Innehållsförteckning för April 4, 2025 från The Week Magazine

For decades, RFE/RL has been a beacon to those fighting oppression. Radio Free Europe first broadcast in shortwave to European nations suffering under communism, while Radio Liberty covered the Soviet Union; later the scope was broadened to other unfree lands, such as Iran and Afghanistan. These U.S.-funded stations don’t spout pro-American propaganda. They provide a forum for brave dissidents to report in their local languages on what is happening in their home countries. One of those dissidents was Vaclav Havel, whose banned anti-communist writings were read over the air in Czech, inspiring his countrymen while he was imprisoned in the 1970s and ’80s. “Truth and love” was Havel’s motto. Under authoritarian rulers who lie, you must tell the truth—and don’t let them persuade you to hate your fellow citizens.…

■ Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has endorsed a bill that would ban “nonhuman behavior” in public schools. The Forbidding Unlawful Representation of Roleplaying in Education (FURRIES) Act, would prohibit activities such as barking, hissing, meowing, litter-box use, and the wearing of tails and/or fur except on Halloween and other approved holidays. Speaking to a group of Baptist ministers, Abbott said students should be “learning the fundamentals of education,” not being “distracted by furries.” ■ Scalpers in Miami-Dade County have created a black market for DMV appointments. Officials said the scalpers use bots and fake accounts to book and hoard free appointments at the Department of Motor Vehicles, and then sell them online for up to $250. “We know who they are and how they operate,” said county tax official…

Mandan, N.D. Spillover damages: Greenpeace must pay a pipeline company more than $667 million after a North Dakota jury found the nonprofit liable for defamation and other claims. The Dallas-based Energy Transfer alleged that Greenpeace orchestrated “violent and destructive protests” in 2016 and 2017 against its Dakota Access Pipeline near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation; Greenpeace maintains it played a minimal role during the protests, which were led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. The organization has said the damages could bankrupt its U.S. operation, and it plans to appeal the verdict. Energy Transfer’s case hinged on what it called a “vast, malicious publicity campaign” against the company. Greenpeace argued that the lawsuit was an attack on free speech rights, designed to take advantage of a friendly venue with…

Peter Wolf is a rock ’n’ roll Zelig, said Rob Sheffield in Rolling Stone. The former J. Geils Band frontman has crossed paths with a remarkable number of luminaries in his 79 years. He roomed in college with director David Lynch, married Faye Dunaway, dined with Julia Child, and talked Soul Train with Fred Astaire. In 1960s New York, he “stalked” and eventually befriended a young Bob Dylan; the mercurial songwriter is “one of the funniest, wittiest people I know,” said Wolf. Van Morrison became a good friend while living in Cambridge, Mass., and working on what would become the 1968 album Astral Weeks. “He had no money, he was living with a mattress on the floor. He would come up to my apartment to use my phone—he didn’t…

Liza Featherstone The New Republic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. might go down in history as “the guy who sounded the alarm on microplastics, only to sit back and allow them to addle our brains and threaten our food supply,” said Liza Featherstone. Despite his hazardous anti-vaccine quackery, the health and human services secretary was prescient about the dangers of global plastic pollution. Campaigning for the presidency last year, Kennedy pushed ambitious proposals—including a ban on single-use plastics—that alarmed the plastics industry. New scientific studies support his radicalism. Researchers have found that microplastics could be contributing to an increase in “dangerous antibiotic-resistant superbugs” and interfering with plant photosynthesis. Oh, and the average human brain now contains “a spoonful of microplastics, which can’t be good.” Yet since taking over HHS, Kennedy…

Jody Wilson-Raybould Toronto Star Most Canadians have never experienced anything as enraging and degrading as Donald Trump’s bullying, said Jody Wilson-Raybould, but Indigenous people like me have been fighting “Trump-like leaders for centuries.” The U.S. president is asserting his country’s right to control another sovereign people? That’s a form of hostility “as old as Canada itself.” When he says he’s going to swallow Canada as America’s 51st state, he’s channeling both the British Crown that first snatched our land and the succession of Canadian governments that imposed their laws on us. If today’s leaders “want to learn how to push back on Trump,” they should turn to the First Nations. So far, that hasn’t occurred to Prime Minister Mark Carney. He’s been appealing to transatlantic allies for help, assuring…

