Innehållsförteckning för September 2, 2022 från The Week Magazine

Help wanted: Frontline soldier in the culture wars. Willing to take flak from all directions. Responsible for keeping 30 young people safe. Expect battles with bureaucracy, active shooter drills, deteriorating physical plants, and low professional respect. Summers and most holidays off, except for the paperwork. Not rushing to apply? You’re not alone. As we head into the school year, districts in the U.S. are contending with a grave shortage of teachers (see Briefing, p.11). Teachers are quitting, and the ones who are staying are unhappy; 90 percent say they are suffering from burnout. There’s no puzzle about why. In red states, teachers are threatened with criminal sanctions for saying the wrong thing, and the very notion of education as anything more than training for efficient workers is treated with contempt.…

After the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago, Republican House candidate Luis Miguel called for violence against federal agents. In a tweet, Miguel said that “under my plan, all Floridians will be able to shoot FBI, IRS, ATF, and all other federal troops on sight.” Twitter permanently suspended Miguel’s account, but he said the ban “doesn’t affect me at all” and kept his post up on Instagram. A Florida firefighter has been suspended for celebrating the murder of a police officer. After Miami-Dade officer Cesar Echaverry, 29, was killed by an armed robbery suspect, firefighter Kevin Newcomb posted “who cares,” and said that Echaverry was “probably against gun control,” and that police are only concerned with “protecting the rich property owners and the status quo.” In other news DOJ releases secret Barr…

Willie Nelson intends to keep making music right up until the grave, said Jody Rosen in The New York Times Magazine. Nearing 90, the country legend has produced nine albums in the past five years, bringing his career total close to 100. His recent music often drolly deals with death, with lyrics such as, “Heaven is closed and hell’s overcrowded, so I think I’ll just stay where I am.” Mortality, he says, “is a pretty good subject to write about.” For someone who has spent most of his life on the road, the pandemic was true misery—and scary, since Nelson’s lungs are damaged from years of pot smoking. (He recently switched to edibles.) He spent 2020 isolating at his 700-acre ranch in Spicewood, Texas. “Every day,” he says, “it…

Eugene Robinson The Washington Post In the post-Roe “abortion dystopia,” new horror stories are emerging every week, said Eugene Robinson. GOP-controlled state legislatures are passing “draconian abortion bans” that have turned “once-routine decisions about patient care” into possible crimes, terrifying doctors and cruelly inflicting misery on women. In Texas, a woman having a first-trimester miscarriage, “with the fetus showing no cardiac activity,” was “sent home to suffer 48 hours of heavy bleeding and excruciating pain” because the hospital was afraid that the necessary medical treatment might be prosecuted as homicide. In Nebraska, a teenager and her mother face criminal charges for terminating the girl’s pregnancy and burying the fetus “based largely on evidence gleaned from private messages they exchanged on Facebook about abortion pills.” In Louisiana, a woman 10…

“Unlike Clinton and Obama, Biden lacks natural charisma. Unlike Kennedy, Biden has not demonstrated the ability to inspire. Unlike Roosevelt, in particular, Biden does not display jaunty optimism or possess the magic gift to forge an emotional connection through the sound of his voice. Biden, instead, is more like Harry Truman—a longtime senator who ascended to power at a time of national crisis. At his best, Biden offers calm competence. Which is why top White House officials should stop overhyping Biden as a modern-day Franklin Roosevelt. Instead, they should honestly portray Biden as a good man—like Truman, and unlike Trump—doing his best in terrible times.” Walter Shapiro in The New Republic…

GERMANY Steven Geyer Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung “The outrage is great—and rightly so,” said Steven Geyer. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, standing next to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Berlin, angered Germans last week by accusing Israel of committing “holocausts” against Palestinians. Abbas had been asked if he would apologize for the 1972 Olympics massacre in Munich, when Palestinian terrorists killed 11 members of Israel’s Olympic team, given that the 50th anniversary is next month. In reply, he accused Israel of committing “50 massacres, 50 holocausts” against Palestinians. It was an unacceptable trivialization of the Holocaust, and Abbas is under investigation for hate speech. Yet some Germans are just as upset at Scholz for waiting 16 hours before condemning Abbas’ words. Of course, a “decisive reply on the spot” would have been…

