Innehållsförteckning för October 28, 2022 från The Week Magazine

I was talking to a neighbor the other day about Covid, and he said with vehemence he wasn’t getting the new booster. He’d already had Covid twice, despite being vaccinated with the original two shots in 2021. Since Covid hadn’t killed him, he said, why bother with more shots? I reminded him that more than 1 million Americans have died of Covid, and that boosters have been proven to dramatically reduce the risk of serious illness. That led him to launch into a riff on “Fauci” laced with conspiracy theories; if that damn Fauci wanted him to get boosted, well, hell, forget it. These views, of course, are shared by tens of millions of people who’ve absorbed the same deluge of disinformation, and who’ve bought into the deadly notion that…

Good week for: Blue gold, after a pair of Levi’s from the 1880s, discovered in an abandoned Old West gold mine, sold at auction for $76,000. Experts were able to date the jeans partly through a label declaring Levi’s jeans as “the only kind made by white labor.” News, after a German man bit a police dog while being arrested. Police say the unnamed 29-year-old acted in an “extremely aggressive and uncooperative” fashion, but the dog was unharmed. Nancy Pelosi, after a video from Jan. 6 captured the fed-up House Speaker, 82, saying she hoped Donald Trump tried to trespass into the Capitol himself. “I’ve been waiting for this,” she told her staff, “I’m going to punch him out… and I’m gonna be happy.” Bad week for: Forgetfulness, after a…

William Shatner always wanted to see Earth from space, said Jonathan Edwards in The Washington Post, but the experience was not what he expected. When the 91-year-old actor, famed for playing Captain Kirk in the Star Trek TV series and films, strapped in for a 10-minute voyage on Jeff Bezos’ space shuttle in October 2021, he thought the view would fill him with awe and elation. Instead, he felt an overwhelming sadness, and when the ship landed, he began to weep. “Everybody else was shaking bottles of champagne. And I didn’t feel that way at all,” he says. “I was in grief for the Earth.” The juxtaposition of the “cold, dark, black emptiness” of space with “the warm nurturing Earth below” gave him an acute sense of the vulnerability…

Oliver Darcy CNN.com “Judgment Day” has finally arrived for Alex Jones, said Oliver Darcy. But while the “staggering” $965 million a jury ordered him to pay in compensatory damages for defaming the Sandy Hook families could “shrink or even doom” his media empire, his disinformation playbook will live on. Infowars, the fake-news media empire Jones created, allowed him to amass “great influence and wealth by poisoning the online information well.” He proved it could be incredibly lucrative to inflame people’s darkest suspicions and resentments with ravings about “the deep state,” “false flag” mass shootings, and the “shadowy, globalist forces” destroying the American way of life. After two trials, he now faces “a reckoning” for one of his cruelest lies: the claim that a gunman’s slaughter of 20 children and 6…

“One of the overriding impressions I’ve gotten from the Jan. 6 Committee is that some large percentage of the people who worked for Donald Trump believed that their boss was a madman. Not an odd duck. Not an eccentric. An actual madman. And they wouldn’t say it out loud. In the real world, neither Pat Cipollone nor Mick Mulvaney would hire a guy like Trump to make the office coffee. In the Marines, Jim Mattis wouldn’t have let a guy like Trump shine his boots. If John Kelly ran into a guy like Trump in a bar, he’d put him through a window. But in the upside-down world of American politics, these men all became Trump’s underlings.” Jonathan Last in The Bulwark…

PORTUGAL Inês Cardoso Jornal de Notícias The Catholic sex abuse scandal is breaking late in Portugal, said Inês Cardoso, but now the reports of victims violated by their priests are coming thick and fast. Apparently “we are no different from other countries” that uncovered rampant abuse, like Ireland, Germany, and the U.S., “except for the delay in our reckoning.” The shocking aspect here, though, is “the lame excuses of some of our bishops in response to accusations of cover-ups.” Haven’t they seen the outrage in other countries, which has caused so many Catholics to leave the church they were brought up in? So far, the commission investigating the dioceses of Portugal has found more than 400 victims since the 1950s, mostly boys, ranging in age from 2 to 17. Their…

