Innehållsförteckning för April 21, 2023 från The Week Magazine

After the 2020 election, Ginni Thomas was apoplectic. She spent weeks firing off texts and emails urging Donald Trump’s chief of staff and state legislators to overturn the results, saying Trump’s defeat would ensure “the end of America.” When the messages were later made public, Thomas insisted she had not discussed her belief the election was stolen with her husband and “best friend,” Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. That’s convenient, since the justice never recused himself from cases involving Trump, the election, or Jan. 6. Last week, we learned that Justice Thomas failed to report that he and Ginni have been vacationing like billionaires for decades on the private jet, superyacht, and lakefront resort of conservative megadonor Harlan Crow. Crow assures us that while he showered expensive freebies on Thomas…

A Florida high school teacher has been fired for asking students to write their own obituaries before an active-shooter drill. Psychology teacher Jeffrey Keene, 63, says he told his class of thirty-five 11th and 12th graders that the assignment “isn’t a way to upset you,” but hoped the prospect of death would inspire reflection on “how they want to move forward with their lives.” A teenager was disqualified from a Pokémon Trading Card tournament in North Carolina because he giggled when asked his preferred pronouns. Makani Tran says his brief laugh was caused by pre-match jitters, and that he has “ZERO issues with people’s pronouns and how they choose to identify.” But a judge told Tran that his giggle caused someone to feel “unsafe and uncomfortable.” In other news Biden…

Michael Bublé hasn’t let success go to his head, said Zoe Williams in The Guardian. The international singing star and sex symbol has sold 75 million records, but he spends most of his time with his wife and four children in the same town in British Columbia where he grew up in a blue-collar family, with his kids attending the same public schools he went to. “There’s this smell of all the hallways, I remember everything,” he says. “Same teachers, the kids that I went to school with are the same people I walk my kids to school with now.” Bublé, the son of a fisherman, says his fellow parents were wary of him at the beginning. “The first time was probably a strange moment for them, and for…

Taylor Swift and her boyfriend of more than six years, British actor Joe Alwyn, have split, multiple news outlets reported last week. The couple met at the 2016 Met Gala and were extremely private about their relationship, which appeared to be Alywn’s preference. A People source said the breakup was driven by the reserved Alwyn, 32, struggling “with Taylor’s level of fame,” especially after the end of the pandemic enabled her to tour again. Swift, 33, is known for drawing musical inspiration from breakups—as in the smash “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”—and Alwyn joins a group of famous exes that includes singers Joe Jonas, Harry Styles, and John Mayer and actors Jake Gyllenhaal and Tom Hiddleston. Swift recently removed the love song “Invisible String” from her blockbuster…

Ed Kilgore New York magazine When Tricia Cotham won a seat in the North Carolina state House last year, said Ed Kilgore, she campaigned on a platform of raising the minimum wage to $15, protecting abortion and voting rights, and strengthening LGBTQ rights. Yet last week, Cotham shocked the state—and enraged Democrats—by announcing she was becoming a Republican. Her switch gives the GOP a veto-proof supermajority in the state legislature and enables them to override vetoes by Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper. Her relationship with Democrats soured only a few weeks ago, when she was criticized for missing a vote that allowed Republicans to override Cooper’s veto on a pistol permit repeal. Cotham says she was then bullied by liberals online for her choice to include American flag and prayer-hands…

PHILIPPINES Rigoberto Tiglao The Manila Times The decline of the Catholic Church is a watershed moment for the Philippines, said Rigoberto Tiglao. Catholicism’s “culture and worldview have dominated this country since the Spanish conquistadores subjugated this archipelago nearly 500 years ago,” yet it is now falling out of favor. Churches are nearly empty on Sundays, while even on Easter weekend, malls, movie theaters, and golf courses are full. It’s partly the pandemic: Lockdowns broke the habit of Sunday Mass, while the disease itself led some to wonder, “Saint and sinners, the virus didn’t differentiate. So what’s the use of religion?” The decline is also a legacy of former President Rodrigo Duterte, who openly challenged the power of the church in ways that few Filipino politicians had before, telling church leaders,…

