Indholdsfortegnelse for November 28, 2025 i The Week Magazine

Border Patrol came to my home state of North Carolina this week, ostensibly to arrest undocumented immigrants. They started off by brutalizing U.S. citizens in Charlotte (see The U.S. at a Glance, p.7). When an American woman saw the CBP trucks in the Plaza Midwood neighborhood and honked her horn, an agent bashed in her car window, pointed an assault rifle at her, and dragged her and her female companion, also a U.S. citizen, out of the car and made off with them. The two women were eventually released without charges, but the frantic husband of one of them said he didn’t know what had happened to his wife for hours. The rest of us only know about the detention because an alert neighbor recorded it all on his phone.…

■ The exclusive beachfront community of Carmel, Calif., could soon ban pickleball. The sport is popular with seniors and retirees across the U.S. But Carmel residents complain they’re being tormented by the loud “pop” sounds of balls hitting paddles, and the city council is now set to vote on a permanent ban. “You guys are all in this position to protect us,” one resident told the council. “That’s what your job is. Not to placate these pickleball enthusiasts.” ■ A Native American woman is considering legal action after ICE tried to deport her. Phoenix-born Leticia Jacobo, 24, belongs to the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, whose roots in Arizona long predate the arrival of European settlers. Still, after Jacobo was arrested in Iowa for driving on a suspended license, ICE…

Keystone, S.D. Secret contract: A firm owned by a longtime friend of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem secretly won work on a $220 million DHS advertising campaign, ProPublica reported last week. For an ad promoting President Trump’s immigration agenda—featuring Noem on horseback at Mount Rushmore, declaring “Break our laws, we’ll punish you”—DHS brought in the Strategy Group, which worked extensively on Noem’s 2022 South Dakota gubernatorial run. That firm is headed by the husband of Noem’s DHS spokesperson, Tricia McLaughlin, but wasn’t listed on public documents. Instead the contracts named a Delaware shell company formed only days before it was awarded $143 million by DHS, and after DHS declared a “national emergency” to bypass competitive bidding. McLaughlin denied knowledge about the contract. Charles Tiefer, a leading authority on federal contract…

War photographers are not supposed to reach age 90, says Emine Saner in The Guardian (U.K.). As Don McCullin enters his 10th decade, he feels “uncomfortable” about surviving and, especially, the accolades he’s received for his work covering everything from the Cyprus civil war to the destruction of ancient Palmyra by ISIS. “I feel as if I’ve been over-rewarded,” he says, “because it’s been at the expense of other people’s lives.” Yes, his work was important, “but at the end of the day, it has done absolutely no good at all. Look at Ukraine. Look at Gaza. I haven’t changed a solitary thing.” He has found some peace photographing the landscape around his home in southwest England, but he’s still haunted by some of his most iconic shots, like the…

Grayson Logue The Dispatch The Department of Homeland Security’s recruitment drive is relying on “explicitly nativist” messaging that sounds like it came from “the very online right,” said Grayson Logue. Traditionally, recruitment campaigns for Immigration and Customs Enforcement invited applicants to protect the country against “violent criminals, traffickers, and terrorists.” Today’s DHS social media accounts have unleashed memes that depict its mission as preserving traditional “American culture and identity” from “invaders.” This campaign includes “nostalgic and whitewashed depictions” of 19th-century white settlers along with slogans such as “pioneers, not illegals.” Norman Rockwell images of small-town white people are accompanied with messages urging viewers to “protect our American way of life.” In his weekly videos, DHS communications official Micah Bock said ICE recruits will “determine what our country looks like for…

Alwyn Lau Malay Mail Malaysians need to learn to have a little fun, said Alwyn Lau. I know a man who received as a bonus a three-week trip to Paris, all expenses paid. The poor fellow flew home after just four days, because he “couldn’t take the pure nothingness and horror of having no meetings to chair.” The idea of leisure is especially disorienting when you’ve spent your adult life “in quasi-OCD mode,” with checklists of tasks, strict deadlines, and “work, work, work.” An unstructured hour, without pressure to accomplish something important, induces feelings of “boredom, stress, anxiety, and mild terror” in the average Malaysian exec. The higher we climb the corporate ladder, the worse it gets, until we reach an age and status where it’s impossible to take a…

