Innehållsförteckning för November 26, 2021 från The Week Magazine

Laugh at Steve Bannon. Go ahead. Snigger at his grizzled, unkempt, soup-kitchen mien and his multiple layers of XXL dress shirts. Roll your eyes at the ogre’s vainglorious rhetoric. “I’m never backing down,” Bannon said after appearing in court this week on contempt charges for defying a subpoena from the House’s Jan. 6 special committee. “We’re taking down the Biden regime.” (See Main Stories.) Who’s we? The populist, nativist movement Bannon helped launch and shape a decade ago through the gleefully racist, misogynistic, and rabidly anti-immigrant website Breitbart.com. In 2015, Bannon harnessed that movement to a New York City real estate mogul named Donald Trump. He’s “a blunt instrument for us,” Bannon explained. For his central role in propelling Trump to the White House, Bannon was rewarded with a West…

Some Americans who complied with vaccination mandates are now seeking ways to “undo” the shots. They’re using baking-soda baths, “cupping,” and other methods to “take nanotechnologies out of you,” as anti-vaxxer Dr. Carrie Medej puts it. Virologist Dr. Angela Rasmussen said none of the treatments work, but the trend suggests “a lot of those people who previously were saying ‘Vaccines are terrible and I will never do it’ are, actually, doing it.” A public library in Denton, Texas, has canceled a “Rainbow Story Time” for children over safety concerns. Library director Jennifer Bekker said the books read at the event address accepting kids who are different, with no specific mention of sexuality or gender identity, but a deluge of complaints and threats “made us concerned for public safety.” In other…

Sarah Jessica Parker is returning to the world of Sex and the City, where much has changed over the past 17 years, said Naomi Fry in Vogue. There will still be an abundance of shopping bags and Upper East Side hookups in the revival of the smash HBO series, but the show’s stars are now middle-aged, and many viewers can’t seem to get past that. “There’s so much misogynist chatter in response to us that would never happen about a man,” says Parker, 56. “Gray hair gray hair gray hair. I’m sitting with Andy Cohen, and he has a full head of gray hair, and he’s exquisite. Why is it OK for him? I don’t know what to tell you people!” The social media peanut gallery can’t seem to…

Britney Spears is free at last from her 13-year conservatorship. Hundreds of the singer’s “#Free Britney” fans celebrated last week outside the Los Angeles County Courthouse, where a judge said control of Spears’ estate, estimated to be worth nearly $60 million, will be transferred to her trust. Her attorney said a “safety net” is in place for Spears’ personal care. “I think I’m gonna cry the rest of the day!” Spears, 39, wrote on Instagram. It was the culmination of a dramatic legal saga that included Spears saying she’d been “traumatized” by the conservatorship and forced to accept such restrictions as being required to wear an IUD so she couldn’t have more children. Spears’ attorneys are seeking to depose her father, Jamie, and other conservators about whether they mismanaged…

Madeleine Kearns NationalReview.com After more than a year of soaring violent crime, “law and order could be making a comeback,” said Madeleine Kearns. Minneapolis voters this month rejected a proposal to replace the police department with a “Department of Public Safety,” and for similar reasons, New Yorkers elected as mayor Democrat Eric Adams, a Black former NYPD captain. He “promised to correct chaos with order.” Last year, the Big Apple suffered through a 97 percent increase in shootings and a 45 percent increase in murders. Cops say they feel “demoralized,” yet in response, outgoing Mayor Bill de Blasio slashed the NYPD’s budget by $1 billion—and leftist activists demanded even deeper cuts. Adams, however, wants “more, not fewer, NYPD officers on the street,” and supports a less intrusive version of “stop…

A California woman who abruptly went into labor delivered her baby in the front yard—an event captured by her doorbell camera. Emily Johnson and her husband live just five minutes from the hospital, so they didn’t rush when her contractions started. But when they finally did head out, Johnson got as far as the car before she realized she wouldn’t make it. “I’m just like, ‘This is my spot,’” she said. By the time emergency responders arrived, she had given birth to a son on her front lawn—and had a video to prove it. “I just laid back in the grass and took a nice, deep breath,” Johnson said. “But man, do I never want to do this again.” A British man is offering an unusual chauffeur service with an…

