Innehållsförteckning för December 10, 2021 från The Week Magazine

I am sick of the pandemic. You are sick of the pandemic. We are all very, very sick of the pandemic. It seemed last spring that vaccination might soon end this ordeal…and then, Delta brought a huge new wave of misery and death, nearly all of it among the unvaccinated. Booster shots seemed to promise a real measure of freedom going into this winter…and now Omicron may (or may not) set us back again. Viruses are microscopic bits of parasitic proteins that exist only to replicate themselves, but natural selection makes them a formidable, shape-shifting enemy. As it mutates and spreads from person to person and continent to continent, SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t care if we’re weary of the fight; in fact, when potential human hosts act as if the pandemic were…

The Women’s March has apologized for a Thanksgiving email thanking supporters for their average donation of $14.92. “We apologize deeply for today’s email” using the number $14.92, the organization said. “It was an oversight on our part to not make the connection to a year of colonization, conquest, and genocide for Indigenous people, especially before Thanksgiving.” A small Pennsylvania library has been deluged with more than $40,000 in donations after its funding request was denied because it was hosting an LGBTQ support group. Republican county commissioners Randy Bunch and Stuart Ulsh vetoed $3,000 in additional funding for the Fulton County Library, with Bunch saying the support group “makes people uncomfortable” and causes “hate and friction.” In other news Meadows will answer Jan. 6 questions The House panel investigating the Jan.…

Vienna Talks to restore the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement resumed in Vienna this week—but without America. The pact, which included the U.S., U.K., France, China, Russia, and Germany, lifted most sanctions on Iran in exchange for restrictions on the country’s nuclear program. After the Trump administration pulled the U.S. from the deal in 2018 and reinstated sanctions, Iran stepped up its nuclear activities. Israeli intelligence officials have warned that Iran is making technical preparations to enrich uranium to 90 percent purity—the level needed to produce a nuclear weapon—and could produce a bomb in one to two years. President Biden wants to bring Tehran back into the Obama-era deal. The Iranians, though, refuse to meet face-to-face with American diplomats, so Europeans are taking the lead in Vienna. Fear of impending…

Jennifer Lawrence still struggles with the loss of privacy that comes with celebrity, said Karen Valby in Vanity Fair. Nominated for her first Oscar at age 20, she became one of the world’s highest-paid actresses, but she was miserable. Paparazzi hounded her wherever she went, and in 2014 a batch of nude selfies was stolen from her phone and leaked online, where they still exist today. “Anybody can go look at my naked body without my consent, any time of the day,” says Lawrence, 31. A string of box office and critical flops compounded her disillusionment. “Everybody had gotten sick of me. I’d gotten sick of me. I was people-pleasing for the majority of my life. Working made me feel like nobody could be mad at me. And then…

David Rothkopf TheDailyBeast.com Merrick Garland’s Justice Department deserves credit for prosecuting “Trumpist foot soldiers who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6,” said David Rothkopf, “but it is not enough.” Federal prosecutors have given no indication they plan to charge Trump or his cronies for their election interference and attempted coup d’état—with Trump caught on tape demanding that Georgia’s secretary of state “find 11,780 votes.” Nor have we heard a peep about the DOJ “prosecuting the dozen instances of clear obstruction of justice that special counsel Robert Mueller’s report cited against Trump.” People who know and respect Garland say he deserves patience and note that grand jury investigations operate in secret. But in a town where everything leaks, we should know by January whether Garland is giving a free pass to…

“One reason Europeans aren’t engaging in an American-style Great Resignation is that they don’t hate their jobs quite as much. Famously, in Denmark McDonald’s pays more than $20 an hour and offers six weeks of paid vacation each year. That may be an exceptional case, but the U.S. does stand out among wealthy countries for having a low minimum wage, for offering very little vacation time, and for failing to offer parental and sick leave. Maybe the poor quality of U.S. jobs is one reason so many American workers are reluctant to return.” Paul Krugman in The New York Times…

UNITED KINGDOM Owen Jones The Guardian Boris Johnson has always been a blithering buffoon, said Owen Jones, but suddenly even right-wing commentators are declaring him unfit for office. In a speech to business leaders last week, the prime minister lost his train of thought and stood confused for an agonizing 20 seconds, before babbling about the merits of kids’ cartoon character Peppa Pig and mimicking the sound of a car engine. It was “consistent with what we have come to expect of the prime minister.” So why are his latest ramblings being cited ominously as evidence that “his premiership is disintegrating”? Johnson’s Conservative colleagues knew he was a habitual liar dogged by corruption rumors when they rallied behind his candidacy in 2019. But at the time, they thought of him…

