Indholdsfortegnelse for April 18, 2025 i The Week Magazine

In the wake of President Trump’s Liberation Day tariff extravaganza, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the unfair trade practices that I’ve tolerated too long in my own life. Take my trading relationship with Amazon. For more than two decades, I’ve been sending money to Jeff Bezos’ online megastore and in return I’ve received all sorts of products: books, diapers, dish soap, fidget spinners, and a storage unit’s worth of tools for never-completed DIY projects. While it’s true that I wanted or needed all those goods, Liberation Day has woken me up to a big problem: that Amazon has never once bought or even asked about buying something from me. Trump’s commerce commandments mandate that both parties must exchange an equal amount of physical goods, lest that…

■ Two Illinois men are suing OnlyFans, claiming they were duped into thinking they were chatting with real models on the online adult platform. The lawsuit accuses OnlyFans of allowing agencies to “impersonate” content creators via direct messages and video clips, frustrating the plaintiffs’ “reasonable expectations” of one-on-one communication with the models pictured. Both men said they wouldn’t have subscribed if they’d known their OnlyFans relationships would not be “authentic.” ■ A new Texas bill would make it a felony to identify as transgender. Introduced by state GOP Rep. Tom Oliverson, the legislation defines “gender identity fraud” as making any “false or misleading verbal or written statement,” either to a government entity or to an employer, in which a person declares their sex as the “opposite of the biological…

Dolly Parton knows how to stand her ground, said Georgina Roberts in The Times (U.K.). The country music legend grew up in Tennessee with a house full of men: six brothers, plus her dad, uncles, and grandfathers. “I know the nature of men,” says Parton, 79. “Daddy was pretty strong-willed, but a good dad. It’s not easy to boss me around.” Still, she’s no stranger to unwanted advances and harassment. “You’re always going to get hit on. I have run up against that—I’m a girl, and I was quite pretty at one time. But I seemed to know how to manage it. I have not had many of the same problems that a lot of women have had.” What she has encountered is a lot of criticism of her…

President Trump has talked of annexing our northern neighbor. We tried to do just that in the War of 1812. What sparked the war? American anger at the British, the former colonial overlords who at the time ruled Canada. The already strained relationship between Britain and the fledgling U.S. hit a boiling point in the early 19th century. Britain, embroiled in the Napoleonic Wars with France, put a blockade on American trade ships bound for mainland Europe. And it seized thousands of American seamen and conscripted them into its undermanned Royal Navy. There was another source of tension closer to home: British support of Native American tribes along the Great Lakes, who used British-supplied weapons in raids on U.S. settlements and inhibited westward expansion. With the rallying cry “Free…

Frank Bowman Slate President Trump is using his pardon powers to extort political favors and “become ever more fabulously wealthy,” said Frank Bowman. Look at the seven “impenitent swindlers and crypto scofflaws” whose slates he wiped clean last month. There’s Trevor Milton, convicted of defrauding investors of tens of millions of dollars via his electric-vehicle startup Nikola. He secured a pardon after doling out $2.85 million to Republican political organizations, including $930,000 to Trump’s campaign. Jason Galanis and Devon Archer bilked the Oglala Sioux Tribe out of more than $60 million but won Trump’s favor by testifying in Congress against a political enemy: former President Joe Biden’s son Hunter. Then there are the four founders of crypto exchange Bitmex, who had pleaded guilty to “openly flouting money-laundering rules.” Their…

Robyn Urback The Globe and Mail The Liberal Party is “terrible at governing,” said Robyn Urback, but it sure knows how to campaign. Silver-tongued Justin Trudeau promised the world when he was first elected prime minister in 2015, but when it came time to deliver, he gave us only “a plan, a framework for a plan, a timeline for a framework for a plan.” Since taking over as Liberal leader a few weeks ago, Prime Minister Mark Carney has shrewdly become the anti-Trudeau, hijacking some of the “best policy positions” of his rival, populist Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, such as deregulating permits and scrapping the carbon tax. Both men loudly proclaim themselves the tough bruiser Canada needs to stand up to a bullying President Trump. With essentially no daylight…