NEW ZEALAND Adam Pearse and Michael Neilson New Zealand Herald Farmers are outraged at the government’s plan to tax them for their cows’ burps and farts, said Adam Pearse and Michael Neilson. Cows and sheep produce two potent greenhouse gases: methane from their gassiness and nitrous oxide in their urine. Since livestock far outnumber humans in New Zealand, it’s not surprising that they generate more than half of our total greenhouse gas emissions. But the farm lobby says that Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s “fart tax” climate solution, to be phased in by 2025, will “rip the guts out of small-town New Zealand.” The plan calls for reducing the amount of land allocated to sheep and cattle farming by 20 percent by 2030. Ardern’s government says the program is based on…

Republicans have made crime “central to their closing message” before the Nov. 8 midterm elections, said Dan Merica in CNN.com. Last month alone, they spent nearly $40 million to flood the airwaves with 157 ads on the issue, assailing Democratic officials as diehard Defund the Police supporters and showing graphic videos of crimes. In response, Democrats have touted police endorsements and their support of bills funding law enforcement. But recent polls suggest Republican attacks may be working. In Pennsylvania, where most recent Republican ads have focused on crime, Republican Senate candidate Mehmet Oz has shrunk Democrat John Fetterman’s polling lead to 2 points, while Wisconsin’s Republican Sen. Ron Johnson has used the same strategy to overtake challenger Mandela Barnes. Some liberals have “bizarrely suggested” that crime-wave fears are “little…

Evidence that Donald Trump committed crimes in the Mar-a-Lago documents case “continues to build—and quickly,” said Aaron Blake in The Washington Post. Damning revelations about the former president’s potential obstruction of justice surfaced last week, when it was reported that his former aide Walt Nauta told investigators Trump had instructed him to move boxes of documents out of a storage space in Mar-a-Lago where the FBI later found classified materials. The transfer, which was captured on a security camera, came after the Justice Department subpoenaed all government documents in Trump’s possession. Meanwhile, a Trump lawyer involved in the documents case, Christina Bobb, met with the FBI to explain why she told the DOJ in June that all documents had been turned over “to the best of my knowledge.” She…

(Penguin, $32) Maggie Haberman’s new No. 1 best-seller about Donald Trump is likely to go down as “the definitive account of Trump’s character and how it was formed,” said Laura Miller in Slate. But that’s less of an achievement than it may seem. The White House reporter who became The New York Times’ most prominent Trump chronicler clearly knows her man, and she roots her analysis in a lengthy chronicle of her subject’s sordid career in New York City real estate. But while she’s persuasive that Trump’s behavior as president can be explained by his expectation that politics on the world stage would be another game of relationships, bribes, and favors, he emerges as “a fairly simple character,” a man interested only in cultivating his own sense of self-worth.…

Jacques Pépin is almost 87 now, but he has no intention of retiring, said Karen Heller in The Washington Post. “Retire from what?” he says. “Retire from doing what I love?” The French-born chef, whose cookbooks and TV programs have taught generations of Americans the finer points of French cooking, wasn’t even slowed by the pandemic. Instead, he posted 250 instructional videos and built his Facebook following to 1.6 million. A celebrity chef for decades, he’s also old enough to remember that his was once a humble profession. When he was 25 and cooking for French President Charles de Gaulle and his dinner guests, he says, “It was another world. The cook was really at the bottom of the social scale. If anyone came to the kitchen it was…

3 On the recent single “Happiness,” the 1975’s frontman Matty Healy “sounds so hopelessly lovestruck that all other concerns have faded into his periphery,” said Alex Swhear in Variety. That mood dominates the flamboyant British foursome’s new album and marks a retreat to pop-rock essentials from their 80-minute 2020 opus that was packed with sociological commentary. Healy, 33, is still a verbose observer of 21st-century life. But he “gravitates toward matters of the heart” here, and “watching him figure out who he is, exactly,” continues to be a rewarding spectacle. With hitmaker Jack Antonoff assisting, this record turns away from computerized production to more traditional instrumentation, said Brady Brickner-Wood in Pitchfork. The result plays up the band’s fundamentals: “goopy ’80s guitars, pumping drums, schmaltzy saxophones, and infuriatingly good hooks.” Somehow,…

