Innehållsförteckning för December 30, 2022 - January 6, 2023 från The Week Magazine

It is below freezing now in Ukraine, and for tens of millions of people, the hostile grip of winter is unrelieved by electric light, heat, and running water. Unbowed, Ukrainians huddle in 4,000 “points of invincibility” throughout the country—public shelters where they can find light, warmth, and comfort. From above, Vladimir Putin’s pitiless missile and drone bombardment continues, as he empties his arsenals to punish every Ukrainian man, woman, and child for defying his genocidal wish to erase them. Hanukkah’s arrival this week could not have been more perfectly timed: The holiday commemorates a miraculous Jewish victory over more numerous oppressors, and is celebrated with the lighting of the menorah candles. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is Jewish, called attention to the symbolism after the lighting of a giant menorah…

An Ohio middle-school teacher says she was forced to resign because she refused as a Christian to use students’ preferred pronouns. In a federal lawsuit, Vivian Geraghty also claims she was told to address two students by names matching “their new gender identities rather than their legal names.” Geraghty’s lawyers say she should not have had to choose “between her faith and her job.” Stanford University’s IT department has advised students not to call themselves “Americans,” in new guidelines designed to curb “harmful language” online. Instead, the department recommends “U.S. citizens.” The guidelines also discourage asking for someone’s “preferred pronouns,” since that phrase “suggests that nonbinary gender identity is a choice and a preference.” In other news $1.7 trillion spending deal to avoid shutdown A bipartisan group of senators appeared…

Andrew Luck stunned the sports world in 2019 when he quit football at age 29, said Seth Wickersham in ESPN.com. The son of an NFL quarterback, Luck seemed born to play the position, and was drafted No. 1 overall by the Indianapolis Colts to be Peyton Manning’s heir. But what helped make him the league’s highest-paid player also warped him emotionally. “To play quarterback, you’re not allowed to worry about anything except the task at hand,” he says, “and that seeps into other areas of life.” When eating out with teammates, he’d order for everyone without asking. He became obsessed with rehabbing his many painful injuries, particularly a torn labrum in his throwing shoulder that wouldn’t heal fully. Finally, he confessed to his wife he was miserable as a…

Jane Fonda received wonderful news from her doctors just days before her 85th birthday: Her cancer is in remission. “Best birthday present ever!” Fonda said last week. The actress and activist revealed in September that she’d been receiving chemotherapy for about six months for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a treatable form of blood cancer. Fonda said her oncologist said she can discontinue chemo, whose side effects made it “hard to accomplish much of anything.” She thanked all “who prayed and sent good thoughts my way. I am confident that it played a role in the good news. I am feeling so blessed, so fortunate.” Amber Heard announced this week that she’d agreed to pay her ex-husband Johnny Depp $1 million to settle a judgment made by a Virginia jury that Heard,…

Dave Donaldson The Dallas Morning News “A military behemoth attacks a fledgling nation” and “dismisses the rebels as little more than a rebellious colony” that will soon be crushed. But “patriots rush to their homeland’s defense” and, with vital military aid provided by other nations, “shock the world” by beating back their supposedly invincible foe as a brutal winter sets in. That, said Dave Donaldson, is the story of both Ukraine’s war and the American Revolution, which could not have succeeded without vital help from the French, Spanish, and Dutch. Today, the front lines in the battle against tyranny are found in Odessa, Kharkiv, Kherson, and Kyiv, rather than Concord and Yorktown, as barbaric Russian missile and drone attacks on Ukraine’s power grid leave millions “shivering in the dark…

A Buenos Aires man allegedly hijacked a bus full of people so he could get home to watch Argentina’s World Cup match against Croatia. In rush-hour traffic, the man grew increasingly desperate as game time approached. So when the driver stopped and left the bus to buy something from a kiosk, the avid fútbol fan grabbed the wheel and gunned it toward home. After about 4 miles, he abandoned the bus and ran toward his house, but he was intercepted by police—and after being arrested, missed the whole game. A South African man sparked online hysteria after posting photos of dead plants that looked like aliens crawling from the sea. “I was surprised [by the reaction],” said Jan Vorster, who snapped the shots of upside-down aloe vera plants in his…

SAUDI ARABIA Dania Koleilat Khatib Arab News Arab nations gleefully watching Iran’s uprising “should be careful what they wish for,” said Dania Koleilat Khatib. The protests began as a women’s rebellion against the law mandating hijab and the morality police who enforce it, but they quickly morphed into a rejection of the entire theocratic system of government. The regime has never been more threatened: Even the sister of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has come out publicly calling for its downfall. This is a dangerous moment. If the regime “were to become desperate, it could take desperate measures.” Already since the protests began, Iran has launched ballistic missiles across the border with Iraq to hit Kurdish-Iranian opposition bases. It could try to divert the people’s attention with a major provocation…

