Innehållsförteckning för March 11, 2022 från The Week Magazine

In a perverse and terrible way, Vladimir Putin has done the world a great service. As he ruthlessly tries to brutalize Ukrainians into submission, Russia’s mad czar has reminded Europeans and Americans of the fragility of the liberal international order. History is not over. Authoritarians are ascendant. Democracy and freedom are in peril. Even the unthinkable—nuclear war—is back in our nightmares. At this hinge point in history, Ukraine’s suffering and incredible courage should provide some moral clarity. “We’ve hardly slept for seven nights,” President Volodymyr Zelensky told his countrymen this week, as shells and missiles rained down on Kyiv. “The time will come when we’ll be able to sleep, but it will be after the war, after the victory.” Though we haven’t fully recognized it until now, Putin has also…

Francis Ford Coppola has spent 50 years trying to escape from the shadow of The Godfather, said Zach Baron in GQ. The director won five Oscars by the time he was 36, but the success of the first Godfather in particular feels like a deal with the devil. “That film ruined me,” Coppola says, “in the sense that it was so successful that everything I did was compared to it.” At 82, he spends most of his time at his vineyard in Napa Valley, where his foray into the wine business earned him a second fortune. “I find that as I get older, I become much more of a hermit,” he says. “It’s what I am.” Still, for 40 years, he’s been dreaming about making a film that could…

Benjamin Mazer The Atlantic As this wave of the pandemic ebbs, said Benjamin Mazer, lots of people are saying that “Covid is—or will soon be—like the flu.” But while Covid, like the flu, is a respiratory illness that may rise and fall with the seasons, its future role in our society can best be compared to cigarette smoking. Covid vaccines have proven to be “among the safest and most effective therapies in all of modern medicine,” with three doses virtually eliminating the risk of serious illness and death for most people. (Flu shots are significantly less effective, and the flu is far less deadly.) Not getting vaccinated against Covid is a self-destructive choice—and so is smoking, “which kills more than 400,000 people each year.” Smokers are up to 30 times…

POLAND Michal Szuldrzynski Rzeczpospolita “I do not expect any Russian tanks to cross the border” between Belarus and Poland anytime soon, said Michal Szuldrzynski. Instead, Russia can attack us in cyberspace, where there are “no borders” and the weapons can be “launched from anywhere in the world,” such as Russian military intelligence offices in Moscow or the basements of hackers in St. Petersburg. Russia has been waging a cyberwar against Ukraine since 2014, targeting everything from government websites to power grids. Given President Vladimir Putin’s obsession with restoring the Soviet sphere of influence, there has been speculation that he might attack other eastern European countries—including NATO members. The truth is, he won’t have to. Russia has already tried out cyberattacks against Estonia, France, the U.S., and others. Now Russian hackers…

The CDC has made sweeping changes to its masking recommendations that allow “most people to ditch their face coverings,” said Spencer Kimball in CNBC.com. The new guidelines, which go into effect immediately, use rates of severe illness and hospitalization rather than infections as the “key metric” in a community, with counties rated green, yellow, or red. In green counties, where the Covid risk is low, masks aren’t needed in schools or indoor places like restaurants or offices; in yellow counties, the risk is medium, and high-risk individuals are advised to consult their doctors about masking up; in red counties, cases remain high or are surging, and masks are advised. That puts only about 28 percent of Americans in locales where masks currently should be worn—down from 99 percent under…

Paleontologists in Scotland have unearthed an exceptionally well-preserved fossil of a pterosaur, reports National Geographic. Before they went extinct along with the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, pterosaurs, commonly known as pterodactyls, evolved to have wingspans of a whopping 12 meters. But little was previously known about their earlier evolution. The newly discovered pterosaur lived around 170 million years ago and had a wingspan of more than 2.5 meters—much larger than any other flying reptile found from the Jurassic period. The fossil, given the Gaelic name Dearc sgiathanach, was nearly complete, with parts of the skull, limb bones, tail, ribs, and vertebrae still intact. Its sharp teeth, used to snap up fish from water, had even retained their shiny enamel. “Usually when we get to describe fossils… it’s a…