■ Wealthy Americans ages 50 and over have roughly the same chance of dying over a 12-year period as their poorest peers in Northern and Western Europe, according to a new study. Researchers said the high mortality rate among rich Americans is likely a result of lifestyle issues, such as poor diet, lack of exercise, and loneliness. NBCNews.com ■ A group of barren islands near Antarctica, covered in ice and home only to penguins, was swept up in President Trump’s trade war last week and hit with a 10 percent tariff. That import duties were slapped on Australia’s Heard and McDonald Islands suggests this was “a rushed process,” said Australian trade minister Don Farrell. BBC.com ■ The Social Security Administration is reducing its workforce from 57,000 to about 50,000—the…

If President Trump’s sweeping tariffs kick in when his 90-day pause ends, Americans will face “significant price shocks,” said Alicia Adamczyk in Fortune. The levies announced in recent weeks are certain to be passed on to consumers by importers and retailers, and will cost the average family an extra $3,800 a year, according to Yale’s Budget Lab. Shoppers will quickly feel the sting at the grocery store, said Scott Neuman in NPR.org. The “vast majority” of our seafood is imported, with top suppliers including Indonesia (subject to 32 percent tariffs in 90 days) and Vietnam (46 percent). Bananas from Costa Rica and coffee from Colombia will incur 10 percent tariffs, Mexican beer a 25 percent levy, and French wine a 20 percent toll. And tariffs’ indirect effects will hit…

■ 73% of Americans expect prices to rise for the next six months on goods that they buy every day as a result of President Trump’s new tariffs. 57% oppose the new import taxes, including 24% of Republicans, 57% of independents, and 88% of Democrats. Reuters/Ipsos ■ If the Constitution were amended to allow a president to serve a third term and both President Trump and former President Barack Obama were to run for office, 47% of Americans would vote for Trump and 53% for Obama. Overton Insights…

■ The robot butler is training A Silicon Valley entrepreneur is training the robots of the future in his own home, said Cade Metz in The New York Times. When I paid a house call on 1X chief executive Bernt Bornich, “the door was opened by a faceless robot dressed in a beige bodysuit.” When Bornich asked for a bottled water, Neo “walked into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator.” Bornich, like Elon Musk, believes that “humanoids will one day do much of the physical work now handled by people,” including household chores. Many of those tasks can’t be taught in a virtual environment. The robots need to learn by gathering data inside real homes. But don’t be fooled: Neo walks on its own, but it was also “being…

The 19th-century English writer and wit Sydney Smith once described his idea of heaven as “eating pâté de foie gras to the sound of trumpets.” But the sublime taste of this French delicacy has long been soured by its gruesome production method: Foie gras is made from the livers of ducks or geese that are force-fed through a tube, causing the organ to swell to 10 times its normal size. Now a German physicist claims to have found a way to make a similar product without quite as much fowl torture. “I’m a big fan of foie gras,” Thomas Vilgis, from the Max Planck Institute, tells New Scientist. “I was just fascinated by this mouthfeel—it was so different from other pâtés—and so I asked myself, what is it?” After…

The compelling latest book from the best-selling religious scholar Elaine Pagels is “a kind of culminating work,” said Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker. For the first time, the author of The Gnostic Gospels has written a volume focused on Jesus, and it charts “a reasonable middle ground” between scholarly skepticism and an appreciation of the extra-rational power of the stories told about Jesus in the New Testament. Pagels accepts as a given that Jesus existed. But starting with the Bible’s claims that he was born to a virgin, Pagels unpacks the miracles ascribed to him to explain what Scripture’s writers were up to when they recorded such tales. Instead of scolding the faith’s early Evangelists for the Gospels’ departures from verifiable fact, “Pagels revels in the contradictions and…

Actress Ione Skye was a teenager when her appearances in River’s Edge and Say Anything…made her a star. In her best-selling new memoir, Say Everything, she details her rocky romantic history and long estrangement from her father, the folk-rock legend Donovan. West of Eden by Jean Stein (2016). After writing Edie—a portrait of Andy Warhol superstar Edie Sedgwick that was also one of the greatest oral-history books of all time—Stein explored the history of Los Angeles through intriguing and dark stories, both well-known and obscure, that took place in and around the movie industry. The Magic World by E. Nesbit (1912). Nesbit was a fantastic and witty writer. This is one of those brilliant children’s books that grown-ups will love as well. Its stories mostly follow English kids, raised…

