Indholdsfortegnelse for June 9, 2023 i The Week Magazine

The AI vs. human score this week was roughly 1-1. A tie, sort of. On the one hand, the poor lawyer who decided to rely on AI to write a brief in the case of a man hit by an airline serving cart was laughed out of court and now must defend his law license (see Business news, p.32). On the other, a blue-ribbon group of tech leaders said that the growth of AI poses the risk of “extinction” for humanity (see The U.S. at a glance, p.7). Between these two poles—“let’s dunk on the stupid computers” and “here come the robot overlords”—lies our likely future. I’m betting against humanity’s imminent demise. For one thing, it’s been a longtime Silicon Valley obsession—the theory that we haven’t met space aliens because…

A new ride-sharing app, Black Wolf, will compete with Uber and Lyft in Atlanta and New York by offering the added security of an armed driver. Black Wolf says most of its drivers have military or security backgrounds, and must pass standard firearm background checks. In a violent society, says founder Kerry King Brown, arming drivers “is a necessary evil.” A Dallas school district has apologized for not warning upset parents that an imitation Winnie the Pooh book they distributed to pre-K through first-grade students was actually a mass-shooting survival guide. Stay Safe shows Pooh and friends advising children that when “danger is near” they should “run like Rabbit” or “hide without making a sound in a place we cannot be found.” In other news Oath Keepers leader gets 18-year-sentence…

Chita Rivera can thank a broken coffee table for her storied career on Broadway, said Chris Wiegand in The Guardian (U.K.). Rivera, 90, grew up in a very Catholic household in Washington, D.C. “I was quite comfortable looking forward to being a nun,” she says. But at age 9, she crashed through a bamboo table while playing, and her mother put her in ballet school, hoping to channel her abundant energy. Rivera later auditioned successfully for George Balanchine’s School of American Ballet, but quit the corps of ballerinas after a couple of years. “I would have had to be just like everybody else,” she says. “I wasn’t about to do that.” Rivera made a name for herself as an actress, singer, and dancer in West Side Story and later…

Taylor Swift has been spotted recently kissing and cozying up to British singer Matty Healy, sparking outrage among “Swifties” over Healy’s past crude comments. Healy, 34, is frontman of the edgy pop-rock band The 1975. Earlier this year, he laughed as podcast hosts Adam Friedland and Nick Mullen joked about the race of rising-star rapper Ice Spice, calling her an “Inuit Spice Girl” and “chubby Chinese lady.” (She’s of Nigerian and Dominican descent.) In that interview, he joked about masturbating to the porn site Ghetto Gaggers, which shows mostly Black women getting, as Healy put it, “brutalized.” Last week, Swift, 33—who broke up with long-term partner Joe Alwyn in April—announced a new song with Ice Spice, which some fans took as damage control in light of her romance with…

Fred Kaplan Slate As Henry Kissinger turns 100 this week, tributes from his admirers are omitting his “bloody legacy,” said Fred Kaplan. As secretary of state and then national security adviser under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, Kissinger achieved some “moments of triumph,” notably U.S.-Soviet détente and the opening of China. But his chessboard tradecraft wreaked havoc all over the globe—and damaged “America’s own reputation.” He was “chief architect” of U.S. efforts to support Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 right-wing military coup in Chile, then turned “a blind eye to Pinochet’s murderous repression” of socialist supporters of the ousted president, Salvador Allende. Kissinger supported an “even more brutal and murderous” military coup in Argentina three years later. In 1975, he gave a U.S. green light to Indonesia’s invasion of East…

Belgian pranksters entered a $2.70 supermarket wine in a prestigious French wine competition, where it won a gold medal. Former top sommelier Eric Boschman and staffers from a Belgian consumer magazine and TV program sought the cheapest wine they could find, stuck on a colorful new label, and renamed it “Le Château Colombier.” The judges at the Gilbert et Gaillard competition deemed it “exceptional,” and “very interesting,” lauding its “suave, edgy, and rich palate” and “clean, youthful aromas that promise a nice complexity.” A Canadian entrepreneur wants to build a 900-foot replica of the moon that would loom over the Dubai skyline and glow at night. Michael Henderson envisions creating a mega-resort inside the giant sphere, which would sit atop a 100-foot building and include a 4,000-room hotel, a 10,000-seat…

