Indholdsfortegnelse for June 16, 2023 i The Week Magazine

How should the news media cover Donald Trump’s pursuit of another term in the White House? “You cover him like any other candidate,” proclaimed CNN’s CEO, Chris Licht, shortly before his hubris got him fired this week. CNN’s new owners had installed Licht to rebrand the network as a nonpartisan alternative to MSNBC and Fox News where “both sides” would get equal treatment. (See Briefing, p.11.) To prove CNN’s neutrality, Licht recently featured Trump on a prime-time town hall. Moderator Kaitlan Collins valiantly challenged Trump’s torrent of lies, but proved no match for Trump’s superpower: utter shamelessness. When confronted with evidence that contradicts his ravings, the Mad King bellows, attacks his questioner, and portrays himself and his fanatical followers as victims of bias and persecution. The dilemma another Trump run…

Gelje, a 30-year-old Nepali sherpa, saved a Malaysian climber from dying on Mount Everest last month. Gelje was nearing the summit with a Chinese client when he saw a man clinging to a rope and trembling in minus-22 Fahrenheit temperature. The two stopped their own ascent, wrapped the man in a sleep mat, and carried him 1,900 feet down, where Nima Tahi, another sherpa, joined the effort. When the team reached a camp at 23,500 feet, a helicopter completed the rescue. “Saving one life is more important than praying at the monastery,” said Gelje. For Dev Shah, a 14-year-old from Largo, Fla., four years of study culminated in one word last week: psammophile. If you’re wondering, it means an organism that thrives in sandy areas. And for Dev it meant…

The United Church of Christ has apologized for the position of a white child’s face on the cover of its 2023 calendar. The circular design features faces of all genders, ages, and colors, but giving the white child the 12 o’clock position betrayed the church’s commitment “to be an antiracist body,” said UCC president John Dorhauer. He said “a slight rotation of the cover image” would have provided “racial equity.” A newly renovated Walgreens in shoplifting-ravaged Chicago has only two aisles open for shoppers, with the rest of the merchandise accessible only by staff. Rather than stroll the blocked-off aisles, shoppers now choose products at a digital kiosk, while signage encourages them to “relax” and “let us do the shopping.” In other news House GOP targets FBI director House Republicans…

Mark Hamill became an international sensation playing Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, said Brady Langmann in Esquire, but his own father thought little of the movies or of acting as a profession. “He was completely unimpressed with Star Wars,” says Hamill, now 71. William Hamill was a military man, and the two had a “troubled relationship,” Mark says. “He was a career naval officer, very authoritarian. I was the middle of seven kids. He just could not understand why I loved puppets and monster movies and comic books. These were all frivolous things. He kept thinking I would eventually outgrow my childhood obsession with movies and get a real job.” Married for 45 years, Hamill has three grown kids of his own; his son Nathan, 43, is a comics…

Al Pacino was “shocked” when a DNA test confirmed that he’d impregnated his girlfriend, Noor Alfallah, TMZ reported last week. Pacino, 83, reportedly suffers from a medical condition that affects fertility, and he requested that the 29-year-old Alfallah, who is eight months pregnant, get tested to confirm he’s the father. Pacino and the film producer began dating last year. She appears to have a taste for older men, having previously dated Mick Jagger—74 when he dated Alfallah and now 79—and billionaire Nicholas Berggruen. This will be Pacino’s fourth child. Robert De Niro, who recently welcomed his seventh child, said he’s “very happy” for his Godfather II co-star. “He’s a few years older than me,” De Niro noted. “God bless him.” Natalie Portman and Benjamin Millepied are working to save…

Conor Friedersdorf The Atlantic It’s time to admit the truth about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training, said Conor Friedersdorf: Its impact on workers ranges “from useless to counterproductive.” DEI training at workplaces and schools exploded after the 2020 police murder of George Floyd. “A poor Black man’s death became a pretext to sell hazily defined consulting services to corporations.” It grew into a multibillion-dollar industry, embraced so quickly “that due diligence was skipped and costly failures guaranteed.” Obviously, employers should foster cultures where all applicants are welcome, workers are “free of discrimination,” and “everyone is treated with dignity.” What many highly paid DEI consultants teach, however, is social-justice gobbledygook about “white supremacy culture” and workplace “microaggressions.” But “hundreds of studies dating back to the 1930s suggest that anti-bias…

