Innehållsförteckning för June 23, 2023 från The Week Magazine

The trial of a politician is bound to appear, well, political. With Trump now charged under the Espionage Act, supporters and detractors alike wonder whether he can possibly get a fair trial. MAGA Republicans see the process as inherently unfair, because the Justice Department is currently under a Democratic administration—but by that logic, no politician could ever be prosecuted by appointees of the other party. Critics of Trump, who include most Democrats but also many Republicans and independents, worry that the judge overseeing his trial, Aileen Cannon, will tip the scales of justice in his favor. And that fear has merit. Simply being a Trump appointee isn’t cause for recusal. But Judge Cannon is no ordinary Trump appointee. She’s an extremely inexperienced one who has already proved herself shockingly biased…

New language guidelines from Johns Hopkins University have re-defined “lesbian” as “a non-man attracted to non-men.” The “updated definition,” the guidelines say, avoids gendered language and “includes non-binary people” who are attracted to women. Critics say the term erases women the same way “birthing person” does, with author J.K. Rowling tweeting that “non-man” defines half the human race as “a vacuum where there is no man-ness.” A Connecticut couple is suing the state for putting a tracking camera on a bear. Mark and Carol Brault contend that since the animal often wanders into their 117-acre wooded property, the camera—part of a state effort to monitor problem bears—constitutes “a warrantless search” in violation of their Fourth Amendment rights. In other news McCarthy struggles with GOP revolt House Speaker Kevin McCarthy reached…

Bryan Cranston does nothing halfway, said Anna Peele in GQ. The actor is famed in the industry for his intense commitment to his roles, and he treats his 34-year marriage to Robin Dearden with the same intensity. “My wife and I have been going to therapy together since before we were married,” Cranston says. “We want to go the distance, but I want to do it in a healthy way. I don’t want to just be with her. I don’t want to just have the two of us go into a restaurant and no one says a word.” In 2026, Cranston, 67, plans to shut down his production company, sell his half of the mezcal company he owns with Breaking Bad co-star Aaron Paul, and move with Dearden to…

Taylor Swift and British singer Matty Healy broke up last week, ending a monthlong fling that horrified “Swifties” because of the 1975 frontman’s history of crude jokes. A source close to Swift told the New York Post that it was merely a “fun little” fling for her, after she ended a six-year relationship with British actor Joe Alwyn. But friends of Swift, 33, and Healy, 34, had told The New Yorker recently “this time, it’s real,” and Swift said at a recent concert, “I’ve just never been this happy in my life, in all aspects of my life, ever before.” She and Healy are both busy touring, and reportedly quickly saw that “they’re not really compatible with each other.” Swift’s fans were not happy she was dating the edgy…

Jason Willick The Washington Post “Imagine a Jan. 6–style crisis” over a presidential election—but with genuine uncertainty over which candidate has won several states’ electoral votes, said Jason Willick. “That disturbing scenario” could be a reality if enough Democratic states sign on to a voluntary agreement called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. Already, 16 states have passed legislation to join the compact, pledging to award their Electoral College votes to the candidate who wins the national popular vote, even if that candidate lost that state. The pact takes effect once states carrying 270 combined electoral votes—the threshold to win the presidency—sign on. Preventing popular-vote losers from winning the White House might seem like a worthy goal, but holding a presidential election under “a patchwork of laws” would open…

ARGENTINA Claudio Mauri La Nación It’s like a semi-retirement, said Claudio Mauri. Argentine soccer star Lionel Messi stunned the world last week with the news that he is leaving European play for good to join a team in the United States. “Leo can’t lie to himself”: He knows, we all know, that playing for Inter Miami won’t let him function at his previous elite level. Even though Major League Soccer has come a long way, it’s “down a few steps, if not more,” from the UEFA Champions League. But Messi has already won all the sport’s accolades, leading Argentina to victory in the World Cup last fall and being crowned best player in the world at FIFA’s annual award ceremony just a few months ago. He wants to “put his…

