Innehållsförteckning för April 8, 2022 från The Week Magazine

It’s 1938 again, and the greatest risk the West faces is not a third world war but appeasement in the face of Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine. No, it’s 1964 or 2003, and the U.S. must not again make the mistake of being stampeded into a foolish war like Vietnam or Iraq. Actually, it’s 1995, and we have a moral duty to intervene militarily to prevent further slaughter, just as we did in Bosnia. Or it’s 2011, and ousting Putin as we did Muammar Qaddafi may lead to chaos and dire unintended consequences. Take your pick. Human beings are wired to make comparisons, and in deciding how to best respond to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, it’s natural to fall back on historical analogies. But which moment in history is most…

When Port Austin, Mich., library director Mary Jaworski discovered a hungry, partially blind cat in her garage, she was determined to find him a good home. Jaworski shared her story with the Port Austin library board, whose members realized a cat could draw in new patrons. The community banded together to fund the cat’s shots, food, and toys and agreed to let him live among the bookshelves. Three years later, Booker Theodorus Sleeper has become a local staple, climbing into purses and greeting kids at the checkout line. In 1980, a notorious thief known as Erik the Belgian made off with six 17th-century tapestries from a church in Northern Spain. Over the years, the tapestries were recovered, but the largest was missing a 2-by-2-foot depiction of an angel cut from…

A Nebraska lawmaker said he was “shocked” to learn of schools placing litter boxes in bathrooms to accommodate students who self-identify as cats and dogs. “They meow and they bark and they interact with their teachers in this fashion,” Republican state Sen. Bruce Bostelman said. He later apologized, saying he felt the debunked internet rumor about litter boxes “really was happening.” Fort Lauderdale, Fla., has fired police chief Larry Scirotto for discrimination against white officers. Scirotto, a mixed-race, 23-year veteran of the department who was asked by the city manager to increase diversity, was accused of favoring people of color for promotions. Scirotto denies the accusation, and notes that nine of the 15 officers he promoted were white men. In other news White House asks for a tax hike for…

Troy Kotsur just became the first deaf male actor to win an Oscar, said Kyle Buchanan in The New York Times. He was honored for his funny, raw, moving performance in CODA, playing a fisherman alongside one of his heroes, Oscar-winner Marlee Matlin. It was the part Kotsur, 53, never thought he’d get. “I’ve been through so much: financial struggle and oppression, folks not ready to work with a deaf actor,” he says in sign language. “I feel like I had cuts all over my body that have finally healed.” For years, even when he’d audition for deaf characters, casting directors would opt for actors who could speak. He’d mail headshots to hundreds of different casting directors, hoping to get just one audition. “And then I wouldn’t get cast!”…

Vice President Kamala Harris was embarrassed that Vogue put a photo of her in casual clothes and sneakers on its cover just before the 2021 inauguration, according to a new book by New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns. When the fashion magazine picked a photo of Harris in Converse sneakers and skinny pants, instead of the suit she preferred, “Harris was wounded,” the book reports. “She felt belittled by the magazine, asking aides: Would Vogue depict another world leader this way?” Vogue editor Anna Wintour defended her choice to a Harris aide, saying it made the new VP look “relatable.” With the new administration confronting Covid and myriad other problems, an adviser to President Biden reportedly told Harris’ incoming chief of staff, “This was not the…

Megan McArdle The Washington Post “What is the purpose of women’s sports?” asked Megan McArdle. That is the critical issue in the debate over whether transgender athletes like college swimmer Lia Thomas should be competing in the women’s category. Thomas, who swam in college as a male for three years, recently won the 500-yard freestyle race in the women’s category at the NCAA championships. That prompted a backlash from other teams and even some of her teammates, who contend Thomas had an unfair biological advantage: years of higher testosterone levels she experienced growing up male, which made her taller, stronger, and faster than most women. Progressive “advocates of inclusion” argue that most great athletes have significant physical advantages over their peers, so why exclude Thomas and other trans athletes? But…

A Brazilian pop star says she was hospitalized because she was too embarrassed to fart in front of her boyfriend. Viviane de Queiroz Pereira, who performs as Pocah, said she’d woken up at 5:30 a.m. with “severe stomach pains” and had to seek medical attention. “Girls, don’t be ashamed to fart in front of your guy,” she wrote, noting that even more embarrassing was “going to the hospital with your guy, and the diagnosis being ‘trapped farts.’” From now on, she wrote, “I’m letting them rip.” The city council in Oxford, England, has made a protected landmark out of a sculpture it spent years trying to remove: a 25-foot shark crashing through the roof of a house. The late father of the current homeowner made the statue out of fiberglass…

