Innehållsförteckning för December 2, 2022 från The Week Magazine

The story that the Silicon Valley investors who call themselves “venture capitalists” like to tell about themselves is that for decades they’ve been the engine of America’s economic vitality. Blessed, they say, are the financiers, for without their investments in Apple way back there would be no iPhone. Entrepreneurs who arrive in Silicon Valley are warned early on that while these investors are mouthing platitudes about innovation, they will also be rifling through your pockets. Most entrepreneurs try to keep them at arm’s length, valuing their money more than their advice. Silicon Valley’s investors usually have impressive technical degrees, but their stock-in-trade is ultimately not technological innovation but financial engineering. This is why Silicon Valley loves “crypto,” or digital currencies, so much. All the innovation was done for free; the…

Good week for: Arabic lessons, after experts settled the dispute about the pronunciation of the home nation of the World Cup by noting that neither Ka-TAR nor KUH-ter actually reflects the glottal sound Arabic speakers use for the first letter. Ka-TAR is closer, though. Religious icons, after an anonymous buyer paid $218,750 for an old pair of suede Birkenstock leather sandals worn by Apple founder Steve Jobs in the 1970s. The auction house said the sandals’ “cork and jute footbed retains the imprint of Steve Jobs’ feet, which had been shaped after years of use.” Free-market competition, after discount retailer Sam’s Club dropped the cost of its in-store hot dog–and-drink combo meal to $1.38, undercutting the $1.50 hot dog combo meal offered by archrival Costco for decades. Bad week for:…

Jennifer Lopez is still a relentless romantic, but she’s no longer naïve, said Rob Haskell in Vogue. After marrying Ben Affleck, she has decided to change her name legally to Jennifer Affleck despite her own career achievements and personal brand. “I just feel like it’s romantic,” she says. It’s her fourth marriage, and there were two broken engagements and other relationship disappointments, but she was stung the most by her first breakup with Affleck in 2004, which she blames on relentless media scrutiny. “We were just living out loud, and it turned out to really bite us,” says Lopez, 53. “There was a lot underneath the surface there, people not wanting us to be together, people thinking I wasn’t the right person for him. I became very guarded because…

Mona Charen The Bulwark The pro-life movement needs to face reality, said Mona Charen. Legal abortion bans are “facing a prolonged backlash at the hands of voters.” Anger over the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision fueled many Democratic candidates’ victories in the midterm elections, and “exit polls found that 63 percent of voters prefer that abortion be legal in all or most circumstances.” In six state referenda so far, the pro-choice side won every time, including in conservative Kentucky and Kansas. Near-total bans in 13 states have alarmed voters, as have vague definitions that have left doctors and hospitals afraid to care for women with doomed or dangerous pregnancies. I personally believe every abortion is “a tragedy,” but how many abortions will these draconian laws really prevent? Women with means are…

“Qatar 2022 is rotten to the core, [but] if you’re a fan struggling to reconcile the moral hazards of this tournament with your love of the game, ‘Just don’t watch’ is plainly inadequate. It’s downright unthinkable for huge swaths of the world who see the World Cup as an unmatched display of beauty, unity, and sporting romance, as well as the source of profound national pride. I will watch the World Cup. I will cheer on the young and talented American team, and I will live and die with every touch of the ball by the magical left foot of Messi, arguably the greatest player of all time. FIFA’s cynical bet that the world will still tune in is clearly a safe one.” Gabriel Debenedetti in New York magazine…

UKRAINE Igor Duda Za Zbruchem Ukraine is getting pummeled, said Igor Duda, and we need more help. As air sirens blared in my hometown of Ternopil last week, “I felt the tremors of a powerful explosion.” The electricity cut out, “a thin trickle of water flowed from the taps,” and internet service grew shaky. Russia’s massive barrage of missiles, which struck civilian areas in cities across the country, was a reminder that even here in the relative safety of western Ukraine, our former “carefree life” is over. As I sat in the total darkness of a city without power, I realized that Putin is terrorizing us because, like a street thug “swearing and swinging his fists,” he knows he can get away with it. The West won’t hit back at…