A daily pill already approved by the FDA can halve the risk of dying from some forms of lung cancer after surgery, reports NBCNews.com. The drug, osimertinib, targets a specific cancer-causing mutation that occurs in 10 to 15 percent of lung cancer patients, mostly nonsmokers. In the international trial, about half the 682 participants took the pill once a day for three years, while the other half took a placebo. Five years after their diagnosis, 88 percent of the drug group were still alive, compared with 78 percent of the control group. That equated to a 51 percent reduction in risk of death. Lung cancer is the world’s leading cause of cancer deaths, and 15 years ago, only about 50 percent of the patients in the trial would have…

(New Directions, $26) It’s no surprise that Jenny Erpenbeck is regarded as a potential Nobel laureate, said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. The 56-year-old German writer is “among the most sophisticated and powerful novelists we have,” and her latest novel, a downbeat love story, “has a subterranean force.” In 1986 East Berlin, a chance encounter between 19-year-old Katharina and 53-year-old Hans, a married novelist, triggers an affair that overwhelms them both. He becomes violent; she submits to her maltreatment. And like everything else in this novel about a child of Hitler’s reign and a child of East Germany’s one-party state, Hans’ need to control Katharina “takes on political ramifications.” Katharina and Hans’ relationship is an allegory for life in East Germany, and “it is not a pretty…

Brave the Wild River by Melissa L. Sevigny (Norton, $30) Because they were women, Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter made headlines in 1938 when they led a team of men on a 600-mile river expedition through the Grand Canyon, said Deborah Blum in The New York Times. The two botanists were determined to document the region’s plant life, though, and this new book turns the journey into “a cascade of a story, colored by sun and water and driven by courage.” Its heroines aren’t curiosities. They’re women “doing their job and doing it well.” Allergic by Theresa MacPhail (Random House, $29) “While everyone agrees that allergic diseases are on the rise, there is no consensus as to why,” said John J. Ross in The Wall Street Journal. In this…

3 “It’s easy to get caught up in the vibe and mood of The Age of Pleasure,” said Mark Richardson in The Wall Street Journal. Janelle Monáe’s first album in five years is “filled with sensual music that’s about feeling good above all else,” marking a departure from the high-concept Afrofuturistic records that previously won her critical praise. Described by the 37-year-old actress and singer as a love letter to the African diaspora, The Age of Pleasure is “clearly a record for gatherings,” with tracks that move from hip-hop to reggae to West African pop and “flow one into the next like a DJ set.” But because there’s so little tension woven into the album, it’s “hard to connect to in a deeper way.” Despite its airiness, however, “The Age…

New stand-up specials… Amy Schumer: Emergency Contact In her first post-pandemic stand-up special, Schumer returns to fine, crass form, joking about the tedium of married sex and the faux pas of naming her baby Gene Attell Fischer without considering the homophonic parallels. Netflix Sarah Silverman: Someone You Love Speaking of crass, Sarah Silverman is back on stage, and there’s a lot of porn and poop talk in her current act. At 52, the Jewish comedian hasn’t stopped pushing the envelope, “selling out my culture for laughs,” as she puts it, demonstrated in a bit about considering naming her special My Struggle. Max John Early: Now More Than Ever Early always colors outside the lines, and does so again in his first special, which mixes stand-up, cover songs backed by…

JPMorgan Chase agreed to pay $290 million this week to settle a lawsuit over its ties to Jeffrey Epstein, said Khadeeja Safdar and David Benoit in The Wall Street Journal. “The lawsuit on behalf of women who accused Epstein of abuse” was brought by an unnamed victim “who claimed the bank ignored red flags” because of Epstein’s ties to wealthy clients. Court documents showed “the bank continued its relationship with Epstein,” who became a registered sex offender in 2008, “despite warnings from its own compliance staffers.” Epstein died in federal jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges. Antitrust: EU says Google misuses market power The EU may force Google to split up its ad empire, said Samuel Stolton and Stephanie Bodoni in Bloomberg. Charges filed this week by…

How private equity ate the market The number of publicly traded U.S. companies has fallen by more than half since 1996, said Nicole Goodkind in CNN.com. “Back then, the number exceeded 8,000 companies.” Today, the count has dropped to just 3,700, according to data from the Center for Research in Security Prices. “It’s not that America has half as many companies as 30 years ago—it’s that companies are increasingly staying private.” The IPO market fell by nearly 95 percent in 2022 after lackluster returns the year before. There are also “about five times as many private equity–backed firms in the U.S. as there are publicly held companies,” holding more companies back from listing. In 1999, the average U.S. tech firm went public after four years. It’s now about 11…