(Simon & Schuster, $30) PayPal, despite its relatively modest size, “holds a unique position in Silicon Valley mythology,” said The Economist. Though the $125 billion digital-payments company is dwarfed by the Amazons and Apples of the world, “a startling number of PayPal’s co-founders and honchos have gone on to corporate greatness,” remaking the business landscape and our online lives. Tesla CEO Elon Musk and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, of course, were PayPal co-founders. Reid Hoffman, an early COO, left to co-found LinkedIn in 2002. Another pair of PayPal alums co-founded Yelp, and three started YouTube. Jimmy Soni’s new book turns back the clock to show how the incredibly influential group came together at the turn of the century to create the company that made them players, and “the story…

Margaret Atwood, at 82, is “taking risks unbefitting a nice old lady,” said Carolyn Kellogg in the Los Angeles Times. The Canadian literary legend signs her name to controversial open letters. She regularly jumps into debates on Twitter. She has been blasted as a “bad feminist” by fans of her great feminist dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale. Part of her seems to simply enjoy the fracas. “If you don’t think of yourself as an august personage,” she says, “you don’t have to behave yourself.” She even refuses to comply when she’s called upon to say whether the world is moving toward darkness or light. To her, history is a wheel, not a line. “There is no right side of history,” she says. “There is no wrong side of history.”…

3 “Seventh acts aren’t often this urgent or original,” said Andy Crump in Paste. It’s been 15 years since Alynda Segarra’s folk-punk band Hurray for the Riff Raff first took up the banner for rebellious women, artists, and other outsiders. But the New Orleans–based singer-songwriter set the stage for a creative rebirth by using 2017’s The Navigator to grapple with the intersection of their identities as a queer, Puerto Rican Bronx native. Segarra’s “dazzling” followup is all about surviving the ugliness of the world, and it “touches on beauty and horror with melancholy that, depending on your mood, may read either as hopeful or nihilistic.” Often, these 11 so-called nature punk songs “exude a prayer-like love for humanity,” said Jenn Pelly in Pitchfork. On the title track, Segarra sings of…

The Trojan Horse Affair (Serial Productions) At last, the production company that created Serial has come close to recapturing the addictive appeal of that blockbuster true-crime podcast, said Laura Miller in Slate. Hamza Syed and Brian Reed partnered here to investigate another troubling mystery: In 2014, a letter received by the city council in Birmingham, U.K., seemed to expose a conspiracy among Muslim employees of the school system to establish a strict Islamic curriculum. Though the letter is now regarded as a hoax, it ignited a local witch hunt and nationwide panic that were at once “dazzlingly ridiculous” and enduringly damaging. Eventually, Syed and Reed develop a solid theory about the sender’s identity and motives. But this is “a story with no easy conclusion,” said Nick Quah in NPR.org.…

This “bright, beautifully balanced” Cuban salad is incredibly versatile, said Courtney Hill in Milk Street magazine. It pairs well with seafood, poultry, or roasted meats. And don’t think you have to start with a whole pineapple. Pineapple chunks from your supermarket’s produce section do the job just fine. • 1 small red onion, halved and thinly sliced• 1 medium garlic clove, finely grated• 2 tbsp white vinegar• kosher salt and ground black pepper• 3 cups fresh pineapple chunks (½-to 1-inch pieces), drained and patted dry• 1 serrano or Fresno chile, stemmed, seeded (if desired), and thinly sliced• 1 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil • ½ tsp smoked paprika, plus extra to serve • 2 tsp finely grated lime zest, plus 2 tbsp lime juice • 2 ripe avocados, halved, pitted, and cut into ½-to 1-inch chunks• 4 cups lightly packed baby…