SOUTH AFRICA  Eusebius McKaiser Sunday Times Cue the nauseating eulogies, said Eusebius McKaiser. F.W. de Klerk, the Afrikaner who as president of South Africa helped end the racist segregation system of apartheid in 1990, died last week at age 85. De Klerk has been lauded for releasing Nelson Mandela from prison and for negotiating with him to dismantle apartheid; the two shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993. But de Klerk is no hero. He’s “a villain.” The best that can be said of him is that he “possibly shortened the pathway” to the end of white minority rule. For years, de Klerk had served in apartheid governments and defended white supremacy on the world stage. Only after “the economic and cultural chokehold” of international sanctions and isolation had taken…

A New Jersey man was sentenced to 41 months in prison for assaulting a police officer during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, the longest sentence yet resulting from the uprising. Scott Fairlamb, a former MMA fighter who was among the first to break into the Capitol, pleaded guilty to punching an officer in his face shield, an act caught on video.Politico.com In the run-up to the 2020 election at least 13 Trump administration officials violated the Hatch Act, which bars federal employees from using taxpayer resources for partisan political purposes, according to a watchdog report. The result was “a taxpayer-funded campaign apparatus within the upper echelons of the executive branch,” said the Office of Special Counsel.Axios.com The tight labor market and concerns of Covid risk have created a shortage of…

“Death is sort of an affront to American life. It’s so anti-aspirational.”Author Zadie Smith, quoted in The Guardian “After repute, oblivion.”Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, quoted in The New York Times “Grief and disappointment give rise to anger, anger to envy, envy to malice, and malice to grief again, till the whole circle be completed.”Philosopher David Hume, quoted in ArtsJournal.com “Every sin is the result of a collaboration.”Author Stephen Crane, in the Los Angeles Times “Guilt to motherhood is like grapes to wine.”Author Fay Weldon, quoted in GoodReads.com “The idea that we can enjoy the benefits of society while owing nothing in return is literally infantile. Only children owe nothing.”Writer Sebastian Junger, quoted in Vox.com “Familiarity breeds contempt—and children,”Mark Twain, quoted in The Times (U.K.)…

A concussion is usually associated with headaches, nausea, dizziness, and confusion. Now new research suggests another symptom should be added to this list: an inability to understand speech in a noisy room. “Making sense of sound is one of the hardest jobs that we ask our brains to do,” says Nina Kraus, from Northwestern University. “So, you can imagine that a concussion, getting hit in the head, really does disrupt sound processing.” Kraus is studying 500 elite college athletes to see how blows to the head affect hearing. She says those who sustain a concussion typically have no problem detecting faint sounds but struggle to make out speech when it’s embedded in background noise. That finding echoes separate research on military personnel who survived concussion-causing bomb blasts in Afghanistan and…

Neal Stephenson’s new novel, Termination Shock, focuses on looming climate disaster. But the influential science fiction author has also been focused on another mounting concern: information manipulation. Below, he recommends six books on the topic. The Philosophical Writings of Peirce edited by Justus Buchler (1940). The Victorian style of American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce can be heavy reading, but writing in 1877, Peirce somehow summed up the weirdly symmetrical right/left hostility toward free discourse that afflicts the public sphere almost 150 years later. Most of the relevant bits appear in the essay “The Fixation of Belief,” which focuses on the different ways people come to believe things. The Constitution of Knowledge by Jonathan Rauch (2021). I found Peirce’s writings through this recent book, in which Rauch calmly articulates the…

