Innehållsförteckning för July 1, 2022 från The Week Magazine

“I know a person when I talk to it,” said Google engineer Blake Lemoine. “It doesn’t matter whether they have a brain made of meat in their head. Or if they have a billion lines of code.” Lemoine made this recent pronouncement just before Google put him on administrative leave, peeved that he publicly claimed that a Google artificial intelligence program, LaMDA, had become “sentient,” and deserved the same legal rights as a person. Nearly all computer scientists dismiss Lemoine’s claim (see Technology, p.20), and insist that LaMDA’s uncanny conversational ability is a sophisticated illusion: Its algorithms draw on the billions of lines of text and conversation in its memory to predict sequences of words, facts, and ideas a real person would use. Evidently, Lemoine fell under LaMDA’s spell when…

What happened The Republican Party of Texas declared last week that Joe Biden is merely the “acting” president and was “not legitimately elected” in 2020—one of several extreme resolutions that left moderate Republicans fretting over the party’s lurch to the right. Roughly 8,000 GOP activists at the Houston convention also called for the repeal of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and declared homosexuality “an abnormal lifestyle choice,” blocking an established group that represents gay Republicans from having a booth at the event. The party platform, which includes a call for Texas schoolchildren to learn about “the humanity of the preborn child,” carries no force of law but signals the Texas GOP’s political agenda. The resolution disavowing Biden’s victory, based on unfounded claims of “substantial election fraud,” drew praise from…

The Kroger and Harris Teeter grocery chains are caught between tribal backlashes over gun symbols and slogans on insulated beverage sleeves. Initially, liberal customers complained that the sleeves were adorned with images of eagles and firearms and slogans such as “Give me liberty or give me death.” When Kroger apologized and withdrew the items, conservatives vowed to boycott the stores “for being anti-American.” The tiny town of Moffat, Colo., is considering changing its name to “Kush,” a slang term for cannabis, to celebrate its booming marijuana businesses. Mayor Cassandra Foxx admits that not all of the town’s 120 residents support the name change, but she feels it would honor an industry that “kind of gave us life, like a rebirth.” In other news An unusual Jan. 5 Capitol tour GOP…

Laura Fernandez remembers the exact moment she decided to flee Moscow, said Kelly Burke in The Guardian (U.K.). The star ballerina, who is half Ukrainian and half Spanish, heard fellow Muscovites describing the siege of the Ukrainian port city Mariupol as a “liberation.” Fernandez, who performed as first soloist with the Stanislavsky Theater, had a cousin and two uncles in Mariupol suffering under the bombardment. The cousin “was telling me all the bad stuff was happening there,” she says, “and then I would tell my friends in Moscow and they would say, ‘No, it’s fine, they’re not killing those guys, they’re saving them.’ It got to the point I couldn’t discuss the war anymore.” Most Russians in Moscow, she says, actually believed the propaganda that it was Ukrainians, not…

Vince McMahon stepped down as CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment last week while the billion-dollar company investigates allegations of misconduct. The Wall Street Journal reports that McMahon, 76, agreed in January to pay $3 million to a former WWE paralegal with whom he had a consensual affair as part of a nondisclosure agreement. WWE’s probe of the longtime executive revealed NDAs involving misconduct allegations from other female employees against McMahon and another top executive, John Laurinaitis. A person claiming to be the paralegal’s friend reportedly notified WWE that she was initially hired in 2019 at $100,000, but her salary doubled after the sexual relationship began. McMahon said he “pledged to accept the findings and outcome of the investigation.” Filmmaker Paul Haggis was arrested in Italy this week on sexual assault…

Benjamin Mazer The Atlantic We may be in the midst of “a mass disabling event of historic proportions,” said Benjamin Mazer. The American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation estimates that 25 million Americans have long Covid—lingering symptoms from Covid infections that range from loss of smell to heart damage, kidney damage, diabetes, chronic nerve pain, “difficulty breathing, overwhelming fatigue, or deadly blood clots.” And with more than 187 million Americans having been infected by SARS-CoV-2, that estimate of long-Covid cases may be a significant undercount, with one recent study finding that 1 in 5 people who get Covid wind up with lasting symptoms. “So much about long Covid remains mysterious.” Its “more insidious symptoms,” such as brain damage and increased susceptibility to heart attacks and kidney failure, may go…