Just don’t call it a children’s zoo in front of the staff, said Jonathan Wosen in The San Diego Union-Tribune. Though the San Diego Zoo’s new Wildlife Explorers Basecamp replaces a beloved petting zoo that opened in 1957, officials stress that the $88 million attraction is intended to make visitors of all ages passionate about conserving natural habitat. Opening March 11 after three years of construction, the 3.2-acre site will “immerse visitors in the sights and sounds of ecosystems from around the world.” In its desert habitat, you’ll see burrowing owls and big-eared fennec foxes. The marsh meadows area crawls with reptiles and amphibians, while the rain forest section “plunges visitors into the world of insects, spiders, and other invertebrates.” Kids are in fact catered to throughout: They can imagine…

Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell told lawmakers this week that the central bank still expects to raise interest rates this month to tackle inflation, said Craig Torres in Bloomberg. The Fed has been signaling for weeks that a rate hike in March from the near-zero level they have been since the start of the pandemic was necessary. But the impact of the war in Ukraine on the U.S. economy remains “highly uncertain,” Powell said. Some analysts say that could deter Fed officials from acting “with more force to get price pressures under control.” Opioids: Distributors finalize $25 billion settlement Johnson & Johnson and three of the nation’s biggest drug distributors received court approval last week for a $25 billion settlement with 46 states over their role in fueling the opioid…

Part-timers choose to stay home Economists say much of the labor shortage may be coming from part-time workers who have checked out, said Rick Newman in Yahoo Finance. Researchers at the Chicago Federal Reserve and the University of Texas mined data from an annual Fed survey of consumers to compare “the number of hours different groups said they want to work each week, before and after Covid struck.” They found “no change among full-time workers,” suggesting the pandemic “didn’t affect their propensity to work.” But part-time workers—many of whom “wouldn’t mind the additional income but aren’t necessarily dependent on it”—reported the biggest change, saying on average “they wanted to work 3.2 hours less per week in the post-Covid time frame” and needed higher pay to stay in the workforce.…

Cecilia Kang The New York Times I recently scanned my palms at a turnstile reader to enter “the nation’s most technologically sophisticated grocery store,” said Cecilia Kang. Perhaps you’ve heard of it? It’s called Whole Foods. For a long time after Amazon bought the grocery chain in 2017, it took “only small steps toward putting its mark on the more than 500 Whole Foods stores in the U.S. and Britain.” Now that’s changing. A pilot store in Washington, D.C., finally reveals the “Amazonification of Whole Foods”: It’s almost completely run by tracking and robotic tools. When I arrived, a clerk greeted me by telling me I could begin shopping “by scanning the QR code in your Amazon app.” Or I could scan my hands at a kiosk to link my…

Leonard Kessler inspired countless youngsters, including two readers who changed his life. Among his 300-plus books was the 1965 hit Mr. Pine’s Purple House, about a character saddened by the monotony of his neighborhood. “A white house is fine,” Pine laments, but “how can I tell which one is mine?” He paints his house plum, sparking neighbors to repaint theirs, and soon the street is a ribbon of colors. The book had been long out of print when, in the 1990s, a woman named Jill Morgan pushed for it to be reprinted so her kids could enjoy it. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who considered Mr. Pine his favorite children’s book, promoted the reissue, making it a best-seller. “The world is a better place,” Bezos said, “when things are a…

Good week for: Payback, after a Ukrainian mechanic opened valves and partially sank the $7.7 million luxury superyacht owned by his boss, Alexander Mikhee, the CEO of a Russian weapons company. “My boss is a criminal who sells weapons that kill the Ukrainian people,” Taras Ostapchuk, 55, told police in Mallorca, Spain. After being arrested and released, he left to fight in Ukraine. Gay men, who academically outperform straight men and all other groups in high school and college, according to a new Notre Dame study. The lazy, after a new study found that sedentary people could boost their biceps strength by 12 percent by doing three seconds of resistance exercise a day. Bad week for: Smugglers, after border officers in Southern California seized 1,336 pounds of methamphetamine disguised as…