“Nothing endures, but nothing is meaningless either.” Salman Rushdie, quoted in National Review “We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.” Joan Didion, quoted in The Daily Beast “Don’t count the days. Make the days count.” Muhammad Ali, quoted in WLKY.com “There is almost no human situation that cannot be explained with the hermeneutical tools of Winnie the Pooh.” Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, quoted in The Guardian “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.” Bruce Springsteen, quoted in Billboard “Read widely of others’ experiences in thought and action—stretch to others even though it hurts and strains and would be more comfortable to snuggle back in the comforting cotton-wool of blissful…

Your lost phone is not here Apple’s Find My phone app keeps erroneously sending people to a single house outside Houston, said Lauren Leffer in Gizmodo. “Doorbell camera footage shows multiple frustrated strangers” showing up at the doorstep of software engineer Scott Schuster. “I lost my cell phone, and I clicked Find My iPhone, and it says it was at this address,” one resident explains on camera. Schuster has “contacted Apple support through multiple avenues to try to get the mysterious problem solved.” He has a theory for why his house is mistakenly labeled “lost smartphone central.” Because it was a model home for his neighborhood, he thinks Apple Maps may have “assigned every home in the neighborhood” his address. Anytime a phone is missing nearby, “Apple’s apps combine…

Deforestation is heavily reducing the amount of rainfall in the world’s three largest tropical rain forests, a new study has found. The forests in question—the Amazon in South America, the Congo Basin in Africa, and the Leuser Ecosystem in Indonesia—all generate their own rainfall, reports NPR.org. When it rains, the trees soak up the water and later release moisture through evaporation and their leaves. The resulting humid air rises and helps create clouds, which in turn produce more rain. This process, known as precipitation recycling, accounts for as much as 41 percent of rainfall in the Amazon and 50 percent in the Congo, the new study found—and the cutting down of trees breaks the cycle. By looking at satellite data, the researchers calculated that deforestation could reduce local rainfall…

New Zealand novelist Eleanor Catton is the author of The Luminaries, which won the 2013 Booker Prize. Her follow-up, Birnam Wood, is a current best-seller about a group of climate activists battling a U.S. billionaire over a remote tract of land. Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner? A Story of Women and Economics by Katrine Marçal (2012). In this highly readable book, Swedish journalist Katrine Marçal explodes the foundational myths of the free market, exposing capitalist pieties, immaturities, and self-deceptions and refocusing our attention on the deep interconnectedness of labor and love. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818). It’s hard to believe that Shelley was only 19 when she wrote this fearsome, deeply felt, up-to-the-minute contemporary, formally perfect novel. What would our culture look like without Frankenstein? I can’t even imagine…

3 Yaeji’s debut album is “both a protest record and a self-therapy session,” said Paul Simpson in AllMusic. The 29-year-old Korean-American singer, DJ, and producer made her name with euphoric dance music, but “her music embraces formative influences from anime to Korean alternative rock,” and her first full-length is “her most cathartic work to date.” A response to the political turmoil and ethnic violence of recent years, this collection of boundary-blurring electro pop turns out to be “playful and optimistic, preferring joy, comfort, and creativity over rage as a form of release.” As the sledgehammer on the album’s cover indicates, Yaeji is ready to smash things up, said Julianne Escobedo Shepherd in Pitchfork. Rather than feeling defeated, she’s experiencing “that euphoric pique when you finally realize you’re not as small…

However you mix a margarita, “tequila remains essential,” said the staff of Punch. “With the ever-increasing availability of high-quality options, though, how do you know which bottle is right?” We surveyed top bartenders and learned that these are three favorites. Pueblo Viejo Blanco Tequila ($23). While not ideal for sipping neat, Pueblo Viejo is a standout in the $25 and under range. It has “an acidity and lime note that makes it perfectly suited to margaritas.” El Tequileño Blanco Tequila ($28). This “agave-forward” tequila is lightly aged in American oak, “giving it added dimensionality and an edge in a variety of cocktails.” El Tesoro Blanco Tequila ($64). If you insist on an elevated margarita, make it with El Tesoro, whose fruity and peppery notes offer a pleasing balance of…

A sofa with a hardwood frame, hand-tied springs, and double-doweled joinery is the gold standard, but can cost tens of thousands. To get a solid alternative, shop in the $4,500 range and “look for a skeleton of high-quality plywood panels with multiple layers, assembled with reinforced joints.” Cushions should be wrapped foam. Rugs are either machine-made or handmade. Low-cut, hand-knotted rugs last the longest. Tufted rugs, made by pulling yarn through a sheet of glued-on fabric, are less durable. Expect to pay $1,500 or more for an 8-by-10-foot hand-knotted rug, which can take artisans a month to make. Task floor lamps are often flimsy because they’re made from assorted existing parts. Insist on two elements: a weighted base and a body made of solid metal. Use lamps from Houston’s Visual…