“The two most frightening words in Washington are ‘bipartisan consensus.’ Bipartisan consensus is like when my doctor and my lawyer agree with my wife that I need help.”P.J. O’Rourke, quoted in National Review “You can live down any number of failures, but you can’t live down a great success.”Austrian writer Vicki Baum, quoted in The New Yorker “The mission of the press is to spread culture while destroying the attention span.”Austrian writer Karl Kraus, quoted in The New York Times “You only grow when you are alone.”Paul Newman, quoted in IT Jungle “Some people are going to leave a mark on this world, while others will leave a stain.”Eleanor Roosevelt, quoted in the Honolulu Civil Beat “Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”Dwight D. Eisenhower, quoted in Fortune “Life isn’t…

1 Beyoncé Renaissance “She did it again,” said Lex Pryor in The Ringer. Every new Beyoncé album is heralded as the best yet, which makes it hard to convey the grandeur and “all-time badassery” of her first studio solo album in six years. “Tender, bombastic, personal, calculated, loose, and precise,” Renaissance is “a picture of the greatest artist of this century at the peak of her skills, rested, and ready for something new.” The 28-time Grammy winner spent lockdown immersed in dance music’s past, including house, techno, disco, and dancehall, and her latest left turn frequently samples those once-underground sounds. “Each interpolation is potent and precise, yielding a DJ mix and a history lesson all at once,” said Isabelia Herrera in Pitchfork. House music was pioneered by queer, mostly…

In the past five years, Apple has generated $454 billion in cash from operations, all of which it has returned to shareholders in the form of stock buybacks and dividends. That’s more than the market value of Exxon Mobil or JPMorgan Chase. Bloomberg The lowest annual salary that a worker with a college degree would accept to change jobs is an average of $92,100, according to a survey by the New York Fed. That’s up from $70,000 in 2014. For those with less than a college degree, the number is now $60,000. Axios James Cameron’s Avatar 2: The Way of Water, opened to $134 million in North America this past weekend and $441.6 million worldwide. Cameron indicated it would need to gross in the $2 billion range to be considered…

Last year, women filled just 25 percent or fewer of the tech-focused roles at major technology companies such as Apple and Google, a gender gap that Girls Who Code (girlswhocode.com) is working to fix. Through their Clubs Program, the nonprofit teaches elementary, middle, and high schoolers the principles of programming while inspiring girls to pursue their interest. Additionally, the organization supports College Loops, weekly programs for students who want to build a tech community, and has established the College Loops Fund, a semi-annual stipend up to $250. Since 2012, GWC has served 500,000 students in the United States, Canada, India, and the United Kingdom, and the organization’s graduates have earned computer science and related degrees at seven times the national average. Each charity we feature has earned a four-star…

David Ignatius The Washington Post Ukraine’s success against the Russian invaders is a testament not only to its “courageous fighting spirit” but also to “the most advanced intelligence and battle-management software ever seen in combat,” said David Ignatius. It’s the handiwork of Palantir, the controversial American technology company. Co-founded by Peter Thiel, Palantir for years made expansive and hard-to-check claims for its data-aggregating systems. In Ukraine, Palantir has lived up to its promises. Since February, Ukraine has used its software in waging “a secret digital campaign,” giving commanders “precise intelligence about where the Russians were moving”—and enabling them to “penetrate the notorious ‘fog of war.’” To aid Ukraine’s campaigns—including the recapturing of Kherson—Palantir draws “imagery from 306 commercial satellites that can focus to 11 feet.” Soldiers in battle access those…

Stage and screen Sidney Poitier (pictured), Bahamian-American actor, director, and diplomat who became the first Black performer to win the Academy Award for Best Actor with 1963’s Lilies of the Field, died Jan. 6, age 94. Bob Saget, comic who starred as Danny Tanner on the long-running sitcom Full House and hosted America’s Funniest Home Videos, died Jan. 9, age 65. Ivan Reitman, irreverent director and producer who made the fraternity comedy Animal House and found his greatest success with Ghostbusters, died Feb. 12, age 75. William Hurt, 1980s leading man who won an Oscar for Kiss of the Spider Woman and earned nominations for Children of a Lesser God and Broadcast News, died March 13, age 71. Estelle Harris, actress who played George Costanza’s shrill mother on Seinfeld…

