Innehållsförteckning för February 11, 2022 från The Week Magazine

Let’s be honest with ourselves: A censor lurks in all of us. When we encounter ideas and arguments that we believe are morally and factually wrong, we instinctively want them banned. When a speaker triggers our visceral disgust, we want him or her silenced, fired, ruined, and perhaps drawn and quartered. These impulses have been given free rein through most of human history, until that radical document, the Constitution, enshrined free speech as a fundamental right. But it’s a right that’s in constant conflict with our passions, and is thus always in danger—never more so than now. With the culture war at a boil, the clamoring for censorship has risen to a din. Books that discuss racism, homosexuality, and even the Holocaust are being banned from schools, and history lessons…

A New York City man has filed a $6 billion class-action suit against the New York Giants and the New York Jets for playing their home games in New Jersey. Abdiell Suero claims that because the two NFL franchises have been sharing a stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., since 1984, millions of New York football fans have suffered “mental and emotional damage, including depression, sadness, and anxiety.” Staff at a Georgia elementary school took down a student’s painting featuring the words “Gay is OK,” likening it to a Nazi flag. The painting was removed from a display of student artwork after a parent complained, prompting a school official to explain that a Nazi flag would get the same treatment. School district officials said they “condemn this comparison.” In other news…

For Terry Bradshaw, playing the clown has been a useful way to hide his inner pain, said Brady Langmann in Esquire. The four-time Super Bowl winner and veteran sportscaster has struggled with crippling depression for most of his life; he once asked a doctor to knock him out for three days just so he could get some respite. Diagnosed with clinical depression in 1999, he says it was a relief to discover that his condition was a disease, that it was different from the black moods that people experience after a crisis. “That’s normal,” says Bradshaw, 73. “I’m talking about just walking around outside, starting to get sick. You get emotional, you get sad, you get sick at your stomach.” Therapy has helped him process his pain, but “I…

Tom Brady announced his retirement this week, saying that at age 44, he no longer could make “that competitive commitment.” The oldest player in the NFL this season, Brady nevertheless led the league in passing touchdowns and yards. He won a record seventh championship last year in his first season with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, following 20 seasons with the New England Patriots, but this year, Brady’s Bucs lost in the playoffs to the Super Bowl–bound Los Angeles Rams. Brady has said in the past he wanted to play until he was 45, but after the season, he spoke about wanting to spend more time with his wife, supermodel Gisele Bundchen, and three children. “It pains [Gisele] to see me get hit out there,” Brady said. “She deserves what…

Sarah Zhang The Atlantic “The coronavirus will surprise us again,” said Sarah Zhang. In the two years since SARS-CoV-2 surfaced, the virus has stunned scientists with its ability to mutate, making “evolutionary leaps like nothing else we’ve seen before.” The Omicron variant contains more than 50 mutations from previous strains; its spike proteins alone hold more than 30. For comparison, “the seasonal flu averages just one or two changes a year in its key protein.” With 30,000 letters in the coronavirus’ genome, “the number of possible mutation combinations is mind-bogglingly huge.” Future strains could become more virulent, or more easily transmitted—or both. They will “definitely alight upon new ways to escape the antibodies we’ve built up,” although it’s “extremely unlikely” our hard-won immunity will be “reset to zero.” With Omicron,…

PERU Ricardo Montero El Peruano It wasn’t until gobs of oil began washing up on beaches near Lima that Peruvians finally recognized we have an oil spill problem, said Ricardo Montero. The government threatened to sanction a subsidiary of Spanish energy giant Repsol in January, after a tanker unloading oil at a refinery was hit by massive waves, dumping 10,000 barrels of oil into the Pacific Ocean. Repsol claims the spill was caused by the eruption of an undersea volcano in Tonga. But we can’t pretend it takes a natural disaster for oil leaks to destroy our environment. A report released last year showed that 474 oil spills occurred in the Peruvian Amazon between 2000 and 2019, enough to fill our 40,000-seat national stadium to the brim more than 200…

(Catapult, $26) Taylor Harris’ new memoir is, at times, “a cascade of late-night and early-morning scares,” said Karen Iris Tucker in The Washington Post. Her son and middle child, Tophs, nearly suffered a seizure as a 22-monthold toddler, and the push to pinpoint the cause of that medical crisis and many others have largely preoccupied Harris and her husband ever since. On that first morning, Tophs woke up in his crib but lay wide-eyed and still. Later, it was determined that his blood sugar had dropped perilously low, yet doctors could discern no known cause. As Harris recounts how she’s lived with this grave new uncertainty, her prose “hugs readers like lifelong confidants, transforming them into innercircle champions of her graceful fight.” Harris often worried that she had contributed…

