Indholdsfortegnelse for June 30, 2023 i The Week Magazine

Is the U.S. economy a flaming disaster, or are we in the midst of a boom and a stunning recovery from the pandemic? It’s a question that can be examined through hard data and evidence, but your answer is likely to depend on your politics. Some data: Unemployment is near a historic low at 3.7 percent, down from 13 percent in 2020. A record 13 million jobs have been created since Joe Biden replaced Donald Trump during the depths of the pandemic in 2020. Inflation, which battered consumers for two years, is cooling, with consumer prices rising just 0.1 percent in May and 4 percent over the previous year. Average wages have risen by 4.3 percent over last year, and the infrastructure bill has boosted factory construction and manufacturing jobs.…

Good week for: Enigmas, after President Biden, addressing a gun-safety summit in Connecticut, concluded his remarks with the sign-off “God save the Queen, man.” Biden’s aides could not explain what he meant. Aristocats, with news that the late Nancy Sauer, of Tampa, has bequeathed her $2.5 million, 4,000-square-foot mansion and a “substantial” inheritance to her seven Persian cats. Sauer’s estate will cover all their food and expenses in perpetuity. Supply chains, after Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro said he was “confident” that a heavily traveled section of Interstate 95 in Philadelphia, destroyed last week when a truck filled with gasoline exploded, can be repaired and reopened within two weeks, not the months initially projected. Bad week for: Elko, Nev., after an invasion of so many “Mormon crickets” that their movements sounded…

Melanie Hamrick doesn’t care what people think about her unconventional relationship with Mick Jagger, said Jane Mulkerrins in The Times (U.K.). Hamrick, a former member of New York’s American Ballet Theatre, is 36 and lives in Los Angeles with their 8-year-old son, Deveraux, while her Rolling Stones beau, who’s a 79-year-old great-grandfather, lives in London. “I know there have been lots of, ‘Are they engaged or aren’t they engaged?’” Hamrick says. She flashes a giant diamond. “Yes, I have a commitment ring.” They met in 2014 in Tokyo, where the Rolling Stones and Hamrick’s ballet company were touring. She’d been engaged, and Jagger was in a 13-year relationship with American fashion designer L’Wren Scott. Weeks later, Scott committed suicide. Hamrick says her pregnancy, after two years of transatlantic dating,…

Bertrand Cooper The Atlantic Most Americans think that affirmative action policies in college admissions benefit “poor Black kids,” said Bertrand Cooper, and that they’ll suffer if a Supreme Court forbids them in an upcoming ruling. That’s simply not true. That’s because a half century of efforts to produce “racial diversity” in higher education have failed to address an even more fundamental obstacle: class. My research shows that about 85 percent of Black and biracial students who graduate from Ivy League colleges like Harvard and Princeton come from “the middle and upper classes.” As a biracial person who grew up in poverty and in family chaos, I had excellent SAT scores but wound up in a community college because no adults urged me to apply to top colleges or for federal…

“Even when Trump doesn’t wield state power, when he is merely campaigning, Trump wields cultural power. The categories we use to evaluate the world lose their meaning—cruelty and kindness, integrity and corruption, honesty and dishonesty, generosity and selfishness. High-minded values begin to seem credulous and absurd, irrelevant to the situation at hand. Trump’s mere presence spreads his counter-gospel: People are basically selfish; raw power runs the world. All that matters is winning and losing. Trump’s corrosive influence spreads far beyond his party.” David Brooks in The New York Times…

FRANCE Clément Pétreault Le Point Kids, these days—they’d rather watch others have sex online than do it themselves, said Clément Pétreault. A recent study has found a “spectacular decline” in sexual activity in France. Fully 43 percent of 18- to 25-year-olds had no sexual partners over the last year, up from 25 percent eight years ago. Almost a quarter of French seniors, by contrast, had done the deed within just the past week. There are “a thousand factors” contributing to celibacy among the youth. It’s partly the internet: France is third worldwide in consumption of online porn, and studies show that the more time you spend on Netflix or Pornhub, the less you get busy with an actual human partner. Researchers also say that “cognitively addictive” social media platforms like…