Clarence Thomas was already “the most plainly corrupt Supreme Court justice since…well, maybe since ever,” said Michael Tomasky in The New Republic. Now comes ProPublica’s bombshell report detailing how, for two decades, the far-right justice secretly accepted luxury travel and accommodations worth millions of dollars from conservative megadonor Harlan Crow, a billionaire real estate mogul. Thomas and wife Ginni—a keen if peripheral player in President Trump’s plot to steal the 2020 election—have been regular passengers on Crow’s private Bombardier jet. As guests on his fully staffed, 162-foot-long, fully crewed yacht, they’ve toured New Zealand and the islands of Indonesia. They summer every year at Crow’s estate in the Adirondacks, where there hangs an oil painting of Crow and Thomas smoking cigars with former Federalist Society head Leonard Leo and…

Louisville An employee of downtown Louisville’s Old National Bank used an AR-15 assault rifle to kill five colleagues this week and injure eight others. The massacre at a morning staff meeting lasted just a minute, after which the gunman, Connor Sturgeon, 25, waited in the lobby to ambush police. Officer Nickolas Wilt, working just his fourth shift after graduating from the police academy, was shot in the head, and another officer was grazed in the shoulder before killing Sturgeon. Wilt, 26, underwent brain surgery and was in critical condition. Sturgeon, who bought his weapon a week earlier from a local dealer, reportedly left a suicide note before streaming his rampage on Instagram Live. The victims killed in the attack included Thomas Elliott, 63, a senior vice president at Old…

Marta Kauffman has regrets about her role in co-creating the smash sitcom Friends, said Greg Braxton in the Los Angeles Times. For years the writer-producer bristled when critics took aim at the whiteness of the enduringly popular show, which depicted six white friends in New York City who rarely interacted with people of color. Why pick on her show over a lack of diversity? Kauffman wondered. “It was difficult and frustrating,” she said. But she came around, she says, after a racial awakening in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police in 2020. “I began to wrestle with my having bought into systemic racism in ways I was never aware of,” she said. “That was really the moment that I began to examine the ways I had…

Jeff Zymeri National Review San Francisco is in deep trouble, said Jeff Zymeri. A Whole Foods supermarket outlet that opened in the city just a year ago closed its doors this week because rampant drug use and crime terrified both customers and employees. The closing comes after “a spate of violent attacks on prominent San Franciscans.” Cash App founder Bob Lee was stabbed to death on the street. Former San Francisco Fire Commissioner Don Carmignani was hospitalized after being beaten with a pipe by a homeless man. When a CNN crew recently went to the city to report on its crime problem, staffers had their bags stolen out of their rental car. Remote work has left downtown San Francisco half empty, with businesses closing and homeless people filling the…

GREECE Kostas Giannakidis Protagon To keep out migrants, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis says he plans to add to the fence along the border with Turkey. He’s clearly pandering to the far right ahead of upcoming elections, said Kostas Giannakidis, but that doesn’t mean his fence is a bad idea. We’ve struggled with migrant crossings there ever since the war in Syria broke out in 2011 and sent hundreds of thousands of people flooding toward the EU. In 2016, Brussels reached a deal with Ankara: Turkey would house the asylum seekers in exchange for $6.4 billion in EU aid. But that only worked for a few years. In 2020, Turkey demanded more money and allowed some 10,000 migrants to cross into Greece—even more would have come had not the pandemic intervened…

Women who enter menopause early may be more likely to develop dementia, a new study suggests—but they can remove the risk by starting hormone replacement therapy (HRT) around the time of diagnosis. About 10 percent of women go through premature menopause, before the age of 40, and the condition has been linked to a greater risk of Alzheimer’s. HRT has long been shown to improve symptoms including hot flashes, night sweats, and mood swings, but its effect on brain health was less clear. For the new study, researchers looked at brain scans from 193 women and 99 men, and mapped the presence of two proteins that are hallmarks of Alzheimer’s: beta-amyloid and tau. They found that women who entered menopause prematurely were more likely to have a buildup of…

