Innehållsförteckning för January 28, 2022 från The Week Magazine

Two years after Covid began spreading through humanity, we are still adapting to SARS-CoV-2, and it is still adapting to us. It’s a Darwinian struggle, fought on the battlefield of natural selection, with immunity conferred by vaccination and infection competing against the random mutations that enable the coronavirus to shape-shift, become fitter, and launch new waves of attack. Will the Omicron wave—now starting to subside on the East Coast, as it previously did in South Africa and the U.K.—be the last big one, with Covid soon becoming a milder disease we can live with? Scientists have varying opinions—but the truth is, no one knows. There are so many variables involved: vaccination and booster rates, human behavior (Do people abandon all precautions too quickly?), and whether a new variant emerges that’s…

Adrian Ballinger and Emily Harrington met on Mount Everest and share a mutual love for death-defying climbs. So when Harrington, a rock climber, and Ballinger, a mountaineer, planned their wedding, they invited guests on a nine-day hike to the summit of Cotopaxi, a 19,347-foot volcano in Ecuador. They didn’t expect many friends to join, but 42 people ultimately accompanied them on the climb. The couple then tied the knot with a beach wedding at Ayampe, Ecuador, where they got matching tattoos depicting Cotopaxi and Ayampe. When Patrick Mitchell, 72, was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer last year, his daughter, Vanessa Mitchell-Delmotte, knew he would want to live every moment to the fullest. So she posted to a local Facebook group in Coronado, Calif., where her parents live, asking for…

A Mississippi middle school has scrapped plans to give female students constricting “shapewear.” In a letter to parents, Southaven Middle School officials said that to help girls cope with “unrealistic social and cultural beauty ideals,” they’d be given form-flattering undergarments such as Spanx. After an uproar, officials conceded they now see how the offer caused “serious concern from parents.” The medical director of the Orange County, Fla., department of health has been suspended by the state for encouraging, but not requiring, staff to get vaccinated. In an email to employees, Dr. Raul Pino said people in “public health” should follow their own advice on vaccines. The DOH put Pino on “administrative leave,” explaining that “the decision to get vaccinated is a personal choice.” In other news Trump tried to interfere…

Belgrade, Serbia Novak Djokovic was greeted by flag-waving fans when he arrived home in Serbia this week, after the unvaccinated tennis star was deemed a public health risk by the Australian government and deported from the country. The men’s tennis No. 1 landed in Melbourne earlier this month with hopes of winning his 10th Australian Open, but was detained by immigration officials who said he’d breached the country’s Covid requirements. A judge ordered him released, but four days later his visa was revoked on the grounds that his presence in the country might spark anti-vaccine sentiment and “civil unrest.” Djokovic has been banned from Australia for three years, and because France’s vaccine mandate has no exemptions for athletes, it appears he won’t be able to defend his French…

Ryan Seacrest is starting to understand the downsides to his relentless work ethic, said Andrew Goldman in The Wall Street Journal Magazine. Five mornings a week, Seacrest, 47, co-hosts ABC’s Live, then sprints down a flight of stairs to broadcast his four-hour syndicated radio show. He also finds time to tape a Top 40 show, host American Idol, and executive-produce the many Kardashian spin-offs. He’s approaching billionaire status, but that’s come at a cost. “In my 30s, I did not socialize as much as I wanted to. I missed Thanksgivings. I never was at Christmas.” During a live Idol last May, Seacrest appeared to have trouble reading the teleprompter, his voice slurred, and his right eye drooped, sparking speculation he’d suffered a stroke. He won’t comment on that, but…

Leana Wen The Washington Post Many pandemic-fatigued Americans are asking the same question, said Dr. Leana Wen: If fast-spreading Omicron appears to produce milder illness than previous Covid variants in vaccinated people, “why not get it over with?” But inviting the virus to infect you remains a bad idea. Despite the lower rate of hospitalization caused by Omicron, “the sheer volume of infections is once again overwhelming our hospitals,” and if you require emergency treatment, your wait for a bed might take days. Even “mild” illness can be fairly miserable, and include more than a week of high fever, extreme fatigue, sore throat, and persistent headache. And studies indicate that all Covid infections—even mild ones—carry the risk of long Covid, with 1 in 10 patients suffering debilitating fatigue and impaired…

“There are literally two Americas. One America is flowing with the milk of prosperity. There is another America, and that other America has a daily ugliness about it that transforms the buoyancy of hope into the fatigue of despair. In that other America, millions of people find themselves forced to live in inadequate, substandard, and often dilapidated housing conditions. In this other America, thousands, yea, even millions, of young people are forced to attend inadequate, inferior, quality-less schools. With the black man, it’s ‘welfare,’ with the whites, it’s ‘subsidies.’ This country has socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the poor.” The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., quoted in the Miami Herald…

ROMANIA Madalin Hodor Revista 22 Could a party of racist extremists win Romania’s next election? asked Madalin Hodor. The Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR) is an ugly nationalist outfit that mixes “militant anti-Europeanism and anti-Semitism,” and simultaneously combines rabid anti-communism with overt nostalgia for the brutal Communist regime of executed dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. Just like far-right zealots in the U.S., when AUR stalwarts are called out on their bigotry, they pretend to be merely mocking political correctness. But “this is not a joke, and it’s not to be ignored.” Founded in 2019, the AUR took 9 percent of the vote in the following year’s legislative election; it is now polling at about 17 percent, making it the second most popular party after the ruling Social Democrats. Its leaders…