Michael Schur just can’t stop worrying about how to be a good person, said Stuart Heritage in The Guardian. His obsession prompted him to create The Good Place, the acclaimed sitcom that for four seasons used laughs, an afterlife setting, and wild plot tests to smuggle lessons in moral philosophy onto network TV. But when he reflected on the reading he had done in works by Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, Albert Camus, and other seminal thinkers, he decided that his work wasn’t done. “I realized,” he says, “that this is the most vital writing that’s ever been done by humans, and it’s impenetrable. The way that I started to think of it was like these people were writing recipes for chocolate chip cookies that were delicious and healthy and would…

“Neil Young wasn’t bluffing,” said Ben Sisario in The New York Times. The 76-year-old rocker informed Spotify last week that he wished to have his entire song catalog removed from the streaming service, and within days, the music was gone. Young had written an open letter complaining that Joe Rogan, the freewheeling host of Spotify’s most popular podcast, was spreading false information about vaccines. “They can have Rogan or Young. Not both,” Young wrote. The songwriter, a survivor of childhood polio, was echoing 270 doctors, scientists, and public health experts who had recently condemned The Joe Rogan Experience, charging that the featured guest on a late-December episode had spread falsehoods and conspiracy theories about vaccines. Though Young claims that his decision will cost him 60 percent of his income…

American Rock Stars Not all heroes have abs. Nick Offerman hosts this new four-part docuseries on the U.S. men’s curling team, led by dad-bod captain John Shuster, who in 2018 won gold with a team nicknamed the Rejects. Peacock Ready to Fly Before Lindsey Van, there was no Olympic competition for female ski jumpers such as Anna Hoffmann, America’s sole qualifier for Beijing. This 2013 documentary follows Van and her U.S. teammates when they were fighting to compete in the Games while proving themselves world-class athletes all winter long. Apple TV+ Dear Rider You probably wouldn’t know the names Chloe Kim and Shaun White if not for Jake Burton. This recent documentary captures the allure of snowboarding while profiling the inventor turned manufacturer who practically willed the sport into…

André Leon Talley traveled an unlikely path, from poverty in the Jim Crow south to the peak of influence in the world of haute couture. Once dubbed the Pharaoh of Fabulosity, he was best known as the first Black creative director of Vogue, a post he held from 1988 to 1995. But that title only hinted at his influence in the fashion world, where his roles included confidant to designers like Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld and style consultant to first ladies Michelle Obama and Melania Trump. Elegant and erudite, the towering Talley, who stood 6-foot-6, was a ubiquitous presence by the catwalk and on the red carpet. Swaddled in capes, furs, and silk caftans, he was typically “the only Black man among a sea of white titans…

Janis Ian was partying with legends before she could legally buy a drink, said Sarfraz Manzoor in The Guardian (U.K.). Born in New Jersey to leftist parents on the FBI watch list, Ian wrote her first songs at age 12, signed a recording contract at 13, and at 16 in 1967 scored her first hit with “Society’s Child,” a folk-pop number about an interracial relationship. The singer-songwriter was soon club-hopping with Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Nina Simone; James Brown and Leonard Cohen hired the teenager to sing backing vocals; and Salvador Dalí offered to paint her portrait for an album cover. Surprisingly, Hendrix—who was nine years her senior—was a responsible influence. “I really wanted to try cocaine,” says Ian, now 70, “but Jimi was way against it because he…

Bruce Ackerman and Gerard Magliocca Politico If Donald Trump does run for president in 2024, said Bruce Ackerman and Gerard Magliocca, it “will provoke a genuine constitutional crisis” that will make January 2021 seem tame. The “disqualification clause” of the 14th Amendment expressly bars any person from holding office if he “engaged in insurrection.” Democrats are already exploring using this clause to bar Trump from running again. Under our election laws, every state would have to decide whether to bar Trump from being on the ballot, and inevitably, more-liberal states would disqualify Trump, while conservative states would insist Trump did not engage in an insurrection. Trump is likely to promote a stand-in candidate in the blue states, but with three candidates in the race, none may win the necessary 270…

