Innehållsförteckning för March 4, 2022 från The Week Magazine

Russia just took another bite out of Ukraine by trucking “peacekeepers” into the eastern provinces—a clear act of aggression. (See Main Stories, p. 4.) But to hear Vladimir Putin tell it, it’s always the Russians who are the victim, forever betrayed by the West. The Russian president’s immediate pretext for his escalation was a fictional Ukrainian “genocide” of Russian speakers. The underlying reason, though, was his fury at what he sees as NATO’s breach of promise. Putin purports to believe that German reunification in 1990 came with the understanding that East Germany was the only ex–Warsaw Pact member that would join NATO. The Baltic states’ accession in 2004, he says, was in bad faith, and Ukraine’s would be utter treachery. In the real world, there was no such deal, as…

A woman is suing the city of Lakeway, Texas, claiming officials closed her home day-care center because it annoyed nearby golfers. Bianca King started taking care of kids at her home, with the full approval of state officials, after being laid off during the pandemic. City officials later shut her down, however, after golfers reportedly complained about “noise” and “toys” in King’s yard. An Illinois gunmaker has introduced a version of the AR-15 designed expressly for children. WEE1Tactical says its JR-15 is 20 percent smaller than an adult assault rifle and fires .22 caliber ammunition, less deadly than the .223 rounds that have made AR-15s the weapon of choice for mass shooters. Otherwise, the company boasts, the JR-15 “operates just like Mom and Dad’s gun.” In other news Biden halts…

Jane Lynch is done lying to herself, said Emine Saner in The Guardian (U.K.). The late-blooming actress, 61, spent decades in denial about her alcoholism. As a teenager, Lynch felt ashamed of her attraction to other girls, and took to drinking—something she did almost every day into her 30s. The first time she had a drink, she remembers thinking, “Ah, I found it. I feel happy in my body, this feeling of bliss.” That magic quickly wore off, but Lynch kept chasing it. She worked in theater as a functioning alcoholic, sometimes staying at the bar until 7 a.m., or waking up to find vomit in her bathroom. Then one day she poured her glass of wine down the sink and joined Alcoholics Anonymous. She remained sober until five…

CNN’s claim of being “the most trusted name in news” took yet another blow last week, after chief marketing officer Allison Gollust was forced to resign for violating CNN’s journalism standards. An internal investigation triggered by the firing of former network host Chris Cuomo uncovered a trove of communications between Gollust, 49, and New York’s then–Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Gollust briefly worked as Cuomo’s spokeswoman in 2012 and 2013. In one exchange from March 2020, Cuomo reportedly requested that three topics be covered during his upcoming CNN inter-view, including his conversations with President Trump and the threat of New York being placed under lockdown. “Done,” Gollust replied. CNN President Jeff Zucker also resigned recently after his undisclosed romantic relationship with Gollust came to light. A spokesperson for Gollust said that…

Ruben Navarrette Jr. The Daily Beast If the U.S. really wants to stop illegal immigration, said Ruben Navarrette Jr., “we can’t count on Mexico to be a partner.” Various Mexican presidents have pretended to help the U.S. keep people from streaming across the border, but the Banco de Mexico—the nation’s central bank—recently revealed that in 2021, Mexican migrants sent a staggering $51.6 billion back home to relatives. That’s a jump of 27 percent in a year—during a pandemic in which legal and illegal migrants did “essential” jobs. These remittances have grown from 2 percent of Mexico’s GDP in 2010 to 3.8 percent in 2020. “The river of money” sent home by Mexican farmworkers, construction workers, landscapers, cooks, dishwashers, elder-care workers, and nannies helps keep Mexico’s economy afloat. Their strenuous, low-paid…

ARGENTINA Claudio Fantini Perfil Alberto Fernández must have been “dazzled by the power” of Russia and China on his recent visits, said Claudio Fantini. In Moscow, the Argentinian president bent over backward to please Russian President Vladimir Putin by “insinuating a desire to break with the United States and offering Argentina as ‘Russia’s gateway to Latin America.’” He then swept into Beijing to announce Argentina’s inclusion in China’s Belt and Road Initiative, where—standing right by the site of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre—he proclaimed he “identified with the philosophy of the Chinese Communist Party.” Wiser foreign leaders wooed President Xi Jinping by praising only aspects of the Chinese system, such as its growth. Fernández, though, announced his admiration for a regime that “killed millions of Chinese” during the time of…