CHINA Katrin Büchenbacher Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Switzerland) President Xi Jinping wants to send China’s brightest young minds “out into the countryside,” said Katrin Büchenbacher. With the jobless rate for 16- to 24-year-olds at 20 percent, a staggering number of college graduates can’t find work. That’s partly because so many businesses that usually hire entry-level professionals went under during China’s harsh Covid lockdowns. But it’s also because Xi’s strict new regulations on sectors like education and entertainment resulted in the elimination of millions of white-collar jobs. A record 12 million more people are due to graduate from college this June, but the knowledge-economy jobs they hope for just don’t exist. Meanwhile, the manufacturing sector is bemoaning a serious shortage of skilled labor. So Xi is now copying Mao Zedong, who famously…

“It’s very pleasant to be praised, but it doesn’t actually help you.”Painter Francis Bacon, quoted in The New Yorker “Somehow, we’ve weathered and witnessed / A nation that isn’t broken, but simply / unfinished.” Amanda Gorman, quoted in NPR “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’Tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” Mark Twain, quoted in Cincinnati Business Courier “Time is a created thing. To say ‘I don’t have time’ is like saying ‘I don’t want to.’” Lao Tzu, quoted in DualShockers “Happiness is the greatest beauty secret.” Tina Turner, quoted in Pinkvilla “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.” G.K. Chesterton, quoted in Christian…

The pros and cons of phone tracking Tracking your spouse’s location can lead you to some unexpected results, said Julie Jargon in The Wall Street Journal. Some couples happily rely on their phones’ tracking features. One kids’ baseball coach is so “notorious for not answering his phone” that players and colleagues call his wife so she can point them to the correct field. But location tracking isn’t always accurate. One woman was unnerved when her tracker showed her husband “in a hotel in the middle of the day” (in fact, he was in his office). And tracking the phone isn’t quite the same as tracking the person. Ohioan Jen Campbell “remembers when her husband tried to find her during a 50-mile charity bike ride.” He kept stopping to let her catch…

Recycling plastic seems like a better idea than dumping it into a landfill. But a new study from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow suggests that the processes involved can spew large quantities of microplastics into the atmosphere. Those tiny particles of plastic, less than 5 mm across, are now showing up everywhere from the bottom of the ocean to the top of Mount Everest to human bloodstreams, and they have been linked to several health issues. For the study researchers examined air and water around a state-of-the-art recycling facility in the U.K. They found that 13 percent of the plastic processed ended up as microplastics in the wastewater or the surrounding air. “I was incredibly shocked,” lead researcher Erina Brown tells The Guardian (U.K.). After the plant installed…

Janika Oza’s debut novel, A History of Burning, is the story of a family. It opens in 1898, when an Indian teenager is shipped to Kenya to work and sets a fire that haunts his progeny. Among them are sisters forced to flee Uganda in 1972. Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese (2009). Verghese’s third novel is a beautiful saga about Indian twin brothers coming of age in Ethiopia amid political turmoil. It’s a story about betrayal, the bonds between family, and what it takes to heal. It was also the first book I read that encompassed an Indian community in East Africa, a community adjacent to mine. Salt Houses by Hala Alyan (2017). A novel about displacement, making home, and the ways we come back to one another,…

2 Graham Nash’s second album in the past two decades “could be considered a resurgence,” said Lee Zimmerman in American Songwriter. As the title suggests, Now doesn’t focus on past glories, though Nash, 81, often counts his blessings here in songs that recapture “the calming and caressing sound” of his work with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Several of the songs “center on gratitude for love and companionship,” while “Golden Idols” takes aim at MAGA and the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, evoking Nash’s CSNY protest songs. The still-touring legend is, to my ears, “artistically treading water,” said Hal Horowitz in Holler. Now is packed with wan love songs, “meandering” melodies, and “cringeworthy” lyrics, such as this tribute to Buddy Holly: “Buddy Holly was who we loved, right from the heart /…

