Innehållsförteckning för November 19, 2021 från The Week Magazine

For the first time in nearly two years, my kids got to hug their grandpa this week. My wife and I are British expats, and so for the entirety of the pandemic Covid restrictions have blocked our U.K.-based family from entering the U.S. But this week, America opened its borders to fully vaccinated travelers. My wife’s dad hopped on the first available transatlantic flight, bringing with him a precious haul of British comics, tea bags, and Marmite. That my kids can once again snuggle on the sofa with their gramps is the latest sign that things might—and only might—finally be getting back to some kind of pre-pandemic “normal.” New daily Covid infections have dropped by about half since their summer high, and new antiviral treatments are being developed that should…

A Native American group is suing the state of Colorado to reverse a recent ban on Native American–themed high school mascots. The Native American Guardian’s Association contends that a state ban on schools using team names such as “Warriors” or “Indians” makes it harder for Native Americans to “reclaim names and images that were once directed at them as insults” and make them “badges of pride.” Colby College in Maine has banned discrimination on the basis of “caste.” In South Asia, caste divides society into hereditary strata. Professor Sonja Thomas, who campaigned for the ban, conceded there are not many South Asian students at Colby, but said that “unless the most privileged step up and maybe say, ‘We need to talk about this oppression,’ it’s not going to change.” In…

Kal Penn is ready to introduce the world to Josh, his fiancé and partner of more than a decade, said John Casey in The Advocate. Known for his lead role in the Harold & Kumar films and his parts on TV’s House and Designated Survivor, Penn says he discovered his sexuality relatively late in life. When he told people in the movie business he was gay, many assumed that he’d want to keep it a secret. “When I first came to grips with my sexuality,” says Penn, 44, “I asked this manager, ‘How do you meet a nice guy in Hollywood?’” The manager responded that he had a list of men who were “cheap and super-hot.” Shocked, Penn said he wasn’t looking for an escort. “I meant, How do…

Kim Kardashian and Saturday Night Live cast member Pete Davidson have been dating. After holding hands with Kardashian on a roller-coaster ride in California, Davidson, 27, arranged a private dinner date with the reality-TV billionaire in his home borough of Staten Island, reserving the rooftop of the pizzeria Campania for their exclusive use. An insider told the New York Post that Kardashian is “intrigued” by the comic, who’s previously dated Ariana Grande, Kate Beckinsale, Margaret Qualley, and Bridgerton star Phoebe Dynevor. Her ex, Kanye West, said in a recent interview he still wants “us to be together,” but unfollowed her on Instagram after the reports of Kim’s dates with Davidson. West is now reportedly dating model Vinetria, 22. FBI agents last week raided the apartment of James O’Keefe, founder…

Janan Ganesh Financial Times “It is not too soon for Democrats to start worrying about 2024,” said Janan Ganesh. Their likely presidential candidates, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, both have significant weaknesses that could lead to a Donald Trump victory. In 2024, Biden will turn 82, his approval ratings are underwater, and “after three more years of wear and tear,” he might not turn out voters in swing states the way he did in 2020. Might he decide not to run? Vice President Harris, meanwhile, has even worse approval ratings than Biden, and there are “whispered qualms” among Democrats about her viability as a presidential candidate. If her opponent were Trump, would she win Michigan, Wisconsin, and other swing states that put Biden in office? Remember: During the 2020 Democratic…

Rapper Cardi B’s social media assertion that “a hoe never gets cold” even when wearing revealing clothes inspired a scholarly study—which backed up her claim. In the study, published in the British Journal of Social Psychology, researchers found that women dressed in crop tops and tiny skirts waiting outside nightclubs on chilly evenings reported feeling no colder than women in warmer clothing. When women wear sexy clothes and enter “a state of objectification,” said researcher Roxanne Felig, it reduces “the amount of cognitive resources they have available to appraise their internal states.” She thanked Cardi B for her “contribution to scientific discovery.” Saudi Arabia plans to turn an abandoned offshore oil platform into an “extreme park” and resort. Named The Rig, the planned 1.6 million-square-foot park in the Arabian Sea…