Sarajevo The European Union’s peacekeeping force deployed 500 additional troops to Bosnia-Herzegovina last week to join the 600 already stationed there, citing fears that the war in Ukraine could “potentially cause instability in Bosnia.” Bosnia, one of just three western Balkan countries that isn’t in NATO, is made up of a Bosnian-Croat federation that is largely pro-Western and a Bosnian Serb republic backed by Russia. While the Bosnian central government has expressed a desire to join both NATO and the EU, Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik strongly opposes both and has threatened secession. Russia warned last year that if Bosnia takes any step toward joining NATO, “our country will have to react to that hostile act,” and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov spoke with Dodik this week to reaffirm Russian…

Courteney Cox has seen her career fade since the 2004 finale of Friends, said Laura Pullman in The Times (U.K.). The NBC sitcom made Cox a global celebrity, and toward the end, she and her co-stars were making $1 million an episode. So it came as a shock, about five years ago, when Cox filmed a TV series pilot that wasn’t even picked up by a network. “It shook me for a little while,” says Cox, 57. “For years in some weird way, I was scared to go back out.” The loss of her youth didn’t help. “You go, ‘Oh, I’m changing. I’m looking older. Time goes so fast.’” In a vain attempt to stop the clock, she admits, she overindulged in cosmetic procedures, including fillers and Botox. “I…

Andrew Sullivan The Weekly Dish How will the war in Ukraine affect China’s thinking about Taiwan? asked Andrew Sullivan. You can be sure that “Xi Jinping will be watching closely” how the West reacts to Russia’s invasion, and how long Ukraine can fend off a much mightier military. The parallels between China/Taiwan and Russia/Ukraine “are as striking as they are unnerving.” China sees Taiwan “as part of its national identity” the same way Vladimir Putin and other Russian nationalists see Ukraine as part of theirs. Taiwan and Ukraine have forged independent, democratic nations in the shadow of giant autocracies next door, which see them as rogue, breakaway regions within their own “sphere of influence.” For Xi and Putin, the fact that these defiant democracies are so closely allied with their rivals…

“Peace between nations is not the norm of human existence. Wars for resources, prestige, power, and vengeance are like chapter breaks in the story of humanity. Vladimir Putin is a kind of Russian Frank Underwood [of the TV show House of Cards]. He scoffs at democratic and moral norms. He, like Nietzsche’s Übermensch, makes his own morality, which is why, I think, so many power worshippers in the West have man crushes on him. Putin’s quest for power and prestige is the norm in human history. He doesn’t just want to go down in the history books like the czars, he wants to be like a czar.” Jonah Goldberg in The Dispatch…

UNITED KINGDOM Matthew Syed The Sunday Times Britain’s belated crackdown on Russian oligarchs’ money should have come a decade ago, said Matthew Syed. Arguably we’ve always known that the tycoons who stashed their billions in British real estate, sports teams, and investment funds were little more than criminals. But their corruption became public record in 2011, during a lawsuit between Boris Berezovsky (now deceased) and Roman Abramovich, who both lived in the U.K. We learned that in the 1990s these men and others helped themselves to Russia’s oil and mineral wealth “at a fraction of its true price” in exchange for propping up Boris Yeltsin as Russian president. The result was that the oligarchs “emerged with the riches of Croesus,” and Yeltsin’s successor, Vladimir Putin, inherited a “state operating as…

TAIWAN Editorial Taipei Times Russia’s assault on Ukraine is giving the Taiwanese night sweats, said the Taipei Times. President Vladimir Putin’s justifications for his invasion are eerily similar to China’s excuses for its own designs on Taiwan. Putin declared the Ukrainian state “a historical error and a fiction” and claimed he had to free Ukraine’s Russian-speaking regions from a Kyiv government he labeled a “U.S. puppet.” It’s the same argument he used in 2014 to snatch Crimea, where he also purported to be protecting ethnic Russians. China wants to do the same to Taiwan, which it views “as a lost territory”—even though the Communist Party never ruled the island. And it is using the tactics in Putin’s playbook. Beijing has long called Taiwan’s government a U.S. stooge. It has endeavored…