CANADA Heather Mallick Toronto Star Alberta is often called the Texas of Canada, because it’s vast and conservative and brimming with oil, said Heather Mallick. But in provincial elections last week, “Alberta did not go full-bore Alberta,” instead delivering a sizable minority of seats to the center-left New Democrats. Still, it did elect populist Danielle Smith as premier, and she is “more Albertan than most Albertans.” A former talk radio host, the leader of the United Conservatives has been a loud voice against Covid vaccines—she once compared vaccinated Albertans to Nazis. Just like an American governor of a Western state, Smith treats the federal government as the enemy. In her quest for greater Albertan sovereignty, she has proposed ditching the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in favor of a provincial force…

The 2022 election brought 39 states under single-party control, with the same party in the majority in both legislative chambers and the governorship—the highest number in at least three decades. Republicans have total control of 22 states, Democrats of 17. The New York Times A nationwide shortage of lifeguards will keep thousands of pools across the U.S. closed this summer or operating with reduced hours. Around a third of the nation’s more than 309,000 public pools are affected by the shortage, which began during the pandemic, when many lifeguards found new jobs and certification classes for new guards were canceled. Lifeguard-strapped cities are raising pay, offering signing bonuses, and instituting new training programs. Axios Only about 350 American students studied abroad in China this academic year, down from as many…

“Seriousness—and morality, and indeed sanity—cannot exist without humor.”Martin Amis, quoted in The Guardian “Until a drag queen walks into a school and beats eight kids to death with a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, I think you’re focusing on the wrong shit.” Wanda Sykes, quoted in the Los Angeles Times “Your days are numbered. Use them to throw open the windows of your soul to the sun. If you do not, the sun will soon set, and you with it.”Marcus Aurelius, quoted in The Dispatch “I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.”Susan Sontag, quoted in The Atlantic “To get back one’s youth, one has merely to repeat one’s follies.” Oscar Wilde, quoted in Le Figaro “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth…

Suffering from app overload The “app-palooza situation” is getting out of control, said Emily Stewart in Vox. Nowadays, “the hotel has an app, the dentist has an app, the restaurant down the street has an app.” We’re left with dozens of apps “floating around on our phones that really, seriously, were not necessary.” It’s not uncommon to be asked to scan a QR code “that eventually results in you downloading some app just so you can place an order or pay.” The benefits of this relationship seem increasingly one-sided. “Companies are making money off the data” they get with each download, and they’re terrible at protecting that data from hackers. Just something to consider the next time you’re asked, as I was, to download an app on a flight…

Pinpointing which chemical compounds can become effective medicines is arduous and time-consuming—unless you get artificial intelligence to do it. Scientists have for the first time successfully used AI to identify a new treatment for a resistant superbug, reports CNN.com. The researchers “trained” the program by manually testing thousands of compounds on the bacteria, Acinetobacter baumannii, and feeding the AI the results. They then provided chemical details of 6,680 other drugs and asked the AI which ones might work as treatments. An hour and a half later, it spewed out a shortlist. When the researchers tested 240 of the suggested treatments, nine proved to be potential antibiotics. The most promising was abaucin, which was able to knock out A. baumannii infections in mice without harming other, beneficial bacteria nearby. If…

Veteran journalist David Von Drehle is a Washington Post columnist and author of The Book of Charlie, a best-seller about the life wisdom he learned from a 109-year-old neighbor. Below, Von Drehle recommends books that help him ‘think like Charlie.’ Enchiridion by Epictetus (circa 125). Mastering this short philosophy book is the work of a lifetime. Epictetus, the diamond cutter of Stoic philosophers, teaches that happiness depends on two radical assertions of freedom: total accountability for my choices, values, and actions, and letting go of concern about everything else. Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl (1946). The great stoic of the Holocaust asked how some of his fellow prisoners in the Nazi death camps retained their humanity under inhuman conditions, and he concluded that they embraced “the last…