SPAIN Irene Lozano El Diario Spain’s older people have had it with banks that try to force them to adopt digital technology, said Irene Lozano. In many village banks, a live human is available only a few hours a day, leaving no option for customers but ATMs or smartphone apps. Now Valencia resident Carlos San Juan de Laorden, 78, is calling for banks to provide “humane treatment” to the elderly by maintaining in-person services. “It makes me very sad that the banks have forgotten older people like me,” he said. He’s not alone: My own mother was outraged when she went to the bank to withdraw cash and was patronizingly pointed to the ATM outside the door. No wonder nearly 500,000 other Spaniards angered by “digital exclusion” have signed San…

It looks like it’s “game over” for affirmative action, said Paul Butler in The Washington Post. The Supreme Court announced last week that it will review two cases challenging the use of race as a factor in college admission decisions, specifically at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. Chief Justice John Roberts and his five conservative colleagues have made it clear they see affirmative action as discriminatory, but policies helping underrepresented minorities secure places at top schools have been among “the most successful racial justice interventions” of the past 50 years. “I got into Yale University and then Harvard Law School because of affirmative action,” and because of those opportunities, I am now a law professor at Georgetown University. Banning affirmative action would be disastrous for Blacks and…

The web’s least-useful protection The last time a cookie consent window appeared on a website, did you actually think for more than five seconds before you clicked “accept”? asked Joe Nocera in The New York Times. “Me neither.” Four years after the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation went into effect, “the proliferation of cookie banners has both numbed people to their purpose and given companies yet another way to manipulate users.” The law required that any website that is accessible in Europe—which covers almost all commercial sites—must post a privacy policy and give people “an opportunity to accept or reject cookies,” which websites use to track our data. But companies, including specialists devoted to “consent rate optimization” have found ways, such as eliminating a simple opt-out button, to get…

Maeve Higgins’ new essay collection, Tell Everyone on This Train I Love Them, offers her outsider’s perspective on life in America. Below, the Irish-born, New York City–based comedian and columnist recommends other funny books about serious matters. S.J. Perelman: Writings (2021). This goofy man was resolute in his dedication to jokes, bits, and general chaos. He wrote for the Marx Brothers and The New Yorker in its laugh-outloud humor heyday, and this collection captures his spirit beautifully. The Possessed by Elif Batuman (2010). As you’d hope from a book that literally follows in the footsteps of the saddest and funniest writers ever to live, The Possessed will make you laugh and cry. It’s the nonfiction account of a possible murder on Leo Tolstoy’s estate; the retracing of Alexander Pushkin’s wanderings in…

The “modern sherry renaissance” is in full flower, said Zachary Sussman in Punch. Since about 2005, independent producers in Jerez, Spain, have been releasing cult-worthy editions of the ancient fortified wine, and sherry’s aging process makes possible a “potentially infinite range of styles.” Buelan Compañía de Sacas Las Canciones No. 1 Mirador Manzanilla ($20). This textbook manzanilla offers “crisp acidity, marine intensity, and a floral aspect that dissolves into ripe pear.” Sacristía AB Manzanilla Saca ($50). “A tour de force of all things savory,” including pine resin and sea salt, this bottle “should be approached as graduate-level sherry study.” Equipo Navazos La Bota de Manzanilla Pasada No. 90 Capataz Cabo ($59). A manzanilla pasada like this one finds sherry at an aging inflection point, blending freshness with “softer, umami-like…

“You can have your Palm Springs domestic or wild,” said Brendan Kiley in The Seattle Times. The desert resort town in Southern California may seem to be all about sipping cucumber water poolside. But when you tire of that scene, adventurous day trips await. Fifty miles north stands a white domed structure, called the Integratron, that was completed in the 1970s by a man who claimed the plans were supplied by visitors from Venus. But you can dismiss that claim and still enjoy the “acoustically amazing” structure and a New Age “sound bath” provided by a musician playing 20 crystal bowls. Closer to Palm Springs, you can wander a “soul-stirring” 10-acre art park created by artist Noah Purifoy. Walking among his scrap sculptures is “like an unguided tour through someone…