CANADA Andrew Coyne The Globe and Mail Quebec is getting greedy, said Andrew Coyne. Federal election officials say that because of population changes, Alberta should get three more seats in the House of Commons, while Ontario and British Columbia will each add one. Quebec, though, loses one seat. This should not be controversial: The constitution provides for reapportioning every 10 years, and the French-speaking province will remain slightly overrepresented in Parliament. But that’s not enough for some Quebecois lawmakers. They’re demanding that their province be given a minimum percentage of seats in the House—perhaps 23 or 25 percent—no matter how low their population drops. “It’s outrageous.” One person, one vote is supposed to be the principle underpinning Canadian democracy. Unfortunately, Quebec can point to all the times Canada has betrayed…

Democrats are sinking into despair, said Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times. One year later, it’s becoming increasingly clear that “dislodging Trump has bought American democracy only a brief reprieve.” Next November, voters are likely to deliver the House of Representatives and possibly the Senate “to a party that largely treats the Jan. 6 insurrectionists as heroes.” The GOP is using extreme gerrymandering to stack the deck against Democrats in state after state. Trumpaligned Republicans are also laying the groundwork for stealing future elections by purging local officials who stood firm against the Big Lie and “replacing them with apparatchiks.” Meanwhile, the GOP increasingly “winks at the violent intimidation of its political enemies.” It’s no wonder that many dispirited progressives are turning off the news and withdrawing—but that’s a…

The U.S. Postal Service faces “unprecedented challenges,” said John Nichols in TheNation.com, including Covid-related worker shortages and plunging demand for first-class mail. “But the biggest threat” is Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, “the Republican mega-donor” who took charge in May 2020, “determined to downsize the Postal Service.” DeJoy has sabotaged the USPS by removing mail-sorting machines and mail collection boxes and deliberately slowing deliveries; last holiday season saw just 38 percent of nonlocal first-class mail arrive on time. For this holiday season, DeJoy has again slowed delivery times, imposed holiday surcharges of up to $5 a box, and reduced post office hours. Confronted by lawmakers earlier this year, DeJoy offered Trumpian defiance. “Get used to me,” he sneered. Maybe not. President Biden recently nominated two new members to the USPS board…

Air regulators raise 5G questions AT&T and Verizon are limiting 5G service for six months to allow federal regulators to review risks to air safety, said Drew FitzGerald and Micah Maidenberg in The Wall Street Journal. The carriers said they would “lower the signals’ cell-tower power levels nationwide and impose stricter power caps near airports and helipads” in response to concerns raised by the Federal Aviation Administration that 5G signals “could confuse some radar altimeters.” While wireless companies transmit 5G signals along a different frequency band than the one altimeters use, air-safety officials are “worried that some especially sensitive sensors could still pick up cell-tower transmissions.” Phone carriers have spent $81 billion for wireless licenses to expand their 5G service, but they have been at an “impasse” with regulators over…

Emerald Fennell is an actress, director, and playwright whose screenplay for the suspenseful dark comedy Promising Young Woman won an Oscar earlier this year. A stage musical based on her reimagining of Cinderella is currently playing in London. Giving Up the Ghost by Hilary Mantel (2003). Hilary Mantel is one of those impossible, once-in-a-lifetime visionaries. She seems as if she’s descended from William Blake, or from a medieval ascetic. Her horror writing is peerless, and there is nothing quite so harrowingly visceral as her memoir. The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous by Jilly Cooper (1993). Jilly Cooper’s bucolic world of picturesque cottages, adorable dogs, and hard-core bonking cannot be beaten. Kindhearted serial shagger Lysander Hawkley is one of the best in the irresistible rogues’ gallery Cooper has created in her 10-book…

Museum of Modern Art, New York City, through March 12 Sophie Taeuber-Arp “could do it all, and was underestimated for decades because of it,” said Jason Farago in The New York Times. The polymathic Swiss artist remains most associated with the Dadaist movement that sprang up during World War I in Zurich. But she worked in myriad modes and media and “could not have cared less about the distinctions among the art on your wall, in your living room, on the stage, or on your back.” In addition to standard museum fare such as abstract watercolors and wooden sculptures, Taeuber-Arp’s colorful output includes necklaces, marionettes, beaded purses, and stained-glass windows. In a retrospective that arrives at New York City’s MoMA following acclaimed stops in Basel and London, Taeuber-Arp’s “multimedia appetite”…

