Innehållsförteckning för April 22, 2022 från The Week Magazine

You might not have realized it, but our country is getting safer every day. How can that be? you might ask. Didn’t the murder rate soar 30 percent in 2020, and isn’t violent crime up nearly everywhere? Isn’t there, on average, more than one mass shooting of four or more people every day—including a crazed gunman’s barrage of 33 shots in a New York City subway this week? Yes, true enough, but look at the bright side: The sale of deadly weapons has been surging at a record pace for years, with nearly 40 million firearms sold in 2020 and 2021. Better yet, in 25 states, you can now legally buy and carry a firearm without a permit, testing, or training. (See Briefing, p.11.) For decades, the National Rifle Association…

A Wake Forest University medical student was placed on leave after she claimed to have deliberately missed a vein while drawing blood because the patient mocked the “She/Her” pronouns on her nametag. Kychelle Del Rosario tweeted that after a patient laughed “loudly” at the pronouns, “I missed the vein so he had to get stuck twice.” She later claimed she missed the vein “due to my inexperience.” An Illinois church is “fasting from whiteness” during Lent by not using any music written by white people. Instead, First United Church of Oak Park said it would use music drawn from African-American and Native American traditions. “I cannot change the color of my skin,” said Rev. Lydia Mulkey, who is white. “But I can change what I listen to.” In other news…

Chris Wright has traveled the world playing professional basketball after beating multiple sclerosis, said Dan Hajducky in ESPN.com. The former Georgetown University standout point guard was playing on a Turkish team in 2012 when, one morning, he couldn’t get out of bed. “I fell to the floor,” says Wright, 32. “I was paralyzed.” He’d soon be diagnosed with MS, an autoimmune disease that attacks the protective covering of nerve fibers. He returned to the U.S., where half a dozen doctors told him to retire from basketball, except one: Dr. Heidi Crayton, who prescribed aggressive monthly injections of a cutting-edge drug that halted his symptoms. “I told myself I would walk again, run again, jump, shoot, dribble, everything,” Wright says. After relearning his basketball skills, he made his NBA debut…

Jennifer Lopez showed off an 8.5 carat, green-stone engagement ring with an estimated value of at least $5 million last week while announcing that she’s engaged to Ben Affleck nearly 20 years after they first made plans to wed. Lopez, 49, rekindled her romance with Affleck last April, soon after she and baseball great Alex Rodriguez ended their engagement. Affleck, 52, popped the question in 2002 with a pink diamond ring, but they called off their engagement in 2004. This will be her fourth marriage and Affleck’s second. Lopez recently said of their romantic reunion, “We’re smarter, we have more experience, we’re at different places in our lives, we have kids. It’s a beautiful thing.” Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Dwayne Haskins died last week after he was hit by a…

David Bernstein The Wall Street Journal In teaching schoolchildren about “America’s legacy of race and racism,” we need not choose between a progressive perspective or a conservative one, said David Bernstein. Why not expose students to multiple perspectives, and let them evaluate the arguments and evidence? In my son’s Washington, D.C.–area public school, teachers in social studies, English, and even physics hammer home the idea that racism defines America’s past and present. Call it critical race theory or not, this is indoctrination, not education. Still, the solution isn’t the other extreme, such as Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s ban on teaching “divisive concepts,” which may make teachers afraid to even mention the word “racism.” American children should be taught about “chattel slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and redlining,” and about the…

MALAYSIA Mergawati Zulfakar The Star There’s a downside to the post-Covid reopening of Malaysia’s borders, said Mergawati Zulfakar. At the start of April, travelers returned to this country after a two-year hiatus, and the largest share by far of the quarter-million people who poured in in the first four days were from Singapore. Our neighbors love to come here and shop, “using the stronger dollar to buy goods on the cheap,” and that’s good for our economy—except when they misbehave. As soon as the border opened, photos and videos of Singaporeans abusing our hospitality began peppering social media. We caught the tourists “peeing by the roadside, driving recklessly on the highway,” and, worst of all, illegally filling up their cars with our subsidized gas. No foreign-registered vehicle is allowed to…

