Innehållsförteckning för April 7, 2023 från The Week Magazine

The shooter blasted through the glass doors of the Covenant School with an assault rifle and stepped past the broken glass. Dressed in military camo and armed with three guns, Audrey Hale, 28, began hunting the hallways for little boys and girls, swinging the semiautomatic rifle in a circle like a soldier searching for the enemy. Like nearly all mass shooters, Hale—who apparently identified as transgender—was declaring war on a world that had been indifferent to the killer’s suffering. To inflict maximum casualties, the shooter chose assault-style weapons, which rapidly fire high-velocity bullets that inflict horrific wounds. Over the past decade, nearly 60 percent of the deadliest mass shootings have been carried out with assault rifles. Not only do they run up the body count like a video game, AR-15s…

The principal of a Christian charter school in Florida has been forced to resign after showing a photo of Michelangelo’s “David” to sixth-grade students. Officials with Tallahassee Classical School say that Hope Carrasquilla should have warned parents, in writing, that their children would be exposed to male nudity. “Parental rights trump everything else,” said school board chair Barney Bishop III. A daily newspaper in Salinas, Calif., now employs zero reporters and editors. Founded in 1871, the Salinas Californian had 35 journalists as recently as 1999, but today only reprints articles from USA Today and other Gannett newspapers, with no local reporting. Gannett acknowledged “staffing challenges in certain newsrooms,” but said it was “developing strategies to support these markets.” In other news Federal judges adopt gift disclosure rules Supreme Court justices…

Padma Lakshmi has bottled up shame throughout her life, said Zoe Williams in The Guardian (U.K.). The Indian supermodel and host of TV’s Top Chef withheld the story of being raped at age 16 and molested at age 7 until five years ago. Lakshmi, 52, was also reluctant to discuss endometriosis, a uterine disorder that causes menstrual irregularities, severe pain, and infertility. She’s suffered from it since she was 13, but it went undiagnosed for 23 years. “Every month, being in bed for a week, my body turned against me,” she says. Female friends would take two ibuprofen and seem fine. “I thought, ‘What is wrong with me, that I cannot handle one of the most basic parts of being female?’” In the late 1990s, she began dating author…

Former first lady Melania Trump is angry over renewed attention to the hush-money payments her husband allegedly made to a porn star, and has been living in a separate area of their Mar-a-Lago estate, People reported last week. Melania, 52, never forgave the former president for his alleged 2006 tryst with porn star Stormy Daniels, sources said. Donald Trump met Daniels at a celebrity golf tournament less than four months after Melania gave birth to their son, Barron. Donald denies having sex with Daniels but has admitted to authorizing a $130,000 payment to keep her quiet ahead of the 2016 election—a payoff that is the subject of a Manhattan grand jury investigation. Melania continues to appear at Trump’s side at social events at the club but “is leading her…

Josh Rogin The Washington Post “Who do they think they are fooling?” asked Josh Rogin. When Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin met in Moscow last week, Putin congratulated Xi on being elected to his unprecedented third term, while Xi said he was sure Putin would win reelection next year. For these autocrats to “pretend to be winners in democratic competitions” is absurd—but their “playacting” isn’t harmless. Not only do they use sham elections to claim popular mandates for autocratic rule, suppression of free speech, and imprisoning any opposition, they are attempting “to redefine the world’s understanding of what ‘democracy’ means.” In Xi and Putin’s “proposed new world order,” actual democracies are portrayed as weak and divided, and critical democratic principles such as human rights and…

JAPAN Editorial The Japan Times It’s no wonder Japanese women don’t want to have babies, said The Japan Times. Our society is doing almost nothing to help them. We desperately need more children. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida recently warned that the country is “on the brink of not being able to maintain social functions” because of our unsustainably low birth rate. Already, nearly 30 percent of the population is age 65 or over, and we have just 1.8 workers per retiree—the lowest ratio in the world. We need women to do two things: have more babies and join the workforce. But Japanese women say the societal expectation that they will be doting wives and mothers while also taking care of both spouses’ elderly relatives is too great a burden. To…

An estimated 238,500 American children have lost a parent or primary caregiver to Covid, according to calculations by the Imperial College London. Globally, there are more than 8 million such “Covid orphans.” CNN.com New York City has converted about 100 hotels and other facilities into housing for 50,000 migrants who’ve been bussed to the city from the southern border. They include tourist hotels in midtown Manhattan that now solely house migrant families. Mayor Eric Adams says housing the migrants could cost $4 billion over the next two years and could lead to cuts in city services. The New York Times About 16 million Americans—or 1 in 20 adults—own at least one AR-15 assault rifle. Two-thirds of those in existence have been manufactured since the Sandy Hook mass shooting and generated…