Media power broker Jeff Zucker resigned from his positions atop CNN and WarnerMedia this week after revealing a romantic relationship with another executive who once served as communications director to ex–New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, said Dan Mangan and Alex Sherman in CNBC.com. Zucker, 56, said that he failed to disclose the relationship, with CNN marketing head Allison Gollust, but it was revealed “during a network investigation into the conduct” of former CNN anchor Chris Cuomo. Gollust worked for former Gov. Cuomo, Chris Cuomo’s brother, in 2013. Zucker and Gollust both obtained divorces several years ago, and their relationship was the subject of rumors for years. Zucker’s sudden resignation reportedly left CNN staff “in shock.” Alphabet: A 20-1 stock split after strong earnings Google parent Alphabet announced a 20-to-1…

AI fails its job interview Robot interviewers are producing robotic job candidates, said Zahira Jaser in Harvard Business Review. A growing number of employers are using automated video interviews, in which job candidates “record themselves on an interview platform, answering questions under time pressure.” The video then gets assessed based on visual, verbal, and/or vocal cues. Our research suggests job seekers’ experience with these AI-based interviews was poor. Most candidates didn’t understand the technology and “felt that they had to behave like robots” in order to pass the interview. The AI experience was especially difficult for young job seekers from less-privileged backgrounds, but for all kinds of applicants, trying to appeal to a computerized interviewing system was exhausting “both emotionally and cognitively.” Getting rid of unfair fees The federal…

Ted Gioia The Atlantic The music industry is at risk of dying because it has lost interest in new music, said Ted Gioia. “Old songs now represent 70 percent of the U.S. music market, according to the latest numbers from MRC Data, a music-analytics firm.” There is a feeding frenzy among investment firms “bidding to buy publishing catalogs from aging stars.” Lots of people—especially Baby Boomers—like to tell me that this is the result of lousy new songs. But the issue isn’t a lack of talent. It’s that “the people running the music business have lost confidence” in their ability to break through and now ignore anything that feels radical or new. While the streaming business is growing, “the new-music market is actually shrinking,” and the algorithms curating music on…

Howard Hesseman brought hippie culture into American living rooms. On the 1978–82 sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati, the actor personified groovy with his portrayal of radio disc jockey Dr. Johnny Fever, a shaggy renegade with a handlebar mustache. Fever loathed disco, loved rock, and—to the unease of network executives—clearly indulged in booze and pot. Screenwriter Hugh Wilson based the character on a DJ he knew who never let his predawn slot keep him from all-night benders. But Hesseman, also a former DJ, made the part his own. “You got Johnny, Dr. Johnny Fever, and I am burning up in here,” he bellowed to listeners in the first episode. “We’re all in critical condition, babies, but you can tell me where it hurts because I got the healing prescription here.” The…

Shefali Luthra of The 19th spoke to people around the country to find personal narratives of life before Roe v. Wade, when getting an abortion meant pursuing shadowy connections, and enduring pain and extreme risk. This year marks the 49th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, the landmark ruling that guaranteed the right to an abortion. It could very well not reach a 50th anniversary before it is overturned. During oral arguments for Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization last year, a majority of the court appeared ready to overturn Roe v. Wade, allowing states to ban abortion entirely. A decision is expected this summer. Such a reversal would be historic. Prior to Roe v. Wade, people seeking abortions were forced to find clandestine clinics, borrow…

Good week for: Josh Wardle, a Brooklyn software engineer, who sold his wildly popular online word game, Wordle, to The New York Times for more than $1 million. “I’d be lying if I said this hasn’t been a little overwhelming,” said Wardle, who created the game in October. The Washington Football Team, which dropped “Redskins” nearly two years ago over complaints it was racially insensitive, finally announced its new name: the Washington Commanders. Arts and crafts, with a report that many of the White House documents obtained by the House committee investigating Jan. 6 had been torn up by former President Trump and taped back together. Trump reportedly had a habit of ripping up internal documents in defiance of the Presidential Records Act. Bad week for: Whoopi Goldberg, who was…

In the 1980s and ’90s, Paulina Porizkova was one of the world’s top supermodels, said Harriet Walker in The Times (U.K.). But today, at age 56 and still gorgeous by any reasonable standard, she struggles to attract attention. “I am completely invisible,” she says. “I walk into a party, try to flirt with guys, and they will just walk away from me mid-sentence to pursue someone 20 years younger.” Porizkova felt the power of her beauty begin to fade around the time that her marriage to Cars frontman Ric Ocasek, whom she split from in 2017, fell apart. Ocasek, who died in 2019, treated her more like a “trophy” than a partner, she says. “When you are a treasured possession, as opposed to a person who is loved, you…