CANADA Stephen Marche The Globe and Mail Canada will soon have to grapple with the total implosion of the large democracy to our south, said Stephen Marche. Like the coyote in the old Road Runner cartoons, American democracy “ran off a cliff” sometime in the middle of the past decade, and when it eventually looks down, it will plunge to its doom. Most Canadians haven’t yet grasped what has happened: For most of our lives, we were the country threatening to split apart, thanks to the separatist aspirations of French-speaking Quebec, while the U.S. was the world’s model of stability. Now, for the U.S., “the question is how, not if, the republic will end.” War? Secession? A military coup? Or, more likely, the Republicans will simply declare themselves winners of…

The Supreme Court has embraced “the right-wing crusade against vaccination,” said Adam Serwer in The Atlantic. In an “alarming” ruling, six conservative justices blocked the Biden administration’s mandate that large companies require their workers to be vaccinated against Covid-19 or tested regularly. The conservative majority described safe, simple vaccinations in the “melodramatic and overwrought” language of Fox News talking heads, portraying the shots as possibly dangerous and mandates as tyrannical. To rationalize their claim that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration had exceeded its authority, said Mark Joseph Stern in Slate, the activist conservatives had to ignore “the plain text of the law” defining OSHA’s duties. They “invented” a distinction between the agency’s authority over “hazards that occur solely in the workplace” and those that occur in and out of…

After nearly two years of the pandemic, “American society is fraying at the seams,” said Matthew Yglesias in his Substack newsletter. An “underdiscussed” impact of life amid Covid is that “everyone is getting a bit more deranged,” and that we’re confronting a “broad rise in aggressive and antisocial behavior.” We see it in the documented surge of reckless and inebriated driving; in the “shocking” spike in air-rage incidents; in attacks on health-care workers and school-board officials; and in students lashing out at teachers, trashing bathrooms, and getting into fights. Workers who face the public say Americans are “devolving into children,” said Sarah Lyall in The New York Times. They’re screaming at waiters, throwing tantrums over sold-out items, and “knocking out flight attendants’ teeth.” People are “so wound up with worry…

Scams overrun the App Store “The App Store is a total mess,” said Jason Cross in Macworld. Take what’s been happening with Wordle, the free word-play game that everyone’s talking about. The real Wordle is “only available on the web.” But several hucksters “decided to copy it entirely, including the name, and sell it on the App Store.” Some charge a subscription fee. Such copycat apps have been a problem for years. You can’t even rely on the first search result being authentic—Apple once sold an ad to a Samsung app knockoff with a $30 subscription fee. Fixing these problems with “a dedicated team to find fakes and trademark infringement” isn’t hard. But one wonders if Apple’s 30 percent cut on in-app purchases reduces its incentive to act. Ransomware raid…

Exposure to high levels of air pollution could make you more likely to catch Covid-19, reports The Times (U.K.). Researchers looked at 62,000 citizens in the northern Italian city of Varese, using study subjects’ addresses to estimate their exposure to fine particulate pollution. They then tracked Covid cases among the group and found that, for every microgram per cubic meter increase in the tiny airborne pollutants, a person’s chance of infection climbed by 5 percent. “Our results imply a higher disease pressure in the most polluted areas,” they concluded, “which already experience a higher burden of non-communicable diseases due to the same exposures.” The researchers say it’s possible that air pollution played no role in the increased infection rate: The correlation may simply be a result of people in…

The phrase “like a fish out of water” may need some updating, reports The Washington Post. In a seemingly bizarre experiment, Israeli researchers have trained goldfish to drive. The mode of transport was a “Fish Operated Vehicle”: a wheeled platform carrying a fish tank. Sensors that detect the fish’s movements were fitted above the water; the vehicle then steered in whichever direction the fish was pointing. To test whether the goldfish could actually navigate, the researchers set up a target that could be seen through the tank’s walls. Hitting the target earned the fish a food-pellet reward. Sure enough, after a few days of training the fish could navigate past walls and other obstacles, and even elude false targets. “The study hints that navigational ability is universal rather than…

(Random House, $27) Kathryn Schulz’s “extraordinary” new memoir “unlocks existential meaning out of the utterly mundane facts of human life,” said Kristen Martin in NPR.org. People find soul mates, as she did. People lose parents as well, as Schulz lost her father five years ago. But the Pulitzer Prize–winning New Yorker writer doesn’t attempt here to render those experiences as high drama. Instead, while writing affectingly about both, she “forces us to sit with that which we ignore in our quotidian lives—the impermanence of everything we love.” A different book could turn such a mission into cause for despair. Lost & Found is “a prod toward amazement.” The author’s father, Isaac Schulz, “seems to have been a warm and fascinating man,” said Alexandra Jacobs in The New York Times. Born…

Noah Hawley is always trying to determine the optimal way to tell a story, said Elizabeth Harris in The New York Times. Best known as the creator of the TV series Fargo and Legion, the 54-year-old New York City native has also directed a Natalie Portman movie and written six novels. “When I have ideas, I think, ‘Well, what is it?’” he says. “‘Is it a show? Is it a movie? Is it a book?’” His goal, he says, is always to surprise, to find ways to “bypass that part of your brain that’s been trained by the thousands of stories that you’ve consumed in your lifetime.” For his ambitious new novel, Anthem, Hawley decided he needed to mix genres, said Ayesha Rascoe in NPR.org. He describes it as…

  2 On FKA Twigs’ uneven new record, “brilliant ideas abound,” said Alexis Petridis in The Guardian. As usual with this artist’s music, oddly intriguing sounds “fly in and out of the mix,” and songs “end up in a completely different place from where they started.” But in her attempt to loosen up after the darkness and heartache of 2019’s Magdalene, the 34-year-old avant-pop artist comes up short on memorable tunes to back up “Tears in the Club,” an advance single that features The Weeknd. She’s calling Caprisongs a mixtape, indicating that it’s a freewheeling affair, but too often she “settles scattered snatches of melodic ideas that might have been more fully developed.” Still, several early tracks live up to Twigs’ promise that this is music to be played…