Think Twice: Michael Jackson (Audible/Wondery) Michael Jackson has been dead for nearly 14 years, and we’re still figuring out what to do with him, said Rachel Treisman in NPR.org. In a 10-episode podcast, journalist Leon Neyfakh and hip-hop commentator Jay Smooth offer a fresh look at the pop star’s complicated life and legacy. Their series “explores Jackson’s staying power despite the disturbing allegations, offering new perspectives on how he was shaped by American culture and vice versa.” The podcast’s biggest draw “may be the sheer scope of people involved,” said Madeline Roth in The Daily Beast. Neyfakh and Smooth conducted nearly 100 interviews, including with the Jehovah’s Witnesses who took Jackson door-to-door as a child and the booker who coordinated the Jackson 5’s first talent show appearance. The “enlightening”…

If you’re buying 2022 Bordeaux futures, “you have to know which ones to pick,” said Elin McCoy in Bloomberg. “The 2022 growing season was a drama of nonstop extreme weather: April frosts, June rainstorms, record-breaking heat waves, and severe drought.” Though the resulting wines are tastier than was expected, not every château met the challenges. These value options were produced by three that did. 2022 Siran ($33). “The wines from this Margaux château get better and better.” The 2022 is “silky and charming, with ripe blackberry juiciness.” 2022 Bellefont-Belcier ($45). “Cassis-and-raspberry-scented,” this wine, from a revitalized estate, “boasts fine rounded tannins and serious structure.” 2022 Langoa-Barton ($50). With its “deep, tangy cherry-and-spice notes,” this classic Saint-Julien “punches way above its price.”…

Biscayne is not like other national parks, said Joe Yogerst in National Geographic. You need a boat to explore the “surprisingly pristine” ecosystem just south of Miami, a large bay that harbors “an incredible range of wildlife” between its coral reefs and mangrove swamps. About 95 percent of the 173,000-acre park is water—warm, subtropical saltwater—and visitors can kayak, sail, snorkel, and scuba-dive throughout. The Crocodile Creek Trail takes paddlers through dark, dense mangroves, while the Maritime Heritage Trail allows divers to explore six shipwrecks. Visitors might glimpse sea turtles, manatees, bottlenose dolphins, or the elusive American crocodile. But you’re not limited to marine pursuits, because “the park is one of the best places for birders.” The Biscayne National Park Institute offers a cruise to Jones Lagoon, home to large colonies…

State Farm said last week it will stop selling new home insurance policies in California due to “rapidly growing catastrophe exposure,” said Christopher Flavelle in The New York Times. State Farm is California’s largest home insurance company, and its decision doesn’t affect only those in wildfire zones, “but everywhere in the state.” Homeowners in other states are also feeling the effects of climate change on insurance. “The price of flood insurance is set to quadruple” in parts of Kentucky ravaged by storms last summer, while “homeowners are increasingly struggling to buy storm coverage” in Florida. Markets: Nasdaq beats London for marquee IPO The Nasdaq stock exchange pulled out all the stops to secure Arm’s much-anticipated public listing, said Min Jeong Lee in Bloomberg. “A remarkable, behind-the-scenes scrum” revealed last week…

Cutting taxes on home sales A new bipartisan bill would double the amount of money that homeowners can exclude from their taxes on the profits on the sale of their home, said Aarthi Swaminathan in MarketWatch. “Currently, the legislation only allows for single filers to exclude $250,000 in gains and $500,000 for joint filers,” and those amounts have not changed in 26 years. Bill co-sponsors Rep. Jimmy Panetta (D-Calif.) and Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.) said that the potential capital-gains tax bill has discouraged many owners whose homes have gone up in value by more than $500,000 from listing their properties. A study by the National Association of Realtors found that simply adjusting the capital-gains exclusion for inflation since 1997 would create “an increase in supply of between 159,000 and…