“Everybody thinks it’s going to be different for them. The dinosaurs thought so, too.”Novelist Kathryn Davis, quoted in LitHub “An error is always the more dangerous in proportion to the degree of truth which it contains.”Philosopher Henri-Frédéric Amiel, quoted in Forbes “Without optimism, we’ve already failed.”George Takei, quoted in The Washington Post “Being around accomplished people will not make you accomplished yourself, or make anyone take you seriously. You have to do the work.”Candace Bushnell, quoted in The New Yorker “Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.”Karl Popper, quoted in The Sunday Times (U.K.) “We love because it’s the only true adventure.”Poet Nikki Giovanni, quoted in The New York Times “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”Ralph Waldo Emerson,…

Sea levels on America’s coastlines will surge by an average of about 1 foot by 2050, much higher than previously thought, government scientists are warning. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and six other federal agencies say this sharp increase will lead to major Eastern cities being hit by costly “nuisance” floods even on sunny days. “It’s going to be areas that haven’t been flooding that are starting to flood,” co-author William Sweet tells the Associated Press. “Many of our major metropolitan areas on the East Coast are going to be increasingly at risk.” Worst hit will be parts of Louisiana and Texas, where waters are projected to be 18 inches higher; at the other end of the scale, Seattle can expect an increase of about 9 inches. Overall,…

In Sheila Heti’s new novel, Pure Colour, sexual metaphor is invoked regularly as the protagonist, a woman in mourning, fashions a personal theology. Below, the author of How Should a Person Be? offers a critical survey of sex in American literature. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (1934). Henry Miller is perhaps the most joyous and exuberant American writer of the 20th century. His books are filled with a lust not just for sex, but for life, freedom, escape, and the city. Tropic of Cancer, first published in the U.S. in 1961, is his utterly strange and messy masterpiece. Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin (1956). This is one of the most moving novels I have ever read, and the sexuality in it is furtive, tender, filled with confusion and guilt and…

The Guggenheim Museum, New York City, through June 13 Gillian Wearing’s mid-career retrospective “will have visitors wondering if they can ever trust the neutrality of a camera again,” said Richard Woodward in The Wall Street Journal. Throughout her career, the 58-year-old British artist “has sought to undermine complacent axioms about portraiture by incorporating masks and makeup, as well as actors and crowds, into the making of her provocative art.” Consider 1996’s 60 Minutes Silence, a video that won Wearing her nation’s prestigious Turner Prize. The piece shows 26 men and women in police uniforms arranged for a formal group portrait and saying nothing as they sit and stand in place for a full hour. They do fidget, though, displaying discomfort that individualizes and humanizes them. But don’t assume the…

3 Not all Texas music is honky-tonk brash, said Kristin Robinson in Billboard. When Leon Bridges collaborated with Khruangbin to create the 2020 EP Texas Sun, the neosoul crooner and the hip Houston grooverock trio scored an unexpected global hit with the feel-good title track, “a warm, easygoing ode to the Lone Star State.” Now the foursome has returned, delivering a five-track sister project that “acts as a sultrier, cooler yin to Texas Sun’s yang.” At times, the subdued music “sounds as spiritual as a Sunday morning service,” starting with the quiet opener, a portrait of Bridges’ grandmother in her final moments as Bridges’ father held her hand. Three tracks later, “Father Father” sounds so penitent that “listening to it seems intrusive,” said Andy Kellman in AllMusic. The tempo picks…

Simplify Gmail makes emailing “a more serene experience.” The $24-a-year browser extension gives the Gmail website “a muchneeded facelift” by streamlining menus and adding white space. It also adds new sorting options and keyboard shortcuts. Mela can compile the recipes bookmarked in your favorite cookbooks and cooking websites. The mobile and desktop app ($5 for iOS) presents the recipes at full-screen size. Super Agent automatically fills in cookie consent pop-ups using preferences you’ve given the free browser extension. “This approach makes websites less likely to break from having their pop-ups hidden, and you can still tell them not to use tracking cookies for ad targeting.” Brickit can scan a jumble of Lego bricks spread across a floor, catalog each piece it sees, then suggest ideas for what you could build…