IRAQ Taif Alkhudary Al Jazeera (Qatar) Iraq’s oil was supposed to make its people rich. Instead, the gas flaring from drilling is “devastating the lives of ordinary Iraqis,” said Taif Alkhudary. Flaring, the burning of the natural gas emitted during oil drilling, is a cheap and dirty procedure first used by the British when they plundered Iraq for its oil in the late 1800s. Now more gas is flared in Iraq than in Saudi Arabia, China, Canada, and India combined. The flares release a host of nasty pollutants, including the carcinogen benzene, and Iraqi cancer rates are skyrocketing—up 20 percent in Basra alone between 2015 and 2018. The Iraqi government passed a law last year to ban flaring, but that will do little because it doesn’t apply to America’s ExxonMobil,…

Most Native Americans breathed “a huge sigh of relief” last week, said Nick Estes in The Guardian. In a surprisingly one-sided 7-2 ruling, the Supreme Court upheld the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA). The case was centered on a white couple seeking to adopt their part-Navajo foster child. That couple and the state of Texas asked the court to overturn the 1978 law, which prioritizes placing such children within their tribe or, failing that, in another Native American family. Conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch’s concurrence “continued his laudable effort” to illuminate the dark history that made ICWA necessary, said Noah Feldman in Bloomberg. The government once shipped most Native American children to abusive boarding schools “designed to rob them of their culture.” Even into the 1970s, up to 35 percent…

“The bellwether of white American evangelicalism” just “took two powerful steps to the right,” said Michelle Boorstein in The Washington Post. At its annual meeting last week, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) voted “to make it explicit in their constitution that women can’t be pastors at any level.” The nation’s largest Protestant denomination, with over 13 million members, the SBC believes the Bible gives men authority over women, who should “submit graciously” to their dictates. A two-thirds majority needs to approve the amendment again next year for the change to go into effect, but the SBC already expelled five churches for appointing female pastors this year. One of the expelled congregations was California’s Saddleback Church, which “has for decades been the epitome of a modern conservative evangelical megachurch.” Shocked…

(Mariner, $32.50) Maureen Ryan’s new best-seller “pulls back a curtain of silence that’s already half open, but never seems to come fully undone,” said Jordan Riefe in the Los Angeles Times. More than five years into the MeToo era, the veteran TV critic and Vanity Fair contributing editor has compiled a “breathless” survey of the abusive behavior of entertainment industry bigwigs. “Culprits include the usual suspects—Harvey Weinstein, Scott Rudin, and Les Moonves,” but also lesser-known alleged offenders such as Lost’s co-creators. But it seems odd that Ryan leans on examples from more than a decade ago while arguing that nothing has changed in Hollywood. And though she was once sexually assaulted by a TV executive, her book risks diminishing its sexual predation allegations by lumping them in with routine…

Martinus Evans doesn’t fit the stereotype of a marathoner, said Danielle Friedman in The New York Times. In 2012, he was told by a doctor, “You have two options: Lose weight or die.” And when Evans responded by vowing to run a marathon, the doctor laughed and told him a marathon would kill him, too. Determined, Evans took to the road and began documenting his experience on a blog, 300 Pounds and Running. The supportive written comments of strangers counterbalanced the insults he sometimes heard from passersby. But after Evans triumphantly completed his first marathon a year after making his vow, he realized that focusing on weight loss was detracting from running’s satisfactions. Though he’d lost 90 pounds, “I wasn’t 90 pounds happier,” he says. He decided then to…

  3 “Some artists play by the rules, others revel in breaking them, and Amaarae leaves no question to which category is hers,” said Thania Garcia in Variety. The Bronx-born queer Ghanaian-American pop star, who released her debut album three years ago, employs a “deceptively honeyed” voice to sing about female sexuality and broken gender norms, “all while demonstrating how wide the umbrella of African pop can be.” Her colorful sophomore album “leads the listener to expect surprises” as it blends R&B, Afropop, guitar pop, and “even Japanese folk.” The music is lavish, layering violins, horns, steel drums, and West African kora, said Julianne Escobedo Shepherd in Pitchfork. “It flows, it saunters, it boasts, connected by Amaarae’s sweet soprano, lilting to the gods.” Unlike other artists who project a “rich,…