As details emerge about the 238 Venezuelans deported to a brutal El Salvador prison, it’s become clear why the Trump administration gave these accused gang members no “semblance of due process,” said Shirin Ali and Mark Joseph Stern in Slate: Evidence of their criminality “is weak to the point of nonexistence.” The administration called the men members of the gang Tren de Aragua and thus subject to immediate deportation under the 18th-century Alien Enemies Act. But stories are emerging like that of Jerce Reyes Barrios, a former pro soccer player who was “living peacefully” in the U.S. with no criminal record. Barrios, 36, says he sought asylum in the U.S. after being arrested, electrocuted, and suffocated in a protest against the Venezuelan regime. Now U.S. authorities claim that his…

Chatbots can get anxious, just like us. But they can also self-soothe. Researchers gave ChatGPT a dull vacuum-cleaner manual to read, followed by a “traumatic narrative,” such as a description of a soldier in a disastrous firefight. After each reading, they tested the chatbot with a questionnaire used in mental-health care that measures anxiety on a scale of 20 to 80, with anything over 60 indicating severe anxiety. ChatGPT’s score was a placid 30.8 after the vacuum manual, but soared to 77.2 following the military scenario. To calm the flustered bot down, the researchers gave it texts for “mindfulness-based relaxation,” with instructions to breathe deeply and imagine being on “a tropical beach, the soft, warm sand cushioning your feet.” This did the trick, lowering its anxiety score to 44.4.…

The story that Karen Russell weaves together in her “dazzlingly original” new novel “exists along the porous boundary between fable and history,” said Ron Charles in The Washington Post. In a small town in 1935 Nebraska, a self-styled prairie witch who calls herself the Antidote is sitting in jail when a devastating dust storm blows through, chasing away the unwanted memories she has kept for her many clients. Soon, she gains a teenage partner who’s obsessed with basketball. As charming as all that is, “what’s wondrous about The Antidote” is how implacably it adds narrators and subplots, gathering up “swaths of history” as it goes. “The Antidote isn’t as relentlessly quirky as Swamplandia!,” Russell’s acclaimed 2011 novel, said Laura Miller in Slate. Still, it often reads like young-adult fiction,…

Me, But Better by Olga Khazan (Simon Element, $29) “Are we stuck with who we are?” asked Elle Hunt in New Scientist. In a new memoir, Atlantic writer Olga Khazan is “admirably frank and often funny” as she recounts her efforts across one year to transform herself into a pleasant extrovert. Guided by the relatively new science of personality, she enrolls in a mindfulness program, joins an improv class, throws a party, and, in the end, “comes to a hopeful conclusion.” Apparently, “a lot of evidence supports faking it until you make it.” Love, Queenie by Mayukh Sen (Norton, $30) A 1930s Hollywood icon “comes alive” in this breezy new biography, said Carolyn Kellogg in the Los Angeles Times. Merle Oberon, best known as Laurence Olivier’s co-star in 1939’s…

Boeing will build the Air Force’s next-generation fighter jet, said Tara Copp in the Associated Press. The new fighter would be named the F-47, a reference to Donald Trump, the 47th U.S. president. It will replace the F-22, produced by Lockheed Martin in the 1990s, and will have new stealth capabilities. The initial $20 billion contract is a much-needed win for Boeing, “which has faced intense pressure from Trump” over its delayed revamp of Air Force One. Separately, Boeing asked this week to withdraw its guilty plea in a trial over two deadly 737 Max crashes, though it faced skepticism from the presiding judge. Trade: Trump announces 25 percent tariff on cars President Trump escalated his trade war with plans for a 25 percent tariff on cars and trucks…