“Spurred by the highest oil prices in years, shale companies are moving drilling rigs back into oil fields that were all but abandoned a few years ago,” said Collin Eaton in The Wall Street Journal. With prices hovering around $95 a barrel, they are returning to places like the Anadarko Basin in Oklahoma and the DJ Basin in Colorado that they had abandoned as unprofitable. Burned by overextending in other flush times, frackers told investors this week they would be careful about new spending. But producers are eager to catch a moment of opportunity for unusually high profits in the cyclical energy business. Investing: Morgan, Goldman face hedge-fund probe Securities regulators and the Justice Department have launched a probe of “block trading” on Wall Street, said Susan Pulliam and Juliet…

Workers resist office return “Companies and workers are living in two different realities when it comes to returning to the office,” said Erica Pandey in Axios. Return-to-work dates are popping up again as America moves past Omicron, but there’s a growing “disconnect between leadership and the rank-and-file.” A recent poll by Pew Research found that “61 percent of teleworkers are working from home because they’re choosing to.” That’s a big difference from earlier in the pandemic, when most offices were closed. Just 42 percent of respondents said fear of infection was their reason for remaining home, compared with 57 percent in October 2020. “Executives are three times as likely as employees to want to return” to the office. Homebuilders prepare to pull back A slowdown in home construction in…

Kara Alaimo Bloomberg “Successful men used to marry their secretaries,” said Kara Alaimo. “Now people choose spouses with similar levels of education and earnings,” but career success is still a minefield for women. Women who are successful in their careers still say it hurts their relationships. One Pulitzer Prize winner called the columnist Maureen Dowd in tears because it would kill her romantic prospects. “Sonia Sotomayor considered turning down her nomination to the Supreme Court because she knew it would hurt her dating life. To state the obvious, successful men don’t tend to have this problem.” A woman who earns more than her husband will often “jump through hoops to avoid making him feel emasculated”—claiming she earns less than she does, or even doing extra housework. And, still, when women…

P.J. O’Rourke might O’Rourke have been the funniest conservative ever. In scores of articles and 20 books, the humorist married his caustic wit to a gonzo writing style that drew comparisons with Hunter S. Thompson, as he targeted liberal pieties, smug elitism, and hypocrisy wherever he found it. The libertarian O’Rourke opposed “government spending, Kennedy kids, seat-belt laws…and jewelry on men,” he wrote in Republican Party Reptile (1995). Among his other best-sellers were Holidays in Hell (1998), a collection of pieces about visiting wartorn countries, and Parliament of Whores (1991), subtitled A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the U.S. Government. A frequent talk-show visitor partial to scotch, cigars, and pinstriped oxfords, O’Rourke cast his aim wide, and was quick to puncture his own team’s foibles. Democrats promise “government will…

Duvall Hecht couldn’t the tedium of his hour-long commute to and from a banking job in Los Angeles. The radio offered only the same few pop songs interspersed with endless commercials. Fed up, in the early 1970s Hecht sold his 1965 Porsche and recorded a college drama coach reading George Plimpton’s football tale Paper Lion. A new medium was born, and within five years, tens of thousands of customers were listening to Hecht’s Books onTape. “It never once seemed like a wacky idea to me,” he said in 2001, soon after selling his startup to Random House for an estimated $20 million. Born in L.A., Hecht attended Stanford University, where he hoped to make the football team, said InsideTheGames.biz. At 6-foot-1, 185 pounds, he was deemed too small and advised…

This week’s question: A “bored” security guard at an art gallery in Yekaterinburg, Russia, used a ballpoint pen to add eyes to two faceless people in a $1 million painting. The painting’s original name was Three Figures; what should it be called now? Last week’s contest: The Razzie Awards, which recognize the cinematic world’s least impressive efforts, created the category “Worst Performance by Bruce Willis in a 2021 Movie” and awarded Willis eight trophies. Please come up with a new Razzie category honoring the worst of Hollywood. THE WINNER: “Worst Reboot of a Rebooted Reboot” John Smigelsky, Holmdel, N.J. SECOND PLACE: “Seth Rogen Same Character Every Time Award” John Holler, Clearwater, Minn. THIRD PLACE: “Best Reason to Read a Book” Jeff Cox, Shawnee, Okla. For runners-up and complete contest…