Coway Airmega AP-1512HH “Perfect for bedrooms and living rooms,” Coway’s “robustly engineered and thoughtfully designed” air purifier combines a prefilter for catching pet hair, a carbon filter for odors, and a HEPA filter for dust, pollen, and smoke. $230, cowaymega.com Source: Wirecutter Levoit Core 400S Cylindrical purifiers pull in air from all sides, and this “incredibly quiet” Levoit, made for 400-sq.-ft. spaces, “stood out for its value, performance, and intelligent design.” A companion app lets you monitor air quality and schedule operation modes. $220, amazon.com Source: Good Housekeeping Blueair Pure 311 Auto “One of the best-looking air purifiers available today,” Blueair’s sleek standout, for spaces up to 550 sq. ft., is “easy to use” and “remarkably powerful” for its size. The only downside: Replacing the HEPA filter “can be…

Nearly two-thirds of U.S. adults ages 65 and older own equity through stocks, mutual funds, or retirement savings accounts. That is up from roughly half of Americans of the same age before the 2008 financial crisis. The Wall Street Journal Airbus announced the biggest plane deal in history on the opening day of the Paris Airshow this week, with an order for 500 narrow-body jets from Indian budget carrier IndiGo. Indigo has 60 percent of India’s domestic air travel market. CNBC.com McKinsey estimates that private cars will account for 29 percent of trips in 2035, down from 45 percent in 2022, with robotaxis making up 8 percent. In the U.S., however, private cars will still make up 80 percent of trips. Axios The median price for a home in Miami…

Suicide is currently the third leading cause of death for Americans ages 15 to 24. Since 1987, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (afsp.org) has been at the forefront of efforts to understand and prevent suicide through research, education, and outreach. Thousands annually participate in the organization’s Out of the Darkness walks, and thousands more volunteer with its local chapters, which have a presence in all 50 states. Each year, AFSP offers 1,500 educational programs nationwide, including Talk Saves Lives (known as the gold standard for suicide prevention), as well as special programming for youth, veterans, LGBTQ people, and communities of color. Its latest campaign aims to reduce the suicide rate by 20 percent by 2025. Each charity we feature has earned a four-star overall rating from Charity Navigator,…

Ali Griswold Oversharing.Substack.com There’s been a lot of chatter recently about how five-star ratings have “lost all meaning,” said Ali Griswold. Supposedly, Americans are being “guilted into leaving perfect ratings for people who are only doing their job.” Please. “There is only one acceptable rating to leave your Uber driver, and it is five stars.” I don’t care if your ride was great, silent, awkward, or the car smelled like a bag of KFC. “Unless you fear for your safety or find a dead body in your Uber, it’s five stars or bust.” I’d give more credence to ratings if Uber actually provided a guide on what a “five-star trip” entails. But it doesn’t. That’s because “platforms that make too many demands of their workers run the risk of having…

Glenda Jackson never played it safe. A two-time Oscar winner, for Women in Love and A Touch of Class, she was known for daring performances that were both emotionally and physically revealing. But her boldest move came in 1992, when she quit acting to be elected to the British Parliament as a member of the Labour Party, briefly serving as a junior transport minister under Prime Minister Tony Blair. She returned to the stage in 2015 after a 23-year hiatus, and soon took on the title role in King Lear as an octogenarian. “I like to take risks,” she said in 1971, “and I want those risks to be larger than the confines of a structure that’s simply meant to entertain.” Born near Liverpool to a bricklayer and a…

