Innehållsförteckning för July 8, 2022 - July 15, 2022 från The Week Magazine

Every four years, pundits proclaim that “this is the most important election of our lifetimes.” In 2016, we now know, it was actually true. The election of Donald Trump to the presidency was an asteroid strike that profoundly altered America’s political and cultural landscape. Six years ago, Trump offered a devil’s bargain to evangelical Christians: If they gave a thrice-married, biblically illiterate New York City libertine their vote, he’d deliver Supreme Court justices who’d overturn Roe and promote a conservative Christian agenda. Trump delivered, with help from Mitch McConnell and Democrats who stayed home in 2016 or voted for Jill Stein because of their distaste for Hillary Clinton. Trump appointed three Federalist Society–minted justices who, last week, gleefully erased Roe—triggering a war between the states over abortion whose consequences we…

Last month, 20-year-old Anthony Perry noticed an unconscious man on the electrified third rail of an L train stop in Chicago. Perry jumped onto the tracks, grabbed the man, and performed CPR with another commuter—likely saving the man’s life. Early Walker, founder of the anti-violence organization I’m Telling Don’t Shoot recently gathered Perry’s neighbors together to award him a gift for his heroism: A 2009 Audi A8. Perry is looking forward to driving the car to work, and skipping the L—along with the rest of his daily two-bus-and-a-train commute. In 1972, a thief snagged a pair of 19th-century portraits worth $30,000 from the historical society in New Paltz, N.Y., as police were tied up with a fire elsewhere in town. Five decades later, Josephine Bloodgood, the society’s curator, joined librarian…

An Oklahoma movie theater has scrapped plans to fast-forward through a same-sex kiss by a lesbian couple in Disney/Pixar’s Lightyear. The theater had assured moviegoers on a sign that “we will do all we can to fast-forward through that scene.” The sign is now gone, and customers say the movie is being shown uncensored. “It was, like, two seconds,” said parent Jill Stuever. “No big deal.” The U.S. Supreme Court has sided with a Georgia death row inmate who prefers to die by firing squad rather than lethal injection. Lawyers for convicted murderer Michael Nance, 61, argued that his veins are “severely compromised and unsuitable for sustained intravenous access,” so it would cause him severe pain and suffering to be injected. He can now petition Georgia to shoot him. In…

Olena Zelenska woke to the sound of muffled booms on Feb. 24, said Shaun Walker in The Guardian. Ukraine’s first lady rushed to find her husband, President Volodymyr Zelensky, already dressed in suit and tie. “It’s started,” he told her. As she and their children—a son, 9, and daughter, 17—prepared to evacuate their home, they’d rush for cover whenever explosions got close. “It was a surreal feeling, like I was playing a computer game and had to pass certain levels to find myself back at home,” Zelenska says. (In Ukrainian, surname endings differ for husband and wife.) With Russian assassins hunting the family, she and the children spent the next two months at an undisclosed location within Ukraine. Zelenska reemerged to tour a school with first lady Jill Biden.…

A grocery-store worker on Staten Island, N.Y., was charged with assault this week after slapping former mayor Rudy Giuliani on the back. The Republican, who was campaigning for his son Andrew’s gubernatorial bid, said he felt “tremendous pain,” as if “somebody shot me,” adding that if he weren’t in “pretty good shape,” he would have “hit the ground and probably cracked my skull.” But Giuliani’s account didn’t appear to match the images on store surveillance footage, which showed the portly 78-year-old looking startled, but not moving or reacting in pain, after Daniel Gill, 39, slapped him on the back while walking by. Gill reportedly called Giuliani a “scumbag” for opposing abortion rights. Charges against Gill were reduced after the video surfaced. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch is divorcing his wife…