AUSTRALIA Bernard Keane Crikey Scott Morrison “assiduously cultivated his links” to the megachurch Hillsong for years, said Bernard Keane, but now that its founder has been revealed as a sexual predator, the Australian prime minister is scrambling to “disassociate himself.” Brian Houston’s global, charismatic-Christian church once counted Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez among its high-profile followers. But Houston recently resigned in disgrace after two women said he had harassed them, including by barging uninvited into a hotel room. Now Morrison, who has said his faith “shapes his approach to policy,” is trying to make us believe he barely knew the man. It’s a preposterous claim, given that the prime minister has publicly called Houston a close friend for years and acknowledged him “in his maiden speech in Parliament.” Morrison even…

It was the slap heard round the world, said Eric Deggans in NPR.org. In a disturbing act of “public violence” this week, actor Will Smith invaded the stage and smacked comedian Chris Rock in the face during the Oscars ceremony after Rock cracked a joke about Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith. Rock’s joke about Pinkett Smith’s short hair was mean and tasteless, since she suffers from alopecia, an autoimmune disorder that often causes hair loss. But hitting people in the face because you’re offended is criminal assault, and it was “bewildering” that just minutes after the slap, the Academy allowed a tearful, self-justifying Smith to go up and accept a Best Actor statue for playing Venus and Serena Williams’ father. Smith then received a standing ovation—a tacit endorsement of…

A man with complete “locked-in” syndrome can now communicate, thanks to brain implants that allow him to control a keyboard using his mind. The patient, a 36-year-old from Germany with the progressive neurodegenerative disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), is able to see, hear, and smell but unable to move or speak. He consented to the experimental procedure when he was still able to answer questions by moving his eyes, reports The Guardian (U.K.). Surgeons then inserted two tiny microelectrode arrays into the man’s brain and taught him to generate brain activity that could transmit to a computer. Once he had mastered that, he used a spelling program to select letters one at a time, writing things like an order for goulash soup and beer—even though he’s fed through a…

Young children in the U.S. were hospitalized with Covid-19 at much higher rates during the recent Omicron wave than they were when the Delta variant was dominant, new research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows. The rate was five times higher for children under 5, and six times higher for infants under six months. But the Omicron wave did not appear to cause more severe infections—the proportion of hospitalized kids who required intensive-care treatment was actually smaller than it was during the Delta wave. Researchers say one possible explanation is that Omicron is more likely to affect the upper airways, which in infants and children are much narrower and easily blocked by inflammation. Indeed, a separate study links Omicron to severe croup in babies under 2.…

(Knopf, $27) Anne Tyler still has it, said Ron Charles in The Washington Post. “In novel after novel, she catches the mingled strains of affection and exasperation that tie a family together,” and she has done it again, at age 80, with her latest. Opening in 1959, it introduces the Garretts, another middle-class Baltimore family, as they feel their way through a week at a lake on a rare vacation. Each of six subsequent sections leaps forward about a decade to bring the Garretts’ story right up to 2020, and as the years pass, Tyler, “our patron saint of the unremarked outlandishness of ordinary life,” subtly conveys both how character is fate and how life holds endless surprises. The funniest chapter finds the Garretts’ marriage on the edge of…

Sentient by Jackie Higgins (Atria, $28) “A hungry sense of wonder requires a diet of nutritious facts,” said Michael Sims in The Washington Post. Science filmmaker Jackie Higgins provides exactly that in Sentient, a “masterpiece of nature and science writing” about animals whose senses outstrip any of our five. As she describes a mole’s remarkable sense of touch or an owl’s incredible hearing, and how they compare with those of humans, “I realized that I was looking at the world again with the humble attention it deserves.” Sounds Wild and Broken by David George Haskell (Viking, $29) David George Haskell is establishing himself as one of our great poet-scientists, said Cynthia Barnett in The New York Times. In his “exquisite” new book, the author of The Forest Unseen urges…