What happened President Biden launched his campaign with a series of events on the East Coast and in California this week, saying that he’s “never been more optimistic” in his long years in politics. Last weekend, he had his first campaign rally with the AFL-CIO in Philadelphia. He also received endorsements from major labor and environmental groups. At campaign events, he highlighted his policy accomplishments, including the first gun-safety legislation passed in decades, and took credit for steering the country through inherited disasters like the pandemic and an economy in freefall. Already 80, he downplayed concerns about his age and skepticism from left-leaning Democrats. “I didn’t come into office with a theory, I came into office with a plan,” Biden told rallygoers. Two months after announcing his candidacy, Biden…

A University of Cincinnati adjunct professor has admitted to giving a student’s paper a zero because it used the term “biological women.” Professor Melanie Rose Nipper said she draws the line on free speech when students are “participating in a systemic harm of some kind”—which she says student Olivia Krolczyk did with her “outdated” reference. A Northern California chain of taquerias was ordered to pay $140,000 in federal fines after it hired a fake priest to spy on employees. Maria Parra, a former worker at Taqueria Garibaldi, says the “priest” asked staff to confess their sins—including whether they’d reported the owner for making them work unpaid overtime. The priest “mostly had work-related questions,” says Parra, “which I thought was strange.” In other news FBI delayed probing Trump’s Jan. 6 role…

Mel Brooks grew up thinking most people were Jewish, said Judd Apatow in The Atlantic. His neighborhood in Brooklyn was nearly all-Jewish, to the point that he thought “that’s what the world was. Mostly Jews and a few strange people.” His family was not religious: His father died when he was 2, and his mother—the mother of four—would not spend a dollar a seat for her family to attend synagogue on High Holy Days. “She simply couldn’t afford it.” When he enlisted in the Army toward the end of World War II, he and two other soldiers were the only Jews in his battalion. “It was an eye-opener. Once in a while you’d get a couple of guys from Alabama who would ask, ‘Take off your helmet. I want…

Miami police are investigating a woman’s allegation that UFC star Conor McGregor sexually assaulted her last week in a VIP men’s room at Game 4 of the NBA Finals. The Irishman, one of the world’s most famous mixed-martial-arts fighters, was videoed leading the accuser to the restroom, where a security guard stood watch outside. The unnamed woman says McGregor, 34, “violently” forced her to perform oral sex and then pulled down her pants before she was able to get away. “This is no more than a shakedown,” said an attorney for McGregor, who’s been accused of multiple prior sexual assaults but never convicted. Hours earlier at Game 4, McGregor had shocked Heat fans by punching the team’s mascot during a promotional skit, sending the man inside the costume to…

Colin Woodard Washington Monthly In the U.S., “gun violence varies enormously by region,” said Colin Woodard. “It’s as if Americans live in separate countries.” For example, the deep red states of the South suffer “per capita homicide and suicide rates two or three times greater than those in the Northeast and West Coast,” and seven to nine times greater than those in the greater New York City area. The New York metropolitan area, in fact, is “the country’s safest region” in terms of gun deaths. Why? Mostly because it has the lowest levels of gun ownership, with 78 percent of households reporting no firearms in the home. “Two other regions with low per-capita gun deaths”—parts of the Southwest and the West Coast—also have low gun ownership. In regions with high…

SOUTH KOREA Editorial The Hankyoreh South Koreans have every right to worry about Japan’s plan to dump radioactive waste from Fukushima into the ocean, said The Hankyoreh in an editorial. Starting this summer, over 1 million tons of tainted water from the facility, which was badly damaged in a 2011 earthquake, will be diluted with seawater and discharged a half-mile offshore. Japan insists the treated water is safe, and U.N. scientists agree. But Koreans have begun panic-buying dried seafood, saying they have no intention of eating anything from those waters after the dumping starts. Many will simply stop buying fresh fish altogether—indeed, fishmongers and sushi restaurants are already feeling “a sense of crisis.” It’s no use for Tokyo and Seoul to repeat “again and again that the seafood is safe,”…