Art Institute of Chicago, through June 29 “The notion of a Roman sculpture show might seem at first blush to be a bit stodgy,” said Kyle MacMillan in the Chicago Sun-Times. But the 58 ancient works that constitute “Myth and Marble” are special, and viewers who give the show a chance are “likely to be surprised by the artistic audacity of this work and how fresh and compelling it seems two millennia after its creation.” The exhibition, which will later travel to Fort Worth and Montreal, offers a glimpse of an astonishing private collection that hadn’t been seen for several decades before selections from it were unveiled in 2020 and last year drew huge crowds in Paris. The Torlonias, a family that made its fortune in banking beginning in…

With his latest collaborative album, Elton John has delivered “a heartwarming burst of rejuvenation and reflection,” said Jon Dolan in Rolling Stone. The 78-year-old pop legend has developed a close friendship with 43-year-old country maverick Brandi Carlile in recent years, and on this 10-song collaboration, they’ve created a sound that “hearkens to classic Elton” and combined it with lyrics that “add a reflective element.” The words are the work of Carlile and Bernie Taupin, while the two headliners trade vocal duties throughout and Elton adds “killer boogie-woogie piano” to the soulful stomp “Little Richard’s Bible.” Often, Carlile’s warm persona and Elton’s exuberant energy “mesh perfectly,” said Tim Sendra in AllMusic. Still, “too much of the record veers into musical theater territory,” as the pair “give in to the…

“Cider is often unfairly relegated to the autumnal months,” said Olivia Bauso in Imbibe. “But the category is nothing if not diverse,” arguably more so than beer or wine. Below, three “bright, floral, and fruity” ciders that “sing of springtime.” Eden Imperial Rosé ($18). Vermont-based Eden puts a dozen heirloom varieties and red currant juice into this light, dry cider that “drinks like a fruit-forward rosé.” Finnriver Spring Bloom ($18). A trio of high-acid Washington state apples blend with a light touch of blueberry in this “delicate and fruity” cider, which is highlighted by its “notes of apple blossom and citrus.” Stormalong Light of the Sun ($13). Massachusetts’ Stormalong blends the juices of heirloom apples, yuzu, lemon, and lime with jasmine green tea to create this “bright and dry”…

Luxury automakers are trying to sell you a spa on wheels, said Brett Berk in Bloomberg. The upgrades on a Lincoln Nautilus, for instance, can include “30-way adjustable heated/cooling/massaging front seats, an air filtration system,” and ambient lighting. Press one of the options for a “scent atomizer” and suddenly you will be led through a guided meditation produced in partnership with the wellness app Calm. The seat will “recline and palpate as its temperature adjusts,” tinkling spa music plays, calming visuals pan across the panoramic display, and a light perfume will mist in. Mercedes-Benz’s “Energizing Comfort” and BMW’s “Caring Car” programs are similar. Automakers want to entice a younger cohort of buyers for brands often associated with middle age. But some analysts are skeptical. Auto industry consultant Alexander Edwards…

Hundreds of millions of people around the world suffer from vision problems that could easily be corrected with glasses. Since 2001, the nonprofit organization VisionSpring (visionspring.org) has distributed more than 14 million pairs of glasses across 29 countries. Headquartered in New York, VisionSpring also provides screening training to other nonprofits, health workers, and agencies, helping diagnose and correct vision impairment in schools, workplaces, and local communities. The World Health Organization follows its pioneering method of identifying vision conditions and prescribing glasses in regions lacking opticians and optometrists. Affordable access to glasses can dramatically improve quality of life and income: In a 2024 study of low-income Bangladeshi villagers, half of the middle-aged adults experienced age-related presbyopia (farsightedness), and they experienced a 33 percent increase in income after nearly a year…

Dakin Campbell Business Insider “The Great IPO Depression is bad news for everyone,” said Dakin Campbell. In 2021, 311 companies raised a record $119 billion through their initial public offerings. In the three years since, 164 companies raised a total of $39 billion. The slump has “bankers, venture capitalists, and investors wondering if a more permanent shift is underway.” The days when “snazzy new startups could expect a huge payoff on Wall Street” seem to be over. And hopes of a turnaround in 2025 sputtered after CoreWeave, a buzzy AI infrastructure provider, tanked in its debut late last month. Two other high-profile startups, Klarna and StubHub, have delayed their IPOs amid the market’s tariff turmoil. It’s true that “some companies don’t need the public markets in the same way…