Hormone therapies for menopause will no longer carry the Food and Drug Administration’s “black box” warning—the most serious caution on a drug label—about increased risks of breast cancer, heart attack, and stroke, NBCNews.com reports. The agency said last week that the warnings, introduced two decades ago, were based on outdated science which discouraged many women from using the treatments. Hormone therapy replaces a woman’s natural estrogen and progesterone, which decline during menopause. Prescribed in the form of pills, patches, gels, and creams, it can ease hot flashes, mood swings, vaginal dryness, and bone loss. The black box warnings stemmed from a 2002 clinical trial that was halted after it found higher risks among older women. But that trial employed an earlier formulation no longer widely used, and studies on current…

(Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, $28) “Imperfect communication is Bryan Washington’s specialty,” said Hannah Gold in The New York Times. In the author’s latest novel, which entered this week as a National Book Award finalist, a gay Jamaican American living in Tokyo is angry when his estranged mother shows up at his door, yet she’s determined to reconnect in the two weeks before her flight out. The pair’s progress is largely measured in terse, needling conversations as Washington cuts between past and present and mother and son. But despite the tension between them, the novel “has a pleasant, calming effect.” Reading it “feels like sifting through a disorganized pile of family photos in bed”—and you can’t stop looking. The flashbacks, combined with the mother and son’s separate ventures out into the…

True Nature by Lance Richardson (Pantheon, $40) “Peter Matthiessen led an immensely eventful life,” said Glenn C. Altschuler in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The Paris Review co-founder and author of The Snow Leopard is the only writer who has ever won National Book Awards for both fiction and nonfiction, and he also worked for the CIA and traveled the world seeking stories and adventure. This “beautifully written” biography, which doesn’t neglect his flaws, is “a tour de force depiction of a restless, talented literary lion.” The Invention of Charlotte Brontë by Graham Watson (Pegasus, $30) Graham Watson’s new book tells a familiar story but “gives it room to breathe,” said Kathryn Hughes in The Wall Street Journal. When Elizabeth Gaskell wrote the first biography of Charlotte Brontë, the 1857 work angered…

“Bring earplugs! Bring Kleenex! Prepare to succumb!” said Naveen Kumar in The Washington Post. The musical Chess is back on Broadway for the first time since it flopped in 1988, and its “belty and synth-tastic score,” written by lyricist Tim Rice and two members of ABBA, has probably never enjoyed a louder or more spirited performance. Lea Michele, Aaron Tveit, and Nicholas Christopher co-star as the three points in the story’s central love triangle, and all three deliver in the handful of “blow-your-hair-back, 1980s-style rock ballads” that most ticket buyers come to hear. Still, Chess has always been “a concept album in search of a script,” its score generating two 1984 pop hits before anyone ever attempted to put it onstage. Rice’s “obviously bizarre” concept will always resist a sensible…

“Many wine professionals consider gamay from Beaujolais a foolproof Thanksgiving pairing,” said Emily Saladino in The Washington Post. The French red is low in alcohol and tannins, “so it won’t overpower even the most tender slice of turkey.” Plus, “it has enough refreshing acidity to play ball with starchy sides.” Just aim higher than Beaujolais Nouveau. 2024 Domaine Dupeuble Père et Fils Beaujolais ($20). The New York Times describes this value choice as boasting “the sort of stony fruit flavors that will go with almost anything on the Thanksgiving table.” 2024 Gaspard Gamay ($22). The Chicago Tribune notes that gamay from the Loire is “still a bit of an insider secret in the U.S.” and touts this wine as “quite youthful, with a bright red-berry character.” 2022 Mont Bessay ‘En…

You would think the creators of the ubiquitous “Baby Shark” tune would be swimming in riches, said Jiyoung Sohn and Alana Pipe in The Wall Street Journal. But all that viral power “hasn’t translated into a mega fortune for Pinkfong, the South Korean company behind the two-minute jingle.” “Baby Shark Dance” is the most-watched video on YouTube, amassing more than 16.4 billion views since it debuted in 2016—and it is still raking in 4.7 million streams a day on average. But due to “restrictions placed on online children’s content,” the animation firm, which debuted on South Korea’s stock market this week, generated only about $67 million in revenue last year, far less than it otherwise could. YouTube, in accordance with federal safeguards, bars personalized advertising on kid-focused content and disables…