“Do not let sorrow die, for it is the sweetening of every gift.”Cormac McCarthy, quoted in The New Yorker “In all affairs, it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.”Bertrand Russell, quoted in KQED “The day you die is just like any other, only shorter.”Samuel Beckett, quoted in The Washington Post “I’m so old, the first time I had sex it was in the back of a chariot.”Joan Rivers, quoted in The Times (U.K.) “If only the sun-drenched celebrities are being noticed and worshipped, then our children are going to have a tough time seeing value in the shadows, where the thinkers, probers, and scientists are who are keeping society together.”Poet Rita Dove, quoted in The New…

Paying to train AI on the news Media companies are pushing Big Tech firms to pay to use their content to train AI models, said Cristina Criddle in the Financial Times. OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft have met with news executives from publishers including The New York Times, News Corp, Axel Springer, the Financial Times, and The Guardian “to discuss copyright issues around their AI products.” Media industry executives are trying to “avoid the mistakes of the early internet era, when many offered articles online for free” that were used by Facebook and Google to take advertising dollars. News Corp CEO Robert Thomson suggested last month that AI could be even worse for publishers, saying it was “designed so the reader will never visit a journalism website.” Virgin Galactic’s long-delayed…

If you think airplane flights have gotten bumpier in recent years, you’re not imagining it, reports BBC.co.uk. Climate change is making turbulence worse. Researchers at Reading University in the U.K. looked at climate data from 1979 to 2020. They found that severe clear-air turbulence—which, unlike disruption from storms, is hard for pilots to detect—had increased by 55 percent over that period, while moderate turbulence was up 37 percent. The reason is that warmer air creates stronger wind shear—differences in wind speed—in the jet stream, a system of air currents a few miles above Earth’s surface. That in turn causes greater turbulence. The biggest increases were on routes in the U.S. and the North Atlantic, followed by those in Europe, the Middle East, and the South Atlantic. “Following a decade…

In Ashley Audrain’s new novel, The Whispers, neighbors overhear a mother berating her 10-year-old shortly before he falls from a third-floor window. Below, the best-selling author of The Push recommends other books about motherhood’s dark side. The Perfect Nanny by Leila Slimani (2016). This isn’t a mystery, per se—we know from the first staggering pages that a nanny has committed a horrendous murder. But we read on, with bated breath, to learn why. I love that The Perfect Nanny brings out the danger lurking beneath an ordinary scenario—parents needing child care! I also love how it taps into a common fear: If we choose our own needs over our children’s, will we inevitably be punished? Inferno by Catherine Cho (2015). In this searingly honest account of postpartum psychosis, Cho…

3 On his first solo album in 11 years, Killer Mike “opens up in ways he never has before,” said Andrew Sacher in Brooklyn Vegan. Most widely celebrated recently as half of the duo Run the Jewels, “one of the most beloved rap acts of the last decade,” the Atlanta rapper and activist hasn’t released anything on his own since 2012’s excellent R.A.P. Music. But it’s clear why this 14-song set needed to be a personal statement. Chronicling a life’s worth of private struggles, “Michael is as much a memoir as it is a rap album.” It’s not a spare production, said Mosi Reeves in Rolling Stone. Killer Mike’s “incisive and compelling” lyrics have to compete for attention amid “florid” old-soul samples, “a cascade of gospel cries and churchy organs,”…

People Who Knew Me (BBC Podcasts) You can easily understand why the team behind this “pacy, bingeable” 10-part audio drama leaped at the chance to adapt the 2016 Kim Hooper novel it’s based on, said Fiona Sturges in The Financial Times. Rosamund Pike plays Connie Prynne, a California woman with a dark secret: Fourteen years earlier, she faked her death in the World Trade Center on 9/11 to escape a husband she had grown disenchanted with. But “there’s a pleasing moral ambiguity at the heart of the story,” because Connie, now 41, has recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and for the sake of her 13-year-old daughter, wishes to put things right before dying. Pike’s whispering performance is “pitched to perfection,” said Helen Daly in Radio Times. Connie is…