Clem Burke knew drumming was a workout. His extreme athleticism, as he pounded away on the drum set with relentless speed, made him the backbone of the new wave band Blondie—and also impressed exercise scientist Marcus Smith. After seeing Burke sweat through a 1988 London show, Smith recruited him into a study of drumming as exercise. Monitoring the musician’s breathing and heart rate while on tour, Smith proved that a drummer playing in a concert was physiologically comparable to an elite athlete’s performance in a 90-minute soccer game. Burke went on to promote drumming as a sport and outreach, especially for children with autism. “You develop a nonverbal communication,” he said in 2023. “That is a very positive way of communicating, not verbally, but through the music.” Born in…

Joy Marver devoted her life to serving the U.S., said Eli Saslow in The New York Times. Then the government decided the disabled Iraq War veteran was no longer an essential employee. IT HAD BEEN six days since Joy Marver was locked out of her office at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, five days since she checked herself into a hospital for emergency psychiatric care, and two days since she sent a letter to her supervisors: “Please, I’m so confused. Can you help me understand?” Now she followed her wife into the storage room of their house outside Minneapolis, searching for answers no one would give her. A half-dozen bins held the remnants of 22 years spent in service to the U.S. government—first as a sergeant first class…

Carnivores, after an op-ed in MIT Technology Review hailed “recent advances” in the development of “bodyoids,” brainless human bodies grown in artificial wombs that could supply transplant organs, be used in medical research, and provide “meat or other products with no animal suffering.” Russian exports, after Washington Capitals captain Alex Ovechkin, 39, scored the 895th goal of his NHL career, breaking the record set by Canada’s Wayne Gretzky in 1994. Russian President Vladimir Putin congratulated the Moscow-born Ovechkin on his “momentous achievement.” The pursuit of excellence, after The Atlantic reported that Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has not only ordered political appointees to master the art of baking fresh cookies in the department’s “industrial ovens,” but “on at least one occasion” has demanded subordinates “remake the cookies because the batch…

Ringo Starr wasn’t expected to make it to adulthood, said Mark Leibovich in The Atlantic. At age 6, the future Beatle contracted a severe infection that caused his appendix to rupture. “All the poison was in my body,” says Starr. The doctors “did actually say to my mother—three times they said to her—‘He’ll be dead in the morning.’” He lived, but spent several months recovering in the hospital. Then at age 13, Starr was hospitalized again—for a year—after catching tuberculosis. He says he almost died of boredom during that stay, but was saved by a music teacher who visited his ward and gave him a drum. “That was the moment. I hit that drum. I only wanted to be a drummer from then on.” Now 84, he still loves…

Michael Mina The New York Times “We used to think of measles outbreaks in the U.S. as isolated events,” said epidemiologist Michael Mina. Since the virus was declared eliminated here in 2000, outbreaks have mostly been short-lived and confined to communities with low vaccination rates. That “hard-won public health triumph, made possible by decades of vaccination, is now unraveling.” Vaccine skepticism has gone mainstream, fueled by fearmongers like our health and human services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who continues to peddle the debunked claim that childhood shots cause autism. The surging outbreak in Texas, where at least two unvaccinated children have died of the disease, “shows how fragile our defenses have become.” Measles is wildly contagious: A single case can cause dozens more among the unvaccinated. Those infected…

“Trump’s tariff train wreck isn’t some freak accident—it’s exactly what happens when you hand the keys to a man who treats history like a nuisance and expertise like a personal insult. The rest of his policies (cutting USAID, making an anti-vaxxer your head of HHS, etc.) are just as disastrous. The only difference? Their damage doesn’t come with a handy graph and a daily Dow ticker. Trump’s foreign policy blunders are every bit as reckless and ill-conceived. We’re just not seeing the full price tag yet. But give it time: Geopolitical idiocy has a way of compounding interest.” Matt K. Lewis in his Substack newsletter…

