The Week Magazine July 14, 2023

It has been a disappointing decade for democracy. The fall of the iron curtain is receding into the past. Instead, in places like the Arab world that were supposed to be turning the corner, we have seen an authoritarian revival. In Russia and China, any tilt toward democracy has been reversed; Hong Kong stands as a searing example of how freedoms can be taken away. Established democracies have taken a turn toward cults of personality. Each of these—Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Narendra Modi in India, and, yes, Donald Trump in the United States—comes with its own flavor. But they all share a basic disregard for minority rights and institutional safeguards. Modi in particular has risen with a brand of explicitly xenophobic and violent Hindu nationalism. Yet last week the…

What happened Russian mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin landed in Belarus this week, three days after he spearheaded and then called off a rebellion that posed an unprecedented challenge to President Vladimir Putin’s 23-year rule. The stunning revolt came after months of lacerating criticism of Russian military leaders by Prigozhin, a longtime ally of the Russian dictator whose 25,000 Wagner Group fighters have been a key fighting force in Ukraine. It came a week before a deadline for his fighters to sign contracts with the Russian army and Wagner to be dissolved—an order he’d vowed to resist. After Prigozhin claimed 30 of his soldiers had been killed by Russian missile strikes, unopposed Wagner fighters took control of the southern city of Rostov-on-Don, a major staging base for the Ukraine invasion, where…

What happened The Supreme Court this week rejected a fringe legal doctrine that threatened to shatter the system of checks and balances governing U.S. elections. In Moore v. Harper, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett sided with the court’s three liberals to find that North Carolina’s state supreme court acted within its authority in throwing out a heavily gerrymandered electoral map. The map favored Republicans in 10 out of 14 districts, in a state with slightly more registered Democrats than Republicans. In Moore, North Carolina Republicans invoked the independent state legislature theory, which argues that the Elections Clause of the Constitution gives state legislatures sole control over federal elections. The theory’s most extreme form holds that no other state body—not the courts, nor…

Neymar Davalos, an 8-year-old boy, found a custom-made World Series championship ring at a Houston Astros game and gave it to his dad, Ray, as a Father’s Day present. The very next day, Ray Davalos saw a Facebook post about Reynaldo Muñoz, a 23-year ballpark veteran who’d lost his World Series ring, a gift from the Astros to ballpark employees. Father and son promptly returned the ring to the very grateful Muñoz. “I’m so glad they did the right thing,” said Muñoz. “At the end of the day, it’s the best thing you can ask for.” On New Year’s Eve 2005, the Knoxville Fire Department was called to help a woman who’d suddenly gone into labor. Eighteen years later, O’Tavais “OT” Harris, the baby the firefighters delivered, joined their crew…

“The entitlement. The hubris. The tone deafness,” said Ruth Marcus in The Washington Post. On the heels of recent revelations about Clarence Thomas’ decades of unreported largesse from Republican megadonor Harlan Crow, ProPublica revealed last week that Justice Samuel Alito also has a right-wing billionaire sugar daddy with interests before the Supreme Court. In 2008, Alito accepted an all-expenses-paid luxury fishing expedition to Alaska, where he stayed at a $1,000-a-night fishing lodge, feasted on Kobe beef and king crab legs washed down with $1,000-a-bottle wine, all paid for by billionaire conservative activist Robin Arkley. Alito flew to Alaska on the private jet of Paul Singer, another GOP megadonor, whose business later netted $2.4 billion when Alito and the Supreme Court sided with him in a financial dispute. That private…

Good week for: Job openings, with news that an anonymous U.S. billionaire couple living in Britain is looking to hire a full-time, live-in “dog nanny” at a starting salary of $127,227. The job listing says the successful applicant will combine superlative dog-pampering skills with the ability to “handle sensitive information with the utmost discretion and confidentiality.” Face mask companies, after more smoke from 488 still-active Canadian wildfires caused air quality alerts in 20 states from Minnesota down to Georgia. Diagnoses, after former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney said the problem with current U.S. politics is that “we’re electing idiots.” Cheney suggested that voters should try electing “serious people.” Bad week for: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who called fellow right-winger Rep. Lauren Boebert “a little bitch” on the House floor. Days later,…