“Keep a little fire burning; however small, however hidden.” Cormac McCarthy, quoted in LitHub “Art is theft, art is armed robbery, art is not pleasing your mother.” Janet Malcolm, quoted in The New Republic “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, quoted in Time “To live is to change, to be perfect is to have changed often.” Cardinal Newman, quoted in the Harrogate Advertiser (U.K.) “Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful.” Warren Buffett, quoted in Barron’s “If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.” Shirley Chisholm, quoted in Built in Chicago “Power without love…

Air taxi plans for O’Hare Within two years, there could be a new way to get to Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, said Stefano Esposito in the Chicago Sun-Times: an electric “air taxi.” Archer Aviation makes fully electric aircraft capable of both flying like a plane and landing like a helicopter. Such aircraft haven’t yet been certified by the Federal Aviation Administration. But that hasn’t stopped Archer and its investor, United Airlines, from going forward with plans for the first commercial air-taxi route between downtown Chicago and its largest international airport starting in 2025. According to the companies, the low-altitude ride would only take about 10 minutes from Chicago’s downtown heliport to the terminal. Archer says it wants the price to be competitive with the high-end Uber Black, or about $100…

Light pollution has become so prevalent that it is growing increasingly difficult to get astronomical readings, reports Space.com. Between 1992 and 2017, the amount of artificial light grew by about 50 percent worldwide—and by as much as 400 percent in certain regions. The result is that astronomers have run out of suitably remote locations where they can station new observatories. Even the Hubble Space Telescope, which orbits the Earth about 300 miles up, isn’t immune to light pollution: This month, scientists found that more than 5 percent of recent Hubble photographs were streaked with trails from SpaceX’s Starlink satellites. Starlink has some 3,700 satellites launched already, and other companies will soon add more. Writing in Nature Astronomy last week, astronomers issued an appeal for new global regulations to rein…

Novelist Tara Conklin is the best-selling author of The Last Romantics. In her new comic novel, Community Board, a woman holed up alone in her childhood home after a breakup slowly reconnects with her neighbors through an online community board. Look at Me by Jennifer Egan (2001). For those familiar with Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad, the multilayered brilliance of this novel will come as no surprise. After a car accident, a fashion model becomes unrecognizable and must reinvent herself entirely. Subplots involving a PI, a teenage girl, and a would-be terrorist all converge in a stunning conclusion. Egan writes like no other—I’d follow her anywhere. Blindness by José Saramago (1995). Although you can read this novel as an allegory, it works equally well as a dystopian…

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, through April 16 If the dry-sounding title makes this show seem skippable, reconsider, said Sebastian Smee in The Washington Post. “A lot of terrific art emerges from national trauma,” and this exhibition, which moves to the Getty Center in Los Angeles next month, demonstrates how drawn-out the renaissance can be under certain circumstances. The 1803–15 Napoleonic Wars were catastrophic for Denmark. The once-mighty country endured the bombardment of Copenhagen by Britain and the loss of most of its merchant and naval fleet. It then made an alliance with France, triggering an economic collapse that forced it to cede Norway to Sweden. “Often, when a nation loses its self-esteem, it looks to its artists to alleviate the shame,” and Danish artists responded in…

3 “A sense of surrender is the essential ingredient to Depeche Mode now,” said Kory Grow in Rolling Stone. The British synth-pop band has specialized in melancholy since the early 1980s, and now that the 2022 death of keyboardist Andy Fletcher has reduced the group to a duo, Dave Gahan, 60, and Martin Gore, 61, have devoted the entire 15th Depeche Mode album to pondering loss and life’s fleeting nature. Even so, the record “never feels heavy-handed or all that sullen. Some tracks even sound upbeat.” The record opens ominously, with “industrial piston crushes and a haunted cosmic haze,” said Neil Z. Yeung in AllMusic. Several songs give fans exactly what they want, though, especially the single “Ghosts Again”—one of the best Depeche Mode songs ever. “The melancholy beauty of…