MEXICO Augustín Gutiérrez Canet Milenio When Mexico agreed to take in Venezuelan migrants from the U.S., said Augustín Gutiérrez Canet, it made a promise it couldn’t keep. Venezuelans have been crossing into the U.S. in record numbers this year, with some 33,000 apprehended by border control in September alone. Rather than allowing them to apply for asylum, the U.S. decided in October to immediately expel those who entered the country unlawfully, citing the Trump-era pandemic order Title 42. The problem: The U.S. has no diplomatic ties with Venezuela and thus can’t deport anyone to the country, so Mexico agreed to receive the deportees and hold them while they applied to enter the U.S. legally. But it outsourced the job of housing and processing them to the same charities that are…

The U.S. has seen more than 600 mass shootings so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive. Not a week has passed this year without at least four mass shootings, defined as gun crimes in which four or more people are injured or killed.The Washington Post The world will have generated 175 zettabytes—a figure with 24 digits—of digital data by 2025, the International Data Corp. estimates. New prefixes will be added to the metric system to quantify the even greater data deluge to come, with the largest, a quettabyte, representing a number with 30 zeroes after the first digit.NPR.org America’s four largest cities will all have Black mayors next year, with Rep. Karen Bass, the new mayor-elect of Los Angeles, joining New York City’s Eric Adams, Chicago’s Lori…

“Every hero becomes a bore at last.”Ralph Waldo Emerson quoted in Politico “It remains a damning fact of life that we ask too much of those who are marginalized and too little of those who are not.”Michelle Obama, quoted in The Guardian “The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.”Andrew Carnegie, quoted in The New York Times “It is not enough that I succeed. Others must also fail.”Producer David Merrick, quoted in Barstool Sports “A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.”Mark Twain, quoted in Skies “Not only will America go to your country and kill all your people, but what’s worse…they’ll come back 20 years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel…

Please Apple, don’t sell us out Hey, Apple, said Jason Snell in Macworld, don’t become like Google. “Google is fundamentally an advertising company whose customers are ad buyers.” Apple, on the other hand, always prioritized the user experience, because its “customers are people who buy Apple devices and services.” Lately, though, it seems Apple is leaning in the opposite direction. Already, it is fumbling the ball. The company added ads to the App Store last month “in a move so universally reviled that Apple quickly backed away and paused what it was doing.” Now there’s news “it might stick ads into its Maps, Podcasts, and Books apps, joining ads already in News and Stocks.” I don’t believe all ad salespeople are the devil. But is anyone still left at…

Humans may have used fire to cook food a staggering 780,000 years ago, reports Smithsonian—more than 600,000 years earlier than previously thought. The new time line comes after researchers in Israel analyzed thousands of fish remains found at a site near the Jordan River in northern Israel. “It was like facing a puzzle,” says lead researcher Irit Zohar, from Tel Aviv University, “with more and more information until we could make a story about human evolution.” Zohar and her colleagues found that in some areas there were almost no bones, which disintegrate at high temperatures, but lots of teeth, which don’t—and that most of these teeth came from two particularly large and succulent species of carp. They also unearthed burnt flints and other possible remnants of fire-tending equipment. To…

Charmaine Wilkerson is the author of Black Cake, a novel about two estranged Caribbean-American siblings who together discover their mother’s secret past. The best-seller, which is being adapted as a Hulu series, is now available in paperback. The Piano Lesson by August Wilson (1990). This play, first staged in 1987 and currently on Broadway in a revival starring Samuel L. Jackson, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1990. The conflict revolves around a treasured family piano in a Pittsburgh home in the 1930s, and two African-American siblings who cannot agree on what to do with it: One wishes to preserve her family’s heritage, while the other wants to sell it to better his future. Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson (1994). A Japanese-American man is charged with murder in…