Sarah O’Connor Financial Times It’s both impressive and sad that we always manage to make work for ourselves, said Sarah O’Connor. I’ve spent the past few weeks interviewing lawyers, accountants, and consultants who are beginning to use generative AI in their everyday work. All have talked “about the time savings involved in having the AI do technical research for them, or the first drafts of documents.” And now what are they all doing with their spare time? They’re using it “to do more work.” This shouldn’t be surprising. “White-collar workers demonstrated the same tendency in the pandemic,” when working from home suddenly freed them from long commutes. As we consider the time-saving potentials of AI, an instructive example is what happened when electronic spreadsheets were invented in the 1980s. It…

Robert Zimmer had no patience for cancel culture. As president of the University of Chicago from 2006 to 2021, the mathematician was a strong proponent of diversity and freedom of speech. In 2014, in the wake of a series of demonstrations against right-wing speakers, he created a Committee on Free Expression that developed standards of academic freedom, and the resulting “Chicago Principles” were eventually adopted or adapted by more than 80 other schools. The guidelines said the university must remain open to all speakers and all points of view, even those that most students found “unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive.” The university, Zimmer said, “creates an environment for the most imaginative and challenging work of faculty. Confrontation of multiple ideas and ideas that are different from one’s own…

Ed Ames made an unlikely Native American. He started out as the youngest member of the Ames Brothers—a smooth-singing quartet of basses and baritones, not tenors like most 1950s singing groups. The brothers were Billboard’s vocal group of the year in 1958, but soon after that Ames ditched the nightclub circuit, saying, “I thought I’d go out of my skull if I had to sing the same song again.” A solo singing career led to acting, and Ames, with his dark complexion and chiseled cheekbones, found a niche playing Native roles. His turn as mental patient Chief Bromden in the Broadway play One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest led to the part of Mingo, the erudite half-Cherokee and son of a British earl he played on NBC’s Daniel Boone…

This week’s question: A relabeled $2.70 supermarket wine won the gold medal at a prestigious French wine contest, with unsuspecting judges describing it as possessing a “suave, nervous, and rich palate with clean young scents.” What would you rename this bottle of plonk to reflect its upset victory? Last week’s contest: A suspected drunk driver allegedly tried to fool police by putting his dog in the driver’s seat. Come up with the name of a charge for this unusual attempt at DUI-dodging. THE WINNER: “Sleight of Hound” Erica Avery, Greenfield, Mass. SECOND PLACE: “Plastered Master” Ken Liebman, Williston, Vt. THIRD PLACE: “DWI: Dog With Idiot” Jim Delaney, Park Ridge, N.J. For runners-up and complete contest rules, please go to theweek.com/contest. How to enter: Submissions should be emailed to contest@theweek.com.…

Peter Singer is among the most influential, and controversial, living philosophers, said Zoë Corbyn in The Guardian (U.K.). The Australian is best known for 1975’s Animal Liberation, in which he argued against the assumption that humans have more worth than animals. That position was radical at the time, but Singer now has many allies, thanks to heightened awareness of the cruelty involved in factory farming and the use of animals in scientific research. “Just as we accept that race or sex isn’t a reason for a person counting more, I don’t think the species of a being is a reason for counting more than another being,” says Singer, 76. “What is important is the capacity to suffer and to enjoy life.” For those who say only humans have higher…

Republicans have proposed restarting construction on ex-President Trump’s unfinished wall. Is the wall effective? How much wall did Trump build? At a recent CNN town hall, former President Donald Trump claimed that his administration finished building a wall along the 1,954-mile border separating the U.S. and Mexico. But according to a Customs and Border Protection report written two days after Trump left office in 2021, about 458 miles of the wall were completed under his administration, with another 280 miles identified for construction but never finished. Of those 458 miles, just 52 covered sections of the border that hadn’t previously had a barrier. The other 406 replaced shorter barriers that already existed with a fence made of reinforced hollow steel bollards ranging from 18 to 33 feet high. In…

Katherine J. Wu The Atlantic “This fall, millions of Americans might be lining up for yet another kind of Covid vaccine”—one specifically tailored to the latest dominant variant, said Katherine J. Wu. A World Health Organization advisory group and other researchers are endorsing a vaccine with only the spike protein for the currently circulating XBB.1 lineage of the Omicron variant. Last year, “going all in on Omicron seemed too risky” in case the coronavirus evolved in a new direction, so experts chose instead to design a bivalent vaccine for both the original Covid strain and the BA.5 Omicron subvariant—neither of which is “meaningfully around anymore.” Now they think devoting half the vaccine to the original virus will produce “a more lackluster antibody response” than is optimal, so a monovalent…