Fred Kaplan Slate No wonder Joe Biden is “finding it hard, if not impossible, to set a foreign policy agenda,” said Fred Kaplan. The world has become “simply too chaotic” for any American president to control, leaving Biden, like his recent predecessors, reacting to a series of insoluble crises and trying to minimize damage. This year has already seen North Korea launch a half-dozen supersonic missiles, Iran balk at conditions for reviving its nuclear deal with the West, a revived ISIS attack a prison in Syria, and Russia mass troops and tanks at the Ukrainian border. Foreign policy wasn’t always this complex: During the Cold War, “nearly every regional and global problem was somehow tied to the bipolar U.S.-USSR standoff.” Now the world is fragmented, unstable, and multipolar, with various…

“The pandemic has forced us to see, even for a moment, the vast inequalities in our society, which has always been built on the backs of the people who are now breaking: meatpackers, low-wage workers, nurses, doctors, mothers. This is a road-to-Damascus moment—when we are forced to see the truth. We all want the world to work better, but we’re finally realizing that it’s always been broken. Maybe this is the year we stop trying to get back to normal and acknowledge that what we had before wasn’t—and isn’t—good enough.” Lyz Lenz in The Washington Post…

NETHERLANDS Hanco Jürgens De Volkskrant The mystery of how Anne Frank fell into the hands of the Nazis in occupied Amsterdam has endured for 77 years, said Hanco Jürgens. After spending more than two years hiding in a secret apartment, the Jewish teenager and her family were found by the Nazis in 1944 and sent to concentration camps. Now, a “cold case” team of researchers say they are 85 percent certain that Arnold van den Bergh, a Jewish notary, gave up the Franks to save his own family. They base this claim on algorithms they used to track links among known collaborators and informants, but their actual evidence is “paper-thin.” The case rests on little more than an “anonymous note”—which could have been written “by anyone for any reason”—delivered after…

INDIA Hrishika Jain & Kaustubh Chaturvedi The Wire As a high court in Delhi hears a heated case on marital rape, it will decide whether wives have rights, said Hrishika Jain and Kaustubh Chaturvedi. India has the indignity of being one of the countries in which a husband cannot be prosecuted for sexually assaulting his wife. The court will soon determine whether to eliminate that “marital rape exemption” to India’s rape laws, which were reformed after a brutal gang rape and murder in 2012 shocked the world. In response, some Indian men are threatening to go on a “marriage strike,” complaining on social media that criminalizing marital rape would make marriage dangerous and brand ordinary husbands rapists. It should be obvious that such a fear is unfounded, but the court…

“My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.”Archbishop Desmond Tutu, quoted in the Bartlesville, Okla., Examiner-Enterprise “Smiling doesn’t win you gold medals.”Simone Biles, quoted in The Guardian “If a man does not know to what port he is steering, no wind is favorable to him.”Ancient Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger, quoted in the Lock Haven, Pa., Express “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”James Baldwin, quoted in The New York Times “Nothing burns like the cold.”George R.R. Martin, quoted in the Montreal Gazette “The fact that questions of justice seem an inconvenient line of speculation for so many adults cannot go unnoticed by children.”Zadie Smith, quoted in The New Yorker “Only intuition…

Older Americans regularly exposed to even low levels of pollution face a greater chance of dying early, a major new study has found. Researchers at the Health Effects Institute, which is partly funded by the Environmental Protection Agency, examined health data from 68.5 million Medicare recipients across the U.S. They focused in particular on people living in rural locations and on the health damage caused by PM 2.5, a form of particulate matter found in everything from smokestacks to car exhaust. The damage was measurable: As many as 143,000 early deaths could have been prevented between 2006 and 2016 if the national standard for PM 2.5 pollution had been set at 10 micrograms per cubic meter rather than 12 micrograms. Exposure to tiny particulate matter has long been linked…

(Riverhead, $35) Olga Tokarczuk, winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in literature, “can be very funny,” said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. In this 1,000-page novel newly translated from Polish, she retells the story of a self-proclaimed real-life 18th-century Jewish messiah, presenting him as so virile that he had two penises and could lay hands on a hen and cause it to lay eggs with three yolks. “Chaucerian in its brio,” The Books of Jacob is “an overwhelming, vastly eccentric novel” that travels the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires with Jacob, mixing dark drama and sharp satire. And because it’s so dense, “I’m glad to have had the experience—and equally glad that it’s over.” Given what’s known about Jacob Frank, “it would be easy to portray him as a…