Nix Mini 2 Color Sensor If you’ve ever thought to yourself, “That would look great as a paint color,” consider this palm-size scanner. Point it at any surface and it will direct you to the best matches among a catalog of 150,000 paint swatches from popular brands. $65, nixsensor.com Source: Wirecutter Haikubox Set this little box outdoors and it will be your ears on local birdlife, recording birdsong and identifying species as they pass through. “It’s one of the rare pieces of technology that actually increases your connection to the world.” From $249, haikubox.com Source: Wired Asus PureGo PD100 Soothe your worries about pesticides on your produce with this gadget. Float it in the water you use to wash fruit and vegetables and it will indicate when the soaking…

Credit card debt is rising at its fastest clip in more than 20 years, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Overall, Americans owe $887 billion on their credit cards, a 13 percent increase from a year ago. The Washington Post The core consumer price index—excluding volatile food and energy prices—rose 6.6 percent in September from a year earlier, the highest rate of increase since August 1982. The Wall Street Journal The Interior Department this week announced the first lease auction for offshore wind development in the Pacific Ocean, with nearly 583 square nautical miles up for bidding off the coast of California. Developments are expected to generate enough electricity to power 1.5 million homes. Axios.com Netflix added 2.4 million subscribers in the third quarter, snapping a streak…

With climate change ravaging the Australian Great Barrier Reef, the Antarctic glaciers, and the Brazilian Amazon, few other causes are more relevant to the future of humanity than preserving ecosystems. Through fieldwork and innovations in science, policy, and finance, Conservation International (conservation​.org) empowers global societies to defend Earth’s common nature and biodiversity. Established in 1987, the nonprofit has developed global projects such as a debt-for-nature swap in Bolivia that protected several million rain-forest acres. Conservation International has offices in 30 countries and works with more than 1,000 partner organizations. Among them are the Amazon’s Kayapó Fund and the Indigenous Leaders Conservation Fellowship, which work with Indigenous communities—caretakers of 40 percent of the world’s virgin landscapes. Each charity we feature has earned a four-star overall rating from Charity Navigator, which…

Ross Douthat The New York Times Left-wing activists can’t seem to decide if they’re more worried about “climate apocalypse” or global poverty, said Ross Douthat. Two protesters with “Just Stop Oil” T-shirts were arrested in London last week after vandalizing Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers with a can of tomato soup. They claimed to be protesting both “the launch of a new round of oil and gas licensing” as well as “an energy price hike.” You may note an obvious tension between those complaints. Progressive climate campaigners imagine that a “simpler, more ecologically wholesome way of life” will only anguish “the greedy rich and consumerist upper-middle class.” But the energy crisis of 2022 has produced “an obvious crack” in that theory. Europe has been able to diversify to wind and solar…

Bruce Sutter was one of the first of baseball’s legendary closers, feared for a single, seemingly unhittable pitch. Over Sutter’s 12 seasons with the Chicago Cubs, St. Louis Cardinals, and Atlanta Braves, his plunging, split-finger fastball helped him earn 300 saves—the statistic for relief pitchers who enter late in a game and protect their team’s slim lead. Sutter famously saved the decisive Game 7 of the 1982 World Series, when the bushy-bearded right hander entered in the eighth inning with the Cardinals leading the Milwaukee Brewers 4-3. Sutter retired the next six Brewers, striking out the final batter before being mobbed by his teammates. Sutter was born in Lancaster, Pa., and his baseball dreams were nearly dashed before his 20th birthday, said the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. While rehabbing from…