UNITED KINGDOM Hugo Rifkind The Times We all know that once people become homeowners, they tend to vote more conservative, said Hugo Rifkind. But that’s about to change, at least for 40-something midcareer homeowners like me. We are the last generation that could still afford to get on the property ladder, albeit by borrowing absurd sums of money at a low interest rate. Now, “beneath our lovely homes, on which we have spent so much and of which we are so proud, somebody has set off a bomb” in the form of skyrocketing interest rates. The U.K. doesn’t offer 30-year, fixed-rate mortgages like the Americans have, so we have to refinance every two to five years, and our monthly payments are suddenly ballooning. The average mortgage payment on a London…

Martha Stewart just showed us “a true definition of beauty,” said Ana Veciana-Suarez in the Miami Herald. By posing for Sports Illustrated’s annual swimsuit issue, the 81-year-old domestic guru and media mogul became the magazine’s oldest-ever swimsuit cover model. She is pictured lounging in a white one-piece, “displaying enough cleavage to be beguiling” and flaunting her artfully tousled hair, firm legs, and “glowing skin.” Yes, she’s clearly one of the world’s “winners in the genetic lottery,” and able to afford the best skin products and treatments money can buy. But I can’t help but “applaud Stewart’s courage” and confidence. “America is an aging society,” with nearly 38 million women ages 60 to 84, said Michele Weldon in MSNBC.com. Stewart’s presence in an issue focused on younger beauties sends “a…

More than a decade after being paralyzed in a motorbike accident, a Dutch man has been able to walk again thanks to a pioneering “digital bridge” system that reads his brain waves and wirelessly connects his brain to his legs. Gert-Jan Oskam, 40, was able to take his first step within minutes of the new technology being switched on, reports New Scientist, and after a year of using it can climb stairs, stand at a bar to drink with friends, and walk for 20 to 30 minutes. He has even been able to take a few steps when the machine is turned off, thanks to new neural pathways the bridge has helped him develop. The revolutionary technology works through implants in his brain that track intentions for movement. These…

(Knopf, $32.50) Tom Hanks “might be a little too in love with filmmaking,” said Stuart Heritage in Air Mail. The veteran screen star’s first novel leisurely chronicles the making of a fictional superhero blockbuster, starting with 100 pages about the creator of the comic book that the movie is based on before spending another 300 on the gofers, caterers, actors, and many other contributors to the film’s production. “A lot of it is deftly done,” and Hanks sincerely invests in his characters. But “not a lot happens in terms of story,” and if the book has any message, “it’s that filmmaking is a noble profession in which hundreds of well-intentioned soldiers fight a doomed battle against fate itself.” At times, Masterpiece “reads like the thank-you speech Hanks would give…

The Three of Us by Ore Agbaje-Williams (Putnam, $26) “Everybody needs a friend as loyal as Temi. God help anybody with a friend like Temi,” said Ron Charles in The Washington Post. That’s the paradox of Ore Agbaje-Williams’ “deliciously wicked” debut novel, which offers three perspectives on a marriage: one from the husband, one from the wife, and one from her “rich, dazzling, and deeply possessive” best friend, Temi, who disapproves of the relationship. The book is “as short and sharp as a paring knife—perfect for carving up this marriage.” I Thought You Loved Me by MariNaomi (Fieldmouse, $30) In her latest graphic memoir, MariNaomi attempts to resolve the unresolvable, said Noah Berlatsky in the Los Angeles Times. Using “a barrage of techniques,” including comics, collage, and reproduced letters,…