Nearly 4% of Laotian children die before reaching their fifth birthday, many from treatable conditions such as malaria, pneumonia, and diarrhea. The nonprofit Friends Without a Border (fwab.org) builds and operates pediatric hospitals in Laos and neighboring Cambodia to provide children with free, accessible health care. Laos’ Friends Hospital for Children, which opened in 2015, treats about 3,000 children every year and performs more than 1,000 surgeries. Its departments offer specialized treatments for blood diseases and developmental disorders. It also houses the only neonatal facility for premature infants in the region, which saw nearly 600 babies admitted to the ward in 2023. In addition to treating the youngest patients, the hospital teaches parents about breastfeeding, nutrition, and vaccinations, and serves as a teaching hospital for doctors completing pediatric residencies focused…

David Yaffe-Bellany The New York Times The Bitcoin boom has turned crypto investors into targets, said David Yaffe-Bellany. Assailants have carried out more than 60 attacks this year on the holders of some digital fortunes. These attacks weren’t carried out via computer. They were real-world kidnappings and hostage situations involving crypto investors and their families. In France in January, the founder of a crypto hardware firm had one of his fingers cut off by kidnappers demanding ransom. And in Manhattan, two men were charged with “kidnapping and torturing a crypto trader inside a luxurious 17-room townhouse.” A Bitcoin conference in Switzerland recently hosted a daylong workshop on “counter-kidnapping,” with sessions led by ex-military security consultants. “Most of the morning was devoted to prevention strategies—how not to get abducted.” Crypto is…

Justice, after the estate of O.J. Simpson agreed to pay $58 million to Fred Goldman, whose son, Ron, was murdered along with Simpson’s ex-wife Nicole in 1994. Although a jury acquitted Simpson of the killings, he was later found liable for the deaths in a civil trial. Cooling-off periods, after a Chinese man who had his wife cryogenically frozen after her death in 2017 was revealed to have been quietly dating someone else, a living woman, since 2020. Following a public outcry, Gui Junmin, 57, insisted his current relationship is merely a “utilitarian” arrangement. Newshounds, after a dog shot a man in Pennsylvania. The 53-year-old victim told police that he put his shotgun down on his bed after cleaning it, whereupon his dog jumped onto the bed, causing the weapon…

Eijsden-Margraten, Netherlands Erasing Black troops: Dutch politicians appealed to the Trump administration last week to reinstall two displays honoring Black American soldiers that were recently removed from an American World War II cemetery in the Netherlands. One of the two plaques told how George H. Pruitt, a Black soldier in the 43rd Signal Construction Battalion, died trying to save a comrade. The other explained how Black Americans fought “on two fronts,” for freedom overseas and civil rights at home. The change was apparently part of the Trump administration’s ban on acknowledging diversity. “We greatly value the story of the Black Liberators in relation to the past, present, and future,” said Alain Krijnen, the mayor of Eijsden-Margraten, the town that hosts the cemetery. He asked that the U.S. “reconsider the removal…

In the late 2010s, everything appeared to be going Lady Gaga’s way, said Brian Hiatt in Rolling Stone. She had a steady flow of hit songs, headlined the Super Bowl halftime show, and won an Oscar for her big-screen breakthrough, A Star Is Born. But behind the scenes, the singer and actress was unraveling. “I did A Star Is Born on lithium,” says Gaga, 39, who was born Stefani Germanotta. She’d been suppressing trauma since age 19 when, she says, a music producer raped her. While on a world tour in 2018, Gaga experienced what she describes as a psychotic break. After her sister told her that she didn’t recognize her anymore, “I canceled the tour. I completely crashed. There was a time where I didn’t think I could get…