This week’s question: A New Age “healer” helped model Gisele Bündchen spiritually cleanse her SUV shortly after she announced she was seeking a divorce from NFL star Tom Brady. Please come up with a job title for someone who specializes in exorcizing cars. Last week’s contest: The joint winners of an Ohio bass-fishing tournament were stripped of their prizes when the bass they caught were found to have lead weights inside their stomachs. Please come up with a name for a true-crime film about these fishing fraudsters. THE WINNER: “Hook, Lies, and Sinker” Hunter Burgan, Los Angeles SECOND PLACE: “Every Trick in the Brook” Jeff Jerome, Northampton, Mass. THIRD PLACE: “Leadbelly Blues” Jay Detweiler, Goshen, Ind. For runners-up and complete contest rules, please go to theweek.com/contest. How to enter:…

What happened The Biden administration is turning to a Trump-era immigration policy to limit an influx of Venezuelan migrants at the southern border. In recent weeks, about 1,000 Venezuelans have crossed the border every day, and almost 160,000 were taken into custody in the last year. Under a U.S. plan introduced last week, Venezuelan migrants who arrive at the border will be sent back to Mexico immediately. A more limited number—up to 24,000—who apply from abroad will be eligible to enter the U.S. legally under a humanitarian program. The quick deportation of migrants who arrive at the border relies on Title 42, a public health policy used by the Trump administration. Venezuelans who hope to gain one of the legal spots will need a U.S. sponsor and the ability…

At least 20 Republican candidates and elected officials are falsely claiming that K-12 schools are providing litter boxes for students who “identify” as animals. The myth that schools are catering to “furries” has been cited by U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, Minnesota gubernatorial candidate Scott Jensen, and many other conservatives as “a growing crisis,” but every rumor of a school providing litter boxes for students has proved to be unfounded. For the first time in 50 years, the school district in Lower Merion, Pa., has canceled its Halloween parades so as not to exclude students “who for religious or cultural reasons do not celebrate Halloween.” Officials also cited the “worrisome” prospect of the parades being attended by adults who “we couldn’t possibly screen.” In other news Trump hotels bilked the Secret…

Lizzo found it inspirational to play James Madison’s flute—and doesn’t care if it offended people who already hate her, said Lisa Robinson in Vanity Fair. The pop star and classically trained flautist sparked an online backlash when on a recent visit to the Library of Congress she played a crystal flute made in 1813 for then-President Madison, a slave owner. At a concert the next night she trilled on it while twerking as the crowd roared—outraging some critics who accused her of “desecrating American history.” Lizzo saw it as the opposite. “When people look back at the crystal flute,” she says, “they’re going to see how far we’ve had to come for someone like me to be playing it in the nation’s capital. That’s a cool thing. My job…

New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft threw a star-studded party last week to celebrate his surprise wedding to Dr. Dana Blumberg. Kraft, 81, and Blumberg, 47—a top New York City ophthalmologist—were serenaded by Elton John and Ed Sheeran, who sang a duet of John’s “Candle in the Wind.” John, who performed a handful of his other hits, met the newlyweds at a recent concert at the Patriots’ stadium and promised to perform for them “as a gift.” Also partying at Manhattan’s Hall des Lumières were NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, singers Jon Bon Jovi and Kenny Chesney, and former Patriots greats such as Tom Brady, who showed up without his estranged wife, Gisele Bündchen. Kraft and Blumberg met in 2019, eight years after his wife of 48 years, Myra, died…

Charles Cooke National Review Joe Biden tells lots of stories that are not true, said Charles Cooke. Doesn’t that make him “a serial liar?” The New York Times last week chronicled the president’s “relentless, eight-decade-long habit of lying about himself,” but never does the newspaper of record use the L-word. Instead, the Times said Biden has a habit of “embellishing narratives to weave a political identity,” with “factual edges shaved off.” Here’s just a small sample of his embellishments: Biden recently told survivors of Hurricane Ian in Florida that he knew how they felt, because he lost “an awful lot” of his Delaware home in 2004 to a lightning fire. In reality, news reports said at the time, it was a small kitchen fire that was extinguished in 20 minutes.…

