Innehållsförteckning för June 10, 2022 från The Week Magazine

We don’t want to think of how the last children died, huddling next to their friends, wondering why nobody was helping them. Outside, the parents were arguing with the police. The cops tased one, handcuffed another. The minutes passed. More children were shot and died. (See Talking Points, p.16.) The parents and the children of Uvalde were failed in a million different ways. Despite the pain, though, it’s worth thinking specifically about how and why they were failed by the police. We hear over and over from the police lobby about protecting the public. But in fact, called to actually protect, the cops retreated into the ways of working they were most used to: loudly asserting their authority while spinning their wheels. They’d had plenty of training, but when it…

Two days after the Uvalde school massacre, California lawmakers voted to repeal a law requiring schools to alert police if students make threats of violence. Democratic State Sen. Steven Bradford said mandatory reporting could have disproportionate impact on “Black students [and] Latinx students,” because they are “disproportionately referred to law enforcement.” A 100-year-old Florida woman says a federal agency refuses to believe she’s alive. Betty Ashley says her monthly annuity checks stopped last year and efforts to reinstate them—including sending the agency a photo of herself holding a recent newspaper—have been unsuccessful. Ashley’s daughter says federal officials told her: “She’s 100 years old. Why would we think she’s still alive?” In other news High Court hunts Roe v. Wade leaker Officials at the Supreme Court are escalating their search for…

Matthew Macfadyen isn’t impressed by tortured Method actors, said Joy Press in Vanity Fair. Macfadyen is fully capable of slipping into his roles; he couldn’t have less in common with Tom Wambsgans, the opportunistic, insecure, doofus Midwesterner he plays on HBO’s Succession. In real life, Macfadyen, 47, is a funny, self-effacing Englishman. But he doesn’t believe the job requires him to stay in character between shots and even when he goes home. His Succession co-star, Jeremy Strong, is famous for his Method approach, embracing his character’s anxiety, self-loathing, and suffering even when the camera is turned off. The awed attention Strong’s over-the-top intensity has gotten is “slightly aggravating,” Macfadyen says, describing the show as “an ensemble piece.” He resents the idea that actors who don’t stay in character “aren’t…

Paul Pelosi, husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was arrested last week for driving under the influence of alcohol after allegedly causing a crash near the couple’s Napa County, Calif., vineyard. Police say the 82-year-old businessman, whose estimated net worth tops $100 million, blew past a stop sign in his 2021 Porsche and pulled onto a state road into the path of a 48-year-old man driving a Jeep. Neither driver was injured. Pelosi faces two misdemeanor counts. At the time of his late-night arrest, his wife was in Providence, R.I., to give the commencement address at Brown University. Her spokesman said that “the speaker will not be commenting on this private matter, which occurred while she was on the East Coast.” British prosecutors plan to charge Kevin Spacey with…

Madeleine Kearns National Review Do most liberals truly believe that women can have penises? asked Madeleine Kearns. Probably not, but none dare challenge the new progressive “sacred cow” that gender is purely a social construct with no basis in biology, or face being fired or ‘‘canceled.’’ It has thus fallen to Bill Maher, Ricky Gervais, and other comedians to question “trans extremism.” On his HBO show, Maher has noted the explosion of adolescents—especially girls—who identify as transgender, pointed out that kids often take on identities they later discard, and questioned giving minors hormones and surgery that alter them forever. “If something in the human race is changing at a previously unprecedented rate,” Maher said, “we have to at least discuss it.” In a new special, Gervais calls out the cultural…

EGYPT Ahmed Twaij Al Jazeera (Qatar) How refreshing to see an “unapologetically” Arab female character in a popular Disney show, said Ahmed Twaij. Moon Knight, the latest streaming miniseries in the Marvel pantheon, features Egyptian-Palestinian actress May Calamawy as superhero Layla El-Faouly wearing a “commanding white and gold winged suit.” As an Iraqi brought up in the West, I’m used to seeing Middle Eastern characters cast as “terrorists, misogynists, or oil sheikhs,” a “dehumanization” of Arabs that only got worse after 9/11. A typical example was the character Sayid in the ABC show Lost, a former Iraqi torturer played by a British-Indian actor putting on “an absurd accent.” Series such as Showtime’s Homeland, in which Muslims were portrayed as a terrorist threat, were even more damaging. In a 2015 U.S.…