More than 5 million children around the globe lost a parent or direct caregiver during the first 20 months of the pandemic, according to a new study published in the medical journal The Lancet. After the Omicron surge, researchers estimated, that number grew to 6.7 million. ABCNews.com Spending by Russian interest groups registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act jumped more than 4,000 percent from 2014 through last year, when these groups spent $35 million to promote Russia, according to data compiled by lobbying Axios watchdog OpenSecrets. Russia was the third-largest foreign-influence spender in 2019, 2020, and 2021. Marine traffic data shows at least four Russian-owned superyachts are being relocated to Montenegro and the Maldives as Western nations plan sanctions aimed at Russian oligarchs, which could include property seizure. The fleeing…

“Being right half the time beats being half-right all the time.”Malcolm Forbes, quoted in The Economist “The interrogation of everything should be on the table. If it’s shut down on one side or the other, it serves no one.”Poet Claudia Rankine, in Interview “Humanity is a mystery. It needs to be unraveled, and if you spend your life unraveling it, don’t say you’ve wasted time.”Fyodor Dostoevsky, quoted in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette “A hat should be taken off when you greet a lady and left off for the rest of your life. Nothing looks more stupid than a hat.”P.J. O’Rourke, quoted in The Times (U.K.) “Friendship with oneself is all-important, because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else.”Eleanor Roosevelt, quoted in Education World “Rats and roaches live by competition…

Tracking wars via Google app A researcher tracked the movements of Russian troops in Ukraine last week by monitoring Google Maps, said Rachel Lerman in The Washington Post. Jeffrey Lewis, a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, Calif., and his team followed data on Google Maps showing heavy traffic on streets outside the Ukrainian capital Kyiv at 3:15 a.m.—an hour “much too early for a traffic jam.” Lewis concluded the traffic pileup likely came from “cars being stopped at roadblocks while military vehicles passed.” The team cross-checked the traffic data with satellite images and confirmed a “Russian armored unit was moving toward the border with Ukraine.” Google later disabled its live traffic features on Maps in Ukraine “for the safety of local communities.” The market…

A massive gas giant about 855 light-years from Earth has a bizarre and violent climate, says CNN.com. A new study of WASP-121b shows unusual weather conditions including metallic clouds and rain made of liquid gems. First discovered in 2015, the exoplanet is bigger than Jupiter, and the intense gravitational pull of the star it orbits has warped it into a football shape. It is tidally locked, as the moon is to Earth, meaning one side is always hot and in daylight while the other is permanently dark and much colder. On its hot day side, water atoms evaporate into the sky, and are then hurtled to the cooler side by winds of up to 11,000 mph. Because of the enormous temperature difference on the cool night side—down from 5,840…

Author and financial journalist Sebastian Mallaby is a senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. His latest book, The Power Law, describes how Silicon Valley’s venture-capital firms reshaped the global economy. The Money Game by Adam Smith (1968). Smith was the pen name of financial journalist George Goodman, and this was his breakthrough—a laugh-out-loud depiction of the financial culture of 1960s New York, when sideburned gangsters ramped stocks and only the inexperienced were foolish enough to make money. “Show me a portfolio, I’ll tell you the generation,” one character says. Perhaps this reminds you of crypto? When Genius Failed by Roger Lowenstein (2000). Ironically, this book is a triumph of genius: a lucid explanation of the quantitative trading strategies that doomed the hedge fund Long-Term…