With their “tart acidity” and “subtle fizz,” white Vinho Verde wines are “perfect for sipping in the summer sun,” said Petrina Darrah in Wine Enthusiast. All are produced in the Vinho Verde region in northwestern Portugal. The region’s name, meaning “green wine,” is believed to refer to the local tradition of releasing all wines, including reds, while they’re young. Below, three whites, which now dominate exports. 2021 Anselmo Mendes Contacto Alvarinho ($15). “Skin contact gives this wine extra intensity and richness.” Vanilla and spice flavors meet “beautiful acidity and freshness.” 2020 Quinta de Paços ‘Casa do Capitão-Mor’ Reserva Alvarinho ($14). This rich Alvarinho “has aging potential.” It “offers touches of honey and a dense texture.” 2021 Quinta do Ameal Loureiro ($19). The Ameal estate’s signature wine combines softness and…

Daniel Ellsberg was in a deserted men’s room when he had a conversion that would alter U.S. history. It was 1969, and Ellsberg was a Pentagon analyst and former Marine hawk who’d come to see the Vietnam War as immoral and futile. Shaken by what he’d heard at a draft resisters’ meeting, Ellsberg retreated to the bathroom and sobbed. He soon became the 20th century’s most famous whistleblower, feeding The New York Times a top-secret Defense Department history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam that came to be called the Pentagon Papers. Hailed as a hero and vilified as a traitor, Ellsberg revealed how four presidents misled Americans while deepening U.S. involvement in a war none thought was winnable. He was charged with espionage; a judge tossed the case. But,…

This week’s question: Artificial intelligence is being used to extract John Lennon’s vocals from an unreleased demo tape to help create what Sir Paul McCartney is calling “the final Beatles song.” What would be an appropriate title for the Fab Four’s AI-enabled single? Last week’s contest: Dissatisfied workers in Japan can now hire professional “quitters” to tell their bosses they’re resigning. Come up with a name for a company that offers this severance service. THE WINNER: “Middlefinger Associates” Norm Carrier, Flat Rock, N.C. SECOND PLACE: “Pinch Quitter” Larry Rifkin, Glastonbury, Conn. THIRD PLACE: “LinkedOut” Claire Williams, Louisville 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 telephone number for verification; this week,…

Minneapolis Minneapolis police routinely discriminated against Black, Native American, and disabled people and frequently used “unjustified deadly force,” according to a two-year Justice Department probe released this week by Attorney General Merrick Garland. The review, initiated after former officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of murdering Minneapolis resident George Floyd, is likely to lead to a court-enforced overhaul of the department. The probe extended far beyond Floyd’s killing, detailing numerous occasions when officers used unwarranted neck restraints, then told people complaining that they couldn’t breathe some version of “You can breathe; you’re talking right now.” The DOJ said officers fired weapons prematurely, used Tasers without warning, including on pedestrians and drivers suspected of minor offenses or none at all, and attacked civilians engaged in legal protests. When the department received…

Shi Yan Ming is a real-life kung fu master, said Charlie Campbell in Time. Shi, 59, can break bricks with his bare hands, knock men down with a 1-inch-long punch, and execute upside-down flying kicks. Now based in New York City, where he has taught kung fu to movie stars and office workers, Shi has been training since age 5, when his desperately poor parents sent their sickly child to China’s legendary Shaolin temple to learn Zen Buddhism and martial arts. “My parents had no idea what was wrong with me, but they believed Buddha could save my life,” he says. The temple, founded in 495, is known for subjecting shaven-headed monks to a rigorous regimen of meditation, chores, and training. By 17, Shi could dangle a 40-pound weight…

Ronald G. Shafer The Washington Post The Republican primary has a new “rallying cry,” said Ronald G. Shafer: Bring back Fort Bragg. Originally named for Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg, the fort in North Carolina was recently renamed Fort Liberty as part of a congressionally mandated effort to change the names of military bases honoring Confederate leaders. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former Vice President Mike Pence are both vowing to reinstate the original name if elected president in 2024, claiming this is an instance of “political correctness run amok,” as DeSantis said. But in pandering to Confederacy nostalgia, they’ve overlooked Bragg’s rotten record as both a general and a human being. Historians consider him “the South’s worst and most hated general,” a flagrantly racist slave owner whose own troops…