Scientists have found an easy way to reduce risk of coronary heart disease—stop watching TV. The researchers looked at data from 373,000 white British people between ages 40 and 69. Around 9,000 of them developed coronary heart disease, which involves a build-up of fatty material that narrows the arteries. Once they accounted for factors like body mass index, age, and diet, the researchers found that those who watched an hour of TV or less a day had a 16 percent lower risk of developing coronary heart disease than those watching four or more hours. For those watching two to three hours, the risk was 6 percent lower. The study proved only correlation, not causation, but previous research has linked TV watching to high levels of cholesterol and glucose. “Unfavorable…

(Putnam, $27) “Very few post-apocalyptic novels have the literary qualities of this one,” said A.D. Cirulis in the San Francisco Chronicle. It opens with a man waking up with a head injury in a dried-up concrete channel not knowing who he is. As he seeks water, food, and shelter, memories of a wife, a child, and a best friend return to him in fragments, all borne along by David Yoon’s “swift and luminous” prose. But City of Orange “mostly rehashes, rather than reinvents” the standard elements of post-apocalyptic dramas, said Leland Cheuk in NPR.org. It’s not until the protagonist meets a teenager who’s living a very different experience that the novel “begins to serve up some surprises.” While some readers will see the story’s big twist coming, that’s not…

The Shores of Bohemia by John Taylor Williams (FSG, $35) This new portrait of a brief-lived Cape Cod creative circle is “as breezy as a spring day by the shore,” said Christoph Irmscher in The Wall Street Journal. Beginning around 1910, the Cape’s outer reaches attracted a band of artistic innovators including Eugene O’Neill, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Tennessee Williams. Their bad and “baddish” behavior is the focus here, “yet what’s ultimately more interesting than how much these writers and artists partied is how much they got done anyway.” Why Sharks Matter by David Shiffman (Johns Hopkins Univ., $25) Don’t let Jaws ruin the beach for you, said Peter Fish in the San Francisco Chronicle. Biologist David Shiffman’s appreciative defense of sharks reveals that we pose a greater…

  4 Wilco’s new double album “makes a modest first impression for a magnum opus,” said Jon Pareles in The New York Times. After years of experimentation, the Chicago-based rock band led by Jeff Tweedy has circled back to the warm, country-inspired music of its 1995 debut and of 2007’s looser Sky Blue Sky. Cruel Country was largely recorded live in the studio, and while its 21 songs “often sound serenely resigned,” there’s a tension to Tweedy’s lyrics: He comes across as “weary but dogged,” juggling despair and persistence. On the title track, Tweedy “pokes at the scar tissue of a country he feels deeply conflicted about,” said Alex Swhear in Variety. Still, this is a record that asks listeners to “bask in the amiable breeziness” of a band enjoying…

More than 140 companies among the S&P 500, including Netflix and steelmaker Nucor, said their median worker was paid at least $100,000 last year. Topping the list was Google, where the median employee received $295,884. The Wall Street Journal At half the companies in the S&P 500, it would take workers at the middle of the company’s pay scale at least 186 years to make what their CEO did last year. That’s up from 166 a year earlier. Associated Press Fidelity reported that its number of 401(k) millionaires, those who have more than $1 million in their workplace Fidelity retirement account, in the first quarter of 2022 fell to 406,000 from 442,000, a drop of 8 percent. That’s after a jump of 32 percent when the market boomed in late…

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began in February, more than 14 million Ukrainians are thought to have fled their homes, with more than 6 million leaving the country and about 8 million internally displaced. For over four decades, Medical Teams International (medicalteams.org) has provided lifesaving medical care to people in crisis, such as refugees and survivors of natural disasters. In Moldova, where more than 473,000 Ukrainians are now living, the organization’s teams of volunteer doctors and nurses are offering medical care and mental health support to refugees, almost a third of whom report urgently needing medication. MTI continues to provide care for other displaced persons around the world, including Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh and Syrian refugees in Lebanon. Each charity we feature has earned a four-star overall rating from…