NIGERIA Kadaria Ahmed Premium Times The BBC has put out a puff piece on the terrorists causing mayhem in Nigeria, said Kadaria Ahmed. The Bandit Warlords of Zamfara, a documentary by BBC Africa Eye, brings us intimately into the world of the gunmen and terrorists who abduct and kill Nigerians in the populous northwestern state. One of these “bloodthirsty criminals” describes his part in the kidnapping of some 300 girls from a secondary school. (They were released weeks later, after a ransom was paid.) Another boasts that he has lost count of how many abductees he has killed. The producers claim that interviews with such vile men help us understand the impact of terrorism on Nigeria. In fact, though, the attention amounts to a PR blitz for “killers and marauders”…

“The time for mincing words is over” about Ron DeSantis’ “barely hidden fascism,” said Will Bunch in The Philadelphia Inquirer. Surrounded by uniformed cops, the Florida governor and likely 2024 GOP presidential candidate announced last week that his Orwellian Office of Election Crimes and Security had arrested 20 Floridians for “voter fraud.” Those hauled off in handcuffs were mostly Black and from majority-Democratic counties, and several of them told journalists they had mistakenly thought they’d regained voting rights after Floridians overwhelmingly approved a 2018 referendum enfranchising most ex-felons. By putting a grand total of 20 people in handcuffs, DeSantis’ clear goal is to intimidate other ex-felons from voting in his upcoming election battle and future elections. As he now travels to other states to endorse fellow Christian nationalists, DeSantis…

Republicans “appear to be realizing” they nominated “a bunch of bozos” in critical U.S. Senate races, said Eric Lutz in Vanity Fair. The latest polls suggest that Democrats, who seemed headed for a midterms wipeout not long ago, are now favorites to retain Senate control. Last week, Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell publicly admitted he’s not optimistic his party can gain a majority in the Senate, blaming a lack of “candidate quality.” He no doubt was thinking of Georgia candidate Herschel Walker, the former football star who’s been accused of putting a gun to his ex-wife’s head, has admitted fathering three-out-of-wedlock children, and has attacked climate initiatives by asking, “Don’t we have enough trees?” In Pennsylvania, former TV host Dr. Mehmet Oz is trailing by double digits after a…

(Catapult, $20) “This is a brave book that is also a little bit insane,” said Nathan Deuel in the Los Angeles Times. A memoir written in a single day, it strings together facts, observations, and anecdotes almost indiscriminately, and its “nearly unbearable honesty” means that its author, novelist Jesse Ball, “sometimes comes across as a bit of a monster.” In his fiction, Ball “has shown himself to be a master stylist, among his generation’s most ambitious and provocative.” Here, he’s blunt, revealing a strain of cockiness, a former taste for revenge, a string of insecurities, and a handful of maladies, including migraines that cause him to vomit and roll on the floor. As his self-accounting proceeds, “the collisions of severe, unvarnished facts start to build a larger idea about…

William MacAskill is reshaping today’s moral conversation with an idea that can be expressed in three words, said Ezra Klein in The New York Times. “Future people count,” says the 35-year-old Oxford philosopher, explaining a worldview that has become a focus of the “effective altruism” movement that he co-founded and whose flagship organization now controls $28 million a year in charitable giving. The outlook that he has labeled “longtermism” also posits that future people deserve special consideration simply because they will greatly outnumber us. “If we last as long as a typical mammal species, we’ve got about 700,000 years still to go,” he says. “The number of the future of people could be absolutely prodigious, maybe even trillions of trillions.” MacAskill’s new best-seller, What We Owe the Future, lays…

Movies about moviemaking… Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound Most people don’t give much thought to how a movie sounds. You will after watching this documentary, which celebrates the extraordinary measures taken by sound engineers and editors to create each film’s soundscape. YouTube Casting By Robert Redford as Michael Corleone? In an era when women couldn’t direct, casting guru Marion Dougherty put her stamp on the movies by fighting for the likes of Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, and Glenn Close. Film greats sing her praises in this study of casting’s importance. Kanopy Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff Jack Cardiff spent decades making acclaimed directors look good. Cardiff and many better-known cinema luminaries share stories here that affirm his status as a trailblazing Technicolor savant. $2…