■ The Florida property tax revolt Florida is considering eliminating property taxes, said Arian Campo-Flores and Deborah Acosta in The Wall Street Journal. State lawmakers have filed “dozens of bills on the issue,” and Gov. Ron DeSantis has said he aims to “get a constitutional amendment abolishing or reducing property taxes on the ballot in 2026.” Florida’s effective property-tax rate is around the nationwide median, but taxes have “roughly doubled over the past decade” as real estate values in the state have surged. Homeowners say recent property reassessments have left them struggling to pay bills. But killing the property tax in a state that already has no income tax would place a lot more burden on the sales tax, which likely “would have to be doubled, to 12 percent,…

Paolo Confino and Leo Schwartz Fortune Donald Trump’s business empire has evolved, but its murkiness remains the same, said Paolo Confino and Leo Schwartz. Lately, the real estate mogul’s interests have “expanded from the steel and concrete of New York skyscrapers to the fiber-optic cables of Silicon Valley.” The Trump Organization, now in the hands of his sons Donald Jr. and Eric, still “comprises 20 golf courses and more than 30 buildings.” But some $2.3 billion of his total $4.8 billion net worth comes from Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company of Truth Social, his “Twitter clone.” Trump has also embraced the crypto sector. Last summer, Trump’s sons launched a crypto project called World Liberty Financial, which sold so-called governance tokens to accredited investors—with Trump earning 75…

Curation, after an unflattering portrait of President Trump was removed from the Colorado State Capitol. The painting was commissioned by Republicans in 2018, but in a lengthy social media post, Trump insisted the “distorted” likeness was the fault of Colorado’s “Radical Left Governor, Jared Polis, who is extremely weak on Crime.” Making America healthy again, after Frito-Lay owner PepsiCo blamed a 3 percent drop in its salty-snack sales last quarter on shoppers struggling with “inflationary pressures,” while Hostess owner J.M. Smucker attributed a 5 percent snack drop to more “cautious” consumers. Going solo, after the New York Post reported that more couples are undergoing “bathroom divorces” and having dedicated his-and-her toilets installed in their homes. “With two toilets,” said Debbie Wiener, 66, who spent $100,000 on her own personal…

Nuuk, Greenland Americans not welcome: Greenland’s Prime Minister Mute Egede denounced this week’s visits by Vice President JD Vance and his wife as “highly aggressive,” saying his government would not meet with them. Greenland will “never be the USA and we Greenlanders will never be Americans,” he said. “Don’t keep treating us with disrespect. Enough is enough.” President Trump has vowed to take over the semiautonomous Danish territory “one way or another”—a proposition rejected by all of Greenland’s political factions—and recently told NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte that the U.S. requires Greenland for its security. While the visit was originally scheduled to have Usha Vance tour historic sites and attend a dogsled race, the new itinerary had both Vances visiting only Pituffik Space Base, a U.S. military site on…

Gwyneth Paltrow is back to acting now that her kids are off to college, said Michelle Ruiz in Vanity Fair, and her offspring may blush when they see the result. Paltrow, 52, is paired up with heartthrob Timothée Chalamet, 29, in the upcoming 1950s-set Marty Supreme, and things get rather heated. “We have a lot of sex in this movie—a lot,” she says. “I was like, ‘OK, great. I’m 109 years old. You’re 14.’” While making the film, she encountered a phenomenon that’s new since she last took it all off on set. “There’s now something called an intimacy coordinator, which I did not know existed.” When the coordinator asked if Paltrow was OK with Chalamet making a particular move, “I was like, ‘Girl, I’m from the era where…

Ron Lieber The New York Times Medicaid is “a middle-class benefit,” said Ron Lieber. Yes, most of the program’s 70 million beneficiaries are on low incomes. But now that Medicaid is “potentially on the chopping block,” as Republicans in Congress look to make up to $2 trillion in spending cuts, it’s a good time to consider the millions of financially comfortable Americans who rely on or might one day use the program. Ask around your circle and you’ll likely find plenty of them. It might pay for nursing-home care for an elderly parent whose “nest egg has been drained after 20 years of retirement”—easy to do when the average cost of a semiprivate room in a nursing home runs to $111,325 a year. Or it might provide health insurance…