Ascension The much-discussed rise of China remains an abstraction to many Americans. Jessica Kingdon’s panoramic imagery makes it palpable. Her boundless array of unforgettable images shows a manufacturing and consumer empire mushrooming minute by minute, defining “the Chinese Dream” as it grows. Paramount+ Some Kind of Heaven Lance Oppenheim’s colorful debut film makes a study of the sprawling Disney World for retirees known as the Villages, and with the help of its enthusiasts and malcontents, paints it as a uniquely American nirvana. Hulu The Truffle Hunters A more earthy nirvana is featured in this near-perfect documentary, which follows a group of elderly Italian men who pass their days hunting truffles in the forests of Piedmont. Watching it is like being in an unfurling Renaissance painting. Hulu The Rescue The against-all-odds…

In mid-winter, “cozy suppers are what I crave,” said Aaron Hutcherson in The Washington Post. This simple vegetarian dish hits the spot and comes with a built-in bonus: “It calls only for canned goods and a few other pantry staples, so you won’t need to leave the warmth of your kitchen to make it.” Polenta with chickpeas and tomatoes 2 tbsp olive oil • 1 medium onion, diced • 1 tsp fennel seeds • ½ tsp garlic powder • fine salt and black pepper • 1 (15.5-oz) can chickpeas, drained and rinsed • 1 (14.5-oz) can diced fire-roasted tomatoes • 4 cups water or unsalted or low-sodium vegetable stock • 1 cup medium or stone-ground cornmeal • 4 tbsp unsalted butter, cut into 4 pieces • In a medium skillet…

Unlike smaller Caribbean islands, Puerto Rico offers easy escape from the cruise-ship crowds, said Anna Mazurek in The Washington Post. During a recent visit, I fled San Juan after a few days in search of secluded beaches, and found many as I drove up the island’s hilly but always sunny west coast. My road trip began at Los Morrillos lighthouse, perched on a high cliff above La Playuela, “a crescent-shaped beach that belongs in a Jimmy Buffett song.” Nearby, I learned about the area’s history of salt mining at Cabo Rojo Salt Flats—part of a wildlife refuge with hiking trails. Three miles of seaside seafood restaurants known as the Gourmet Golden Mile beckoned me farther north, as did Rincón, a surf haven where huge waves crashed off of Domes Beach.…

The Boca Raton Boca Raton, Fla. “Boca Raton is under going a makeover,” said David Lyons in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. New shops, restaurants, and high-rise condos are cropping up in the “suddenly cool” city, and the crown jewel is a freshly renovated resort that dates from 1926 and was recently purchased by Michael Dell. The Boca Raton is a five-hotel complex anchored by the Cloister, a Spanish colonial–style former Ritz Carlton. A 1930s-style supper club has been added, and buildings that previously catered to business clients have been replaced by an “inner sanctum” of outdoor bars, pools, and other water features. thebocaraton.com; doubles from $585…

Verizon and AT&T agreed to again pause the rollout of their 5G technology near major airports, said David Shepardson in Reuters. The concession this week came after airline executives warned in a letter to the White House that interference with airplane instruments caused by 5G service “could render a significant number of widebody aircraft unusable.” While 5G shouldn’t affect newer equipment, it could interfere with older altimeters, and several foreign carriers have canceled some U.S.-bound flights. Verizon said it would not turn on the 500 towers near airports, “less than 10 percent of their planned deployment.” Global growth: Slowdown hits Chinese economy China’s economic growth slowed significantly in the second half of 2021, said Laura He in CNN.com. The world’s second-largest economy expanded by 8.1 percent last year, “far exceeding…

Are target-date funds too cautious? New research has found that most target-date funds are too conservative, said Mark Hulbert in The Wall Street Journal. Target-date funds let investors to set a theoretical retirement date in the future (say, 2040) and then follow an “algorithm for reducing equity exposure over time.” The intention is to minimize risk as one gets closer to retirement age. But according to researchers at MIT and the University of Illinois, this approach may be too simplified. The researchers built an AI program that considered numerous scenarios, including the potential for market crashes. In a typical target-date fund, equity exposure drops to 50 percent at retirement age, and then falls as low as 30 percent. But the optimal “equity exposure in the researchers’ model never fell below…

Anne Applebaum The Atlantic Winners in the dirty-money economy are creating a lot of losers everywhere else, said Anne Applebaum. Take the fate of the Warren Steel plant in Warren, Ohio, which committed dozens of safety violations before shutting down for good in 2016. It’s no surprise that “the owner was uninterested in the health and safety of his employees.” He was a Ukrainian oligarch named Ihor Kolomoisky, who bought Warren Steel and roughly a dozen other U.S. entities “as part of a money-laundering operation” with the help of shell companies formed “by American frontmen.” An investment in a Rust Belt factory might “make no sense to ordinary businesspeople.” But it makes sense “within the arcane world of international kleptocracy.” In this “alternate universe,” shell companies and funds based in…

In October 1942, Charles McGee reported for training in Tuskegee, Ala., where the U.S. Army Air Corps had created the first all-Black aviation unit. The prevailing opinion at the time, McGee later wrote, “was that Blacks did not possess the intelligence or courage to be military pilots.” As one of the now-legendary Tuskegee Airmen, McGee helped demolish that misconception. With the all-Black 332nd Fighter Group, he flew 136 missions in Europe during World War II, strafing targets and shooting down Nazi planes while accompanying heavy bombers on raids. McGee went on to serve in both the Korean and Vietnam Wars; by the time he retired as a colonel in 1973, he’d logged 409 combat missions, among the most in service history. “You could say that one of the things…