“Climate change has not been friendly to kabinett,” said Eric Asimov in The New York Times. Germany’s kabinett rieslings once were barely sweet and wonderfully refreshing, but a warming climate rendered recent vintages sweeter and richer. A cool and wet 2021 made farming difficult, but the wines made that year are throwbacks, with a welcome delicacy and grace. 2021 Meulenhof Erdener Treppchen ($24). “Not quite so fragile as a classic kabinett,” this “fruity, lightly sweet” riesling from Mosel is still a move in the right direction. 2021 A.J. Adam Dhroner Hofberg ($27). This softly sweet Mosel kabinett is subtle, delivering “quiet satisfaction.” 2021 Kruger-Rumpf Münsterer im Pitterberg ($28). “An ideal kabinett,” this wine from the Nahe region is “gorgeously mineral” and heavy on apricot, but with an “almost unnoticeable”sweetness.…

Gather the ingredients. Dyes made from common food items can transform a batch of white eggs into a rainbow of colors. Four cups of chopped beats will make a quart of dye for pink eggs. Four cups of yellow onion skins make a quart of orange dye. You get gold or yellow from 3 tbsp of turmeric. Red cabbage, surprisingly, turns eggs blue. Brew the dyes. Bring 1 qt water, 2 tbsp white vinegar, and the coloring agent to a boil, simmer for 30 minutes, then strain. For vibrant colors, boil the eggs in the dyes. For paler hues, boil the eggs separately and soak them for 30 minutes in the cooled dyes, rotating the eggs frequently. The longer the eggs sit, the deeper the coloration. Experiment. Blueberries, paprika, and…

In 1965, Gordon Moore made a prediction: that integrated circuits would grow in complexity and capacity so fast that computer processing power would double every year. These advances would “lead to such wonders as home computers” and “personal portable communications equipment,” he wrote. While he later widened the time frame for doubling to every two years, his prediction of exponential advancement held up and became known as “Moore’s Law.” The law set forth an ethos of growth that made Silicon Valley the global leader of a tech revolution—and nobody did more to make Moore’s vision come true than Moore himself. He was the co-founder of Intel Corp., maker of the first commercial computer microprocessor. Intel’s Pentium silicon semiconductor chips eventually powered more than 80 percent of the world’s desktop…

Dan Rossi relishes his continuing battle with New York City over his hot dog stand, said Chris Crowley in New York magazine. For nearly 16 years, Rossi has operated a cart on Fifth Avenue outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art—a heavily trafficked area that could bring Rossi $1,500 on a nice day. When he arrived, in 2007, a vending company was paying the city more than $500,000 a year for exclusive rights to that coveted spot. But Rossi, citing a Civil War–era policy, argued that as a disabled veteran he’s exempt from such fees and permits, and he refused to leave. “This is like the Alamo,” Rossi says. “I’m the only one protecting the vets. And I’m probably the only one protecting the legitimate vendors.” About a decade ago,…

Rich Lowry National Review Social contagion is real, said Rich Lowry, and it’s making “teenage girls depressed, anxious, and “trans.’’ The number of teens who want to change genders is soaring, amid strong evidence that this phenomenon is being driven by the suggestible nature of that age group, and by “the constant discussion and celebration of transgenderism” in peer groups, schools, and on TikTok and YouTube. To deny that peer influence is a major factor in the sudden increase of gender dysphoria, says Marci Bowers, president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, “is just not recognizing human behavior.” For years, gender-dysphoric boys outnumbered girls by 2 to 1. Suddenly, there are three times more dysphoric girls than boys. Teen girls “are particularly sensitive to peer pressure,” and…

ITALY Claudia Brunetto La Repubblica “With the stroke of a pen,” Italy’s far-right government has wiped out the rights of same-sex parents, said Claudia Brunetto. These rights were few to begin with: Gay people here are still denied permission to marry or adopt. But same-sex Italian couples sometimes go abroad to have children via surrogacy, and certain cities, including Milan, had been allowing such couples to put both parents’ names on birth registrations. Two weeks ago, the Interior Ministry commanded the city to stop. The new policy fits with the social conservatism of far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who has railed against “the LGBTQ lobby” and “gender ideology.” Her government is mounting “an attack on the entire LGBTQ community,” and it’s children who will suffer most. Families who managed to…