“The philosopher Roger Scruton said that conservatism starts in ‘the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.’ America as formerly constituted—warts and all—was a good thing. It was good to be a country that cared about babies born with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa, that was willing to save their lives for pennies a day. It was good to be a country that cared about Ukrainian children torn from their families by a hostile power, that strove toward a future that saw them home. Maybe someday we can claw our way there again—if we remember.” Andrew Egger in The Bulwark…

Jiba Raj Pokharel The Himalayan Times Royal fever has taken over Nepal, says Jiba Raj Pokharel. Thousands lined the streets of Kathmandu this month to demand the reinstatement of the monarchy. They want King Gyanendra Shah, who was deposed in 2008 after mass protests, to return. You can see why people are disenchanted with republican governance, given the “sagging economy” and the “alarming level of corruption” in our ruling elite. Since the overthrow of the monarchy, so many young people have left to work abroad that the country feels like a “senior citizens’ abode.” Other countries—England in the 1600s, for instance—have successfully reinstated their monarchies. But before Nepalis get carried away with royalist enthusiasm, they should cast their minds back to the last time Gyanendra came to power, in…

Petr Honzejk Hospodarske Noviny The Czech Republic is a free country today partly thanks to Radio Free Europe, said Petr Honzejk. The U.S.-funded radio stations offered us “an alternative to regime propaganda” when we were suffering under totalitarian rule, and in gratitude our dissident-turned-president, Vaclav Havel, offered it a home in Prague after communism fell. Now it and its sister organizations like Radio Liberty and Radio Farda broadcast in local languages to Asia and the Middle East as well as the former Soviet region, “bringing hope to” some 50 million people over the airwaves and the internet. These broadcasts provide some of the only truthful reporting some oppressed people can access. Yet Donald Trump has decided to yank funding for all that programming, just to save a mere $142…

Big Law has already begun surrendering, said William Kristol in The Bulwark. President Trump this month targeted three major Democratic-leaning law firms for, essentially, destruction. By executive order, he terminated all federal contracts with the firms and any federal contractors employing them, meaning they’d lose all their clients. This “extraordinary diktat” seems clearly unconstitutional, and when one firm—Perkins Coie, which had represented Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign—fought it in court, it won a restraining order. But another firm, Paul Weiss, “chose capitulation,” cravenly agreeing to provide $40 million in pro bono services to Trump causes to get the order lifted. Paul Weiss had been targeted because its lawyers had investigated Trump’s business dealings and sued alleged Jan. 6 rioters, and its head, Brad Karp, said it faced an “existential crisis.”…

In her native Australia, author Helen Garner is a living legend, said Lance Richardson in The Washington Post. She’s not as well known here, though that may change as her U.S. publisher reintroduces several of her best books. The latest of these releases, How to End a Story, collects three volumes of diaries that span 20 years, several books, and two rocky marriages. Like her fiction, her journal writing is sparse, frank, and “allergic to mush of any kind.” Because she trimmed down her entries, erasing much contextual information, the book “can be disorienting at first.” Soon enough, though, the fragments “assemble into a grand mosaic—a portrait of an extraordinary sensibility at work.” “These are the greatest, richest journals by a writer since Virginia Woolf’s,” said Rachel Cooke in…

“Laura Delano is a familiar type,” said Judith Warner in The Washington Post. In her new memoir, Unshrunk, the 41-year-old ex–Ivy Leaguer recounts how after 14 years of using psychiatric medications, she weaned herself off them and discovered that the rewards are so great that others should follow her path. Admittedly, she’s a persuasive writer. She captures both the severe alienation she felt as a teenager when she first became a psychiatric patient and how awful the effects of prescribed medications can be. But her anti-psychiatry book is appearing at a moment when her story could add fuel to a movement to gut federal support for the mental health services that many Americans need. Delano isn’t blind to the dangers of quitting meds, said Ellen Barry in The New…