U.S. life expectancy dropped for the second year in a row, a new analysis of public health data found. While Black and Hispanic deaths drove much of the 1.9-year decline in 2020, the bulk of the additional 0.4 decline in 2021 came from white Americans, which the study’s authors attribute to people refusing to get the Covid-19 vaccine. NPR.org Battered by war, Ukraine will see its economy shrink by 45 percent this year, according to an estimate from the World Bank. Russia’s economy, which has been sent into a deep recession by harsh economic sanctions, is projected to contract by 11 percent. Barron’s In a rebound from the pandemic, Americans are expected to host 2.5 million weddings this year—a 30 percent increase over last year and the highest figure in…

“Knowing everything is too much like knowing nothing; without a story, it’s all just information.”Novelist Jennifer Egan, quoted in The New York Times “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction.”Blaise Pascal, quoted in Herald Malaysia “Eternity’s a terrible thought. I mean, where’s it all going to end?”Tom Stoppard, quoted in The Times (U.K.) “Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness. The word ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.”Carl Jung, quoted in The Atlantic “There seems to be enough room in the world for mediocre men, but not for mediocre women.”Madeleine Albright, quoted in Forbes “I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could…

Covid.gov turns into Covid.flub The new Covid.gov website is a callback to the Healthcare.gov debacle, said Scott Duke Kominers in Bloomberg. More than two years into the pandemic, the Biden administration finally launched a “one-stop shop” for “resources on Covid services, mitigation, and treatment options.” But it “mostly just aggregates information” that’s been available for a long time. The instructions for ordering free masks “are labyrinthine.” Using the website to find a pharmacy that will provide a Covid treatment after testing positive—under the ballyhooed “test to treat” program promoted by the Biden administration—is “even more convoluted.” The rise of ‘algospeak’ The effort to bypass content-moderation filters on social media has given rise to a new form of internet-driven language, said Taylor Lorenz in The Washington Post. “‘Algospeak’ is becoming…

Global warming is increasing the risk of extreme wildfires in the American West that are followed by heavy rainfall, new research has found—a one-two punch that can cause catastrophic floods and mudslides. Fires destroy absorbent vegetation and make the soil less permeable, meaning even short bursts of heavy rain can lead to problems. And the rising temperatures not only make wildfires more likely but also generate more intense rainfall, because warmer air can hold more moisture. Researchers say the greatest risk of floods is between three to six months after a fire, reports Scientific American. By the end of the century, more than half the days with extreme wildfire risk in areas of the Pacific Northwest, Idaho, Nevada, and Utah could be followed by heavy downpours within a year,…

Mai Al-Nakib is the author of the award-winning story collection The Hidden Light of Objects. In her debut novel, An Unlasting Home, a professor in Kuwait who is facing blasphemy charges revisits the globe-spanning lives of four women who raised her. Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust (1913). Proust, the master architect of memory, is my touchstone. He loops together lived experience, recollection, and writing, as epitomized in the well-known scene with the tea and madeleine. He died at 51 but managed to preserve the specificity and beauty of his world forever. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927). This is a novel as much about novelistic form as it is about grief over lost parents and the brutal transition to the modern era. I have never read a more…

  3 Even measured against peers in every other genre, “Molly Tuttle is one of the greatest guitar players of this current generation,” said Kyle Coroneos in Saving Country Music. What’s more, “she happens to be a great songwriter.” The first woman to be named bluegrass’ Guitar Player of the Year leaned more toward folk and indie-rock with her first three albums. But with Crooked Tree, she has embraced her mountain-music roots and “really put herself into the record.” Addressing how her alopecia has affected how people have treated her from childhood on, it’s the rare bluegrass album that mixes virtuosic picking and heartfelt lyricism. Even though Tuttle also “unblinkingly” confronts such subjects as deforestation and gender inequality, “the most compelling quality of the record is how fun it sounds,”…

Get in line, adrenaline junkies, said Sharon Kennedy Wynne in the Tampa Bay Times. Rollercoaster enthusiasts have been flocking to Busch Gardens Tampa Bay to experience the theme park’s “terrifying” new thrill ride, the Iron Gwazi, which opened in March following a two-year delay. The long-awaited attraction was built on the bones of an old, “teeth-rattling” wooden coaster, which the park repurposed by adding 4,000 feet of “glass-smooth” steel track. The green-and-purple crocodile-themed ride is now the fastest and steepest hybrid coaster in the world, as well as North America’s tallest. The big draw is a 206-foot-tall section that “looks like the letter U placed upside down.” After a slow upward climb, riders plunge down a 91-degree, beyondvertical drop and reach speeds of 76 mph as they begin careening through…