Bonnie Kristian The Daily Beast The Republican Party is now in the grip of “folk libertarianism,” said Bonnie Kristian. Unlike traditional libertarianism, the folk version does not believe in free markets, small government, and personal liberty—at least not for everyone. Folk libertarianism is “an anti-authority impulse that wants authority for itself.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is “an exemplar” of this irritated new attitude. DeSantis opposes government mask and vaccine mandates—but threatened to impose $50,000 fines on private companies that imposed mandates on their own property. He unabashedly used state powers to punish Disney for criticizing Florida’s “Don’t say gay” law. For folk libertarians, “that’s not hypocrisy.” They are quite comfortable bossing around other people. They also revere “the enforcement arms of the state: police forces, border patrol, and the…

PAKISTAN Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhry Dawn It’s obvious why Western governments don’t want to give aid to the Taliban, said Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhry. They want no part of sending money to a country ruled by hard-line Islamists who bar women from working and girls from going to school. But millions of Afghans are starving, and now they need urgent aid after a recent earthquake killed more than 1,000 people. The West’s “coercive economic approach” toward Afghanistan is cruel—and it could also create blowback. Since the Taliban took over last year, the U.S. has frozen billions of dollars in Afghan assets, so neither the Taliban government nor ordinary Afghans can access their bank accounts, and Western donors have refused to give aid through the Taliban. Afghanistan is headed for “likely economic collapse,”…

The abortion rate among Black women in 2019 was nearly quadruple the rate among white women and more than double that of Hispanic women. That disparity, said the Guttmacher Institute, is largely the result of a lack of access to and effective use of contraception. About half of Black Americans live in Southern states, which will soon ban or severely limit abortion.The Washington Post Covid vaccines saved the lives of 19 million to 20 million people worldwide in the first year of their availability, according to a disease-modeling study published in British medical journal The Lancet. Officially, there have been 6.3 million deaths, but most experts think the number is far higher.The Economist Donald Trump had a mystery call with Russian President Vladimir Putin nine days before the 2020 election,…

“What’s another word for thesaurus?”Steven Wright, quoted in Las Vegas Weekly “Laughter is dangerous to the guardians of the state as to all good men, because of its tendency to get out of hand.”Samuel Weber, quoted in The Paris Review “The only lasting truth is change.”Octavia Butler, quoted in The Marginalian “Once you get over the 1-inch barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to many more amazing films.”Bong Joon Ho, quoted in Gaming Age “Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative.”H.G. Wells, quoted in Hospitality Net “It’s not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.”Audre Lorde, quoted in Ohio State News “You don’t know what pressure is until you play for five bucks with only two bucks…

Instagram’s new teen hurdle After much prodding, Instagram introduced new tools to verify teens’ ages on its platform, said Tatum Hunter in The Washington Post. The company said last week that young account holders must now submit “a video selfie” if they wish to edit their birth date from under 18 to over 18 on the app. The videos will be verified by digital-identity company Yoti. Or, as an alternative to facial recognition, they can “ask three adult Instagram friends to vouch for their age.” Instagram has implemented new safeguards for under-16 users, whose accounts are automatically labeled as private. Teen accounts “can’t receive direct messages from adults they’re not connected with, and they’re protected from certain types of ad targeting.” There’s one really big loophole: There’s still nothing…

Surgeons have a hard time excising cancers in the brain because of the risk of damage to healthy cells. Now researchers have developed a promising new treatment that uses photoimmunotherapy to identify and destroy even microscopic cancer cells. They used synthetic molecules engineered to target a protein that often mutates in cases of glioblastoma, a common form of brain cancer. The molecules glow when exposed to normal light, and they trigger anti-tumor activity under near-infrared light. In a major trial involving mice with glioblastoma, the treatment helped surgeons identify and resect the tiniest cancer cells—and then, under the light, it wiped out the bits that remained. The treatment also triggered an immune response that might help the immune system target new cancer cells to prevent recurrence. “Brain cancers like…