  3 “Humble Quest lives up to its name,” said Will Hermes in Pitchfork. A popcountry collection “full of easy, comfortable pleasures,” Maren Morris’ third album exhibits “a coherence and a clarity that make it feel matter-of-factly masterful.” The 31-year-old Texan hasn’t been a neat fit for country radio since she broke out in 2016 with “My Church,” a gospel-influenced singalong about driving with the radio on. But she’s been such a versatile vocalist on subsequent hits that “she already seems like one of the most influential stylists in modern country.” This is her first outing without her late longtime collaborator Michael Busbee, whom she pays tribute to in the closing piano ballad, said Jonathan Bernstein in Rolling Stone. Most of the album, though, “luxuriates in tasteful adult pop-rock in…

Blended Scotch still far outsells single malts, but it has been losing ground for years, said Jordan Michelman in Punch. Fortunately, the genre’s want of a recharge “has allowed for freedom and experimentation to bloom,” as shown below. Compass Box Orchard House ($50). London-based Compass Box sparked the resurgence of blended Scotch, yet this nuanced new release is a leap forward for the brand. It’s “soft and fruity” with “just a whisper of peat.” SIA Blended Scotch ($38). This whisky blends innovation and tradition, delivering “notes of caramel and honey and a lengthy finish.” Big Peat ($50). This cult favorite delivers “notes of tar and black licorice,” but also summer fruit and “a noted salinity.”…

“The public has been losing faith in the Supreme Court for years,” said Elliot Williams in CNN.com. Now “the biggest current threat to the court’s legitimacy” is the extremist partisan activism of Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, wife of Justice Clarence Thomas. In 29 unhinged, conspiracy-laden text messages that were leaked last week, Thomas repeatedly urged then–White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to overturn the 2020 election. In Thomas’ messages, which Meadows turned over to the House’s Jan. 6 committee, Thomas implores Meadows to keep fighting to keep President Trump in power, claiming that “Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.” That’s right, said Dan Balz in The Washington Post. The wife of a sitting Supreme Court justice called for a coup, using kooky language…

Portland, Ore. Oregon will no longer require terminally ill people to be residents of the state to receive lethal medication, after settling a lawsuit this week that argued the residency requirement for the state’s assisted suicide law was unconstitutional. Advocates said they would use the settlement to push eight other states (and Washington, D.C.), which have similar laws, to drop their residency requirements, too. Plaintiffs said that residency rules violate the Constitution’s Commerce Clause, which gives Congress authority over interstate commerce, and the Privileges and Immunities Clause, which forbids states from discriminating against residents of other states. Critics predict a wave of “suicide tourism,” but Oregon doctors say terminally ill patients are reluctant to travel, and the change will mainly bring in residents of neighboring Washington state. Since it…

Karl-Anthony Towns has channeled intense grief into his bestever season for the NBA’s Minnesota Timberwolves, said Ramona Shelburne in ESPN.com. In April 2020, his mother, Jacqueline Cruz-Towns, died of Covid-19 at age 58, after spending weeks on a ventilator in a medically induced coma. Her death was a reminder that even a multimillionaire with every resource couldn’t save a loved one from this disease. “I watched her life fade away in my hands, with a hazmat suit on,” the three-time all-star says. Since then, Towns, 26, has lost seven other family members to Covid, and in 2020 he was hospitalized himself with the virus. His mother served as his support system and inspiration, and after her death, he wasn’t sure he could continue to play basketball. “I had to…

Jemele Hill The Atlantic To NFL teams desperate for star players, “there is no such thing as a red flag,” said Jemele Hill. We saw proof of that again when the Cleveland Browns recently traded a host of draft picks to acquire quarterback Deshaun Watson—and immediately rewarded him with a five-year, $230 million deal. Watson was forced to sit out last season after 22 massage therapists accused him of sexually abusive behavior, including touching them with his penis and forcing two of them to perform oral sex. Though their lawsuits remain unsettled, the Browns said they were satisfied by the results of a “comprehensive evaluation” of the allegations and Watson’s character. In other words, “he’s good at football.” The NFL has a long, sad history of ignoring or excusing “deeply…

UNITED KINGDOM Editorial The Times With pandemic-induced food and fuel shortages paralyzing the country, the government has begged retired truck drivers to get back on the road, said The Times. So why haven’t they? Because with this government, “trying to sort out almost any problem has become a Kafkaesque nightmare of circular ring-arounds.” It turns out that while thousands of truckers applied, our incompetent vehicle-licensing agency never issued their licenses. An undercover investigation by The Times reveals that Britain’s motor vehicle bureau is mired in an appalling culture of “indolence, indifference, and apathy.” During the first lockdown in 2020, a shocking 3,400 of its 6,200 staff were given paid leave—without having to work from home. Months later, around a thousand were still idle, and in nine of the past 24…