3 “Arlo Parks is a pop prodigy,” said Maura Johnston in Rolling Stone. The London-born singer-songwriter was just 20 when she released Collapsed in Sunbeams, a 2021 album that won the Mercury Prize, marking it the year’s best from a British Isles artist. On her follow-up, she again both sings and drops spoken-word poetry over “plush textures and simmering beats,” creating a record for listeners to luxuriate in even as its lyrics regularly cite life’s wounds and sorrows. She has also gently expanded the range of her homespun bedroom pop, even turning the song “Devotion” into “a grunge-soul love song” by building to a chunky alt-rock–style guitar riff. Mostly, though, Parks’ music remains “more pleasant than impactful,” said Kitty Empire in The Guardian. While her lyrics “drill down into the…

The whistleblower life… Reality White Lotus and Euphoria actress Sydney Sweeney delivers an award-worthy performance in this new HBO movie about Reality Winner, the NSA contractor imprisoned for leaking classified documents about Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The dialogue is taken verbatim from FBI transcripts. Max The Insider Michael Mann’s true-ish tale of a Big Tobacco shill who decides to expose the industry’s darkest secrets to 60 Minutes is edge-of-your-seat stuff, and it garnered seven Oscar nominations. Russell Crowe stars. $4 on demand Citizenfour Laura Poitras’ documentary brings the viewer along on a high-stakes mission as she and print journalist Glenn Greenwald travel to Hong Kong to meet Edward Snowden, the former U.S. contractor who handed the pair proof of the NSA’s surveillance abuses. Tubi All…

The labor participation rate for women ages 25 to 54 reached a record high 77.5 percent in April, surpassing a peak reached in 2000, according to U.S. data going back to the 1940s. Participation among women 55 and older has been stuck near pandemic-era lows. Bloomberg The average price per gallon of regular gasoline was $3.53 in May, compared with $4.60 a year ago. It was about $2.75 in May 2019. Axios Solar investments are expected to attract more than $1 billion a day in 2023, overtaking investments in oil production for the first time, according to the International Energy Agency. Total global investment in energy is slated to hit roughly $2.8 trillion in 2023, with more than $1.7 trillion of that going into clean energy technologies. CNBC.com A record…

The number of displaced people reached a record high of 100 million last year, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, as armed conflict, food insecurity, and other factors continue to force families to flee their homes and seek help across borders. Founded at the call of Albert Einstein in 1933 to aid victims of Nazi persecution, the International Rescue Committee (help.rescue.org) has grown to an organization of thousands—including first responders, relief workers, health-care providers, and educators—operating in some 40 countries. In 2022, the IRC reached 32.9 million people in crisis, and it has led efforts to get aid to refugees from the war in Ukraine, civil strife in Sudan, massacres in Myanmar, and other conflicts around the world. Each charity we feature has earned a four-star overall…

Ashlee Vance Bloomberg Businessweek Google co-founder Sergey Brin thinks airships can be the transportation of the future, said Ashlee Vance. As other tycoons have staked out the edge of space, Brin is looking lower down in the atmosphere for his own grand ambition. Brin’s LTA—it stands for “Lighter Than Air”—company has “operated mostly in secrecy since its founding in 2016.” But after years of work, LTA is close to unveiling the Pathfinder I, the biggest rigid airship since the 1930s. Back then, dirigibles were “cruise ships in the sky,” complete with luxury accommodations. The civilian craze blew up with the Hindenburg in 1937, and today’s soft blimps are best known for puttering “around stadiums with ads on their sides.” Brin has been vague about his precise ambitions, although he seems…

Good week for: Hole digging, after the state of Colorado, exasperated with hikers defecating on the state’s scenic trails, began giving away free waste-burial kits. The kits—a trowel and “biodegradable wipe tablets”—are part of the state’s “Doo Colorado Right” campaign. Normalcy, with news that the TSA screened 2.74 million air travelers on the Friday before Memorial Day, making it the busiest day of air travel since the epic disruption of the pandemic. Oceanfront property, with an announcement from the General Services Administration that it is giving away 10 free lighthouses, which in the GPS era are no longer needed to keep ships from running aground. The structures, a GSA spokesman noted, are “often located in prominent locations that offer breathtaking views.” Bad week for: Going overboard, with the news that…