Lucille Lortel Theatre, New York City You could call adapting Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya into a one-man show a stunt, said Jesse Green in The New York Times. Yet “what’s so wrong with a stunt when it becomes a tour de force?” Andrew Scott, who last year starred in Netflix’s Ripley, plays eight characters, just as he did in the show’s award-winning London run, and he proves “endlessly and polymorphously resourceful.” His performance, coupled with Simon Stephens’ script, engages deeply with Chekhov’s original drama, “offering a new way of seeing into the heart of its beauty.” For prospective ticket buyers, “a working knowledge of Uncle Vanya is recommended,” said Tim Teeman in The Daily Beast. At times, Stephens’ distillation “muddies” the tale, making it wisest to approach this…

The wines of Tasmania are collecting many “far-flung fans,” said Emily Saladino in Imbibe. Though the windswept island due south of Melbourne has only a short history of winemaking, “the cool climate helps create the sort of crisp, lower-ABV wines that headline trendsetting bars and restaurants worldwide.” 2018 Devil’s Corner Resolution Pinot Noir ($29). “This is elegantly approachable Tassie pinot at its best,” with complex tannins and notes of strawberry and cherry. 2021 Stargazer Coal River Riesling ($45). Stargazer’s food-friendly riesling features “crisp green apple and lemon curd flavors” along with “bright acidity” and “a long, refreshing finish.” Jansz Sparkling Rosé ($25). This creamy nonvintage wine from Tasmania’s best-known sparkling producer is “crisp and refreshing, with strawberry, raspberry, and ripe summer cherry flavors.”…

A new exchange lets investors buy and sell shares in lawsuits, said Matt Levine in Bloomberg. The JurisTrade Platform is like the Robinhood of “litigation finance”—an often secretive but surprisingly big business. In litigation finance, “plaintiffs and law firms get money upfront from investors in exchange for a share of their possible eventual winnings.” Because “it is expensive but socially valuable for class-action lawyers to bring mass tort cases,” selling off portions of the potential proceeds “is a way for them to finance their cases.” This has been done for years, but only through one-off deals. JurisTrade estimates that “the potential market for litigation finance” is well above $100 billion, but “only $30 billion is currently funded.” It’s starting with several class-action cases and what it calls a “high-profile…

Dozens of people died, hundreds of homes were destroyed, and more than 100,000 people lost electricity last week when tornadoes, dust storms, and wildfires swept the U.S. In response to the devastation, the nonprofit organization Global Empowerment Mission (globalempowermentmission.org) has deployed volunteers to distribute critical aid supplies to victims in Missouri, where 19 tornadoes were recorded across 25 counties. In southern Missouri, GEM is handing out “necessity kits” with food and other essentials, as well as cash cards for emergency expenses. GEM has done relief missions in all 50 states—but it also works abroad. Currently it is working in Argentina to provide aid to victims of record-breaking, catastrophic flooding in Bahia Blanca. Since its founding in 2010, GEM has sent out nearly 400 relief missions to 69 countries. Each…

William D. Cohan The New York Times “Now might be a good moment to check on your retirement funds,” said William D. Cohan. What you may have thought were safe index funds are actually tilted heavily toward a small number of tech stocks. If you are invested in a standard S&P index fund, a third of your money “is subject to the vicissitudes of seven stocks,” the so-called Magnificent Seven. The markets have been on a tear for the past eight years, so “we are probably long overdue for the inevitable correction”—or worse. After the last financial reckoning, in 2008, federal regulators “curbed the role that big banks play in trading stocks and bonds” but also paved the way for high-speed traders like Citadel, Point72, and Millennium Management. These…