When it comes to hyper-realistic portraiture, Hans Holbein the Younger has few rivals, said William Poundstone in the blog LACMA on Fire. The Renaissance master, who was appointed a court painter to King Henry VIII in 1536, is remembered today mainly for his portraits of such icons of British history as Thomas Cromwell, Sir Thomas More, and Henry himself. The Getty museum’s new Holbein exhibition is the first significant survey of the artist’s work to be exhibited in the U.S., and while the king himself isn’t in the show, “you won’t miss Hank one bit.” Many of the portraits in the Getty’s selection feature sitters whose identities have been lost to history, but they grab your gaze anyway. “Holbein didn’t save his talents for the richest and most powerful.”…

  4 “Valentine is proof that a breakup album doesn’t have to be sad—it just has to be powerful,” said Ellen Johnson in PasteMagazine.com. Three years after releasing a “shockingly great” guitar-driven debut album at age 18, Lindsey Jordan, who records as Snail Mail, has returned with a record that confirms she wasn’t just lucky; “she’s an innovator who’s here to stay.” The title track, which opens the set, is “one of the best songs of the year,” with a driving chorus—“Why’d you want to erase me?”—that feels hollered through tears. And why not? “Breakups aren’t just sad—they’re rage-inducing.” The 10-song record has been sequenced “like a dizzying spin through the stages of grief,” said Lindsay Zoladz in The New York Times. “Jordan’s voice has changed since Lush; it’s become…

Imagine yourself in a British pub, said John Holl in Wine Enthusiast. The beer you’d be drinking wouldn’t be a hoppy IPA or thick stout but either a proper mild ale or a bitter. American brewers who make these sessionable styles “have a respect for history,” and the best can be “a welcome island of relaxation.” Wallenpaupack English Pale Mild Ale This Hawley, Pa., product honors mild-ale tradition with its malty nose and mildly bitter finish. “The world needs more beers like this.” Good Word Analog Life Brewed in Duluth, Ga., this dark mild ale proves that roast flavors don’t equate to bitter. It “leans heavily into floral hops” and finishes dry. Bonn Place Mooey Pub Ale “By the third pint you know this is a friend for life.”…

Pfizer will let other manufacturers make its experimental Covid-19 pill, said Michael Erman and Emma Farge in Reuters.com. The pharmaceutical giant reached an agreement this week with a U.N.-backed public health group to grant royalty-free “sub-licenses to qualified generic drug manufacturers to make their own versions” of Pfizer’s experimental antiviral pill in 95 poorer countries. The company this week asked the Federal Drug Administration to grant an “emergency use” authorization for the pill in the U.S. Security: U.S. turns down Intel factory in China “The Biden administration spurned a plan by Intel to increase semiconductor production in China over security concerns,” said Jenny Leonard and Ian King in Bloomberg.com. Intel proposed using a factory in Chengdu to produce silicon wafers, which could have helped ease a global chip supply crunch…

One week from listing to offer If you’re looking to buy a home today, you need to move fast, said Chris Morris in Fortune.com. That’s the takeaway from a report by the National Association of Realtors last week, which found that the average listing between July 2020 and June 2021 found a buyer “in just one week.” That rate was the quickest since 1989, and triple the speed at which homes were selling in the same period a year earlier. And sellers aren’t settling; in fact, 35 percent got more than they asked for their properties. That has netted the average home seller $85,000 more than their purchase price. Though “the housing market is cooling down after its historic run,” median prices were still up 16 percent in the third…

Michael Strain Bloomberg.com Big business has few friends left in the political arena, said Michael Strain. There’s no question the marriage between corporate America and the Republican Party is on the rocks. Former President Donald Trump obviously helped drive this wedge by using his soapbox in ways that “sent chills through the business community.” Some corporate leaders also feel “a sense of civic responsibility in the face of some of the most troubling aspects of today’s GOP.” In the pre-populist era, “Republicans might have tried to mend fences. Not this time.” No longer. Last month, “House Republican leaders kicked the Chamber of Commerce, the nation’s most powerful pro-business lobbying organization, off their strategy calls about the Democrats’ social spending package.” The move seemed to be retribution for the Chamber’s criticism…

