Innehållsförteckning för December 23, 2022 från The Week Magazine

My mom died a year ago, and her passing brought me a disorienting mixture of grief and relief. She was 98, and had suffered from dementia for more than a decade. In her last two months, my mother’s joy in eating (“Yum, yum!”) finally faded, and seeing her laboring to breathe tortured me. When her body finally gave out, it was no surprise, but the sudden absence death creates is always a shock. In ensuing weeks, I found myself with what is referred to in our Last Word this week (see p.36) as “dreadful freedom.” I’d spent afternoons with my mom virtually every Saturday and Sunday for the 13 years since my father died, took her on my family’s vacations, drove her to doctors, hired and managed caregivers, winced as…

Good week for: Active seniors, with a new study suggesting that the active ingredient in Viagra could lower users’ risk of Alzheimer’s disease by up to 70 percent. Researchers speculated that Viagra might have “neuroprotective effects” in addition to the better-known one. Shaming, after Kanye West, aka Ye, was named the 2022 Antisemite of the Year by StopAntisemitism.com for his descent into Hitler praise and rancid Jew-hatred. Ye lost an estimated $1 billion in endorsement and licensing deals this year. Women, after Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Treasurer Lynn Malerba saw their signatures reproduced on new U.S. currency—the first not to have a man’s signature. Money, said Yellen, “can tell us who we are, what we value, and what is possible.” Bad week for: Elon Musk, the Twitter CEO, who…

Shania Twain was afraid to be a woman, said Sophie Heawood in The Sunday Times (U.K.). Growing up poor in Ontario, she started singing in bars at 8. Her stepfather sexually abused her, so she was horrified when her pubescent body started changing. “I hid myself and I would flatten my boobs,” she says. “I would wear bras that were too small, and I’d wear two, until there was nothing girl about me.” When she got older, “You go into society and you’re getting the normal other unpleasant stuff too, and that reinforces it. You think, ‘Oh, I guess it’s just shitty to be a girl.’” Once she started singing professionally and “had to play the glamorous singer,” her beauty brought unwanted attention. She made her way to Nashville,…

Bill Scher Washington Monthly Voter ID, early voting, and mail-in ballots have little or no impact on which party wins elections, said Bill Scher. That’s the takeaway from the 2022 midterms. “Everything both parties have told themselves about election laws” was proved wrong. In Georgia, Republicans passed a law in 2021 that limited access to ballot drop boxes, increased ID requirements for mail-in voting, and banned mobile voting buses. Democrats called the law “Jim Crow 2.0,” and said the clear intent was to deter Black voters. But such laws invariably “boomerang and galvanize” voters. In the Georgia Senate runoff, large Black turnout propelled Democrat Raphael Warnock to victory. Democrats also claimed victories in the Arizona Senate race and gubernatorial races in Arizona, Wisconsin, and Kansas—all states that have adopted voter…

“It is true that many people who become homeless are mentally ill. But the claim that drug abuse and mental illness are the fundamental causes of homelessness falls apart upon investigation. The homelessness crisis is most acute in places with very low vacancy rates, and where even ‘low income’ housing is still very expensive. If mental health issues or drug abuse were major drivers of homelessness, then places with higher rates of these problems [such as Utah, Colorado, West Virginia, and Vermont] would see higher rates of homelessness. They don’t. What prevents at-risk people in these states from falling into homelessness at high rates is simple: They have more affordable-housing options.” Jerusalem Demsas in The Atlantic…

FINLAND Peter Zashev Helsinki Times Finland has a happiness conundrum, said Peter Zashev. Even though we routinely rank as the “world’s happiest country,” many people are quietly suffering. Visitors who come to Finland expecting to find widespread joy are met instead by gloomy, even bitter people. You can blame the happiness index itself, which really measures a country’s national sense of stability, not the gaiety of its citizens. But you can also blame the “low level of empathy” in our culture. That served us well hundreds of years ago, when life up north was about “enduring hardships in a stubborn, silent, remote, and individualistic way.” Yet now, this stoicism just makes us unfeeling. As a people, “we are not that interested in one another and have little tolerance for people…