3 Shovels & Rope’s ninth album “brims with gratifying tunes and irresistible vocals,” said John Amen in No Depression. The husband-wife alt-country duo from South Carolina have maintained an “exhilaratingly seductive” chemistry since debuting in 2008. Fourteen years later, Michael Trent and Cary Ann Hearst “continue to hone their integrations of bar-room Americana, heartland rock, and a DIY sensibility” across a new 10-song collection that features “some of the pair’s more critically empathetic commentaries on American values.” Manticore was recorded as an acoustic-based album before keyboards and electric guitar were added, said Stephen Thomas Erlewine in AllMusic. Though it has greater emotional range than previous efforts, “much of it unfolds at a crawl,” making it “much less visceral” than the duo’s previous album. To me, this set “rivals their best…

New adventures in animation… The Legend of Vox Machina Fans of the Dungeons & Dragons web series Critical Role contributed more than $11 million on Kickstarter to see this show realized. Their investment is paying off in a series that follows dungeon master Matthew Mercer and a motley band of mercenaries as they undertake action-packed quests in a richly imagined world. Amazon Prime The Guardians of Justice Adi Shankar, who developed Castlevania, is behind this wild ride of a superhero satire that freely mixes traditional, Claymation, 8-bit and other animation styles to bring to life the tale of second-tier superheroes forced to step up when the top-tier hero Marvelous Man self-destructs. Netflix Cat Burglar Black Mirror producers Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones developed this unique choose-your-own-adventure series, which takes its…

Institutional clients traded $1.14 trillion worth of cryptocurrencies on Coinbase in 2021, more than twice the $535 billion for retail investors. There are about 856 crypto hedge funds operating today with $68 billion in assets under management. The Wall Street Journal Global sales of Covid-19 vaccines and treatments exceeded $79 billion in 2021. Forecasts from companies and Wall Street analysts point to at least $90 billion in combined Covid drug and vaccine sales—a market that didn’t exist before 2020—for 2022. The Wall Street Journal The percentage of Black Americans who own their homes decreased over the past decade. While nearly 66 percent of all Americans are homeowners—about the same as the share in 2010—the rate of Black homeownership dipped to 43.4 percent, versus the 72.1 percent rate for white Americans.…

The Amazon rain forest is being destroyed at an alarming rate of 2 million hectares per year, accelerating climate change and causing an incalculable loss to Earth’s biodiversity. Amazon Conservation Team (amazonteam.org) is a nonprofit that believes the best way to protect the Amazon is to partner with the indigenous communities that have lived in its rain forests for generations, working to gain legal protection for their forest lands. ACT also helps indigenous communities derive sustainable income from the forests through nondestructive agricultural practices, such as cultivating cacay trees to produce high-value oils used in cosmetic manufacturing. Since its founding 25 years ago, ACT has helped create an additional 1.9 million acres of protected rain forest reserves with 78 partner communities. Each charity we feature has earned a four-star…

Rana Foroohar Financial Times The financial sanctions against Russia could hasten the shift to a bipolar global financial system, said Rana Foroohar. Cutting off many Russian banks from the SWIFT service was a dramatic escalation. SWIFT, which stands for the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, provides a secure network and standardized instructions to send and receive payments between international banks. Excluding Russia from this system takes the “financial decoupling” between Russia and the West to another level. Unfortunately, there’s a very worrying global side effect: It pushes Russia into the arms of China. China has not joined in the international sanctions, and in fact it has an opportunity to “allow Russian banks and companies more access to its own financial markets.” China aims to build a “post-dollarized world, in…

She was teenager Henriette Hanotte to her neighbors in Rumes, a small Belgian town on the border with France. But to fellow operatives in the World War II resistance, she was Monique, one of the most trusted guides for downed Allied pilots. Because she attended school on the French side, the young Hanotte was well known to border guards and could pass back and forth without much notice. From age 19 to her early 20s, she shepherded nearly 140 airmen, mostly British but also a few Americans, to safety. Hanotte, who kept her code name after the war, downplayed her bravery, saying she grew up in an anti-Nazi family. “It was our natural instinct to help,” she said. Hanotte’s parents owned a small hotel, and she grew up knowing…