When Afghan girls excitedly arrived for the resumption of high school last week, said Rafiullah Anwari in the Afghanistan Times (Afghanistan), they were crushed to be ordered home instead. After seizing power in Afghanistan last year, the Taliban initially shut the schools but promised that girls would retain many of the rights they had gained over the past 20 years, including the right to an education. All other schools have since reopened, and girls’ secondary schools were about to restart, too, but at the last minute the Taliban “abruptly changed” course. They claim, implausibly, that the girls’ schools lack sufficient female teachers and proper uniforms right now, but most people believe the closure is permanent. Manzeh, an 11th-grade student in Parwan province, said that when she and her classmates…

Conservative Republicans tried last week to smear Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as a radical leftist with extreme views on race and crime, said E.J. Dionne Jr. in The Washington Post, but “choosing the low road” backfired spectacularly. Confronted with “false charges” and “vile innuendo,” President Biden’s Supreme Court nominee was poised and patient, and her confirmation is now “nearly assured.” Republicans, meanwhile, shamed themselves by descending into “backlash politics” and meanspirited, culture-war tropes designed for Fox News sound bites. They hounded the first Black woman nominated to the high court about critical race theory, “which Jackson has never embraced,” and misrepresented her experience as a public defender to suggest she sympathizes with criminals and terrorists. GOP senators even pursued a “despicable” and factually false line of attack on Jackson’s…

With gasoline prices “near their highest-ever level,” said Jinjoo Lee in The Wall Street Journal, states are considering cutting taxes to give motorists some relief. Governors in Maryland, Georgia, and Connecticut have already signed gas tax “holidays” into law, and 22 other states, including New York and Ohio, are considering similar moves. But these tax cuts of roughly 30 cents a gallon “are likely to be disappointing,” giving consumers a “low-octane boost” at most. A 2006 study of an Indiana gas-tax cut showed that 30 percent of the savings were eaten up by gas producers and sellers. Worse yet, the cuts will drive up demand for gas—leading to higher prices. There are smart ways to lessen the pinch, said Peter Coy in The New York Times. In California, which…

Hyundai’s newest hybrid features a roof with built-in solar panels, said Haje Jan Kamps in TechCrunch. “In good sunlight,” the company says, the panels in the 2022 Sonata Hybrid “will produce 200Wh of electricity”—enough energy for about 3 to 4 miles of driving—that gets stored in the car’s drive and starter batteries. It’s not a huge figure, and that’s partly because solar panels collect the sun’s rays better when placed at a 30-degree angle, which isn’t possible on a car roof. With Hyundai’s configuration, you’ll need roughly six hours of solid sun per day to add 800 miles to the total annual driving distance, which, for the average driver, adds up to “a fuel-efficiency bump of around 8 percent.”…

Add another danger to the long list of possible complications from a Covid-19 infection: A new study suggests an increased risk of diabetes. Researchers at VA Saint Louis Health Care System compared more than 181,000 people who had recovered from Covid-19 to more than 4.1 million people who hadn’t been infected over the same period. They found that in the year after their recovery, those in the Covid group were 40 percent more likely to develop a new case of diabetes than those in the control group. That equates to 1 in 100 people at increased risk. As almost 80 million Americans have been infected with Covid, that could mean nearly 800,000 are now more likely to get diabetes. “That’s hard for me to swallow,” lead author Ziyad Al-Aly…

(Grand Central, $30) Calling it “the romance of the century” might be a stretch, said Michael Arditti in the Financial Times. But Vivian Leigh and Laurence Olivier, British-born stars of both screen and stage, had much of the world watching as their tumultuous relationship unfolded across 20-odd years, and this “pacy—at times racy” new account casts the drama in a new light. Leigh and Olivier both had other spouses when they began a passionate affair while co-starring in 1937’s Fire Over England. They married shortly after each broke through in Hollywood in 1939—Leigh with Gone With the Wind, Olivier with Wuthering Heights. But Leigh’s bipolar disorder contributed to a rocky union, as author Stephen Galloway underscores. In Truly, Madly, he “paints a sympathetic portrait of a couple who loved…