Igor Kirillov knowingly played a part for three decades. As the chief anchor of the USSR’s main evening TV news show Vremya (“Time”), the former actor would inform his audience of millions about the latest Soviet triumphs—the launch of Sputnik in 1957, the first manned spaceflight by Yuri Gagarin in 1961, a bumper grain harvest seemingly every year—and deliver communiqués from the Communist Party and reports on endless Western aggression. His steady, sonorous voice became such a constant in Soviet life that it was sampled by pop star Sting for his 1985 hit single “Russians.” But following the USSR’s collapse in 1991, Kirillov admitted that his broadcasts had been filled with lies and propaganda. “The hardest thing of all,” he said in 2011, “was to believe what I was reading…

This week’s question: A proposed $1.5 billion dormitory at the University of California, Santa Barbara, designed by billionaire investor Charlie Munger, is being compared to an 11-story prison, because 94 percent of the tiny rooms have no windows. In seven words or fewer, please come up with a snappy slogan to persuade students to move into “Dormzilla.” Last week’s contest: 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 that might air on the network. THE WINNER: “Barks & Recreation” Matthew Lane, Emporia, Kan. SECOND PLACE: “Paw & Order: Chasing SUV” Michael Grossman, San Dimas, Calif. THIRD PLACE: “Gimme Kibble Live!” Rick…

Jamie Dornan does not like being treated as just a pretty face, said Jonathan Heaf in GQ (U.K.). Now best known as the smoldering and often shirtless star of the Fifty Shades of Grey film adaptations, the Northern Irish actor first made his name as a model in the early 2000s. At age 19, he dropped out of college and—still reeling over the death of his mother three years earlier—began “drinking aggressively” in Belfast pubs. “My family were worried about me being so directionless, so my sister put me up for this TV show where you could win a modeling contract.” Dornan, now 39, didn’t get the top prize. But he pursued a modeling career and was soon working for Dior and Calvin Klein. Dornan was hailed as “the…

During the debate over spending bills, Democrats proposed raising taxes on the wealthy. Do the rich pay a fair share? What do the wealthy pay? Generally, a much lower percentage of their incomes than the middle class. A White House study released in September found that America’s 400 wealthiest families paid an average federal income tax rate of just 8.2 percent from 2010 to 2018. The rich do pay other taxes not included in the White House analysis, such as estate taxes, but in recent decades, most kinds of taxes on the wealthy have been substantially cut. The marginal tax rate for the top tax bracket held at above 63 percent between 1932 and 1982, spiking as high as 92 percent in the 1950s. Now, after decades of cuts…

Alex Shephard NewRepublic.com Chris Christie is trying to pull the Republican Party “out of Donald Trump’s grip,” said Alex Shephard. “But it’s a doomed project.” The brash, bigmouthed former New Jersey governor seemed to be a viable contender for the GOP presidential nomination in 2016, but Trump—with far more brazen and even reckless rhetoric—stole his brand. Christie reacted by endorsing Trump and displaying such meek deference he “came off like Trump’s servant.” While serving as Trump’s debate preparer in 2020, Christie caught Covid and nearly died. Now he is exploring another presidential run and telling Republicans it’s time to stop obsessing over that lost election and move on. But the time to stand up to Trump was in 2016, or at least in the aftermath of Jan. 6. Today, any…

CZECH REPUBLIC  Petr Honzejk Hospodarske Noviny A fourth wave of the coronavirus is rolling across the Czech Republic, said Petr Honzejk, and we have no one to blame but ourselves. “Dozens of people are dying” every day, and we’re recording more than 9,000 new Covid-19 infections daily—double the number at the start of November. The vast majority of these cases and deaths are, of course, among the unvaccinated. And we have far too many of those. Like other former Communist countries in Eastern Europe, the Czech Republic has plateaued in vaccinations, with some 58 percent of people fully inoculated. That’s a good 10 to 20 percentage points lower than most Western European nations. The culprit is “the concept of freedom that still prevails in many post-Communist societies.” The Communist regime…