“The most important election this year” is happening in Wisconsin next week, said Andy Wong in The Guardian. A “staggering” $31 million in donations has flooded the race for a supreme court seat in a pivotal swing state that pits progressive Milwaukee County Judge Janet Protasiewicz against conservative Trump ally Daniel Kelly; the winner will tip the court’s balance to 4-3 in favor of either progressives or conservatives. Protasiewicz has openly said Wisconsin’s legislative and congressional maps were “rigged” in 2021 and 2022 to favor rural Republican areas, and should be redrawn. Either Kelly or Protasiewicz will cast the deciding vote on challenges to an 1849 state law banning nearly all abortions—which was activated after Roe fell. This “sleeper race” could even decide the winner of the 2024 presidential…

A once rare tick-borne disease is becoming ever more common in the U.S., reports NBCNews.com. Babesiosis, a malaria-like illness, causes fever, chills, sweats, headaches, and body aches, and can be severe or even fatal in people with compromised immune systems. Cases of the parasitic disease shot up between 2011 and 2019, according to a new study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The disease was already endemic across the Northeast and Midwest in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin. The new report adds Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont to that list. The parasite Babesia microti is typically found in mice and other rodents and is transported to humans by infected deer ticks—the same tiny ticks that can harbor Lyme disease. Its rise…

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28) With her “genre-quaking” new novel, Catherine Lacey has created a protagonist who functions as “an unstable new element in the periodic table of literature,” said Hillary Kelly in The Atlantic. X is a woman who appeared out of nowhere in 1972 to become a celebrated shape-shifting artist in the mode of Cindy Sherman or David Bowie, and the biography we are reading is an attempt by X’s widow to nail down who X was. The story plays out against an alternate history in which the U.S. split violently into three territories in 1945. X’s personal history also enfolds those of many real-life artists, and the effect proves “pleasingly disorienting.” Initially, Lacey’s dedication to her “bizarro-world” reality felt irksome, said Jessica Ferri in the Los…

The Exceptions by Kate Zernike (Scribner, $30) When you read about Nancy Hopkins’ long career, “you may feel the need to knock a hole in the wall,” said Bonnie Garmus in The New York Times. A molecular biologist who joined MIT’s faculty in 1973, she suffered countless indignities before becoming the unlikely leader of an inside group that documented pervasive discrimination against the small number of women on the school’s faculty. Their work shook up higher education, and this excellent book is packed with “jaw-dropping” details. A Stranger in Your Own City by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad (Knopf, $30) Though many books have been written about the war in Iraq, “this one matters,” said Renad Mansour in The Guardian. Ghaith Abdul-Ahad is a Baghdad native who turned to journalism shortly after…

3 “More than any of its predecessors, this Lana Del Rey album is about the very heart of things,” said Lindsay Zoladz in The New York Times. The singer-songwriter, now 37, arrived as a major artist “sounding like a nihilist.” But 11 years later, she’s “seriously self-scrutinizing” and asking big questions, about God, marriage, family, and motherhood. Though this 78-minute album is “marked by occasional overindulgence,” it’s Del Rey’s strongest since the “sublime” Norman F---king Rockwell. “Del Rey will be recognized as a voice of her generation,” said Bobby Olivier in Spin. Here, though, she seems more coolly aloof than ever, and Under Ocean Blvd, across its “lulling” run time, becomes “a chore to ingest.” Del Rey is “a great American collage artist,” said Mikael Wood in the Los Angeles…

Recent sci-fi movies you may have missed… Prospect Burned through The Last of Us and need more Pedro Pascal? Consider this strikingly similar lo-fi movie in which he plays a prospector on a remote moon who becomes an enigmatic father figure to a girl played by Sophie Thatcher. Hulu Love and Monsters Not even a monster apocalypse can stop true love in this charming 2020 genre-crosser. Dylan O’Brien (Teen Wolf) stars as a young survivor who leaves the safety of his communal bunker when he learns his girlfriend survived and is living 80 miles away. Pluto TV I Am Mother In this stark 2019 drama, a girl raised in a high-tech shelter by an android she knows as Mother is shocked when an actual woman, played by Hilary Swank,…

GolfLogix is a leader in GPS golf apps, because it’s highly detailed, easy to use, and very accurate. The $13-a-month app has 35,000 courses mapped, gives distances to any point on a hole, and shows slope contours. You can also adjust the pin position on the map of the green. And the app stores plenty of stats for post-round self-analysis. Bushnell Golf offers many of the same features: yardages, scorecards, statistics, 3D maps of 38,000 courses worldwide. But it’s also free. Hole 19 is popular with smartwatch users because it can send yardage data straight to your Apple Watch or Android Wear. The free app has more than 43,000 courses mapped. Golfshot allows for shot tracking on Apple and Android smartwatches. The watch will sense when you swing, then measure…