Maw Baw Meh and Maggi Quadrini Myanmar Now Myanmar’s ruling military junta always makes tragedies worse, said Maw Baw Meh and Maggi Quadrini. A magnitude-7.7 earthquake last week has led to more than 3,500 deaths and added to the “already harrowing numbers” of people displaced by civil war. The military put its “ongoing disregard for civilian life” on display by hampering aid workers and first responders, “ignoring appeals to permit immediate and unfettered access to survivors.” The junta has a history of “weaponizing aid” by withholding it from communities it suspects of siding with its enemies. It declared a cease-fire—after insurgents unilaterally halted fighting—but has still conducted “indiscriminate attacks” in some devastated areas. It also hit places largely spared by the quake with 500-pound bombs. The army will likely…

Martine Aurdal Dagbladet Get used to seeing police “with pistols on their hips,” said Martine Aurdal. We took pride in being one of the few countries where cops didn’t need to carry guns. But those days are gone. The political consensus has been building ever since 2022, when a government commission concluded that terrorism threats and rising criminal violence made arming police necessary. Center Party co-leader Emilie Enger Mehl, for example, once believed that “arming the police would lead to an arms race where criminals would become tougher.” But she has shifted her position because, she says, “the reality today is that the criminals have already armed themselves with a knife or a firearm.” Now, in the wake of the December killing of a police officer, a proposal to…

“Why is a president imposing tariffs at all?” asked Jessica Levinson in MSNBC.com. Lost in the chaos of President Trump’s global trade war is the fact that the Constitution grants Congress—not the executive branch—the “Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises” and regulate foreign commerce. But since the Great Depression, the legislature has “ceded much of its authority to the president,” letting the White House set tariffs without congressional approval. Trump has overstepped the considerable powers delegated to him by Congress, said Rich Lowry in National Review. He claims that 1977’s International Emergency Economic Powers Act lets him unilaterally impose import duties “to deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat.” The U.S. trade deficit is neither: We’ve been running one since the 1970s, making it “the…

Reassuring news for anyone who feels that time slows down when they’re doing exercise: It basically does. Scientists have discovered that physical exertion can alter our perception of how quickly minutes or seconds are passing by up to 10 percent. “We become very focused on our body and what we’re feeling, like breathing hard or experiencing sensations of muscle fatigue,” study leader Andrew Edwards, from Canterbury Christ Church University, tells The Times (U.K.). “This increased awareness makes our brains process more sensory information than usual in the same time, so it feels like more is happening.” For the study, 33 people took part in a 4-kilometer time trial on a stationary bike and were asked to estimate the passage of 30-second intervals. The cyclists consistently overestimated how much time…

The new book by the best-selling author of Detransition, Baby “will likely make readers of all genders uncomfortable,” said Hugh Ryan in The New York Times. “That’s on purpose.” Torrey Peters says she wrote the book’s novella and three short stories to sort through inconvenient aspects of her own gender transition. Clearly, “she wants to show all parts of the queer experience, even the disturbing parts,” and she’ll go wherever she needs to, whether to a plague-ravaged dystopia, a boarding-school dorm, or a Las Vegas convention where two trans women plot to humiliate a participant they find insufficiently queer. The book’s titular novella is “just about the most exciting piece of writing I’ve encountered in years,” said Dan Kois in Slate. In an early 1900s logging camp, a band…

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones (Saga Press, $30) This isn’t just the latest horror-tinged best-seller from the author of The Only Good Indians, said Gabino Iglesias in NPR.org. “This is Stephen Graham Jones’ masterpiece.” In the 1912 diary of a Lutheran pastor, a tale emerges of a Blackfeet tribe member who had been turned into a vampire by another supernatural creature, unleashing a decades-long battle for revenge. “The prose is gorgeous, and the plot is engaging and multilayered.” It’s all we expect of Jones but “even better than before.” Propaganda Girls by Lisa Rogak (St. Martin’s, $29) Women did what they could to aid the Allied cause during World War II, said Melanie Kirkpatrick in The Wall Street Journal. For the four spotlighted in this book,…