Rebecca Heilweil Vox Boeing has officially entered the space race, said Rebecca Heilweil, and we should all cheer its progress. Last week, “Starliner, a space capsule designed by Boeing, landed safely in the New Mexico desert” after a nearly weeklong trip to the International Space Station. It’s “the first time a private American company not named SpaceX successfully reached the ISS,” and while SpaceX is still the only company certified to carry astronauts on board, Boeing is planning a passenger mission this year. That would represent “a critical step for anyone worried that the future of space is already too dependent on a single company” controlled by the mercurial billionaire Elon Musk. Boeing still lags SpaceX—there are still issues with Starliner’s thrusters, cooling system, and software that “delayed docking with…

Margot Heuman believed she owed her life to her love for another woman. The German Jew was just 14 when she and her family were sent to Theresienstadt, a Nazi-run ghetto in occupied Czechoslovakia. There, she met Dita Neumann, a Jewish Viennese teen, and the two fell in love. Both of their families were sent to Auschwitz and other camps, and all the members perished except the two girls, who ended up together in Bergen-Belsen. After the war, the two remained lifelong friends, and Heuman came out a few years ago—becoming one of the few Holocaust survivors to speak publicly of her experience as a lesbian. “Because I took care of another human being,” she said in 1992, “we managed to never lose our dignity, and we remained people.”…

Igor Pedin, a former ship’s cook, was home in Mariupol, Ukraine, in April when Russian troops began going door-to-door, shooting people at will, said Daniel Boffey in The Guardian (U.K.). Pedin, 61, fled the port city, setting out on foot for what ended up being a 140-mile trek across the war-torn country with his 9-year-old mongrel terrier, Zhu-Zhu. The dog often had to rest, lick her sore paws, and be carried up hills, Pedin says, but he told her: “If you don’t walk, we will both die.” They trudged through a hellscape of destruction, sidestepping mines, seeing burning homes and dead bodies, and passing through 24 Russian checkpoints before finally arriving at the relatively safe city of Zaporizhzhia. Now in the capital city, Kyiv, Zhu-Zhu is fearful of the…

Jonathan Chait New York magazine Special counsel John Durham tried to prove that the FBI investigation of Russian election interference was “a criminal plot,” said Jonathan Chait. Three years later, Durham’s theory has been “debunked.” Durham was appointed in 2019 by former Attorney General Bill Barr to prove that the FBI never had grounds to investigate Donald Trump for his role in Russia’s 2016 attack on U.S. elections. This week, a jury humiliated Durham when it took only six hours to acquit Hillary Clinton lawyer Michael Sussmann of perjury. The prosecutor alleged that Sussmann concealed that he had worked for Clinton when he tipped the FBI about unusual activity on a Kremlin-connected Alfa Bank server in Trump Tower. The entire case was “weak tea,” since the FBI clearly knew Sussmann…

UNITED KINGDOM Ross Clark Daily Mail What if our streets were “plastered with Russian-made CCTV cameras” equipped with facial-recognition software and microphones? Thankfully, Russia doesn’t possess such “a fleet of potential spying machines,” said Ross Clark. “But China does.” Two Chinese firms, Hikvision and Dahua, have become big players in our CCTV market. Of 1,300 public bodies in the United Kingdom that responded to freedom of information requests, 800—including nearly 75 percent of local councils and nearly a third of police forces—confirmed that they had cameras made by those firms on their premises. Many government ministries have them: In fact, it was a Hikvision camera that captured married former health secretary Matt Hancock breaching Covid restrictions by fondling an aide. The security risks this network of cameras presents should be…

The nation’s largest Protestant denomination has been rocked by a “bombshell” report exposing a massive sexual abuse scandal, said Robert Downen and John Tedesco in the Houston Chronicle. The report documents how leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention, which has some 47,000 member churches across the U.S., shunted aside hundreds of allegations of sexual abuse of women, teens, and children by clergy and other church personnel. Evangelical leaders “routinely silenced and disparaged” victims and “ignored calls for policies to stop predators.” Victims were met at times with “outright hostility,” says the report. To avoid liability, church leaders claimed SBC’s decentralized structure didn’t allow for tracking accused abusers—while secretly keeping a 205-page list of hundreds of ministers and church workers accused of sexual abuse. For the nation’s 14 million Southern…

