Innehållsförteckning för February 3, 2023 från The Week Magazine

Tanks are finally on the way to a grateful Ukraine. After months of refusing to allow its Leopard 2 tanks to be exported to the war zone, Germany relented this week and announced it would send one company of its own tanks, or 14 units, and authorize other European countries to send their Leopards as well (see The world at a glance, p.8). What took so long? It’s partly that Germany wanted the U.S. to share blame for what Russia will surely see as an escalation—Berlin reportedly insisted that it would only commit tanks if Washington did the same. The larger reason, though, lies in the national trauma of the Nazi past. Generations of Germans have been raised as pacifists, and they feel a visceral horror at the idea that…

Good week for: Avenging angels, after a thief who stole a statue of St. Michael from a church in Mexico tripped during his getaway and was stabbed in the neck by the statue’s sword. Carlos Alonso, 32, is recovering in a hospital, while St. Michael was unharmed. Comebacks, after an elderly Florida man boasted he won his golf club’s Senior Championship despite missing the tournament’s first day. Donald Trump, 76, credited his own “strength and stamina” for the math-defying victory at the Trump International Golf Club. Winter wardrobes, after new research found that people still have the genes that gave our evolutionary ancestors full-body coats of hair. The genes are currently dormant, but might one day be activated to cure baldness and other hair problems. Bad week for: Hiding and…

Berlin Germany finally agreed this week to send at least 14 Leopard 2 diesel-powered tanks to Ukraine and to allow other European countries to ship their own German-made Leopards to Ukraine at will. Chancellor Olaf Scholz had been insisting for weeks that Germany would supply Ukraine tanks only if the U.S. first agreed to send its own Ml Abrams tanks. Because Abrams tanks run on jet fuel and require much more extensive training to operate and maintain, they are not as suited to Ukraine’s needs. But to placate Germany, Washington has agreed to send 31 Abrams tanks, which will arrive months from now after crews have had time to train. Dozens of Leopards will begin arriving from various European countries within weeks, and analysts said they could shift the…

Janelle Monáe is a long way from working-class Kansas, said Michael Schulman in The New Yorker. But the glam, nonbinary actor, musician, and fashion icon grew up there, with a mother who was a janitor, a stepfather who was a postal worker, and a grandmother who was a former sharecropper and a cook in the county jail. As a child, she saw her life plan in The Wizard of Oz, the tale of a Kansas girl who lands in a dazzling new world. “It made me want to explore—like, Wow, I could have this zany life outside Kansas? What would that look like for me?” In retrospect, she said, “a lot of my life mirrored that.” She followed her yellow brick road to a New York City conservatory where…

Will Saletan The Bulwark “This is a gut check for pro-lifers,” said Will Saletan. If their goal in the post-Roe world is to minimize abortions rather than to force women to give birth to more babies, then they should support low-cost or free birth control. For Catholics who adhere to church teaching, contraception is “a non-starter,” but polls indicate most other pro-lifers don’t object. Desperate women have always found ways to evade abortion bans, but “among women who don’t get pregnant, the abortion rate is zero.” Long-acting reversible contraception (LARC), such as IUDs and hormonal implants, can prevent nearly all unwanted pregnancies. “You don’t have to talk the woman out of getting an abortion. You don’t have to inspect her mail for pills or try to stop her from…

“During the age of Trump, the GOP’s white evangelical base won the Olympic gold medal for ‘tolerance of serious wrong by leaders.’ It elevated to the pinnacle of American politics one of the most thoroughly corrupt and cruel people ever to occupy the Oval Office. We’ve been living with the consequences ever since. Is there a single moment since Donald Trump clinched the nomination in 2016 that ‘telling the truth’ has been a cardinal Republican virtue? Or even a virtue at all? George Santos was inevitable. The American right rendered him inevitable. And now it lives with the consequences.” David French in The Dispatch…