“Tony Bennett might want to thank the Recording Academy for getting rid of its nominations review committees,” said Paul Grein in Billboard. Together with his duet partner, Lady Gaga, the 95-year-old crooner has been named a Grammy finalist for Record of the Year and Album of the Year—honors that the duo’s Cole Porter tribute album might not have achieved if the Academy was still using the committees that have served as gatekeepers since 1995. That year, gatekeeping had seemed like a smart response after Bennett’s MTV Unplugged performance won Album of the Year and helped fuel talk that the Academy was out of step with young listeners. But earlier this year, R&B superstar the Weeknd put the screening panels on the defensive when he boycotted the 2021 awards event…

During gift-giving season, “single-malt Scotch often tops wish lists,” said Kara Newman in WineMag.com. And who can be blamed for asking? Here are three recent single-malt releases that should lift the spirits of any discerning whisky lover. Aberfeldy 18 Years in Oak Highland ($120). Aged in casks used for a French syrah, this standout Scotch “opens dry in tones of cedar and a hint of tingly spice.” Adding water brings out “a nutty tone reminiscent of pecan pie.” Benriach the Twelve Speyside ($60). This “lightly sweet” 12-year-old sipper opens “brisk and bold, showing caramel and baked apple flavors.” A splash of water brings out mocha, ginger, and cinnamon. Ardbeg Wee Beastie 5 Years Old ($50). This Islay Scotch opens with “almond, spicy honey, peat smoke, plus a hint of…

Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell told the Senate Banking Committee this week that the central bank should “weigh removing pandemic support at a faster pace,” said Craig Torres in Bloomberg.com. The Fed’s bond-purchasing program is set to sunset in mid-2022, but accelerating inflation has led the Fed to consider putting the brakes on earlier. While several months ago Fed officials believed that inflation was “transitory,” Powell conceded it was lasting longer than expected and told lawmakers that “it’s a good time to retire that word.” JPMorgan: Dimon seeks to placate China JPMorgan Chase’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon, apologized for saying that the bank would outlive China’s Communist Party, said Scott Murdoch and Matt Scuffham in Reuters.com. In an interview at Boston College last week, Dimon noted that both JPMorgan and…

The bank that keeps on taking “Wells Fargo keeps coming up with ingenious ways” to take advantage of its customers, said David Lazarus in the Los Angeles Times. At age 68, Rick Yelinek finally had “amassed enough money to pay off his mortgage.” He deposited a cashier’s check into the checking account used for his home loan. But the bank said he was still short: He needed to shell out another $30 for the wire transfer “to move his mortgage payment from one division of the bank to another.” Wells Fargo says Yelinek wouldn’t have been charged if he had used a certified check instead, a distinction no ordinary customer is likely to know about. The bank has since waived the fee, but Yelinek believes Wells Fargo “will do anything…

Stephen Sondheim reinvented the American musical with every new work. After making his Broadway debut with lyrics for 1957’s West Side Story and 1959’s Gypsy—both stage sensations that became Hollywood hits—the songwriter dedicated himself to pushing musical theater into uncharted territory. He adapted the comedies of the Roman playwright Plautus into 1962’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum; reworked an Ingmar Bergman film into A Little Night Music, written almost entirely in waltz time; and assembled everyone who had tried to assassinate an American president in the 1990 black comedy Assassins. Some critics accused him of being needlessly highbrow—his most devoted followers produced an academic quarterly, The Sondheim Review—but Sondheim insisted he was aiming at a mass audience. “I’m not writing for myself,” the lyricist…

President Joe Biden is coming off “one of the best weeks of his presidency,” said David Siders in Politico.com, so why are his poll numbers “cratering?” Biden’s approval rating last week sank to an aggregate poll average of 42 percent—at the very same time that the House was passing his Build Back Better Act, a $1.5 trillion package of climate action and assistance to American families that 58 percent of voters say they support. Nor did the public seem to give Biden any credit for the “hard” infrastructure bill he signed last month, another resoundingly popular (63 percent) piece of historic legislation, or the spring’s Covid stimulus package that prevented ed widespread hardship by putting cash directly into Americans’ pockets. The chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan took a lasting…