Stephen Mihm Bloomberg History has shown it’s unwise to fire workers en masse, said Stephen Mihm. The recent announcements of thousands of layoffs from companies like Amazon and Meta mark “a revival of long-discredited corporate strategies” that could do far more damage to these companies down the line. Decades ago, executives at industrial giants like Boeing and General Motors could easily sell mass layoffs to shareholders. It seemed intuitive that “pruning payrolls could restore” the bottom line, and investors greeted such heartbreaking announcements “as a sign that corporate leaders were ‘taking the necessary steps.’” But numerous studies have since shown that the layoffs “had a negligible impact on profitability” in the years after restructuring. Surviving employees, unsurprisingly, became more “narrow-minded, self-absorbed, and risk averse—the opposite of the outcome that was…

George Lois married advertising with wit to become the best-known art director of the 20th century. His iconic 1960 commercial for Xerox showed a chimpanzee operating a copy machine with ease. Decades later, another of his commercials featured rock stars rallying young viewers to tell their cable company “I want my MTV.” In between, he designed daring magazine covers for Esquire in the 1960s and ’70s, depicting Muhammad Ali as an arrow-strafed St. Sebastian and Andy Warhol drowning in the contents of a Campbell’s soup can. He melded highbrow and lowbrow, counterculture and corporate America. And he had little patience for conventional wisdom. When he learned that Esquire had been designing its covers by committee, he scoffed at the idea. “You need to get one guy who understands the…

What happened Doubts about the survival of Twitter grew this week after Elon Musk instigated a continued exodus of employees and reactivated the accounts of Donald Trump and others banned for violating content standards. Musk last week gave Twitter’s 3,700 remaining workers—just half of the company’s original workforce before his early-November layoffs—an ultimatum: Sign a pledge committing to an “extremely hardcore” work schedule or accept three months’ severance pay. About 1,200 employees took the pay and left—and this week, Musk said he planned even more layoffs. Most of Twitter’s content-moderation staff has exited, and current and former employees report that two or fewer engineers are overseeing some critical functions. Musk last week lifted the site’s suspension of Trump after posting a poll asking whether he should be reinstated, saying…

A suburban mom in Texas was handcuffed and jailed after letting her 8-year-old son walk a half-mile home from karate class. Police told Heather Wallace her son could have been kidnapped and sex-trafficked. Facing a prison sentence for child endangerment, Wallace took a plea deal requring parenting classes and 65 hours of community service. The whole family suffered “deep trauma,” Wallace said. San Francisco’s Elections Commission has decided not to renew the contract of the elections director—whom it recently lauded for “incredible leadership”—because he’s white. Elections officials told Director John Arntz that the city’s “racial equity plan” required that his position be opened to others. Mayor London Breed called that decision “unfair politicization.” In other news U.S. rules out lawsuit against Saudi prince With King Salman of Saudi Arabia recently…

Travis Barker nearly died, and the close call changed his life, said Alex Pappademas in GQ. In 2008, the punk rock drummer was on a private jet that crashed and burned soon after takeoff from a South Carolina airport. Both pilots died, as did Barker’s assistant Chris Baker and security guard Che Still. Barker needed 26 surgeries. The other survivor was Barker’s best friend, Adam “DJ AM” Goldstein, who also suffered severe burns and died of a drug overdose a year later. Barker, 47, suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and survivor’s guilt. “I didn’t know if I’d ever play music again,” he says. “I didn’t know if I ever wanted to go outside again.” He was heavily using pot and pills as his marriage, to former Miss USA Shanna…

Yasmin Tayag The Atlantic Thanks to vaccination and acquired immunity, “most Americans seem to have tuned out Covid,” said Yasmin Tayag. As we head into “the third pandemic winter,” people think of Covid “as a minor nuisance” if they think of it at all. But while it’s true that young, healthy, vaccinated people are unlikely to get severely ill or die from Covid, it continues to pose a significant threat to people over 50, who make up more than 90 percent of all Covid-related deaths. Covid has killed more than 230,000 Americans in 2022 alone, and remains the third-leading cause of death in the U.S. in 2022, after heart disease and cancer. Before spending time with vulnerable older or immunocompromised people, those of us at low risk should take steps…