ARGENTINA Fernando Laborda La Nacion Why won’t the government treat violent attacks by the indigenous Mapuche as terrorism? asked Fernando Laborda. Federal forces have ignored Mapuche assaults on private property in the Villa Mascardi area, even as the indigenous have “spread terror” among the inhabitants. Finally, this month, after Mapuche militants shot up and burned down a Border Guard cabin, troops came in to try to evict them. Their efforts were so half-hearted, though, that they ended up letting the Mapuche men responsible for the violence escape to the mountains, leaving only a few women to be arrested. And even that was too much for Women’s Minister Elizabeth Gómez Alcorta: She resigned in protest, saying the troops had trampled native rights. The truth is, these Mapuche militant groups claim to…

This year’s high school graduates scored an average of 19.8 out of 36 on the ACT, a 30-year low. Among members of the class of 2022 who took the college admissions test, 42 percent failed to meet any of the subject-proficiency benchmarks in English, reading, science, or math—​a decline educators attribute to learning loss during the pandemic.Associated Press As a Republican Super PAC sets fundraising and spending records, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has essentially given up trying to win six House “swing” districts that President Biden won in 2020. The DCCC also isn’t funding TV ads for several Democratic incumbents in Arizona, Wisconsin, Texas, and Michigan. “The No. 1 factor here is money,” said Tim Persico, executive director of the DCCC.Politico An estimated 120 “tent cities” of homeless people…

“If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up someplace else.”Yogi Berra, quoted in Golf Course Industry “Your struggles develop your strengths. When you go through hardships and decide not to surrender, that is strength.”Arnold Schwarzenegger, quoted in the Montreal Gazette “If there’s one thing you can say about mankind, there’s nothing kind about man.”Tom Waits, quoted in NPR.org “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.”Gloria Steinem, quoted in The Times “I hope I shall never be such a coward as to mistake oppression for peace.”Hungarian statesman Lajos Kossuth, quoted in National Review “The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the…

An AI nightmare for teachers AI is making homework too easy to ace, said Claire Woodcock in Vice. Since tech companies like OpenAI and Google have made their large language models open to the public, “more students have begun feeding written prompts” to the algorithm and letting the computer generate written responses. The results “often can’t be distinguished from human-written text,” and assignments that would normally take two hours can be completed in minutes. One high-school senior “used OpenAI to generate an entire essay about contemporary world affairs.” The teacher had no idea but knocked points off for “failing to cite outside sources.” Plagiarism-checking algorithms aren’t flagging AI-generated text because, while the source material is scraped off the internet, the final result is still “technically original output.” War isn’t…

Scientists have successfully transplanted human neurons into newborn rat brains in an effort to better understand the biology of debilitating neurological disorders, reports The New York Times. In an incredible accomplishment of biological engineering, researchers at Stanford University grew poppy seed–size clumps of human brain cells, known as organoids, in a lab and then injected them into the part of the rats’ brains that processes pain and touch. The cells took root and spontaneously tapped into the rats’ brain circuits, connecting to far-off neurons and permitting them to sense whisker movements and alter the animals’ behavior. When air blew over a rat’s face, the human organoid responded. Scientists can now use such rats to study how brain cells from people with conditions such as schizophrenia, epilepsy, and autism, function—or…

Best-selling author Nora McInerny is the host of the podcast Terrible, Thanks for Asking, which tackles stories of grief and loss. Her new book of essays, Bad Vibes Only, offers a humorous look at the pitfalls of relentless positivity. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers (1940). I pulled this novel off my parents’ shelf in the summer after fifth grade and was immediately enchanted with the world Carson McCullers created in 1930s Georgia—and all the lonely, longing people within it. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien (1990). This book was assigned reading in my ninth-grade Honors English class. O’Brien’s sometimes gruesome and always devastating interconnected stories about young men in combat helped me to see my own father, a Vietnam veteran, for what he was:…

  3 “Lucrecia Dalt has become one of modern music’s most fascinating chameleons,” said Lewis Gordon in NPR​.org. Since she emerged in 2005, the musician and composer has recorded offbeat indie-pop, avant-garde electronica, spoken-word poetry, and even “atmospheric horror.” Dalt’s new LP marks “her most dramatic transformation yet: an album of lushly arranged bolero sci-fi, one that fuses tropical music, jazz, and electronics.” The Berlin-based artist uses the “delightfully absurdist” story of an alien newly landed on Earth to expand bolero, salsa, and merengue—the romantic music of her Colombian childhood. Several woozy songs, such as “Atemporal,” combine “outlandish electronic processing, slapped-hand percussion, and slithering bass lines,” said Paul Simpson in AllMusic. Despite the largely acoustic instrumentation, “the record has a bit of a space-age exotica feel, giving the impression of…