Hurricane Girl by Marcy Dermansky (Knopf, $26) “What makes this book so funny?” asks Emma Copley Eisenberg in The Boston Globe. It’s not the premise: Thirty-two-year-old Allison Brody flees an abusive boyfriend and buys a beach house only to see it blown away by a hurricane and to get knocked over the head by the next guy she sleeps with. But author Marcy Dermansky is “a master of that slippery thing we might call voice,” and she puts us inside that bloodied head as Allison hurtles through life with no master plan, establishing Hurricane Girl as “a powerful comedic indictment of the darkness of American Millennial life.” The neurosurgeon who treats Allison turns out to be an old fling with a great swimming pool, said Omari Weekes in NYMag.com.…

Katy Tur isn’t easily shaken, said Dave Davies in NPR.org. In her new memoir, Rough Draft, the 38-year-old MSNBC news anchor remembers regularly riding in her parents’ news helicopter as a child when they were chasing breaking stories across greater Los Angeles. She saw standoffs turn into shootings, watched car chases turn into deadly collisions, and got close enough to fires that she could feel their heat. “Nothing scared me. I loved the feeling of flight, the rush of it,” she says. As her parents captured now iconic exclusive footage, including the beating of truck driver Reginald Denny by 1992 rioters and the O.J. Simpson chase two years later, Katy tagged along often enough that she considered the helicopter her true home. “I felt more comfortable there than I…

3 The indie-pop trio Muna appears to be “on the verge of breaking out,” said Dani Blum in The New York Times. Five years ago, Katie Gavin, Naomi McPherson, and Josette Maskin seemed headed toward early stardom, courting new fans on tours with Harry Styles and the 1975. But RCA Records unexpectedly dropped the L.A. band early in the pandemic, and Muna has responded by signing with the indie label run by Phoebe Bridgers and putting out “its most pop-oriented and propulsive album yet.” The self-titled record is “filled with fizzy songs about twirling through gay bars and rollerblading through the night that barrel over slick, sputtering synths.” The album’s buoyant first single, “Silk Chiffon,” has been an “alt-radio mainstay” since its release in September, said Bobby Olivier in…

Run, Bambi, Run (Campside Media) Laurie “Bambi” Bembenek’s story is “the perfect candidate for a post-MeToo retelling,” said Alice Florence Orr in PodcastReview.org. In this “complicated yet rousing listen,” host Vanessa Grigoriadis revisits the largely forgotten story. Bembenek, an ex-cop and ex-model, was sentenced at 23 to life in prison for the murder of her husband’s ex-wife, only to break out a decade later with the help of a new lover. Bembenek died in 2010, but her biographer and sympathetic ex-colleagues help assemble a one-sided version of the story that’s also “a masterclass in making good of partial material.” As a true-crime skeptic, “I’m always delighted to find a series in the genre that has something more on its mind than the crime itself,” said Eliana Dockterman in Time.…

With new tequilas launching “on a seemingly daily basis,” the category is in the midst of “an unprecedented boom,” said Tyler Zielinski in Punch. To identify a few everyone should know, we surveyed top bartenders about the best blanco tequilas for mixing. The three below were top choices: Tequila Ocho Plata ($57). Ocho Plata isn’t cheap, but “its oily mouthfeel and citrusy, subtly earthy flavor profile make it extra versatile for mixing in cocktails.” The 2021 vintage is “super green” with “an undertone of cactus.” Olmeca Altos Plata ($35). Crafted from blue weber agave grown at high altitudes in Jalisco, this value choice features “notes of citrus, honey, and brine.” Tequila Tromba Blanco ($40). Caramelized flavors plus “notes of lemon pith, white pepper, and vanilla” make this tequila perfect…

Sweep regularly. Get out the broom about once a week, because dirt and leaves left sitting on a wooden deck “can lead to discoloration, mold, and wood rot.” Use the right cleaner. Combat mold, algae, and discoloration at least once a year by using a deck cleaner formulated for the deck’s wood type. Avoid chlorine bleach and instead use oxygen bleach solutions, which remove mildew and “help restore weathered gray wood.” Consider an oxalic acid–based solution to brighten the wood. Be gentle. When cleaning, “a garden hose with a sprayer is the best option,” because pressure washing can damage wood, “especially soft varieties like cedar.” Sand, stain, and seal. The deck should be sanded, restained, and resealed every two or three years. To make finishing a one-step process, “look for…