(Viking, $28) “On its face, this is a standard cold-case crime novel,” said Kevin Canfield in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Don’t be fooled. Sebastian Barry, one of Ireland’s finest writers, is “up to something more ambitious.” Tom Kettle, a recently retired police detective, is approached by ex-colleagues probing the murder of a priest suspected of sexually abusing children. What does Tom recall? “We’ll find out eventually, but be warned: You might think you’ve cracked the mystery early on, but you’ll be mistaken.” Old God’s Time “can be almost physically painful to read,” said Michael Schaub in NPR.org. “Suffused with a deep moral anger,” the book includes graphic descriptions of child sex abuse by Catholic clergy, and yet those painful scenes “feel necessary, refusing to let the reader escape from…

White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link (Random House, $27) “Consider White Cat, Black Dog the perfect opportunity to get to know one of America’s most inventive, evocative writers,” said Laura Miller in Slate. Each of the book’s seven stories is inspired by a classic fairy tale. In one, a woman falls in love with a ghost in a dazzling coat; in another, a man discovers a marijuana farm operated by cats. Unusually for fairy tales, these concern the worries of middle age. “Their melancholy is potent, but that only makes them more beautiful.” Happily by Sabrina Orah Mark (Random House, $27) “As ancient as fairy tales are, Happily reminds us that they remain living, breathing guides,” said Anna Schachner in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. In this “wonderful” memoir in…

4 “At this rate, Wednesday might end up as the greatest indie band of their generation,” said Chris DeVille in Stereogum. While other acts merely imitate their 1990s heroes, the Asheville, N.C., ramblers have been “injecting their throwback fuzz-rock with actual innovation and personality,” and the group’s fifth studio album is their best yet. As always, lead singer Karly Hartzman “litters her lyrics with vivid scenes from the decaying American South,” chronicling all she sees “with a mix of heartfelt pride and unflinching realism.” But the music—a mix of shoegaze and alt-country—now “moves with a ragged grace that can only come from constant gigging and woodshedding.” Wednesday “isn’t a particularly melodic band,” said Mark Richardson in The Wall Street Journal. Their music could also use more production sparkle amid the…

Six ways to get stranded… Class of ’07 This new Australian series opens with a nightmare scenario: A tidal wave strikes, stranding a group of women who had gathered on high ground for their 10th high school reunion. Think Yellowjackets with a more comic edge. Amazon Prime The Wilds Fans of Yellowjackets should love this binge-worthy series, which debuted in late 2020. A disparate group of 17-year-old girls are stranded on an island when their plane crashes. But their predicament wasn’t an accident, and flashbacks reveal compelling backstories as the girls bond and clash. Amazon Prime Lost Remember the edge-of-the-sofa thrills of tuning in each week to see whether Jack, Kate, Locke, and company were going to get off the island, and what was up with that polar bear?…

Tornado: American Red Cross pings your smartphone with local tornado warnings issued by FEMA, the National Weather Service, or the U.S. Geological Survey. The free app also offers step-by-step advice on how to prepare for a tornado. Clime: NOAA Weather Radar Live sends tornado and hurricane alerts and tracks nearby storms via real-time radar images. After a weeklong trial, many features require a $10-a-month or $20-a-year subscription. Weatherbug, another of the best weather apps, claims you’ll receive warnings of dangerous thunderstorms 50 percent faster with its free alert system, including all available alerts from the NOAA and NWS. Storm Shield, a freemium app, is focused on sending storm alerts for your exact location. Push notifications about thunderstorms, tornados, hurricanes, floods, and other disasters come as automated voice memos. Source: Lifewire…

The Environmental Protection Agency proposed new emissions standards this week that, if enacted, “would essentially spell the end of the internal combustion engine,” said Coral Davenport in The New York Times. The agency “cannot mandate that carmakers sell a certain number of electric vehicles.” But its proposed new limits on tailpipe pollution are “set so tightly” that “67 percent of new passenger vehicles, from sedans to pickup trucks,” will have to be all-electric by 2032. Last year, 5.8 percent of new vehicles sold in the U.S. were all-electric. Crypto: ‘Greed’ and ‘hubris’ at FTX The new management team of defunct crypto exchange FTX attributed its failure to “hubris, incompetence, and greed,” said Caitlin Ostroff and Vicky Ge Huang in The Wall Street Journal. According to the report released this week…