This week’s question: A Chinese gamer said two parents recently paid him to outscore their son so decisively that he would abandon his dreams of a pro gaming career and refocus on school. Come up with a job title for someone who specializes in crushing kids’ dreams of gaming glory. Last week’s contest: 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. THE WINNER: “Curjacking” Robert Morton, Chicago SECOND PLACE: “Driving Off-Leash” Wendy Playter, Austinburg, Ohio THIRD PLACE: “Grand Theft Fido” Erica Avery, Greenfield, Mass. For runners-up and complete contest rules, please go to theweek.com/contest.…

Fran Lebowitz is famously set in her ways, so it might not come as a surprise that she’s also a devout Luddite, said Fiona Sturges in The Guardian (U.K.). The acerbic New Yorker, 72, doesn’t have a mobile phone or computer, and detachment from the digital world helps insulate her from criticism of her writing and speaking gigs. “It’s not that I don’t care what people think of me as a person,” says Lebowitz, 72. “But I don’t care how they feel about what I think. It really surprises me, in general, how angry people get because they don’t agree with someone. What difference does it make?” Cancel culture, she says, is irrelevant to her. “I might even be canceled, but I would never know it.” Instead of wasting…

Noah Smith Substack In real life, people do not choose to spend time with people who have conflicting worldviews, said Noah Smith. So why would they want to do that online? The reason “why the internet now feels like a place we need to flee from,” why social media platforms like Twitter are frequently described as “hellsites” and “toxic,” is that they try to force “the whole world into a single room.” The techno-utopians’ “experiment in uniting the human race” in a virtual “town square” was based on the theory that if we could just get people to leave their bubbles and talk to each other, “the old world of war and hate and misunderstanding would melt into memory.” This experiment has failed. As Elon Musk is now discovering,…

ITALY Fabrizio Roncone Corriere della Sera It took the prime minister herself getting stuck in gridlock for the rest of Italy to realize that Rome is being “strangled by traffic jams,” said Fabrizio Roncone. Giorgia Meloni arrived 20 minutes late to a meeting at the parliament building last week, making the assembled legislators first amused, then incensed. One lawmaker accused Meloni of treating her colleagues “like waitstaff.” Once Meloni said her tardiness was caused by traffic, though, everyone calmed down. Ah, of course, congestion. It is the defining condition of Rome. We spend our days calling people from our cars, begging the beautician not to cancel that appointment or the teacher not to leave our kids on the sidewalk. Every appointment a Roman makes is a “challenge to fate”: You…

Donald Trump is now “ripping off his supporters to line his pockets,” said Brad Polumbo in the Washington Examiner. Last week, after hinting at “a big announcement,” he revealed to widespread ridicule that he’s hawking digital trading cards, in the form of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that depict him as a superhero, a sheriff, and an astronaut. Calling himself a president who was “better than Lincoln, better than Washington,” Trump introduced the Trump Cards, which he called “gorgeous.” Priced at $99 each, the 45,000 NFTs reportedly sold out in 24 hours. The money paid by his loyal supporters goes not to the Trump 2024 campaign—but straight into Trump’s pockets. Facing tanking poll numbers and “countless legal threats,” Trump has become a totally shameless “con artist,” said the New York Post…

Firefighters rescued a woman who fell headfirst into an outdoor toilet at the top of Washington’s Mount Walker while attempting to fish her cellphone out from the waste. After dropping the phone while using the public outhouse, the woman used dog leashes to hold herself while reaching down into the muck. “They didn’t work very well and in she went,” said Brinnon Fire Department Chief Tim Manly. The woman called 911, and after rescue workers pulled her out, she declined medical attention. “She only wanted to leave,” explained a fire department spokesman. Two men in Carlow, Ireland, were arrested after they carried a dead man into a post office in an effort to collect his pension. One had inquired about collecting a third party’s pension and was told the recipient…

New push to limit TikTok Federal lawmakers introduced a bill to ban TikTok from operating in the U.S., said Herb Scribner in Axios. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) sponsored the legislation in the Senate, and a companion bipartisan bill in the House aims to “protect Americans” by blocking the social media company, which is owned by China’s ByteDance. The legislative effort comes two years after former President Donald Trump tried unsuccessfully to get TikTok sold to an American tech company. But the pressure on TikTok is growing again, this time from officials in the Biden administration, including FBI director Christopher Wray. Meanwhile, “a number of states—including Utah, Maryland, and Texas—have already sought to prohibit the use of TikTok in government agencies.” Netflix flailing with new ad plan Netflix’s new ad-supported…