Christopher Mims The Wall Street Journal Shopping on Amazon now feels like strolling through the fictional, and utterly incomprehensible, “Library of Babel,” said Christopher Mims. The short story by Jorge Luis Borges envisioned a library “that contained every possible book that could ever be written.” Now imagine that with garlic presses instead of books. As I waded through pages and pages of listings of garlic presses, I found 27 results that “appeared to be the exact same item,” ranging in price from $1.50 to $10. The pages together contained tens of thousands of reviews, most of which are untrustworthy. How did things get this way? Amazon brought this on itself. In the mid-2010s, Amazon courted Chinese sellers “to bring more goods onto its service at even lower prices.” Many…

Olivia Harrison has spent two decades fighting to protect the legacy of her late husband, George, said Christina Patterson in The Times (U.K.). She met the lead guitarist of the Beatles in 1974, four years after the band’s breakup, when she went to work for George’s new label, Dark Horse. She was 26, he was 31. They were soon inseparable, and Olivia moved into his colossal estate, Friar Park, in the English town of Henley-on-Thames. Four years later they had a son. The 1980 murder of John Lennon terrified the Harrisons, and their fears came true in 1999, when a mentally ill man broke into Friar Park and stabbed George multiple times. Olivia smashed the attacker’s head with a poker, saving her husband’s life. The Harrisons were intensely loyal…

Joshua Zeitz Politico The legal philosophy of “originalism” requires “a very, very firm grasp of history”—one that Supreme Court justices clearly do not have, said historian Joshua Zeitz. Take the court’s ruling last week that a New York law restricting the carrying of firearms in public places violated the original intent of the Second Amendment. In the 18th century, “a well regulated militia” had a clear meaning: states had the right to organize armed citizens for the common defense. At that time, states did regulate individual gun ownership, and “local and state authorities frequently confiscated guns from persons they deemed a menace to public safety, or simply disloyal.” In the abortion decision, Justice Samuel Alito argued that the 14th Amendment provided no right for women to control their own…

GERMANY Leander F. Badura Der Freitag Hate speech is still hate speech when it is couched as artistic expression, said Leander F. Badura. Why couldn’t the curators of the Kassel art festival Documenta see that? They invited the Indonesian collective Taring Padi, a group known for anti-Semitism, to exhibit. The Indonesian artists offered not a painting, nor an installation, but simply an anti-Israeli protest banner masquerading as art, a banner that included an image of “a pig with ‘Mossad’ written on its helmet and a caricature of an Orthodox Jew with SS runes on his hat.” The images are not just hateful politics, but also “bad art,” worked in “a clumsy, obvious pictorial language” that does nothing to stimulate aesthetic experience. Art is the politicization of aesthetics, but these images…

If you think vitamins offer you protection against cancer and heart disease, think again. That’s the conclusion of an independent panel of experts at the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, after a new review of 84 studies found “insufficient evidence” of any such benefits. The analysis covered the impact of minerals such as calcium, magnesium, and zinc, as well as multivitamins and vitamins A, B, C, D, and E. It concluded that the products could help certain groups—such as children, those with chronic illness or a nutritional deficiency, and pregnant women (who need folic acid to prevent birth defects). But for the average healthy adult, there was nothing in the analysis to support taking up dietary supplements. Far more important for preventing cancer and heart disease, experts tell NBCNews.com,…

Patrick Radden Keefe’s latest book, Rogues, gathers 12 of his New Yorker stories about real-life grifters, crooks, and rebels. Below, the award-winning author of Say Nothing and Empire of Pain names six favorite true-crime books. Ghettoside by Jill Leovy (2015). An extraordinary book about policing, detective work, and race and criminal justice in one American community. Leovy is a masterful reporter and storyteller, and the tale she relates about a South Los Angeles murder is fast-paced, often counterintuitive, and deeply important. The Hard Sell by Evan Hughes (2022). Having written about the opioid crisis myself, I’ve read all the books on the subject and can safely say that this one, about little-known Insys Therapeutics, is unique. It’s an immensely absorbing crime story about a bunch of colorful crooks who…