Google’s new text-to-image generator takes AI artistry to another level, said James Vincent in The Verge. The basic premise of text-to-image AI is this: You type what you want to see and the program generates it. From a simple text prompt, Google’s Imagen software scours the web for clues and generates photorealistic images. The prompts can be straightforward (“A photo of a raccoon wearing an astronaut helmet, looking out of the window at night.”) or quite complex (“An art gallery is displaying Monet paintings. The art gallery is flooded. Robots are going around the art gallery using paddle boards”). While others have attempted the same thing—until now, the leader in the field has been a program called DALL-E—Imagen has produced results that are “undeniably impressive,” though it’s not yet…

All animals have an even number of limbs, but a few also use other body parts to propel themselves—kangaroos with their tails, for example. To that list can now be added lovebirds. Scientists had long observed the small, brightly colored parrots using their beaks when climbing certain inclines, but they weren’t sure whether that was for balance or propulsion. To find out, they used high-speed cameras and sensors to watch the birds climb slopes in a lab. Once the angle grew steeper than 45 degrees, the birds started using their beaks for propulsion—creating nearly as much power as their legs during walking. “For them to take their faces and integrate it into their stride cycle is pretty incredible,” co-author Melody Young, from the New York Institute of Technology, tells…

(Gallery, $30) The Anna Wintour of myth turns out to be “far more intriguing than the flesh-and-blood reality,” said Robin Givhan in The Washington Post. In the public imagination, the longtime editor of Vogue is a fashion tyrant: cold to friends, cruel to underlings, bent on power. But at least as she’s portrayed in this deeply reported new 500-page biography, the 72-year-old tastemaker appears to be a more common type: a person of ambition who has built a successful career by being a canny, demanding boss. “If she has an inherent gift that separates her from her rivals, it’s her ability to see herself as others do.” When people show an inclination to fear her or worship her, she has been willing to exploit the advantage. But is that…

Jhumpa Lahiri For Jhumpa Lahiri, the third language was the charm, said Caryn James in The Wall Street Journal. The London-born, New England–raised author, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her 1999 debut, Interpreter of Maladies, surprised many readers in 2012 when she moved to Rome and began writing in Italian. She has heard the disappointment in the questions of fans who, she says, “came up to get their book signed, saying, ‘Aren’t you ever going to write in English anymore? What happened? I used to like you.’” But Lahiri, who grew up speaking both Bengali and English, has fallen lastingly in love with Italian. “It’s a language in which I feel very at home, very alive, and very inspired,” she says. And her enthusiasm for Italian extends beyond…

  3 The uncommon poise that Ravyn Lenae displays on her long-awaited debut album “establishes her as a resonant voice in R&B,” said Gio Santiago in Pitchfork. The Chicago singer-songwriter has been lauded for her vocal technique since her mid-teens, and her first full-length record, arriving four years after her third EP, is “the work of a perfectionist.” Her featherlight soprano has evolved to the point that she sounds, at 23, “as self-assured as she is exploratory,” sing a stylistic range that evokes “a potpourri of R&B female icons of the last three decades,” starting with Aaliyah. “Mercury,” an airy kiss-off in which Lenae is joined by Deep End singer Foushée, is “a bold and bittersweet highlight.” As is “Lullabye,” a second track that proves “getting told off in a…

Gone are the days when France’s Mâcon region was a reliable source of “cheap, innocuous” white Burgundy, said Eric Asimov in The New York Times. Prices have risen along with the ambitions of the producers in Burgundy’s southern tip, and the Mâconnais chardonnays of today merit new respect. “They have a warm quality very much their own,” as well as a pleasing salinity. 2020 Domaine Frantz Chagnoleau Mâcon-Villages Clos Saint-Pancras ($24). The “earthy, floral, and herbal” flavors of this lean white Burgundy are underscored by its salty quality. 2020 Merlin Mâcon La Roche Vineuse ($16). Expect “savory citrus and floral flavors” from this chardonnay, which is “both richer and more straightforward.” 2020 Bret Brothers Mâcon-Chardonnay Les Crays ($33). A saline note highlights “stony flavors of citrus and melon” in…