A slow spring start for housing The annual spring housing frenzy is looking distinctly un–frenzy-like, said Diana Olick in CNBC.com. New listings were down 20 percent year over year in March, “and total inventory was about half of what it was in March 2019.” The lack of available homes may be discouraging some potential buyers. Demand for mortgage applications is 35 percent lower than the same week a year ago. However, it may not just be because of low inventory. The interest for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage has been falling in recent weeks, from 7 percent to 6.40 percent. But the rates on jumbo loans above $726,000 are on the rise. That “suggests banks may be tightening credit in response to recent challenges.” Google’s low-price airfare promise Google is…

Gabriel J.X. Dance The New York Times Just 34 active Bitcoin mining operations in the United States altogether consume the same amount of electricity as 3 million households, said Gabriel J.X. Dance. Large-scale “Bitcoin mines” are essentially empty warehouses in which rows of computers “perform trillions of calculations per second, hunting for an elusive combination of numbers” that will generate a fresh new batch of 6.25 Bitcoins, worth about $170,000. This industrial endeavor requires thousands of computers cooled by fans running day and night, consuming mind-boggling amounts of energy, most of it from fossil fuels. A Times investigation found that in Texas, “where 10 of the 34 mines are connected to the state’s grid, the increased demand” for energy to supply the Bitcoin mines “has caused electric bills for power…

Radio Man stands above every other ‘grapher’ on earth, said Drew Schwartz in The New York Times. His secret? Start with rescuing Amal Clooney and teaching Robin Williams to play a bum. On a blustery February evening in midtown Manhattan, opposite an unmarked side entrance to the Ed Sullivan Theater, a crowd of more than 60 people stood crushed against a row of steel barricades. They all knew that at any moment, Harrison Ford would arrive for an appearance on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.” They elbowed and cursed one another, jockeying for position, each clutching a sheaf of photographs for Ford to sign. They weren’t fans—not most of them, anyway. They were “graphers,” who make a living by hounding celebrities for autographs and selling them to the highest bidder. For…

Good week for: Ancient scrolls, after golfer Jon Rahm, who won last week’s Masters tournament, revealed he posted on Twitter back in 2013 that he was “gonna win the masters!” That prophetic tweet included a photo of a Chinese cookie fortune that reads: “Your talents will be recognized and suitably rewarded.” Twelve-year-old boys, after Elon Musk—a big fan of breast jokes—painted over the “w” in the sign outside Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters so that it now reads, “@titter.” The porn industry, with revelations that “Claudia,” an attractive 19-year-old brunette who’s selling lots of nude photos of herself on the website Reddit, is the imaginary creation of an AI-powered image generator. Bad week for: Big Brother, after Llano County, Texas, officials responded to a judge’s order that they restore banned books…

Emily Ratajkowski is giving up on her acting career, said Amy Kaufman in the Los Angeles Times. The supermodel says she no longer will put up with how the Hollywood “boys clubs” treat women. “I didn’t feel like, ‘Oh, I’m an artist performing and this is my outlet,’” she says. “I felt like a piece of meat who people were judging, saying, ‘Does she have anything else other than her [breasts]?’” Her acting career began with a role in 2014’s Gone Girl, in which she played a hot student who has an affair with Ben Affleck. She then struggled to find serious roles and became increasingly frustrated with making herself “digestible to powerful men.” Three years ago, she fired her agent and manager. “I didn’t trust them,” she says.…

David Wallace-Wells The New York Times Average life expectancy “is one of the most fundamentally revealing facts about a country,” said David Wallace-Wells, and in the U.S., this critical measure is “moving not forward but backward, at unprecedented speed.” New data reveals that the dramatic decline in U.S. life expectancy—which breaks “from all global and historical patterns”—is being driven primarily not by well-publicized “deaths of despair” among the middle-aged or even by Covid, but by the deaths of children and teenagers. Today, “in the average American kindergarten at least one child can expect to be buried by his or her parents.” Overall, Americans “are dying younger than in any peer countries,” including China, Cuba, and Lebanon. Why? The U.S. is “a violent place and is getting more violent.” Gun…