TURKEY Ayse Karabat Qantara (Germany) Syrian restaurants are “conquering” Istanbul, from kebab shops to bustling bistros, said Ayse Karabat, but Turks aren’t exactly lining up outside these immigrant-run eateries. Roughly 3.6 million Syrians have fled to Turkey since the start of the Syrian civil war over a decade ago, and now they’re the country’s biggest immigrant group—and the target of widespread animosity. More than 80 percent of Turks say they want the Syrians to “return to their own country,” and that sentiment reigns even in proudly multicultural Istanbul, where refugees make up fully 15 percent of the population. Semin Guner Gumesel, a local who loves exploring the restaurant scene, said she’s found gem after gem, but many of her friends “won’t consider a restaurant run by refugees.” Such bigotry also…

“This is a political victory for the LGBTQ community,” said Hal Boyd in NBC News, “but it’s also a win for pluralism.” This week, President Biden signed the Respect for Marriage Act into law after Congress approved the bill guaranteeing federal recognition and protection of same-sex and interracial marriages. The bill had some bipartisan support, with 39 House Republicans and 12 Senate Republicans voting yes. But most Republicans voted no, even though same-sex marriage has been legal in every state since the Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision. The legislation shouldn’t have been necessary, said Bloomberg in an editorial, but when the court’s empowered conservative wing overturned Roe v. Wade this year, it became clear that a right established in one era “can be easily dismantled in another.”…

For six years, Donald Trump has served as the GOP’s “strongman ruler,” said Matt Lewis in The Daily Beast. But the loss of Trump’s handpicked candidate, Herschel Walker, in the Georgia Senate race has completed a disastrous midterm for MAGA Republicans. With sharp criticism of a wounded Trump growing, other right-wing populists “are jockeying for position in a potential post-Trump world.” The increasingly irrelevant Trump is “holed up” in his Florida mansion, facing multiple criminal investigations and the tax fraud conviction of his real estate company. He further wounded himself by dining with anti-Semites and calling for the “termination” of the Constitution so he could be reinstalled as president. In the midterms, Trump’s endorsed Senate, governor, and secretary of state candidates went a humiliating 2-for-14, said Charlie Sykes in…

The appliance maker Dyson is preparing to launch a pair of noise-canceling headphones with an attached air-purifying face mask, said Low De Wei in Bloomberg. The “alien-looking gadget,” called the Dyson Zone, combines the headphones with a “detachable front bar” that looks “reminiscent of Hannibal Lecter.” The mask works with compressors hidden in each ear cup, “which draw air through two layers of filters before projecting it to the nose and mouth.” Dyson said it began working on the device six years ago, and it “was not designed for protection against Covid-19.” However, its filters “can capture particles as small as 0.1 microns,” which should make them as effective as an N95 mask. At a price of $949, however, Dyson’s mask isn’t one you would toss away.…

A new study may have solved the mystery of Namibia’s “fairy circles”—the millions of circular patches, each a few meters wide, in the grasslands in the coastal Namib desert region. Some scientists had thought termites were responsible, others that the desert conditions caused them. The study supports the desert theory, reports The New York Times. Researchers installed soil-moisture sensors in and around the circles. They found that after rainfall, the water within the circles depleted quickly, despite having no grass to use it, while the grasses outside the circles were robust. They also found no clear evidence of termite damage. Their conclusion: The grass plants “self-organize” into circles so they can grow in the arid conditions, with the insides of the circles effectively serving as reservoirs for the outsides.…

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30) In early 1977, when armed Black Muslims took control of three Washington, D.C., buildings, “it seemed quite possible that things would end very badly,” said Andrew Beaujon in Washingtonian magazine. Hamaas Abdul Khaalis, a former jazz drummer who orchestrated the siege, aspired to be the leader of all Black Muslims in the U.S., and his followers were holding 150 people hostage and had already killed a reporter and shot two other men, one of them future D.C. Mayor Marion Barry. “Even those basic details seem incredible,” said Martin Austermuhle in DCist. But in his new book, journalism professor Shahan Mufti finally pieces together a full account of the three-day siege, “masterfully tying together story lines stretching from D.C. to the Middle East.” Khaalis “stands…