CANADA  Eric Andrew-Gee The Globe and Mail French expats are resettling in Quebec en masse, said Eric Andrew-Gee, and some are suffering from culture shock. Over the past 20 years, tens of thousands of French citizens have moved to the French-speaking Canadian province—more than settled here during the entire colonial period—and greater Montreal now has the largest French-born community outside of Europe. They come for the “cultural and economic openness they can’t find at home,” fleeing France’s rigidly hierarchic, apprenticeship-based employment structure and its social immobility. While Canadians in the rest of the country see Quebec as a little Europe, with its cobblestone streets and bloated bureaucracy, “the French see it as almost Californian, a land of swimming pools, friendliness, and jobs.” And it quickly becomes apparent to the French…

Humans aren’t the only species to practice social distancing. Honeybees also appear to give one another a wide berth when a pathogen threatens the health of their community. A team of European scientists examined how bees behave in hives that were naturally infected with the Varroa destructor mite—a parasite that can cause colonies to collapse—compared with those in hives that were treated to kill the pest. In the infested hives, they noted that the foraging bees performed dances to indicate the direction of food sources further away from the center of the colony, where the queen and the younger bees are found. The foragers tend to be older and “are one of the main entrance routes for the mites,” co-author Alessandro Cini, from University College London, tells The Guardian (U.K.).…

(Random House, $28) If the pandemic has you still feeling frayed, the mix of caustic humor and poignancy in Gary Shteyngart’s new novel “may be the most effective tonic,” said Diane Cole in The Washington Post. At the country getaway of a Manhattan couple, six adult friends, one child, and a random professional acquaintance gather in March 2020 to try to ride out the virus’ surge. As the members of this privileged circle pamper themselves, complain about the Wi-Fi, couple up, clash, and occasionally freak out, “they may not be able to laugh at themselves, but we can.” Shteyngart sometimes pushes the satire too far, said Hamilton Cain in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Still, “his delight in his own sentences is contagious,” and because he ultimately celebrates his characters’ flawed…

LaserWriter II by Tamara Shopsin (MCD, $26) This “unusual and oddly moving” debut novel evokes a bygone era in tech, said Heller McAlpin in NPR.org. In 1990s New York City, a shy 19-year-old takes a job at Tekserve, an independent repair shop for Macintosh gear. As she unexpectedly finds joy in the shop’s culture and a sense of purpose in fixing finicky laser printers, the novel becomes “a charming elegy to a less disposable culture and an enchanted workplace predicated on caring for machines and people.” 12 Bytes by Jeanette Winterson (Grove, $27) No doubt someone will eventually create an artificial intelligence that outperforms humans, said Lauren Elkin in AirMail.news. But how will that change the world? In 12 “inquiring, accessible” essays, British novelist Jeanette Winterson considers the possibilities, probing…

Wilson, Okla. Two former Oklahoma police officers were convicted last week of second-degree murder for killing an unarmed man by tasing him 53 times. Officers Brandon Dingman, 35, and Joshua Taylor, 27, found Jared Lakey, 28, screaming and running down a road naked on July 4, 2019. After Lakey was detained but refused to put his hands behind his back, the officers deployed their Tasers for nearly four minutes over a less than 10-minute span. Lakey died two days later, and medical providers told his family that he suffered multiple heart attacks. The officers plan to appeal the conviction, citing Lakey’s enlarged heart and coronary artery disease. Police Chief Kevin Coley testified that the officers tried to use their Tasers to cause Lakey’s muscles to freeze up. “To have…

Brian Rosenwald NBCNews.com Why does Fox News let Tucker Carlson get away with it? Simple, said Brian Rosenwald: “Dollars and cents.” The cable network’s highest-rated host, who has built an audience of millions with anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and white-nationalist “replacement theory,” last week produced a three-part series for Fox’s subscription service claiming the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection was a “false flag” operation designed to smear Trump supporters. Patriot Purge insisted it was left-wing antifa activists and FBI undercover agents, not MAGA supporters, who instigated the brutal attacks on Capitol police. This incendiary claim is nonsense, but Fox’s success is “tied to luring a narrow slice of viewers who want precisely this style of content.” Carlson’s “bigoted rhetoric” draws in more than 3.2 million nightly viewers, which allows Fox to charge…