‘Bad Habit’ Steve Lacy The unexpected rise of this October No. 1 hit “evoked the same feelings that the song did: pure, euphoric joy,” said Time. “A mellow mélange of wistful longing, playful flirtation, and straight-up vibes,” the tune initially caught fire on TikTok, fueled by an earworm chorus and cheeky lyrics about being too shy to have landed a love interest. “Though the song is lo-fi easy listening at its best, don’t be surprised if it gets at your feelings.” ‘As It Was’ Harry Styles “Harry Styles was everywhere in 2022,” said the Associated Press. A newly minted movie star, the former boy-band heartthrob also played a massive tour while this “brightly packaged bop” was enjoying a three-month run as America’s No. 1 single. The song is “deceptively…

Good week for: Having space, with a reported surge in the number of U.S. married couples who live apart so they don’t get on each other’s nerves. About 4 million married Americans currently live separately from their spouses, the U.S. Census Bureau said—a 25 percent increase from the year 2000. Female snakes, with the discovery they not only have clitorises, but actually have two of them. “I was just kind of jumping up and down,” says Australian biologist Megan Folwell, who found the organs during a dissection of a dead Australian death adder. Fake extra-terrestrials, after the original animatronic model of the alien from Stephen Spielberg’s 1982 film E.T. sold at auction to an anonymous bidder for $2.56 million. Bad week for: Real extra-terrestrials, after the Pentagon’s new All-Domain Anomaly…

Montreal Nearly all the world’s countries agreed at a U.N. summit this week to protect 30 percent of the planet’s land and oceans by 2030. At least 1 million plants and animals are at risk of disappearing thanks to human encroachment, in what would be the biggest extinction event since the dinosaurs. The Kunming-Montreal Agreement is “a scale of conservation that we haven’t seen ever attempted before,” said Brian O’Donnell, director of the coalition Campaign for Nature. The U.S., which is not a party to the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity because Senate Republicans have blocked ratification for decades, was one of just four countries that didn’t sign the pact. President Biden issued an executive order to protect 30 percent of U.S. land and water, but it doesn’t have…

Charlize Theron knew she was at a crossroads when she saw herself in lingerie on a billboard, said Lacey Rose in The Hollywood Reporter. The actress, 47, left South Africa at age 16 after winning a modeling contest, and in 1996, she was featured as a scantily clad blonde in promotions for 2 Days in the Valley. While Theron was thrilled to be starting a film career, she didn’t want to be typecast as a bombshell. “You have something that works,” she says, “and then every audition is like, ‘We just want you to do that.’” Instead, Theron made a series of challenging, unexpected career choices, playing a badass action hero in Mad Max: Fury Road and a deranged prostitute who murdered her clients in Monster. “My parents were…

Paul Roderick Gregory The Wall Street Journal Lee Harvey Oswald “acted alone” when he assassinated President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, said Paul Roderick Gregory. The Warren Commission made that determination after sifting through mountains of evidence, and “a new tranche of files the National Archives released last week contains nothing that calls that conclusion into question.” Still, today more than 60 percent of Americans believe Oswald carried out the assassination at the behest of some shadowy force—the Mafia, the Soviets, Fidel Castro, the CIA. But as someone who knew and befriended Oswald through my father, a Russian teacher, “I never doubted” that he had committed a lone-wolf attack. The Oswald I knew was “a paranoid, delusional high-school dropout” who dreamed of being a hero…

“From time immemorial, political types have spouted off about ‘the people’—sometimes with justice, sometimes not. ‘The people’ can be a powerful weapon in the mouth of the demagogue. There is always someone claiming to be speaking and acting in the name of the people. In my experience, people who say ‘the people’ mean ‘people I agree with.’ ‘People I like.’ This is akin to ‘real Americans,’ who live in ‘real America,’ as opposed to the false Americans, who live in false America. And the people who are our people—the people—are definitely not…‘elites.’ Anti-elitism—a self-righteous, chest-thumping anti-elitism—can be as nauseating as elitism.” Jay Nordlinger in National Review…

GREECE Lefteris Charalambopoulos To Vima We don’t have the death penalty here in Greece, said Lefteris Charalambopoulos, and even if we did, it wouldn’t apply to someone who drove away from a gas station without paying for his gas. Yet earlier this month, four police officers who witnessed a 16-year-old Romany boy commit such a crime gave chase on their motorcycles, ran the child down, and shot him. The boy died of his injuries last week. The car chase and public shootout were such a drastic overreaction that I can’t help but assume that the officers’ “racist reflexes” kicked in. It wouldn’t be the first time Greek police treated the minority Roma, who make up less than 4 percent of the population, “as more delinquent or dangerous” than ethnic Greeks.…