Maria Ressa has given her life to journalism, said Emily Bobrow in The Wall Street Journal. The co-winner of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, a native of the Philippines who was raised in Toms River, N.J., could have done anything after graduating from Princeton in 1986 and winning a Fulbright scholarship. But a democratic revolution was remaking the Philippines, and Ressa chose to cover it. Within weeks, she was running a nightly news report. Soon she joined CNN and started traveling the world to cover wars, disasters, and more. “I was learning so much, growing so much,” she says. “But I was traveling so much that my cactus died. A cactus!” At 30, she fell in love but chose her work over a long-term relationship. “I believe journalism is…

Holiday movie classics, and where to stream them… It’s a Wonderful Life The humor and heart never get old in Frank Capra’s tale about a good man driven to despair on Christmas Eve before a novice guardian angel does some quick thinking. Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed co-star. Amazon Prime A Christmas Story All Ralphie Parker wants for Christmas is a BB gun his parents don’t want to give him. And that’s all the premise this 1983 movie needed to lock up the title as the best comedy about the absurdities of the holiday in an era of dawning American prosperity. HBO Max Elf Can someone please trim down the climactic Central Park chase scene? Otherwise, this is another comic miracle, built around Will Ferrell’s timeless portrayal of a…

Bang & Olufsen Beoplay A9 “You know you’re sitting in the home of someone who loves luxury when you see this standing speaker.” A decade-old icon of Danish design, the A9 now automatically adjusts its sound delivery to the size and shape of your room. $3,799, bang-olufsen.com Source: Elle Métier Backgammon Set This all-leather backgammon set glamorizes one of the world’s oldest games. The board rolls up like a scroll for easy portability. $950, us.metier.com Source: The Wall Street Journal Gucci Floral Jacquard Armchair “Designed with visual impact in mind,” this Gucci armchair adds “a touch of whimsy” to any home. The floral jacquard pattern on the velvet seat and back discreetly incorporates the Gucci logo. $6,800, gucci.com Source: Robb Report Rimowa 12-Bottle Wine Case LeBron James helped…

Exxon Mobil last week announced a plan to buy back $50 billion in shares in 2023 and 2024 despite President Biden’s threat of a windfall tax on excess oil profits, said Justin Jacobs in the Financial Times. Biden last month criticized oil companies for using record earnings to benefit shareholders “while a war is raging” in Ukraine and gasoline prices were above $5 a gallon. The president wants oil companies to invest in new drilling projects to ease supply. But both Exxon’s and Chevron’s spending plans “remain far below what they had signaled before the pandemic, which inflicted huge losses on the companies.” Airlines: $20 billion United deal boosts Boeing United Airlines is betting big on Boeing, said Dominic Gates in The Seattle Times. The carrier announced “a massive order”…

Mortgages sinking underwater About 1 in 12 homes purchased in 2022 are already worth less than their mortgage, said Gabriella Cruz-Martinez in Yahoo. A new analysis by Black Knight found that “among 450,000 underwater borrowers in the third quarter, nearly 60 percent had mortgages originated in the first nine months of 2022.” That means that about 270,000 homebuyers got in at the peak of the market this year and “already owe more than their house is worth.” Last year, red-hot demand caused home prices in many places to soar above ordinary property values. “At least 10 percent of June purchase originations—when home prices peaked at $438,000—are now underwater.” Mortgage rates have risen above 6.5 percent, curtailing demand, and nationwide home prices have fallen 3.2 percent from June’s high. The…

Morgan Meaker Wired There’s a classic old LinkedIn post about a guy missing a job interview after stopping to feed a starving dog on the side of the road, said Morgan Meaker. The punch line is that the interviewer turns out to be the dog. It’s the perfect send-up of what most Linked In content was for a long time: “humble brags and grating morality tales.” But the posts are gradually changing. “My newsfeed is starting to include genuinely interesting comments, links to good articles, life updates from friends, even selfies” and wedding pictures. The Microsoft-owned social media site is starting to “feel like the last vestige of the centralized internet of the 2010s,” what Instagram used to be before logging on meant being bombarded with ads. “And if Facebook’s…

Grant Wahl wrote passionately about soccer long before it was common for American sports fans to pack Major League Soccer stadiums and wake up early for English Premier League telecasts. In 1998, Wahl, then a budding Sports Illustrated reporter, saw a niche and offered to cover what the rest of the world knows as “the beautiful game.” During his 24 years at the magazine, Wahl introduced U.S. readers to homegrown stars such as Mia Hamm and Christian Pulisic as well as global icons. He died of an aortic aneurysm in the press box in Qatar, while covering a match for his eighth World Cup. Along with inspiring Americans to follow soccer, Wahl also advocated for his country’s contributions to the sport. “He was almost a missionary in that sense,”…