In a stunning reversal, Elon Musk decided this week not to join Twitter’s board, said Sarah Frier in Bloomberg. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO had been offered a board seat at the social media giant days after disclosing that he had acquired a 9.1 percent stake, becoming Twitter’s largest shareholder. His abrupt reversal has “renewed speculation about Musk’s intentions for Twitter,” especially after he revised his regulatory paperwork, which now classifies him as an activist investor. If he doesn’t join the board, he will “not be subject to an agreement to keep his stake at no more than 14.9 percent.” Banking: JPMorgan warns of loan losses JPMorgan Chase said this week its first-quarter profit fell 42 percent from a year earlier, said Hugh Son in CNBC.com. The country’s largest bank,…

Work-from-home lawsuits Employee are suing for reimbursement of work-from-home expenses, said Hugo Martín in the Los Angeles Times. California is one of several states that mandates employers pay “all necessary expenditures” for employees to perform their duties. When the pandemic hit, many companies did reimburse workers for home-office tech, such as laptops and webcams. But a Stanford study found fewer than 10 percent of employers also “reimbursed workers for costs such as new furniture or internet fees.” Dozens of employee lawsuits allege that such costs can “add up to $50 to $200 a month.” Several disgruntled remote workers who sued the firm Better Mortgage even complained about having to buy their own snacks and lunches, perks the company previously provided in the office. Used-car prices rise even as sales…

Michael McDonald Bloomberg El Salvador might bill itself as “the world’s crypto capital,” but it isn’t ready to handle a dollar-less future, said Michael McDonald. Last September, El Salvador became the first country “to declare Bitcoin legal tender, which means all businesses should accept it as a form of payment.” Saying everyone should take Bitcoin is one thing; then there’s the reality. I visited El Salvador with $1,000 worth of Bitcoin in a digital wallet, intending to stick to using crypto for my trip. Right off the bat, at the airport, I tried to use Bitcoin to pay my $12 entry fee, but the point-of-sale device for Chivo, El Salvador’s Bitcoinprocessing system, wasn’t working. I was given the choice of cash or credit, and charged the fee to my…

Vaughn Smith is what linguists call a hyperpolyglot, said Jessica Contrera in The Washington Post. Smith, 46, is a high school graduate who cleans carpets in the Washington, D.C., area, for less than $20 an hour, and foreigners are often shocked to hear him speaking their language. He picks up new languages just by chatting with people, such as when he cleaned the fish tank at a Japanese restaurant. By his count, Smith can speak 37 languages, 24 well enough to carry on lengthy conversations. He can tell stories in Italian and Finnish and American Sign Language, and is teaching himself Welsh and Indigenous languages from Mexico’s Nahuatl to Montana’s Salish. Growing up, his father spoke English and his mother spoke Spanish. When he heard his dad’s cousins speaking…

As gun violence soars across the nation, many states are making it far easier to buy and carry concealed weapons. What has changed? A growing number of states have passed laws authorizing citizens to carry weapons in public without a license. In 2011, only a single state, Vermont, allowed “permitless carry.” But as of last month, when Georgia, Indiana, Ohio, and Alabama passed such laws, 25 states do. Eleven of those states passed their laws within the past year. It’s part of an aggressive effort to roll back state gun restrictions; at the same time, congressional Republicans have blocked all efforts to expand federal gun-safety laws. The removal of restrictions comes at a time when gun violence in the U.S. is surging. Gun purchases hit a record 22.8 million…

Jordan Weissmann Slate Republicans have developed a strange obsession with pedophilia and sex crimes, said Jordan Weissmann, accusing critics of “don’t say gay” laws of being “groomers” who want to prey on kids. The irony is that “the GOP has many more notable and recent scandals involving the sexual abuse of minors and young students—as well as a recent track record of reacting to them with a shrug.” In 2015, former House Speaker Dennis Hastert pleaded guilty to making hush-money payments to cover up “his history of sexually abusing high school wrestlers he had coached.” In 2018, Republicans ran Roy Moore as a Senate candidate in Alabama, despite multiple accusations he preyed on teen girls. Currently, Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio serves despite accusations he ignored the predatory sexual…