Uncovering family secrets… Shiny Happy People The Duggar family represented the cheery face of Christian fundamentalism, until a sexual-abuse scandal hit. Daughter Jill Duggar Dillard and family friends reveal all in this new docuseries, which paints the Duggars’ popular TLC reality show, 19 Kids and Counting, as propaganda for disgraced minister Bill Gothard’s Institute in Basic Life Principles. Prime Burden of Proof Years after the 1987 disappearance of 15-year-old Jennifer Pandos, her brother accuses their parents of criminal culpability. But the ensuing police investigation of his parents leads to different answers than expected in this suspenseful new four-part documentary. Max Stories We Tell Diane Polley was a free-spirited woman who gave up an acting career to be a full-time wife and mother. In this remarkable 2012 documentary, her filmmaker…

HipCamp is essentially “Airbnb for camping.” Its 300,000 listings include campsites, cabins, RV parks, treehouses, and plots of private land. “If you have your own slice of nature, you can make a couple of bucks providing space for campers.” The Dyrt gives you the lowdown on what others loved or hated about various campsites. “The service is a great way to get an inside look before booking.” Recreation.gov, the booking system used by the National Park Service, is often the only way to reserve campsites in national parks and forests. Users can also book activities, “from excursions in Alaska’s Tongass Forest to tours of the 17th-century Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine, Fla.” RA Camping focuses on campsites in state parks. Because it’s affiliated with the RV rental platform…

The Securities and Exchange Commission this week sued two of the largest crypto exchanges, Binance and Coinbase, said Jonathan Stempel in Reuters. The lawsuits, if successful, “could transform the crypto market by successfully asserting the SEC’s jurisdiction over the industry, which for years has argued that tokens do not constitute securities.” Regardless of the outcome, the suits represent a crackdown on the crypto sector, which has functioned like the Wild West. The SEC accused Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, of mishandling customer funds and “operating a ‘web of deception.’” Oil: Saudis cut output to counter plummeting price Saudi Arabia said this week it will cut its oil output by 1 million barrels per day to boost sagging oil prices, said Grant Smith in Bloomberg. The world’s top oil exporter…

The great SPAC robbery Insiders profited to the tune of billions of dollars before their SPAC deals went bust, said Tom McGinty in The Wall Street Journal. SPACs, or special-purpose acquisition companies, are shell firms that go public for the sole purpose of merging with a hot startup, which then replaces the SPAC in the stock market. SPAC creators are given a unique incentive: They are allowed to buy 20 percent of the company at a deep discount. A review of SEC filings found 232 SPACs with insider sales, and “on average, insiders sold about $22 million of shares each”—for a total of $22 billion in sales. Some of the biggest winners, like Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson and convicted Nikola founder Trevor Milton, made hundreds of millions of…

Farhad Manjoo The New York Times Artificial intelligence could finally allow computers to ditch their translators, said Farhad Manjoo. Since its inception, computer programming has always required knowledge of a special language—coding language—to get the most out of them. “Once, only the small priesthood of scientists who understood binary bits of 1s and 0s could manipulate computers.” Over time, programming has gotten more approachable, although it has remained a realm reserved mainly for trained experts. But AI could bridge that skill gap, making it possible for you to “tell a computer to do something the same way you’d tell another human.” AI tools based on large-language models—like OpenAI’s ChatGPT—“have already begun to change the way many professional coders do their jobs.” They can find bugs, identify mistakes, offer coding suggestions,…

Cynthia Weil’s lyrics made 1960s pop soar and swell with emotion. Together with songwriting partner and husband Barry Mann, she became a fixture of midtown Manhattan’s Brill Building music scene alongside Carole King, Neil Diamond, and Burt Bacharach. Weil and Mann wrote hundreds of songs, including “On Broadway” and “Walking in the Rain.” The 1964 hit “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” paired their heartrending lyrics with the Righteous Brothers’ powerhouse vocals to become American radio’s most-replayed song of the 20th century. “When they are successful, songs are like little novels,” Weil said. “It paints a picture of the human condition.” A native New Yorker, “Weil found her talent for writing song lyrics early,” said Rolling Stone. By age 20, she was working for Broadway composer Frank Loesser. The following…