INDIA Suresh Menon The Hindu India’s top cricket league may be too lucrative for its own good, said Suresh Menon. Last week, Disney and the Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries together bought the broadcasting rights for the Indian Premier League for a staggering $6 billion, more than double the previous deal. That makes the IPL one of the most lucrative leagues in the world in terms of costs per game. We are now in for “more hype, more hysteria, greater frenzy—and all that before a ball is bowled!” How will the board that controls the sport cope with this sudden firehose of money? It has announced an increase in pensions for former players, but that’s a tiny fraction of the new wealth. Fans hope the extra money will mean improved “spectator…

About 1 in 5 pregnancies in the U.S. ended in abortion in 2020, according to a report by the Guttmacher Institute. There were more than 930,000 abortions that year, up from about 862,000 in 2017.Associated Press With about a third of the 2022 primaries completed, Republican voters have chosen at least 108 candidates for Congress or statewide offices who say the 2020 election was rigged. Another 40 have campaigned on a platform of tightening voting rules or more stringently enforcing existing rules.The Washington Post Border officials have made 1.44 million arrests of migrants this fiscal year, according to Department of Homeland Security data. Monthly arrests reached another record high in May, with 222,656 apprehended; about a quarter had tried to cross the border before.The Wall Street Journal A record-low 81…

“Nothing travels faster than the speed of light—with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.” Douglas Adams, quoted in the Montreal Gazette “Color is its own divine language, creating meaning through combinations and arrangements. It makes existence feel.” Poet Colleen Louise Barry, quoted in the Los Angeles Review of Books “A father carries pictures where his money used to be.” Steve Martin, quoted in the Newport, R.I., WhatsUpNewp “When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.” Oscar Wilde, quoted in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette “Life isn’t about finding yourself, or finding anything. Life is about creating yourself and creating things.” Bob Dylan, quoted in the Minneapolis Star Tribune “If you really want to make a friend, go to someone’s house and eat with…

Musk: Twitter should be a ‘superapp’ Billionaire Elon Musk, Twitter’s prospective owner, told Twitter employees he thinks the social media company should become more like TikTok and China’s WeChat, said Hannah Murphy in the Financial Times. In an hour-long virtual meeting last week with Twitter’s 8,000-strong workforce, Musk said that the business was not making enough money and hinted at layoffs. He hopes to quadruple Twitter’s existing user base globally “while adding an array of features” to emulate the “superapp” WeChat, “where users can send messages and payments, shop, or book taxis.” Musk softened his stance on remote work, saying that he was “biased toward in-person work” but “exceptional” work could still be done at home. The freewheeling Q&A even saw Musk muse on the existence of aliens, though…

It has been a perennial question throughout the pandemic: Am I currently immune to Covid-19? Now scientists think they may be able to provide an answer with a simple blood sample, reports NBCNews.com. Rather than the less accurate antibody test, this test focuses on T-cells, the part of the immune system that provides long-term protection by getting the body to “remember” and then attack the virus. The patient’s blood sample is mixed with fragments of proteins from the virus; if the T-cells activate, it proves that there is some immunity. The technique isn’t new, but until now it has been expensive and considered difficult to implement on a large scale. This test, which will be subjected to clinical trials in the hopes of gaining regulatory approval, is designed for…

In Chris Pavone’s new novel, Two Nights in Lisbon, a vacationing American searches for her enigmatic younger husband after he vanishes from their hotel room. Below, the best-selling author of The Expats names his favorite novels of the current century. Life After Life by Kate Atkinson (2013). Atkinson’s spectacular doorstop might be described as a reincarnation story, but also might be called a deeply insightful examination of how a single character would experience the whole of the tumultuous 20th century. A remarkable achievement of the imagination. A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (2010). I don’t think there’s anyone writing today as adept as Egan at running a completely different race every time she leaves the gate. Goon Squad is, I think, her biggest triumph: a collection…