CYPRUS George Kallinikou Phileleftheros Cyprus is all but synonymous with money laundering, said George Kallinikou. The country is once again in the global spotlight for its “golden passport” scheme offering citizenship to wealthy foreigners in exchange for some $2 million each in investment. The program, which gave hundreds of passports to Russian oligarchs and other unsavory types over 13 years, ended two years ago, but recently the American investigative news show 60 Minutes reported that its repercussions continue. In the segment, money-laundering experts and U.S. government officials detailed how Cyprus had “opened Europe’s door to criminals” by letting them pay for an EU passport that would enable them to do business all over Europe. More than a dozen Russian oligarchs got those passports and are using them to this day—which…

VENEZUELA Piero Trepiccione Efecto Cocuyo President Nicolás Maduro may be facing a rough re-election campaign—against himself, said Piero Trepiccione. After nine years in office, the authoritarian leader has eviscerated the opposition, and his last re-election, in 2018, did not approach international standards of fairness. But he still needs the appearance of winning the most votes. While the presidential election is due in 2024, Maduro is reportedly considering moving it up to this year. He wants to take advantage of the opposition’s lack of a charismatic leader: While it had once coalesced behind former National Assembly leader Juan Guaidó, even declaring him a rival president in 2019, it has now abandoned that attempt and appears rudderless. But that doesn’t mean Maduro can cruise to victory. He is deeply unpopular, as voters…

“It’s a real moment of maturation to say, ‘My time here is short—what can I do the most beautifully?’” George Saunders, quoted in Lit Hub “The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous.” H. L. Mencken, quoted in The Atlantic “Work is most fulfilling when you’re at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you’re doing.” Philosopher Alain de Botton, quoted in Fast Company “We are all born to die. The difference is the intensity with which we choose to live.” Gina Lollobrigida, quoted in BBC.com “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, quoted in The New York Times “Macho…

New MacBooks test laptop demand Apple last week unveiled its latest MacBook Pros, “a move that will test its sway with consumers as demand for personal computers is expected to slump,” said Denny Jacob in The Wall Street Journal. The new MacBooks are now available to order and retail for $1,999 to $2,499. They are equipped with the latest generation of Apple’s in-house–designed chip, the M2 Pro and M2 Max chips, which the company says will give the laptops a raft of performance enhancements and battery life as high as 22 hours. Laptop sales saw a sharp fall in 2022, and 2023 is expected to be “another tough year” for PC makers as “inflation and fears of a recession test consumers’ willingness to shell out on big-ticket purchases.” Escalating…

The James Webb Space Telescope has produced some stunning images of the cosmos since it began operations last year. Now it has notched another accomplishment: confirming the existence of an exoplanet. Known as LHS 475 b and located about 41 light-years away, the celestial body is almost exactly the same size as Earth. NASA’s exoplanet-hunting satellite, TESS, had provided data that suggested the planet might exist. But it wasn’t until researchers observed the area using Webb—checking for dips in starlight as LHS 475 b passed in front of its host star—that they could confirm their suspicions. “There is no question that the planet is there,” says study co-author Jacob Lustig-Yaeger, from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. “Webb’s pristine data validate it.” The team are now hoping they…

(Simon & Schuster, $30) In 1848, a husband and wife from Macon, Ga., both enslaved, “pulled off one of the most daring and ingenious feats of self-emancipation imaginable,” said Terry Edmonds in Washington Monthly. Ellen Craft, a fair-skinned seamstress, disguised herself as an ailing and wealthy young white man and boarded a train with her darker-complexioned husband, William, posing as an enslaved caregiver. The Crafts’ scheme succeeded, remarkably, and the tale they began sharing after they reached the north “energized the abolitionist movement and helped change the course of history.” Today, the Crafts’ story has faded into obscurity, but author Ilyon Woo’s “riveting” new book combines meticulous research and “cinematic sweep” to bring it to wider attention. It makes “a welcome addition to a growing effort to tell the…