Patricia Cornwell is famous for thinking up elaborate plots, said Bryan Appleyard in The Times (U.K.), but the crime novelist’s real life might be stranger than anything she’s written. When Cornwell was 5 years old, her lawyer father walked out of their Miami home on Christmas Day, and, she says, “everything just went to hell.” Her mother, Marilyn, took to religion and became obsessed with evangelist Billy Graham. She drove her three children 800 miles to rural North Carolina, burned their clothes, and made the kids walk up to the Graham house with a note that read “Please raise my children. There’s going to be a flood.” The Grahams found a foster home for the kids, while Marilyn descended into psychosis and ended up in a mental hospital. “My…

Kanye West ramped up his public pleading to win back his estranged wife, Kim Kardashian West, last week, narrating a five-minute “Thanksgiving prayer” in which he said, “All I think about every day is how I get my family back together and how I heal the pain that I’ve caused.” West, 44, who now legally goes by Ye, said he made his “hair-trigger temper” worse by heavy drinking and by going on and off medication for his bipolar disorder, which led to “episodes.” He also admit-ted that Kardashian “did not like me wearing the red hat”—a reference to his friendship with former President Trump. Kardashian West, 41, filed for divorce in February after seven years of marriage and has been dating Saturday Night Live’s Pete Davidson. Lindsay Lohan announced…

Thomas Hogan City Journal For years, law enforcement has been warning that “bail ‘reforms’ would get people killed,” said Thomas Hogan. Their fears were realized last week in a horrific homicide spree in Waukesha, Wis. Career criminal Darrell Brooks—out on just $1,000 bail after allegedly running over his girlfriend with a car—“mowed down dozens of people at a Christmas parade,” killing six. Based on his history of violent crimes, Brooks should have been held in jail, but John Chisholm, the progressive Milwaukee district attorney, has spent years fighting to “eliminate or substantially reduce” cash bail. Bail-reform advocates argue that “thousands of poor and minority people” are sitting in jails on minor charges because they can’t pay cash bail. “This simply isn’t so.” The vast majority of people awaiting trial in…

Hundreds of people have tried to hire a paid killer through a fake website called RentAHitman.com. California resident Bob Innes launched the site 16 years ago, incorporating fake customer testimonials and industry-award citations. Some 400 people have since filled out a “service request form,” including personal details for themselves and their intended targets. Innes forwards ones that look serious to law enforcement, which resulted in the recent conviction of a Michigan woman who wanted her husband dead. “I don’t get it,” Innes said. “People are just stupid.” A new combat sport is vying for a slice of the competitive world of payper-view TV: pillow fighting. Competitors at the Pillow Fight Championship in Florida will be armed with queen-size combat pillows made from nylon. League CEO Steve Williams hopes pro pillow…

SOUTH KOREA Kim Seong-kon The Korea Herald It’s not surprising that South Koreans use many English words in their everyday language, said Kim Seong-kon. After all, U.S. troops have been stationed here since the 1950s, and the language of global business and pop culture will always have a certain cachet. What is surprising, though, is that so many of the words we use are “awkward or wrong.” Instead of cellphone, we say “hand phone,” and instead of laptop, we say “notebook.” Contact-free payments are “untact.” A steering wheel is a “handle,” a windshield wiper a “window brush,” and a flat tire a “tire punk.” A comedian is “gag man,” pronounced gae-geu-maen. “No foreigners would understand those words,” so American tourists here are often perplexed, and Korean tourists in the U.S.…

■ Ninety-two percent of federal employees and military personnel had received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine by Nov. 22, the deadline for vaccination of federal workers set by President Biden. Nearly 5percent have asked for exemptions on religious or medical grounds.The Washington Post ■ At least seven doctors who attended an anti-vaccine conference in Florida in November fell ill from Covid soon after. They included Bruce Boros, a 71-year-old cardiologist from Key West who boasted to hundreds of attendees at the Florida Covid Summit that he and his wife had been taking the dewormer ivermectin for 16 months, and that he’d “never felt healthier in my life.” TheDailyBeast.com ■ The Department of Defense is establishing a new division tasked with investigating reports of UFOs. The formation of…