4 Six years into her recording career, Yaya Bey “has crystallized her sound into one of the most dazzling albums of the year,” said Eric Torres in Pitchfork. Her new record glides through jazz, soul, and R&B “with a dancer’s careful sense of balance,” and Bey, a 33-year-old Brooklyn singer and songwriter, sounds as natural on an upbeat reggae song (“Meet Me in Brooklyn”) as she does on a smoky neo-soul track (“Alright”). The lyrics, which often address the misogyny that Black women endure in their romantic relationships, are “rooted in the desire to be loved,” and Bey “constantly shifts into different modes of lyrical and vocal expression, each one more poetic and surprising than the last.” A few funny skits scattered in among the record’s 13 songs create…

“Rice with pigeon peas is a Caribbean classic,” said Courtney Hill in Milk Street magazine. For our version, we use canned pigeon peas, though you can swap in black-eyed peas or pinto beans. It’s “delicious with fried plantains and avocado.” 8 oz bacon, chopped • 4 medium garlic cloves, minced • 2 shallots, finely chopped • 1 medium red bell pepper, stemmed, seeded, and chopped • 1 or 2 habanero chiles, stemmed, seeded, and thinly sliced • ¾ tsp ground allspice • 1½ cups long-grain white rice, rinsed and drained • 15-oz can pigeon peas, (preferably green), rinsed and drained • 2 cups unsweetened coconut water • 2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce • kosher salt • ground black pepper • In a 12-inch skillet over medium-high, cook bacon, stirring occasionally,…

“Ginni Thomas has a lot of explaining to do,” said Jamelle Bouie in The New York Times. We already knew that the conservative activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was an enthusiastic supporter of the plot to overturn the 2020 presidential election, after publication of dozens of text messages in which she urged President Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to bypass the will of the American people and install Trump for a second term. If her contacts with Meadows were “shocking,” the new information that emerged last week is “explosive.” Not only did Ginni Thomas email two dozen Arizona Republicans urging them to overturn President Biden’s victory in the state, but she also contacted conservative attorney and Trump adviser John Eastman—a key architect of the…

Jerrod Carmichael came out as gay in the most dramatic way possible, said Frazier Tharpe in GQ. The comedian publicly revealed his sexual orientation for the first time in an hour-long HBO stand-up special. Released in April, the special was met with critical acclaim, although his family’s reaction was “subpar,” says Carmichael, 35. Years earlier, Carmichael, who grew up in Winston-Salem, N.C., filmed a conversation with his mother in which he casually mentions having “hooked up with men” before quickly moving on. “I was scared,” he says. “I was trying to just throw it out like it wasn’t one of the most devastating, nerve-wracking, anxiety-building moments ever.” His new special was his way of ripping the Band-Aid off, and he thinks people reacted positively because his performance felt genuinely…

Paul Karrer Los Angeles Times As a gun owner and retired teacher with 34 years in schools, said Paul Karrer, I can tell you with certainty that “armed teachers have no place in a classroom.” Since 19 schoolchildren were murdered in Uvalde, Texas, gun boosters have revived the absurd claim that arming teachers is a solution to school shootings. Just consider the potential for accidents. Every year trained police officers cause injuries and deaths by unintentionally firing their guns; the same will happen if teachers are armed, and let’s remember: “They are surrounded by kids.” Inevitably, some teachers will leave guns in places where children will find them. Imagine a scenario in which a child brings a fake gun to school, or an unruly student physically attacks an armed teacher.…