UNITED KINGDOM  Matthew Parris The Times Prime Minister Boris Johnson has once again exposed his weak character, said Matthew Parris. A parliamentary watchdog last month recommended that Boris’ good friend Owen Paterson, a lawmaker with the ruling Conservative Party, be suspended from the legislature after he was found to have broken lobbying rules. Paterson had emailed colleagues and approached government agencies on behalf of two businesses that paid him a total of some $675,000 over five years. So, Johnson decided to muster his Conservatives behind a motion to vote against the 30-day suspension and to refer the case to a committee of party cronies. Lawmakers were ordered to support the corrupt measure, and many did, only to watch Johnson reverse himself and accept Paterson’s resignation after the predictable public outcry.…

Aaron Rodgers knew “the rules didn’t apply to a star as big as him,” said Jemele Hill in TheAtlantic.com. The Green Bay Packers’ quarterback missed last Sunday’s loss to the Kansas City Chiefs after testing positive for Covid and becoming mildly sick. When asked in August whether he’d been vaccinated, Rodgers said, “Yeah, I’ve been immunized.” This “disingenuous” phrasing was “a conscious decision not to tell the truth”: Rodgers had declined the vaccines but had received an unproven homeopathic treatment he was told would “stimulate” his antibodies. Rodgers then flouted protocols for unvaccinated players, such as wearing a mask on the sidelines, in practices, and around the media. Football is a sport “where huge men blow air in each other’s faces for three hours,” said Will Leitch in NYMag.com. Fortunately,…

Facebook’s addiction research Facebook’s internal research found that 1 in 8 users feel “addicted” to the platform, affecting their sleep, work, parenting, or relationships, said Georgia Wells in The Wall Street Journal. While all major social media platforms “seek to keep users coming back,” the people who reported their own “problematic use” said it seemed to “be worse on Facebook.” The company launched a research team focused on user well-being to “mitigate harmful behavior.” The researchers indeed found that roughly 12.5 percent of users—some 360 million people—“lack control over the time they spend on Facebook,” which the team likened to a clinical addiction. A new risk to power plants The Department of Homeland Security revealed that it is investigating an attempted drone strike on a Pennsylvania power substation in July…

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $35) Don’t mistake Paul Auster’s new 800-page book for a standard biography, said Richard Deming in The Boston Globe. It is, instead, “a fine novelist’s plunge into the life and mind of another artist.” Readers who know Auster’s complex, heady novels, such as the acclaimed New York Trilogy, might be surprised that the 74-year-old postmodernist has chosen to devote so much attention to Stephen Crane, the 19th-century American writer now most widely remembered for his short Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage. But Auster says that reading that book at 15 was life-changing, and he makes a case that Crane was unusual in his searing desire to understand and distill humanity to its essence. This mammoth book “hurtles forward in its often intense, often…

For artist Ai Weiwei, enduring political persecution is a family tradition, says Jordan Riefe in the Los Angeles Times. In 1957, his father, the renowned poet Ai Qing, dared to defend a fellow writer during a political purge and was aggressively targeted by the Chinese government. The entire family was soon relocated to a remote labor camp where Ai Qing, forbidden to write, was forced every day to clean the latrines. Ai Weiwei remembers those years as the grimmest. “It’s a horrible struggle when you don’t have daily nutrition,” he says. “You have nothing. It’s the bottom of surviving.” Later, Ai Weiwei lived for five years with his father in a dirt dugout, battling rats. He values what that taught him. “I think you establish an understanding of how…