AUSTRIA Verena Kainrath Der Standard We Austrians gobble down our schnitzel with nary a thought to where the meat comes from, said Verena Kainrath. We are among the world’s most ravenous consumers of pork, eating nearly 90 pounds per person per year, and our agricultural lobby spends millions of dollars to promote our sausages abroad. But there’s a dark secret: Our animal welfare regulations are among the EU’s weakest. A video taken at an Austrian farm and released last week by an animal welfare society shocked the country with images of suffering pigs with infected eyes, open abscesses, and severed tails, all packed together in a crate with a slatted floor. Most other countries have banned such floors, which cause leg and tail injuries and force pigs to inhale “caustic…

Country folk who grew up on winding roads are better at navigating than urbanites raised among neatly laid-out grids. That’s the conclusion of a new study of data from the smartphone game Sea Hero Quest, designed by scientists to test people’s navigation skills, says The New York Times. Researchers looked at results from some 400,000 players and found a clear divide: Those who grew up outside cities had an edge in navigating, no matter their age, gender, or education. What’s more, urbanites from countries where cities have patchwork street systems—such as Spain—were better at the game than those from countries with more predictable urban design. The findings could help create a test for Alzheimer’s, because getting lost can be an early sign of the neurodegenerative disease. Researchers have already…

(Random House, $27) Kate Folk’s debut story collection “capably captures the lunacy of the moment we’re living through,” said Kevin Canfield in the San Francisco Chronicle. In one story, millions of people welcome the spread of a mysterious void that vaporizes everything it touches, because they believe it will whisk them straight to heaven. In another, which caused a stir when it was published in The New Yorker in 2020, women struggle to determine if the men they’re dating are human or bots designed to harvest their personal data. Folk’s “bizarre, droll” riffs on troubling questions about technology, politics, and culture “would be satisfying to read in any era,” but “they’re particularly well suited to this one.” All the stories reside “somewhere in the borderlands of magical realism, weird…

Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou (Penguin, $28) This debut novel is so consistently funny “it almost makes the reader forget about the serious issues that undergird the humor,” said Leland Cheuk in The Washington Post. At a small New England university, Ph.D. candidate Ingrid Yang unleashes a firestorm when she discovers that the school’s most famed poet was a white man who presented as Chinese. The characters’ mounting stumbles “make you laugh while forcing you to ponder the uncomfortable implications of every punch line.” Keats by Lucasta Miller (Knopf, $32.50) We tend to remember the poet John Keats as a pure and divinely inspired soul, said Elizabeth Lowry in The Wall Street Journal. His latest biographer, however, “isn’t buying any of it.” Her “irreverent yet compassionate” approach to Keats…

  3 Wet Leg’s debut album is “an absolute blast,” said Bill Pearis in Brooklyn Vegan. Almost no one had heard of the U.K. altrock duo when the cheeky single “Chaise Longue” blew up last summer, leading to a sold-out North American tour. That innuendo-laden earworm generated “the kind of hype that doesn’t really exist anymore,” and bandmates Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers responded by delivering on its promise across a full 12-track set: “These are expertly crafted pop songs played with casual charm,” with “Ur Mum” just the latest in a string of singles “full of sticky choruses, fuzzy guitars, and tongue-in-cheek humor.” The humor sets Teasdale and Chambers apart from other indie-rock singer-guitarists, said Mark Richardson in The Wall Street Journal. The two “wry, playful” 20-something friends only…

Better homes and gardens… Get Organized With the Home Edit Home organization queens Clea Shearer and Joanna Teplin bring a gung-ho cheeriness and Instagrammable aesthetic to the personal spaces of every client. In Season 2 of their series, their celebrity customers include Chris Pratt, Drew Barrymore, and Winnie Harlow. Netflix Tidying Up With Marie Kondo The 2019 series hosted by decluttering’s original supernova remains a potential inspiration source for any spring cleaner. Attending to her own clients, Kondo turns straightening up into a quasi-spiritual experience. Netflix Home If you seek inspirational ideas on a more ambitious scale, try this series, which highlights one innovative home in each episode, from a house in Sweden built inside a greenhouse to a 344-square-foot apartment so flexibly furnished that it feels limitless. Apple…