Worried about the state of the world, an increasing number of young women say they don’t want kids, said journalist Suzy Weiss in BariWeiss.Substack.com—and getting The Operation to make sure they never have them. Rachel Diamond looks like most of the moms at the Brooklyn café where we meet. She’s wearing a green T-shirt under a black corduroy jumper, with sensible shoes, and carries a smart leather bag. She sips a $4 iced chai. Except the 31-year-old isn’t a mom. And she never will be. “You know,” Diamond says cheerily, “I never expected to be the poster child of sterilization.” On the aspiring actor’s TikTok, one finds short, funny videos about Diamond’s job working the register at a Manhattan café and updates on her rescue pit bull, Rue, who has…

Florence, Ariz. Former President Donald Trump last week repeated his false claims that the election was stolen from him in a defiant speech widely regarded as the effective launch of his 2024 White House bid. “The real insurrection took place on Election Day, Nov. 3,” Trump told a crowd of 15,000 supporters, although the speech wasn’t heard live by viewers of Fox News. His guests included three House members and several candidates for state office, all of whom endorse Trump’s claims about the 2020 election. Kari Lake, the GOP candidate for governor, told the crowd she wants to imprison Arizona officials who oversaw the 2020 election. Trump incited chants of “Lock him up!” when he attacked Dr. Anthony Fauci, the White House chief medical adviser. He also claimed “the…

Riz Ahmed is one of the most successful British actors of his generation, said Tim Lewis in The Observer (U.K.), and the first Muslim to be nominated for the Best Actor Oscar, for 2020’s Sound of Metal. Yet it was only by chance that he fell into acting. Born in north London to Pakistani parents, he grew up speaking Urdu at home and didn’t learn English until age 6. Five years later he won a scholarship to a prestigious private school, where he struggled to blend in. “I had quite a volcanic energy as a kid,” says Ahmed, 39. During his first week at school he threw a chair through a window. “I was quite lucky that I had some teachers that were like, ‘Right, we’ve got to channel…

Sinéad O’Connor was hospitalized last week after tweeting that she had decided to “follow my son” after the death by suicide of her 17-year-old son, Shane, who reportedly escaped from an Irish treatment facility. “There is no point living without him,” the Irish singer-songwriter, 55, tweeted. “I’ve destroyed my family. My kids don’t want to know me.” She later apologized for the disturbing tweets, writing, “I am lost without my kid and I hate myself.” O’Connor, who has spoken openly about her years of struggles with PTSD and bipolar disorder, co-parented Shane with musician Dónal Lunny, who she said was upset when she tweeted about Shane’s Hindu funeral. Lunny wanted those details to be kept private, she said. “Twitter is for lonely people,” O’Connor wrote. “Monsters like me get…

Max Greenwood The Hill “The long-simmering tensions between former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis are reaching a boiling point,” said Max Greenwood. As DeSantis’ growing popularity among Republicans generates speculation about a 2024 presidential run, Trump’s simmering anger about his former protégé has burst into open confrontation. Trump recently derided Republican officials who don’t admit they’ve had a booster shot as “gutless”—an obvious shot at DeSantis. That prompted DeSantis to complain in an interview about Trump’s handling of Covid in the early phase of the pandemic, saying “locking down the country” was a big mistake. Angry that DeSantis won’t rule out running in 2024, the former president reportedly has been dismissing him as an ingrate who “has no personal charisma and has a dull personality.” In polls…

A woman in Zhengzhou, China, went to a man’s house for a blind date but found herself stuck there for days when the area went into a sudden Covid lockdown. “Because we don’t know each other very well, it was not so convenient,” said the woman, identified only as Ms. Wang, in a series of videos posted to a Chinese social media site. The man was as “mute as a wooden mannequin,” and his food was “mediocre,” reported the woman, after four days of enforced togetherness. But “he’s still willing to cook, which I think is great.” A man’s failure to tip a bartender led to his arrest in the burning of a Key West, Fla., landmark. Cameron Briody, a bartender at Irish Kevin’s, said a 21-year-old man made an…

PAKISTAN Kamila Hyat The News International Why isn’t Pakistan a big international tourism draw? asked Kamila Hyat. With our mountain landscapes and ancient mosques, we have “more beautiful scenery” than many other Muslim countries. Yet we don’t encourage visitors to come here and spend money. Part of the problem is a failure of infrastructure. We haven’t invested in the necessary roads and hotels, and where we do have vacationers, we don’t take care of them. At least 23 Pakistani tourists froze to death while trying to reach the scenic mountain town of Murree last week, all because authorities failed to warn them of an approaching blizzard. But mostly what’s holding us back is our own hang-ups. So much of what foreigners might want to do—listen to music or drink…

On average at least one child is shot every hour of every day in the U.S. More than 2,200 American kids were killed by guns in 2020, by far the highest number in 20 years, and 2021’s death toll is expected to be worse.The Washington Post Billionaires’ total wealth rose by $5 trillion between March 2020 and November 2021, according to a new Oxfam report—a bigger increase than in the previous 14 years combined. The wealth of the world’s 10 richest people is now six times higher than that of the world’s poorest 3.1 billion people.CNN Melania Trump is auctioning off the hat she wore during a 2018 event at the White House for personal profit, an unprecedented action for a former first lady. The white, wide-brimmed crepe hat is…