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba said this week that its $200 billion corporation would split into six independently run companies, dismantling Jack Ma’s empire, said Raffaele Huang and Clarence Leong in The Wall Street Journal. Like other Chinese tech giants, Alibaba has struggled amid a “sweeping regulatory clampdown.” Each of the six new entities will “have its own CEO reporting to a board of directors.” The split comes after Ma, the once outspoken CEO largely shackled by China’s campaign to “tame” internet tycoons, was spotted back in mainland China “for the first known time in almost a year.” Bribery: More charges against Bankman-Fried U.S. prosecutors unveiled a new indictment against Sam Bankman-Fried this week, accusing the disgraced crypto prince of paying $40 million to bribe Chinese officials, said Luc Cohen and…

Buying a home in the layoff era Contingencies are back in the homebuying process, said Veronica Dagher in The Wall Street Journal. During the housing-market frenzy of 2020 through 2022, many buyers felt pressured to waive standard contingencies like financing and even home inspections “to compete with those making cash offers.” Now, though, “53 percent of real-estate agents report an increase in contingencies.” Among the more popular provisions getting added is an employment contingency, which hasn’t been this popular since the 2008 financial crisis. In general, employment contingencies are written into the offer to state that if buyers lose their job before the closing, “they can back out of the deal” without losing their deposit. Dorsey’s Cash App under fire Shares of Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s payment app Block,…

Zachary Crockett The Hustle You’ve heard automation experts philosophize about how AI is going to replace vast swaths of workers, said Zachary Crockett. Here’s another idea: “Why not start by replacing the highest-paid employee of them all—the CEO?” Today’s average chief executive is paid the equivalent of 399 median workers’ salaries, up from 20 to 1 in 1965. Studies show that executives have simultaneously gotten more expensive while becoming less effective over time. Automating the CEO wouldn’t just be cheaper, it might actually improve the company’s performance. McKinsey, the consulting company beloved by ruthless CEOs, estimates “that roughly 25 percent of a CEO’s time is spent on tasks that machines could replicate,” like reviewing financial performance and forecasting trends. CEOs are “heralded as decision-making geniuses,” but firms like IBM and…

Willis Reed became a hero to basketball fans—and won a place in sports history—for his sheer determination. After dominant performances in the first four games of the 1970 NBA Finals, the New York Knicks’ captain tore a muscle along his thigh, and his team lost its next game to the Los Angeles Lakers. Nobody expected him to play the decisive Game 7, but after getting an injection of painkillers, Reed limped out onto the court. Madison Square Garden erupted. “I thought, this is what an earthquake must feel like,” he said. The 6-foot-9 center scored the Knicks’ first two baskets—his only points of that game, but they were enough to inspire his teammates to victory. Reed, who played an injury-limited 10 seasons, all with the Knicks, was brilliant on…

This week’s question: A recent study concluded that corny “dad jokes” help teach children how to cope with embarrassment. Come up with a term for the beneficial psychological effect of exposure to a pun-loving, shame-proof dad. Last week’s contest: The Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt, a 5,000-mile-wide mass of thick, toxic fume–emitting brown seaweed, is expected to make beachgoing at Florida’s Gulf Coast much less pleasant this spring. Come up with a tabloid headline about this foreign assault on the Sunshine State. THE WINNER: “Kelp Is on the Way!” Peter Gordon, Great Neck, N.Y. SECOND PLACE: “This Is Not Recreational Weed!” Gary Evenson, McFarland, Wis. THIRD PLACE: “Huge Stinking Mess Envelops Florida (Also, Seaweed)” Saul Bronstein, Port St. Lucie, Fla. For runners-up and complete contest rules, please go to theweek.com/contest.…

Good week for: Endless winter, after several key California ski resorts in the Sierra mountains announced that this year’s record-breaking snow accumulation of about 55 feet will let them stay open into June and perhaps as late as August. Previews, with the unveiling in Australia of a virtual-reality installation that gives users a simulated experience of dying of cardiac arrest and floating out of their bodies. If the simulation gets too intense, staff are on hand to “pull you out.” The transformative power of art, with the announcement by Ye, the anti-Semite formerly known as Kanye West, that watching Jonah Hill’s performance in the 2012 action-comedy 21 Jump Street “made me like Jewish people again.” Bad week for: Peanut butter, which was classified as a liquid by the Transportation Security…