Paul Simon might never perform live again, said Dan Cairns in The Times (U.K.). Four years ago, when Simon began recording his first album in seven years, Seven Psalms, the iconic singer-songwriter suffered every musician’s nightmare. “Quite suddenly, I lost most of the hearing in my left ear, and nobody has an explanation for it,” says Simon, 81. “So everything became more difficult. My reaction to that was frustration and annoyance; not quite anger yet, because I thought it would pass, it would repair itself.” That hasn’t happened, and Simon also went through a rough bout with Covid. Seeking peace and quiet, he and his wife bought a ranch in Texas. They also have a summer house in Hawaii. “I’m not drawn back to New York at all,” he…

David French The New York Times “The very definition of ‘masculinity’ is up for grabs,” said David French. Sen. Josh Hawley’s (R-Mo.) new book on the crisis of masculinity has prompted debate about how to define manhood at a time when young men are struggling, falling behind women in higher education, and suffering higher rates of drug overdoses and suicides. The American Psychological Association defined traditional masculinity in 2019 as “marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance, and aggression”—which it called “harmful.” But besides dominance, those traits “can be indispensable in the right contexts.” Stoicism carried to excess leads to emotional repression, but meeting difficult challenges with persistence and “calm courage” is critical in life. On the Josh Hawley–Tucker Carlson right, ironically, there is no stoicism: Threatened men are responding to…

“The randomness, stupidity, and cruelty of Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine doesn’t suggest a superpower at all, or even an expired superpower, or an aspiring once-and-future superpower. What it most suggests is a stagnant psychotic state. You may not think that the U.S. has any great interest in seeing Ukraine win, but the U.S. does have an abiding and critical interest in seeing Russia lose. The more Russia bleeds in Ukraine, the more defeat and humiliation the Putin regime inflicts on the Russian people, the less capacity Moscow has to make trouble in Europe, in the Middle East, in Africa, in Latin America, or anywhere else.” Kevin D. Williamson in The Dispatch…

POLAND Bartosz T. Wielinski Gazeta Wyborcza With elections looming this year, the Polish government is trying to whip up nationalist fervor against Ukrainians, said Bartosz T. Wielinski. The center-right Law and Justice party, in power since 2015, has been slipping in the polls and is afraid of losing ground to the far-right, xenophobic Confederation party. So, it has chosen to weaponize the 80th anniversary of the Volhynia massacres, an “ugly chapter of World War II” in which Ukrainian nationalists slaughtered 100,000 Poles. Poland considers the episode genocide, perhaps forgetting that it was followed by the retaliatory killings of some 15,000 Ukrainians by Poles. Now the government is demanding an official apology from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. It’s “unfathomably absurd” to dredge up such an old wrong right now, “as Russian…

SUDAN Rebecca Bradshaw The National (U.A.E.) The civil war in Sudan, just a month old, is already laying waste to the country’s cultural heritage, said Rebecca Bradshaw in The National. Among the hundreds of civilians who have been killed in the crossfire between the army and a rival militia are many beloved cultural figures, including the country’s first professional actress, Asia Abdelmajid, and the soccer star Fozi El-Mardi. The singer Shaden Hussein, who had posted on social media about nearby shelling, was killed in her own home. The country’s many ancient sites from the Nubian civilization are also in jeopardy. Many of the civilians fleeing Khartoum have gone north to Karima, near the archaeological dig at Jebel Barkal, and the town can’t cope with the influx. “The people who have…

“The Supreme Court just gutted the Clean Water Act”—and “the effect will likely be devastating,” said Richard J. Lazarus in The Washington Post. Last week, “an activist Supreme Court” voted 5-4 to roll back the 1972 Clean Water Act in Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency, severely curtailing the EPA’s authority to block development and discharges of pollution into marshes and bogs that empty into rivers, lakes, and oceans. The Clean Water Act authorizes the agency to regulate “navigable waters,” which Congress expressly defined to include wetlands “adjacent” to larger bodies of water. But the Supreme Court’s conservatives threw out 50 years of precedent, ruling that wetlands can be protected only if they have “a continuous surface connection” to larger bodies of water. So radical was this ruling that Justice Brett…