  3 Luke Combs, who’s had an unprecedented run of 14 No. 1 singles on Billboard’s country chart, is “trying hard to not be starstruck by his own success,” said Maura Johnston in Rolling Stone. On his third album, “mostly it works,” because the 32-year-old from Asheville, N.C., keeps finding ways to sing about “small-town bars and bighearted people” while sounding sincere. In “Doin’ This,” the first single, he vows he’d be singing for bar tips if he weren’t singing in stadiums, and his “robust, rough-edged tenor” sells the notion while a big chorus adds “just enough modern-day brawn” to suit his hitmaker status. “Little has changed in Combs’ music,” said Carena Liptak in Grammy.com. “He’s still a hard-partying, traditional-country-leaning, full-throated force of a performer,” yet he’s aware that he’s…

Independence studies… John Adams An oft-overlooked Founding Father won new fans when David McCullough’s best-selling biography was adapted for this 2008 seven-part biodrama. Paul Giamatti garnered an Emmy for his turn as the driven New Englander who advanced liberty’s cause in backrooms, not battlefields. HBO Max The Crossing Few great screen dramas focus on George Washington. The best may be this 2000 A&E movie in which Jeff Daniels plays the war commander when he was outmanned but determined to cross the Delaware River in winter to strike a surprise blow. YouTube Hamilton If you’re the last remaining American who’s never seen Lin-Manuel Miranda’s megahit, there’s no better time to change that. The groundbreaking and insanely entertaining musical chronicles the life of a flawed but fervent patriot whose fight for…

Signal is a free messaging service that truly puts privacy and security first. The app automatically applies end-to-end encryption to calls, texts, and video chats, which guarantees that no one—not even Signal—can spy on your in-app communications. WhatsApp is the most popular secure messaging app. It’s “super simple,” and the userbase is enormous, which means that many of your contacts are likely to already have the app installed. A caveat: Messages to business accounts are not encrypted, and WhatsApp is owned by Facebook’s Meta, which doesn’t always put privacy first. Telegram is a service that generates additional privacy concerns because end-to-end encryption is merely optional, not the default. The app “has been at the center of many social movements,” though, because it makes it easy for individuals to privately message…

The long-awaited SPAC merger involving Donald Trump’s social media company is under federal investigation, said Mike Calia in CNBC.com. A grand jury in New York issued subpoenas this week to the board of Digital World Acquisition Corp., a special-purpose acquisition company that is seeking to merge with Trump’s Truth Social and take it public. “The grand jury wants similar documents that the Securities and Exchange Commission had been seeking in its civil probe” of meetings between Trump and DWAC’s chief executive. A successful merger “would grant Trump’s company over $1 billion in capital.” California: State checks to counter rising costs Millions of California taxpayers will soon be getting “inflation relief” checks, said Timothy Bella in The Washington Post. Facing the nation’s highest gas prices—at an average of $6.30 per gallon—California…

The IRS backlog keeps growing The IRS was still sitting on 21.3 million unprocessed tax returns as of May 31, said Kate Dore in CNBC.com, leaving many taxpayers waiting 10 months or more for refunds. But the staggering backlog is still “crushing the agency,” according to the Taxpayer Advocate Service, an independent watchdog. “While more than 90 percent of taxpayers filed returns electronically last year, roughly 17 million sent paper filings,” which is the primary reason for the logjam. The agency said it is just finishing processing the paper returns from 2021, “about five months later” than normal. In March, “the IRS planned to hire 5,000 new employees,” but as of May it “had not yet achieved half” of that goal. A national medical debt problem More than 100…