Novelist and Columbia University writing professor Matthew Salesses is the author of the 2021 best-seller Craft in the Real World. His new novel, The Sense of Wonder, follows an Asian American NBA point guard during his unlikely breakout season. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston (1976). Kingston’s blend of memoir and mythology is probably the book I have re-read the most. Each time I find it has grown with me. It has had something to say to me in each stage of my life. The Woman Warrior is a novel, yet won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction. I Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita (2010). The Great Asian American Novel, if I had to pick only one. How does this…

  2 Måneskin’s first English-language album “does not make a very strong case that the band’s appeal is its music,” said Spencer Kornhaber in The Atlantic. The quartet of stylish Italian 20-somethings became an object of worldwide fascination when the band won the 2021 Eurovision Song Contest. Since then, Måneskin has opened for the Rolling Stones, popped up on the Elvis soundtrack, and garnered more than 6.5 billion streams. Alas, the 17 songs on Rush! are “so brazenly mediocre” that the hype about Måneskin “saving” rock ’n’ roll “seems tragic at best.” Though Thomas Raggi’s distorted guitar, Victoria De Angelis’ bass, and Damiano David’s raspy vocals give the music a hard-rock surface, “the melodies throughout are pure mainstream pop,” said Alexis Petridis in The Guardian. Still, listening to these unlikely…

“If you want to pour yourself something new and interesting, reach for a bottle of ice wine,” said Wine Enthusiast. Made from grapes that are left on the vine and picked when frozen, ice wines are sweet, and “excellent for an after-meal digestif or dessert pairing.” They also go well with cheeses and foie gras, served at a temperature of 40 to 50 degrees. Red Newt Riesling Ice Wine ($20). Layered, “supremely intense” citrus and fruit flavors combine with a “luscious” honeysuckle and molasses core in this winter missive from New York’s Finger Lakes. 2020 Y Knot Cabernet Sauvignon Ice Wine ($50). Made when an uncommon freeze hit the West Texas High Plains, this cabernet sauvignon ice wine “strikes an enticing balance between sweeter notes and citrus.” Inniskillin Vidal…

In Richmond, Va., “there is a compelling new chapter in the works,” said Julie Besonen in The New York Times. The state capital—and onetime capital of the Confederacy—no longer looks like a grand-scale monument to the slaveholding South. The statues of Confederate leaders that lined Monument Avenue until 2020 have all been taken down, while downtown is “getting more interesting.” Visitors to the district’s Valentine museum can see the statue of Jefferson Davis just as demonstrators left it—toppled and paint-splattered. Other museums are also doing a better job of spotlighting Richmond’s complicated past, while a stroll around the “eminently walkable” river city reveals neighborhoods “stuffed with history” as well as well as dazzling Victorian, Georgian, and Beaux-Arts façades. The city’s dining scene features excellent Black-owned restaurants, and “even the most…

Billionaire Ken Griffin’s Citadel just scored “the biggest dollar gain by a hedge fund in history,” said Laurence Fletcher in the Financial Times. Citadel made $16 billion in profits for clients in 2022, according to research by LCH Investments. That beats the $15.6 billion John Paulson made in 2007 with his bets against subprime mortgages. For its trouble, the firm piled up $12 billion in expenses and performance fees. That “huge” haul showed that “many investors tolerate hefty so-called pass-through expenses”—covering items like trader pay and rent—“if net returns are high.” Streaming: Netflix founder Reed Hastings lets go Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings passed the torch last week, said Jason Aten in Inc. He stepped down as co-CEO, effective immediately, though he will stay on as chairman. The streaming video giant’s…

Derek Thompson The Atlantic In a job market that has proved to be surprisingly resilient, tech companies are laying off workers in droves, said Derek Thompson. Layoff announcements have become “depressingly common,” with Alphabet (12,000 layoffs planned) and Microsoft (10,000) joining the list last week, bringing to 130,000 the total announced cuts from big tech and media firms. So why has tech diverged so much from the rest of the economy? One key explanation is that tech companies expected the pandemic to be “a time machine, hastening the 2030s.” Companies hired tens of thousands of workers to meet this “expectation of acceleration.” But it seems the pandemic may not have been this kind of accelerant after all. Tech companies pushed in all their chips only to find that Covid did…