“Politics today is consumed by a sense of extreme urgency, in which there is no place for compromises. This is politics as the clash of two apocalyptic imaginations. On the left, climate activists believe that if we do not act now, then if not tomorrow the day after tomorrow there will be no more human life on Earth. The nativist right, for its part, is driven by the fear that ‘our way of life’ might be about to end. The job of the election is to turn madness into reason and to translate passions into interests. When elections are merely carnivals of passions, effective governance is impossible.” Ivan Krastev in the Financial Times…

FRANCE Jennifer Rankin The Guardian (U.K.) “China’s attempts to divide and rule” seem to be paying dividends in France, said Jennifer Rankin. On the flight home last week after his three-day state visit to Beijing, President Emmanuel Macron told accompanying press that European nations “would become vassals” if they allied with the U.S. in a conflict over Taiwan. Getting “caught up in crises that are not ours,” he said, would be a “trap for Europe.” Instead, he said, Europe should strive to become a third superpower in the world order, alongside the U.S. and China. That sort of multipolar world is, of course, exactly what authoritarian leader Xi Jinping is seeking, and Macron’s words provoked a “storm of criticism” in both the U.S. and the EU. Macron has made moves…

SOUTH KOREA Song Young-gil The Korea Herald South Korea has the world’s lowest birth rate, and the government has exactly the wrong ideas for solving the looming demographic crisis, said Song Young-gil. “Korea is widely known as a country of overwork,” and a lack of work-life balance is creating what one philosopher calls “a hopeless society.” The solution the government floated? Raising the cap on working hours to 69 hours a week, so that “the younger generation could theoretically work more and then take time off for a longer period.” But Koreans already spend on average 1,915 hours at work annually—314 hours more than the Japanese, 566 hours more than the Germans. Koreans work so much that people “consume everything they can see, but do not have the time to…

Disgusted voters are punishing Republicans for criminalizing nearly all abortions in red states, said Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times, and the GOP is “starting to freak out” about its “electoral predicament.” The whopping 11-point victory of pro-choice Justice Janet Protasiewicz in last week’s state supreme court election in Wisconsin has served as emphatic proof that overturning Roe v. Wade has created a powerful backlash in America’s “previously complacent pro-choice majority.” Since Roe’s repeal, pro-choice views prevailed in every abortion-related ballot measure, and in midterm elections, the abortion issue helped Democrats stave off the predicted red wave. Polls show that 64 percent of Americans want abortion to be legal in most circumstances, but the “anti-abortion maximalism” of the GOP base is spawning draconian restrictions in “state after state,”…

To moderate Republicans who watched Donald Trump “steamroll through the primary in 2016” in helpless horror, the GOP’s current situation is “beginning to look like a rerun,” said Sally Goldenberg and Natalie Allison in Politico. As Trump dominates news coverage and Republicans “rally to his defense” following his Manhattan indictment, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, and other frustrated Republicans vying for the 2024 nomination are fighting a losing battle to be heard over the din of the “The Donald Trump Show.” The indictment gave Trump momentum just as “many in the party wanted to move on,” said Mark Niquette and Nancy Cook in Bloomberg. After the indictment, his lead over DeSantis jumped to 51 percent to 26 percent in the RealClearPolitics poll aggregate. Strategists worry Trump’s surge will damage other…

Asteroid-mining startup AstroForge is shooting for the stars with two planned test launches this year, said Denise Chow in NBCNews.com. The first test flight, scheduled to take place this week, “is to demonstrate that the company can refine materials in low-Earth orbit.” It will involve sending its “orbital refinery” into the atmosphere preloaded with “asteroid-like material” and testing whether it can extract and sort out the valuable goods. The California company “has a second test flight planned to study a space rock up close,” in preparation for a real mining mission by the end of the decade. “NASA and Japan’s space agency have both carried out sample-return missions to asteroids.” AstroForge says it can do it far cheaper, keeping “the cost to around $10 million per launch.”…

The classic image of the Tyrannosaurus rex—baring a set of massive, sharp teeth in a lipless mouth—may be wrong. Researchers have found that the gnashers on T. rex and other large theropods were probably covered by scaly lips, so that only the tips of their teeth were visible. It was previously thought that the fearsome dinosaur had a mouth similar to a crocodile’s, in which the teeth are visible even when the jaw is shut. But the new study found that some lizard species today, such as monitors, have larger teeth than the T. rex relative to their skull size, but still fit them in their mouth. The researchers also found that a tooth from a Daspletosaurus, a T. rex relative, had no sign of erosion on one side,…