Social media stars are trying to get you to buy, not just follow or watch, said Mark Bergen and Lucas Shaw in Bloomberg.com. This week, YouTube took its first step toward becoming “a shopping destination,” with a livestreaming event in which celebrities, including the chef Gordon Ramsay, pitched products from brands like Verizon, Samsung, and Walmart. Previous efforts at bringing the QVC model to livestream video have “mostly floundered in the U.S.,” but YouTube is “banking on the influence of its stars,” many of whom already sell merchandise through links on their channels. Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat have also recently debuted similar features involving live product reviews from top influencers. They are betting live e-commerce will eventually catch on as it has in China, where “Lipstick King” Li Jiaqi…

The Cretaceous period, which lasted from 145 million to 66 million years ago, is known by researchers as the “super fire world.” Massive wildfires raged across much of the planet, but not, researchers assumed, in Antarctica. Now a new study suggests that the southernmost continent was also scorched by these blazes, reports The New York Times. An analysis of fossilized charcoal extracted from sediment on Antarctica’s Ross Island found that these ancient hunks of carbon had once been plants. Specifically, they were an ancient family of conifers called Araucariaceae, suggesting that paleofires were a feature of prehistoric life in Antarctica. The finding is important because it will help further scientists’ understanding of another era marked by rapid changes in the climate—the one we’re living through. “The more we know about…

(Harper, $29) No matter how many pandemic novels are eventually written, Louise Erdrich’s current entry “may be the best one we ever get,” said Ron Charles in The Washington Post. In a story that “hovers between the realms of historical horror and cultural comedy,” an ex-convict named Tookie is working at a Minneapolis bookstore in late 2019 when she becomes convinced the shop is being haunted by a former customer who was a wannabe Native American. But before Tookie, who is Ojibwe, can exorcise this annoying specter, Covid and the police killing of George Floyd throw the city into turmoil. Erdrich’s whimsical tone, which helped win her a Pulitzer for 2020’s The Night Watchman, works less well this time, said Katy Waldman in The New Yorker. It “jostles uncomfortably, at…

Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks edited by Anna von Planta (Liveright, $40) The diaries and notebooks that Patricia Highsmith left behind comprise “one of the great 20th-century artistic self-portraits,” said Frances Wilson in The New York Review of Books. From age 17 on, the author of The Talented Mr. Ripley kept a dual running record of her life—one focused on writing and the other on serial obsessive love. Aware but ashamed of her homosexuality from childhood, she transposed that conflict into a body of crime fiction “the like of which had never been seen before.” Unprotected by Billy Porter (Abrams, $28) Billy Porter’s new memoir “recounts his lifelong struggle to heal the deep wounds buried under the sheen of his charismatic presence,” said R. Eric Thomas in The New…

  3 “Anyone who knows or loves early-1970s R&B will have a goofy grin on their face throughout this entire album,” said Jem Aswad in Variety. Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak have done it: pulled off the “monumentally” hard challenge of producing a full collection of throwback songs that evoke a golden past but transcend mere nostalgia. The record’s debut single, “Leave the Door Open,” topped Billboard’s pop chart in April, and Mars and Paak have now added eight more winking tributes to such soul, funk, and R&B masters as the O’Jays, Kool & the Gang, and the Chi-Lites. Once this 31-minute set ends, “there’s no way you’re not playing it again.” When Paak raps, “he drags some songs to the brink of novelty,” said Justin Charity in TheRinger.com. But…

The Trump organization is selling its marquee Washington, D.C., hotel to an investment group, which plans to have it rebranded as a Waldorf Astoria, for $375 million. Financial disclosures show that revenue for the hotel, housed in the capital’s Old Post Office, fell to $15 million in 2020 and the first few months of 2021, from $40 million in 2019. The Wall Street Journal The average price of a gallon of gasoline hit $4.68 in California this week, breaking the previous record, set in 2012. That means a typical midsize sedan with a 14-gallon fuel tank costs $21 more to fill up than last year. CNN.com Sales of pregnancy tests are up 13 percent year-over-year since June 2020. The average annual increase between 2016 and 2019 was just 2 percent.…