“You don’t have to become something you’re not to be better than you were.”Sidney Poitier, quoted in Ebony “Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”T.S. Eliot, quoted in the Lock Haven, Pa., Express “It is worth living long enough to outlast whatever sense of grievance you may acquire.”Author Marilynne Robinson, quoted in the Pittsburgh City Paper “Subjectivity is just objectivity waiting for data.”Author Dave Eggers, quoted in the Financial Times “I’m afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.”Aldous Huxley, quoted in GoodReads.com “Ideas are not always responsible for the people who have them.”Journalist Katharine Whitehorn, quoted in The Times (U.K.) “My health is good; it’s my age that’s bad.”Country music star Roy Acuff, quoted in Forbes.com…

A new—and very strange-looking—keyboard gives users the ability to “type at superhuman speeds,” said Matthew Gault in Vice.com. The CharaChorder looks nothing like the QWERTY keyboard you’re probably used to. On this, your palms “rest on two black divots out of which rise nine different finger-sized joysticks.” Those 18 sticks move in every direction and “can hit every button you need on a regular keyboard” without your fingers ever breaking contact with the device. Expert typists generally work at around 100 words per minute (WPM) on a traditional keyboard. Skilled CharaChorders, however, can achieve up to 500 WPM, typing so fast that they are automatically blocked as cheaters by the website Monkeytype, which hosts typing competitions.…

Dogs know when someone is speaking to them in a foreign language, new research suggests. Hungarian scientists conducted brain scans on 18 dogs: five golden retrievers, six border collies, two Australian shepherds, one labradoodle, one cocker spaniel, and three of mixed breed. During the scans the scientists read sentences from a Hungarian and a Spanish version of the classic children’s book The Little Prince—the dogs had previously heard only one of the languages from their owners—and found that the pooches’ brains lit up differently for each language. The fact that the dogs weren’t responding to familiar words or commands suggests they can recognize their owners’ mother tongue from how it sounds, without the aid of known vocabulary. Older dogs showed a more pronounced reaction to their owner’s language, presumably because…

(Doubleday, $32.50) You have to wonder about Hanya Yanagihara’s enormous following, said Andrea Long Chu in New York magazine. She won her devotees with 2015’s A Little Life, a 700-page novel that has sold 2.5 million copies, was lauded by many critics, and was recently voted one of the 25 best books of the past 125 years by readers of The New York Times. Like her new novel, A Little Life is “a book in which horrible things happen to people for no reason.” Yanagihara, who is also the editor of the Times’ fashion magazine, exhibits “a touristic kind of love for gay men”: She smothered the gay protagonist of her breakthrough with the adulation due a martyr while she simultaneously subjected him to child molestation, and later kidnap, torture,…

Novelist Bernardine Evaristo is the author of Girl, Woman, Other, winner of the 2019 Booker Prize. Her ninth book, and nonfiction debut, is Manifesto, a memoir. Below, she recommends six other books that offer insights on being Black and British. Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging by Afua Hirsch (2018). Exploring her British, Ghanaian, and Jewish heritage in a blend of memoir, history, and social commentary, Hirsch—a phenomenal journalist and broadcaster—writes honestly, wisely, and beautifully about culture and identity and the contradictions inherent in a racially stratified society. Black and British: A Forgotten History by David Olusoga (2016). One of Britain’s leading historians offers a fantastic introduction to the still little-known Black strands of British history, traveling back to the Roman occupation 2,000 years ago. This chunky book is fascinating,…

3   “Sick! is the first Earl Sweatshirt album that doesn’t sound more freaked out and withdrawn than the one that came before,” said Tom Breihan in Stereogum.com. The 27-year-old rapper-producer found fame at 16, but his music grew “weirder and weirder” on his previous two albums. His songs, though still widely admired, became “foggy, atmospheric doubt-trips.” This record is different. “It’s a dense, rich, contemplative piece of work, but it’s also got the snarling self-confidence that one might expect a collection of rap songs to have.” While Earl’s raps are “as thoughtful and tightly coiled as ever,” said Dylan Green in Pitchfork.com, he’s also “clearer and more confident, approaching his past and his future with hope.” He seems as comfortable rapping over Alchemist’s lo-fi horn loop on “Lye”…

Things Fell Apart BBC Podcasts At a time of heated culture wars, Things Fell Apart is here to bring the temperature down, said Daisy Dunn in The Spectator (U.K.). The podcast, hosted by author and journalist Jon Ronson (The Men Who Stare at Goats), “seeks to uncover the unlikely origins of the debates raging today” and unearths “astonishing” stories, such as how a child filmmaker helped launch the U.S. antiabortion movement. “Even the concept of a ‘culture war’ has become ground for controversy, divisiveness, and bad takes,” said Madeleine Finlay in The Guardian. But Ronson is an ideal host, approaching each topic “with empathy and nuance.” As he interviews instigators in the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s or the spread of QAnon conspiracy theories today, “there’s little judgment, endorsement,…

When you shop for wine, “the best values come from discoveries rather than from pursuing the tried-and-true,” said Eric Asimov in The New York Times. The three reds below are standout values, but don’t worry if you can’t find these exact choices. Good merchants can suggest apt substitutes. 2019 Domaine Guion Bourgueil Cuvée Domaine ($15). “This Bourgueil, made of cabernet franc, demonstrates how good a simple wine can be when produced conscientiously.” Think pure red-and dark-fruit flavors, plus a touch of bell pepper. 2020 Ultraviolet California Cabernet Sauvignon ($18). “If you like fruity cabernets, this is an excellent bottle”—“a pure expression of ripe fruit,” yet well balanced. 2020 Ioppa Colline Novaresi Nebbiolo ($18). A perennial personal favorite, this lean Italian nebbiolo is “juicy, fragrant, and easygoing.”…