(Scribner, $28) Why, in our country, do some people have no access to the medical care they need? asked Linda Villarosa in The New York Times. Ricardo Nuila, a Houston physician, has given much thought to that “simple but profound” question. “His answer is equally simple: Because the principal goal of the American health-care system is to make money.” Fortunately, Nuila is unusually well positioned to argue that things could be different. Besides being a skillful storyteller, he is a staff physician at Ben Taub Hospital, the publicly funded safety-net hospital that serves Houstonians who can’t afford to go anywhere else. With his first book, he proposes “what seems like an audacious idea: that Ben Taub should serve as a model for change.” “Although data is very much present,…

Hollywood is finally ready for Judy Blume, said Nicole Sperling in The New York Times. Though her novels, including 1970’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and 1972’s Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, have thrilled generations of young readers—and continue to sell well today—the film industry never knew what to do with Blume’s frank depictions of adolescent experiences of menstruation, masturbation, and sexual desire. “I don’t know why things never worked,” she says of previous movie efforts. “Eventually you just say, ‘Eh, you know, let me write my books.’” But, at 85, Blume is enjoying a renaissance. “Somebody used to say to me, ‘Just wait till all these kids who grew up with you get to those positions of power in Hollywood—you will see,’” she says. “Of…

3 Nearly four decades into his career, “Baaba Maal still sounds almost eerily contemporary,” said Noah Berlatsky in the Chicago Reader. In recent years, the Senegalese star “has forged an uplifting, soulful, and danceable Afrofuturist sound that also feels rooted in the past.” Last heard on the recent Black Panther soundtrack, Maal continues to experiment with electronics on Being, beginning with “Yerimayo Celebration,” a percussion-driven opener that “thumps hard enough to shake your sternum.” The “fuzzed-out dreamy psychedelia” of “Freak Out” follows, before “Agreement” adds another career highlight to the 69-year-old’s long list. “The rule of Maal’s albums is that their quality is always in inverse proportion to the number of instruments deployed,” said David Honigmann in the Financial Times… Being mostly stays sparse, showcasing Maal’s soaring voice. “Casamance Nights,”…

Audubon Red Cedar Bird House “Decorative birdhouses are actually less inviting to birds than a sturdy wooden option”—such as this simple cedar model, which has a slight overhang for rain protection and “specifically attracts bluebirds.” $21, lifeandhome.com Source: NYMag.com NiemaTK Colorful Hummingbird Feeder There are eight styles of this “distinctive” handblown glass feeder, each with a bee guard and ant moat “to keep your hummingbirds’ nectar safe.” Recycled materials and a leak-proof bottom sweeten the deal. $34, etsy.com Source: BHG.com Umbra Cafe Bird House The “modern architectural vibe” of this lightweight feeder makes it a standout for a minimalist space or anywhere else. Its wraparound tray allows birds to “feast from all angles,” and it comes with a five-year warranty. $35, amazon.com Source: Real Simple Nature Anywhere Window Feeder…

Jason Zweig The Wall Street Journal Buyer beware: It’s total anarchy in the marketplace for alternative investments, said Jason Zweig. Alt investments—assets such as stocks and funds that don’t regularly trade in public markets—“are one of the biggest fads on Wall Street.” However, anyone—literally—can file a private investment offering at the Securities and Exchange Commission without any credentials or fees, potentially luring investors into a scam. Is the SEC paying attention? Apparently not. According to public filings, four companies controlled by a man named Stephon Patton have raised at least $344 billion since 2020, which “would make him one of the greatest financial titans in American history.” Who is this mogul and why haven’t you heard of him? One reason is that Patton “has spent much of the past 20…

Harry Lorayne never forgot a face. At his magic shows, he would meet nearly every person in the audience and then rattle off their names later, pointing each one out in the crowd. He wowed with that trick at theaters and trade shows across the U.S., as well as on two dozen stints on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Over the course of his decades-long career, he said, he recalled the names of more than 20 million people. To skeptics who thought he was cheating by planting friends in the audience, he retorted, “Who’s got 500 friends?” Born into a Jewish family on New York’s Lower East Side, the young Harry Ratzer had a reading disability. When he brought home bad grades, his father, a garment worker, would…