Alex Sherman CNBC.com CNN needs more than a new CEO, said Alex Sherman. Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav had “a litany of reasons” to fire CNN chief Chris Licht last week. Licht “struggled with leadership style, lifting morale, programming decisions, how to cover former President Donald Trump, and, ultimately, hubris.” But Licht didn’t exactly have an easy job. Weeks after he started, Discovery shut down CNN+, a subscription streaming platform that hardly anybody watched. CNN+ was a disaster, but without it, “Licht was left with a foundering cable TV network and no coherent digital strategy. That’s anathema to a modern media company.” Zaslav’s primary mandate for Licht was to make CNN “less of an advocacy network and more of a straight news network.” That’s not a business strategy. Half-baked…

The malign influence of Ted Kaczynski went beyond the people he killed and maimed from 1978 to 1995. A Harvard-educated math prodigy, he became a domestic terrorist, responsible for more bombing attacks than anyone else in U.S. history. The effort to stop him was the country’s longest and most expensive manhunt. And he forced the publication of his 35,000-word manifesto Industrial Society and Its Future, an anti-technology screed that won him a cult following and inspired similar attacks. In 1995, he vowed to blow up a plane unless The New York Times and The Washington Post agreed to publish the tract; under pressure from federal authorities, they did. Pretending to be part of a militant group rather than a lone wolf, in the missive he defended the attacks that…

This week’s question: Dissatisfied workers in Japan can now hire professional “quitters” to save themselves the anxiety of telling their bosses they’re resigning. Come up with a name for a company that offers this severance service. Last week’s contest: The federal government is giving away 10 lighthouses it no longer needs because GPS now helps keep ships from running aground. What would you call a lighthouse bed-and-breakfast? THE WINNER: “Seabnb” Larry Rifkin, Glastonbury, Conn. SECOND PLACE: “Rise ’n’ Shine” Rick Torrence, The Village, Okla. THIRD PLACE: “Crash Here!” Stuart Gibson, Reston, Va. For runners-up and complete contest rules, please go to theweek.com/contest. How to enter: Submissions should be emailed to contest@theweek.com. Please include your name, address, and daytime telephone number for verification; this week, type “Secondhand quitter” in the…

Tom Colicchio has relatively few battle scars by restaurant-kitchen standards, said Vince Mancini in GQ. The successful restaurateur and longtime Top Chef judge has suffered burns and once needed stitches for a cut finger, but that pales in comparison with what he’s witnessed among fellow cooks. “We had one woman on her last day of working for me,” he says. “She had two 5-gallon buckets of hot stock coming out of the kettle. She decided to walk both of them downstairs, and I guess one tipped and splashed and then she went the other way and she ended up with third-degree burns on her thighs.” Another “gruesome accident” involved a sous chef carrying a sharp new blade for a food processor. He stumbled and fell on the blade, getting…

Marina Koren The Atlantic Since the late 1940s, self-proclaimed whistleblowers have been coming forward to reveal that the U.S. government has proof that UFOs are real alien spacecraft, said Marina Koren. The latest is a former Air Force and intelligence official named David Grusch, who said in published news stories in recent weeks that the government has recovered “intact vehicles” and fragments of vehicles of extraterrestrial origin, and in a few cases found the “dead pilots” of these highly sophisticated alien spacecraft. He even said this week that Mussolini’s government recovered a UFO in 1933. Like previous whistleblowers, Grusch admits he hasn’t seen the alien spacecraft himself, and can provide no photos, documents, or other evidence of what he claims he’s been told. Nonetheless, claims like his are taken…