Gisele Bündchen insists she never gave NFL legend Tom Brady an ultimatum: her or football, said Michelle Ruiz in Vanity Fair. The tabloid narrative has been that after 13 years of marriage, the Brazilian supermodel got tired of putting her career on hold to take care of their kids while Brady played into his mid-40s chasing more Super Bowl rings. He retired from football last year, then unretired to play one more season; shortly afterward, he and Bündchen announced they were splitting. Bündchen, 42, is evasive about what caused the divorce, saying they grew apart as their aspirations diverged. “You have to have somebody who can meet you in the middle,” she says. “You give everything you got to achieve your dream. It’s heartbreaking when it doesn’t end up…

Yasmin Tayag The Atlantic Covid may no longer pose a serious threat to most of us, said Yasmin Tayag, but “older people are still in a precarious position.” The immune systems of people 65 and over are weaker, and older people are more likely to have chronic illnesses that leave them vulnerable to severe Covid. Vaccination substantially reduces their risk, but a recent study found seniors’ risk of death tripled a year afterward if they didn’t receive boosters. Even booster protection fades in months. As a result, “older adults continue to face real threats from the illness” every time they go to the store, attend family gatherings, and interact closely with other people. More than 2,000 people are still dying from Covid every week, and most of them are…

“‘Woke’ isn’t hard to define at all. In its most focused sense, it is the belief that America’s social and political institutions are engines of racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of persecution. More broadly, it is the illiberal insistence that group identity and grievances trump freedom of thought and honest debate. In the woke zeitgeist, anyone who prioritizes traditional liberal values, such as merit or color blindness, over ‘equity’—i.e., proportionately equal outcomes for every group, regardless of credentials, experience, or performance—is part of the oppressive hierarchy that needs to be demolished.” Jeff Jacoby in The Boston Globe…

SLOVAKIA Frantisek Miklosko Denník N Slovaks once led Europe in the fight for freedom, said Frantisek Miklosko, so why are we now siding with the oppressor? Thirty-five years ago this week, I helped lead Bratislava’s Candle Demonstration, a protest by Catholic activists against the Communist government that denied us religious freedom. We held candles in Hviezdoslav Square, and the whole world watched as authorities sent police to attack us with batons, dogs, and water cannons. Our nonviolent protest set the stage for the following year’s Velvet Revolution, which toppled Czechoslovakia’s Communist regime and helped bring about the fall of the Soviet Union itself. Today, “we can see that the bravery of those citizens” who gathered in 1988 “carried a prophetic message for the future.” We must stand up whenever we…

AUSTRALIA Geraldine Brooks The Sydney Morning Herald Australia has hitched its military policy to America’s at “the worst possible time,” said Geraldine Brooks. America is at risk of “slipping into autocracy,” with a huge sector of its electorate “untethered from the reach of truth.” Yet last month Australia agreed—as a member of the AUKUS defense group of Australia, the U.K., and the U.S.—to start stationing AUKUS nuclear-powered submarines at a base near Perth from 2027 on, the better to counter threats from China. We are now effectively bound to follow the U.S. military lead in the Pacific. And where will the Americans take us? The next commander in chief could well be another “erratic, uninformed, ego-driven” president in the vein of Donald Trump, or even Trump himself. In all major…

“Are we actually arguing about whether 14-year-olds should work in meatpacking plants?” asked Terri Gerstein in The New York Times. Last month, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed a bill eliminating a requirement for 14- and 15-year-olds to have a state work permit to get a job. The move is part of a broader push to loosen child labor laws by conservative state legislatures. The Iowa legislature is considering a bill that would allow 14-year-olds to work in industrial freezers and meat coolers and 15-year-olds to work on assembly lines moving items that weigh up to 50 pounds. In Ohio, there’s a push to allow 14- and 15-year-olds to work until 9 p.m. during the school year—in violation of federal law—while the Minnesota legislature is debating letting the construction…

A culture war battle over public school curricula “took center stage” on Capitol Hill last week, said Lauren Gambino in The Guardian, as the GOP-led House passed the Parents Bill of Rights Act on a near party-line vote. The bill serves as a national “rallying cry” for Republicans amid an impassioned political struggle over what is taught in the nation’s schools. For two years, red-state legislatures have enacted or considered “a dizzying array of new proposals” restricting what public school teachers can say and what books students can read about sex, gender, and America’s racial history. The federal bill would require public schools to post online their class curricula, reading lists, and the books in their libraries, and to notify parents if their children change their pronouns. Republicans said…