Sacramento California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom called Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis a “small, pathetic man” this week for sending 36 Latin American migrants on chartered planes to Sacramento—continuing DeSantis’ stunt of shipping migrants to liberal cities. Newsom said those involved could face charges for tricking the migrants, who allegedly were told at an El Paso, Texas, shelter that they’d get help finding work in California, only to be left outside a church. Florida officials took credit for the two flights, releasing video of migrants celebrating their arrival. “For left-leaning mayors,” state spokesperson Alecia Collins said, “the relocation of those illegally crossing the United States border is not new. But suddenly, when Florida sends illegal aliens to a sanctuary city, it’s false imprisonment and kidnapping.” A Texas sheriff this…

Growing up as Steven Spielberg’s sister meant being subjected to the budding auteur’s direction, said Anne Joseph in The Times (U.K.). Nancy, the youngest of Steven’s three sisters, was drafted to serve as both cast and crew in her brother’s moviemaking projects, which took over the household. “We just did whatever Steve said because he sort of ruled the house,” she says. Obeying his dictates wasn’t always fun. “But you didn’t have a choice, because the punishment was that he would scare the crap out of us. He would draw this Medusa scary face with the snakey hair and the big skeleton eyes on a chalkboard. And he would say, ‘If you can sleep with this staring at you, I will give you 10 cents.’ We tried, but ended…

LZ Granderson Los Angeles Times “High school freshman girls should not double as cocktail waitresses at night,” said LZ Granderson. But in Wisconsin, it is now legal for 14-year-olds to serve alcohol, and Iowa recently rolled back its child labor laws to allow children to work in slaughterhouses. They are the latest in a string of Republican-led states to loosen child labor protections. In Ohio, 14-year-olds can now work until 9 p.m. during the school year, while teens in Arkansas no longer need parental permission to get jobs. Conservatives justify child labor by claiming minors are needed to fill a worker shortage, but these laws are based on “disdain” for poor families. More than 40 percent of Republicans believe the poor haven’t worked as hard as other people, even…

FRANCE Philippe Askenazy Le Monde So much for France’s rebirth as Europe’s next great powerhouse, said Philippe Askenazy. A decade ago, the U.N. predicted a demographic “upheaval” in Europe that would see France supplanting Germany as the European Union’s most populous country. By 2050, France was supposed to add 10 million people to reach 75 million, while Germany would lose 10 million, leaving it a few million short of France. But “the latest projections are spectacularly different.” Mainland France is now expected to have a mere 66 million inhabitants, far below Germany’s projected 79 million. These opposing trajectories reflect “a dizzying political contrast” between the two nations. Germany sees migrants as its future. It already takes in an average of about 1 million immigrants annually and is wooing even more.…

A humble multivitamin could help keep your brain sharp into old age, reports NPR. In a new trial, 3,500 older adults were asked to take either a placebo or a Centrum Silver multivitamin every day for three years. Over that period, the participants took online tests to evaluate their cognitive skills. After just one year, the people taking the multivitamin showed marked improvements. When given a list of words and asked to remember as many as possible, they were able to recall about 25 percent more words than the placebo group, staving off the equivalent of three years of decline. The overall effect was still relatively small, and the multivitamin appeared to have no effect on executive function or other areas of cognition. But study author JoAnn Manson, from…

(Riverhead, $28.00) “As the title suggests, The Late Americans is suffused with nihilism: a sense of a society nearing its end,” said Alexandra Jacobs in The New York Times. Brandon Taylor, whose first novel was a Booker Prize finalist, here makes a study of the Iowa City he knew while enrolled in a graduate writing program, creating a loose circle of young people working, arguing, and engaging in unsatisfying sex as the larger economy sputters. Many of the characters are gay men, and a “flow chart would be handy to keep track of all the overlapping relationships.” But the novel, “a bleak book” lit by “flashes of beauty,” unfolds like linked stories anyway. The world Taylor examines “may seem small,” said Claire Messud in Harper’s. But he brings “a…

Psychonauts by Mike Jay (Yale, $32.50) The 19th century’s enthusiastic opium and cocaine users are “easily mockable,” said Clare Bucknell in The New Yorker. The era abounds in seekers, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Sigmund Freud, who waxed poetic about their highs. But in the latest of his “excellent” books on the history of drug use, scholar Mike Jay celebrates how drug experimentation in those days helped broaden our understanding of consciousness. He also chronicles how drugs eventually became stigmatized. “In his telling, it is a story of loss.” Fires in the Dark by Kay Redfield Jamison (Knopf, $30) Kay Redfield Jamison’s sweeping new history of mental healing is “not a book for the lazy or the linear-minded,” said Judith Warner in The Washington Post. Though “often fascinating,” Fires…