A campaign launch typically gives a presidential candidate a jolt of energy and momentum, said Chris Cillizza in his Substack newsletter. But when Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis kicked off his campaign in an audio interview on Twitter with the social media firm’s CEO, Elon Musk, it was an “unmitigated disaster” that only served to raise doubts about DeSantis’ “prime-time readiness.” The streaming audio immediately crashed, subjecting listeners to 20 minutes of dead air and comical, frantic efforts to fix the technical problems. The decision to announce on Musk’s decimated, glitch-ridden platform, instead of before a cheering room of supporters in Florida or a key primary state, was “one of the worst unforced errors” ever seen in a presidential campaign. And it came with DeSantis badly trailing Donald Trump in…

(Basic, $30) “The title sounds more like a thriller than a legal treatise,” said Nina Totenberg in NPR.com. But Stephen Vladeck’s unlikely new best-seller focuses on a facet of the U.S. Supreme Court’s work “that until six or seven years ago was viewed as pretty boring.” Since its inception, the court has issued unsigned orders that block lower-court rulings, such as when it temporarily stays executions. But the court’s use of its so-called shadow docket has recently expanded dramatically. After the previous two presidential administrations requested only eight emergency stays across 16 years, President Trump’s administration asked for 41 in four years, and enjoyed at least partial success 28 times. The court heard no oral arguments and issued no written statements in these cases, but the stays allowed Trump…

Emily Henry never planned to become publishing’s rom-com queen, said Anna Kaplan in Today.com. After writing three moody, modestly selling young adult novels, the suburban Cincinnati author tried her hand at a summery romantic comedy. “I started writing Beach Read entirely for fun,” she says. “There was no intention to try to publish it.” But she finished the novel quickly, and when it was finally released, in May 2020, readers greeted it rapturously. That book and Henry’s two subsequent rom-coms have sold more than 2.5 million copies. With Happy Place, her latest, an instant No. 1 bestseller, the 32-year-old is now an undeniable star in a genre she’d only recently fallen for. “I think there are still so many people out there who don’t know that they would love…

3 Brandy Clark’s self-titled fourth album “captures only a few facets of a deeply complex artist,” said Stephen M. Deusner in Pitchfork. The alt-country singer-songwriter “can break your heart with a stray observation,” but this collection of 11 ballads “embraces melancholy to the neglect of humor, world-weariness at the expense of wit.” The 10-time Grammy nominee remains “one of the finest rhymers in Nashville,” though, and there are many moments here that “make you realize Clark can do things with a song that others simply cannot.” Brandi Carlile’s spare production showcases Clark’s “powerful, agile” voice, said Brittney McKenna in NPR.org. The album opens with a vivid murder ballad, and Derek Trucks’ slide guitar slices through the song “like strikes of lightning in a rainstorm.” Other highlights include “She Smoked in…

“Los Angeles is the best sushi town in America,” said Bill Addison in the Los Angeles Times. In fact, “we have cultivated one of the world’s most fervent sushi cultures,” with a history benchmarked by the 1970s arrival of the California roll, a late-1980s luxury push spearheaded by two Beverly Hills hot spots, and the current ongoing multiplication of world-class omakase practitioners. Each of the chefs below is engaged in a shared art: “a dance between honoring the cuisine’s origins, nudging Angelenos’ ever-evolving tastes forward, and trusting in one’s self-expression.” Morihiro Morihiro Onodera remains “a defining force” in L.A.’s sushi culture, and at his warmly boisterous sushi-ya, the counter is the place to be. “Nigiri is spectacular when it begins arriving from Onodera’s hands,” each piece a dazzling mix…

Tina Turner was a living phoenix, a symbol of resilience and raw female power. A riveting stage presence, she honed her skills alongside husband Ike Turner, fronting a revue that in the 1960s and early ’70s racked up a string of R&B hits and a reputation for frenetic live shows. But Ike was a violent, domineering husband who abused her physically and emotionally, and one night in 1976 she walked out on him, leaving a Dallas hotel with just 36 cents in her pocket. Lean years followed, but so did a remarkable second act that began with the album Private Dancer. The 1984 smash won four Grammys—including for No. 1 hit “What’s Love Got to Do With It”—and remade Turner as one of pop’s top arena acts. “Each electrifying…