A German artist creates detailed paintings of the Bavarian rural landscape using cow dung as his pigment. “Through this technique I bring in beautiful depth and sharpness,” said Werner Härtl, who hatched the idea while working as a farmhand. “Around two bowel movements deliver enough for half a year of creativity.” He waters down the dung to achieve varying shades, and says there’s no smell once it dries. Working with cow poo “has a serious purpose,” Härtl said. “I want to sensitize [people] to appreciate their environment more.” A 50-year-old Chinese man became the toast of the nation’s social media after he was photographed chain-smoking his way through a marathon. Chen Bangxian, completed the Xin’anjiang Marathon in Jiande in under 3.5 hours—an hour faster than the average worldwide finishing time.…

JAPAN Editorial Asahi Shimbun As the U.S. and Japan practice defending Taiwan from a Chinese attack, they’re putting Okinawans “on the front lines,” said the Asahi Shimbun in an editorial. Okinawa has long put up with a U.S. military base. Now, its outer islands, which lie near Taiwan, are being seen as the ideal staging ground for repelling a potential Chinese invasion. Yonagunijima, Okinawa’s westernmost island, is so close to Taiwan that you can see it “on a clear day,” and earlier this month, thousands of U.S. Marines landed there for the joint exercises with Japanese forces. Locals feel besieged. The drills involve more than 30,000 soldiers practicing extensive operations like amphibious landings and air defense. A Japanese tank even trundled across the tiny island this week—the first such vehicle…

New data from Boston schools suggests that masking in the classroom slows the spread of Covid, reports The New York Times. All but two school districts in the greater Boston area lifted mask requirements last spring, so researchers were able to analyze the “natural experiment” and compare the masking and the nonmasking schools directly. They found that infection rates were significantly lower among the masked students. This was true even in Boston’s public schools, many of which have poor ventilation and more students from at-risk communities. Removing the mask mandates was associated with an additional 44.9 Covid cases per 1,000 students and staff over the 15-week study period, amounting to a total of 11,901 extra cases. “What we see in the study is that Covid does spread in schools,”…

(Mariner, $28) Lynn Steger Strong’s new novel about a family holiday gathering is “decidedly old-fashioned—in the best way,” said Bethanne Patrick in the Los Angeles Times. Shortly after the sudden death of their formidable mother, three adult siblings bring their families together in upstate New York for a snowy Christmas that will inevitably include fraught debate about a money issue: what to do with mom’s home in Florida, including whether to gift it to a bird refuge. Still, as Strong introduces us to each of six grieving adults, “it’s her facility with the details of habit and personality that breathes life and plot into this novel.” The story “sweeps forward in a rich flurry of details: a fallen gingerbread house, a game of Canasta, a furtive sexual encounter,” said…

Surrender by Bono (Knopf, $34) U2’s lead singer strikes a lot of people as self-aggrandizing, said Jen Chaney in NYMag.com. But the Irish rocker has a sense of humor about himself and the charitable work he’s done. His 500-page memoir is “Bono at his Bono-iest: verbose, wry, inspiring, and fully aware of how grating he can be when his ego gets the best of him.” It occasionally bogs down in details about political negotiations, but is mostly an “earthy, self-deprecating” appraisal of his uncommon life. Chuck Berry by R.J. Smith (Hachette, $32) Though Chuck Berry didn’t invent rock ’n’ roll single-handedly, “you wouldn’t be blamed if you thought that he could have,” said David Kirby in The Washington Post. This new biography of the midcentury hitmaker emphasizes the sheer…