Perfume Genius’ new album is “so stylistically ambitious that it should immediately be considered his greatest invention,” said David Feigelson in Paste. In the music Mike Hadreas has made under that name since 2008, “there is always a longing.” But the current version of Hadreas seems more grounded, and the musicians he’s surrounded himself with “contribute immeasurably to the depth in texture of the record” as Glory moves from the R.E.M.-like guitars of “It’s a Mirror” to an “ephemeral” midsection and into the minimalist abstractions beyond. “There is no moment that breaks Glory’s spell, only those that allow you to sink deeper into its labyrinth.” Though these 11 songs “rarely contain straightforward narratives,” said Marissa Lorusso in Pitchfork, Hadreas’ breathy, wavering voice “pulls you into their emotional core.”…

The Actor This offbeat new indie film should please Severance fans craving similar mind games. André Holland plays a man who wakes up in an Ohio town knowing only that he has an apartment in New York City. When he learns he was an actor in love, he’s torn between trying to recover his old self and starting anew. $6 on demand Memento A murder mystery plays in reverse in Christopher Nolan’s clever 2000 film. Guy Pearce stars as an insurance investigator with no short-term memory but an array of tattoos that he has used to retain information to further his vengeful pursuit of a killer. Peacock Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Jim Carrey’s character in Michel Gondry’s brilliant 2004 mind-bender is a prototype for Severance’s Mark S.…

■ DuckDuckGo is still our favorite browser for private web searching. You might find it worth installing simply for its ability to play YouTube videos without Google ads. It automatically handles annoying cookie consent requests and supports the Global Privacy Control standard. It also has a beta-version stand-alone app. ■ LibreWolf is a “bare-bones” version of Firefox that focuses on hardening security. It uses DuckDuckGo as its default browser and it comes with uBlock, an “excellent” anti-tracking extension, already installed. ■ Opera “stands apart in terms of unique conveniences” and blocks ads and trackers by default. Opera claims to provide “a built-in VPN,” but that feature cloaks only browser data, not all traffic from your computer. ■ Brave lets you earn cryptocurrency while you browse. Its creators aim to…

This week’s question: A recent study identified Virginia as the state best equipped to survive an alien invasion. If the state were to change its tourism motto from “Virginia Is for Lovers” to a phrase that promotes this surprising strength, what would it be? Last week’s contest: Researchers have discovered that funnel-web spiders from busy urban areas can weave soundproof webs, allowing them to eat their prey in peace. If a company were to manufacture a scaled-up funnel web for noise-sensitive humans, what name should it give the product? THE WINNER: Weave Me Alone Troup Miller, Austin. SECOND PLACE: World Hide Web John Ewers, Forsyth, Ill. THIRD PLACE: Little Miss Muffl-It Lidia Zidik, Reading, Pa. For runners-up and complete contest rules, please go to theweek.com/contest. How to enter: Submissions…

As other countries line up to negotiate with the Trump administration, China is girding for a trade war, said Lily Kuo and Christian Shepherd in The Washington Post. And Beijing “believes it has the upper hand.” Chinese officials “have long said that a trade war will only hurt the American economy,” and the market turmoil of the past week and cracks in support for Trump’s tariffs “have further cemented that view,” say China experts. So, as Trump ratchets up his tariffs, “Beijing is betting it can stare him down with a simple strategy: retaliate, then sit back and wait.” It leaves the world’s top economies “locked in a rapidly escalating trade war” that could “push their rivalry to a new level of confrontation.” That means “pain is coming for…

SCOTUS blocks rehiring of fired federal workers The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Trump administration this week and blocked a lower court’s ruling ordering the government to rehire some 16,000 fired federal employees. The original lawsuit was filed by labor unions and nonprofit groups that said they were harmed by cuts to public services resulting from mass layoffs at the Pentagon, the Treasury, and the Agriculture, Energy, Veterans Affairs, and Interior Departments. But in a two-paragraph order, the high court said those groups hadn’t suffered an injury that granted them legal standing to sue. Liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, with Jackson saying the court shouldn’t have to decide such a critical case through a rushed emergency application. The decision may have a limited…

Alysa Liu is over being a prodigy, said Helen Li in The Guardian. At age 13, the Californian became the youngest U.S. figure-skating champion and the youngest woman to land a triple axel. At 16, Liu placed sixth at the 2022 Olympics and won a world bronze medal. She then shocked the skating world by announcing her retirement, but it was a decision she’d long contemplated. When Covid shut down rinks in 2020, Liu got her first break since starting skating at 5. “I was like, ‘Wow! This is what not skating is like.’ And I loved it,” says Liu, 19. The pandemic gave her time to think, and she realized she was missing out by dedicating her life to the sport. “I’m growing up so fast,” she recalls…