This week’s question: Texas police attempted to apprehend an out-of-control driver who crashed a truck into two cars in a Walmart parking lot, only to discover a dog behind the wheel. Come up with a special canine traffic violation that the dog could be charged with. Last week’s contest: Hundreds of fishermen and women had to be rescued from Minnesota’s Upper Red Lake after the chunk of ice where they stood broke off and went adrift. Come up with the title of a disaster movie melodrama about this harrowing accidental voyage. THE WINNER: “Lake We-be-gone” Don Weinberg, Bonita Springs, Fla. SECOND PLACE: “Gone With the Floe” Phyllis Klein, Forest Hills, N.Y. THIRD PLACE: “Thaws” Ken Liebman, Williston, Vt. For runners-up and complete contest rules, please go to theweek.com/contest. How…

What happened The biggest scandal to shake the crypto-currency world became a criminal matter this week when Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the crypto exchange FTX, was arrested in the Bahamas and charged by the Department of Justice. In the Southern District of New York, prosecutors charged the 30-year-old with eight criminal counts, including lying to investors, wire fraud on lenders and customers, and conspiring to violate campaign finance laws. The Securities and Exchange Commission also filed civil charges alleging that he misled investors while defrauding customers from the company’s inception, transferring customer deposits to his trading firm, Alameda, and taking huge risks with the funds. When a rush on withdrawals revealed an $8 billion shortfall last month, FTX declared bankruptcy. It was a “house of cards built on a…

The town of Dedham, Mass., has been plunged into turmoil by its library’s decision not to put up a Christmas tree. When a librarian complained on social media that there’d be no tree because it made some “people” uncomfortable, it triggered a social media war that escalated to death threats. “This behavior,” town officials said, “tears at the fabric of our community.” Some public high schools have been automatically enrolling low-income students in military training. Enrollment in the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps is usually voluntary, but hundreds of schools have put JROTC on the compulsory-class schedule. “The only word I can think of is ‘indoctrination,’” said parent Julio Mejia, who said his daughter hated the program. In other news Congress ramps up Kushner-Qatar probe The Senate Finance Committee and…

Ke Huy Quan was sure his acting career was over, said Delia Cai in Vanity Fair. He briefly became a star at age 12, four years after he’d moved from Saigon to Los Angeles with his parents and eight siblings. Quan was cast to play Harrison Ford’s wisecracking sidekick in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom after he’d caught the casting director’s eye at an open-call audition. At that point “I don’t think I’d seen a single American movie,” he says. But when he landed another major role, in 1985’s Goonies, he figured he was set for an acting career. Instead he struggled for years in an industry with few substantial parts for Asian actors. Deciding “this was not the way to live,” he attended film school and…

Celine Dion has announced that the severe muscle spasms that have kept her from performing for the past year are the result of stiff person syndrome, a rare neurological disorder. “It hurts me to tell you,” Dion, 54, said in an emotional video released last week. “These spasms affect every aspect of my daily life, sometimes causing difficulties when I walk and not allowing me to use my vocal cords to sing the way I am used to.” The Canadian singer, famous for her powerhouse voice, has postponed her Las Vegas residency and tours in North America and Europe, prompting speculation that she may never perform again. Over time, stiff person syndrome—believed to be an autoimmune disease—causes spasms throughout the body and can lead to overall rigidity. Prince Harry…

Greg Sargent The Washington Post Elon Musk has become “the world’s richest right-wing troll,” said Greg Sargent. Musk left no doubt about his agenda in purchasing and transforming Twitter this week when he tweeted: “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.” This clumsy bit of double trolling—combining an attack on infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci with mockery of trans people—showed that he now shares the primary goal of the Right, which is “The Triggering of the Libs.” To further delight his fanboys, Musk tweeted an additional, “profoundly irresponsible” attack on Fauci, accusing him of funding and covering up research that supposedly created the coronavirus in a lab. Fauci, Musk said, is responsible for killing millions. Studies have found “zero grounds” for this conspiracy theory, and strong evidence that the virus jumped from animals…