Kitty Dukakis made the best of a harsh limelight. As the first lady of Massachusetts during her husband Michael Dukakis’ three terms as governor, she worked for causes important to her, such as getting children out of refugee camps. On one 1985 trip to Southeast Asia, while searching for an orphan whose sister was a Boston resident, a Thai colonel denied her access to a refugee camp on the Thailand-Cambodia border. She dropped to her knees to beg, and the man relented—and the boy was not only reunited with his sister but eventually graduated from Brandeis University. During her husband’s ill-fated 1988 run for president, she opened up about her personal struggles, revealing an addiction to pills and alcohol. Later she wrote about her depression, which was so severe…

Characterless monochromatic mansions have taken over America’s wealthy suburbs, said Dan Kois in Slate. When one sprang up next door to his own house, he decided to investigate why. FOR YEARS, THE house next door to ours was condemned. The retired federal employee who owned it lived elsewhere and seemed mostly to use the property to store a whole bunch of his junk. I would sometimes see him puttering around the library in our part of Arlington, Va. Though I would have preferred a neighbor who was friendly and present, I was grateful that for some unfathomable reason he never sold the place—because the moment he did, I knew exactly what would happen to that ranch house, built, like ours, in 1955. Last winter, we started seeing men pulling…

There’s been no move to investigate from either the FBI or the Department of Justice. But Senate Armed Services Committee chair Roger Wicker has promised action, said Kaia Hubbard in CBSNews.com. The Mississippi Republican asked for an expedited investigation by the Pentagon’s inspector general, saying the material shared on Signal “appears to me to be of such a sensitive nature” that it should be classified. Still, Wicker defended Hegseth as a man who “made a mistake” and expressed relief that “no real damage was done.” While the Trump administration still insists “no classified information was shared,” said Alex Gangitano in The Hill, it has again called on Elon Musk to be its troubleshooter. The Tesla billionaire and DOGE co-founder will be asked to lead an investigation into how Goldberg…

Trump asks SCOTUS to allow mass firings of federal workers The Trump administration this week asked the Supreme Court to halt a ruling by a federal judge that ordered the government to rehire more than 16,000 probationary employees fired from six federal agencies. In an emergency appeal, acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris called the order an “extraordinarily overbroad remedy” that hijacked the “employment relationship between the federal government and its workforce.” U.S. District Judge William Alsup, a San Francisco–based appointee of President Bill Clinton, argued in his ruling that while individual federal agencies can downsize their own staffs, the Office of Personnel Management—which coordinated the mass firings—lacks the legal authority to cut employees in other agencies. In a separate case, a federal judge in Maryland has ordered the administration…

Dylan Mulvaney never planned on becoming a hate figure, said Megan Agnew in The Times (U.K.). In 2022, the then-25-year-old influencer accumulated 10 million followers on social media with videos in which she described her new life as a trans woman, posting about laser hair removal, facial feminization surgery, and hormones. The next year, she teamed up with Bud Light to make a 60-second promotional ad. It triggered one of the biggest boycotts in business history: Bud Light sales fell 17 percent as conservative activists denounced the beer for going “woke,” and parent company Anheuser-Busch InBev shed some $21 billion in value. Mulvaney received bomb threats, lost jobs, and contemplated suicide. Why does she think the reaction was so extreme? “Because extremists needed an enemy to unite them,” says…

■ Tiger Woods and Vanessa Trump, President Trump’s former daughter-in-law, went public with their romance this week. The golfing icon, 49, announced the news on Instagram, with a photo of him snuggling on a hammock with Vanessa, who was married to Donald Trump Jr. from 2005 to 2018. “Love is in the air,” Woods wrote, adding, “we would appreciate privacy for all those close to our hearts.” Gossip about the pair started to circulate in early February, when they were spotted together at the Genesis Invitational tournament in San Diego. Despite the golfer’s love-cheat past—his ex-wife Elin Nordegren filed for divorce in 2010 following revelations of Woods’ numerous extramarital affairs—Vanessa’s former sister-in-law, Ivanka Trump, signaled that she’s a fan of the new relationship. “So happy for you both,” she…