At least 153 pieces of pending cryptocurrencyrelated legislation have been introduced in 40 states and Puerto Rico, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, with many using language proposed by crypto companies and lobbyists. Several bills would shield cryptocurrency from anti-fraud laws; one proposed in Arizona would make Bitcoin legal tender. The New York Times A Bank of America survey found 71 percent of fund managers expect the global economy to weaken over the next 12 months, the highest percentage since the survey began in 1995. Stagflation, or slowing economic growth combined with inflation, is now anticipated by twothirds of those surveyed. Financial Times A wind energy company was ordered to pay $8 million in fines and restitution after pleading guilty to killing at least 150 bald and golden…

Team Rubicon (teamrubiconusa.org) is a disaster relief organization that unites the skills of military veterans with medical professionals and other first responders to mobilize help where it is needed most. In western Ukraine, a Team Rubicon mobile unit is providing medical services to internally displaced refugees. Ukraine’s well-developed medical system has been devastated by the war, and cancer patients who were receiving chemotherapy and kidney patients relying on dialysis are suddenly without that vital care. Team Rubicon has sent both primary-care doctors and specialists to provide lifesaving aid. And because crises do not disappear when the world moves on to the next story, Team Rubicon is also helping with the urgent needs of Afghan refugees resettling in the U.S. Each charity we feature has earned a four-star overall rating…

Joanna Weiss Politico A new trio of television series about famed “unicorn” CEOs turns “con artists into three-dimensional antiheroes,” said Joanna Weiss. We already know the real-life ending to the stories of Uber’s Travis Kalanick, WeWork’s Adam Neumann, and Theranos’ Elizabeth Holmes. Each of these founders “fall from grace, employees lose their jobs, and investments disappear into nothingness.” But “when the series delve inside the founders’ heads” the effect is to “shift the blame.” In Hulu’s The Dropout, for instance, Holmes “starts as an underdog—smart and ambitious but socially awkward”—and the series suggests that “her initial lie about whether Theranos’ bloodtesting devices actually work has a noble purpose.” Neumann, played by Jared Leto in WeCrashed, gets to make “a thesis statement” when his partner confronts him about misrepresenting his…

This week’s question: Meghan Markle has filed a trademark for the word “archetypes,” which she wants to use as the title of her new podcast. Which celebrity should try to trademark what word next? Last week’s contest: British psychologists have determined that the “most boring person in the world” would be a data scientist who lives in a small town and watches a lot of TV. What would you call a dating app for the world’s most unexciting people? THE WINNER: “StaleMates” Joanne Wiggins, Newtown, Pa. SECOND PLACE: “ZzzzzzzzzHarmony” Laurel Wroten, Petaluma, Calif. THIRD PLACE: “OKTepid” Erica Avery, Greenfield, Mass. 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 include your name, address, and daytime telephone number for…

Good week for: Shamelessness, after former Donald Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort launched a consulting firm “to help people with strategic advice.” Manafort, 73, was pardoned by Trump after being convicted of bank and tax fraud for millions paid him by oligarchs. Postponing Armageddon, after NASA detected the biggest comet ever recorded—80 miles across and weighing 500 trillion tons—hurtling toward the sun at 22,000 miles per hour. Fortunately, calculations show the massive comet will never get close to Earth. Life imitating art, as romantic suspense writer Nancy Crampton Brophy went on trial in Portland, Ore., for allegedly killing her husband, Daniel, in 2018. The jury will not be told about Brophy’s earlier blog post, titled “How to Murder Your Husband.” Bad week for: Comebacks, after influential Republican pollster Frank Luntz…

Bonnie Raitt appreciates how lucky she is still to be making music, said Kat Lister in The Guardian (U.K.). Honored with a Grammy lifetime achievement award last week, Raitt first wowed critics with her voice and musicianship in 1971, when she was just 21. Her self-taught mastery of the guitar later prompted B.B. King to call her the “best damn slide player working today.” But as Raitt struggled with raised commercial expectations, she descended into alcohol and drug abuse, and her career came crashing down in 1983, when she was dropped from her label. In 1987, she entered a recovery program. “I recognized that I had been in the grips of an increasing addiction, reliant on drugs and alcohol to numb my feelings,” says Raitt, 72. Two years later…