One of the biggest challenges to ending the Covid-19 pandemic is getting the whole world vaccinated, particularly people in regions already facing a severe shortage of health-care workers and resources. VillageReach (villagereach.org) is a nonprofit that promotes vaccine equity in sub-Saharan Africa by strengthening the supply chain so that vaccines and health-care workers can reach people even in remote areas. VillageReach has been working for 20 years to solve the “last mile” difficulties of delivering health care in Africa and is currently focused on bringing Covid vaccines to Ivory Coast, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, Malawi, and Mozambique. It has developed innovative techniques to overcome the logistical hurdles—even experimenting with using drones to bring medical supplies to remote villages. Each charity we feature has earned a four-star overall…

Good week for: Public health, with an Austrian brothel’s offer of free sex “with a lady of your choice” to any customer who takes advantage of its on-site Covid-19 vaccination center. “We have a great vaccination site,” said the brothel’s owner. Snowflakes, with the unveiling during Dubai’s Design Week festival of the Themis, a lamp-size device that monitors human speech and sets off an “extremely annoying” alarm lasting two minutes if it hears any “racist remarks” or “offensive jokes.” Theocrats, after retired Gen. Michael Flynn, former President Trump’s national security adviser, told a crowd on the far-right Reawaken America Tour that “if we are going to have one nation under God, which we must, we have to have one religion.” He didn’t specify which one. Bad week for: Legal briefs,…

A decade ago, Richard Klein decided he wasn’t living his best life, said Sheila Yasmin Marikar in The New York Times. He was content in his job as a teacher at a Hebrew day school in Oakland and had a group of friends who were like a family. But “one morning I woke up and thought, ‘If I don’t do something, I could be here for the next 20 years,’” says Klein, now 55. “That wouldn’t be a terrible outcome, but it wasn’t the one I wanted.” He’d studied India in graduate school, went backpacking there in the 1990s, and had long dreamed of breaking into Bollywood. So, six months after his revelation, Klein moved to Mumbai. He found work editing subtitles for English-language TV shows, then started getting calls…

Eric Topol TheGuardian.com “Profound pandemic fatigue has led to the irresistible notion that the pandemic end is nigh,” said Eric Topol. A serious new surge of the Delta variant in Europe should warn us that we’re “in denial” about what lies ahead this winter. Cases are surging in both sparsely vaccinated Eastern European nations and countries such as Ireland and Belgium, where vaccination rates exceed 70 percent. Denmark, which lifted all its pandemic restrictions in September after vaccinating more than 86 percent of everyone over 12, has reinstated vaccine passports as Covid resurges. In many countries, it is unvaccinated children and teens who are primarily spreading the super-infectious variant. The coming of cold weather and waning vaccine effectiveness after six months are also contributing. In the U.S., less than 60…

“Communities built around obsessive interests online spill out into real life. Helping create a mob makes people feel powerful, and membership in a mob makes people even more fanatical. Those are intense incentives not just to act like lunatics but to develop messianic ambitions. Members of mobs don’t need individual courage, because membership in the collective gives them a sense of power, false accomplishment, and security. The rest of us had better learn how to deal with the madness of crowds. To defeat them, we will have to get better at being brave ourselves.” Chris Stirewalt in TheDispatch.com…

UNITED KINGDOM  Tom Utley Daily Mail Kids today just can’t understand their parents’ fondness for the once ubiquitous red telephone booth, said Tom Utley. Nearly all Britons now own a cellphone—90 percent of children have one by age 11—so youngsters find it utterly bemusing that us olds used to wait in line at public call boxes, hunting around in our pockets for coins. “Call volumes from pay phones have plummeted,” from 800 million minutes in 2002 to only 7 million in 2020. But the British phone box remains a simply gorgeous example of urban design, and that’s why campaigners across the country are “battling so fiercely to save these relics of a past age from the scrap heap.” Government regulators said last week that 5,000 of the 21,000 remaining red…