Good week for: Golden handshakes, after an office worker in Chile was accidentally paid the equivalent of $180,000—286 times the usual monthly salary. The unnamed employee initially promised to reimburse the company—but did not, and has now disappeared. Definite articles, after the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office approved The Ohio State University’s bid to trademark the word “The” on sports apparel and merchandise. “THE has been a rallying cry in the Ohio State community for many years,” said a university spokesman. Everyone, after BioNTech and Pfizer announced they would begin testing in the second half of this year a new pan-coronavirus vaccine that would, in theory, provide protection against all variants. Bad week for: The Week, which in the June 24 issue misidentified Donald Trump Jr.’s fiancé in this space.…

London Prince Charles accepted three cash payments of 1 million euros (about $1 million) each from a Qatari sheikh between 2011 and 2015, Britain’s Sunday Times reported this week. Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani handed over the money at private meetings with Charles in his London home. The palace confirmed the donations and said all of the money was deposited into the account of the Prince of Wales’s Charitable Fund. The donations weren’t illegal, but they raise eyebrows, as the charity pays for the prince’s pet projects and his country estate in Scotland. Sheikh Hamad has admitted that Qatar might have bankrolled the local branch of al Qaida while he was prime minister. NATO gets serious Madrid NATO members have agreed to significantly bolster the alliance’s…

Brad Pitt has made peace with his demons, said Ottessa Moshfegh in GQ. He quit drinking after his ex-wife, Angelina Jolie, filed for divorce in 2016, and quit smoking during the pandemic. Achieving sobriety required a year and a half of attending Alcoholics Anonymous. “I had a cool men’s group here that was really private and selective, so it was safe,” says Pitt, 58. “I’d seen other people who had been recorded while they were spilling their guts, and that’s just atrocious to me.” Pitt’s intense feelings about having his privacy invaded manifested in a recurring dream he had for about five years. “It would always be at night, in the dark,” he says. “I would be walking down a sidewalk and as I’d pass under an Exorcist-like streetlamp,…

David French The Dispatch With political violence growing on both the Left and Right, “America is in a dangerous place,” said David French. In recent weeks, pro-choice activists have firebombed pro-life crisis pregnancy centers, and a man showed up at Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home with a gun. And “progressives still haven’t fully reckoned with the cultural and political impact of the George Floyd riots” in 2020. Among Republicans, campaign ads featuring candidates brandishing weapons have become commonplace, and the Texas Republican Party recently passed a party platform that “rejects the results of the 2020 election” and raises the prospect of secession. The Jan. 6 hearings have exposed “the terrible threats” made against election and state officials who dared to declare President Biden the rightful winner of the…

“I am regularly asked about the temptation of hopelessness: ‘How can we keep going when the progress accumulated over our lifetimes has been reversed?’ But we go forward because that progress was made against forces that will never stop trying to reverse it. Despair is poison. It deadens people when the most important thing they can do is proceed with more drive and force than they have before. Which is why the work ahead is insisting on hope, behaving as if there is reason for hope, even if you feel, based on the ample available evidence, that there is not.” Rebecca Traister in New York magazine…

UNITED KINGDOM Simon Kelner Inews.co.uk The largest rail strike in a generation brought much of Britain’s train network to a standstill last week, said Simon Kelner, yet Britons aren’t blaming the unions. Many people now are too young to remember the horrors of the strikes in the late 1970s, when auto workers, trash collectors, truckers, hospital staff, and even gravediggers staged militant actions and walked off their jobs, plunging the country into chaos. That was known as the Winter of Discontent, a season of “bitterness, recrimination, anger, and total pessimism about the state of the nation.” The current strike, by contrast, is merely a “Summer of Inconvenience,” with no “public fury” against the strikers. Prime Minister Boris Johnson is desperately attempting to paint rail union leader Mick Lynch as some…