This week’s question: In a recent survey, 39 percent of pet owners admitted to tasting their pets’ food, with nearly a third of them saying they enjoyed it. If a company were to market its dog or cat food by portraying it as a tasty treat for humans too, what would the brand be called? Last week’s contest: 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 title was Three Figures; what should it be called now? THE WINNER: “Only Have Eyes for Two” Paul Anderson, Franklin, Tenn. SECOND PLACE: “With Eyes From a Beholder” Drew Bennett, Rogers, Ark. THIRD PLACE: “(Now Worth Only) Three Figures” Charles R.…

A Black student at Harvard who broke a bone in his foot didn’t realize it for a day, which he blamed on “white supremacy.” Writing in the Crimson student newspaper, Gordon Ebanks said he assumed he’d merely suffered a sprain because society had taught him that “my pain didn’t matter.” A doctor who X-rayed his foot the next day informed him of the fracture. A Houston man allegedly opened fire at restaurant workers after he said they didn’t give him enough barbecue sauce with his takeout order. Andre Thomas, 36, called Dickey’s BBQ Pit to complain he’d been shorted on sauce. Police say he waited in the parking lot for workers to leave, firing at them in their car, breaking one worker’s arm and missing the other. In other news…

Eric Adams wants to be the “Zen mayor” of New York City, said Katie Glueck in The New York Times. On the surface, the Big Apple’s new leader is a tough-talking former police captain. But he’s also a vegan cookbook author, an astrology follower, and a reader of self-help books with titles like Becoming Supernatural. He praises the “healing powers” of spices, shares a meditation mentor with Oprah Winfrey, and works out every day in his City Hall office. “We all breathe incorrectly because we were never taught breathing,” says Adams, 61, who practices alternate-nostril breathing. He used to be a heavyset officer—“It’s not a myth: Cops like doughnuts,” he says—until type 2 diabetes impaired his vision and threatened his health. He switched to a plant-based diet in 2016.…

Golf icon Phil Mickelson lost a slew of sponsorships last week after he backed a Saudi-funded league that aims to rival the PGA Tour. KPMG, Amstel Light, Workday, and other advertisers cut ties with Mickelson, 51, who told a biographer he might defect to the upstart tour despite the Saudis being “scary motherf-----s” who “killed [journalist Jamal] Khashoggi and have a horrible record on human rights. They execute people over there for being gay.” Still, Mickelson, one of the wealthiest American athletes, said he would play for the Saudis because it would give him and other golfers “leverage” in negotiating with the PGA over profit sharing and media rights. Saudi tour supporters include Australian golf legend Greg Norman and former President Trump, who wants the kingdom’s tournaments at his…

Steve Chapman Chicago Tribune Texas Gov. Greg Abbott presents himself as a “staunch champion of parental rights,” said Steve Chapman. But the same governor who recently proposed adding a “Parental Bill of Rights” to the state’s constitution has joined Attorney General Ken Paxton in issuing an order threatening “child abuse” charges against parents of transgender children. Any teacher, doctor, or nurse in Texas who knows of a minor receiving gender-transitioning treatments such as puberty blockers, the governor announced, faces “criminal penalties” for failing to report their parents. One set of parents and a psychologist are already under investigation by the state, and are suing. Abbott and Paxton’s cruel, performative stunt equates parents of trans kids with those who “beat, starve, molest, or neglect their children.” In the real world, these…

NIGERIA Editorial This Day The “tragic death” of Ajibola Heritage Ayomikun should never have happened, said This Day. The student at Obafemi Awolowo University was living in a private dorm complex when she fell into a poorly covered septic tank and “died before help could reach her.” It’s a “sad commentary” on the deterioration of Nigerian higher education. Ayomikun’s school used to “showcase itself as the most beautiful campus in Africa,” but funding cuts have left it with “decaying facilities.” Nor is it the only one. Students at that and other state-run universities “study in overcrowded and poorly ventilated classrooms,” and campus grounds are crawling with “reptiles and insects.” When colleges do provide housing, students are crowded “like inmates” into tiny rooms. The bathrooms lack doors and the “defective toilets…