ARGENTINA  Claudio Savoia Clarín Because of our history of corruption and dictatorship, the “bar for outrage” is set pretty high in Argentina, said Claudio Savoia. Yet much of the country reacted with fury last week when José López, a former official in the Public Works ministry who embezzled more than $9 million, was let out of prison on parole. López, who served during the presidencies of Néstor Kirchner and his successor and widow, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, was caught on film in 2016 heaving bags of cash and luxury watches over a fence into a convent, where his accomplices, “a group of elderly nuns,” were waiting to receive it. The images were proof of the breathtaking corruption of the Kirchners, whose rule was “a festival of rigged tenders,” in which…

The upcoming launch of the University of Austin could be “the best news in academia in a long, long time,” said Quin Hillyer in WashingtonExaminer.com. Former St. John’s College President Pano Kanelos announced last week his plans to create a “fiercely independent” new institution of higher learning. His co-founders, columnist Bari Weiss and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale among them, include conservatives and classical liberals who prize free speech. Their dream: a haven where scholars and students can engage in open, rigorous debate—what great colleges offered until they were “hijacked by the illiberal left.” Here’s why I’ve joined them, said historian Niall Ferguson in Bloomberg.com. Recent surveys have found that 62 percent of college students said that their campus’ progressive orthodoxy made them fearful of expressing their opinions. Put simply, “higher…

The word “woke” used to have a meaning, said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post, but it’s become “an empty, all-purpose insult hurled by conservative propagandists, anti-vaccine fabulists,” and reactionaries who deny the existence of racism and sexism. Originally, “woke” was popularized in the African-American community, to describe waking up to the racism and bigotry that permeated this country’s history and present. “These days,” I never hear people of color, LGBTQ Americans, “or any other constituencies of the supposed ‘woke mob’ use the word.” Instead, you hear it from elites desperate to flout their “populist credentials.” Even NFL star Aaron Rodgers is now whining that “the woke mob” was persecuting him after he lied about receiving the Covid vaccine. Conservatives are master marketers, said Charles Blow in The New York…

Lawyers under surveillance Lawyers are some of the earliest guinea pigs for enhanced employee-monitoring software, said Drew Harwell in The Washington Post—and some of them worry that if even law firms that defend workers’ rights are turning to the software, “why won’t every other business?” Contract attorneys are typically hired as needed by law firms and often asked to “look at sensitive files” under “strict confidentiality rules.” But working from home, they are now subject to monitoring software that uses a webcam to “record their facial movements and surroundings and will send an alert” even if the attorney’s focus begins to drift. Several lawyers complained that the software was error-prone and would “boot them out of their work if they shifted slightly in their chairs.” Another type of monitoring software,…

(Knopf, $40) “A definitive biography if there ever was one,” Matthew Sturgis’ 861-page Oscar Wilde might disappoint readers who like to remember Wilde as a saintly gay martyr, said Brooke Allen in The Wall Street Journal. Sturgis’ Wilde is by no means a bad man. The legendary Irish writer, humorist, and bon vivant comes across instead as kind, attentive to others, and unusually generous. But Sturgis, a historian, aimed to find the true Wilde beneath the myth, and “he has succeeded remarkably well.” When the story calls for it, he reminds us that Wilde was at times prideful and self-indulgent, and that many of his sexual partners were boys, not adults. This is, in other words, “the story of the man in full,” and we readers are lucky to have…

Trying to make sense of his native South Africa has never been easy for Damon Galgut, said Martin Chilton in The Independent (U.K.). The newest winner of the Booker Prize was at university in the mid-1980s, and he remembers telling his grandfather, a judge, about being beaten by police at an anti-apartheid protest and seeing others stripped naked. “Nonsense,” was the older man’s response, which told Galgut that white South Africans could no longer even see what was right in front of them. “It felt a bit like that—people insisting that reality was the other way around,” he says. The Promise, Galgut’s Booker-winning novel, returns to that era to open with a family funeral, mixing darkness and humor as it touches down at four funerals in all to bring…