ZIMBABWE Ranga Mataire The Herald China is unfairly being called “the new colonial power in Africa,” said Ranga Mataire. It is supposedly guilty of bamboozling African leaders by lending generously for projects from ports to railways to mining, only to trap countries in debt. Even among some Africans, suspicion of Beijing is intense: Zimbabwean opposition lawmaker Charlton Hwende recently said the Chinese “must not be embraced, but fought.” And many Africans believed false social media reports that China had taken over Zambia’s major airport because the country defaulted on its loans. This is overblown. Yes, Zambia owes billions to China—but the airport is not even finished yet and is certainly not in Chinese hands. How ironic that those who criticize China’s involvement on the continent stay silent about the U.K.,…

Could the Supreme Court’s scrapping of Roe v. Wade “have a political silver lining for Democrats?” asked Chris Cillizza in CNN.com. Their midterm election prospects look bleak, with high inflation, President Biden’s approval rating under 40 percent, and Republicans poised to gain 25 to 35 House seats—“more than enough” for a majority. But polls taken just after last week’s release of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health found that 56 percent of Americans and 53 percent of independents oppose the ruling. And “the judgment may have woken up the long-dormant Democratic base,” with 78 percent of party members saying the decision makes them more likely to show up in November. That newfound energy might at least “limit Democratic losses.” The impact, however, may be small, said Susan Page in USA…

“Do not underestimate the significance of this victory,” said E.J. Dionne Jr. in The Washington Post. President Biden last week signed into law the first “meaningful” gun-safety legislation in nearly three decades. With back-to-back mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde, Texas, providing renewed urgency, nearly two-thirds of the Senate voted to pass the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which went on to pass the House 234-193. The law provides about $15 billion for states to enact and enforce reforms that include expanding background checks on 18- to 21-year-olds, strengthening school security, and tightening red-flag laws that allow the confiscation of guns from people who present a threat. Much more needs to be done, including banning the assault weapons and high-capacity magazines that mass shooters often use, as well as raising…

Amazon said it is developing a feature that allows its virtual assistant, Alexa, to replicate a specific human voice, said Annie Palmer in CNBC.com. At a conference in Las Vegas last week, scientist Rohit Prasad said Alexa could soon mimic “a high-quality voice” based on as little as a minute of recorded audio, enabling it “to help memorialize a deceased family member.” It’s part of a pandemic-driven effort to make Alexa more “conversational and companion-like.” In the demonstration, a young child asked Alexa if “Grandma can finish reading me The Wizard of Oz.” The voice assistant “confirmed the request with its default, robotic voice, then immediately switched to a softer, more humanlike tone.” It’s an impressive technical achievement—if arguably a potentially creepy one.…

Fearless by Don Dahler (Princeton Architectural Press, $30) Harriet Quimby should be more widely remembered, said Charlotte Gray in The Wall Street Journal. The first American woman licensed as a pilot and the first woman to fly across the English Channel, the “obviously charismatic” former magazine reporter was killed during a 1912 aerial show and didn’t leave detailed personal records. Finally, author Don Dahler “has done Quimby justice,” fleshing out the trailblazer’s stirring story “with adrenaline-filled descriptions of the early years of flying and the bizarre characters attracted to the new sport.” Imagine a City by Mark Vanhoenacker (Knopf, $30) The airline pilot who’s been called “the poet of the skies” is offering another grand tour, said Melanie Reid in The Times (U.K.). Unlike 2015’s Skyfaring, this book isn’t…

3 “Sophie Allison’s inner turmoil has never sounded so spectacular,” said Chris DeVille in Stereogum. The Nashville-based indie rocker, who has recorded as Soccer Mommy since her teens, “can distill a roiling cauldron of emotions into streamlined bursts of melody,” and on her third album, the 25-year-old comes across as “a great songwriter growing increasingly confident.” Her “moonbeam of a voice” brightens soundscapes here that, thanks to producer Daniel Lopatin, are often darker and weirder than the mid-tempo rock that Soccer Mommy and her band offered on 2018’s debut or 2020’s Color Theory. But none of the experimentation feels forced, and the result is “by far the band’s most sophisticated work to date.” Tracks such as “Unholy Affliction” stake new ground, said Eric Bennett in Paste. “Its clashing, mechanical…