Good week for: Shanghai, where residents were finally allowed to leave their homes after two months of a rigorously enforced Covid lockdown. Authorities banned the phrase “lockdown,” insisting on the term “static management.” Coffee drinkers, who were up to 21 percent less likely to die than those who didn’t drink coffee during a seven-year study of about 120,000 British people. Coffee drinkers who added a teaspoon of sugar were up to 31 percent less likely to die. Picking up takeout orders yourself, after a survey of 500 delivery drivers found that 4 in 5 admitted to sometimes eating part of customers’ orders. Bad week for: Nancy Crampton Brophy, an Oregon-based romance novelist and author of the 2011 essay “How to Murder Your Husband,” who was found guilty of murdering her…

Ottawa In response to the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting, Canada’s government intends to freeze handgun sales, capping the number of legal handguns in the country. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said this week that gun violence in Canada has worsened and warned that Canadians “need only look south of the border” to see the consequences of inaction. “Other than using firearms for sport shooting and hunting,” Trudeau said, “there is no reason anyone in Canada should need guns in their everyday lives.” The government’s bill also includes a “red flag” measure to confiscate guns from anyone deemed to be an immediate danger. A mandatory buy-back program for assault rifles, banned in 2020, will follow. Police turn on Brits Paris The U.K. demanded an investigation this week after French police tear-gassed…

Emma Thompson decided to show moviegoers more of herself recently—a lot more, said Caitlin Moran in The Times (U.K.). In her latest film, Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, the 63-year-old British actress performs the first fully nude sex scenes of her celebrated career. “I’ve never really been offered sex scenes,” she says. “I have never conformed to the shape of someone they might want to see naked. And by ‘they,’ I mean male executives. I’m too mouthy, not pretty enough.” In the film, Thompson plays a widowed, repressed retiree who decides to hire a high-class male escort in pursuit of her first orgasm. After she succeeds in her goal, Thompson’s character jubilantly sizes herself up naked in the mirror. In real life, Thompson says, when she looks at…

Jason Willick The Washington Post Trumpism may no longer need Donald Trump, said Jason Willick. Trump had a mixed outcome with his endorsements in last week’s primaries, showing that Republican voters “won’t simply follow his orders,” and that a lot has changed since he first ran for president in 2016. In that run, Trump was essentially “a third party–style political entrepreneur” challenging the GOP establishment. His isolationist, anti-immigrant stances and confrontational, culture-war style made him wildly popular with the conservative base and successfully reshaped the Republican Party. So successfully, in fact, that “his distinctiveness within it is fading.” Many Republicans, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, “have at least partly appropriated” Trump’s zeal for attacking the cultural left, dishing out personal insults, and downplaying Covid. DeSantis…

“We have created a museum of unbearable sorrow. With each [mass shooting] tragedy, it gets a bit denser with new names, new unsatisfying explanations, and new photos of the deceased. The names of places just pile up: Columbine, Virginia Tech, El Paso, Buffalo, Parkland, Las Vegas, Orlando, Roseburg, Marysville, Newtown, and now Uvalde. There is the expectation that Uvalde will not be the last name on that list. While we still feel the pressing, manic need to do something, we also now know that nothing will be done. We will keep reliving the brutality of history over and over again.” Jay Caspian Kang in The New York Times…

FRANCE Thierry Aimar La Tribune France’s insistence on banning the “burkini” swimsuit “reveals a real problem of coherence,” said Thierry Aimar. A French court last week suspended a decision by Éric Piolle, the left-wing mayor of Grenoble, allowing the body-covering garments favored by some Muslim women to be worn in public pools. Grenoble’s decree did not name the burkini, but merely said swimmers may wear any type of swimwear, from fully covering themselves to going topless. The burkini, supporters reason, “does not provide any privilege and does not promote any segregation.” So what’s the problem? The government, in the person of Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin, says allowing burkinis at public pools undermines the state’s commitment to secularism. It’s the same argument made by supporters of hijab bans and other measures…