The best of anime… Cowboy Bebop Anime fanatics will be watching the live adaptation (see “Show of the Week”) for its faithfulness to the original. If you’ve never seen the original, with its deft English overdubs, now is a great time to jump in. Netflix Death Note Netflix’s disastrously overstuffed, whitewashed live-action adaptation of this anime series didn’t do justice to the source. A genius teenager comes into possession of a special notebook. Any person whose name he writes in it dies. What will he do? HBO Max Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood This classic 2009 anime series follows the Elric brothers, early-20th-century alchemists who violate a taboo when they attempt to resurrect their deceased mother. Punished for their violation, they embark on a quest to find the legendary Philosopher’s Stone and…

For billions of smartphone users, “FoodTok” needs no introduction, said Kari Sonde in The Washington Post. Food is a hugely popular subject on TikTok, as it has been on older social media platforms, and some of the most compelling food content is produced by amateurs. The app’s algorithm will steer you to posts you’ll like, but seek out a few of these content creators and that’ll help the algorithm feed you good stuff. Alexis Nikole Nelson (@alexisnikole) Nelson has 3 million followers for her “effervescent” posts about foraging. Often she’s sampling yet another edible plant you might find close by, and “you can’t help but feel her excitement.” George Lee (@chez_jorge) Lee, at 20, is already an expert on creating vegan versions of Taiwanese culinary classics. His TikTok clips…

General Electric announced plans this week to split into three separate companies, ending an era, said Steve Lohr and Michael de la Merced in The New York Times. The company, formed in 1892, “reached into almost every American home over the next century,” selling everything from light bulbs to jet engines. It became a model for American business in the 1980s and ’90s under chief executive Jack Welch. But the “size and complexity” of Welch’s empire became a liability after 2008. Facing enormous debt and declining value, it will spin off the health-care and energy businesses. The legacy company will be left with the aviation division, worth about $22 billion. Rivian: IPO for Amazon-backed EV maker Electric-vehicle maker Rivian raised $12 billion in an initial public offering this week, said…

Price increases by another name “Cost-recovery fees” and “supply-chain surcharges” are new ways that companies are finding to sneak around raising list prices, said David Lazarus in the Los Angeles Times. When Bob Klatskin emailed Brinks Home Security about a $1.97 “cost recovery fee” on top of his $46.60 monthly bill, he was told the fee was imposed to cover the “increased costs of providing service.” It’s hard to figure how that wouldn’t automatically be covered by the company’s main monthly service charges. Klatskin’s Brinks contract states that total service costs won’t increase by more than 5 percent per year, but the new fee guarantees a higher price hike. It’s a dishonest practice that’s on the rise: The paint company Sherwin-Williams, for example, recently added a 4 percent “supply-chain charge”…

Abha Bhattarai The Washington Post Product delays and shortages could be the last straw for many small businesses that made it through the pandemic, said Abha Bhattarai. With the holiday season approaching, Walmart and Amazon are “spending millions to charter their own ships and planes to move merchandise” amid the supply chain dysfunction. Meanwhile, Kim Mitchell, the owner of a small toy store outside Boston, “placed her holiday orders months ago, but she has no idea what will make it in time.” Lego sets that “used to arrive on a pallet are coming in dribs and drabs,” and anything from Mattel and Hasbro is “off the table.” The problems for Mitchell begin at the factories. The largest toymakers demand a $20,000 minimum in annual orders, which is more inventory than…

In 1959, Aaron Beck made one of the boldest moves of his psychoanalytic career: He removed the couch from his office. Beck had been trained in Freudian analysis, which held that resolving internal conflicts rooted in childhood was the key to easing psychic pain. But Beck saw scant evidence that his patients were helped by lying back and free associating about their pasts. So he moved them to a chair and developed a more pragmatic, collaborative approach, focused on training patients to identify ingrained negative beliefs that guide their behaviors—“I’m bound to fail,” “Nobody loves me”—and to modify them with positive thinking. His method, which became known as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), revolutionized psychotherapy, and has been used to treat millions of people for depression, anxiety, and other disorders.…