NORTHERN IRELAND Suzanne Breen Belfast Telegraph The British government must end its “shameful silence” on the torture of Irish nationalists during The Troubles, said Suzanne Breen. The facts are clear: For a week in 1971, British soldiers and royal police in Northern Ireland brutalized 14 Catholic men they suspected of being involved with the Provisional Irish Republican Army. Not one of the men was ever convicted of a crime. Yet they were cloaked in hoods; forced to stand in painful “stress positions”; denied food, water, and sleep; and dropped out of low-hovering helicopters they’d been told were high up in the air. Some of these “Hooded Men,” as they came to be known, never recovered from this “degrading and inhumane treatment,” including Pat Shivers, a father of five, who hallucinated…

We used to think the question “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” had a simple answer: eggs, because chickens’ dinosaur ancestors were laying them long before the domestic fowl evolved. But a new study suggests the reverse may be true, reports The Times (U.K.). Researchers now believe that millions of years before the dinosaurs were around, the chicken’s reptilian ancestors were giving birth to live young rather than laying eggs. Previously, it was thought that evolution in that area of reproduction only went one way: that egg-laying (“oviparous”) species could evolve into live-birthing (“viviparous”) species such as mammals, but not vice versa. But the researchers say there is now evidence of some species switching in both directions. When they studied 51 fossils of 29 living species, they…

(Flatiron, $28) S.A. Cosby latest crime novel “acts like a mirror” to troubling aspects of the American character, and “that makes it necessary reading,” said Gabino Iglesias in NPR.org. In rural Charon, Va., the county’s first Black sheriff responds to a fatal shooting at a local school and uncovers evidence that three religious zealots have been murdering Black children and that one of them is still at large. Cosby, a recent breakout star of crime fiction, “spends a lot of time making sure we understand the historical context of everything that happens in Charon.” But he “understands that thrillers need to thrill,” and All the Sinners Bleed proves “wildly entertaining.” A well-told crime novel isn’t rare itself, said Stephen King in The New York Times. “What sets this one…

I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore (Knopf, $27) Lorrie Moore’s new novel is typically enigmatic, and “I wouldn’t have it any other way,” said David L. Ulin in the Los Angeles Times. The book’s main strand follows a teacher’s dreamlike road trip with an ex-girlfriend who’s a living ghost; a second strand arrives via Civil War–era letters written by an innkeeper to her sister. It doesn’t matter that not everything adds up: “Moore is after something more mysterious than naturalism. She is operating in the territory of myth.” Sing Her Down by Ivy Pochoda (MCD, $28) “Are some women simply born with a need to inflict pain?” asked Alexis Schaitkin in The New York Times. In Ivy Pochoda’s new thriller, two female inmates…

3 Héloïse Letissier’s fourth album as Christine and the Queens “feels like the score for a film epic,” said Hanif Abdurraqib in The New Yorker. The transgender French singer-songwriter has been making dramatic, maximalist synth-pop since 2014, but there’s a particularly dreamlike quality to this project, “a patient and pleading unfurling of atmospheric sounds.” Letissier is a shape-shifting performer who, like many queer artists before him, has embraced multiple personae over the years. Here, amid his meditations on grief and longing, “Letissier’s constellations of identities move toward and away from one another, forming fresh, evolving shapes and building space for others yet to come.” Spacious, hypnotic ballads, including “Tears Can Be So Soft,” provide many of the album’s highlights, said Heather Phares in AllMusic. “True Love” is another standout, “blending…