UNITED KINGDOM Janet Street-Porter Daily Mail Wales, the British Isles’ most overlooked corner, is trying to rebrand to attract visitors, said Janet Street-Porter, but it’s “a hard sell.” Tourists tend to choose Ireland, with its green hills and excellent stout, or Scotland, with its highland castles and golf. What does Wales have to offer? Most foreigners likely still associate it with the now moribund coal industry, and if they did bother to investigate, they would find only “gray skies. Gray granite chapels. Gray sea.” The Welsh have no quaint handicrafts to hawk, no tasty delicacies to serve. And don’t accuse me of prejudice or ignorance: I’m half Welsh and I spent my childhood summers in my granny’s northern village. Everyone there seemed to hate their neighbors, and I remember almost…

Scientists may be close to finding a way to recycle polystyrene, the long-lasting plastic packaging known as Styrofoam, thanks to the larva of the darkling beetle. In a new study, says The New York Times, larva fed on only polystyrene got enough nutrition to metamorphose into their beetle phase. The worms underwent several physiological changes on the all-polystyrene diet: Their feces turned from light brown to white, and their weight rose slowly. “Polystyrene is definitely a poor diet,” says co-author Christian Rinke, from the University of Queensland in Australia. But “the worms can survive it.” When the time came for metamorphosis, 67 percent of the plastic-munching worms were successful in pupating, compared with 10 percent of those that were fed nothing at all. If scientists can pinpoint what enzyme…

(Algonquin, $28) “The ingenuity of Louis Bayard’s new novel is that it doesn’t try to penetrate the black box of the Kennedy marriage,” said Anna Pitoniak in The Washington Post. Instead, this “poignant, late-summer-afternoon kind of novel” focuses on 1952, when young congressman John F. Kennedy is courting 22-year-old socialite Jacqueline Bouvier. The book’s narrator is Lem Billings, a gay friend of Kennedy’s who is often dispatched to entertain Jackie when Kennedy is otherwise occupied. Because we see Jackie through Lem’s eyes, “we get to know her as a witty, driven young woman,” said Elisabeth Egan in The New York Times. Still, “the real star of this story is Lem,” a friend caught in between. Though Lem at times is privy to conversations he couldn’t possibly have heard, “Bayard…

Pig Years by Ellyn Gaydos (Knopf, $27) Even if you have no interest in reading a farmhand’s memoir, “Ellyn Gaydos is a writer of such vigorous eloquence that you’ll find yourself riveted,” said Claire Messud in Harper’s. Gaydos describes the cycle of work she experienced over several seasons on farms in Vermont and upstate New York, and her account “imparts an abiding sense of the gravity of these acts—of raising, tending, and killing animals; of planting, nurturing, and harvesting vegetables.” There’s “an almost sacred quality” to her prose. Wastelands by Corban Addison (Knopf, $30) “I wish that Wastelands were a work of dystopian science fiction, not a damning portrait of how we feed ourselves now,” said Eric Schlosser in The New York Times. A real-life legal thriller, written by…

It was only a small art exhibit at a public university, but “I’ve never seen anything quite like it,” said Christopher Knight in the Los Angeles Times. In the newly rechristened Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum, the new Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Gallery was displaying work by Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld, and the 23 paintings and drawings were “frankly terrible.” Kleefeld, an heiress and New Age self-help author, recently donated $10 million toward a $24 million expansion of the museum at California State University, Long Beach. In exchange, the museum agreed to put her name everywhere, store and preserve 178 of her creations, and reserved one of its three galleries to exhibit a selection of those works in perpetual rotation. “The deal was a colossal blunder.” Kleefeld is not some…

3 Bartees Strange is, without doubt, “a major talent,” said Mark Richardson in The Wall Street Journal. The Oklahoma-raised songwriter and guitarist “stood out immediately” when he released his debut at 31 two years ago, and this “richer and fuller-sounding” sophomore effort “delivers on the promise of its predecessor.” A Black artist working in a genre dominated by white musicians, Strange creates rock music that freely mixes in folk, R&B, rap, and emo, choosing the style that best suits what each song is trying to convey. His sturdy tenor can handle the demands, and “his phrasing has grown deeper and more evocative since his first record.” Farm to Table’s lyrics often find Strange reflecting on his upbringing, to sometimes wrenching, sometimes heartwarming effect, said James Rettig in Stereogum. He…