SWEDEN Inger Jägerhorn Dagens Nyheter We Swedes “like to keep nationalism at a distance,” said Inger Jägerhorn. We think of it as “something ugly,” a narrow-minded, warlike impulse that fuels the rise of tyrants like Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán. But as we recognize this month the 500th anniversary of our nation’s unification under King Gustav Vasa, why must we keep hiding our pride at the nation we’ve become? Maybe because “we know deep down that we are the best,” and so we think it “goes without saying.” After all, Sweden regularly tops indexes of the world’s most democratic nations. We have a strong welfare state, yet we also excel at innovation. On human rights and other issues, “our word carries weight internationally.” But taking all this for granted may…

The Supreme Court “did something genuinely shocking” last week, said Ian Millhiser in Vox. It defended the Voting Rights Act with a decision that “all but assures that Democrats will gain at least one congressional seat” in 2024—and possibly more. Alabama’s 2021 election map contained one majority-Black congressional district out of seven in a state that is 27 percent Black. Chief Justice John Roberts and fellow conservative Brett Kavanaugh joined the court’s three liberal justices in upholding a lower court’s decision that the map diluted Black representation in violation of the Voting Rights Act. Roberts’ authorship of the opinion is especially remarkable given his “past attacks on voting rights,” including a 2013 decision gutting the law’s requirement that former Jim Crow states “preclear” any changes in election law with…

Meta this week introduced its version of “ChatGPT for music,” said Kyle Wiggers in TechCrunch. “Called MusicGen, Meta’s tool can turn a text description (e.g., ‘An ’80s driving pop song with heavy drums and synth pads in the background’) into about 12 seconds of audio.” Meta said the program “was trained on 20,000 hours of music, including 10,000 ‘high-quality’ licensed music tracks and 390,000 instrument-only tracks from Shutterstock and Pond5, a large stock media library.” MusicGen can also be “steered” with reference audio, like an existing song, a fact that only adds to the controversy surrounding “deepfake music” that “can be passed off as authentic.” One problem: Homemade tracks that incorporated AI-generated voices of Drake and The Weeknd went viral, prompting complaints from music labels.…

(Knopf, $32.50) The wildfire that tore through Fort McMurray, Alberta, in 2016 was the first to force the complete evacuation of a North American city. But “it won’t be the last,” said the editors of Quill & Quire. As author John Vaillant bluntly puts it in his terrifying new book, “There has never been a better time to be a fire.” Global warming has lengthened the season in which forests are dry tinderboxes awaiting a spark, and generations of fire suppression have left vast stretches of dense timber that can burn hotter, faster, and more uncontrollably than forests of the past. The Fort McMurray fire forced 88,000 people to flee, destroyed 2,400 homes and buildings, and cost Canada a record $9 billion. And once Vaillant’s suspenseful account sets the…

Rebecca May Johnson wants to change how you think about cooking, said Maggie Lange in The New York Times. In her acclaimed first book, Small Fires, the British writer examines all that’s not said in a written recipe but shouldn’t be overlooked: the feel of a pan’s weight as you lift it, the splatter of sauce that stains your clothes, the generations of cooking wisdom informing each of the recipe’s written details. It’s not just that Johnson wants people to be thinking of such things as they cook. “Cooking itself is thinking. It is complex,” she says. “I tried, in the book, to slow down and perceive the thinking that I was doing in the kitchen.” She also made room to record when she couldn’t be bothered to cook,…

4 The 13 songs on Jason Isbell’s new album “were built for the long haul,” said Stephen Thomas Erlewine in Pitchfork. “Filled with open spaces for a band to explore,” they “reveal their intricacies slowly,” and foreground the chemistry of the talented musicians that the acclaimed Americana singer has long traveled with. The members of the 400 Unit “excel on the quieter songs,” including the John Prine–like “Volunteer.” Still, “they sound best when they crank up their amplifiers.” The stories unspooled in Isbell’s lyrics “put human faces on head-count epidemics: mass shootings, opioid addiction, Covid-19,” said Will Hermes in Rolling Stone. “Even the love songs are bruised and weary,” yet “what’s crazy is how, in these grim times, this is effectively feel-good music.” For all the anger and fear these…