Veronique de Rugy National Review “Washington’s so-called debate over deficit spending is a complete joke,” said Veronique de Rugy. As the U.S. faces the consequences of runaway pandemic spending and deficits that could add $25 trillion to our existing $36 trillion national debt over the next decade, “neither party is serious” about tackling the problem. Democrats “refuse to acknowledge” the crisis even exists, instead pretending “the fix for every economic problem is more government spending paid for by rich people.” Meanwhile, they label any suggestion on taming Social Security and Medicare as “devastating and, hence, unacceptable,” even though those programs will account for half of all noninterest federal spending by 2035. Republicans, for their part, “try to convince voters they care about the deficit” but feed the delusion that…

I read it in the tabloids ■ Workers at a Michigan motel were stunned to look under a bed and find a 3-foot alligator left by a guest. “It was just about the weirdest thing I’ve found in a room,” said the manager of the Pine River Motel in Cheboygan, who gave his name as Gary. The guest, traveling with exotic animals to make presentations at elementary schools, had assumed the alligator, named Wally, had escaped outside. While startling, Wally wasn’t especially scary, said Gary: “He was a real friendly gator.” Wally and his owner were soon reunited. ■ A Chinese woman and her boyfriend landed in the hospital after she stuck her hand in his mouth to film a funny video and then couldn’t extract it. When she…

Ian Birrell The i Paper The Western aid “gravy train” has reached the end of the line, said Ian Birrell. The U.S. has frozen most of its foreign aid, while the U.K., France, Sweden, and Germany are slashing their assistance budgets. The bleeding-heart crowd is in an uproar, wailing that the rich West is betraying the world’s poor. Yet we’ve been doing poor countries little good with all that cash we splash around, bestowing vast sums in ways that are both “wasteful and patronizing.” It all started in 1985 with Live Aid, a well-intentioned attempt to raise funds for starving Ethiopians that “ended up aiding the dictatorship behind a cruel famine.” Britain’s former foreign secretary, David Miliband, claims the cuts are “devastating for people who need more help.” His…

“National teachers’ unions may scream and yell,” but President Trump’s efforts to roll back the Department of Education “should be commended,” said National Review in an editorial. Trump signed an executive order last week directing Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to begin shuttering the $268 billion agency, empowering her to reduce “bureaucratic bloat.” If everything goes according to plan, the agency’s essential functions will be distributed among other departments—student loans to Treasury, civil rights enforcement to Justice. It’ll then be up to congressional Republicans, with the help of a “few free-thinking Democrats,” to “formally and finally close up shop on Jimmy Carter’s 1979 carbuncle” and transfer its authority back to the states. Nobody will miss the agency if it disappears: It employs no teachers, administers no schools, sets no…

“There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes.” Ernest Hemingway, quoted in The Bulwark “Follow your dreams, not your boyfriends.” Gillian Anderson, quoted in The Knowledge “A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian.” Pope Francis, quoted in the Milwaukee Independent “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing slowly…very slowly.” Stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, quoted in Artnet “Our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction.” Dada artist Francis Picabia, quoted in The Guardian “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” George Orwell, quoted in the Dhaka Tribune…

■ Drone warfare, available for all It’s dangerously easy to “turn a mainstream quadcopter into a war machine,” said Lily Hay Newman in Wired. Chinese shopping platforms like Temu and AliExpress sell drone accessories such as AI guidance modules and fiber-optic tethers that are more commonly associated with the battlefields of Ukraine. The modules are “essentially small mounted cameras that use object recognition to identify” targets at long range. Meanwhile, the tethers “allow drones to fly around a large area without being vulnerable” to signal jammers. Strap-on cargo holders that can be “loaded with mortar bombs” sell for about $100 each. “The fact that battlefield technology is widely available at low cost augurs a climate in which any actor” can quickly and cheaply “go on a destructive and violent…