Twitter’s former security chief last month dropped bombshell accusations that the social networking service is bursting with security issues severe enough that they “pose a threat to its own users’ personal information, to company shareholders, to national security, and to democracy,” said Donie O’Sullivan in CNN.com. The revelations from Peiter Zatko, made in letters to Congress and federal agencies and reported this week by CNN and The Washington Post, have raised questions about Twitter’s susceptibility to hacking and to organized disinformation campaigns. Zatko, who was fired by Twitter in January, said Twitter’s management had sought to mislead regulators the company’s own board. Picked by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey in November 2020 to solve Twitter’s festering problems, Zatko, “a former hacker who is known as Mudge, has been a noted…

Ten million children in the United States can’t access the vision care they need. For more than 20 years, EyeCare4Kids (eyecare4kids.org) has tried to rectify that by offering eye exams and glasses to children in low-income communities around the country. The charity has eight eye-care clinics across Utah, Nevada, New Jersey, and Arizona, and aims to eventually have a vision clinic in every major city. EyeCare4Kids also runs a mobile outreach program that brings vision care to schools, Native American reservations, and rural areas. Inside the mobile clinics, children can receive eye exams and pick out new glasses or contact lenses. Since 2001, the organization has provided professional eye exams, vision screenings, and glasses to 400,000 children. Each charity we feature has earned a four-star overall rating from Charity…

Will Wade and Mark Chediak Bloomberg Businessweek The skyrocketing price of energy is about to upend the lives of millions of Americans who will lose their utility service, said Will Wade and Mark Chediak. Some 20 million Americans—representing about 1 in 6 American homes—are now behind on their utility bills. It’s the worst crisis energy-assistance groups have ever seen, with total utility arrears more than double what they were three years ago. “Underpinning those numbers is a blistering surge in electricity prices, propelled by the soaring cost of natural gas.” It’s by no means just a U.S. problem; the power crisis is worse in Europe. There, though, “policymakers have sprung into action” to provide subsidies. Here, by contrast, “the hand-wringing has been dedicated, as always, to the gyrations of gasoline…

What happened Florida Democrats nominated Charlie Crist this week over a more liberal opponent to take on Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who ran unopposed but whose hard-right politics proved popular in GOP primaries across the state. Crist, a former Republican governor who switched parties before winning a House seat in St. Petersburg, campaigned on ending DeSantis’ scorched-earth culture wars, but remains a significant underdog in the general election. However, Rep. Val Demings, the winner of Florida’s Democratic Senate primary, is polling neck and neck with GOP incumbent Marco Rubio. Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz beat back a primary challenger despite facing a child sex-trafficking investigation, while Army veteran Cory Mills won a GOP primary after likening mask mandates to Taliban control and boasting about selling the tear gas used on…

Good week for: Tailgaters, with the news that despite inflation, the wholesale cost of bone-in chicken wings is now $1.68 a pound, lower than at any point since before the pandemic. Prices are expected to rise, however, with the arrival of the football season. UFOlogists, after the Senate Intelligence Committee drafted legislation directing the Pentagon to analyze a growing number of “unidentified aerospace-undersea phenomena” that move rapidly from the atmosphere to oceans and appear not to be “man-made.” Turning off your phone and TV, after a new Texas Tech study found that 1 in 6 Americans obsessively follow the news, live in a “constant state of high alert,” and see the world as “a dark and dangerous place.” Bad week for: Too much thinking, with new research suggesting that extended…

Jennifer Doudna helped discover how to edit the fabric of our existence, said David Marchese in The New York Times Magazine. In 2020, the California-based biochemist and Emmanuelle Charpentier won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their research on CRISPR gene-editing technology. The potential of that discovery—from making crops more drought resistant to “editing” the genes of human embryos—seems godlike, inspiring intense ethical debate. “With CRISPR, you could imagine doing things with life that have never happened in nature but now are possible because we can alter the DNA at will,” says Doudna, 58. “That is a profound thing.” In Japan, scientists recently used CRISPR to tweak tomatoes to have more of a nutrient that supposedly lowers blood pressure; those tomatoes are now on sale. Doudna imagines a not-too-distant…