“After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one’s own relations.” Oscar Wilde, quoted in Southern Living “Anything worth dying for is certainly worth living for.” Joseph Heller, quoted in BusinessInsider.com “People say money is not the key to happiness, but I have always figured if you have enough money, you can have a key made.” Joan Rivers, quoted in Reader’s Digest “There is only one mystery: the world.” René Magritte, quoted in The Guardian (U.K.) “Thoughts are never honest. Emotions are.” Albert Camus, quoted in the Monterey County, Calif., Weekly “Legend remains victorious in spite of history.” Sarah Bernhardt, quoted in TheBrowser.com “It’s a very sobering feeling to be up in space and realize that one’s safety factor was determined by the lowest bidder on a government contract.”…

Children of women who use marijuana during or soon after pregnancy are more likely than other kids to develop a range of behavioral problems, reports The New York Times. For a new study, researchers asked 322 healthy mothers whether they had used marijuana while pregnant or in the 18 months after. They then studied the children’s development. The kids of the marijuana users were more than twice as likely as those of the abstinent to be anxious, aggressive, or hyperactive between ages 3 and 6. The children’s hair contained higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol, and they had heart rate variations linked to anxiety issues. The researchers also examined some of the mothers’ placentas; those from weed users displayed dampened activity in genes that make important proteins connected to…

“The truth about Fyodor Dostoevsky has proved to be as mysterious as the enigmatic figures he wrote about,” said Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times. Readers who admire the great Russian novelist’s work will always be curious about the man who created them, and this new book offers fresh perspective. Author Kevin Birmingham, who previously gave similar treatment to James Joyce’s Ulysses, has now devoted a complete volume to the making of Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky’s 1866 breakthrough. Part of the draw is Birmingham’s detailed account of the 1834 double murder that inspired the novel, a crime for which the perpetrator, a haughty poet, showed no remorse. But Dostoevsky is the more fascinating character. “It would take a Dostoevsky novel to do full justice to Dostoevsky,” said Maureen Corrigan…

Winter Recipes From the Collective by Louise Glück (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25) Fresh off winning the Nobel Prize for literature, poet Louise Glück is in no mood to celebrate, said Troy Jollimore in The Washington Post. Her new collection, consisting of 15 “brooding, death-obsessed” poems, feels like “an end-of-life book where the life in question could be anyone’s: the poet’s, the reader’s, the planet’s.” Don’t seek comfort here: “One’s impression is of small human figures huddled against a cold and empty landscape.” Even so, “reading Glück’s new poems is a joyful experience, as reading great poetry always is.” Powder Days by Heather Hansman (Hanover Square, $27) Once a ski bum, always a ski bum, said David Shribman in The Wall Street Journal. In an “endearing” book that’s part memoir,…

■ Only 8.4 percent of Americans live in a different home than they did a year ago, according to Census data. The aging of the U.S. population, a lack of new housing, and increased caution during the pandemic have produced the lowest rate of mobility recorded at any time since 1948. TheHill.com ■ The number of Americans filing initial jobless claims last week fell to 199,000, the lowest level since November 1969. It marked the eighth consecutive week of decreasing initial unemployment claims. Nonetheless, the economy remains about 4 million jobs below pre-pandemic levels. The Washington Post ■ Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella sold nearly 840,000 shares of the company’s stock—about half his holdings—yielding more than $285 million. Washington’s 7 percent state tax on long-term capital gains takes effect next year.…

According to a Department of Education survey, 94 percent of U.S. public-school teachers have had to pay for classroom supplies out of their own pockets, with the average teacher spending $479 throughout the year. DonorsChoose (donorschoose.org) is a nonprofit that aims to make donating to teachers easy, transparent, and effective by allowing donors to pick specific class projects to fund. Teachers submit requests for supplies—ranging from books to robotics kits—that are each vetted and verified by DonorsChoose, which buys the supplies once a request is fully funded. After donating, you’ll get photos of the project in action and a report of how each dollar was spent. Since it began in 2000, DonorsChoose has raised $1.19 billion and funded over 2 million projects. Each charity we feature has earned a…

Jerry Useem The Atlantic “Trust is to capitalism what alcohol is to wedding receptions: a social lubricant,” said Jerry Useem. But since the pandemic began, companies seem to be growing increasingly parched. Bosses have been openly “wondering whether their remote workers are working.” Lines get more easily crossed over Slack. Demand for employee-surveillance software has skyrocketed. And American workers are ditching their jobs at the highest rate in decades. A recent study of more than 5,400 Finnish workers put the blame on office lockdowns: “The longer employees were apart from one another during the pandemic, the more their faith in colleagues fell.” The absence of physical contact with co-workers has left us prone to what social scientists call “fundamental attribution error,” in which elaborate narratives get spun in the absence…