Margaret York rose from the bottom rungs of the Los Angeles Police Department to become its first woman deputy chief—and inspired a hit TV show along the way. While working homicide in the 1970s, she was paired with another woman, Helen Kidder, in large part because male detectives refused to work with them. The pair proved to have a remarkable knack for solving cases—including a notorious series of Sunset Strip murders. Television producers found their story irresistible and used it as the basis for the 1980s CBS hit Cagney & Lacey, about two women cops in New York City who battle sexism in the force and crime on the streets. Born in Canton, Ohio, York moved with her florist parents to Los Angeles at age 13, said The New York…

Good week for: Spuds, with news from New Zealand of a recently unearthed potato weighing an astonishing 17.2 pounds. Gardeners Donna and Colin Craig-Brown say that as they wait for Guinness confirmation that the spud—which they named “Dug”—is the largest potato in recorded history, it’s “just chilling out” in their freezer. Time and tide, after a trash can bearing the logo of Myrtle Beach, N.C., washed up on a beach in Ireland. “Amazing to think it traveled all the way across the Atlantic,” said beachcomber Keith McGreal. Neo-Marxism, after a member of Vietnam’s Communist Party, who was in the U.K. for the climate summit, laid a wreath on the London grave of Karl Marx and then dined on $2,000-a-plate gold-wrapped steak at the restaurant of flamboyant chef Nusret “Salt Bae”…

Montreal The new CEO of Air Canada has promised to learn French after offending French Canadians in his first major public appearance. Michael Rousseau gave a 26-minute speech in English to the Chamber of Commerce in Montreal, where Air Canada is headquartered, offering just a few token phrases in poor French. When a French-speaking reporter asked how Rousseau had managed to live 14 years in Montreal without learning French, the CEO could not understand the question and finally answered that it was a “testament to the city of Montreal” that he could get by with only English. Outraged local and federal officials condemned Rousseau, who said he’d start French lessons right away. Terror at resort Puerto Morelos, Mexico Panicked tourists ran scrambling for cover this week after some 15 gunmen…

David Chase still gets hounded with questions about one of TV’s great mysteries, said Scott Feinberg in The Hollywood Reporter. As creator of the iconic HBO series The Sopranos, the writer and director has grown sick of being asked about what actually happens in the last moments of the show’s 2007 finale. In that scene (spoiler alert), mob boss Tony Soprano is eating dinner with his family at a restaurant when, as the restaurant’s doorbell rings and Tony looks up from his onion rings, the camera suddenly cuts to black. “I had no idea it would cause that much of an uproar,” says Chase, 76. He says he originally planned to show Tony’s demise but settled on a more ambiguous ending. Many fans were furious, demanding to know whether Tony…

Dana Milbank The Washington Post Republicans now believe there are two possible outcomes in any election, said Dana Milbank. “A. The Republican wins. B. The Democrat stole the election.” Consider what happened in last week’s Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races. In New Jersey, Democrat Phil Murphy defeated Republican Jack Ciattarelli by a margin of 50.8 percent to 48.5 percent–nearly the same margin that Republican Glenn Youngkin defeated Democrat Terry McAuliffe in Virginia. McAuliffe “conceded defeat the morning after the election” and wished Youngkin well. Ciattarelli, meanwhile, refused to concede, urged “people to come forward with allegations of fraud,” and said the election wasn’t over “until every legal vote is counted”—implying there were many illegal votes. After Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” that he won the 2020 election, it has become…

“Daydreaming of civil war is a First World privilege. We indulge in fantasies of winning a final victory against political opponents in a culture war that will, in truth, never end—and we do so because almost none of us have any real experience of physical violence beyond what we see in the movies. The Oath Keepers and Proud Boys and antifa and Jan. 6 rioters are best understood as Braveheart LARPers, charging the imaginary fields of Bannockburn in their minds, with lower stakes and dumber tactics. Far better to devote our energies to upkeep American democracy from the inside than to give up on it altogether in exchange for deluded fantasies of violence.” Paul Miller in TheDispatch.com…