A lawsuit Angelina Jolie recently filed against the FBI using a pseudonym has resulted in the public exposure of her account of Brad Pitt’s drunken explosion on a private jet in 2016. The actress, 47, filed for divorce from Pitt, 58, six days after the family flight home from Europe and met with the FBI to discuss possible criminal charges. After authorities decided not to charge Pitt, she sought to get documents from the bureau’s investigation to use in her custody battle with Pitt for their six children. Released by a judge in response to the suit, the documents show that Jolie told investigators that a drunken Pitt yelled at their children while spilling drinks, screaming, “Mommy’s not OK. She’s ruining this family. She’s crazy.” Jolie claimed Pitt grabbed…

Jay Nordlinger National Review You know what’s harder than speaking truth to power? “Speaking truth to people,” said Jay Nordlinger, because “in a democracy, that’s where power actually lies.” In recent years, many conservative Americans “have been sold a bill of goods” by liars and hucksters to get their votes and their money. As a result of deceit and political cowardice, polls find that about 70 percent of Republicans believe that Democrats stole the 2020 election through massive fraud. That false belief “led to a physical attack on the U.S. Congress—the worst attack on our Capitol since the War of 1812.” Recently, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has been campaigning for GOP Senate and gubernatorial candidates who are running on the Big Lie, and when asked if the election was…

A Missouri pastor berated his “cheap” congregation for not buying him an expensive watch and “taking care of God’s shepherd.” Pastor Carlton Funderburke of Kansas City complained that he’d asked a year ago for a Movado watch, which ranges up to $3,295, and still hasn’t received it. “I’m not worth your Red Lobster money?” he asked churchgoers, calling them “poor, broke, busted, and disgusted.” Funderburke apologized after a video of his tirade spread online, saying it “does not reflect my heart.” A pair of Australian tourists who surfed Venice’s iconic Grand Canal on motorized surfboards drew $1,500 fines and the wrath of the city’s mayor. The thrill seekers are “two overbearing imbeciles who are making a mockery of the city,” said Mayor Luigi Brugnaro. The young men were caught after…

COLOMBIA Marcela Meléndez El Tiempo “In Colombia we are systematically late,” said Marcela Meléndez. We’re never on time for work meetings, doctor appointments, or meetups with friends, even when we’ve booked months in advance. It’s become known as a “bad Latin American habit,” to the point that foreigners making plans with us factor in an extra half-hour or two because they know we’ll operate on “Colombian time.” Yet this chronic tardiness is not just a harmless cultural quirk. It has a “ripple effect” on society that makes life harder for everyone. Respecting other people’s time is a core courtesy that “allows societies to function efficiently.” Late to coffee with your friend? She might have to cancel later plans. Miss half a work meeting? Your “lack of foresight” could force your…

“Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing.”Georgia O’Keeffe, quoted in Parade “I’m sick of following my dreams, man. I’m just going to ask where they’re going and hook up with ’em later.”Comedian Mitch Hedberg, quoted in The Vindicator “How to defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized. Don’t let fear rule your life. Even if you are scared.”Salman Rushdie, quoted in The Quint “With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come.”William Shakespeare, quoted in The New York Times “We don’t know what it is possible for us to feel until we are shown what it is possible for us to imagine.”Writer Adam Gopnik, quoted in The New Yorker “Old age is like everything else. To make a success of…

Google takes aim at junk content “The engine that drives much of the online world is about to be retooled,” said Tom Dotan in Business Insider. Google this week began rolling out its latest search algorithm, a so-called helpful content update that is designed to “prioritize pages that are authoritative, written by humans, and aren’t explicitly gaming its search results.” It’s the latest sally in the long-running game of cat and mouse between Google and web content makers. An earlier effort from Google to weed out low-quality content “decimated” the ranks of “content farms” such as eHow that were devoted to churning out huge volumes of quickly written, superficial articles. Fraudsters turn to ‘audio deepfakes’ Two-thirds of cybersecurity professionals have had to contend with audio-deepfake attacks in the last…

British visitors tend to bring patients in the hospital grapes instead of flowers—and that may be hugely beneficial, reports The Independent (U.K.). Eating the fruit could extend human life by five years and reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s. A new study of mice has found that the specific antioxidants in grapes improve neuron function, protecting the brain from developing dementia. Researchers put female mice on high-fat diets, with half of the group also receiving grape supplements. When they compared the liver, brain, and metabolic health of the mice, they saw that the group that ate grapes had higher metabolism, a longer life span, and a reduced risk of fatty liver disease. The grapes even changed the expression of the mice’s genes, which co-author John Pezzuto, from Western New England…

Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies, now out in paperback, is about a woman assigned to be the translator for a former ruler on trial in The Hague for war crimes. The New York Times named the novel one of the 10 best books of 2021. The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg (1947). One of my favorite novels by one of my favorite writers. The opening page—in which a woman matter-of-factly reveals that she has shot her husband—is extraordinary. And the novel carries on from there, a tumult of dread and horror, right through to the end. Mothercare: On Obligation, Love, Death, and Ambivalence by Lynne Tillman (2022). For more than a decade, Tillman, a novelist and critic, cared for her sick and aging mother. This extended meditation on care, family, love,…

Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, through Jan. 2 “Never shy—in art or life—Mexico’s foremost muralist and arguably its best 20th-century artist propounded a sweeping conception of ‘America,’” said Judith Dobrzynski in The Wall Street Journal. To the painter Diego Rivera (1886–1957), “America” was the entirety of the New World, stretching from the Arctic Circle to Cape Horn. It was, more importantly, a land set apart from Europe “in culture, revolutionary spirit, societal aspirations, and innovation.” A major new exhibition at SFMoMA focuses on that vision, and every painting, drawing, or fresco in the show dates from 1921 to the mid-1940s, “the period when Rivera’s creativity soared, his mature style crystallized, and his international reputation boomed.” The impressive array of more than 150 works convincingly evokes the America he…

My Mother Made Me (Radiotopia) This four-part series “wears its heart unapologetically on its sleeve,” said Fiona Sturges in The Financial Times. Host Jason Reynolds, an award-winning author of best-selling young-adult novels, simply invites us to listen in as he and his septuagenarian mother, Isabell, get together and chat about what they’ve taught each other across the years. “If that sounds sentimental, it is, though not to the point of sickliness.” As the pair visit a Costco, hit a local casino, or share a birthday lunch, Isabell might ask, say, for help with taking a selfie while Reynolds pursues a different goal: “using his mother as a sounding board while trying to glean her influence on his work ethic, his ambition, and sense of self-worth.” Reynolds’ writing skill meanwhile…

American-made rosé “hasn’t always been an easy sell,” said Dave McIntyre in The Washington Post. But as demand for rosé has grown, so, too, have quality domestic offerings. Many “tend to be riper and fuller-bodied than their European counterparts,” best enjoyed not as imitations but for what they are. Here are three I rate as “excellent” or better. 2021 Bonterra Rosé ($16). This grenache-based blend features “flavors of red grapefruit, watermelon, rosewater, and persimmon,” and “may be the best value in California rosé.” 2021 Alexander Valley Vineyards Dry Rosé of Sangiovese ($20). There’s “nothing subtle” about this Sonoma rosé, which “bursts with flavors of strawberry, raspberry, and watermelon.” 2021 Stinson Vineyards Rosé of Tannat ($23). This dark-hued, “zesty” Virginia rosé is “redolent of red grapefruit, wild herbs, and honeysuckle.”…

It’s never too late to go to Space Camp, said Jennifer Billock in Thrillist. I recently enjoyed “a particularly wild adventure” at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala., where anyone 18 and over can sign up for adult space academy (spacecamp.com). For three days, you live in dorms and “do all the things actual astronauts do.” Wearing a blue NASA jumpsuit, I strapped into a bouncy chair and practiced bunny-hopping as you would in the moon’s low gravity. “If you’re like me, you’ll fly out into space and someone will need to reel you back in.” I nearly lost my lunch in the multi-axis trainer, too. The gyroscope-like contraption whips you around as if you’re spinning out of control in space. But the real test came during…

Saudi Arabia’s energy minister this week suggested the kingdom and other oil producing states could cut oil output, rebuffing persistent calls from the U.S. and other Western countries, said Benoit Faucon in The Wall Street Journal. U.S. officials had hoped the Saudis would raise output and “predicted the kingdom would be instrumental in cooling the market after President Biden met Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for the first time in office.” But in a sharp break with the White House, the minister, Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, said that Saudis were more likely to reduce output to deal with fears of a global recession. Day trading: ‘Meme king’ faces ire of small investors Ryan Cohen, an activist investor who is a favorite of day traders and a prolific creator of stock…