“Nothing beats freshly caught seafood on the Oregon coast,” said Jennifer Burns Bright in Eater. But don’t stop for a bite blindly while traveling beautiful coastal Highway 101, because at some coastal restaurants, dinner has traveled farther than you have. Not at the three below, which “do the Oregon coast proud” and are sure to make any road trip more memorable. Bridgewater Bistro You won’t find a grander view of the Astoria-Megler Bridge than at this restaurant near the mouth of the Columbia River. Enjoy fresh-caught seafood specials in the high-beamed dining room or out on the deck, where tables are protected from the chill by sturdy, clear-topped pods. Don’t miss the savory Dungeness crab cheesecake or, on nippy mornings, a bowl of the curried clam and mussel chowder.…

The S&P 500 last week finally exited out of the longest bear market since 1948. It took 248 days for the market to close up more than 20 percent from its most recent low. Yahoo Finance For the four weeks ending June 3, Mexican brand Modelo Especial was the top-selling beer in the U.S., with 8.4 percent of sales. Bud Light, facing continued blowback from a promotion with a trans influencer, slipped to 7.3 percent, the first time it has lost the top spot in more than two decades. CNN.com Signet Jewelers, the parent company of Zales and Kay Jewelers, lowered its sales forecast for the year after reporting a 9.3 percent drop in revenue from the first quarter a year ago. The company blamed fewer engagements, saying that the…

Partners in Health (pih.org) is a worldwide organization of medical providers and grassroots aid workers that aims to provide high quality health care for the world’s poor. Founded in 1987 by the anthropologist and physician Paul Farmer, PIH has been building and supporting clinics (treating some 3 million patients), delivering in-home care (to more than 2.2 million families), and training local health-care workers by the thousands ever since. Working hand in hand with sister organizations in some of the poorest regions on Earth, they are also to be found on the front lines of the world’s public health crises—from the AIDS epidemic in Haiti to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa to the rise of drug-resistant tuberculosis in the Andes. Each charity we feature has earned a four-star overall…

Shira Ovide The Washington Post Sometimes all the buzz in the world doesn’t add up to a life-changing technology, said Shira Ovide. Before we all went gaga over artificial intelligence or Apple’s goggles, “America’s big phone companies and smartphone manufacturers, including Apple, wouldn’t shut up about 5G, the next generation of cellular internet networks.” We were bombarded with commercials “that bragged how 5G would make your phone faster and better,” and even help doctors spot cancer earlier. In retrospect, all that bombast looks like a marketing ploy to get us to buy new phones or upgrade our service. “It’s true that a phone connected to a 5G network can theoretically download a full-length movie in seconds rather than minutes.” But has my 5G phone made any significant impact on my…

Good week for: Artificial reunions, after Paul McCartney announced that the Beatles will release their final record this year, featuring vocals of the late John Lennon extracted from an old demo cassette using AI tools. McCartney, 80, said AI is “exciting because it’s the future.” The local pizza joint, after Zume, an automated pizza company that used robots to make its pies inside delivery trucks, shut down. Launched with nearly $500 million in venture-capital funding, Zume and its robots never mastered the art of delivering a hot pizza without the cheese sliding off. Strength in numbers, after female fans of mega pop star Taylor Swift, who vastly outnumber males on her current tour, have taken over men’s rooms to shorten the time it takes to pee. Bad week for: Umami,…

Glasgow In what could prove a blow to Scottish prospects for independence, police detained Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s former leader, this week in an investigation into the finances of her Scottish National Party. Sturgeon faced six hours of questioning before being released without charges. “To find myself in the situation I did today, when I am certain I have committed no offense, is both a shock and deeply distressing,” she said. Police have been looking into the possible misuse of $754,000 raised for a Scottish independence campaign since 2021, and Sturgeon’s husband, former party chief executive Peter Murrell, and another official were detained in April but also released without charges. Sturgeon led the SNP and was the head of the semi-autonomous Scottish government for more than eight years before unexpectedly…

Drew Barrymore is working to forgive herself, said E. Alex Jung in New York magazine. Years of therapy helped her appreciate the trauma of being a child star raised by dysfunctional, abusive parents. “I’ve been a circus bear my whole life,” says Barrymore, 48. “I swear to God, if the ringmaster left the tent, I would become the ringmaster and start, like, flagellating myself.” She starred in E.T. at age 7. She had her first glass of Champagne at age 8, her first beer a year later, and at 12 was doing cocaine to help “soar above my depression and sadness,” she says. By 13 she was in rehab. That felt like rock bottom, but she sank to new emotional lows after her third divorce, in 2016. Barrymore had…