Worn by Sofi Thanhauser (Pantheon, $30) We should all think harder about the clothes we choose, said Moira Hodgson in The Wall Street Journal. Sofi Thanhauser’s “admirable, meticulously researched” book looks at the history of five fabrics—linen, cotton, silk, synthetics, and wool—to explore how the clothing we wear impacts the environment, politics, “even our ethics.” Thanhauser is highly critical of a global fashion industry that has flooded the world with disposable mass-produced clothing, and though her book becomes “a bit of a jeremiad,” it “makes us pay attention.” Seven Games by Oliver Roeder (Norton, $27) Each of the seven main stories Oliver Roeder tells in this book “reads like a tragedy,” said Peter Sagal in The New York Times. Humans love to play games, and love to believe that checkers,…

Tesla saw its profits leap sixfold in the fourth quarter compared with a year ago, bringing in $5.5 billion, the highest total in its 19-year history. The company, which became profitable for the full year for the first time in 2021, ended the year with $17.5 billion in cash on hand. The New York Times It took nearly $2 billion in public incentives for Intel to commit to building a massive chip factory in Ohio. The package includes $600 million in cash, $691 million in infrastructure spending, and $650 million in job-creation tax credits. Axios Kim Kardashian’s underwear label, Skims, doubled its valuation to $3.2 billion from just nine months ago after raising another $240 million in financing. Kardashian remains the largest individual shareholder of the company, which is expected…

An estimated 1.7 million children experience homelessness in the United States each year. Reaching those children and getting them off the streets is the mission of national nonprofit StandUp for Kids (standupforkids.org). The organization trains volunteers to connect with unaccompanied homeless and at-risk youth—including young parents with children of their own—and get them the help they need. StandUp also runs outreach centers and provides mentoring, educational, and counseling services. It aims to end the cycle of homelessness by providing services to young people until the age of 25, helping them transition into adulthood with access to stable housing and career opportunities. The Decatur, Ga.–based organization has 20 chapters in cities across the country, with many outreach programs focused on homeless LGBTQ youth. Each charity we feature has earned a…

Allysia Finley The Wall Street Journal Operation Warp Speed was so successful that even some progressives are now asking if it can be applied to other technologies, said Allysia Finley. But first, we need to ask why it took so long for the Biden administration to acknowledge the value of the OWS strategy. In past crises, such as the Ebola outbreak of 2014, drugmakers got burned developing vaccines and treatments that turned out not to be needed. The Trump administration’s plan for Operation Warp Speed “shifted the financial risk to the government by placing orders for vaccines and therapies before they were authorized by the Food and Drug Administration,” incentivizing the companies to move ahead without waiting for the FDA’s green light. This approach delivered three Covid-19 vaccines and two…

Dr. Jeremiah Stamler helped spread the word that heart attacks and strokes weren’t simply the result of bad genes and rotten luck. Beginning in the 1950s, Stamler’s research identified risk factors linked to heart disease, including smoking, eating too much salty and fatty food, and not exercising enough. Obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol were also tied to cardiovascular problems, Stamler found over six decades working at Northwestern University. The American Heart Association adopted his standards for cardiovascular health, and today his advice is commonplace. In health research, people doubt your theories at first, he said. Then, after years of studies, “they’ll say, ‘I knew it all the time.’” Stamler was born in Brooklyn to a dentist father and teacher mother who had immigrated from Russia, said The…

This week’s question: Cold weather has compelled the National Weather Service to warn Floridians to watch out for cold-stunned iguanas, which have been tumbling from trees. If you were to design a road sign warning of the danger of falling, frozen reptiles, what would it say? Last week’s contest: A Canadian woman took a moment to snap some selfies as her car began sinking through ice on a frozen river and rescuers struggled to save her. In seven words or fewer, write a caption for her dramatic photo. THE WINNER: “Free car—but hurry!” Cary Wiger, New Albany, Ind. SECOND PLACE: “On Unfrozen Pond” Karen Stewart, New Wilmington, Pa. THIRD PLACE: “I have an insurance question” Mark A. Chmelewski, Ellensburg, Wash. For runners-up and complete contest rules, please go to theweek.com/contest.…