When Robert Bly published Iron John: A Book About Men in 1990, he was already a celebrated poet and literary figure. That nonfiction work would transform Bly into something bigger: a household name. Drawing on myths, ancient religions, and Jungian psychology, he argued that modern men, lacking rites of initiation into manhood and guidance from absent fathers, had become feminized and needed to reconnect with their “interior warrior.” His international best-seller launched a movement that sent scores of men into the woods to bang on drums and dance around fires. The movement prompted many a wisecrack and backlash from feminists who called it regressive, but Bly said critics missed the point. “The media reduced it to something ridiculous,” he said. But the “men we saw took a deep interest…

Good week for: Xi Jinping, after the World Health Organization decided to skip the letters “nu” and “xi” in the Greek alphabet and name the new coronavirus variant “Omicron.” A WHO spokesman explained that “nu is too easily confounded with new, and xi was not used because it is a common last name.” Dogs, after researchers at Britain’s University of Liverpool found that many cats exhibit psychopathic traits, including “meanness, disinhibition, pet-unfriendliness, and human-unfriendliness.” Texas, after actor and self-described “philosopher-poet-statesman” Matthew McConaughey announced that after careful consideration, running for Texas governor “is a path that I am choosing not to take at this moment.” McConaughey advised disappointed fans to “just keep living.” Bad week for: Chris Christie, who after a national tour that included interviews on nearly all the major…

Saskatoon, Saskatchewan Canada’s top researcher on indigenous health has been ousted from her government job after her claims to native ancestry were discovered to be fraudulent. Five days after the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. published a lengthy exposé on her background, Carrie Bourassa was suspended from her role as scientific director of the country’s Institute of Indigenous Peoples’ Health. The report found that she was not a member of the Métis nation, as she had said, but the descendant of Russian and East European immigrants. Colleagues began doubting Bourassa in 2019, after she gave a tearful TED talk in which she appeared in full tribal regalia and called herself “Morning Star Bear.” “I was repulsed by how hard she was working to pass herself off as indigenous,” said Winona Wheeler,…

Rod Stewart isn’t shy about discussing his bedroom adventures, said Neil McCormick in The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). At the height of his fame in the 1970s, the British rocker had a string of relationships with beautiful women—including Swedish actress Britt Ekland. “It was a hedonistic era,” he says. “The shagging era!” Now 76, Stewart concedes that his libido “is not quite what it used to be. But I really love women. I loved Marilyn Monroe when I was 8 years old. I used to clip pictures of her out of the newspaper.” He lost his virginity at age 17, to a woman he met in a beer tent at a jazz festival, an encounter that inspired his timeless hit “Maggie May.” Stewart doesn’t care that, in the #MeToo era, tales…

William Saletan Slate.com In an act of “pernicious hypocrisy,” Republican governors have decided to give welfare to “vaccine refusers,” said William Saletan. The same governors in Iowa, Tennessee, Florida, and Kansas who cut unemployment benefits to force workers to get off “the sidelines” now are ensuring payouts to people who lose or can’t find jobs because they refuse Covid vaccines. Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, for example, criticized supplemental unemployment benefits during the pandemic for “paying people to stay home.” He ended those payments last summer. But Lee recently signed legislation that “pays vaccine refusers to stay home.” So did Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who had complained that unemployment benefits created a perverse “incentive structure.” Now he’s signed a law that guarantees those benefits to people who refuse to be vaccinated.…

TURKEY Pia Krishnankutty and Nikhil Rampal ThePrint.in Turkey’s economy is collapsing, and it is one man’s fault, said Pia Krishnankutty and Nikhil Rampal. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan refuses to raise interest rates to tame runaway inflation, claiming against all evidence that high interest rates actually “fuel inflation.” Some experts suspect Erdogan’s religious beliefs are driving this foolishness. Having posed as a moderate to win the prime ministership in 2003, Erdogan turned increasingly authoritarian and Islamist after ascending to the presidency in 2014. Claiming the exclusive power to appoint central bank officers, he fires those who want to raise interest rates. One Istanbul economics professor told us that Erdogan is being guided by an Islamist school of thought that considers high interest rates to be usury, and says faculty in state…