Elite Screens Yard Master Plus Attain “professional-grade clarity” with this indoor/outdoor screen, which is compatible with a variety of projectors and can handle 4K Ultra HD. Its collapsible aluminum frame is lightweight and sturdy. $336, amazon.com Source: Popular Mechanics BenQ HT2060 Projector This quiet, LED-lit projector is simple to set up, has two HDMI inputs for streaming sticks, and generates “a bright, rich-looking image with more accurate color than most competitors can offer.” Its adjustable feet make image positioning easy. $999, bestbuy.com Source: Wirecutter Vizio M-Series AiO A soundbar delivers better sound quality than a projector alone, and this is the best for $200 or less. It provides “excellent dialogue clarity,” and its input options make connecting to it “a cinch.” $200, bestbuy.com Source: Digital Trends Nostalgia Popcorn Maker…

The top 10 companies on this year’s Fortune 500 list accounted for roughly 20 percent of the list’s total revenues. With $611.3 billion in revenue in its most recent fiscal year, Walmart topped the Fortune 500 for the 11th year in a row. Fortune Global growth is projected to decelerate to 2.1 percent this year from 3.1 percent in 2022, according to the World Bank, reaching its lowest level since the 2008 financial crisis. Yahoo Finance The price of a Tesla Model 3 may fall to $25,240 in California when the $7,500 federal tax credit and another $7,500 from the California tax rebate kick in, depending on income and other requirements. That’s cheaper than a Toyota Camry ($26,320). Reuters Park Hotels & Resorts, the operator of two of the most…

Founded as the first women’s shelter in the country, Rosie’s Place (rosiesplace.org) has been serving poor and homeless women for nearly 50 years. Helping women in Boston since 1974, Rosie’s Place is part community center, part food pantry, part housing program. This independent nonprofit’s priorities are its clients’ priorities—it accepts no funding from the government and relies entirely on private donations. In recent years, Rosie’s Place has risen to meet the challenges of the pandemic, the affordable housing crisis, and growing food insecurity: Last year alone, the organization reached 14,000 people with services, served 62,000 meals, provided shelter to hundreds of women, prevented eviction for another 1,000, and supported more than 1,500 others with wellness care, education, employment help, legal aid, and recovery support. Each charity we feature has…

This week’s question: The federal government is giving away 10 lighthouses it no longer needs, since GPS now helps keep ships from running aground. What would you call a lighthouse bed-and-breakfast? Last week’s contest: 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? THE WINNER: “Sommfoolery” Laurel Rose, Pittsburgh SECOND PLACE: “Châteauneuf-du-Pauper” Nicole Gruen, Bethel Park, Pa. THIRD PLACE: “Deux Euro Charles” Norm Carrier, Flat Rock, N.C. For runners-up and complete contest rules, please go to theweek.com/contest. How to enter: Submissions should be emailed to contest@theweek.com. Please include your name, address, and daytime…

Good week for: Potty mouths, with the announcement from Apple that an update to the iPhone operating system will no longer auto-correct a common swear word to “ducking.” Believers, with reports that David Grusch, an Air Force veteran and former U.S. intelligence officer, has filed a whistleblower complaint claiming that federal authorities have recovered numerous “intact and partially intact vehicles” of “non-human origin” that have crashed on Earth, including dead aliens. Consistency, after a Utah school district banned the Bible in response to a parent’s complaint that it discusses fornication and other “sensitive material.” State Sen. Todd Weiler called the ban “a fair trade” so schools could censor “X-rated content” in other books. Bad week for: Kim Jong Un, after South Korean intelligence reported that the 5-foot-7 North Korean dictator…

Sarah Silverman makes no apologies for taking some jobs purely for the money, said Carrie Battan in The New Yorker. The veteran stand-up comic, 52, describes herself as a collector of odd jobs in entertainment, which have included voice-over work, acting, podcasting, and writing. “Doing a rich guy’s daughter’s quinceañera? F--- yeah,” she says. “That’s a money gig. Great.” A recent commercial she did for Uber Eats—for which she was “paid a shit-ton of money”—was “a godsend,” she says. “It gives me an incredible amount of freedom.” For actors, the big paydays “subsidize the stuff we care about,” she says. “You know, I get this amount of money and hopefully no one will see it. Or two months on this project for no money, but it’s going to be…