George Takei spent four years of his childhood in Japanese-American internment camps during World War II, said KK Ottesen in The Washington Post Magazine. The activist and Star Trek actor, 84, says one morning soon after his fifth birthday is “burned into my memory.” He remembers his Japanese immigrant father rushing in to say they were moving. “Suddenly we saw two soldiers marching up our driveway,” Takei says. “They carried rifles with bayonets on them. My father answered the door, and they pointed the bayonet at him.” His American-born mother came out with tears “streaming down her cheeks.” His family was taken to the Santa Anita racetrack in Los Angeles. “Each family was assigned a horse stall to sleep in, temporarily, while the barbed-wire camps were being built in…

Stephen Collinson CNN.com Throughout his scandal-stained business and political career, Donald Trump has shown a “superpower” for “wriggling out of accountability,” said Stephen Collinson. But the former president is sinking deeper and deeper into “a legal swamp” that threatens his viability as a 2024 presidential candidate. Last week, a judge in New York ruled that Trump, Donald Jr., and Ivanka must sit for depositions in the state attorney general’s probe into the Trump Organization’s possibly fraudulent business practices. The Westchester County, N.Y. district attorney is conducting another probe of the firm’s tax practices. Trump’s longtime accountants, Mazars, recently disavowed the accuracy of years of financial documents they prepared for him—“a very grave development.” At the same time, Trump’s White House documents and call logs have been turned over to the…

GREECE Editorial Agonas tis Kritis A “shocking” elder-care scandal here in Chania, Crete, is emblematic of a problem sweeping Europe, said Agonas tis Kritis. In a case that has rocked this Greek island, the owner of a nursing home and six other defendants face charges including homicide and fraud as part of an investigation into dozens of deaths at a care facility they turned into a “hell.” Authorities have confirmed 30 deaths, but they believe that nearly 300 residents may have succumbed to neglect. Residents were rarely fed meat or fruit, force-fed to the point of choking, and made to share towels and razors; some were strapped to beds and heavily sedated. It’s a repugnant example of the unscrupulous profiteers grubbing for the “gray gold” of elder care as European…

Even a mild Covid case leaves people with a much higher risk of many kinds of heart problems and stroke for at least a year, a new study suggests. Researchers examined the rates of new cardiovascular issues among 153,760 Covid patients who were treated by the Department of Veterans Affairs before vaccines were available. Compared with people who hadn’t had the virus, says NBCNews.com, the patients had more heart muscle inflammation, heart rhythm irregularities, and potentially fatal blood clots in the legs and lungs. They had a 72 percent higher risk of heart failure, 63 percent higher risk of a heart attack, and 52 percent greater chance of a stroke. Strikingly, the effect was the same across all demographics, regardless of the severity of the patient’s bout with Covid.…

(Riverhead, $30) The new Marlon James book is “a rare sequel that is better than its predecessor,” said Alex Brown in NPR.org. Revisiting certain events in Black Leopard, Red Wolf but from the perspective of the Moon Witch—an antagonist in that 2019 National Book Award finalist—this second book in a planned trilogy set in a mythical Africa introduces its title character when she is a nameless girl imprisoned by her brothers. She develops, over time and despite brutal suffering, into a formidable woman. James, all the while, “toys with the common traits of epic fantasies, giving readers a journey with no destination” and characters who defy traditional story arcs. Given the violence in its pages, the book “requires a trigger warning for those accustomed to G-rated fantasy,” said Natashia…

Camera Man by Dana Stevens (Atria, $30) Buster Keaton holds center stage, but Dana Stevens’ terrific new book is “a triple biography of sorts,” said Rien Fertel in The A.V. Club. Slate’s film critic contends that the talented, innovative screen star and filmmaker makes a fine guide to the emergence of cinema and of the American Century. Camera Man is “an essential read if you’re interested in any of these topics,” and because it excels at parsing Keaton’s work, it’s also “a terrific starting place for the budding Busterphile.” Putting the Rabbit in the Hat by Brian Cox (Grand Central, $29) Brian Cox comes across in his new memoir as “a seasoned workhorse finally able to enjoy a victory gallop,” said Alexandra Jacobs in The New York Times. HBO’s…

  3 “Beach House seems to be making the same very good album over and over,” said Mark Richardson in The Wall Street Journal. For nearly 16 years, the Baltimore duo has been churning out “icily cinematic” dream-pop characterized by “patient tempos, ethereal synths, and lots of reverb.” You register a lack of growth, yet it’s “hard to complain” when the music sounds as good as it does on this eighth album. There are some minor refinements, such as the heightened use of warm electronics. The opening title track “courses with thick and lush keyboard gurgles that turn your brain into an ultrasoft down pillow.” When you listen closely, this 18-track, 84-minute record “gradually unveils more and more detail, like an intricate painting viewed from different perspectives,” said Jem Aswad…