Dave Eggers’ latest novel is “not subtle, and not nuanced, but it is important,” said Eric Ackland in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. In a follow-up to his 2013 best-seller, The Circle, Eggers imagines a tech company, the Every, that has intruded on every aspect of our lives. The book’s heroine, Delaney Wells, has decided to tear the firm down by pitching new apps and services that she expects the public will rebel against. But every time Delaney suggests, say, an app that rates the strengths of every user’s friendships, the public embraces the idea and increases the Every’s power. But for a 577-page novel, “the story is strikingly static, its message so unchanging that a plot never really develops,” said Chelsea Leu in The New York Times. “The problem is that…

Maybe the only thing more surprising than the premise of Claire Oshetsky’s new novel, said Thaisa Frank in the San Francisco Chronicle, is that the project began as a memoir. Chouette, Oshetsky’s debut, relates a fable-like story of a woman who gives birth to an owl and loves the bird despite its foreign way of thinking and behaving. Oshetsky had previously tried writing more directly about raising an autistic daughter but dropped the effort when she decided she was appropriating her daughter’s story. The breakthrough came when a strange opening line popped into Oshetsky’s head: “I dream I’m making tender love to an owl.” The rest of the tale flowed from there. “Once I wrapped this story in a fictional wrapper,” the former journalist says, “I felt free to…

Tick, Tick…Boom! Lin-Manuel Miranda has expanded his repertoire to movie directing with this excellent new biopic of another Broadway prodigy, Jonathan Larson. Andrew Garfield stars as the Rent composer, a frenetic spirit who died of an aneurism the night before his smash hit’s off-Broadway premiere. Netflix Amadeus Tom Hulce played Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as a puerile wild man in the movie that swept the Oscars in 1985. F. Murray Abraham won a Best Actor trophy for his portrayal of a fellow composer enraged by Mozart’s easy brilliance. $4 on demand La Vie en Rose Marion Cotillard won her own Oscar for her work in this 2007 French-language biopic about Edith Piaf, the beloved chanteuse who lived too hard to ever reach 50. $3 on demand Respect Perhaps no Aretha Franklin…

During Hanukkah, the surest route to happiness is really good latkes, says Evan Bloom in Eat Something: A Wise Sons Cookbook (Chronicle Books). In our household, we combine Korean and Jewish tradition with this delicious variety. Kimchi latkes 1 medium yellow onion, peeled and trimmed, with root end intact • 1 lb skin-on russet potatoes, scrubbed • 2 large eggs, lightly beaten • ¼ cup potato starch • ¾ tsp Diamond Crystal kosher salt • ¼ tsp freshly ground black pepper • 4 scallions, thinly sliced, plus more for garnish • 1 cup strained chopped kimchi • soy sauce • vegetable oil, for frying • sesame seeds, for garnish • In a medium bowl, grate onion on the large holes of a box grater. In a second bowl, shred potatoes using…

Anybody who’s been to Chicago knows that our city suffers no shortage of beautiful structures, said Christopher Borrelli in the Chicago Tribune. Even so, the Ugly Buildings walking tour is “the local architecture tour that needed to happen.” If you’ve ever heard all the tour boat guides who praise every eyesore along the downtown riverfront, you’ll know what I mean. “Too much civic pride! What is this, Des Moines?” Mike McMains, a former docent at the Chicago Architecture Foundation, launched his more entertaining tour in August, and he typically begins by asking participants to name a hated building. And then the group is off, passing the Apparel Center (“aggressively bland”), the 1895 home of Harry Caray’s steakhouse (“continuously ugly for 125 years”), and River North (“now I’m going to talk…

Allison Schrager Bloomberg.com President Biden and the Democrats promise that the rich will pay for their new spending, said Allison Schrager, but they have an interesting definition of “rich”: an income of at least $400,000 a year. To most Americans, that certainly sounds like “rich.” After all, a household earning $200,000 is in the top 10 percent. But that same household with three children in a coastal city might feel more financial stress than a single person in Boise, Idaho, earning $50,000. And one year of income shouldn’t define you as wealthy. One study found that “36 percent of Americans will earn in the top 5 percent of income (roughly $250,000) at least one year of their life.” But just 3.7 percent of Americans earn $250,000 or more for 10…