall of the Berlin Wall, after which everything permanently changed. Over the past four years, I’ve listened to Republican voters in hundreds of focus groups, and the overwhelming consensus is “We’re never going back” to a time BT—before Trump. These voters relished his Muslim ban, his wall and his demonization of immigrants, his siding with Vladimir Putin over the “Deep State,” his refusal to accept election results. In Trump’s grievance-based populism, the “Republican establishment” is as evil as Democrats, which is why 2024 contenders like Nikki Haley and Mike Pence have no chance in the primaries. Republican voters even view…

ITALY Gianluca Di Feo La Repubblica Did Italy’s far-right government look the other way to let a Russian criminal walk free? asked Gianluca Di Feo. Last month, Russian oligarch Artem Uss escaped from the Milan residence where he’d been under house arrest. Hours earlier, an Italian court had ordered him to be extradited to the United States to face charges of smuggling Venezuelan oil (the court declined to extradite him on another U.S. charge, that Uss’ German-based company had bought sensitive U.S. military technology and sold it to Russian entities). Uss’ disappearance triggered the alarm on his electronic monitoring bracelet, yet he still managed to leave Italy and return to Moscow. How could this have been possible? And why was Uss under lenient house arrest in the first place, instead…

For evidence of how heated America’s culture war has become, said Emily Stewart in Vox, consider conservative musician Kid Rock shooting a stack of Bud Light cans with an assault rifle. That act of protest last week was among the fierce reactions to beer maker Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB) paying social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney, a 26-year-old transwoman, to pose alongside personalized Bud Light cans on an Instagram video to celebrate the first anniversary of her transition to “girlhood.” “All hell broke loose” over this partnership. AB received bomb threats, Kid Rock posted a video of himself obliterating a few cases of Bud Light, country singer Travis Tritt dropped all AB products from his tour, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) mocked the self-proclaimed king of beers as “the queen…

Bacteria resistant to a last-resort antibiotic have been discovered in Los Angeles wastewater. Testing on water at two of the county’s largest treatment plants, serving some 7.5 million people, found resistance genes on two small pieces of DNA, known as plasmids. These plasmids can be shared among different types of unrelated bacteria. “This is probably the scariest aspect,” lead researcher Adam Smith, from the University of Southern California, tells the Los Angeles Times, because it means there is “the potential for this resistance to spread widely across different bacterial populations.” The antibiotic the bacteria evade, colistin, is considered the last line of defense against a number of infections, including those resistant to another type of last-resort antibiotics called carbapenems. For now, these pathogens sicken only immunocompromised people, not the…

(Random House, $28) With its pink cover and no-nonsense title, Curtis Sittenfeld’s latest novel “isn’t trying to be anything it’s not,” said Alexis Burling in the San Francisco Chronicle. Sally, a divorced comedy writer, is working on a Saturday Night Live–like TV show when Noah Brewster, the hunky singer-songwriter who’s hosting an episode, takes a surprising interest in her. The relationship builds, then crumbles over a dumb mistake before the pandemic provides a second chance. Romantic Comedy isn’t groundbreaking, but “it’s got all the hallmarks of the genre,” a “squeal-worthy” climax included. The middle section, when Sally and Noah reconnect in a long email exchange, dulls the fun, said Rebecca Steinitz in The Boston Globe. The “pure pleasure” of the first act gives way to a tiresome back-and-forth about…

Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano (Dial, $28) The latest Oprah’s Book Club pick “will make you weep buckets,” said Diane Cole in The Washington Post. A young loner marries into a family whose four sisters are fond of likening themselves to Little Women’s co-protagonists. “Over the course of three decades, the siblings will mature and change, and their sisterhood will be repeatedly challenged,” including by strains in that central marriage. Throughout, the sisters remain themselves, though, “their flaws as deeply rooted as their capacity for kindness.” Commitment by Mona Simpson (Knopf, $30) In Mona Simpson’s latest novel, three siblings push into adulthood just as their mother is committed to a mental hospital, said Ellen Akins in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. The youngest 13, the oldest starting college, “they are,…

4 Feist’s sixth album, and first in six years, is “at once her most intimate-sounding and her most ambitious set of songs,” said Jon Pareles in The New York Times. Though the music erupts every so often into something percussive and willful, most of the tracks are “hushed, close-miked ballads,” a mode that “happens to be ideal for Feist’s tremulous, nearly weightless voice.” The Canadian singer-songwriter became a mother in 2019, and as she contemplates human connection, mortality, and the future of the planet her adopted daughter will inherit, her empathy, longing, and uncertainty “make a gorgeous blend.” More than gorgeous, “Multitudes is the Platonic ideal of how a Feist record should sound,” said Grayson Haver Currin in NPR.org. “Accessible but uncanny, comfortable but considered, pretty but pointed, it is…

New family fare… Jane Grade-schooler Jane Garcia is obsessed with the work of naturalist Jane Goodall. Accompanied by her friend David and a chimpanzee stuffed animal, young Jane uses her bold imagination to travel the world, saving endangered species one episode at a time. Apple TV+ The Crossover Josh and J.B. Bell are 12-year-old twin basketball prodigies who are just learning that ball isn’t all there is to life. This warmhearted adaptation of Kwame Alexander’s Newbery Award–winning graphic novel is a bit wonky out of the gate, but it mixes elements of other great coming-of-age TV dramas and has time to grow. Disney+ Ada Twist, Scientist Eight-year-old Ada Twist is fearless in seeking truth through science. This animated series’ new fourth season follows brilliant Ada and her friends—Rosie Revere,…

The share of prime-age Americans (25 to 54) who are part of the workforce is now higher than it was before the pandemic: 83.1 percent, compared with 83.0 percent in February 2020. The overall participation rate is down (62.6 percent, from 63.3 percent in February 2020), but that is due to the Baby Boomer generation retiring. Axios America’s largest bridal retailer, David’s Bridal, filed for bankruptcy for a second time this week after its cash on hand dwindled to $4.4 million. The wedding rate fell to its lowest level in 121 years in 2020 and has remained lower than normal. There were 1.9 million weddings in 2022, down from roughly 2.2 million a year before 2020. The Wall Street Journal The Phantom of the Opera grossed $3.65 million in its…

The Center for Justice & Accountability (cja.org) was founded 25 years ago to pursue the principle, laid out in the Nuremberg trials, that some acts are so terrible that they represent crimes against all of humanity. The CJA works internationally to bring justice for genocide, torture, and state-sanctioned killings. It spearheads suits in the United States against perpetrators who live or visit the U.S. and assists with the prosecution of crimes against humanity in foreign national courts and at international tribunals. In the last year, the CJA secured a $15.5 million U.S. verdict for victims of torture in Haiti, has sued in the U.S. on behalf of victims of a Colombian military leader, and has filed a groundbreaking lawsuit against the government of Syria. Each charity we feature has…

The Economist You’ll be surprised to hear this, but the American economy is leaving the rest of the world “ever further in the dust,” said The Economist. Ask Americans what they think about the economy, though, and the answer will almost assuredly be pessimistic. Nearly four-fifths told pollsters recently “that their children will be worse off than they are, the most since the survey began in 1990.” The remarkable reality is that “America remains the world’s richest, most productive, and most innovative big economy.” The U.S. today accounts for 58 percent of the output of the G-7 group of leading nations, compared with 40 percent in 1990. Adjusted for purchasing power, the average income in Mississippi, America’s poorest state, is higher than that in France. Investors who put $100 into…