Arthur Duncan tapped his way into American living rooms as one of the first regular Black performers on television. The elegant, exuberant tap dancer first became an audience favorite on The Betty White Show, which ran from 1952 to 1954. A few stations in the Jim Crow South threatened to pull the program over Duncan, but host Betty White refused to drop him, telling network bosses, “Live with it.” He was better known, though, as a weekly performer for nearly two decades on ABC’s The Lawrence Welk Show, from 1964 to 1982. Duncan pepped up the staid show with his snappy routines, sometimes even dancing atop a piano. “Lawrence would introduce me as ‘the man keeping tap dance alive,’” Duncan said in 2005. “I was one of the few…

This week’s question: A startup founded by a group of rocket scientists is trying to devise an artificial intelligence system that can make pizza from scratch. What would you name a specialty pie created without the use of human hands? Last week’s contest: Males and females of a species of gibbon native to Southeast Asia have been observed singing duets in order to solidify social bonds. Come up with the title of a song that would suit the talents of these musically inclined apes. THE WINNER: “Swinging in the Rain” Suzie Fraser, Whitesboro, N.Y. SECOND PLACE: “Gibbon All My Love to You” Jesse Rifkin, Arlington, Va. THIRD PLACE: “Stop Dragging My Knuckles Around” Roger Lewis, Burlington, Vt. For runners-up and complete contest rules, please go to theweek.com/contest. How to…

What happened Thousands of anti-abortion activists marched in Washington, D.C., last week to celebrate the demise of Roe v. Wade, amid growing divisions in the movement and the Republican Party about how far to take abortion bans in the states. Disagreements have arisen over whether to allow exceptions or permit abortion during the first few weeks of pregnancy, creating tension in a movement that was united for nearly 50 years in its goal of overturning Roe. Some activists, such as Marjorie Dannenfelser of SBA Pro-Life America, said they would push for a federal 13-week ban. “It’s the beginning of an entirely new pro-life movement,” she said. Republican leaders, though, are reluctant to pursue a federal law because of the disappointing GOP performance in last year’s midterms and pro-choice victories…

The M&Ms “spokescandies” are on “indefinite pause,” said Mars, following a year of right-wing criticism of “woke M&Ms.” Fox News’ Tucker Carlson complained that the coquettish Green M&M had swapped her sexy high heels for androgynous sneakers. When Mars recently added Purple, representing “acceptance,” Carlson called her “obese.” The characters were not meant to be “polarizing,” said Mars. Minnechaug Regional High School in Massachusetts has not been able to turn off its 7,000 lights for 17 months. A software failure in a “smart” lighting system could not be fixed because of a parts shortage. Officials concede the constantly burning lights are “costing taxpayers a significant amount of money,” but say they’ve found a firm to fix the system in February. In other news Zients replacing Klain ​as Biden’s chief of…

Iggy Pop knows he’s lucky to still be alive at 75, said David Marchese in The New York Times Magazine. Famed in his younger days for wild abandon both onstage and off, the singer nearly died several times. One night, while partying with members of his proto-punk band the MC5, “I turned blue,” he says. “I just remember I woke up in a bathtub full of ice. They threw me in ice, and that didn’t work, so they shot me up with salt to bring me back.” Another close call came when he was in a Hollywood apartment with someone who had “a large vial of cocaine, and it turned out to be stolen.” There was a knock on the door “and boom! A big guy burst in, and…

ABC is investigating whether suspended GMA3 co-host T.J. Holmes had an affair with an intern in 2015, the New York Post reported. The network took Holmes and co-host Amy Robach off the air as “a distraction” after they confirmed a Daily Mail report they’d become involved, although both said they had separated first from their spouses. Years earlier, Holmes, 45, reportedly had sex at the office with then 24-year-old Jasmin Pettaway after she approached him seeking a mentor. The monthslong dalliance left Pettaway feeling “used,” a friend told the Daily Mail. Holmes is accused of having affairs with at least two other colleagues, and ABC reportedly has no plans to reinstate Holmes and Robach. The two have hired lawyers and reportedly may allege that ABC invoked a morals and…