KENYA Peter Kagwanja Daily Nation The United States is “stridently upping its game” in Africa, said Peter Kagwanja. President Joe Biden tried to reconnect with the continent last week by hosting 49 African leaders at the three-day U.S.-Africa Leaders’ Summit in Washington, D.C., promising a free-trade deal, $55 billion in investments over the next three years, and support for an African seat on the G-20. His efforts mark a “radical shift in America’s African policy,” but will it be enough? America neglected the continent for years—through the “benign disinterest” of the Obama administration and the open disdain of the Trump years—allowing China to swoop in and become Africa’s main trade partner. Beijing not only struck mining deals for crucial minerals but also financed roads and railroads and sent in Chinese…

Jackie Hegarty will never forget the five minutes that changed her life, said Sandra Diamond Fox in the Danbury, Conn., NewsTimes. She was a second-grader when a disturbed 20-year-old with a Bushmaster XM-15 semiautomatic rifle walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., 10 years ago last week. In minutes he bathed its classrooms in blood, executing 20 first- and second-graders and six adults. Hegarty, now 17, recalls her classmates being led out in a line and told to shut their eyes. When she opened hers, she said, she saw “horrific things no 7-year-old should have to see.” Those images still haunt her, and she was left with trauma, survivors’ guilt, and a hypervigilance that has her constantly looking for hiding spots and doors. “Every place I go,”…

“If it seems like everyone around you is getting sick, they are,” said Katie Camero in BuzzFeed News. The tripledemic of Covid, flu, and RSV is in full force as the holidays arrive, with rising hospitalization rates and one of the worst flu and cold seasons on record. Young children and the elderly are the most likely to get seriously ill. Major pharmacies are limiting purchases of children’s pain relievers due to demand, and almost 90 percent of Covid deaths—which are averaging about 380 a week—are people over 65. Still, only 36 percent of seniors have received the new bivalent booster, despite CDC data showing that it decreases the risk of hospitalization by 73 percent for that age group compared with those who got the original two doses and…

1 Trust by Hernan Diaz (Riverhead, $28) “Everything about this cunning story makes a mockery of its title,” said Ron Charles in The Washington Post. The first 100 pages read like a 1930s novel about the sorry fate of a Wall Street tycoon who was America’s wealthiest man. But Hernan Diaz’s second novel offers three other perspectives on the same tale, beginning with what appears to be a memoir aimed at correcting the record. While that may make Trust sound overly complicated, “in execution it’s an elegant, irresistible puzzle.” As that puzzle is unfolding, “the only certainty is Diaz’s brilliance.” Readers may notice the novel’s allusions to Henry James, Jorge Luis Borges, and other literary titans, said The New York Times. But Diaz isn’t throwing a spotlight on the…

Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder and former CEO of crypto exchange FTX, agreed this week to be extradited from the Bahamas to the U.S., where he’s been indicted on eight counts of fraud and conspiracy, said Kara Scannell in CNN.com. Bankman-Fried was arrested earlier this month and denied bail in the Bahamas. He “had initially planned to fight efforts to return him to the U.S.,” but changed his mind after spending a week in Nassau’s notorious and overcrowded Fox Hill prison, where cells and mattresses are routinely “infested with rats, maggots, and insects.” Housing: Sales continue to decline The housing market continues to slump as the year ends, said Diana Olick in CNBC.com. “Sales of existing homes fell 7.7 percent in November compared with October,” the National Association of Realtors…

Credit-card headaches abroad Chase’s highest-end credit card declines a distressing number of overseas transactions, said Seth Kugel in The New York Times. On a trip to Brazil, I “had dozens of transactions declined” with my Chase Sapphire Reserve and a Delta-branded American Express card. This isn’t supposed to happen, especially with the Chase card, which is touted as “one of the best travel cards out there,” with a $550 annual fee. A reader wrote to say that she had the same thing happen with her Sapphire card on a trip to Europe. I looked into her case. Chase said that on two of the occasions that her card didn’t work, there was a chip malfunction; another rejection was caused by a fraud warning, for which she didn’t get a…

Leticia Miranda Bloomberg What a difference a year has made for Amazon, said Leticia Miranda. During the pandemic, the e-commerce giant was practically indispensable. Fast-forward to today, and Amazon is the first company ever to lose $1 trillion in market value, slipping from a high of $1.9 trillion to roughly $900 billion. Prime memberships have flatlined, and online shopping has slowed sharply. This is partly attributable to inflation, which has made shoppers “more cautious about what they do with their wallets.” Instead of $25 avocado choppers, they are “spending more on groceries and necessities.” And that’s Walmart’s sweet spot, not Amazon’s. Despite its acquisition of Whole Foods in 2017, Amazon has “yet to get the hang of running physical stores.” Meanwhile, Walmart and Target have “dramatically reconfigured their spaces” to…