(Norton, $29) “Jeff Sharlet is a kind of anthropologist of the Trumpocene,” said Elizabeth D. Samet in The American Scholar. A magazine writer, Dartmouth writing professor, and author of two books on Christian fundamentalism, Sharlet has long immersed himself in church congregations, political rallies, and other gatherings that offer potential keys to understanding the belief system of the Right. His latest book adds more such stories as it zeroes in on the common belief among supporters of Donald Trump that the U.S. is headed toward another civil war, and it reminds me of Joan Didion’s masterful 1968 essay collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. “Both books are mood-altering, mind-altering odysseys; both set forth visions of a weird and roiling body politic.” Didion chronicled a moment when it felt as if the…

Priya Guns has created a Travis Bickle for our own time, said Meredith Maran in the Los Angeles Times. In Guns’ “piercingly funny, scathingly censorious” debut novel, Your Driver Is Waiting, the protagonist is an angry young Sri Lankan immigrant who drives for a ride-share company and struggles to support her recently widowed invalid mother. Guns aimed to reimagine Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, and she admits to vast hopes for the book. “I see readers so compelled by Damani’s story that they begin to act in solidarity towards dismantling our current system, redistributing wealth and power amongst all of us,” she says. But Guns also believes in entertaining readers, and has thrown Damani into a fast-moving plot and a chance romance with a woman who’s a wealthy white liberal.…

3 Luke Combs’ fourth album is “equal parts ambitious and familiar,” said Alex Hopper in American Songwriter. Once again, the award-winning country singer-songwriter “reminisces about the good times, falls in love, and finds happiness in the simple things.” But Combs comes across here as more thoughtful and mature. “With his trademark rasp,” the 33-year-old sings about fatherly love on “Take You With Me” and “See Me Now.” Fans who follow his personal life will hear those lyrics as “deeply emotive.” The Nashville star mostly stays in his comfort zone of everyman anthems, said Will Groff in Holler. But there are “unexpectedly engaging” moments here when Combs “transcends the limits of his own dependability.” The smart, warm ballad “Joe,” for example, “slowly reveals itself as the rare commercial country song that…

Tornadoes that ripped through Mississippi last week and killed 26 people have left devastation in their wake, largely destroying the town of Rolling Fork. United Way of Northwest Mississippi (unitedwayvicksburg.org) is coordinating relief for survivors, who need both urgent support with water and emergency cash and long-term help rebuilding their lives. United Way NWM is a largely volunteer-driven organization with 70 years of experience in the area. Based about an hour away from Rolling Fork, the organization is making a commitment to extended recovery. If you donate online and write “Rolling Fork” in the donation notes, 100 percent of the funds will be used specifically for the tornado relief effort. Each charity we feature has earned a four-star overall rating from Charity Navigator, which rates not-for-profit organizations on the…

Zhiwu Chen The New York Times “Remember the Evergrande crisis?” asked Zhiwu Chen. It was a little more than a year ago that Evergrande, China’s largest property developer, “was about to collapse under more than $300 billion in debt.” Hundreds of apartment towers sat empty or unfinished. “China, it was said, faced its Lehman Brothers moment,” inciting warnings of “a catastrophic default” that could set off a global depression. Such “predictions of Chinese financial doom” tend to resurface every few years, mostly because Wall Street and the media repeat the “mistake of applying pure market logic to China’s economy.” It just doesn’t work that way. China is still not entirely a market economy. Its government has “virtually unlimited power to head off crises by directing resources—and apportioning pain—as it sees…

It was hard to miss Fuzzy Haskins on stage. A vocalist and songwriter for Parliament-Funkadelic, the music collective led by George Clinton, Haskins was known for his wild performances, wearing tight long johns and gyrating against the microphone pole. He started out in the five-member doo-wop group the Parliaments, which soon changed its name to Parliament and created an alter-ego funk band called Funkadelic, blurring genre distinctions and disrupting the pop music scene. Haskins’ bluesy tenor was on display in both groups—by then, he’d been honing his ability to sing with others for decades. “We used to sing church music—hymns, gospel—at home,” he said. “We’d harmonize.” Born in Elkhorn, W.Va., Clarence Haskins grew up with a coal-miner father and a homemaker mother. The family moved to New Jersey, where…