INDIA Rahul Bedi The Wire The lush Indian mustache is more than “just a fashion statement,” said Rahul Bedi. It’s a symbol of “respect, privilege, honor, and above all, machismo.” Many Indians consider cutting off a mustache to be “an unpardonable insult” that can lead to clan feuds. Men in Punjab and Rajasthan states, in particular, live by the saying “He who has no mustache has no standing.” To the Sikhs, a mustache should be thick and stiff enough to balance a lemon on its upturned ends. Among police, the mustachioed occupy “an unstated, albeit higher status”—indeed, in some states policemen have even been paid stipends to grow mustaches, because police chiefs believe that whiskered lawmen generate “a positive and masterful aura.” But the reverence inspired by the mustache can…

“Heroism doesn’t always happen in a burst of glory. Sometimes small triumphs and large hearts change the course of history.”Author Mary Roach, quoted in Good Housekeeping “It is better and more praiseworthy to be well-read in the book of experience, the teacher of the teachers.”Leonardo da Vinci, quoted in Lit Hub “Learn to live alongside cringe. No matter how hard you try to avoid being cringe, you will look back on your life and cringe retrospectively.”Taylor Swift, quoted in Billboard “Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.”Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, quoted in Collider “Any long-haul flight can plausibly be described as an act of violence.”Travel writer William Atkins, quoted in The Critic (U.K.) “There is no path to peace. Peace is the path.”Mahatma Gandhi,…

Democrats back off on Big Tech Some Senate Democrats are getting cold feet about Big Tech oversight, said Adam Cancryn and Emily Birnbaum in Politico. A relatively modest bill introduced by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), “would ban major tech firms like Amazon and Google from favoring their products over competitors.” But “several Democratic senators have privately expressed reservations” about bringing the bill to a vote. One Senate aide dismissed it as a “pet project,” while the chief of staff to Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), who is up for re-election in the fall, told Klobuchar’s team that the bill was too controversial for an election year. “Supporters of the legislation chalked up the last-minute anxiety from vulnerable Democrats to lobbying by the major tech companies.” Electric…

More than three-quarters of Americans diagnosed with long Covid weren’t hospitalized during their initial infection, a new study suggests. The syndrome, a constellation of symptoms including fatigue and brain fog, can last for months or longer and is thought to affect between 10 and 30 percent of adults who get infected with Covid, reports The New York Times. Researchers analyzed data from almost 80,000 private insurance claims for the syndrome over the five months through January 2022. They found that 76 percent of the patients hadn’t been hospitalized, and that a third had no preexisting conditions—a much higher percentage than expected. “These are people who have been healthy and they’re like, ‘Guys, something is not right with me,’” says epidemiologist Paddy Ssentongo from Penn State, who was not involved…

In Therese Anne Fowler’s new novel, It All Comes Down to This, the fate of a summer house divides three sisters as their mother nears death. Below, the author of Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald recommends other books about messy families. Commonwealth by Ann Patchett (2016). I devour everything Patchett writes, but this insightful, compassionate story is one of my favorites. We follow the abruptly and reluctantly blended Keating-Cousins clan over five decades as they sort through the consequences of a fateful moment’s choice. The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough (1977). I read this as a teenager, enraptured by not only the exotic setting and scandalous romance, but also the intricate plot and tangled motives of the Carson-Cleary family. Ever on the edge of melodrama, it’s possibly the…

  3 “It was a match made in heaven,” said Grant Britt in No Depression. Thirty-five years after the Staples Singers performed with the Band in The Last Waltz, gospel queen Mavis Staples reunited with Levon Helm in 2011 for a rollicking show at the concert barn Helm built in Woodstock, N.Y. It was the last time the two friends would take the stage together—Helm died a year later. But the newly released recording of the show is “powerful testimony to the glory these two could stir up.” The gospel hymn “Farther Along” is particularly stirring: Staples “belts it out like she was singing at her own funeral. And the harmonies, God a-mighty!” Helm, following throat cancer, couldn’t sing much himself, said Alexis Petridis in The Guardian. The roots-rock drummer…