■ Kanye West revealed in a new song released last week that his wife, Bianca Censori, has dumped him over his increasingly disturbed behavior. On the track “BIANCA,” West raps that Censori, 30, “ran away” after having a “panic attack” over his antisemitic and pro-Nazi rants on social media. Before the Australian architect left, “she tried to get me committed,” he raps, but he refused to go to “the hospital ’cause I am not sick, I just do not get it.” West ends the song by pleading with his wife to come home. “Don’t know what I did to make you mad,” he raps. Gossip columnists have noted that the three-year marriage went south after West, 47, forced Censori to wear a see-through dress to the Grammys in February,…

Inez Feltscher Stepman National Review With President Trump restoring sanity to the federal definition of sex and gender, women-only spaces are once again being protected, said Inez Feltscher Stepman. But what about the guys? “Men suffer when denied their single-sex spaces as well,” and there are far fewer such bastions than there used to be. Starting in the 1990s, “one all-male space after another fell to the twin demands” of feminism and misapplied civil rights law. The Elks Club, that “fixture of mid-century American life,” was pressured into admitting women in 1995, and so was Virginia Military Institute a year later. Citadel after citadel fell, and now even the Boy Scouts have gone co-ed. The loss of these spaces has coincided with an alarming rise in male loneliness: One…

Editorial The Irish Times Donald Trump is dragging us into his “war on woke,” said The Irish Times. The U.S. president is using every pressure tactic he can find to push America’s “main trading partners” into dismantling their own diversity, equity, and inclusion policies—just as he has done at home. He’s not just twisting our arms with tariffs. U.S. embassies across Europe have sent letters to companies that have commercial contracts with the U.S. government, telling them to “cease immediately any DEI” programs. The “diktat from the U.S. State Department baldly claims” that White House anti-DEI directives extend beyond America. The war on woke is a cornerstone of the worldview of Trump and his band of “ultra-libertarian” tech billionaires, headed by Elon Musk. In reality, “there is an abundance…

“An unhinged conspiracy monger” now calls the shots on U.S. national security, said Tom Nichols in The Atlantic. Laura Loomer is a “far-right celebrity” who describes herself as a “proud Islamophobe,” claims 9/11 was an inside job, and said a Kamala Harris White House would “smell like curry.” She has no official role in the Trump administration, and even ardent Trump loyalists call her “toxic,” but what she does have is Trump’s ear. So, when she sat down last week for a meeting in the Oval Office, armed with a list of National Security Council officials she considered disloyal “neocons,” Trump seemingly listened. The next day, at least six staffers were fired, followed by Gen. Timothy Haugh, the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command chief. Trump denied Loomer’s…

“You can not watch the news. It doesn’t mean it’s not happening.” Fran Lebowitz, quoted in Harper’s Bazaar “A truth that’s told with bad intent, beats all the lies you can invent.” William Blake, quoted in The National Law Review “The collective noun for ‘toddler’ is ‘superspreader.’” Writer Kathryn Schulz, quoted in The New Yorker “If the world were perfect, it wouldn’t be.” Yogi Berra, quoted in the Saline, Ark., Courier “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” Frederick Douglass, quoted in The Telegraph (U.K.) “You can’t have everything. Where would you put it?” Steven Wright, quoted in The New York Times “Next to excellence is the appreciation of it.” William Makepeace Thackeray, quoted in Forbes “Literature is mostly about having sex and not…

Graydon Carter’s new memoir “will make some readers itchy,” said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. The former Vanity Fair editor is the opposite of immune to name-dropping, to tales of the glitterati, to listing his posh possessions. Still, “I quickly and (mostly) happily consumed it anyway.” It’s the rags-to-riches tale of a college dropout who came to lord over a magazine era of top ad dollars, budgets without ceilings, bottomless expense accounts, even eyebrow specialists on staff. Before assuming the Vanity Fair mantle in 1992, Carter co-founded the satirical glossy Spy, but those who remember Spy’s “ironic, wised-up” style will be disappointed that Carter’s own prose is bland here. No matter. The gossip is “first-rate.” “Carter’s great strength is dispositional: He’s happy,” said Virginia Heffernan in The…