Grifters and cons… The Sting The best con-man movie of all time won a whopping seven Oscars. Paul Newman and Robert Redford co-star as charismatic 1930s grifters who pair up to pull off a high-stakes long con on a powerful crime boss. $4 on demand Six Degrees of Separation Will Smith put the world on notice with his stellar performance as a young con man, based on a real person, who slipped into the 1980s New York City elite by claiming to be the son of Sidney Poitier. Stockard Channing and Donald Sutherland co-star. Hulu The Wizard of Lies Bernie Madoff remains unrivaled among 21stcentury confidence men in the success with which he separated rich people from their money. Robert De Niro delivers a masterfully controlled portrayal of the…

In the third quarter of 2021, life insurance claims were up 37.7 percent. Roughly half the excess deaths were the direct result of Covid; others may be tied to deferred medical treatment. Total death benefit payments in 2020 were 15 percent higher than in 2019, the biggest jump since the 1918 flu pandemic. The Wall Street Journal European banks have some $76.9 billion in outstanding Russian loans. Since late 2009, 11 major European banks have paid a total of $19.6 billion in fines for violations of U.S. sanctions rules. Bloomberg The investment bank Barclays froze ex-CEO Jes Staley’s $29 million bonus as it investigates his ties to sex offender and onetime financier Jeffrey Epstein. CNN.com Mortgage applications fell 13.1 percent last week to their lowest level since 2019. The average…

Studies have shown that children are far more likely to read books that they can pick for themselves and keep in their homes. Book Trust (booktrust.org) works to build children’s interest and sense of agency by giving elementary school children from low-income homes the opportunity to choose and buy their own books. Each month of the school year, BookTrust teachers help their students select books that connect with their interests, turning reading into a regular habit in the hope of instilling a lifelong love of literature. For many kids, BookTrust books are the first childrens’ books they have ever gotten to take home and keep. In 2020 alone, BookTrust served about 58,000 students, who picked out and took home more than 765,000 books. Each charity we feature has earned…

Good week for: Cheap eats, after a new survey found that 39 percent of pet owners admit to having sampled their pets’ food before serving it to them, with 29 percent saying it tasted surprisingly good. Normalcy, when Karex, the Malaysian firm that produces 20 percent of the world’s condoms, informed shareholders that it expects to see a sharp growth in sales this year as “societies begin to adapt to post-pandemic life.” Introverts, after a new British study of 17,000 kids ages 8 to 18 found that one third actually reported feeling happier during the pandemic. They got more sleep and exercise, suffered less bullying, and because of online friendships felt less lonely. Bad week for: Useful idiocy, after former President Trump lavished praise on Vladimir Putin for his “genius”…

Stevie Nicks feels a deep connection to the spirit world, said Tavi Gevinson in The New Yorker. Her life has been shaped by “taps on the shoulder” that have guided her choices and her songwriting, and she regards other musicians as soul mates and allies. When Fleetwood Mac formed, she and bandmate Christine McVie could have been rivals, but instead they bonded. “We were very protective of each other,” says Nicks, 73. “We made a pact that we would never be treated with disrespect by all the male musicians in the community.” Anytime they felt uncomfortable, they’d turn to each other and say, “This party is over for us,” and leave. Her close friendships with Prince, Tom Petty, and others helped Nicks avoid feeling jaded about fame (she still…

Will Bunch The Philadelphia Inquirer Taking the food out of millions of children’s mouths is “a sin against humanity,” said Will Bunch. A year ago, the $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief plan included an expanded child tax credit that had a miraculous impact: It helped the country “cut child poverty in half” almost overnight. The subsidy of up to $300 a month per child gave the nation’s poorest working parents a cushion that enabled them to buy more food, afford child care, and get better jobs. President Biden included an extension of the credit in his Build Back Better bill, but after that legislation succumbed to congressional gridlock, the credit expired in January. “The impact was immediate—and massive.” A Columbia University study found that 3.7 million kids have fallen back below…