GERMANY  Johanna Roth Die Zeit The country that celebrated the fall of the hated Berlin Wall no longer thinks border walls are such a bad idea, said Johanna Roth. Just two years ago, Michael Kretschmer of the Christian Democrats declared open borders Germany’s strength. But last week he changed course, saying, “We need fences, and we probably also need walls.” Until recently, such language was the preserve of the far right and would have provoked “widespread horror” if used by a mainstream politician. But this year Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko began flying in planeloads of migrants from the Middle East and Africa and dumping them on European Union borders, his way of hitting back at the bloc for criticizing his rigged re-election. EU members Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia are now…

SOUTH AFRICA  Stephen Grootes DailyMaverick.co.za The African National Congress’ lock on national power is starting to slip, said Stephen Grootes. The once revered party of Nelson Mandela has dominated South African politics since the end of apartheid in 1994, when it won the country’s first free elections and ushered in a new era of black majority rule. But in last week’s municipal elections, the ANC took only 46 percent of the total vote—the first time the party has won less than 50 percent in elections held nationwide. Sure, the pandemic depressed turnout to an all-time low of 47 percent, but that wasn’t the ANC’s biggest problem. Instead, a massive corruption scandal around the procurement of Covid-19–related medical gear has “horrified and repulsed many voters.” South Africans are tiring of a…

“Liberals feel unworthy of their possessions. Conservatives feel they deserve everything they’ve stolen.”Comedian Mort Sahl, quoted in The Hollywood Reporter “Everything returns, but what returns is not / what went away.”Poet Louise Glück, quoted in The Washington Post “How desperately difficult it is to be honest with oneself. It is much easier to be honest with other people.”Novelist E.F. Benson, quoted in Forbes.com “To be nobody-but-yourself—in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight.”Poet E.E. Cummings, quoted in TheMarginalian.org “People often claim to hunger for truth, but seldom like the taste when it’s served up.”Author George R.R. Martin, quoted in Reader’s Digest “You’ve got to go there to know there.”Zora Neale Hurston,…

Women who are pregnant or breastfeeding respond to the first dose of a Covid-19 vaccine more slowly than other women, new research suggests. As a result, pregnant women initially generate a less potent immune response to the virus—and their antibody levels only reach parity with similarly aged women two to six weeks after a second dose. The study adds to a growing body of research showing that expectant and new mothers are at heightened risk from Covid, reports The New York Times. During pregnancy, the immune system lowers its guard to tolerate the fetus—which is effectively a foreign entity—leaving mothers more susceptible to pathogens. That likely explains why pregnant women are more likely to become severely ill and die from Covid than other women of the same age. Researchers say…

Kate Baer’s latest best-selling poetry collection, I Hope This Finds You Well, consists of poems she created using messages she received from admirers and trolls. Below, the author of What Kind of Woman names six favorite novels that also take risks. Luster by Raven Leilani (2020). One minute you’ll be chuckling, the next you’ll be crawling out of your skin. In Edie—23, Black, sleeping with a married older white man—Leilani creates a dynamic and complicated protagonist and zips from scene to scene without any warning of what’s coming next. This novel does not beg for your love. Instead, its incredible prose grabs you by the shoulders and doesn’t let go. Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff (2015). I’ve reread this book so often that the cover is long gone.…

A live-action remake of Shinichiro Watanabe’s late-1990s space Western is certain to draw skepticism. That 26-episode saga about bounty hunters on the spaceship Bebop is, to many anime fanatics, the genre’s masterpiece. But this series looks promising, with the right blend of comedy, cyberpunk noir, and comic-book action, with the reliable John Cho co-starring as hitman turned bounty hunter Spike Spiegel, Mustafa Shakir as the Bebop’s captain, and Daniella Pineda as con artist Faye Valentine. Yoko Kanno, who wrote the jazzy original soundtrack, is also back for a reprise. Available Friday, Nov. 19, Netflix…