The German region of Mosel is known for “pure, precise” rieslings, said Megan Krigbaum in Punch. Though the style was long sustained by technical interventions such as sulfite additions, producers are now embracing natural winemaking, often creating excellent wines that “hew to the Mosel style, only without the heroics in the cellar.” 2020 Philip Lardot der Graf Riesling ($34). This unfiltered riesling is “perfectly mouthwatering and crisp,” delivering “flavors of wild strawberries, green rhubarb, and still-crunchy peach.” 2020 Sybille Kuntz Orange Organic Riesling ($39). An orange riesling should still smell like a riesling, and this one does. It’s fragrant with fresh apricot and “notes of apple and earth.” 2019 Rita & Rudolf Trossen Kestenbüsch Purus Riesling ($45). This riesling “smells and tastes like ripe Golden Delicious apples.”…

Buy specialty tools. A proper pumpkin-carving kit makes the fall tradition safer and more enjoyable. If you’re comfortable using a power drill, consider buying an attachment called a pumpkin gutter. It removes the innards quickly and can thin the rind where you intend to carve. Use a stencil. To avoid a mistake you can’t repair, use a pre-designed stencil or create your own. You can attach a drawing to the pumpkin and cut through the paper. Better yet, use sewing transfer paper to transfer the design by tracing over the lines with a pen. Remove the bottom. Instead of sawing out the stem, cut your opening in the pumpkin’s base. That way you can set a candle on the plug and light it more easily. Just add water. A shriveled…

If Angela Lansbury had been only a Broadway star or Hollywood character actor, that alone would have been a respectable career—but she did both, and also hit global fame in her late 50s as a grandmotherly sleuth on TV. First came a run as a supporting film actress that won her Oscar nominations for playing a conniving Cockney maid in Gaslight (1944) and a demonic mother in The Manchurian Candidate (1962). Next, she became a Broadway sensation, collecting five Tony Awards for roles including the leads in Mame (1966) and Sweeney Todd (1979). Her biggest success, though, came playing the mystery novelist and amateur detective Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote, which ran on CBS from 1984 to 1996. The genteel, unflappable Fletcher—denizen of a coastal Maine town that…

Glenda Jackson lives a decidedly spartan life for one of Britain’s most celebrated actresses, says Janice Turner in The Times (U.K.). The 86-year-old lives in a small basement apartment with a well-worn sofa; she shares a small garden with her son, who lives upstairs with his family. She has no cellphone; if you’re looking for one of her two Oscars, you won’t find those either. She never showed up to collect them, and ultimately gave them to her mother, who used them as bookends. “It always sounds so ungrateful, and I’m not, but once you’ve got it, what do you do with it?” Did she ever splurge on jewelry or a car after landing a lucrative role? “I don’t think so.” What about a jaunt to the south of…

Steven Paulikas The New York Times I am a gay Episcopal priest who sanctified my union in a church wedding conducted by a bishop, said Steven Paulikas. It was “one of the most profoundly spiritual experiences of my life.” Yet in a case pending before the Supreme Court, “a powerful political, legal, and social movement is poised to prevail in its mission to relegate the marriages of LGBTQ people to second-class status in the name of ‘religious freedom.’” Today, seven years after the court recognized the right to marriage equality, “same-sex marriage is a fully integrated part of some 15 religious traditions, including most mainline Protestant churches and three prominent Jewish movements.” But Christian conservatives contend that their “religious freedom” should enable them to stigmatize and discriminate against same-sex couples…