A Florida man was charged with attempting to shoplift from a Walmart filled with more 40 law enforcement officers. “Seriously, we just can’t make this up,” wrote the Osceola County Sheriff’s Office. They said the man, whom they identified as “Brad,” started stealing items during a “Shop With a Cop” event, which pairs officers with local kids. There were nearly 40 deputies, the sheriff, the forensics team, and the community services team in the store. “Bad idea, Brad,” the police wrote. Animal control officials in Los Angeles County granted a young girl permission to keep a unicorn at home, if she follows certain rules. The girl, identified as Madeleine, wrote the county Animal Care and Control department asking for approval to “have a unicorn in my backyard if I can…

ARGENTINA José Crettaz La Nación Why does the government allow Russia to blast its war propaganda from Argentine TVs? asked José Crettaz. Most Western countries pulled Russian state media off their airwaves after Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. But in Argentina, the Russian network RT is still one of 17 channels included in the government’s free, public digital TV package. RT’s Spanish-language version tries to look and sound like regular journalism, but it’s still a Kremlin mouthpiece that spreads “propagandistic lies.” The station came to Argentina in 2014, when then-President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner struck a deal with Russia for both countries to air each other’s public media. Her successor tried to end the exchange, noting that Russia didn’t keep up its end, but gave up when Moscow threatened…

“Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”Mel Brooks, quoted in Decider “We accept the love we think we deserve.”Screenwriter Stephen Chbosky, quoted in Lithub “Character is a journey, not a destination.”Bill Clinton, quoted in The Bulwark “We all come and go unknown / Each so deep and superficial / Between the forceps and the stone”Joni Mitchell, quoted in Pitchfork “Science describes accurately from outside, poetry describes accurately from inside. Science explicates, poetry implicates.”Ursula K. Le Guin, quoted in The Marginalian “The winners forget, but the victims have terribly long memories.”John le Carré, quoted in The Baffler “Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a good carpenter to build one.”Sam Rayburn, quoted in The Bharat Express News…

Apple AirTags blamed for stalking Apple is being sued by two women who claim that its AirTags are a “weapon of choice” for stalkers, said Ashley Belanger in Ars Technica. When AirTags launched last year, dozens of police cases were reported in which stalkers planted the lightweight devices on targets to track their locations. One of the plaintiffs in the potential class-action suit filed last week said “her ex-boyfriend used a Sharpie to color the AirTag to hide it inside the wheel well of her car.” The other woman suing said her estranged husband kept slipping AirTags into her child’s backpack. Apple introduced several features to safeguard against stalking, including “sound notifications when an AirTag is detected.” The plaintiffs say, however, that stalkers can easily disable the speaker. Pentagon…

The health risks of eating ultraprocessed foods—including sausages and burgers as well as pizza and ice cream—are well documented: They have been shown to raise the risk of obesity, diabetes, and cancer, among other ailments. To that list can now be added dementia, reports CNN.com. Researchers followed more than 10,000 Brazilians, average age 51, for up to 10 years. They found that people who consumed more than 20 percent of their daily calories from ultraprocessed foods had a 28 percent faster cognitive decline compared with those whose intake was less than 20 percent. Unfortunately, that 20 percent is not a high threshold: just 400 calories out of the average 2000-calorie diet. And most Americans are well over that, getting on average a whopping 58 percent of their calories from…

Meghan O’Rourke is the author of The Invisible Kingdom, a 2022 National Book Award finalist, which explores a “silent epidemic” of chronic illness that afflicts tens of millions of Americans. Below, she recommends six books that shaped her thinking. Illness as Metaphor by Susan Sontag (1978). In this brief, startlingly original, and audacious essay, Sontag argued that we often psychologize and stigmatize illnesses that are poorly understood. Writing against the idea of the “cancer personality,” she starkly admonishes us not to confound biological illness with psychology. This book was the catalyst for The Invisible Kingdom. It taught me how to see what was really behind our cultural discomfort with invisible illness. The Pain Chronicles by Melanie Thernstrom (2010). In this hybrid of memoir and research, Thernstrom braids her own…