“All that’s left today is a sign in muted colors and a few crumbling buildings in the old Santa Barbara Mission style,” said Julie Tremaine in SFGate.com. But the Motel Inn was charming once—a place to stop about halfway between L.A. and San Francisco just before your Model T had to climb the steep Cuesta Grade. The man who built it in 1925 wanted to call it the Motor Hotel Inn, but the sign only fit “Mo-Tel Inn” and the local newspaper misspelled that. It’s said that Lucille Ball and Clint Eastwood were guests in later years. No hotel before had let you park right in front of a private room, and this one had orange trees outside the door, plus a popular steak house and bar. The neighboring Apple…

U.S. home sales fell by 11 per cent in December from a year earlier, the biggest decline in 18 months. Prices, however, still jumped 15 percent to a median of $382,900.Bloomberg Netflix raised the cost of its standard plans in the U.S. to $15.49 per month, up from $13.99. The company spent $17 billion on programming in 2021. Reuters 17-year-old Charli D’Amelio earned more last year than the CEOs of Exxon, Starbucks, McDonald’s, and Delta. D’Amelio is TikTok’s No. 1 influencer, with 133 million followers. That translated into $17.5 million worth of brand deals, product promotions, and a clothing line.The Wall Street Journal The spot rate for a 40-foot container to the U.S. from Asia topped $20,000 last year, including surcharges and premiums, up from less than $2,000 a…

Alight (wearealight.org), formerly known as the American Refugee Committee, was founded to help Cambodians escaping from the Khmer Rouge, and for 40 years has worked with survivors of conflicts around the world, in refugee camps and in the United States. Each year, their services reach an estimated 3.5 million people in 17 countries, including Sudan, Somalia, Syria, and Uganda. Alight has worked with Afghan refugees for nearly two decades and has educated a million Afghan children in Pakistan. In the U.S., the organization is now working to resettle families who have escaped the Taliban takeover and are now housed on U.S. military bases. Alight also continues to operate in Southeast Asia, providing health care and education in an ambitious campaign to eradicate malaria. Each charity we feature has earned…

Will Knight Wired Robot leasing could change the calculus for small businesses needing an extra hand, said Will Knight. In Chicago, “Polar Manufacturing has been making metal hinges, locks, and brackets for more than 100 years.” But when the company needed a new worker to lift metal into a press for shaping, it “hired its first robot employee.” The automation was leased from a company called Formic, costing “the equivalent of $8 per hour,” much cheaper than the city’s $15 minimum wage. Jose Figueroa, Polar’s production manager, said at that cost “he’d like to see 25 robots on the line within five years.” That may not mean replacing any of the company’s 70 workers, but Polar might not need to hire new ones for a while. Robotleasing companies see big…

What happened President Biden said this week that he expects Russian President Vladimir Putin will invade Ukraine, even as U.S. officials engaged in frantic diplomatic efforts to avert what could become Europe’s largest conflict since World War II. During a hastily arranged visit to Kyiv, Secretary of State Antony Blinken promised continued U.S. support to the government of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—including $200 million in additional military aid. The meeting, the first in a series of emergency talks with European and Russian officials, came as the Kremlin intensified preparations for a possible invasion. With 100,000 Russian troops already deployed along the Ukrainian border, Moscow sent forces to Belarus—which borders Ukraine—for previously unannounced military drills. Russia is also emptying its embassy in Kyiv and is believed to have been behind…

Good week for: Defying Beijing, after China’s Olympics organizing committee warned foreign athletes they may face “punishment” for speech that violates “Chinese laws and regulations” at the 2022 Winter Games. High-tech solutions, after officials in Sunnyvale, Calif., decided to test green lasers to drive away the thousands of crows that have filled the city’s downtown with cawing and droppings. The lasers are expensive, said Mayor Larry Klein, but “it’s far better than spending hundreds of dollars to spray-wash the sidewalks every few weeks.” Denial, after the Alt Bar pub in Donegal, Ireland, instituted a “Covid Fine Jar” into which any patron who dares speaks the name of the contagious disease currently ravaging humanity must deposit two euros ($2.28). Bad week for: Chamath Palihapitiya, the billionaire co-owner of the Golden State Warriors,…

Paris France implemented a new vaccine mandate this week that bars unvaccinated people ages 16 and over from all restaurants, sports arenas, and cinemas, as well as many planes, trains, and buses. To get a vaccine pass, residents must complete a schedule of Covid shots, and starting Feb. 15 will need a booster four months after their final dose. More than 90 percent of French adults are already fully vaccinated. Possession of a fake vaccine pass will be punished with a $1,100 fine; helping to create a fake vaccine pass can be punished by up to five years in prison and a fine of $85,000. President Emmanuel Macron has said he wants the unvaccinated to experience “a world of crap.” Betting on oil Mexico City Mexico’s national oil company,…

Chloe Sells spent a year as personal assistant to the volatile originator of gonzo journalism, Hunter S. Thompson, said Sean O’Hagan in The Guardian. She landed the job when an older woman, who turned out to be Thompson’s wife, Anita, approached Sells in late 2003 at a bar in Aspen, Colo., and asked, “Are you a night owl?” Sells—who says she was then in her late 20s and “in full rock’n’roll mode, young and bulletproof”—took the gig. Her work hours normally ran from 11 p.m. to dawn, during which she’d prepare dinners for the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas author (a typical request: microwave turkey with soup, chutney, peanut butter, and salsa), read his prose back to him while he shouted instructions (“Louder, slower”), and deal with his explosive…

What motivates mass shooters? The motivations of these killers are often confused, complex, or simply not known. But researchers have found that many mass shooters, who are almost entirely men, are linked by a common thread: a history of misogyny, violence against female partners or family members, or sharing women hating views online. A Bloomberg analysis of 749 mass shootings from 2014 to 2019—incidents in which four or more people were shot and which weren’t identified as gang-related, drug-related, or robberies—found that 60 percent of the attacks were either acts of domestic violence or committed by men with a record of domestic violence. Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people at an Orlando gay nightclub in 2016, beat and strangled his ex-wife during their marriage. Stephen Paddock, who killed 60…