Returning to your old workplace More “boomerang” employees are returning to the jobs they left a year ago, said Charlie Wells in Bloomberg. “In the U.S. in the first quarter of this year, 4.2 percent of all new hires for companies that advertised jobs on LinkedIn were boomerangs, compared with 3.3 percent in 2019.” Employers haven’t always welcomed returnees, but that’s changed in the still-tight labor market. Some companies have even been using boomerang examples on social media to counter the Great Resignation narrative and boast that “the grass isn’t always greener on the other side.” One downside: When employees return, they’re often more expensive. One study comparing boomerangs with employees who had not switched jobs found that they “were paid more but performed on a similar level as…

Michael Hiltzik Los Angeles Times The Biden administration has gotten a lot of publicity for provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act that will finally let Medicare negotiate lower drug prices, said Michael Hiltzik. But wait until you see what’s not covered. “Medicare is the largest single purchaser of prescription drugs in the country, and prescriptions are the program’s fastest-growing expense.” The hope is that cutting the prices Medicare pays can lower drug costs across the board. Unfortunately, the negotiations will cover just 10 drugs in 2026, rising gradually to 40 in 2029, and will not include drugs that have been marketed for less than nine years (for conventional drugs) and 13 years (for biotech products)—“close to the end of their patent-protected life span.” That means the rules don’t apply…

One of the rare foreign directors to find prolonged success in Hollywood, Wolfgang Petersen vaulted to fame with his 1981 anti-war masterpiece Das Boot. The hyper-realistic film captured the terror and claustrophobia of life in a German submarine during World War II. After Petersen’s first English-language film, the 1984 children’s fantasy The NeverEnding Story, he directed big-budget blockbusters starring leading men, including Clint Eastwood in In the Line of Fire, Dustin Hoffman in Outbreak, Harrison Ford in Air Force One, George Clooney in The Perfect Storm, and Brad Pitt in Troy. Petersen was unashamedly obsessed with pleasing audiences. At the Los Angeles premiere of Das Boot, he recalled the audience applauding a title card noting that 30,000 German submariners died in the war. By the end, Petersen said, the…

Raymond Damadian never got his due. That, at least, was the fervent conviction of the physician himself, who revolutionized medical diagnostics by building the first magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner in 1977. The machine, made possible by Damadian’s finding that radio waves could detect cancerous tumors, led to the now-common devices that yield detailed body images. Damadian made millions and received a medal from President Ronald Reagan in 1988. But when two other scientists won a 2003 Nobel Prize for their work refining MRI technology, he was outraged, and bought ads in major papers calling his exclusion a “shameful wrong.” To be “erased from history,” he said, “is a torment that I can neither bear nor live with.” Raised in Queens, N.Y., by Armenian immigrants, Damadian studied violin at…

This week’s question: A Missouri pastor used a recent sermon to lambaste his “cheap” congregation for not getting him the expensive Movado watch he’d asked for. What would you call a custom luxury timepiece created particularly for faith leaders who often ask for money and gifts? Last week’s contest: Because of a system Ticketmaster calls “dynamic pricing,” tickets to a recent Bruce Springsteen concert cost as much as $5,500. What would you call a Springsteen song about a working-class hero who’s unable to afford tickets to his favorite band? THE WINNER: “Plunder Road” Joe Ayella, Wayne, Pa. SECOND PLACE: “Blinded by the Price” Rebecca Burgan, Grass Valley, Calif. THIRD PLACE: “Born to Ruin” Ken Liebman, Williston, Vt. For runners-up and complete contest rules, please go to theweek.com/contest. How to enter:…

Chicago Barre Seid, a secretive electronics manufacturing mogul, donated $1.65 billion—possibly the biggest political contribution in U.S. history—to a nonprofit run by Leonard Leo, a prime architect of the successful campaign to install conservatives across the judiciary, The New York Times reported this week. Over the past two years, Seid, 90, donated all his shares of Chicago-based electric-equipment maker Tripp Lite to Leo’s group, which then collected the 10-figure sum that an Irish conglomerate paid to acquire Seid’s company. Delivering the donation that way reportedly avoided $400 million in taxes. Leo, 56, co-chairs the Federalist Society legal group—a pipeline for conservative judicial picks—and advised former President Trump on his Supreme Court picks. A conservative Catholic, Leo has led battles over abortion, voting rights, and climate change. Leo said Seid’s…