“The pandemic may have alerted new swaths of people to their distaste for their jobs—or exhausted them past the point where there’s anything to enjoy about jobs they used to like. Essential or nonessential, remote or in person, almost no one I know likes work very much at the moment. The office is where it shouldn’t be—at home, in our intimate spaces—and all that’s left now is the job itself, naked and alone. And a lot of people don’t like what they see. It’s as if our whole society is burned out.” Noreen Malone in The New York Times Magazine…

FRANCE Laurent Sagalovitsch Slate France Valérie Pécresse is releasing a “slow poison” into France, said Laurent Sagalovitsch. Blatantly pandering to far-right voters, the center-right presidential candidate peppered a major speech with racist attacks against Muslims and immigrants. France, she said, must not be doomed to the “great replacement”—a racist conspiracy theory that nonwhite immigrants are intentionally replacing white Christian populations. The theory, which originated in France, has become popular among white supremacists throughout the world, inspiring mass killings in New Zealand and the United States. Pécresse’s far-right rivals, Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour, frequently allude to replacement theory during their own anti-immigration screeds, but they’ve mostly avoided using the actual term. Pécresse—the candidate for the respectable Republicans, the party of former Presidents Nicolas Sarkozy and Jacques Chirac, and a…

MOROCCO Aida Alami Al Jazeera (Qatar) When 5-year-old Rayan Oram was pulled dead from a dry well, the hopes of many Moroccans were “extinguished with him,” said Moroccan journalist Aida Alami. We had all watched, anguished, on TV as rescuers toiled for days digging a tunnel to reach the little boy, who had fallen 100 feet to the bottom. The news that the effort was in vain was “crushing.” While many of us hoped that the saga would show Moroccans the need for wholesale reform, it looks distressingly as though our countrymen will simply grieve and move on. After all, “another boy died the same horrific way only days after,” and that tragedy “got little attention.” Moroccan authorities say they are working to close these dangerous old wells, but “there…

It’s high time for Congress to amend the Electoral Count Act—the muddled 135-year-old law that governs how Congress certifies state election results, said The Dallas Morning News in an editorial. The “byzantine” law, passed after the disputed 1876 election, is full of ambiguities that Donald Trump and his allies tried to exploit in their bid to overturn his 2020 loss—and they need fixing to “help prevent a rerun.” There’s bipartisan support for revisions, which must address several key points. First, it must be made clear that the vice president has only a ceremonial role in tallying the vote, with no right to reject a state’s results—a power Trump claimed for Mike Pence in 2020. Second, currently only one senator and one House member are needed to challenge a state’s…

“They were told repeatedly they couldn’t win,” said E.J. Dionne in The Washington Post, but last week families of nine Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims secured a $73 million payout from Remington Arms. Seven years before 20-year-old Adam Lanza opened fire at the Newtown, Conn., school, a Republican-controlled Congress passed a law granting gunmakers broad civil immunity from lawsuits. But the law contained a small exception for lawsuits alleging a gun’s marketing violated state laws. The families’ lawyers seized on that exception, citing Connecticut’s Unfair Trade Practices Act, said Elizabeth Williamson in The New York Times. They argued that Remington marketed the Bushmaster XM15-E2S, one of Lanza’s military-style weapons, as a way for insecure young men to reclaim their masculinity through violence. The “checkmate moment” was a crime…

Apple’s big Mac push Apple is “planning a massive slew of upgrades this year,” said Mark Gurman in Bloomberg. The iPhone, Apple Watch, and iPad will get refreshes, but most attention will likely be devoted to the Mac line. Apple started its transition to its custom chips to rave reviews in 2020. “This year, the transition to Apple Silicon will shift into high gear.” An M2 chip will follow up on the M1 in Apple’s MacBook Air, with faster performance and more graphics cores. The biggest changes may be at the high end, with a “super-powered” version of the already powerful M1 Max. Look for the M2 chip to be in Apple’s 24-inch desktop Mac, and for Apple to introduce a larger, prolevel desktop model. “Just a few years…

(St. Martin’s, $30) The heiress, for centuries, “has been an unfair object of ridicule,” said Alexandra Jacobs in The New York Times. Author Laura Thompson wishes to defend the honor of this cohort, at least up to a point. Her “well-informed but slightly breathless” book surveys four centuries of high-profile British and American women who stumbled in one way or another after being born into immense wealth. “With proper indignation,” Thompson points out that for too long, women born to wealth lost it all on the day they married. They were fat targets for schemers; “men were gaslighting them before gaslight was even invented.” But even as she begs sympathy for them, Thompson can’t help making a spectacle of their extravagance and seemingly incurable ennui. That makes the book…