Cormac McCarthy on film… No Country for Old Men No filmmakers have been better than the Coen brothers at bringing the late novelist’s brand of grim violence to the screen. Their 2008 Best Picture winner features Javier Bardem in an unforgettable performance as a denim-tuxedoed killer. $4 on demand The Road McCarthy’s Pulitzer-winning 2006 novel about a father and son making a long trek on foot in a post-apocalyptic America has become a defining fable of our time. The screen adaptation is grim, but creates an acting workout for Viggo Mortensen and an 11-year-old Kodi Smit-McPhee. Tubi The Sunset Limited Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel L. Jackson go head-to-head in this 2009 chamber piece, adapted from a 2006 McCarthy play about a suicidal professor and the born-again ex-con who…

ChatGPT Plus is the original app that allows anyone to play with ChatGPT, the artificially intelligent chatbot developed by OpenAI. “It can answer questions and generate impressive written content, but there are many things it will flat-out refuse to do.” The $20-a-month service also grants limited access to GPT-4, the most cutting-edge language-processing AI. Bing Chat was the first chatbot to bring GPT-4 to the public. Microsoft’s conversational chatbot remains “one of the easiest ways to access GPT-4 for free,” and though it reverts to using GPT-3.5 when the GPT-4 service is busy, “you won’t be able to tell.” Duolingo, the popular language-learning app, recently added a new feature called Duolingo Max, which allows users to practice Spanish or French in conversations with GPT-4. For now, this $30-a-month subscription tier…

UPS union workers last week overwhelmingly approved the right to conduct the largest-ever strike against a single U.S. business if a contract deal isn’t reached by Aug. 1, said Lauren Kaori Gurley in The Washington Post. The Teamsters said 97 percent of 340,000 UPS employees approved, threatening the first major walkout in “the nation’s transportation system since the last time UPS employees went on strike 26 years ago.” Drivers already scored a big win when UPS agreed recently “to equip new package delivery vans with air conditioning.” The union still wants guaranteed raises, more full-time positions, and the end of a two-tier wage system. Chip race: A massive spending spree from Intel Intel will spend $33 billion to build two chip plants in Germany, after the country pledged to cover…

An annual return on a charitable gift New rules let retirees ages 70.5 and older donate up to $50,000 from their IRAs to fund gift annuities, said Ashlea Ebeling in The Wall Street Journal. About 1,600 charities run gift annuity programs, in which they agree to make fixed annual payments in exchange for a donation, “much like a traditional annuity purchased from an insurance company.” The payments continue as long as you live. “While charities have offered gift annuities for years, the donations previously couldn’t be made directly from retirement accounts.” Thanks to retirement rule changes passed in Congress in December, funds for a gift annuity can be withdrawn from your IRA tax-free—though the annual payments are usually taxable. The annual payout for a 70-year-old from a $50,000 gift…

Sandeep Vaheesan The Atlantic Drugmakers use America’s watered-down antitrust laws to keep prices high and their patent monopolies intact, said Sandeep Vaheesan. Patents give drugmakers a 20-year monopoly. In theory, when that’s up, other companies can produce generic versions, lowering prices through competition. However, “using a tactic known as pay for delay, brand-name drug companies who hold the patents to blockbuster medications pay other companies to put off introducing generic equivalents.” This is “the sort of thing that makes people say, ‘There ought to be a law against this.’” And, in fact, there is. Under the Sherman Antitrust Act, it’s illegal for two independent rivals to make a deal not to compete with each other, as Gilead Sciences did when it paid Israeli drugmaker Teva Pharmaceuticals $1.5 billion to (wink…

Cormac McCarthy was unsparing, in his prose and of his readers’ comfort. The novelist, whose works earned him comparisons to Faulkner, Joyce, and the King James Bible, used vivid, sparsely punctuated sentences to tell tales of shocking violence in Appalachia and along the U.S.-Mexico border. Blood Meridian, published in 1985, follows a group of 19th-century outlaws as they slaughter Native Americans en masse. In 2005’s No Country for Old Men, adapted into an Oscar-winning Coen Brothers film, a bungled 1980 heroin deal in southwest Texas attracts the attention of a psychopathic hit man. McCarthy never psychoanalyzed his characters, and his outlook was usually bleak. “There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed,” McCarthy said in 1992. “I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way,…