David French The New York Times “A Christian answer” to “the cruelty and corruption of Trumpism” has finally arrived, said David French. The American-born Pope Leo XIV and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops are denouncing President Trump’s cruel roundups of immigrants—in stark contrast to the overwhelming support he’s received from my fellow evangelical Christians. In a statement approved 216 to 5, the bishops rebuked those who are creating “a climate of fear and anxiety” among immigrants through “dehumanizing rhetoric and violence” and “indiscriminate mass deportation.” Leo has taken the lead on this issue, reminding Christians that Jesus clearly states in Scripture that people will be judged on how they treat “the foreigner.” Leo has questioned whether those who oppose abortion but approve of “the inhuman treatment of immigrants” are…

“Millions of people who voted for Donald Trump in 2024 are learning a hard lesson: A man who refuses to face facts in his own life is also unlikely to face facts about the lives of others. These voters are discovering that Trump’s denial of the election results in 2020 wasn’t a one-off. It was a forewarning of what we’re seeing now: his refusal to acknowledge the affordability crisis. ‘Prices are all down,’ he said. ‘We have the greatest economy we’ve ever had.’ Trump wasn’t just impervious to the truth about 2020. He’s impervious to the struggles of American families in 2025.” William Saletan in The Bulwark…

Berkant Gultekin BirGun Apparently, having the audacity to run against de facto president-for-life Recep Tayyip Erdogan is now a crime, said Berkant Gultekin. Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu has just been charged with leading a criminal organization, and prosecutors are seeking a prison sentence of more than 2,000 years. The popular mayor, who has run Turkey’s largest city since 2019, was detained in March, just before the opposition was to name him its presidential candidate. The 4,000-page indictment, just released, reads as if it were written by Erdogan himself. It claims that Imamoglu squeezed Istanbul “like an octopus”—a phrase Erdogan uses constantly—to wring billions of dollars in personal gain. And it characterizes Imamoglu’s “entire political career as a crime,” saying each of his three mayoral victories over Erdogan allies was financed…

Juan Diego Madueño El Mundo It’s finally time to “say goodbye to the guayabera,” said Juan Diego Madueño. The embroidered cotton-and-linen summer shirt was once reserved for “real characters” who spiced the landscape in Spanish-speaking countries from the Caribbean to Andalucia. It was the “uniform of those on the fringes of society,” worn by “surly waiters,” barbers, and “chronically unemployed men” lingering in bars. But then it got trendy. Major labels picked it up, and it was suddenly everywhere, “a way to identify with an urban tribe without the burdens of belonging to one.” More serious than a T-shirt, it gave a man’s outfit a “relaxed touch, like a CEO at a barbecue.” An older man could wear one to loosen up, but not too much. For young men, it…

After years of sordid revelations, I didn’t think there was anything about the Jeffrey Epstein scandal that “could still shock me,” said Joe Nocera in The Free Press. “But I was wrong.” Among the hundreds of Epstein emails released by a House committee last week, there are several that deal directly with President Trump’s friendship with the financier and child-sex trafficker. But the ugliest are Epstein’s chats with an elite circle of business leaders, politicos, and academics. Most were written well after Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting prostitution from a minor in 2008—a crime that didn’t seem to bother his powerful friends. Pals like venture capitalist Boris Nikolic bemoaned the “crazy” hounding of Epstein by the media. Kathy Ruemmler, former White House counsel for Barack Obama and now Goldman Sachs’…

Republicans won the government shutdown, said Steven T. Dennis in Bloomberg, but now they must solve “a health-care mess that risks upending the balance of power” in Washington. Enhanced subsidies for people who get their health insurance through the Affordable Care Act’s exchanges were the centerpiece of the shutdown fight and are now set to expire at the end of the year. That means some 24 million Americans would see their health-care-premium costs jump 114% on average. If Republicans do kill the higher subsidies—which the Biden administration provided during Covid in 2021—they would save “billions of dollars,” but it could “carry a heavy political cost” ahead of next year’s midterms. Democrats want to extend the subsidies and are hammering home their message that Trump failed to deliver on his promise…

(Random House, $30) “How many memoirs can a richly lived life fill?” asked David Hajdu in The New York Times. Patti Smith has now written several autobiographical books of poetry and prose, “yet one of the marvels of Bread of Angels is that, for a work by a memoirist of uncommon prolificacy, it is remarkably fresh.” Fifteen years after Just Kids, a portrait of her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe that earned her a National Book Award, she has produced a cradle-to-today account of her 79 years that sheds light on life chapters she’s said little about before. “Smith lingers with particular affection on early childhood,” while the book’s biggest reveal may be its “slow, warm” section on the decade-plus that she spent raising two kids in Michigan after she and…