Timothy Noah The New Republic “It will be interesting to see how many House Republicans are suicidal enough” to vote for their so-called Fair Tax bill, said Timothy Noah. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy promised a committee hearing on the proposal, which would eliminate taxes on income, capital gains, gifts, estates, payrolls, and corporations. It would kill the IRS, too, leaving the governance of a flat 30 percent national sales tax on everything you buy to the Treasury Department. This extremist proposal appeals to a small, far-right constituency, but would be a huge political gift to President Biden and the Democrats, “who can only hope House Republicans are this stupid.” Even if lower-income people get some rebates under the GOP plan, a consumption tax would redistribute wealth from the poor…

■ Bolivia’s state airline has hired an “interspecies communicator” to find a passenger’s missing pet cat. The disappearance of Tito—who was lost before he was supposed to be caged in a cargo hold—has made headlines in Bolivia. Consumer Rights official Jorge Silva explained that the cat psychic “can communicate with Tito to find out where he is,” and has received messages that he’s alive. Cans of tuna have been placed around the airport. “We are exhausting all our resources to find Tito,” said Silva. ■ A young girl in Rhode Island has asked police to solve a mystery: whether Santa Claus really ate a piece of a cookie she left out on Christmas Eve. “I took a sample,” the girl wrote, “and I was wondering if you could take…

AUSTRALIA David Evans The Age The airline industry must not be allowed to get rid of the co-pilot mandate, said David Evans. The industry wants to cut costs and alleviate staffing shortages by allowing single-pilot flights, and it has been lobbying the U.N. agency that regulates aviation to make that change. As a former Qantas pilot, I know how dangerous that would be. Just look at the emergency that occurred on a Qantas flight last week. One of the two engines on Flight 144’s Boeing 737 suddenly failed while the plane was flying from Auckland to Sydney over the Tasman Sea, causing the flight to descend from its planned altitude of 38,000 feet to 20,000 feet. But did anyone panic? No. The passengers “heard a bang” in-flight, yet they weren’t…

Getting drugs into the brain has long been a medical challenge, because of the blood-brain barrier. But scientists say they may have found a way using nasal spray, which could allow drugs to travel up the smell-detecting nerve cells and into the brain, reports New Scientist. To test the theory in rats, researchers mimicked the effect of a stroke by stopping blood from flowing to parts of the rodents’ brains, making them markedly clumsier at reaching food through a hole. The rats were then given a nasal spray of antibodies that block a compound that inhibits brain cell growth. After two weeks of treatment, the rodents’ success in the food-grabbing task had improved to about 60 percent of their pre-“stroke” record. For a control group, it was only 30…

(Knopf, $30) “If you’d told me five or 10 years ago that Bret Easton Ellis was finished as a novelist, I wouldn’t have put up much of an argument,” said Rob Doyle in The Guardian. So it’s a welcome surprise that the “slippery, impish” American Psycho author has delivered a 600-page new novel that, though “needlessly baggy,” is “as vital as anything he’s ever written.” Ellis returns readers to the 1980s Los Angeles milieu of his debut, Less Than Zero, to follow an elite bisexual 17-year-old, named Bret Ellis, as he fills his time with parties, drugs, casual sex, writing a novel, and fretting over both an enigmatic new classmate and a serial killer roaming the city. Until the attention to surface details becomes wearying, “the narrator’s voice is…