Geraldo Cadava The New Yorker “Latino white supremacy isn’t an oxymoron,” said Geraldo Cadava. Puzzled media commentary on last month’s mass shooting in Allen, Texas, noted the 33-year-old Mexican-American shooter’s apparent affinity for white power ideology: his Nazi tattoos, his “Right Wing Death Squad” patch, and the conspiracist replacement theory rhetoric in his diary. But he wasn’t unique. The ranks of white nationalist Latinos today include far-right live streamer Nick Fuentes and Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio. It’s a sign of how deeply many of the 60 million Latinos in the U.S. have assimilated: “They learned English, intermarried, became loyal Americans, and adopted American politics”—including, for some, right-wing extremism. People like Tarrio and Fuentes succumb to “aspirational whiteness,” and the belief that a secure place in the country’s social…

“There are very few people who don’t see themselves as independent thinkers. There are even fewer people who are. Most people just want to belong, and the most essential elements of belonging are agreeing and conforming. Would-be belongers engage in what’s known as ‘preference falsification,’ pretending to enjoy things they don’t, or subscribe to ideas they secretly reject. They go along to get along, because the usual emotional companion to intellectual independence isn’t pride or self-confidence. It’s loneliness and sometimes crippling self-doubt.” Bret Stephens in The New York Times…

UNITED KINGDOM Marie Le Conte The Guardian The pandemic destroyed that crucible of British politicking, the smoke-filled room—and replaced it with WhatsApp, said Marie Le Conte. Stuck at home, officials began communicating by text, and “the waters between professional and personal conversations were muddied.” The messaging service is now the primary mode of communication, used “by MPs needing to talk to ministers, by whips’ offices trying to keep their benches in check, by journalists talking to their sources, and by everyone else for gossip and general tittle-tattle.” In WhatsApp chatrooms, alliances are forged and coups organized. But what are these messages, legally? Are they “official correspondence,” subject to freedom of information requests? Or are they private, like the conversations lawmakers once held in bars? The question has come up because…

NEW ZEALAND Verity Johnson Stuff “The kiwi isn’t our national bird, it’s our national baby,” said Verity Johnson. That’s why New Zealanders “let out a howl of maternal fury” after seeing footage of Americans manhandling one of the flightless birds at Zoo Miami. The video showed the “Kiwi Encounter,” a moneymaker for the zoo in which certain zoogoers pay extra for the opportunity to pat Paora, a male hatched in 2019. As every New Zealander knows, endangered kiwis are shy, nocturnal creatures. Seeing Paora being kept awake in the daytime, trying to hide his poor face from the fluorescent lights as strangers pawed at him, united the nation in “immediate, incendiary rage.” A petition to rescue Paora quickly attracted over 10,000 signatures, and even Prime Minister Chris Hipkins weighed in,…

The Republican presidential primary race is finally getting “a brawler in the mix”—former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, said Michelle Cottle in The New York Times. So far, Donald Trump’s rivals have been afraid to criticize him too harshly, lest they alienate his supporters, and are merely giving the former president a passive-aggressive “side eye.” But Christie, who announced his candidacy this week, could change the dynamic of the race if he goes “all in on his no-nonsense, in-your-face, Jersey tough-guy shtick—the one where he yells at people to sit down and shut up.” In 2016, Christie endorsed Trump after his own presidential campaign failed. But he “sharply rebuked” Trump after Jan. 6 for refusing to accept the 2020 election results, said Jennifer Rubin in The Washington Post. The…

Sen. Joe Manchin sure knows how to get his way, said Heather Souvaine Horn in The New Republic. With President Biden desperate to pass a deal to avert default on the national debt, the West Virginia Democrat was able to use his “crucial swing vote” to advance his pet project: a 304-mile natural-gas pipeline through his state into Virginia. Never mind that the Mountain Valley Pipeline is “a bad project” that has incurred more than 500 regulatory violations over the six years of its construction. Never mind that it has nothing to do with the debt ceiling. Manchin insisted on it, so it’s now on a fast track for approval. The many lawsuits filed against this pipeline aren’t “nuisance challenges,” said the Charleston, W.Va., Gazette-Mail in an editorial, but…