New York Times columnist Frank Bruni could have sunk into self-pity four years ago, said Steven Petrow in The Washington Post. At 52, he awoke one morning with his vision obscured, spent several hours hoping it was nothing but within days was listening to a startling diagnosis: He had suffered a rare type of stroke that had damaged an optic nerve, causing a significant permanent loss of vision in his right eye. Worse, the neuro-ophthalmologist estimated that there was a 40 percent chance that the same thing would happen in the left eye, leaving Bruni legally blind. “It was tempting,” he says, “to curl up into the fetal position.” Instead, Bruni decided to see what he could learn from people who had thrived after suffering serious health setbacks, said…

  3 This debut album from one of reggae’s rising stars “delicately walks the tightrope between heritage and innovation,” said Carrie Battan in The New Yorker. Koffee, now 22, already made history as the first woman to win a Grammy for best reggae album—though she did it with a five-track EP she’d recorded when she was 19. On her full-length follow-up, she opens with several tracks that evoke 1970s reggae, many with “an acoustic, off-the-cuff feel.” But the album’s second half, while still light and melodic, is “much more in step with the constantly evolving styles of the broader Afro-Caribbean diaspora, a musical network that mixes Nigerian pop with U.K. hip-hop, West Indian dancehall, and American electronic music.” The single “Run Away,” with its auto-tuned vocals, “undersells Koffee’s individuality,” said…

This meatless pot pie “comes together in one skillet and manages to be hearty yet light,” said Hetty McKinnon in The New York Times. It’s “loaded with the season’s finest offerings,” but feel free to substitute other favorite vegetables. • 2 tbsp olive oil• 1 leek, finely chopped • 2 garlic cloves, finely chopped • 1 fennel bulb, cored and diced into ¼-inch pieces • 2 Yukon Gold potatoes, peeled and diced • 16 to 20 asparagus spears, sliced into ¼-inch pieces • 1½ tsp kosher salt • black pepper • 2 tbsp all-purpose flour, plus more for rolling • 1 cup vegetable stock • 8 oz sour cream • 1 bunch chives, finely sliced • 1 tbsp Dijon mustard • 1 cup grated Gruyère cheese • 1 (14-oz)…

It was a railway known as the Eighth Wonder of the World, and you see its remains anytime you drive on U.S. Highway 1 across the Florida Keys, said Tony Perrottet in Smithsonian magazine. Its abandoned concrete pylons “loom in eerie grandeur, like a capitalist Stonehenge.” Oil magnate Henry Flagler spent a fortune building his Overseas Railroad, which for three decades carried vacationers 156 miles from Miami to Key West, often over open water, as if they were flying 20 feet above the waves. A monstrous hurricane ripped apart the railway in 1935, but much of the longest seacrossing section, known as “Old Seven,” still stands. In January, a 2.2-mile section reopened to cyclists, pedestrians, and anglers, and I booked a room in Marathon to see it. Stepping onto the…

FedEx founder Frederick Smith announced this week he is stepping down after 50 years, said Sheera Frenkel in The New York Times. “A former Marine officer who served two tours of duty in Vietnam, Smith came up with the idea for FedEx from a term paper he wrote in 1965” that explained how shipping companies could improve delivery speeds. Today, FedEx moves about 17 million packages a day and earned $23.6 billion in the last quarter. Current president and chief operating officer Raj Subramaniam will succeed Smith, who plans to remain executive chairman. Stocks: Tesla joins rush to split shares Tesla plans to ask shareholders to approve its second stock split since August 2020, said Fred Imbert in CNBC.com. Following similar stock-split announcements by Amazon and Google, the electric-vehicle maker…

A scam turns into a shoot-out The FBI is investigating an alleged Ponzi scheme that became violent when one of the salesmen turned his gun on federal agents, said Ben Foldy in The Wall Street Journal. After being shot twice by the SWAT team called to his Las Vegas home, Matthew Beasley confessed that the “high-return, zero-risk investment plan” he helped pitch to investors was a fraud. “Investors, the majority of them Mormons,” were solicited to help finance a company that made “short-term loans to people awaiting payouts from settled personal-injury lawsuits.” They claimed payouts were 12.5 percent a year and not a single loan of the “over 16,000 in six-plus years” had gone bad. Nate Anderson, founder of the Hindenburg Research firm that uncovered the fraud through a…

Derek Thompson The Atlantic The Great Resignation you’ve heard so much about isn’t really about quitting the work world, said Derek Thompson. Over the past two years, three related narratives have taken root: “Americans don’t want to work anymore”; “people hate their job”; and “the Great Resignation is a reflection of that job hatred.” All these stories are wrong. No one wants to work anymore? The unemployment rate is under 4 percent. The labor-force participation rate, the percentage of working-age adults who are employed or actively looking for work, for people ages 25 to 54 “is now higher than it was for most of the Obama administration.” Polling has also reflected that “most Americans don’t hate their job.” The share of workers who say they are very or moderately…