CNN International’s Bianna Golodryga became a first-time author this year for the sake of her kids, said Stephen Battaglio in the Los Angeles Times. In 2022, the news anchor’s middle-school son posed a hard question when Kyrie Irving, a star on his favorite NBA team, touted a wildly antisemitic film online, then refused to apologize. “My son is a big sports fan,” says Golodryga. “He’s asked me point-blank, ‘Why do they hate us? Can I not go to basketball games anymore?’” His school had been doing a lot of anti-hate education, so Golodryga asked faculty members how they addressed antisemitism and learned they didn’t. Then came Hamas’ attack on Israel and a brutal war. Golodryga and a friend, fellow anchor Yonit Levi, anticipated a surge in antisemitism and decided to…

(PG) Glinda the Good is forced to choose sides. John M. Chu’s highly anticipated second installment of Wicked “delivers what we might call the ‘whew factor,’ as in: Thank goodness, he didn’t blow it,” said Peter Debruge in Variety. But the film also does more. After last year’s Part 1 “succeeded in wowing audiences,” racking up $750 million worldwide, it would have been enough to follow up with a merely solid rendition of Act 2 of the stage musical based on Gregory Maguire’s revisionist Oz-set novels. Instead, this movie addresses a common complaint about the show’s back half, giving green-skinned Elphaba and her former roommate Glinda more scenes together and adding enough story content that Act 2 “now feels like a robust tale unto itself.” To me, this chapter of…

The Smashing Machine Dwayne Johnson delivers his finest screen performance yet in this recent biopic about early ultimate fighter Mark Kerr. The uneven story crafted by writer-director Benny Safdie is elevated by his star’s display of range. $20 on demand The Cut This September release did nothing in theaters, but Orlando Bloom is terrific as a past-his-prime Irish fighter who takes a punishing path toward making weight for a title fight. Caitriona Balfe and John Turturro co-star. Paramount+ Day of the Fight Another great performance, this one from Michael Pitt, deepens this 2024 drama about another boxer attempting a comeback. Inspired by a classic short documentary by Stanley Kubrick and shot in black and white, the film is a must-see for fans of the genre. $6 on demand The Iron…

■ Set a charge limit. Repeatedly charging your battery to 100% “causes it to degrade faster.” To maintain peak performance, go to Battery in Settings, enable Charge Limit, and select 95%. ■ Deactivate your lock-screen widgets. All the widgets on your lock screen—providing such data as the outdoor temperature—require apps to be “constantly fetching data” in the background. So lose these power drains. Delete them via the lock screen’s Custom settings or simply swipe to a different lock screen that displays no widgets. ■ Tone down the animation effects. The sleek animations that make the phone feel more alive when you open or close an app cost some extra power, too. In Settings, go to Accessibility, choose Motion, and select Reduce Motion. While you’re at it, go to Sounds &…

Judged solely by his scientific résumé, James Watson’s life was a parade of triumphs. He won a Nobel Prize alongside Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins for together constructing the double helix model of DNA in 1953, and that was just the start of a brilliant career. Watson also transformed the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory into one of the world’s foremost biomedical research institutions, helped map the human genome, and wrote a memoir, The Double Helix, widely deemed a masterpiece. But he also belittled his colleagues in that book, prompting his former partner Crick to tell him, “History will condemn you.” And he later torched his legacy through his racism and sexism, saying for example that Black people were inferior to whites. “All our social policies are based on the fact…

Alice Wong would not be ignored. And she wouldn’t let other disabled people be overlooked, either. After years of work as an activist, Wong founded the Disability Visibility Project in 2014 and began interviewing disabled Americans about their lives. The project was supposed to last just one year, but it proved so successful that she kept on going—talking to people who were deaf, or blind, or in wheelchairs like her, many of them people of color or immigrants or LGBTQ. Now hundreds of those oral histories are housed at the Library of Congress. “I want to leave behind a body of work that is in community with others,” Wong said in 2023, “relationships and good memories that will live on forever.” Alice Wong was born in Indianapolis to Hong Kong…