The Half Known Life by Pico Iyer (Riverhead, $26) Pico Iyer’s latest book “upends the conventional travel genre,” said Thuy Dinh in NPR.org. In a “mesmerizing” collection of essays, he seeks out places that offer a promise of paradise, including the lakes of Kashmir, the mosques of Iran, and the temples of Japan—then shows heaven to be elusive. Along the way, Iyer “poetically depicts the otherworldly beauty of these places” while positing that our lives are shaped by concepts, such as paradise and happiness, that we will only ever half know. The Wandering Mind by Jamie Kreiner (Liveright, $30) A monkish existence might sound appealing in our age of data overload, said Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times. But historian Jamie Kreiner’s “charming and peculiar” new book about…

3 As her fans know by now, Margo Price is “much more than a country artist,” said Jonathan Bernstein in Rolling Stone. Ever since she debuted with Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, in 2016, the Nashville-based singer-songwriter has steadily broadened her palette of styles and sounds. She’s “an artist who’s often at her best when she’s challenging herself to try something new,” and that pattern continues with Strays, her “most cohesive collection yet.” The 39-year-old Illinois native “fully stretches out as a storyteller” here, and “has never sounded more in command of detail and scene-setting” than she does on “Lydia” and “Country Road,” two vivid character studies. Price rocks out, too, “painting a psych-rock backdrop to her stories of redemption, survival, and rebirth,” said Ellen Johnson in Paste. She wrote Strays…

The stage/screen connection… The Banshees of Inisherin Martin McDonagh’s current Oscar contender was originally written to complete a trio of his early plays. Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson clash memorably in McDonagh’s devastatingly funny, hauntingly existential tale of the rupture of a long friendship. HBO Max Fences Denzel Washington directed and co-starred in the powerful 2016 adaptation of August Wilson’s 1985 play about a proud Pittsburgh sanitation worker afraid to let his son exceed him. With Best Actress winner Viola Davis as the tragic hero’s wife. Amazon Prime West Side Story Steven Spielberg brought dazzling energy to his 2021 take on the classic 1957 stage musical. The gorgeous sets, brilliant choreography, and smart Tony Kushner screenplay were matched by the vivid work of young actors Rachel Zegler, Mike Faist,…

“For a very long time, tartes Tatin were my nemesis, especially when made with apples,” says Deb Perelman in Smitten Kitchen Keepers (Knopf). “It took me years to make one that wasn’t too thin, sparse, pale, over- or undercooked.” Once I mastered the technique, though, I didn’t want to stop making upside-down tarts, and “strangely, it wasn’t the pineapple or peach that became my favorite but this, a savory version, with carrots.” “Wait, come back. I know it sounds finicky.” But this tarte Tatin is made simple by its use of puff pastry (use an all-butter version if you can find it). The honeyed sautéed carrots themselves are “good enough to eat right from the pan.” But add goat cheese, pastry, time in the oven, and one final flip,…

Microsoft announced it would invest an additional $10 billion in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. The funding, to come over several years, builds on $3 billion Microsoft has already put in. The New York Times Sales of previously occupied homes fell 17.8 percent nationwide in 2022, according to the National Association of Realtors. It was the weakest annual U.S. home sales figure since 2014, and the biggest single-year drop since 2008, after the foreclosure crisis. Chicago Tribune Tips at full-service restaurants increased by 25.3 percent in the third quarter last year and by 16.7 percent for counter service, according to digital payment company Square. Gratuities have grown every year since 2019. Fortune Two banks that bet big on crypto deposits, Signature and Silvergate Capital, have turned to borrowing from Federal…

Ordering quiet quitters back to work Bosses are on to you, quiet quitters, said Jane Thier in Fortune. Citibank offers flexible schedules, but it’s ordering employees “back to their cubicles” if they’re unproductive at home. CEO Jane Fraser pointedly noted that they’ll get coaching in the office. That sounds like a crackdown on “quiet quitting,” or “doing the bare minimum” on the job. Remote-work fans insist there’s no “quiet-quitting epidemic.” Slack’s think tank, Future Forum, surveyed white-collar workers and found that “those with full schedule flexibility showed 29 percent higher productivity scores” than employees with none. But many CEOs are still “bullish on a return to office.” The end of road for AmazonSmile Amazon is pulling the plug on its AmazonSmile charity program, said Michael Grothaus in Fast Company.…