This week’s question: At Karen’s Diner in Sydney, the waitstaff intentionally insults and ridicules customers and provides lousy service. Please come up with the name of a daily special that obnoxious servers could throw on patrons’ tables. Last week’s contest: Congress is considering legislation to make daylight saving time permanent year-round so that clocks no longer need to be changed in the fall and spring. Please come up with an appropriate title for this bill. THE WINNER: “Wake America Late Again” Josh Dym, Bergenfield, N.J. SECOND PLACE: “No Hour Left Behind Act” Joe Ayella, Wayne, Pa. THIRD PLACE: “The Times They Aren’t A-Changin’ Act” Norm Carrier, Flat Rock, N.C. For runners-up and complete contest rules, please go to theweek.com/contest. How to enter: Submissions should be emailed to contest@theweek.com. Please…

What happened President Biden said this week he would make no apology for calling for Vladimir Putin’s removal, but administration officials clarified that the U.S. was not seeking regime change in Moscow. During last week’s four-day visit to Europe, Biden ad-libbed at the end of a 27-minute speech on the Russian leader’s invasion of Ukraine, saying, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” Secretary of State Antony Blinken and U.S. Ambassador to NATO Julianne Smith quickly explained that the remark in Warsaw did not imply a change in U.S. policy, and Biden later characterized his outburst as “expressing moral outrage” at Putin’s actions. But some European allies expressed unease. The British government said the Russian people should decide on their leadership, and French President Emmanuel Macron,…

Good week for: The Russia ‘hoax,’ after former President Trump called on Russian President Vladimir Putin to release any dirt he might have on President Biden’s son Hunter. “I would think Putin would know the answer,” Trump said. Proof of collusion, after Russia claimed that Hunter Biden secretly funded biological weapons research in Ukraine. State TV host Evgeny Popov said that it’s time to change “the regime in the U.S.” and “to again help our partner Trump to become president.” Gay pride, after a same-sex couple adopted a dog that was recently dumped at a North Carolina animal shelter because his previous owner feared he might be gay. “We’ve faced the same ignorance,” said Steve Nichols, one of the dog’s new owners. Bad week for: Reproduction, after a U.S. census report…

Geneva Iran began a four-year term on the U.N.’s top women’s rights body last week, after winning election last year in a secret vote that drew outrage from women’s groups around the world. Iran is now on the 45-member Commission on the Status of Women, which promotes gender equality and women’s empowerment, and it got there thanks to at least four votes from Western countries. Iran’s theocratic government has imprisoned and tortured dozens of women’s rights activists and allows girls younger than 13 to be married off by their parents. Its “morality police” patrol the streets, harassing or arresting women who refuse to wear a hijab. In a 2020 report, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres condemned Iran’s “persistent discrimination against women and girls.” Anti-corruption judges are fleeing Guatemala City Guatemala’s Supreme…

Anne Hathaway prefers to remain a mystery to the public, said Marisa Meltzer in The Wall Street Journal Magazine. Unlike many of her publicity-crazed peers, Hathaway doesn’t post selfies and doesn’t hang out with other actors and celebrities, preferring the “chosen family” of friends she made at Vassar College, who know her as Annie. She won’t even say where in NewYork state she lives. “I see [actors] who never seem to be watching their words,” says Hathaway, 39. “I’m still a little uncomfortable. I take my time to establish trust.” Her private life is focused on her family: She and her husband, jewelry designer Adam Shulman, have two kids, Jonathan, 6, and Jack, 2. She’d like to have one more, but is not sure that’s going to happen. “There’s…

Jonathan Chait New York magazine The failure thus far to prosecute Donald Trump for any of his astonishing number of crimes is “deeply corrosive” to our democracy, said Jonathan Chait. We learned last week through a leaked resignation letter that Mark Pomerantz, a prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation of Donald Trump’s company, strongly believed that Trump could be proven “guilty of numerous felony violations” for falsifying financial and tax records. The district attorney, Alvin Bragg, decided not to pursue an indictment on the grounds that Trump’s criminal intent would be hard to prove. Now, “certain crimes are difficult to prosecute,” and Bragg is “certainly prudent” to avoiding risking an acquittal. But there are mountains of evidence that Trump is “a career criminal” who routinely commits fraud, violates laws,…