Luxury-goods baron Bernard Arnault, CEO of Louis Vuitton’s parent company LVMH, has surpassed Elon Musk as the world’s richest person, with a net worth of $186.2 billion to Musk’s $181.3 billion. Musk’s slide to No. 2 comes as Tesla’s stock has fallen 60 percent this year, and more than 25 percent since Musk bought Twitter. Forbes Real household net worth, which includes the value of investment assets and real estate, fell roughly 9 percent compared with the third quarter of 2021, to $143 trillion. Americans’ net worth peaked at $160 trillion in December 2021. Axios Eight percent of the American public has a positive view of crypto-currencies, down from 19 percent in March. The survey of 800 Americans found that 24 percent of the public has invested in, traded, or…

For the more than 400,000 children in foster care, the holidays can be especially challenging. To help them feel loved, One Simple Wish (onesimplewish.org) provides essential items such as laptops and comforters, as well as holiday gifts like video games and sneakers. In 2021, the nonprofit reached more than 20,000 children, and expanded its programs with the One Simple Wish Scholarship Fund, which supports foster kids’ higher education aspirations. Founded in 2008, OSW also devoted more than $60,000 to the Life After Fund last year, assisting young adults who age out of foster care. Donors can pick individual “wishes” to support through the website, contribute to the Holiday Giving Fund, or set up regular contributions that One Simple Wish will direct to kids. Each charity we feature has earned…

The Economist There’s one place where inflation shows no sign at all of letting up, said The Economist: The market for puffed-up job titles. Many companies employ someone whose job includes “greeting all visitors at the front desk.” You may think you are meeting a receptionist. But no. This would be the “director of first impressions,” or perhaps, if you are so lucky, the “lobby ambassador.” Title inflation happens more regularly during down times; when a company’s money is tight, “a bump in title is a way of recognizing someone’s efforts cheaply.” But the outcomes can be laughable. Titles are “conjured up to stand out from the crowd—chief evangelist, director of storytelling, chief innovability officer.” The person at the deli counter refers to herself as a “sandwich artist.” Inflated titles…

It was Aug. 16, 1960, and Joseph Kittinger stood in a gondola hanging from a helium balloon some 19 miles above Earth, staring down at a blanket of clouds from the edge of space. Then he jumped. Clad in a pressure suit, the 32-year-old Air Force captain free-fell for more than four and a half minutes, reaching speeds of over 600 mph before his parachute opened. By the time he landed in the New Mexico desert, Kittinger had set several world records, including the highest balloon flight, the longest free fall, and the fastest speed reached by a human under their own power. Those records held for 52 years, until an Austrian, Felix Baumgartner, jumped from 24 miles up in 2012, with help from Kittinger, who served as trainer.…

For Dorothy Pitman Hughes, it always came back to community activism. The pioneering Black feminist was immortalized in a 1971 photo, now in the National Portrait Gallery, of her and Gloria Steinem with their fists raised in the Black Power salute. Yet it was her work organizing New York City’s first battered women’s shelter and a child-care center—inspired by her own struggle finding someone to watch her kids—that defined her life. “Every Black woman who has ever gone out to work has always carried with her the worries of her children,” she said. “And so we really never left home.” Born Dorothy Jean Ridley in Lumpkin, Ga., Hughes resolved to devote herself to activism when she was 10, said NPR.org, after her father was beaten almost to death in…

Celesta Byrne first sent a letter to England’s Geoff Banks in 1938, as part of a pen-pal program at her New Jersey school. The pair stayed in touch, trading stories about their daily life and families, and Banks even sent Byrne mail while serving in the Pacific during World War II. The two met in person in 2002 for their 80th birthdays, and this year, after eight decades of correspondence, they connected on Zoom to celebrate turning 100. “She’s a very interesting person,” Banks said of Byrne. “She’s always been there to write to.” When only two people showed up for her book launch event in Ohio, debut author Chelsea Banning vented about the poor turnout on Twitter. Within hours, several best-selling writers—including Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, and Min Jin…

Charlotte Rampling caused quite a scandal in her youth, said Chris Harvey in The Sydney Morning Herald. In the 1970s, the British actress shared a home with her agent Bryan Southcombe, whom she later married, and a male model, Randall Laurence. The arrangement went public when she was asked about her dual housemates by a reporter. “I was very frank,” she said. “We weren’t thinking, ‘I shouldn’t say that …’ Because it’s not correct, it’s not this, it’s not that. I just said, ‘I love them both.’ And then they decided to make it into something.” Not that she was surprised when the British tabloids went wild. “I can understand why—two men with one woman. My father was not too pleased. ‘What will people think at the golf club,…