Deena Shanker Bloomberg Businessweek Meat made without animals was billed as the “next world-changing disruption,” said Deena Shanker. Beyond Meat messianic founder Ethan Brown promised his products would “help solve heart disease, diabetes, cancer, climate change, natural resource depletion, and animal welfare.” Everyone from Silicon Valley venture capitalists to Leonardo DiCaprio and America’s biggest producer of real meat, Tyson Foods, wanted to invest, “catapulting” the startup to a $1.3 billion valuation by 2018. Bill Gates also put money into Beyond’s rival Impossible Foods, helping it raise $183 million before it “had sold a single burger.” Now, almost four years after Beyond Meat’s splashy public offering, “Big Meat is still alive and well,” while Beyond’s sales of its high-priced plant-based meat have “plummeted.” Impossible is doing a little better, having replaced…

David Crosby was a complicated artist. He was an ethereal harmonizer whose ability to blend his voice with others helped make the Byrds and Crosby, Stills & Nash into powerhouses of the classic-rock era. Yet he was also an abrasive presence who sowed so much discord in the bands that eventually none of his old bandmates would speak to him. With his wild hair, walrus mustache, fringed suede jacket, and voracious appetite for sex and illicit substances, he was a Woodstock-era icon—he even claimed to have been a model for Dennis Hopper’s character in the 1969 film Easy Rider. But while he sang of peace and love, his life was marked by turmoil, including addiction, relapses, illness, and imprisonment on drug and weapons charges. Clean for the last several…

Memphis A police video shows that a 29-year-old Black man who died after being pulled over by police was shocked with a stun gun and beaten “like a human pinata,” his family’s attorneys said this week. They compared the “savage” encounter to the Los Angeles police’s beating of Rodney King in 1991. After watching video of Tyre Nichols’ Jan. 7 arrest, his stepfather, Rodney Wells, said, “Our son ran because he was scared for his life.” Nichols was pulled over for reckless driving and fled on foot. He was caught, pepper sprayed, shocked with a stun gun, and beaten, sending him into cardiac arrest with a broken neck, his family said. He died three days later. The five officers involved, all of whom are also Black, have been fired.…

Robert Waldinger knows the key to happiness, said Alison Flood in New Scientist. The Harvard psychiatrist is director of the longest-range study of human contentment ever conducted: the Harvard Study of Adult Development. Beginning in 1938, it tracked more than 700 people throughout their lives, eventually expanding to include their offspring. The central factor that determines life satisfaction, said Waldinger, is not money or even achievement. It’s “warm connections with other people,” he says. “The big, surprising takeaway” from the study, he says, is the extent to which your interactions with other human beings affect not just your outlook on life but “how long you stay healthy, how long your brain will stay sharp. Having these good connections makes you less likely to get coronary artery disease. You’re even…

Jill Filipovic CNN.com The criminal charges filed last week against actor Alec Baldwin for an accidental shooting on a film set “seem extreme,” said Jill Filipovic. New Mexico prosecutors charged Baldwin with involuntary manslaughter in the fatal shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of Rust in 2021. Baldwin was handed a gun by an assistant director who should have joined the armorer in checking it, and told to point it toward the camera lens; when he did and the gun fired, Hutchins was fatally wounded. The revolver obviously should have been loaded with blanks, and the film’s armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, has also been charged. How live rounds ended up in that gun remains unresolved. Prosecutors are blaming Baldwin for not checking the weapon himself, but the Screen…