“As inflation has surged to levels not seen in more than a generation, so has the rate at which manufacturers have resorted to shrinking their products in order not to have to raise prices. Frito-Lay recently reduced its large bag of Doritos from 9.75 ounces to 9.25 ounces. To the company, it means an estimated savings of 21 cents per bag. Multiply 21 cents by the tens of millions of bags of Doritos sold each year, and the half-ounce reduction amounts to a transfer of millions of dollars to the company from its customers. When the price doesn’t appear to change, how likely are we to realize that we’re getting less for our money?” Jeff Jacoby in The Boston Globe…

NETHERLANDS Saskia Kluit and Hans Rodenburg De Volkskrant Travelers driving between Amsterdam and Utrecht are now treated to “the largest LED screen in Europe,” said Saskia Kluit and Hans Rodenburg, garishly displaying nearly half a mile of advertising as motorists zoom past. Such billboards have mushroomed all over our cities and common spaces in recent months. Dutch parks and squares, initially intended “as places of conviviality and relaxation,” are now covered in brightly colored ads “so that private individuals can make a profit.” And they aren’t just static posters: Modern advertising is all flashing digital screens and quick-cut videos, a constant assault on “our most precious asset: our attention.” For a population that already spends too much time on phones, Zoom, and Netflix, this is psychologically exhausting. And, frankly, the…

QATAR Marwan Bishara Al Jazeera The latest World Happiness Report is out, and it’s “utterly depressing,” said Marwan Bishara. As usual, the high ranks in this year’s report are dominated by Nordic and other European states that are wealthy, healthy, and secure but also “culturally introverted and largely reserved”—or, as they might say, more content than happy. Finland is in first place for the fifth consecutive year, yet it has one of the world’s highest suicide rates. So who decides what makes a country happy? The global index kicked off in 2011 after an intense U.N. lobbying campaign by Bhutan, which started using “gross national happiness” as its main development indiother, cator rather than gross national product. Bhutan quantified its people’s well-being by surveying 8,000 random households—but surely excluded…

“If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.” Hannah Arendt, quoted in The Washington Post “We will chase perfection, and we will chase it relentlessly, knowing all the while we can never attain it. But along the way, we shall catch excellence.” Vince Lombardi, quoted in ProFootballHOF.com “The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.” Alfred Hitchcock, quoted in The Irish Times “You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.” Jonathan Safran Foer, quoted in Oprah Daily “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.” Winston Churchill, quoted in The Atlantic “The books that the world calls immoral are books that show…

An AI order to kill? Sightings of Russian “loitering munitions” in Ukraine have raised fears about AI-powered killing machines on the battlefield, said Will Knight in Wired. Photographs on Telegram and Twitter showed “what appears to be the KUB-BLA, a type of lethal drone sold by ZALA Aero, a subsidiary of the Russian arms company Kalashnikov.” The sleek white machine is nicknamed a suicide drone because it is programmed to “deliberately crash into a target, detonating a 3-kilo explosive.” ZALA Aero has claimed in promotional material that the KUB-BLA features “intelligent detection and recognition” of targets, although some AI experts doubt such drones are truly autonomous weapons—yet. Meanwhile the U.S. has supplied Ukraine with a loitering munition—a drone that hovers waiting for a target—called the Switchblade, which has “some…

The number of alcohol-related deaths in the U.S. rose by 25.5 percent in the first year of the pandemic, reports CNN.com. That’s a massive increase: The average annual growth between 1999 and 2017 was just 2.2 percent. There were 78,927 deaths involving booze in 2019—including liver failures and fatal car crashes involving a drunk driver—but a new study shows the number shot up to 99,017 in 2020. That means that alcohol killed more adults under 65 than Covid did that year. The spike was seen across all age groups, with the largest increase among 35-to 44-year-olds. Alcohol sales also rose some 3 percent, the most in 50 years. “It’s unfortunate, but we sort of expected to see something like this,” says Aaron White, from the National Institute on Alcohol…

(Random House, $30) To the degree that Americans remain naïve about the world beyond their own nation’s borders, said Krithika Varagur in The New Yorker, the four main figures in Deborah Cohen’s “effervescent” new book might deserve some blame. John Gunther, Dorothy Thompson, H.R. Knickerbocker, and Vincent Sheean, now largely forgotten, were among the most widely read U.S. foreign correspondents during the years between the two world wars, and in focusing their reporting more on personalities than on broad social, political, and historical forces, they “helped define the profession as we know it today.” Fortunately for Cohen’s readers, they also make a “winsome” collection of friendly rivals, their professional and personal lives deeply intertwined as they dash around Europe trying to figure out how to explain the place to…