BELARUS Iryna Khalip Charter97 (in exile) We Belarusians have been watching with pity as Russia swallows chunks of Ukraine, said Iryna Khalip. The annexation referendums that Russia conducted in Ukrainian provinces last month were a sham, but what’s truly terrifying is that they weren’t faked—at least, not exactly. There were no polling booths. Instead, a woman “with a stack of ballots” would show up in a neighborhood “accompanied by two armed separatists” who threatened to immediately draft anyone who voted against Russia’s land grab. All three carefully looked on while the hapless voter filled out the paper. And voilà! The referendums passed, and just days later, the border between Russia and those provinces was abolished. But guess what, my countrymen? Belarus, too, is a kind of occupied land, controlled by…

Iran’s protests have grown into “one of the largest feminist uprisings the Middle East has seen,” said Golnar Motevalli in Bloomberg. One month since Mahsa Amini, 22, died in custody after being arrested by Iran’s morality police for “improperly” wearing the compulsory headscarf, or hijab, women have taken to the streets in 105 cities across Iran to perform astonishing acts of defiance: cutting their hair, burning hijabs, and chanting “Death to the dictator!” Some men, including oil workers and truck drivers, have joined protests and are also demanding “complete overhaul” of the oppressive Islamic Republic and its broken economy. “Even the most skeptical Iran watchers think this time might be different,” said David Ignatius in The Washington Post. Unlike the futile uprisings of 2009, 2017, and 2019, this youth-driven…

Microplastics, the microscopic bits shed by the plastics we use every day, have been detected in human breast milk for the first time, with unknown health implications for babies. When they analyzed breast milk samples from 34 healthy mothers one week after they gave birth, Italian researchers identified microplastics in 75 percent of the samples. They then tracked the mothers’ use of products that contain plastic and their consumption of food and drinks packaged in plastic. Because there was no correlation between that consumption and the presence of microplastics, researchers believe the presence in breast milk is simply a result of the ubiquity of microplastics in our environment. Previously detected in human blood, microplastics often contain harmful chemicals—and infants are far more vulnerable to such chemicals than adults. “It…

(Penguin, $29) Though you could call the latest from the author of Little Fires Everywhere dystopian fiction, “it is all too real in parts,” said Meredith Cummings in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. In an America where anti-Asian bias runs high and the government bans books and separates children from parents deemed to be dissidents, a boy named Bird goes looking for his missing mother, a Chinese American poet whose work has been blacklisted. “From the novel’s first sentence, the reader will want to know how it ends,” because already a mysterious letter has eluded censors to reach Bird and set him wondering. In an “ingenious” turn, author Celeste Ng soon aligns Bird with an underground network of librarians dedicated to rescuing disappeared books, said Maureen Corrigan at NPR​.org. Though the…

The Hollow Kind by Andy Davidson (MCD/FSG, $28) Andy Davidson’s new novel feels like “a creepy variation on Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax,” said Ousmane Power-Greene in The New York Times. Nellie, a young mother, flees her abusive husband and moves with her son to a former Georgia turpentine farm that was recently bequeathed to her. Though a shape-shifting beast lurks in the woods, “from the beginning of this powerful gothic ghost story, it’s clear the real legacy Nellie is inheriting is one of intergenerational greed.” Jackal by Erin E. Adams (Bantam, $27) Author Erin Adams has set her debut novel in her Rust Belt hometown, and it’s “a terrifying tale of the fears and hatreds generated by racism and class inequality,” said Bruce DeSilva in the Associated Press. Liz…

4 Plains’ debut record rates as “one of the best Americana albums of the year,” said Ellen Johnson in Paste. The confident new collaboration between Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield and indie-folk artist Jess Williamson evokes classic country by the likes of Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris. Crutchfield had moved in this direction with 2020’s Saint Cloud, and in many ways, this new project plays like an “airy, beautiful” sequel to that acclaimed album. But the duo’s first LP, a supposed one-off, is “country through and through,” and the lyrics they’ve written are “full of Southern-isms pulled from their own lived experiences.” Often, those lyrics concern overcoming hurt or insecurity and finding strength in being honest, said Maeri Ferguson in No Depression. It makes for a rejuvenating listen, “a soundtrack for dusting…