Ticketmaster has been blasted by critics before, but it “has never shaken a beehive quite like the Swifties,” said Ron Knox in Slate. Last week, fans of Taylor Swift were bitterly disappointed when the website of the world’s largest ticket company crashed shortly after tickets were made available to the megastar’s first concert tour in four years. The rollout “went about as badly as it could,” with precertified fans enduring hours-long waits, glitches that cost them their place in line, and finally the news that all available tickets were gone and that aftermarket prices had reached $22,000. Sadly, “Ticketmaster’s meltdown was more than just predictable.” Ever since the vendor merged with the concert promoter Live Nation in 2010, the company’s monopoly hold on the concert tour business has been…

The holiday season has arrived, and there are so many “decadent new ways to imbibe,” said Brad Japhe and Elin McCoy in Bloomberg Businessweek. Consider these outside-the-box options, which can be great as gifts or as conversation starters at your own gatherings. Empirical Symphony 6 ($50). “This pink-hued spirit resists easy categorization.” Produced in Copenhagen and inspired by Beethoven, it’s citrusy, yet with savory notes from black currant, fig leaves, and an Indian grass root. Mr. Black Mezcal Cask Coffee Liqueur ($60). For an instant eggnog alternative, mix this with milk. The coffee liqueur sits in mezcal casks for 12 weeks, adding hints of nutmeg, clove, smoke, and “vegetal earthiness.” Aplós ($48). This alcohol-free spirit “uses hemp cannabidiol to help take the edge off.” It offers notes of yuzu,…

The Mexican city of Morelia is an underappreciated gem, said Michael Snyder in The New York Times. Founded by the Spanish in 1541, the capital of the western state Michoacán is home to 850,000 people, a rich arts heritage, and “one of the country’s most beautiful historic centers.” Many of its 250 historic buildings, including a cathedral that is “among Mexico’s loveliest religious structures,” are built from rose-hued quarry stone, and at sunset, the city “blushes a deep shade of pink.” Casa de Artesanías, one of Morelia’s oldest buildings, is now a market-museum hybrid that “serves as a good introduction to the depth and diversity of the state’s craft traditions.” You’ll find more artisanal wares at Mercado de Dulces y Artesanías, where 30 of the 165 stalls sell homemade sweets…

Former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison last week after she was convicted of defrauding investors in her failed blood-testing startup, said Rachel Metz in CNN.com. “Once hailed as a tech industry icon, she is now the rare tech founder to be convicted and face prison time.” More than 100 people wrote letters asking for leniency for Holmes, who has a young son and is pregnant; the government had asked for 15 years, saying she gained “fame, admiration, and a lifestyle from the fraud.” Murdoch: Questions about News Corp–Fox reunion An activist investor asked Rupert Murdoch to reconsider his recent proposal to recombine News Corp and Fox, said Lauren Hirsch in The New York Times. In October, Murdoch, the chairman of both Fox…

The Select Seven are suffering Seven stocks helped boost the S&P 500 index to record highs, said Allan Sloan in The Washington Post—and now they are dragging it down. I call them the Select Seven, and they consist of Apple, Amazon, Meta, Google, Microsoft, Tesla, and Netflix. Last year, those seven companies “returned a weighted average return of 36.3 percent,” significantly boosting Vanguard’s S&P 500 index. Alas, the tables have quickly turned. Those same seven are down 32 percent in 2022. The overall S&P 500 fund has dropped 17.7 percent this year. But if you subtracted those seven dogs from the fund, “Vanguard says the remaining 493 would have shown a loss of 12.8 percent.” A mortgage-rate reprieve Mortgage rates suddenly plunged last week by the biggest week-over-week decline…

Eric Lipton and Kenneth Vogel The New York Times The U.S. has been suckered into going “all in” on sports betting, said Eric Lipton and Kenneth Vogel. “Less than five years ago, betting on sports in the United States was prohibited under federal law except in Nevada casinos and a smattering of other venues.” In 2018, the Supreme Court ruled that a federal prohibition was unconstitutional. But reversing the long-standing antipathy of sports leagues toward gambling and the concerns of state lawmakers about addiction and corruption required “a bare-knuckled lobbying campaign” by gambling companies and their allies. In addition to doling out millions to lawmakers’ campaigns, “the gambling industry disseminated data about how much tax revenue states could expect to receive.” In many cases, they were so persuasive that states…