BULGARIA Stoyan Popov Webcafé Bulgaria smuggled fuel and ammunition to Ukraine in the early months of the war, an exposé in Germany’s Die Welt revealed last week. Now that the secret’s out, said Stoyan Popov, we should be proud of being on “the right side of history.” Strong pro-Moscow sentiment among the political elite in this onetime Warsaw Pact country forced former Bulgarian Prime Minister Kiril Petkov to officially deny Ukraine’s pleas for aid in the spring of 2022, just after the Russian invasion. All the while, though, his pro-Western government was maneuvering behind the scenes to ship thousands of tons of the diesel fuel the Ukrainian army desperately needed as well as significant amounts of the Soviet-era ammunition its weapons required. Petkov, who was ousted last June in a…

“We may never know who leaked the Dobbs draft opinion,” said Aaron Tang in The New York Times. Last week, Supreme Court Marshal Gail Curley announced that her internal investigation into who gave reporters an early look at the bombshell opinion overturning Roe had failed “to identify a person responsible” for the leak. Investigators interviewed 97 people—primarily law clerks and other court personnel—who signed sworn statements declaring they hadn’t shared the draft with outsiders. Their online activities and court-issued phones and laptops were also examined. But in a “significant” omission, the justices were interviewed but not made to sign sworn affidavits, and Curley didn’t indicate whether their spouses—including Ginni Thomas, the right-wing activist wife of Justice Clarence Thomas—were interviewed. Those failures “will do little to repair the court’s battered…

(Random House, $30) It’s natural to compare the subject of Tracy Kidder’s latest book to Sisyphus, said Chris Hewitt in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. After all, Boston physician Jim O’Connell has devoted his entire career to the seemingly impossible task of providing care for Boston’s homeless. “But what if Sisyphus is energized by the challenge? What if the striving is what he seeks?” O’Connell proves to be a fascinating protagonist. Since 1985, when the then 37-year-old Harvard Medical School graduate accepted an offer to lead a new homeless outreach program, the man many refer to as “Saint Jim” has regularly toured the city by night, visiting patients in doorways and under bridges to hand out food, blankets, light medications, and a friendly ear. Better yet, “O’Connell is not only…

For journalist John Hendrickson, the rewards from one botched 2019 interview just keep coming, said Rainesford Stauffer in Esquire. An editor at The Atlantic and a stutterer, Hendrickson came away from a sit-down with Joe Biden feeling that he’d failed because he’d been unable to persuade the then–presidential candidate to admit to still struggling with the disfluency that had made him a stutterer into his teens. But the article Hendrickson wrote became a chance to describe his own struggles with stammering. The piece went viral. It also elicited 1,000 responses, many from fellow stutterers. “Writing that article changed my life,” Hendrickson says. “It began to open up this part of me.” At last, he was moving toward accepting that he has a stutter. And the memoir he started gave…

3 Belle and Sebastian’s second album in eight months is “somehow even better than its acclaimed predecessor,” said Marc Hogan in Pitchfork. Purveyors of sensitive indie pop since the mid-1990s, the Scottish band sounded reinvigorated on last year’s A Bit of Previous, and this follow-up from the same recording sessions is “packed with moments when the band’s on-the-fly energy and head-in-the-clouds musings collide in memorable ways.” The collection runs the gamut from “sepia-toned folk-rock” to “insidiously earworm-y” neon synth-pop. Unfortunately, those synth-pop excursions can be jarring, said Poppie Platt in The Telegraph (U.K.). Though old fans will enjoy the album’s “twee” lyrics and “sing-song” melodies, the annoying dance-pop single “I Don’t Know What You See in Me” could be the work of a different band. At least frontman Stuart Murdoch…

For hundreds of people living with autism in more than 2,700 families, AutismUp (AutismUp.org) has been a catalyst of change. Established in 2004, the nonprofit has expanded opportunities and improved quality of life for these individuals and their families through initiatives like the Center for Community Transition, a program to help young adults navigate the change from high school to adulthood. Since 2020, the organization has provided in-person and virtual-learning opportunities to people with autism, including body awareness and musical theater, and has developed a speech-centered summer camp for nonverbal people. AutismUp also offers support groups and training for relatives of kids with autism, along with free workshops on topics from building circles of support to managing governmental benefits. Each charity we feature has earned a four-star overall rating…