Wearing a hearing aid may cut your risk of developing dementia. Researchers from the universities of Oxford and Ulster in the U.K. looked at data from more than 4,300 American adults with an average age of 68. People with untreated hearing loss were more than twice as likely as those without to develop mild cognitive impairment (MCI), a precursor to dementia. But there was no significant difference in risk between those with normal hearing and those who used hearing aids. “This implies that use of hearing aids may help mitigate cognitive decline associated with hearing loss,” the authors write, “offering an actionable strategy to reduce the incidence of MCI.” Previous studies have shown a link between hearing impairment and dementia risk, perhaps because deafness can make people socially isolated,…

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26) Sheila Heti’s latest book is “part bonkers cosmology, part contemporary parable,” said Alexandra Kleeman in The New York Times. After an opening in which God classifies humans based on their similarities to birds, bears, and fish, we’re introduced to Mira, a “bird” and aspiring art critic who suffers the death of her beloved “bear” father. In grief, Mira disassociates and follows his spirit into a leaf, where they reunite to discuss subjects that include quantum entanglement, time travel, and the physicality of God. Heti broke through with two works of autofiction, How Should a Person Be? and Motherhood, said Lily Meyer in NPR.org. Pure Colour is different. It “can feel less like a real novel than like a bedtime story for adults.” It also…

Watergate: A New History by Garrett M. Graff (Avid Reader, $35) “Watergate studies can be a rabbit hole of hard-to-decipher tapes and half-baked theories,” said Douglas Brinkley in The New York Times. Garrett Graff’s “dazzling” new account instead captures the sweeping drama of the scandal, cutting from player to player while keeping a stewing President Nixon at the center. Who ordered the Watergate breakin? What was the goal? Those questions remain unanswered, but Graff brings out, “with granular detail,” the character and motives of his rogues’ gallery—plus a few imperfect heroes. Thank You, Mr. Nixon by Gish Jen (Knopf, $28) The great Gish Jen has never been better, said Michael Schaub in NPR.org. In the title story of this “exceptional” collection, a Chinese woman in heaven addresses a letter to…

3 Robert Glasper has quite a friend group, said Ayana Contreras in NPR.org. Ten years after he kicked off a series of guest-laden albums with 2012’s Black Radio—a “breathtaking” and Grammy-winning fusion of jazz, rap, and R&B—the jazz pianist and hip-hop producer has assembled another A-list cast of Black vocalists to expand the effort. Q-Tip, Jennifer Hudson, H.E.R., Ledisi, and 18 other stars join Glasper on Black Radio III, “an album that champions not only Black music but also Black love and resilience in deeply troubled times.” The 13-track set includes a few standouts, said Andrew Sacher in Brooklyn Vegan. Esperanza Spalding’s smooth, bilingual vocals float above the psychedelic jazz of “Why We Speak.” Killer Mike delivers a killer verse on “Black Superhero.” The single “Better Than I Imagined” won…

America seems to be experiencing a love affair with “all things potable and Italian,” said Brad Thomas Parsons in Punch. Like Coca-Cola, Italy’s bitter sodas began life as medicinal elixirs that evolved into substitutes for classic aperitivi, with flavors derived from the same botanicals. Amid a current rise of nonalcoholic cocktails, sodas like these are finding new fans. Stappi Red Bitter Though sweet, the No. 1 choice of Punch’s tasters has a bitter grab and a “layered effervescence” that evokes a composed aperitivo cocktail. Crodino Italy’s most popular nonalcoholic aperitif is a “sunsetcolored” beauty that offers a pleasing interplay of “earthy bitterness” and “bright citrus.” San Pellegrino Sanbittèr The most widely known Italian bitter soda de-livers a Campari-like pop of orange and grapefruit and offsets its sweet-ness with “a lingering dry…