Silvia Vasquez-Lavado once seemed like the last person who’d ever become a celebrated mountaineer, said Jessica Zack in the San Francisco Chronicle. Growing up in Peru, the future Silicon Valley executive was so afraid of heights that she cried the first time she saw the ice-covered high range of the Andes. But years later, after taking the hallucinogen ayahuasca during a personal low point, she became convinced that she could begin to heal from past traumas, including childhood sexual abuse, by training her body and mind to climb Everest and other towering peaks. From her first summit, she was hooked. “More than anything, it just felt so peaceful,” she says of her first trip to the Himalayas. “I’ll never forget it. I felt this sense of belonging that I…

  3 Raveena’s sophomore album “feels like a spiritual rebirth,” said Vrinda Jagota in NPR.org. The Los Angeles–based singer-songwriter has previously specialized in R&B lullabies that “bordered on monotonous” when strung together. For her major-label debut, though, she has invented a Punjabi space princess as an alter ego, and that has freed her. “It’s thrilling to hear her embrace a lusher, more effervescent sound,” one that weaves together disco, Bollywood instrumentation, and 2000s R&B. She’s also “singing with a newfound confidence and imaginative wonder.” The back half of the album comes across as a tribute to 1970s Indian jazz and disco singer Asha Puthli, said Alexis Petridis in The Guardian. But the entire project is “both dazzling and impressively eclectic,” with ambient interludes set beside warped beats and straightforward pop…

Natural wine can no longer be dismissed as a fad, said Eric Asimov in The New York Times. The audience for unadulterated wines made from organically grown grapes keeps growing, as do the number of excellent examples. Producing wine this way is risky, “but the results can be thrilling,” as with these bottles. 2020 Roberto Henríquez Rivera del Notro Blanco ($23). Produced in Chile’s Itata Valley, this orange wine blends the juices of three grapes. “It’s intensely floral, lightly textured, and altogether delicious.” 2019 Absentee Winery Red ($26). The label and name are minimalist, but this red blend from California’s a’s Mendocino County is “fresh and alive, direct and to the point.” 2020 Ca’ de Noci Sottobosco ($27). A reliable organic producer r in Emilia-Romagna, Italy, makes this sparkling…

Know the risks. One of the most natural ways to hold a phone can lead to acute pain in the hand and beyond. It often originates in the habit of resting the phone on the pinkie while the thumb types or scrolls. But the pain can run from the pinkie to the hand and wrist and right up to the elbow. Use both hands. Two hands are better than one in reducing repetitive stresses. The tendon in the pinkie isn’t strong enough to hold a heavy phone for long periods, and use of two hands keeps your wrists in a neutral position and minimizes the distance that the thumb must stretch. Accessorize. Attach a PopSocket or other phone grip to the phone’s case if you can’t quit one-hand use. The…

Derek Thompson The Atlantic Not long ago, we used to ask about when work life was going back to normal, said Derek Thompson. Now it is—it’s just not the office life we remember. “Tech, media, and finance companies have basically stopped talking about their full return-to-office plans.” That’s because almost all of these companies are sticking with hybrid work—except for the few that are going all-remote. And if the office is changing, so is work. The traditional “five-day workweek is dying.” Fridays and Mondays are spent largely out of the office, “occupying a murky space between weekday and weekend.” And on the days when we are in the office, it still won’t be the nucleus of our work lives anymore. Many companies won’t like this, because “when the office becomes…

  Diana Crouch was 20 weeks along and unvaccinated when she fell seriously ill, said Ariana Eunjung Cha in The Washington Post. Doctors worked for 139 days to save her and the baby she carried. KINGWOOD, TEXAS—Chris Crouch had had low expectations for online dating. He was a police officer in his 30s, almost a year out from a painful divorce and, he said, the women he had met had been “playing games” in ways that left him dispirited. Then he met her. Diana Garcia Martinez was 24 and a busy single mom whose sister had set up her profile without her knowing. She was intelligent, empathetic and upfront, and by the third date, he was in love. “It was just a feeling…. I felt like I knew her my whole life,” he recalled…