Roc Explorer Inflatable stand-up paddleboards are so much easier to transport than hard boards that they’ve “completely revolutionized water sports.” Roc’s 17.5-pound board is one of the shortest and lightest on the market, as well as one of the most affordable. $275, amazon.com Source: Miami Herald Atoll 11-Foot Inflatable SUP This is the board we recommend for most paddlers who want to step up from bargain options to get better all-round performance. A bonus: It “comes with one of the best paddles included in an inflatable SUP package.” $600, atollboards.com Source: OutdoorGearLab iRocker Blackfin Model X Boards from iRocker are “among the best,” and this “durable, versatile” standout will suit paddlers of all levels. Its carbon-fiber rails provide extra stiffness, and the large cargo hold makes it…

The University of Michigan’s popular gauge of consumer sentiment reached a final reading of 50 in June. That was the lowest reading on record going back to 1952. About 79 percent of consumers surveyed expressed pessimism about future business conditions. The Wall Street Journal The number of problems per 100 new vehicles rose 11 percent to 180, a record high in the 36-year history of J.D. Power’s annual assessment. Infotainment systems “remain the most problematic area,” averaging 45 problems per 100 vehicles. Electric vehicles had more issues than gas-powered cars, at 240 per 100 vehicles. Axios Food for July 4 barbecues cost 17 percent more this year, marking the biggest increase since the American Farm Bureau Federation began tracking data a decade ago. Ground beef prices are up 36 percent…

In the United States, more than 38 million people, including 12 million children, struggle with food insecurity. The pandemic has increased the need for aid, with more than 53 million people turning to food banks and community programs last year. For over four decades, Feeding America (feedingamerica.org) has provided free food to its network of food banks and pantries across the country. The charity accepts food and grocery donations from businesses and government agencies, as well as unused food from grocery stores, restaurants, and farmers that would otherwise go to waste. It then distributes the food to about 200 food banks and 60,000 food pantries. The largest hunger-relief organization in the country, Feeding America has served 6.6 billion meals, reaching 1 in 7 Americans. Each charity we feature has…

Eric Boehm Reason The Biden administration has found a simple way to address every product shortage, said Eric Boehm: Just invoke the Defense Production Act. The 1950 law was originally designed “to ensure the military can access supplies during wartime.” Biden has used it to accelerate the production of vaccines, rare minerals for electric-car batteries, baby formula, solar panels, heat pumps, and home insulation. “How, exactly, is insulation related to national security?” Good question. Before Biden, the DPA was used sparingly. President Barack Obama invoked the law in 2011 “to compel telecoms companies to disclose foreign-made components within their networks” because of concerns about Chinese espionage. There was national-security justification there. Trump was “never one with high regard for the limits of executive authority,” but the idea of signing…

James Rado wasn’t exactly a flower child. The co-creator of Hair, Broadway’s first rock musical, had previously attended graduate school, served in the Navy, and appeared in The Lion in Winter on Broadway. But the New York City counterculture of the ’60s proved infectious. Rado met his future partner, Gerome Ragni, while appearing in a musical revue about capital punishment, and they decided to try to capture the spirit of the age. “I was very drawn to the idealism,” Rado said in 2010. “People were communicating in their own way, they were letting their hair grow, trying to form a culture, a new way of living.” Born James Radomski in Los Angeles, Rado was “a lover of Broadway musicals since childhood,” said The New York Times. He moved to…

This week’s question: An heiress donated $10 million to a Southern California college in exchange for her paintings—which a Los Angeles Times critic called “frankly terrible”—being featured in an on-campus museum named after her. What should an exhibit of pay-to-play art be called? Last week’s contest: 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. THE WINNER: “Burning, Man!” Paul Steckler, Oakland SECOND PLACE: “We’ll Light a Fire Under You!” Daniel Hicks, Randolph, Mass. THIRD PLACE: “Putting Skin in the Game” Skip Flanagan, Roseville, Calif. For runners-up and complete contest rules, please go to theweek.com/contest. How…