Stop-motion scares… Wendell & Wild Coraline director Henry Selick has returned to stop-motion for a delightfully spooky collaboration with Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele. Key and Peele voice two demons who strike a deal with a young girl to resurrect her dead parents if she helps them escape damnation. Netflix Frankenweenie Yes, The Nightmare Before Christmas is the classic. But this Tim Burton–directed stop-motion gem is loaded with clever allusions to black-and-white horror classics. It recounts the tale of a science-obsessed boy who, in Dr. Frankenstein style, brings his beloved dog back to life. $4 on demand Corpse Bride Another Burton masterpiece, this 2005 effort recounts the tragic love story of a timid groom-to-be and the dead bride he mistakenly marries. With voices by Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham…

PlantNet can put a name to any plant you come across. It’s quick and easy, with none of the ads or pop-ups that often ruin free plant-identification apps. “Within five seconds, this app was able to differentiate a forsythia from a goldenrod and a maple from an oak.” It’s light on information, but “consistently accurate.” iNaturalist “makes it easy to share and confirm your findings,” whether you’re communicating with amateur or professional naturalists. The app is an excellent tool for educators, as well as “citizen scientists,” who can participate in research projects from within the app. “iNaturalist isn’t quite as accurate as PlantNet,” however. “It’s also a little trickier to use.” PictureThis “goes into much more depth on subjects like toxicity and natural history.” This encyclopedic plant identifier is “less…

Trevor Milton, the founder of electric-truck maker Nikola, was found guilty of lying to defraud investors, said Jack Ewing in The New York Times. A federal jury last week convicted Milton, 40, on one count of securities fraud and two counts of wire fraud, “the most serious of which carry a maximum prison sentence of 20 years.” Milton made “numerous false assertions about the company’s technology,” including promoting a misleading video of a “working prototype” of a hydrogen-powered truck. Energy: U.S. to release oil from strategic reserve The Biden administration plans to tap 15 million more barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to keep fuel prices down, said Ben Lefebvre in Politico. The release, scheduled this week for December, “will account for the last of the 180 million…

Bigger COLA, bigger risks The biggest cost-of-living adjustment to Social Security since 1981 will put more money in retirees’ wallets, said Alan Rappeport in The New York Times—and put more strain on the program. The Social Security Administration announced a COLA, which is based on the inflation rate, of 8.7 percent for 2023, boosting retirees’ average monthly payments by $146. However, rising benefits mean the program will be “under even more pressure to sustain itself.” Annual reports in June showed that the Trust Fund used for paying benefits is ticking down toward depletion by 2034; that date will come sooner if COLAs continue at similar levels. If that fund—the result of years of surpluses—is depleted, Social Security will need to be funded by incoming payroll tax revenue, “unless Congress…

Rebecca Ballhaus The Wall Street Journal It’s astonishingly common for federal officials to own or trade stocks that rise and fall with decisions made by their agencies, said Rebecca Ballhaus. A Defense Department scientist working in a division that tests fighter jets bought Lockheed Martin stock weeks before the Pentagon announced a new deal for F-35s. An official at the Environmental Protection Agency with “a front-row seat to deliberations” made more than 100 trades in energy and mining companies. And a third of the 90 senior officials at the Federal Trade Commission “owned or traded stock in companies undergoing an FTC merger review or investigation.” In all, in an investigation covering five years of financial disclosure forms for 12,000 senior federal employees, the Journal found some 2,600 had investments in…

Robbie Coltrane was larger than life. As Rubeus Hagrid in all eight original Harry Potter films, the Scottish actor spent a decade portraying a half-giant who measured 8-foot-6 and was known for his ragged beard, good cheer, and protectiveness over young wizard Harry. Coltrane himself stood at 6-foot-1, sometimes weighed nearly 300 pounds, and was jovial and loud, prone to giving bear hugs. But he also struggled with alcoholism, binge eating, and depression, and with his short temper he avoided interviews. Harry Potter and its millions of young fans softened him, though. “Kids come up to you and they go, ‘Would you like to sign my book?’ with those big doe eyes,” he said. “And it’s a serious responsibility.” Born Anthony Robert McMillan, Coltrane grew up near Glasgow, where…