Lincoln Mitchell NBCNews.com Anthony Fauci has finally had enough, said Lincoln Mitchell. The infectious-disease expert who’s advised every president back to Ronald Reagan finally fought back last week against the demagoguery of Sen. Rand Paul, “a leading figure in the Covid-19 denial movement,” who has repeatedly accused the veteran scientist of forcing vaccination and masks on people for no reason—and even of helping Chinese scientists create the coronavirus in a lab. After a disinformation-filled diatribe by Paul during a Senate hearing, an indignant Fauci noted that the senator’s reckless rhetoric “kindles the crazies out there,” and has led to an avalanche of death threats against him and his children. Police recently arrested a California man driving to Washington, D.C., with an AR-15 and lots of ammunition, who told them he…

BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA Editorial Le Monde (France) The flames of Serbian nationalism are once again “smoldering in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” said Le Monde. The U.S-brokered peace deal that ended the Bosnian War in 1995 set up an unwieldy political structure, with the country divided into a Serbian republic and a Croatian–Bosnian Muslim federation. Now the ethnic Serb member of the nation’s tripartite presidency, Milorad Dodik, is threatening to pull his republic from national institutions this summer and to create a separate Bosnian Serb army. He has plenty of support from abroad. A contingent of the Night Wolves, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s favorite motorcycle gang, was in attendance when Dodik defied the Bosnian constitution and marched armed men through the city of Banja Luka on Jan. 9 to celebrate the founding…

Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas, was supposed to have a quiet, largely virtual Sabbath service last weekend, said Eric Levenson in CNN.com. Instead, it became “the center of a global drama,” as a terrorist took four congregants hostage in an 11-hour ordeal that was partially livestreamed to at-home worshippers. Their captor, Malik Faisal Akram, was a Muslim British national who demanded the release from federal prison in Fort Worth of Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani neuroscientist convicted of the attempted murder of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. Some 200 federal and local officers surrounded the synagogue, and after Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker threw a chair at Akram and helped two congregants escape, their captor was shot dead by police. But for American Jews, another assault on a synagogue is a “searing…

Lia Thomas is either the best female college swimmer in the country, or “an affront to the fairness of sports,” said Jenna Stocker in the National Review. Thomas competed on the University of Pennsylvania men’s team for three seasons before transitioning. After hormone replacement therapy, she qualified this season to race against women. Despite seeing her times drop about 5 percent, the 22-year-old is still winning most races by a wide margins and shattering Ivy League women’s records. As a former collegiate swimmer, I can only imagine how demoralized Thomas’ competitors must feel. “There is no chance this year,” a parent of one of Thomas’ teammates said. “They train hard but know that they cannot beat Lia.” We should “respect the new identities” of trans athletes, said Dominic Green…

When it comes to protecting reclusive endangered species, one of the biggest problems faced by conservationists is figuring out exactly where these creatures are living in the wild. Scientists have now devised some innovative tools to do just that by sucking animals’ floating DNA out of the air. So-called environmental DNA, or eDNA, has long been used to track aquatic animals. Two new studies suggest it can also help spot land animals. At Copenhagen Zoo, researchers deployed a vacuum cleaner fitted with a special filter, as well as two smaller samplers, and picked up DNA shed by 49 species, including giraffes and elephants. “We even detected the guppy that was living in the pond in the rain forest house,” lead author Kristine Bohmann tells NPR.org. Meanwhile, researchers at Hamerton…

Last year was Earth’s fifth-hottest on record, according to data gathered by the European Union’s satellite system. The mean global temperature in 2021 was 2 to 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit higher than before the Industrial Revolution, when humans began pumping vast amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. The fact that 2021 wasn’t a record breaker doesn’t mean we can stop worrying about climate change, reports The New York Times. The seven hottest years since 1850 were, by a clear margin, the past seven. And a string of worrying climate records were set in 2021. The U.S. and Europe endured their warmest-ever summers. Canada smashed its maximum-temperature record in June, with the mercury hitting 121.3 degrees Fahrenheit in British Columbia. Higher temperatures around the Arctic also caused it to rain for the…

(Flatiron, $28) Xochitl Gonzalez’s deft debut novel “lures us in with laughter,” said Ron Charles in The Washington Post. Olga Acevedo is a New York City–bred wedding planner to the superwealthy, her brother is a closeted rising congressman, and their mother is a Puerto Rican revolutionary. But after setting up a classic rom-com premise by establishing that Olga, at nearly 40, believes that love has passed her by, Gonzalez keeps us hooked with an “ingenious” plot that stretches the rom-com genre to accommodate a satire of capitalist excess and a tale of family secrets. By the time Hurricane Maria demolishes Puerto Rico late in the book, “Gonzalez has spun all the various personal and political crises of this story into a perfect storm.” Leading up to that point, said Maggie…

The Latinist by Mark Prins (Norton, $27) “Like the classics that inspire it,” Mark Prins’ new novel is “an inventive wedding of the elegant and the barbaric,” said Maureen Corrigan in The Washington Post. Tessa, a Ph.D. candidate in classics, discovers early on that her mentor at Oxford is sabotaging her career because he’s obsessed with her. Prins makes the arcane details of Tessa’s work “not only graspable, but engrossing,” and his superb suspense novel finishes with a metamorphosis “that might have earned the approval of Ovid himself.” Bibliolepsy by Gina Apostol (Soho, $26) A 1997 national book award winner in the Philippines, Gina Apostol’s “audacious” debut novel has finally won U.S. publication, said Idra Novey in The New York Times. Its narrator, Primi, “has a refreshing…