David French The New York Times Many conservatives have decided that the First Amendment can be discarded in order to win the culture war, said David French. This “authoritarian” version of conservatism has led Oklahoma state charter board officials to approve the nation’s first religious charter school, where the teaching of Catholic Church doctrine will be fully funded by taxpayers. The First Amendment’s establishment clause forbids the government from promoting specific religions. But a substantial segment of the Right now “believes that someone’s worldview will control our schools, so it should be theirs.” They are advocating using public education to promote Christianity—which is blatantly unconstitutional. The Right, however, is not alone in wanting to use education as indoctrination, rather than giving students the freedom to think for themselves. California’s…

“This indictment is a ‘Fifth Avenue’ indictment, proving the truth of what Trump famously said about shooting someone on Fifth Avenue and not losing a single vote. His apologists are done pretending that he’s innocent of the things of which he’s been accused and done pretending that they’ll care if he isn’t. There’s no circumstance under which he could justly be tried and convicted. He’s above the law. If the country is ‘torn apart’—a nonzero possibility, especially with populist congressmen egging it on—it’ll be right-wingers who do the tearing because they’ve concluded that accountability for Trump is illegitimate per se.” Nick Catoggio in The Dispatch…

UNITED KINGDOM Kenan Malik The Observer The European Union pays autocrats and bandits to lock up would-be migrants before they can reach European shores, a morally bankrupt policy that causes untold human suffering. Now the British government wants to do the same, said Kenan Malik. For years—ever since striking a 2010 deal with dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi—the EU has been “stitching up deals with virtually every coercive force in the region, however reactionary or repulsive,” to stop African and Middle Eastern migrants before, or sometimes after, they board boats for Europe. The result has been the creation of “a huge kidnap and detention industry” in North Africa, where “prisons, warehouses, even zoos have been repurposed” to cage migrants. The EU pretended its goal was to stop the terrible human traffickers who…

CHINA Gabriel Dominguez The Japan Times (Japan) China is integrating artificial intelligence into its military strategy, said Gabriel Dominguez in The Japan Times, and not just for “intelligent warfare,” or AI-enabled military systems. It’s now also shifting to “cognitive warfare,” using AI tools to influence the minds and shape the decisions of its adversaries, thereby “subduing them without a fight.” Beijing could manipulate public opinion in Taiwan, for example, by amassing vast data banks of personal information on Taiwanese politicians and soldiers and then using deepfakes and other AI-generated content to spread misinformation. Indeed, China already has masses of data on Americans. In 2015, Chinese hackers stole millions of U.S. government personnel records, including fingerprints and extensive files of background checks carried out for security clearances. The 2017 Equifax hack,…

Fraudsters stole as much as $280 billion in U.S. Covid-19 relief funding, while another $123 billion was wasted or misspent, according to an analysis by the Associated Press. So far the federal government has charged more than 2,230 defendants with pandemic-related fraud crimes, including many who used Social Security numbers of dead people and prisoners to get unemployment checks. Associated Press Ron DeSantis’ campaign released a video featuring three images of Donald Trump hugging and kissing former White House Covid adviser Anthony Fauci that experts flagged as AI-generated “deepfakes.” Fauci, who led the federal government’s pandemic response, is widely viewed as a villain by Republicans. Reuters Financier George Soros is handing control of his $25 billion empire, including his investment company and his philanthropic organizations, to his 37-year-old son Alex.…

“While the main purpose of a door is to admit, its secondary purpose is to exclude.”Edith Wharton, quoted in The Paris Review “Character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.”Joan Didion, quoted in The Marginalian “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”H.L. Mencken, quoted in USA Today “Time is free, but it’s priceless.”Harvey MacKay, quoted in VCY America “Commencement speeches were invented largely in the belief that outgoing college students should never be released into the world until they have been properly sedated.”Garry Trudeau, quoted in The Tennessean “My wealth has come from a combination of living in America, some lucky genes, and compound interest.”Warren Buffett, quoted in The Motley…