Gamay is a great wine for summer, a “juicy, chuggable” red that’s marvelous when lightly chilled, said Samantha Maxwell in Paste. There’s no shortage of expensive Beaujolais, made from the Gamay grape, on store shelves. But there’s also affordable Gamay out there “if you know where to look.” 2020 Domaine de Colette Vieilles Vignes Régnié ($20). “Notes of cherry, strawberry, and raspberry” give this wine “an almost candy-like quality,” while acidity and a slight minerality “keep things interesting.” 2020 Domaine du Clos du Fief Tradition Juliénas ($21). This “surprisingly complex” Beaujolais features “a pop of bubblegum on the nose,” red fruit, plus a subtle minerality and notes of leather. 2018 Duboeuf Côte-de-Brouilly Domaine du Riaz ($26). This tart Gamay offers evokes black cherry and orange peel as well as…

Bob Dylan is 81 now, and “what a saver he’s been,” said Jon Bream in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. When the Bob Dylan Center opened in Tulsa, in May, giving the public access to the rock legend’s personal archives, it counted its holdings at more than 100,000 items. The $10 million facility, housed in a former warehouse two doors from the Woody Guthrie Center, is “packed with Bobabilia,” including performance footage, bootleg recordings, correspondence, and the leather jacket that Dylan wore when he went electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. U.S. poet laureate Joy Harjo curated the reading alcove. Elvis Costello curated the 162-song jukebox selection. The principal focus, though, is the Nobel laureate’s creative process. On view are three pocket-size notepads in which Dylan wrote the lyrics to…

Apple store workers voted for a union last week, said Tripp Mickle and Noam Scheiber in The New York Times. In a first for Apple in the U.S., “65 employees at the store in Towson, Md.,” voted in favor of joining the Apple Coalition of Organized Retail Employees, beating anti-union votes nearly 2 to 1. Union leaders say employees at more than two dozen stores “have expressed interest in unionizing in recent months.” However, employees at a store in Atlanta abandoned a planned vote after Apple raised its starting hourly pay to $22. Mega-brands: Kellogg to split cereals, snacks Kellogg announced it will split into three companies, said Annie Gasparro in The Wall Street Journal. The move from the 116-year-old company “would separate snacks such as Pringles, Cheez-Its, and Pop-Tarts…

A short era for worker power Workers feel their leverage is starting to slip away, said Callum Borchers in The Wall Street Journal. Stimulus checks, a soaring stock market, and remote-work flexibility contributed to an extraordinary amount of employee turnover during the pandemic, when the monthly “quits” rate—or the percentage of workers who resigned their positions—surged to record highs. But with fears of a recession growing, “workers are showing a little less swagger.” The labor market remains tight, but the days of job prospects “Zooming into interviews with a confidence bordering on arrogance” may be ending. Layoffs are already beginning to tick higher, particularly at tech startups where funding has dried up. Workers are also looking for stability; taking a new job can “be risky in the event of…

Bjorn Lomborg The Wall Street Journal The global energy crisis has exposed the virtue-signaling hypocrisy of wealthy countries, said Bjorn Lomborg. In response to soaring energy demand, “Europe and the U.S. are begging Arab nations to expand oil production,” while “so many European countries have asked Botswana to mine more coal that the nation will more than double its exports.” For all the rich world’s talk of climate activism, solar and wind power deliver less than 3 percent of wealthy countries’ energy today, while all the batteries in the world are only “enough to power global average electricity consumption for 75 seconds.” Yet the world’s rich continue to “choke off funding for new fossil fuels in developing countries,” instructing them instead to “skip coal, gas, and oil, and go straight…

Good week for: Working the refs, after Myles Copeland, a firefighter who plays for the Toledo Glass City basketball team, performed CPR and saved the life of a referee who suffered a heart attack during a game. “When you’re off the job,” Copeland said, “you’re really not off the job.” Ecclesiastical clarifications, with a 30-page ruling from a Church of England tribunal that the Rev. Clive Evans violated “acceptable church practice” when he stripped to his underwear to perform a “full immersion” baptism and also pinched two women’s bottoms. Atmospherics, after Ben & Jerry’s pledged that its cows will be fed a new diet to reduce the methane—a greenhouse gas—in their flatulence. “This is a big deal,” the ice cream company said. Bad week for: Political gravity, after President Joe…