“You thought last year’s Oscars were weird?” said Patrick Ryan in USA Today. The surge in Covid infections caused by the Omicron variant is making a hash of Hollywood’s awards season, forcing postponements of the events that usually build momentum for the movies contending for prizes and keeping ticket-buying moviegoers from joining the ride. With the Golden Globes all but sidelined by past controversies, it had been thought that the Critics’ Choice Movie Awards would kick off televised festivities—until the scheduled Jan. 9 event was pushed back to March 13. Distributors are responding by holding back on the wide release of potential award winners, said Pamela McClintock in The Hollywood Reporter. Best Picture contender Licorice Pizza may not boost its limited screen count until Oscar nominations are announced on Feb.…

  3 “Some youthful pleasures weren’t illusions at all,” said Jon Pareles in The New York Times. More than 30 albums into his career, Elvis Costello and his small backing band—including key personnel who started out with him in 1978—can still deliver a bristling set of rock songs loaded with clever wordplay and intriguing scenarios. Most of the 13 tracks “kick hard and deep,” including “Magnificent Hurt,” a late cut that “harks back to the pounding garagerock and nagging organ of old Costello songs like ‘Pump It Up.’” The Boy Named If “also contains some softer gems that demonstrate the group’s resilient knack for nuance and melody,” said Jordan Blum in Consequence of Sound. “Paint the Red Rose Blue” is a “gorgeous” ballad about a bereft couple who learn…

Kasama Chicago “Kasama was supposed to be a neighborhood café,” said Louisa Chu in the Chicago Tribune, but the pandemic had other plans. By the time co-owners Genie Kwon and Tim Flores had finished adapting, their passion project had evolved to the point that it’s “one of the best restaurants in the world right now.” To be clear, the setting is still modest: a small, painted-brick building with bare wood floors and tables. And each day still begins with the kind of food the pair served for takeout when their modern Filipino bakery-restaurant opened in July 2020. For breakfast: an egg sandwich with house-made longganisa sausage. For lunch: the same longganisa paired with pork adobo on a hero-style roll. The course correction has come at dinnertime, because there had…

Families who ski a few times a year no longer have to break the bank, said Abigail Barronian in Outside. The Indy Pass was introduced in 2019 as an affordable alternative to mega-passes such as Vail’s Epic and Alterra Mountain Co.’s Ikon, which cost more than $800. “It has since grown rapidly.” The $329 Indy Pass ($139 for kids) permits two days of skiing at each of 81 resorts, including properties in the U.S., Canada, and Japan. “The company prioritizes independently owned, small-to-midsize ski areas with a family-oriented vibe, an increasingly rare commodity.” Some are familiar, such as Idaho’s Tamarack Resort and Powder Mountain in Utah, but many may be under your radar. “Each beckons with its own sense of charm—cozy lodges, creaky lifts, and casts of longtime locals.”…

A blockbuster deal for Activision Blizzard this week may be the most ambitious in Microsoft’s history, said Aaron Tilley and Sarah Needleman in The Wall Street Journal. The $70 billion takeover of Activision, the maker of top titles like Call of Duty and Candy Crush, would make Microsoft “the world’s third-largest gaming company by sales,” behind Tencent and Sony. The move is a major advance in the global “race to build out services that will stream high-end games to all kinds of devices the same way movies and TV shows are streamed.” If Microsoft can convert some of Activision’s 400 million monthly users into subscribers to its Game Pass, the company believes its service could become “the Netflix of gaming.” The price tag “only makes sense if Activision gets…

Economists are starting to question whether the Federal Reserve missed its chance to act on inflation, said Christopher Rugaber in the Associated Press. Consumer prices rose 7 percent in the past year, the steepest climb since 1982. The latest U.S. jobs report also “raised alarms,” showing “another sharp drop in the unemployment rate” even as businesses are still reporting a labor shortage. That has forced “an unexpectedly large increase in hourly pay” to attract and retain workers. With no sign of the price crunch easing, inflation has “become the most serious threat to the economy, a growing worry for the financial markets, and a major political problem for the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress.” A “nightmare” threat is becoming real, said Paul La Monica in CNN.com. So far,…

Ronnie Spector’s fortunes soared and fell with the 1960s. She rocketed to fame at the start of the decade as leader of the Ronettes, who with hair teased high, lashings of black eyeliner, and skin-tight dresses became one of the girl-group era’s most iconic acts. The trio—Ronnie, her older sister Estelle Bennett, and their cousin Nedra Talley—scored a string of hits with pop masterpieces such as “Be My Baby” and “Baby, I Love You,” in which Ronnie’s youthful but brass-tinged voice crested over Phil Spector’s swelling “wall of sound” production. She married the producer in 1968 and ended the decade as his virtual prisoner. “He was a brilliant producer, but a lousy husband,” she said of Phil, who was later convicted of murder and died last year. But “I…

Alan Scott never intended to create a wrinkle-relaxing elixir of youth. In the 1960s, the San Francisco ophthalmologist began investigating a deadly toxin produced by the bacterium Clostridium botulinum, wondering if he could harness its muscle-paralyzing properties to treat strabismus, better known as cross-eyes, and blepharospasm, an uncontrollable closure of the eyes. A purified form of the toxin injected into patient’s eye muscles proved effective for both conditions, and in 1991 he sold the drug, named Oculinum, to the company Allergan. By then, eye patients were happily observing how the injections also smoothed nearby wrinkles for several months. Allergan renamed the drug Botox, and a billion-dollar cosmetic industry was born, which Scott called “charming” and “slightly frivolous.” He was born in Berkeley, Calif., to a dentist father and a mother…