In her novel Great Circle—an acclaimed best-seller now in paperback—Maggie Shipstead interwove the stories of a missing 1950s female aviator and a film actress hired to play her. Below, Shipstead recommends six other books about the sea or sky. A Voyage for Madmen by Peter Nichols (2001). This is a riveting account of a 1968–69 round-the-world solo-sailing race, in which nine yachtsmen set out and only one finished. Nichols expertly tells how the others were picked off by storms, wrecks, illness, loneliness, fatigue, idealism (oddly enough), and, in one case, the impossible, madness-inducing burden of deception. The Outlaw Sea by William Langewiesche (2004). I’m a huge admirer of Langewiesche’s aviation writing, too, but this book changed the way I understand the world. Without wasting a word, he lays bare the…

  3 Blues fans, rejoice, said Mark Deming in AllMusic. Six decades after Son House and other aging Delta blues singers stepped out of retirement to reap the benefits of a 1960s blues revival, a batch of previously unreleased recordings of their work from the era is being cleaned up by musician-producer Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys and released a record at a time. House was 62 when he recorded the eight tracks on this new album, all featuring just his voice and guitar. He hadn’t played regularly in two decades, and “he wasn’t back to full strength as a guitarist.” But his vocals “retained their spectral power” and “the intimacy of the recordings is electrifying.” Though House was often fiery, said Grant Britt in No Depression, these tapes…

Taking it to the limit… The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition Ernest Shackleton’s ship, which sank in Antarctica more than a century ago, seemed lost forever before its recent discovery. This superb documentary features actual footage from Shackleton’s ill-fated expedition, which resulted in a celebrated tale of survival. TopDocumentaryFilms.com Losing Sight of Shore Laura Penhaul and the other women in the so-called Coxless Crew also know something about endurance. Following them on their record-setting 2015–16 journey, when they rowed across the Pacific Ocean in nine months, is inspiring and exhausting, even from the comfort of a sofa. Amazon Prime The White Diamond Director Werner Herzog’s fascination with extreme adventurers has led him to artistic peaks, none higher than this 2004 gem about engineer Graham Dorrington, who built a small white…

Young women outearn young men in 22 cities across the country, including New York and Washington, D.C., a Pew Research analysis found. However, nationwide, women ages 16 to 29 earn 93 percent of what their male peers make; for women of all ages, the figure is 84 percent. Axios In America, 2.4 million injectable cosmetic procedures were carried out in 2020, Global sales of noninvasive aesthetic treatments are currently around $60 billion, and are expected to more than triple by 2030. The Economist Private schools that have gone on magical “Cinderella” runs in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament have seen a 4.4 percent bump in enrollment in the two years following. For Saint Peter’s University, that’s worth approximately $9 million in additional revenue from tuition and room and board over…

Michael Hiltzik Los Angeles Times Tech’s biggest hubs aren’t going anywhere, said Michael Hiltzik. The pandemic-driven shift to remote work opened some entrepreneurs’ eyes to their freedom to venture beyond high-tax metropolises like New York, Boston, and, of course, Silicon Valley. But few have actually moved. On the contrary, they slightly increased their share of national high-tech employment from 2019 through 2020, doing better than the “wannabe innovation hubs” like Dallas, Atlanta, and Miami. This shouldn’t be too surprising. Workers gravitate to clusters where they can network with other like-minded individuals doing new and exciting things. The value of these “concentrated ecosystems for nurturing innovation has been documented for decades.” Commentators trying to persuade us that there is vast flow away from California are often just trying to score…

Few rock drummers of the past quarter-century could match Taylor Hawkins. Dave Grohl, the former Nirvana drummer, was one of them, and when he found his later venture, Foo Fighters, short a man in 1997, Hawkins leaped at the chance to play for him. With Grohl as frontman and Hawkins on drums, the alt-rock band became a regular on the Billboard charts for the next two decades, winning 12 Grammys and, last year, induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. But for Hawkins, who died on tour in Bogotá, Colombia, of a suspected drug overdose, a place in the pantheon never translated into freedom from stage fright. “The drummer’s seat is the hot seat,” he said in 2020. “It’s the first [guy] when everyone goes, ‘We sucked…