There’s a lot to do to prepare a holiday feast, so “don’t sweat the wine,” said Eric Asimov in The New York Times. Simply avoid wines that are too tannic, oaky, high in alcohol, or avant-garde. The right choices, in red and white, are any that’s versatile and lively—meaning with a bright acidity that doesn’t tip toward harshness. Below are three of many examples: 2020 Pine Ridge Chenin Blanc-Viognier ($15). This affordable California white blend is “bright, snappy, and floral, with a hint of spritziness.” 2019 Other People’s Pinot Noit ($20). “Light in body and color,” this screw-capped pinot noir from Oregon’s Willamette Valley offers subtle notes of fruit and herbs. 2019 Pegaso Zeta Garnacha ($24). A standout red from Spain’s Sierra de Gredos region, this is a “savory…

The typical professional has roughly five scheduled meetings a day, up from three per day before the pandemic, according to the “smart calendar” firm Reclaim.ai. Meetings now occupy more than half the workweek, with the average professional spending 21.5 hours a week on them. Before the pandemic, that number was just 14.2 hours a week. Protocol.com Americans’ credit card balances increased for the second straight quarter, jumping by $17 billion to $800 billion. That’s still about $123 billion lower than at the end of 2019. Bloomberg.com Google parent Alphabet became the third U.S. company to reach the $2 trillion milestone, doubling in value since January 2020. The company’s shares have risen 70 percent this year, the most among the five biggest tech giants. Bloomberg.com Bill Gates had the equivalent of…

There are about 33 million people who are blind and 260 million with moderate to severe visual impairment because of conditions that are completely preventable or treatable. Orbis International (orbis.org) is a nonprofit dedicated to preventing avoidable blindness in low-income countries. Since 1982, the organization has conducted training programs in more than 92 countries and has trained hundreds of thousands of medical professionals, many aboard the Orbis Flying Eye Hospital—a fully accredited ophthalmic teaching hospital housed in a converted cargo plane. In 2020, Orbis and its local partners conducted more than 3.4 million eye examinations, performed over 36,000 eye surgeries and laser treatments, and distributed more than 7.5 million doses of azithromycin to treat trachoma, a bacterial infection that is the leading cause of preventable blindness. Each charity we…

Matthew Fleischer San Francisco Chronicle The collapse of Zillow’s home-buying business didn’t surprise me, said Matthew Fleischer. “I sold my house to Redfin several months ago—and watched the company get clobbered trying to flip it.” My partner and I didn’t want to deal with open houses in the pandemic, so we opted for the convenience of Redfin, which “promised to buy my home sight unseen.” I filled out a form and they gave us a great offer the next day. “It seemed too good to be true,” and for weeks I woke up in a cold sweat thinking I’d been scammed. But it turned out I was “the one to make a big tech company look like a sucker.” Redfin initially listed my house a few weeks later for roughly…

Ida Nudel’s fearlessness cost her dearly. For the crime of giving food, medicine, and legal and moral support to fellow Soviet Jews imprisoned for trying to emigrate to Israel, the 4-foot-11 Moscow accountant was repeatedly arrested and assaulted by KGB goons. And for unfurling a banner from her apartment in 1978 that said “KGB, Give Me My Visa,” she was exiled for four years to Siberia, where for a time she had to live in a rat-infested hostel with 60 male prisoners. Nudel slept with a knife underneath her pillow. “Of course, I won’t be able to kill them,” she explained, “but at least I can kill myself.” When her exile was over, she was sent to Moldova, where authorities hoped the world would forget her. Yet her defiance…

This week’s question: DogTV, a newly launched TV network in the U.K., will feature programming designed to soothe four-legged viewers suffering from separation anxiety when their humans are not home. Please come up with a title for a prime-time show, intended to both relax and entertain the canine audience, that might air on the network. Last week’s contest: Archaeologists have pinpointed the first landing of Vikings in North America: A.D. 1021. If a Viking explorer had written a travelogue about his trip to America 1,000 years ago, what should it have been titled? THE WINNER: “Norse by Northwest” Lavinia Ycas, Boulder SECOND PLACE: “Erik the Red, White, and Blue” Dave Grossman, Petaluma, Calif. THIRD PLACE: “The New World: A Sight for Thor Eyes” Janine Witte, Doylestown, Pa. For runners-up and…