Commencing travel season… Taste the Nation With Padma Lakshmi Longtime Top Chef host Padma Lakshmi has taken her game to a new level with this thoughtful, entertaining series that highlights the many cultures that have contributed to today’s American cuisine. Hulu Amazing Hotels: Life Beyond the Lobby Sure, touring the world’s most dramatic hotels one by one is like streaming candy. But this British series goes further, putting co-hosts Monica Galetti and Giles Coren to work behind the scenes to show how much effort goes into making guests happy. BBC Select Gordon Ramsay: Uncharted Chef Ramsay, having built his TV career on kitchen tirades, shows a friendlier face in this series that tracks his globe-trotting search for culinary inspiration. He’s no Anthony Bourdain, but he is an insightful guide.…

In Microsoft Windows or Office: The Speech function, found in Windows 10 and Windows 11, is “one of the most accurate” dictation tools around and can be called up in any text box. When working in Microsoft Office, no matter the operating system, you can access the same speech-to-text engine by hitting the “Dictate” button. While the auto-punctuation feature works “fairly well,” you can also dictate punctuation. In iOS or macOS: Apple’s Dictation tool is also “very accurate.” Activate it using the microphone icon on the keyboard of your Mac or iPhone, or by setting a keyboard shortcut in System Preferences. After you dictate, a spell-check function helps ensure accuracy. In Android: The keyboard on an Android phone has its own mic icon, which activates Android’s similar dictation feature. In…

“The Federal Trade Commission has revamped its antitrust probe of Amazon,” said Leah Nylen in Bloomberg. “The agency has been looking at Amazon since 2019 over antitrust concerns with its retail business and cloud-computing services.” But the FTC is now led by Lina Khan, who “made a name for herself with a groundbreaking legal paper” at Yale that used Amazon as an example to argue for an expanded definition of anti-competitive behavior. People familiar with the probe said this week that the agency has begun “re-interviewing potential witnesses and asking questions” about Amazon’s $8.45 billion acquisition of MGM Studios. Economy: Yellen says U.S. understated inflation risk Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said this week she was wrong about inflation, said Jeff Cox in CNBC.com. Yellen conceded she “didn’t fully understand” the…

Miami? Let it sink, banker says HSBC suspended a senior executive for accusing central bankers and policymakers of climate change “hyperbole,” said Owen Walker in the Financial Times. The executive, Stuart Kirk, is the global head of responsible investing at the bank’s asset management division. But in a conference speech he expressed frustration about his role, saying “there was always some nut job telling me about the end of the world,” and likening the “shrill” and “apocalyptic” climate warnings to Y2K. “Who cares if Miami is six meters underwater in 100 years?” Kirk said. “Amsterdam has been six meters underwater for ages, and that’s a really nice place. We will cope with it.” The presentation is unlikely to have been a surprise to HSBC. It was announced two months…

Allison Schrager Bloomberg The virtue economy was doomed from the start, said Allison Schrager. Over the past decade, money has poured into Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) funds that claimed to invest only in companies that upheld certain “do-good” values. The ESG movement certainly worked for asset managers, who charged higher fees. For a while, they also did reasonably well for investors. “But a bull market can cover many sins—or virtues.” Since the market began to turn this year, ESG funds have performed especially poorly, and now “even industry insiders are voicing skepticism” about the movement. As they should. Investing to save the world is “horribly inefficient.” Meanwhile, keeping up with “who is pure and worthy of your money or labor is a fulltime job,” so investors turned to ESG funds,…

This week’s question: Flocks of jackdaws have been observed squawking their way toward consensus on where to collectively fly and roost next. If these loud, crow-like birds were to form a movement to spread their democratic values, what should they call it? Last week’s contest: The Italian government is trying to figure out what to do with the Sardinian island villas and mega-yachts it has seized from sanctioned Russian oligarchs. If Italy decides to sell off these trappings of obscene wealth at an auction, what should the event be called? THE WINNER: “Putin on the Ritz” Lidia Zidik, Reading, Pa. SECOND PLACE: “Crème de la Kremlin” Ken Liebman, Williston, Vt. THIRD PLACE: “Everything Moscow!” Kenneth Burgan, Grass Valley, Calif. For runners-up and complete contest rules, please go to theweek.com/contest.…