  3 “Summer Walker’s music has the emotional intensity of a Real Housewives reunion,” said DeAsia Paige in Pitchfork.com. Two years after her debut album established the then 23-year-old as a star of trap R&B, she has released a No. 1 Billboard follow-up on which “she cements herself as one of the genre’s most relatable storytellers.” Walker’s producer on half the songs is now both an ex and the father of her child, and she lets him and his other lovers have it, bringing “irresistibly entertaining” melodrama to these moody tracks. The only problem: The act runs for over an hour, and “starts to become monotonous.” Still Over It builds on Walker’s 2019 sound with a few “poppier” moments, including the first single, “Ex for a Reason,” said Meagan Jordan…

New holiday specials… 8-Bit Christmas Every generation deserves its own A Christmas Story. This hilarious update on the formula follows 11-year-old Jake Doyle in his quest to celebrate the holiday by acquiring a Nintendo 8-Bit game console—the Red Ryder BB gun of the late 1980s. With Neil Patrick Harris. HBO Max A Boy Called Christmas Santa Claus gets a new origin story in this potential new classic, adapted from a 2015 children’s book. At a time when magic is scarce, a boy named Nikolas journeys into the snowy far north with his pet mouse and a reindeer, seeking a mythical home of elves. Netflix ’Twas the Fight Before Christmas Jeremy Morris is the neighbor who loves Christmas too much. This wild new documentary chronicles how the Idaho attorney triggered a…

In Japan, sweet potatoes are so beloved they are sold out of passing vans, like Good Humor ice cream trucks, said Albert Stumm in Milk Street magazine. If you can find Japanese sweet potatoes, use them here. But we’ve taken the idea of daigaku imo, or “university potatoes,” and developed a version that can be made with American sweet potatoes and without deep frying. Ours are more a dinner side than a carnival snack, but they still have the kind of bold, savory-sweet coating that makes daigaku imo so popular. Japanese-style glazed sweet potatoes with sesame • ½ cup water • 2 tbsp grapeseed or other neutral oil • ¼ cup white sugar • 1 tbsp soy sauce • 2 tsp unseasoned rice vinegar • 1 tsp toasted sesame oil •…

The headwaters of the Everglades Anyone who spends time in central or southern Florida should take an airboat ride at least once, said Sharon Kennedy Wynne in the Tampa Bay Times. Getting to one isn’t easy: “You have to drive to the boonies and then get on a funny-looking boat that resembles a Rube Goldberg contraption.” You also have to wear earmuffs to block out the noise from the “big, honking motor” and propeller that power the flat-bottomed vessels. But hop on, and for the next hour, you can be gliding through the heart of a swamp at the headwaters of the Everglades. The ride is so smooth that even people with bad backs can enjoy it, and the boats can go anywhere. “There were times I was thinking that…

Editorial The Wall Street Journal Rivian’s $120 billion stock market debut was practically underwritten by the federal government, said The Wall Street Journal. A lot of people have been hailing 12-year-old EV designer Rivian as “the next Tesla.” But hang on. When Tesla went public in 2010, “it reported $93 million in revenue and was valued at $1.7 billion.” To date, Amazon-backed Rivian, which went public last week, has delivered only 156 of its electric trucks, almost all to its own employees. Yet it’s now the fifth-most valuable automaker in the world. Why? Because “investors are betting the government won’t let it fail.” The Democrats’ social spending bill includes a $7,500 tax credit for electric pickups, trucks, vans, and SUVs costing as much as $80,000, which covers Rivian’s higher-end $73,000…

I knew that my father was a tough guy who was often on the run or in prison, said author James Dolan in D Magazine. But it was only after he was murdered that I discovered just how dangerous he was. My dad had gotten out of prison, and, for the first time in years, we were sitting down to dinner. It turned out to be the last time I ever saw him alive. This was 1984. We were at Newport’s, in Dallas’ West End, drinking Anchor Steam beers, and the mood was one of celebration. A former light heavyweight boxer, my dad was still physically imposing, even at 70 years old, but he was slimmer after his most recent stint inside. His sports coat hung loose on him,…