(Bloomsbury, $29) You may come to hate Rachel Louise Snyder’s father, but don’t expect her to do the same, said Katie Roiphe in The Washington Post. The award-winning author of 2019’s No Visible Bruises “seems more interested in bearing witness, in high-level storytelling, than dividing the world into villains and victims,” and her “superb” new memoir applies that ethic to her own coming of age. Snyder was 8 when her mother died, and was still grieving when her father moved her and her brother to suburban Chicago, embraced a strict evangelical ethos, and began beating them when they fell out of line. One day, he and his second wife lined up four suitcases at the door and ordered Snyder their children to leave. Snyder was 16 and soon living…

James Comey has found yet another post-FBI career, said Sophia Nguyen in The Washington Post. The former director of the bureau, who has been blamed both for getting Donald Trump elected and miring Trump in Russiagate, recently had his first airport thriller published and is vowing to write many more. “This is not just a hobby for me,” he says. “I want this to be my job.” Comey had previously written two memoirs and balked when his agents suggested he try a novel. “I thought it would be silly, somehow—that I am a nonfiction person,” he says. But his wife, noticing his growing interest, dreamed up a New York City murder plot and helped make the project an enjoyable collaborative effort. Unfortunately, reviews for Central Park West have been…

Arena Stage, Washington, D.C. 3 When Kenneth Lin’s new comedy is spoofing Hollywood, it “doesn’t always feel novel,” said Celia Wren in The Washington Post. But the veteran TV writer also pushes a second theme, cleverly working in a primer on the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act by focusing on a historian who’s thrilled to sell TV rights to her book about the subject—until she sees how a studio bigwig wants to replace the truth with stereotypes. The play’s star, Karoline, is especially good when the character banters with her husband. The show’s “emotional high point” arrives with a conversation in Cantonese between the historian and a screen actress, said Jesse Green in The New York Times. Many audience members won’t understand the women’s words, yet the moment “dramatizes with great…

To identify gins best suited for a gin and tonic, we conducted a survey of top bartenders, said the editors of Punch. “Many favored a London dry style, with a palate that’s able to shine through when mixed with tonic water.” Approachability was also valued, even in gins with distinctive botanical makeups. Fords Gin ($19). “The most-cited brand among surveyed bartenders,” this crisp new-school London dry is “made for cocktails” and “made to be affordable.” Roku Gin ($27). Japanese gins began arriving on these shores several years ago and “have gained a cult following with bartenders.” The unique botanicals in this widely available spirit include yuzu peel, green tea, and sakura leaf, creating “a unique floral yet citrusy profile.” St. George Terroir Gin ($35). In this “trailblazing” gin from…

James Rogan Washington Examiner Why was Jamie Dimon in China last week? asked James Rogan. As CEO of America’s biggest bank, JPMorgan Chase, Dimon is “the nation’s pre-eminent banker”—so adulated on Wall Street that his bank had to put out a statement this week that Dimon is not running for president in 2024. So “why is Dimon serving as a foil in China’s strategic plan to supplant the U.S. as the foremost global power?” Dimon’s decision to host a financial conference in China last week “sends a clear signal to global investors that China is attractive for investment.” Dimon called himself a “red-blooded, full-throated, free enterprise capitalist,” while making sure to add that he wants JPMorgan to do business in China “through good and bad times.” Sorry, but China is…

Major Brian Shul wasn’t supposed to fly again. When he was piloting a fighter jet during the Vietnam War, his plane was hit by small-arms fire and ignited in flames, crash-landing in the Cambodian jungle. Shul was rescued by U.S. Special Forces, but his prognosis was bleak: More than half of his body was badly burned, and doctors said he’d never walk again. He spent more than a year as “119 pounds of blood and gauze,” as he said later, undergoing 15 painful operations and grafts. But just two days after being released from the hospital, Shul was back in an Air Force cockpit. His final assignment, in the 1980s, was to pilot what was then the fastest plane in the world. At the height of the Cold War,…