Not all Americans knew Michael Gerson’s name, but most knew his words. As chief speechwriter for George W. Bush for seven years, Gerson had a pivotal role in shaping the voice of a president not previously known for eloquence. When Bush spoke of “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” or called democracy a “seed upon the wind, taking root in many nations,” that was Gerson’s pen at work. Most notably, Gerson crafted Bush’s messaging in the days after 9/11, coining the phrase “axis of evil” and writing the speech Bush gave Congress nine days after the attack. “Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war,” he wrote, “and we know that God is not neutral between them.” An evangelical Christian, Gerson believed it was “a real…

Before Carol Leigh, prostitution was seen as a crime, not a labor issue. The former prostitute—a fearless performer who sported red curly hair and went by the stage name “Scarlot Harlot”—reframed the conversation around sex for hire in 1982 when she spoke up at an anti-pornography panel, objecting to the use of the phrase “sex-use” industry. “How could I sit amid other women as a political equal when I was being objectified like that, described only as something used?” she said. “I said, ‘No, we should call it “sex work” because that’s what the women do.’” Leigh was born in New York, said The Washington Post, under a name she kept private. After studying creative writing at Empire State College, she moved to San Francisco in 1978. The restaurant…

This week’s question: A Gainesville, Texas, landlady insists one of her rental properties is haunted by ghosts whose sexual assertiveness is driving away her tenants. Come up with the PG title of a movie about a group of paranormal researchers who attempt to rid the building of these promiscuous presences. Last week’s contest: Fans of embattled tech billionaire Elon Musk have created a 30-foot aluminum statue of him as a human-goat hybrid riding a rocket. Come up with a name for this work that acknowledges the Tesla and Twitter CEO’s current troubles. THE WINNER: “Icarus Rides Again” Joe Ayella, Wayne, Pa. SECOND PLACE: “Wreck-It Man” George Strong, Plano, Texas THIRD PLACE: “To Bankruptcy and Beyond!” Jon Harper, Cary, N.C. For runners-up and complete contest rules, please go to theweek.com/contest.…

Jim Harris didn’t expect anything more than a mind-bending trip when he took “magic” mushrooms at a music festival in 2015, said Rachel Mabe in Outside. The adventure photographer and former mountaineering instructor had suffered a snowkiting accident in Chile eight months earlier, breaking nine vertebrae and becoming partially paralyzed. After grueling physical therapy, Harris could get around with the help of a walker but couldn’t activate his right hamstring. “The disability made me feel like an outsider,” says Harris, 40. Then, at the festival, someone offered him mushrooms containing the hallucinogen psilocybin. While tripping, he became deeply attuned to the nature all around him and to the music; while swaying to the beat, he discovered that he could pick up his right foot and pull it back. He…

Mark Goldfeder CNN Dave Chappelle believes there can be only one oppressed group in America, said Mark Goldfeder, and it’s not gay or trans people or Jews. Though he’s “one of the funniest people alive,” the brilliant Chappelle has a myopia about bigotry that he put on full display in a recent Saturday Night Live monologue about recent anti-Semitic comments by rapper Kanye West and NBA star Kyrie Irving. Chappelle started off criticizing “the very hateful things” West and Irving said, before “pivoting halfway through to blame the targeted minority group for being offended, and to explain how the Black community is the real victim.” In fact, Chappelle “actually reinforced the anti-Semitic ideas” West and Irving promoted, by suggesting—ha, ha, ha—that the Jews really do run the world. In his…