Amy Griffin didn’t write a memoir for it to be the Oprah-endorsed best-seller that it has become, said Benjamin VanHoose in People. She wrote the original version for herself, to contend with having been repeatedly sexually abused decades earlier by a teacher in her West Texas middle school. But when an agent suggested she write a book about business, to capitalize on her renown as an investor who has worked with Gwyneth Paltrow, Reese Witherspoon, and other celebrities, Griffin replied that the story she’d already written about would be more valuable. In The Tell, she details the abuse but also how she was in denial about it for so long that she didn’t even remember what had happened until, in her early 40s, she ingested microdoses of MDMA under…

“Welcome to My Blue Sky is an object lesson in how a band can expand their horizons without losing the bite that made them so compelling in the first place,” said Andy Von Pip in Under the Radar. Brooklyn-based Momma broke through with 2022’s Household Name, but instead of playing it safe and churning out more ’90s-indebted indie rock, co-founders Etta Friedman and Allegra Weingarten “have pushed their sound outward while digging deeper inward.” The 12-song set, which plays like a shared diary of the pair’s 2022 summer road tour, mixes power pop with shoegaze and other kin. And the vulnerability Friedman and Weingarten display for the first time “adds weight to the crashing guitars, making the album’s emotional peaks hit even harder.” It’s a record “brimming with…

“Cratering” bond prices are worrying Wall Street forecasters, said John Melloy in CNBC.com. Bond prices typically fall “when fears of a recession are growing.” The reversal this time was worrisome because it could indicate that foreign investors are dumping U.S. bonds, threatening Treasurys’ status as a “safe haven.” Falling prices correspond with increasing yields, raising interest rates on mortgages and other consumer debt. Lowering those rates had been a priority of the Trump administration. Satellites: SpaceX to take lead in Pentagon launches Elon Musk’s SpaceX will get the biggest share of $13.7 billion in Pentagon launch contracts, in a deal that displaces the current incumbents, said Sandra Erwin in SpaceNews. The program will entrust SpaceX, as its leading contractor, with “the most demanding category of national launch assignments,” awarding…

■ The greatest deal in flying Owning a “lifetime lounge membership” puts a lucky few travelers into rarefied air, said Dawn Gilbertson in The Wall Street Journal. These days, an all-access pass to an airline lounge can cost as much as $1,400 per year. But that’s no concern for a “small but mighty group of travelers” who snagged a “lifetime lounge access” card decades ago from a bygone carrier like Eastern Airlines or USAir. These cards, which are still accepted by the legacy carriers, are “the stuff of legend on airline forums like FlyerTalk and Reddit.” Jonathan Slater paid $300 for his “lifetime membership in Eastern Airlines’ Ionosphere Club in the early 1980s.” That turned into a Continental Airlines club membership, and then a United membership. The expiration date…

Catherine Thorbecke Bloomberg President Trump’s determination to rescue TikTok is only giving China a stronger hand, said Catherine Thorbecke. Trump last week signed another executive order delaying a decision on the social media company, which was banned by Congress in January. Trump has said he would consider “a little reduction in tariffs” to secure a TikTok deal. But “by obfuscating the national security concerns to advance his tariff agenda, he has delegitimized them.” The TikTok law is one of the few things that Congress managed to rally around last year. But some of the latest reports from last week suggested that Trump might approve a deal “that keeps ownership of the app’s powerful recommendation algorithm in the hands” of China-based ByteDance. The reasoning behind Congress’s ban was that Beijing’s…

Sam Keen believed that modern ideas of manhood were failing men. In his 1991 best-seller Fire in the Belly, the self-help guru inspired his readers to get in touch with their primal selves. “Only men,” he wrote, “understand the secret fears that go with the territory of masculinity.” Though his writings helped birth the men’s movement of the 1990s, Keen, who had doctorates in theology and philosophy, was not a misogynist, or even an anti-feminist. But he did feel that men needed to respond to feminism by developing a new emotional identity. “The warrior metaphor has shaped men’s lives for hundreds of years,” he wrote. “That is changing, but it will take another 100 years. The code we have to break is that of the warrior psyche.” Born in…