The legislation requires Attorney General Pam Bondi to release “all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials” related to Epstein or co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell within 30 days. But “there are many reasons to doubt that a bulk release of the files is imminent,” said Perry Stein in The Washington Post. The bill grants some exceptions under which Bondi can withhold material, including if its release would infringe on victims’ rights or “jeopardize an active federal investigation.” That means the Trump-ordered probe into Democrats could be cited as a reason “to block release of many files.” Bondi could also just quietly withhold damaging materials, and it will be hard to know what “might have conveniently gone missing,” said William Kristol in The Bulwark. Given how hard Trump fought to keep these…

FEMA chief resigns after series of failures The embattled acting head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency announced his resignation this week, adding to the chaos inside the troubled agency. David Richardson’s six-month tenure was marked by repeated criticism of his leadership. A former Marine combat veteran, painter, and martial arts instructor who lacked any experience in disaster response, he made headlines in June after telling staff he didn’t know the U.S. had a hurricane season. The agency later said he was joking. And when flash floods devastated Texas Hill Country in July—killing at least 135 people, including young girls at a Christian camp—Richardson was uncontactable for 24 hours. Morale at the agency has sunk amid budget cuts, layoffs, and public attacks from administration figures including Homeland Security Secretary Kristi…

Jesse Plemons had a true Texas upbringing, said Robbie Collin in The Telegraph (U.K.). The actor was raised in the small town of Mart by a firefighter father, Jim Bob, who was also something of an amateur rodeo star. Plemons, 37, remembers his dad sitting in front of the TV, playing well-worn VHS tapes of his rivals. “He would play them back in slow motion, watching their lasso technique, studying the mechanics.” That attention to detail passed from father to son. “There’s a part of me that with acting is always like, ‘Let me just figure this little thing out.’” By the time Plemons was 3, Jim Bob had him swinging rope and riding horses, skills that won young Jesse parts on Western films and TV shows. Plemons and his…

■ Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told journalist Olivia Nuzzi that he would “take a bullet for” her and wanted her to have his baby, Nuzzi writes in her upcoming memoir, American Canto. Nuzzi, 32, who was fired from New York magazine last year after admitting to a sexting affair with the then-presidential candidate, writes that she loved Kennedy “so much” that she “winced” whenever he joked about a parasitic worm that was supposedly found in his brain. RFK Jr., 71, who is married to Curb Your Enthusiasm actress Cheryl Hines, soothed Nuzzi’s concerns by telling her “Baby, don’t worry” and explaining that doctors believed the shadow on his brain was in fact “not a worm.” Nuzzi writes that Kennedy also confessed to using psychedelic drugs, despite being “sober”…

Greg Sargent The New Republic Do military leaders fear they could one day be prosecuted for following President Trump’s orders to carry out deadly air strikes in the Caribbean? asked Greg Sargent. One telling sign is that the admiral in command of U.S. operations in the region, Alvin Holsey, “abruptly stepped down last month” without “public explanation.” Evidently, Holsey did not want to follow Trump’s orders to blow up boats of alleged drug smugglers without congressional approval. To allay such concerns, The New York Times reports, the Justice Department has issued a secret memo classifying these assassinations—which have killed 80 people so far—as acts of war against “foreign terrorist organizations.” Most legal experts doubt the legitimacy of classifying drug smugglers as terrorists. Nonetheless, the memo states that everyone in the…

Gabor Horvath Nepszava Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban was facing a tough reelection fight next spring, said Gabor Horvath. But his odds just got a boost from his good friend Donald Trump. Orban “oiled the machinery of Hungarian-American relations” with commitments to buy up to 10 “mini nuclear power plants” worth $2 billion each, along with $700 million in weapons and $600 million worth of liquefied natural gas. In return for this splurge, Trump lavished praise on the Hungarian leader when the two met recently in the White House. Orban left their “expensive Washington party” with a sanctions exemption that allows Hungary to “continue buying Russian oil”—even though that will give Russia billions to “keep on killing Ukrainians.” The gift came just in time. While Orban has structured the electoral…