Tom Hanks isn’t above making cheesy movies for a paycheck, said David Marchese in The New York Times Magazine. A two-time Oscar winner for Best Actor, Hanks freely concedes the three films based on The Da Vinci Code that he starred in were not artistic masterpieces. “The Da Vinci Code was hooey,” Hanks says. “Those are delightful scavenger hunts that are about as accurate to history as the James Bond movies are to espionage.” But he sees them as harmless entertainment. “They’re as cynical as a crossword puzzle,” he says. “All we were doing is promising a diversion. There’s nothing wrong with good commerce, provided it is good commerce.” He found the actual filming to be an adventure, especially of the third movie in the series. “We were shooting…

Paul Waldman The Washington Post “One of fascism’s key features is the glorification of violence as a domestic political tool,” said Paul Waldman. That’s worth keeping in mind when watching Republican campaign ads that feature candidates firing and brandishing weapons. The most troubling example of this to date is a new ad from Eric Greitens, a Missouri Republican running for U.S. Senate. The ad shows Greitens armed with a shotgun and a pistol, accompanied by a militia, bursting into a suburban home. “Join the MAGA crew,” Greitens says to the camera. “Get a RINO hunting permit. There’s no bagging limit. It doesn’t expire until we save our country.” A RINO, of course, is a Republican In Name Only–a term now used by Trumpists to describe any conservative who is “insufficiently…

“Huge corporations are never, ever on the side of the people. Today’s young people have been forced to learn that old lesson, because they are the inheritors of 40 years of corporate greed, private equity’s smash and grab, bank deregulation, and the collusion of the very rich and the U.S. government to squeeze every penny it can from the middle class and move it into the counting houses of billionaires. Corporations are now faced with labor shortages, and there are rumblings from the owner class about the demise of the great American work ethic. But corporations are the ones who killed it.” Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic…

UKRAINE Igor Berezhansky Tsn.ua The Russians are not content with killing our people, said Igor Berezhansky. They are “committing ecocide,” deliberately laying waste to Ukrainian land and sea to ensure that the country will be polluted for generations to come. The eastern Donbas, where Russia is concentrating its firepower, is our center of industry. There, Russian missiles have blown up hundreds of power plants, chemical and metallurgical factories, and oil depots, lighting fires that can be seen from space and releasing “toxic clouds” laden with sulfur and lead into the air. The shelling of Azovstal steel and iron works “almost led to a catastrophe on a global scale,” as it could have caused tons of hydrogen sulfide to pour into the Sea of Azov, rendering it lifeless. That was a…

AUSTRALIA Abul Rizvi The Sydney Morning Herald Australian leaders are fixated on the fear that armadas of asylum seekers will swarm our coasts, said Abul Rizvi. But the real challenge for recently elected Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is not new boat arrivals, but the nearly 130,000 asylum seekers who are already in the country. Only some 30,000 of those got here by sea. The rest were flown in, through a massive “labor-trafficking system” that began in 2015. Scammers targeted vulnerable people, many from Malaysia or China, “with the prospect of well-paying jobs” on farms. They had the migrants come on tourist visas and opened asylum applications for them, often without their knowledge. The migrants could then work legally over the years it took to process the applications, while the traffickers…

“It’s a moment many parents have anxiously awaited for months,” said Apoorva Mandavilli in The New York Times. Eighteen months after U.S. adults began getting vaccinated against the coronavirus, the CDC this week finally made children under 5 eligible for both Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. It’s an auspicious moment for parents who have kept their young children from schools, sports leagues, and family gatherings out of fear they’d get Covid. It’s “life-changing,” said Erin Schmidt of Alexandria, Va. But such parents “may very well be in the minority.” Vaccines have “lost some of their potency against infection with new variants,” and many parents fear side effects and think Covid presents little danger to young kids, especially if they’ve already been infected. In a recent Kaiser Health poll, only 18…