A bigger MacBook Air Apple’s new MacBook Air “hits the sweet spot for most people in terms of price, capability, and portability,” said Kif Leswing in CNBC.com. “This is the first time it’s had a 15-inch screen, which is the most popular laptop size.” That alone could boost flagging MacBook sales. But it also comes supplied with battery life so good “it lasts an entire day and only needs overnight charging.” Apple’s M2 chip “can handle what feels like infinite windows and apps at the same time.” The cost is $1,299 for the base model, making it “one of the first laptops from Apple’s M-series transition to be priced aggressively.” If you haven’t upgraded your laptop in the past two years, this model “should be particularly attractive.” Remember: ChatGPT…

The first summer with no sea ice in the Arctic could take place as early as the 2030s, a new study suggests—more than a decade earlier than expected. Even more worryingly, the researchers said the new prediction, based on a reappraisal of sea ice loss, won’t change even if the world meets the most stringent emissions goals. That was “not expected,” lead author Seung-Ki Min, from the Pohang University of Science and Technology in South Korea, tells CNN.com. “We need to prepare ourselves for a world with a warmer Arctic very soon.” The milestone would have a huge effect on people and wildlife not only in the northernmost part of the planet—where a lack of ice would further endanger polar bears and open up new shipping routes—but also in…

Former American Ballet Theatre dancer Melanie Hamrick launched her choreography career with a ballet set to Rolling Stones songs written by her partner, Mick Jagger. Her debut novel, First Position, follows a ballerina drawn into a tempestuous affair. Manon Lescaut by Abbé Prévost (1731). I’m in the middle of this one and I love it so much! Manon Lescaut is also an opera and a ballet, so I was very curious to read what those works are based on. It’s the story of two young lovers, set in France and Louisiana in the 18th century. The novel was banned for being provocative when it first came out—which of course piqued my interest. I’m also reading it as research for a new novel I’m writing. The Turnout by Megan Abbott…

3 “If you don’t have a big, fat lump in your throat while listening to But Here We Are, you may not have a pulse,” said Jonathan Cohen in Spin. The first album from Foo Fighters since the band’s drummer, Taylor Hawkins, died at 50 last year while on tour, it finds frontman Dave Grohl grappling with the recent losses of both his mother and Hawkins. But Grohl and the other five members of this remarkably reliable rock band have imbued But Here We Are with “new levels of depth, maturity, and songcraft,” making it “far more than just an album about grief.” As a lyricist, “Grohl is not immune to cliché or predictable rhyme patterns,” said Lindsay Zoladz in The New York Times. But there’s fresh passion in his…

Mention flavored spirits and many people flash back to college parties and “nightmarish memories of garishly colored vodka,” said Lucy Simon in Food & Wine. Today, we’re living amid “a flavored spirits renaissance.” Distillers are infusing high-quality spirits with natural ingredients, creating products that “jump-start the complexity of a cocktail.” 21 Seeds ($31). Three women founded 21 Seeds to create cocktail-friendly infused tequilas, sourcing the tequila from Jalisco, Mexico. The cucumber-jalapeño tequila is great in a spicy margarita. Buchanan’s Pineapple ($32). “A whiskey pineapple is a go-to order at dive bars and high-end cocktail bars alike, and Buchanan’s Pineapple captures the essence of that perfect pairing in a ready-to-drink spirit.” Deep Eddy ($26). Named after an Austin swimming hole, Deep Eddy’s fruit juice–flavored vodkas are made for spritzes, and…

Pat Robertson transformed U.S. politics by harnessing conservative Christians as a potent political force. In the 1970s, the Baptist minister and founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network found international fame as host of The 700 Club, a long-running show that combined evangelizing with political talk. Riding that popularity—and, he said, heeding God’s command—he ran for president in 1998, then founded the Christian Coalition, an advocacy group that mobilized evangelical voters and helped turn the Republican Party rightward. Robertson had a calm, folksy manner and gentle smile that belied his often incendiary rhetoric, which cast progressives as forces of evil. Feminism, he said, encouraged women to “kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians,” while homosexuality was “an abomination.” Assailing morals was a lucrative enterprise: Through programming, books,…