President Trump ran in 2024 on the promise that he’d tame prices. Now he has “finally admitted his tariffs do the opposite,” said Schuyler Mitchell in Mother Jones. Scrambling to tackle the affordability crisis that drove voters to Democrats in this month’s elections, Trump announced last week that he was exempting more than 200 agricultural imports—including staples like beef, coffee, and bananas—from the reciprocal tariffs he “proudly implemented in April.” Those import tolls, which range from 10% to 50%, have helped push up the price of numerous groceries: Coffee is up 19% over the past year and beef 16%. Of course, Trump didn’t concede outright that his signature policy is stoking sticker shock, and his administration continues to insist that foreign companies, not American consumers, pay tariffs. “But if tariffs…

“Freedom of speech is a principal pillar of a free government; when this support is taken away, the constitution of a free society is dissolved, and tyranny is erected on its ruins.” Benjamin Franklin, quoted in the Chicago Tribune “Life is a magnificent robe, riddled with fleas.” Writer Zhang Ailing, quoted in the Los Angeles Review of Books “When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, quoted in The Bulwark “To protest against injustice is the foundation of all our American democracy.” Thurgood Marshall, quoted in Harvard Law Today “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of socialism is the equal division of misery.” Winston Churchill, quoted in the Christian Post “The death of classical…

■ Stopping crypto scams at the source The Justice Department has announced a new task force to root out crypto-related frauds, said Philip Heijmans in Bloomberg. The “Scam Center Strike Force,” headed by Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, “will target U.S.-based infrastructure,” such as internet providers, that are exploited by criminal networks in Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar. Victims in the U.S. are often reached via social media and “tricked into transferring funds to fake cryptocurrency websites and apps hosted by U.S. companies, only to have the money laundered abroad.” Pirro called the scams a “generational wealth transfer” from ordinary Americans “into the hands of Chinese organized crime.” Both Washington and Beijing are pressuring “Southeast Asian nations to crack down on the operations.” Thailand last week…

A new experimental pill may offer fresh hope to patients with high cholesterol that doesn’t respond to statins alone. In a large trial involving more than 12,000 people across 33 countries, those who took the oral drug enlicitide alongside their standard statin regimen saw a drop of up to 60% in LDL cholesterol (the “bad” kind) after 24 weeks compared with those taking their statin and a placebo. These reductions were sustained for a full year, and rates of side effects were similar to those experienced in the placebo group. Developed by Merck, which plans to seek Food and Drug Administration approval for the treatment next year, enlicitide is the first oral PCSK9 inhibitor to reach late-stage trials. Like injectable PCSK9 drugs, which are already on the market, the once-daily…

My Life and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov (1920). I revere Chekhov as a writer—of short stories. And I’m absolutely fascinated by the man himself. Any volume of Chekhov’s mature stories—the ones he wrote in the last 10 years of his life—will contain masterworks. But if you only had to read one Chekhov story, then his longest, “My Life,” will open the door to his particular genius. His sensibility is completely modern. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov (1962). This is a unique novel. How often can you say that? It’s a 999-line poem followed by hundreds of pages of completely wrongheaded footnotes. Only Nabokov could have pulled off this extraordinary feat of narration (and beautiful poetry, it has to be said). Mesmerizing prose—and also very funny indeed. A Far Cry…

(PG-13) An actor takes work filling holes in strangers’ lives. Rental Family is a nice movie of the kind that’s “lit brighter than a dentist’s office” and “aimed toward a heart-stirring conclusion about the power that we all have to affect each other’s lives,” said David Ehrlich in IndieWire. The movie can get “treacly,” but it’s also unsentimental enough at heart to recognize that true human connection and performance aren’t so easily separated. Oscar winner Brendan Fraser plays a struggling American actor living in Tokyo who begins working for a rental family service—one of the many in real-world Tokyo that hires out actors to temporarily fill roles in customers’ lives. And while the premise suggests “a banal family comedy,” said William Bibbiani in The Wrap, Rental Family is actually “a…