Neil Parish’s obsession with tractors changed his life, said Camilla Long in The Sunday Times (U.K.). The British farmer was elected to the U.K.’s House of Commons in 2010 and claims he was innocently looking for tractor images on his phone in April when a porn site came up. (“Tractor” can also refer to a sex position.) Parish, 66, admits when he saw what the site was, “I went into it.” It would’ve been no big deal if he’d looked just once, he says. But he looked at it again while waiting to vote, which he says was “absolutely stupid.” Two female members of Parliament spotted the images on his phone and complained, and Parish became a national laughingstock. Even after he resigned tearfully on the BBC, he says,…

Ronald Brownstein The Atlantic Liz Cheney has no chance of winning the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nomination, said Ronald Brownstein, but she may run a “kamikaze” campaign against Donald Trump. After Cheney lost her Wyoming congressional seat last week because of her anti-Trump stance, she made it clear that “this is round one,” and that she’s considering a presidential run. Her campaign’s sole goal would be to prevent Trump from winning the 2024 nomination, “or to stop him winning the general election if he does.” Cheney would have little trouble raising funds, and “her unflinching attacks” on the former president would ensure “bottomless media coverage.” On a debate stage, she’d be a “battering ram” demanding that Trump address his lies about losing the 2020 election, his coup attempt, and…

FINLAND Editorial Helsingin Sanomat Once again, we find ourselves forced to discuss the Finnish prime minister’s partying, said Helsingin Sanomat. Videos that went viral last week showed Sanna Marin at a party, gyrating and singing and mugging for the camera, and at a nightclub dancing very closely with a male Finnish pop star not her husband. Marin has whooped it up with celebrities on other occasions since taking the country’s top post in 2019—notably last December, when she stayed at a Helsinki club until 4 a.m.—and many Finns say the 36-year-old should be allowed “the right to relax in her free time.” But this time, opposition lawmakers made much of a rumor that some of the partiers on the video mentioned cocaine, and Marin had to pass a drug test.…

Vegetarian women are much more likely to break a hip in old age than those who eat meat or fish, reports The Times (U.K.). In a study of 27,000 women ages 35 to 69, researchers at the University of Leeds found that as the women grew older, the vegetarians were 33 percent more likely to break their hips than their meat-eating peers. Pescatarians, though, who eat fish but not meat, were no more likely to fracture their hips than carnivores. Over the course of the 20-year study, about 3 percent of the women developed hip fractures, at an average age of 83. One explanation for the disparity is that vegetarians may eat fewer nutrients linked with muscle and bone health. That can lead to lower muscle mass and bone…

(Viking, $23) “Diary of a Void advances one of the most passionate cases I’ve ever read for women’s creative pulse and rich inner life,” said Katy Waldman in The New Yorker. Japanese author Emi Yagi’s prizewinning debut has an “irresistible” premise: A 34-year-old single office worker, whom we know as Shibata, falsely announces that she’s pregnant because she’s tired of being treated like dirt. The gambit works, but maintaining the lie over nine months spawns problems both logistical and psychological. “In a way, Shibata’s new status as a gilded vessel only continues the dehumanization that her co-workers subjected her to before she faked her pregnancy.” Yagi demonstrates “a light touch for the endless ironies made possible by her premise,” said Lauren Oyler in The New York Times. Her story…

The Many Daughters of Afong Moy by Jamie Ford (Atria, $28) Jamie Ford “must have a teeming brain,” said Kathryn Ma in the San Francisco Chronicle. His “optimistically overstuffed” new novel spans 250 years as it combines the true tale of the first known Chinese woman to arrive in the U.S. with the lives of six of the immigrant icon’s fictional descendants. Though he should be applauded for imagining a long, rich legacy for Afong Moy, the many journeys into side topics that he takes along his way to 2045 “risk swamping his story.” Joan by Katherine J. Chen (Random House, $28) “This is not your grandmother’s St. Joan,” said Jess Walter in The New York Times. In this “stirring” new novel about Joan of Arc, the teenage French…