Some local and state Democrats “are pursuing an enormously risky strategy,” said Jonathan Weisman in The New York Times. They are quietly encouraging Republicans to nominate far-right, Trumpist candidates in primaries, in the hope their extremism leads to easy Democratic victories in November. This unusual tactic has been used in House, Senate, and gubernatorial elections in at least five states. In Colorado, a “shadowy” new group has spent $1.5 million on ads calling senatorial candidate Ron Hanks, a Big Lie supporter who participated in Jan. 6 protests, “too conservative.” To the Republican base, that sounds like enough of a compliment to make them choose Hanks, not the moderate Joe O’Dea, to run against incumbent Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet. Democrats are pulling similar “stunts” in California, said Ed Kilgore in…

(Crown, $29) “Bicycles are the workhorses of the world’s transportation system,” said Jill Lepore in The New Yorker. Though you wouldn’t know it by looking at our nation’s roadways, the world has twice as many bikes as cars, and more people get around by cycling than by any other form of transportation, save walking. Jody Rosen’s “quirky and kaleidoscopic” history of the bicycle gets its ballast from such facts, and from the attention Rosen pays to cultural battles over this form of conveyance. But one of the joys of the book is that the author, who was once a bike messenger in Boston, never loses sight of the joy of cycling. “To ride a bike, Rosen points out, is to come as close to flying by your own power…

At 79, Werner Herzog “has finally found his medium,” said Alexandra Alter in The New York Times. The hugely prolific German filmmaker wrote two books during the pandemic shutdown, including his first novel, which helped confirm his own sense that he is primarily a writer. “It’s odd, but I can explain it easily in a sort of dictum,” he says. “My films are my voyage, and my writing is home.” His short, unconventional novel, The Twilight World, is based on Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese army intelligence officer who refused to accept that World War II had ended and operated as a guerrilla soldier in the mountains of the Philippines for 29 years. Though Herzog originally considered making the story as a film, he decided a novel would be a…

3 “It’s hard for a juggernaut to be nimble,” said Jon Caramanica in The New York Times. Drake needed a reset following last year’s Certified Lover Boy, the bloated culmination of 12 years spent blurring the lines between hip-hop, R&B, and pop. How refreshing, then, that the megastar’s seventh album “fully embraces the dance floor.” These 13 summer-ready songs are as “appealingly weightless” as ever, “but the beats here have sharp corners,” spanning house music from Baltimore club to South African amapiano. “Drake is still Drake,” and his subject matter “reveals nothing new,” said Marcus Shorter in Consequence of Sound. Granted, “Honestly, Nevermind is made for late nights where the lyrics don’t matter because the vibe is so undeniable,” but since Drake built his brand on emotional vulnerability, it’s…

Directed by Baz Luhrmann (PG-13) 3 A kid from Memphis redefines stardom. It should surprise no one who’s seen a Baz Luhrmann movie that the director’s new biopic about the King of Rock ’n’ Roll turns the dial up to 11, said Stephanie Zacharek in Time. “Elvis is exhausting, a mess; it’s also exhilarating, a crazy blur you can’t look away from.” In Austin Butler, Luhrmann has found a star who “goes beyond merely replicating Elvis’ signature moves” to achieve a “phantasmal” spiritual likeness, yet the movie’s first hour is so “exceptionally fragmented and frenetic” that the director of Moulin Rouge! seems more interested in reveling in the Presley myth than in piercing it. At times, though, Elvis “feels like an ideal match of filmmaker and subject,” said Justin Chang…