Olight ArkPro Ultra This slim rechargeable option is just 5 inches long but “has the value of multiple flashlights.” It offers a spotlight, a 1,700-lumen floodlight, a UV light, a laser pointer, and the capacity to use two functions simultaneously. $104, olight.com Source: Popular Mechanics Imalent SR16 The kid brother of the world’s brightest flashlight is “a shining star” at less than half the price. It’ll last seven hours at its lowest setting but can crank out a blinding 55,000 lumens for 42 seconds. $370, imalentstore.com Source: ZDNet Stanley Fatmax SL10LEDS Spotlight “Superior brightness and a long range” make this 2,200-lumen workhorse a top pick. The built-in stand and locking pistol-style trigger also make it great for hands-free operation. $50, homedepot.com Source: Better Homes & Gardens Midland ER310 Emergency Radio…

Jeff Bezos is back in the C-suite at a new AI startup focused on computers, automobiles, and aerospace, said Cade Metz in The New York Times. Called Project Prometheus, it represents the first time Bezos “has taken a formal operational role in a company since he stepped down” as the chief executive of Amazon in 2021. Bezos’ co-founder and co-CEO is Vik Bajaj, who worked closely with Sergey Brin at Google’s “moon-shot factory.” Project Prometheus launched this week with $6.2 billion in funding, partly from Bezos. Google: Buffett discloses massive investment Google’s stock jumped to record highs this week after Berkshire Hathaway announced a $4.9 billion stake, said Niket Nishant and Aditya Soni in Reuters. While the “broader sentiment on tech” has turned more cautious, Berkshire’s Warren Buffett, who is…

■ Planning early for long-term care Don’t count on Medicare to pay for long-term elder care, said Kaitlin Mulhere in Money. In an AARP survey, almost half of Americans “said they thought Medicare would pay for a nursing home.” Unfortunately, that’s “one of the biggest misunderstandings” around long-term care. In fact, it is not covered by Medicare, and last year the median annual cost of an assisted living facility averaged about $70,800; a private nursing-home room costs an average of $127,750 per year. That’s why most long-term care is provided by spouses and children. If you want long-term-care insurance, start “researching your options in your 50s.” For a 60-year-old woman, insurance that covers $165,000 of care costs $3,325 a year—and “premiums tend to jump after age 65.” ■ Doubtful claims…

Editorial The Wall Street Journal There are plenty of jobs available for workers willing to use their hands, said The Wall Street Journal. Ford CEO Jim Farley delivered that hard truth on a podcast last week, decrying that “he can’t find enough skilled mechanics to run his auto plants.” Money isn’t the problem: Ford has 5,000 mechanic jobs open that pay $120,000 a year. Not enough workers have the know-how to apply. “We do not have trade schools in this country,” Farley said, and he is “right to a large degree.” Few high schools teach trades these days, and community colleges offer mostly “remedial” high school education. Years of misguided government policies have “steered every high school student toward college,” even if they would be better off learning a trade.…

Todd Snider was an American storyteller. The Nashville singer’s plainspoken, wryly funny songs told tales of the down on their luck, the drifters and underdogs, the trailer park derelicts. Some of his characters bore a resemblance to Snider himself, a freewheeling self-described hippie who resided comfortably wide of the mainstream. They include the narrator of 1994’s “Alright Guy,” who says he’s not a bad fella despite his dissolute ways. “I know I get wild, and I know I get drunk,” he sings, “But it ain’t like I got a bunch of bodies in my trunk.” A disciple of folk- and country-influenced songwriters like Jerry Jeff Walker and John Prine, Snider was also known for the humorous shaggy-dog tales he spun onstage. “I’ve always been into being a troubadour. I love…

This week’s question: A Chinese man who had his wife cryogenically frozen after her death in 2017 is facing backlash after it was revealed he’d been dating someone else, a living woman, since 2020. If Hollywood were to make a sci-fi movie about the love rivalry between a revived, formerly frozen spouse and her husband’s new partner, what would it be titled? Last week’s contest: A 77-year-old French cyclist who tumbled into a 130-foot-deep ravine on his way home from the supermarket was rescued after three days, having sustained himself on several bottles of red wine he had in his shopping bag. If this Gallic hero were to write a survival book for fellow wine lovers, what should it be titled? THE WINNER: “Better Red Than Dead” Thomas Roever, Warrenville,…