LITHUANIA Arunas Dumalakas Lietuvos Rytas Lithuanian lawmakers haven’t had a hot lunch in months, said Arunas Dumalakas. Since the congressional catering company’s contract expired this summer, our poor legislators have been forced to brown-bag it, because nobody wanted the job of feeding them. Nobody acceptable, at least. Just one restaurant applied to cater: the pizzeria and bistro Gustuko, which became notorious during the pandemic for flouting Lithuania’s Covid-vaccine requirements. Can you imagine a pro-lockdown politician “pouring soup made by the cook of an anti-vaxxer company” into his bowl? Of course not. “The devil knows what names of dishes these caterers would come up with if someone had allowed them” into parliament—“impeachment cutlet,” anyone? Desperate for more politically correct candidates, the government finally announced it would allow alcohol to be sold…

A “multibillion-dollar showdown” over student debt relief is coming, said Greg Stohr in Bloomberg. Last week, the Biden administration asked the Supreme Court to intervene and lift the nationwide stay on his plan to cancel up to $20,000 per person in student debt, imposed by the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals days earlier. But that case, brought by six Republican-led states, is only one of “multiple legal challenges” to Biden’s executive order granting student debt relief. Applications for relief are no longer being accepted, and the 26 million who’ve applied are now in limbo. A final court ruling might not come until June at the earliest, meaning that debtors may need to resume repayments starting Jan. 1. The next time Biden wants to create a new government “freebie”…

(Liveright, $32.50) History largely remembers Sarah and Angelina Grimke as heroic abolitionists, said Michael Jeffries in The New York Times. The sisters had, after all, turned away from their own slaveholding family in Charleston, S.C., to move north and join the anti-slavery cause. But historian Kerri Greenidge has peered beneath the story’s surface, and in her new book, she “takes the Grimke sisters off their pedestal so that we understand them as pieces of a tapestry that could only be sewn in America.” Yes, the sisters spoke out boldly against slavery and for women’s rights. Later, they helped facilitate their Black nephews’ rise in Northern society. Still, “the lives they built, and their relationships with Black relatives, were poisoned by the profits, violence, and shame of white supremacy.” “Like all…

Rob Delaney wants to ruin your week, said Alex Moshakis in The Guardian. His new memoir, A Heart That Works, is about losing a son at age 2 to brain cancer, and its first mission is to make you feel the pain its author does. “I sat down to write this book thinking, How can I hurt people?” says the 45-year-old writer and comedian. “I wanted to offload some pain, I wanted to spread it around, I wanted to bruise people’s psyches and hearts.” Delaney, who co-created the comedy series Catastrophe, swears he doesn’t hate people who haven’t been through anything as devastating. But he had already written about his anger and grief online and an editor encouraged him to share more. “I thought the kindest thing to do,”…

Early holiday specials… The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special To cheer up Peter Quill, aka Star-Lord, the other Guardians undertake a misguided mission to Earth in search of “the legendary Kevin Bacon.” Disney+ A Christmas Story Christmas In this sequel to 1983’s A Christmas Story, the original Ralphie, Peter Billingsley, returns to Cleveland Street in middle age to try to do the holiday the way his old man did. This one won’t be a classic, but it has modest charm. HBO Max The Santa Clauses Tim Allen returns in a sequel series to his Santa Clause movies, now looking to finally retire and turn his Santa duties over to someone new. Expect some goofy humor, but also some Allen-esque griping about the ostensible “war on Christmas.” Disney+ Falling for…

According to the United Nations World Food Program, 222 million people in 53 countries are in near-term danger of starvation, the highest number on record. Hunger has been made worse by the war in Ukraine, which has raised global food prices, especially in countries that depend on Ukrainian imports. To combat this, Rise Against Hunger (riseagainsthunger.org) is building safety-net programs that address basic nutrition needs. Through those, as well as long-term agricultural and income-generating initiatives, the nonprofit helped more than 2 million people last year. Operating in India, South Africa, the Philippines, and other countries, Rise Against Hunger has delivered meals to schools and has developed the Planting Seeds for Strong Communities project to train farmers and feed schoolchildren with local crops. Each charity we feature has earned a…