Radley Balko RadleyBalko.Substack.com It’s an item of faith among conservatives that crime has risen in recent years because progressive cities “defunded the police,” said Radley Balko. But only a handful of cities cut police budgets after the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020—in fact, most cities increased funding for cops. Cities such as Mobile, Indianapolis, Albuquerque, and Columbus set homicide records in the past two years even while adding uniformed police officers. Recent research has repeatedly found that “more spending on police doesn’t even correlate with—much less cause—less crime.” In many cities, people feel less safe because of the widely publicized but false narrative that police resources have been cut, allowing criminals to run wild. But statistics from all over the country show that more or fewer cops makes little…

UNITED KINGDOM Robert Hardman Daily Mail Environmentalists are appalled at the news that England is about to dig its first new coal mine in 30 years, but the mine’s neighbors are “euphoric,” said Robert Hardman. For three centuries, coal dominated the town of Whitehaven, in northern England, and the collapse of the industry in the 1980s killed the local economy. The new mine, which was greenlit last week, will bring some 500 jobs paying $60,000 or more to a postindustrial town desperate for “investment and regeneration.” And the Greens needn’t worry. The facility won’t mine the kind of dirty coal that is burned for heat, but “quality coking coal for making steel”—a material we need to build all those wind turbines and electric cars that will help us meet our…

People tend to get sick when it’s cold outside—that’s why flu season falls in winter. But why? Scientists believe they have an answer, says the New York Post. The cold air damages the nose’s immune response. When you inhale a virus or bacteria through the nose, cells in the nostril create billions of basic copies of themselves called extracellular vesicles, or EVs. These effectively act as decoys—the intruder sticks to them, rather than the actual cells, and is then expelled in the form of snot. In a small experiment carried out in vitro—using human tissue in the lab rather than in the body—researchers found that reducing the temperature by as little as 9 degrees Fahrenheit kills off nearly 42 percent of EVs in the nostrils. It also reduces the…

(Knopf, $30) “In a land of swamps and sinkholes, nothing is as solid as it appears,” said Clea Simon in The Boston Globe. That’s something that Harley Mann, the narrator of Russell Banks’ new novel, learned long ago. In this “beautifully crafted story of love and betrayal,” Mann is looking back from 1971 on his youth in a Florida Shaker community that occupied the land that has since become Disney World. Mann, at 12, fully subscribed to the Shaker creed, including its demand for celibacy. But his infatuation with a 19-year-old woman led to exile, ruining Mann’s chance for happiness and revealing the flaws in every attempt to build a perfect society. “Though Banks is dealing with big-picture stuff, the novel isn’t airless,” said Mark Athitakis in the Los…

The New Yorkers by Sam Roberts (Bloomsbury, $30) “I thought I knew plenty of New York history both epic and trivial,” said Edward Kosner in The Wall Street Journal. “But now I’ve been schooled by a master, and it’s been a pleasure.” In this “sometimes dense but always rewarding” book, veteran New York Times reporter Sam Roberts covers 400 years of city life by telling the stories of 31 New Yorkers. Leaping from the powerful to everyday citizens, the book brims with fascinating nuggets—“some profound, some just fun.” Come Back in September by Darryl Pinckney (FSG, $32) Darryl Pinckney’s new memoir “doesn’t march through time so much as dance,” said Maggie Doherty in The New York Times. Mixing memories and impressions from the present and the past, it conjures…

“The magnum has been of limited utility these past two years,” said Zachary Sussman in Punch. But with in-person gatherings more common this holiday season, the 1.5-liter wine bottle is back. Shop around and you’ll find a diverse assortment of magnums available, even from small growers, including these “excellent” options, all priced under $60. Raventós I Blanc Conca del Riu Anoia de Nit ($55). “Bone dry” and “deeply savory,” this organic Catalonian sparkling rosé is “the perfect all-purpose bubbly.” 2020 Roberto Henriquez Corinto Super Estrella ($53). This “savory” skin-contact white wine from Chile is sourced from 100-year-old chasselas vines. Bottled unfiltered, it’s “a steal for cold-weather entertaining.” 2020 Clos de Roilette Fleurie Cuvée Tardive ($46). Though this structured Beaujolais is meant to be cellared, “it offers plenty of charm…