Bess Levin Vanity Fair As a senior adviser to his father-in-law, Jared Kushner was given a large portfolio of problems to solve—and in nearly every case, said Bess Levin, “he screwed up big-time.” Kushner, for example, initially dismissed Covid as a problem only for blue states and killed a plan for nationwide testing. His one talent was kissing up to foreign dictators, particularly Saudi Arabian crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, with whom he shared long, secret chats in person and in encrypted WhatsApp messages. When MBS was accused of ordering the murder and dismemberment of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Kushner reportedly urged then-President Trump to support the prince and wait for the episode to blow over. Now we see the payoff. Just six months after Kushner left the White…

“The way that people tend to argue today, particularly online, makes things worse. Disagreements can feel like a war in which the fighters dig trenches on either side of any issue and launch their beliefs back and forth like grenades. These sorts of fights might give everyone involved some short-term satisfaction—they deserve it because I am right and they are evil!—but odds are that neither camp is having any effect on the other; on the contrary, the attacks make opponents dig in deeper.” Arthur Brooks in The Atlantic…

UKRAINE Volodymyr Fessenko Novoye Vremya The U.N. Security Council is making a mockery of its own name, said Volodymyr Fessenko. It can’t ensure our security or any other country’s. President Volodymyr Zelensky said as much last week, addressing the body as it was trying to grapple with the atrocities Russian troops wrought on our civilians in Bucha. Either kick out Russia, he told the council, or “dissolve yourself altogether.” As one of the five permanent members of the council, Russia wields veto power over all decisions, and that has hamstrung the institution for decades. Out of 263 resolutions vetoed since the U.N. was established, 120 were struck down by Russia. Whenever Moscow “grossly violates international law,” as it did by invading Georgia in 2008 and by invading and occupying Crimea…

JAPAN Nao Yamamoto Mainichi Shimbun Japanese students returning to in-person university after two years of Covid-19 restrictions will find extensive warnings there against binge drinking, said Nao Yamamoto. Before the pandemic interrupted campus drinking culture, many young people succumbed to Japan’s relentless glorification of ikki, or blackout drinking, and hundreds died of alcohol poisoning. “Ikki! Ikki!”—“Binge! Binge!”—was named Japan’s most popular phrase in 1985, and the popularity of dangerous drinking games has only ballooned since. During the pandemic, some college kids made do at home by sharing YouTube and TikTok videos of a board game that uses little bottles of 40-proof booze, a bit under an ounce per shot, as playing pieces. But even with such dangerous games, no binge-drinking deaths among youth were recorded during the pandemic. Now, as…

As horrifying evidence mounts of Russian atrocities in Ukraine, a growing chorus of Western leaders are labeling them “war crimes” and demanding “prosecution and punishment,” said Erika Kinetz in the Associated Press. Prosecutors in Ukraine and neighboring countries have launched war crimes investigations, as has the International Criminal Court in the Netherlands. But the path to establishing crimes against humanity “is long and complex.” Evidence must be painstakingly compiled, and prosecutors must show atrocities were “part of widespread, systematic attacks on civilians.” Then there’s the daunting task of building evidence to charge top military and civilian leaders, including Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. The odds that he or other top Russian officials will ever stand trial are close to nil, so years of effort may yield only “trials of mid-level…

If anyone needs a “taxpayer bailout” right now, it sure isn’t people with college and graduate school degrees, said Brad Polumbo in Newsweek. Yet President Biden capitulated to his party’s left wing last week and extended the moratorium on federal student loan payments through August, costing the government about $7.5 billion in monthly interest-payment collections, which are waived during the “pause.” Pausing loan payments made sense after the job market cratered during the pandemic in 2020, but “the unemployment rate for college grads is now just 2 percent.” The two-thirds of Americans who did not attend college get zero benefit from this giveaway. Doctors, lawyers, and MBAs benefit most, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial, because they took on the most debt and largest interest payments. “What…