Top new documentaries… Navalny Vladimir Putin’s most prominent political foe, Alexei Navalny, easily holds the screen in this gripping and surprisingly entertaining documentary portrait. Poisoned in 2020, almost certainly by Putin operatives, he not only survived but also pursued the perpetrators, resulting in a climactic phone call in which one of the suspects spills the details. HBO Max Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey In this new four-part series, female survivors of Warren Jeffs’ Mormon fundamentalist sect expose in shocking detail the exploitative culture that Jeffs built. Before his 2011 conviction on sexual abuse charges, the self-declared prophet accumulated 78 wives, including 24 who were underage. Netflix The First Wave Camera crews embedded at a Queens, N.Y., hospital during the first four months of the Covid pandemic provide a harrowing…

The average monthly car payment in May hit $712, according to Moody’s Analytics. New cars are still 26 percent more expensive than before the pandemic and 19 percent more expensive than just a year ago. Jalopnik U.S. losses to identity fraud last year added up to an estimated $24 billion. On the dark web, credentials for a hacked Gmail account sell for $80, while a stolen Social Security number can be bought for just $2. Quartz An anonymous bidder paid a record $19 million for a private steak lunch with investor Warren Buffett. The bidding started at $25,000 for the last year of Buffett’s annual “power lunch,” which has raised over $53 million for charity. The previous winner, cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun, paid $4.5 million. CNN.com Foreign shipments worth less…

Sexual exploitation, violence, harmful cultural practices, and systemic inequalities violate the human rights of women and girls around the globe. Founded in 1992, Equality Now (equalitynow.org) is an international human rights organization that addresses violence and discrimination against women and girls through legal change. It advocates for eliminating laws that treat people differently on the basis of gender or sex. From Europe and Central Asia to the Middle East and North Africa, the group collaborates with community members to increase legal equality and reform family law, which covers child marriage, divorce, and custody. Nearly 60 percent of the discriminatory laws highlighted by Equality Now have been fully or partially reformed. In 2020, the charity’s work impacted more than 96,000 girls worldwide. Each charity we feature has earned a four-star…

Prashant Gopal Bloomberg Markets A new subprime mortgage is enabling risky borrowers to cobble together Airbnb empires, said Prashant Gopal. Out-of-state investors are snapping up properties in America’s vacation spots, often sight unseen, “at once-unheard-of prices.” The buyers aren’t Wall Street types—they’re “software engineers, middle managers, teachers, and even TikTok influencers” tapping “a special kind of business loan” that qualifies borrowers “not on their salaries but on the projected future income of the property they’re buying,” including short-term bookings through sites such as Airbnb and Vrbo. Some lenders are advertising these rental loans by highlighting the fact they require “no income verification”—reminiscent of the “no income, no assets” loans of the early-2000s boom. And while several of them require borrowers to have good credit and at least “a one-year track…

George Lamming helped the West Indies find its voice. Born in British-ruled Barbados, he wrote six novels and volumes’ worth of essays on the effects of colonialism. His first novel, 1953’s semi-autobiographical In the Castle of My Skin, won plaudits from the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre and Richard Wright. Lamming went on to help forge a Caribbean literary tradition, yet also borrowed from British literature, arguing that the relationship between the sorcerer Prospero and the slave Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest mirrored the relationship between colonizer and colonized. “The language of modern politics is no longer Prospero’s exclusive vocabulary,” he wrote in 1960’s The Pleasures of Exile. “It is Caliban’s as well.” Lamming was born into humble circumstances on a former sugar plantation, said the Associated Press. He won…

This week’s question: Two dozen employees of a Swiss marketing agency suffered burns after walking over hot coals during a team-building exercise at a corporate retreat. Please come up with a name for a corporate retreat that’s more honest about the sole-scorching risks facing employees. Last week’s contest: A self-declared “sologamist” in India is planning a three-day wedding to marry herself. If she were to have a song for her first dance as a self-married woman, what should it be? THE WINNER: “Still the One” Ed Dolan, Wayne, Pa. SECOND PLACE: “Dancing With Myself” Hunter Burgan, Los Angeles THIRD PLACE: “I Am the Sunshine of My Life” Jim Signorelli, Evanston, Ill. For runners-up and complete contest rules, please go to theweek.com/contest. How to enter: Submissions should be emailed to…