(Knopf, $29) Ben McGrath, with his first book, has fashioned “a worthy addition to the literature of American restlessness,” said Heller McAlpin in The Wall Street Journal. His subject, Dick Conant, was 63 in 2014 when he tied up his canoe along the Hudson River not far from McGrath’s home. A large, bearded, sociable eccentric, Conant had spent most of the past 20 years alone on America’s rivers, and he was 300 miles into a planned solo excursion to Florida when he made McGrath’s acquaintance and began sharing his story. Three months later, his canoe was found overturned at the mouth of a coastal waterway in North Carolina and Conant was never found. But by gaining access to Conant’s journals, McGrath was able to reconstruct the charming wanderer’s life…

Ocean Vuong recently had to learn how to write without his “North Star” to guide him, said Tonya Mosley in NPR.org. Vuong’s mother, Rose, died of cancer at 51 shortly after Vuong published his best-selling 2019 novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, and only once she was gone did he recognize how much her presence in the world motivated him. Vuong was 2 when he and his mother arrived in the U.S. as Vietnamese refugees. Though Rose never learned to read or mastered English, she loved hearing the applause that greeted her son at his poetry readings, to a degree that he was pained that she received so little recognition herself. She worked in a nail salon for 25 years—head down, focused, meticulous. Painting nails “takes so much more…

  3 Josh Tillman “knows how to keep people guessing,” said Ryan Leas in Stereogum. The singer-songwriter who assumed the persona of Father John Misty a decade ago has taken another “great big left turn” in a critically acclaimed career that’s already full of them. Having already shifted from folkrock to chamber pop, he’s now dabbling in lounge balladry, bossa nova, and the jazzy, orchestral sounds of Old Hollywood, resulting in his “gentlest, most puzzling album to date.” Chloë and the Next 20th Century is “a real ‘your mileage may vary’-type affair,” packed with pretty but archaic music, before ending with one of Misty’s best songs ever, “The Next 20th Century.” An adept lyricist, Tillman “feasts on the decay of culture, morals—the disintegration of everything, really—as if it’s the sweetest…

Until Prohibition, rye was “the rough and rugged whiskey that defined cocktail culture,” said Tyler Zielinski in Punch. Though America now favors bourbon, rye is enjoying a revival as an affordable alternative and because many cocktail makers prefer the spiciness of rye in Manhattans, Sazeracs, and Old-Fashioneds. Rittenhouse Rye ($25). A majority of bartenders recommend this budget-friendly Heaven Hill Distillery product, aged four years and offering “notes of honey, caramel, orange peel, cinnamon, and nutmeg.” Michter’s US 1 Straight Rye ($45). Every bottle of Michter’s comes from a single barrel, producing subtle variations in a rye tinged with flavors of vanilla, butterscotch, and dried fruit. Town Branch Rye Whiskey ($60). This 100-proof rye has floral and toasted notes that play well in a cocktail and also can be savored…

Bobby Rydell made the bobby-soxers swoon. With his pompadour, V-neck sweater, and boy-next-door image, he was among the teen idols who ruled the pop charts in the early ’60s, after Elvis had joined the Army and before the Beatles landed stateside. He released nearly three dozen hit singles between 1959 and 1964, including “Wild One,” “Volare,” “Wildwood Days,” and “Swinging School” (which by some accounts served as inspiration for the Beatles’ “She Loves You”). Rydell—the eponym for Rydell High in the 1978 musical Grease—was a regular on TV variety shows such as The Milton Berle Show and starred opposite Ann-Margret in the 1963 movie musical Bye Bye Birdie. He might have made a bid for a Hollywood career, but the self-described “South Philadelphia kid” couldn’t warm to the idea.…

Eric Boehlert had zero patience for the news media’s failures. An unabashed liberal, he would expertly unpack the biases of not only right-wing outlets like Fox News but also ostensibly left-leaning papers like The New York Times. Boehlert rose to prominence in the 2000s writing for Salon and Media Matters for America, and in 2006 published Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush, asserting that reporters had failed to hold the 43rd president to account. He made similar critiques during Donald Trump’s presidency. In fiery appearances on cable news, Boehlert—who died at age 57 after being hit by a passenger train while riding a bike near his home in Montclair, N.J.—excoriated right-wing misinformation and mainstream media hypocrisy. “We need a press corps,” he wrote in 2020, “that doesn’t…