Researchers sifting through hundreds of studies on low-back pain have bad news, reports The Guardian. Out of dozens of treatments tried, the only one that reliably relieved short-term pain was an NSAID drug, such as ibuprofen. For chronic pain, five treatments offered some measure of help: exercise, spinal manipulation, taping, taking antidepressants, and rubbing on warming creams. Yet even in the success stories, the effects were relatively small, reducing the intensity of pain by an average of about 8 points on a 0-to-100 scale. For acute pain, three treatments—exercise, glucocorticoid injections, and acetaminophen—were found to be definitely ineffective, and the evidence for the other 45 nonsurgical methods examined was deemed inconclusive. Still, a few studies did show that for certain sufferers, getting massages and wearing orthotics in shoes could…

Mystery writer Max Allan Collins is best known for comics and graphic novels, including the Road to Perdition series. He has also finished and published 15 of Mickey Spillane’s incomplete Mike Hammer novels. The latest, Baby, It’s Murder, is the last of the series. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett (1930). In Hammett’s third novel, he assembles all the tropes of the private eye story, perfects them, and abandons them. He wrote only two more novels, The Glass Key and The Thin Man, neither traditional private eye novels. This one is a crackling read, with prose as spare and well-minted as anything Hemingway ever did. Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler (1940). Philip Marlowe and his creator each display an ease here that’s not readily apparent in the other…

Thank You Very Much Andy Kaufman went where no other comedian has, before or since. This dive into the performer’s life and work is a wild ride. Longtime collaborator Bob Zmuda compares working with Kaufman to working with Harry Houdini, which feels apt. $15 on demand Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story As the daughter of Judy Garland, Liza Minnelli was a nepo baby long before the term was invented. She was also an undeniable talent. This entertaining documentary follows her path to stardom. $6 on demand Piece by Piece Music producer Pharrell Williams is known for playful hits, from the Snoop Dogg collaboration “Drop It Like It’s Hot” to his own “Happy.” So it’s fitting that this 2024 biographical documentary tells his story entirely through animated Lego-style…

■ Go dark. Less energy is required to display a black than a white background. Under Settings on a PC, choose Personalization, then Colors, and select Dark Mode. ■ Nap regularly. Learn to use the key command (Alt + F4 on a PC) to put your machine in sleep or standby mode every time you take a break. ■ Lower the screen refresh rate. Google Docs and apps like it don’t need the high refresh rate that video games do. On a PC, find Advanced Display Settings and choose 60 Hz. ■ Create a power plan. On a PC, you can set a lower refresh rate and lower display brightness for just part of each day by seeking out the Control Panel’s Power Options menu. If you read emails…

A White House effort to purge two Democratic members of the Federal Trade Commission ends the agency “as we know it,” said Nate Robson in Politico. “Since its founding in the 1920s, the FTC has run as a bipartisan committee with nominees from both parties drafting rules, conducting investigations, and bringing enforcement cases” to protect consumers. The presence of both Democrats and Republicans among the five-person committee bred healthy debate, sharpened arguments, and “strengthened the commission’s hand in court,” as federal judges would be less likely to think cases are brought “at the president’s behest.” But that precedent was shattered last week when President Trump fired the only remaining Democrats on the board, Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya. Both are planning to file lawsuits that could ultimately decide…

Fearsome in the ring, George Foreman was so charming outside it he became America’s favorite pitchman. The Olympic gold medalist and two-time world heavyweight boxing champion fought the sport’s legends, helping define boxing’s golden era alongside Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier in the 1970s. After saying he’d seen a holy vision, he quit the sport in 1977 to become a preacher and open a youth center in Houston. But he managed an improbable comeback a decade later. Despite widespread skepticism that he could even get back into shape, he won his second world title in 1994 at age 45, making him the oldest heavyweight champion in history. By then, he was already hawking George Foreman Grills, which eventually became a multimillion-dollar business. “Anything you desire, you can make happen,”…

Mia Love was unique in Congress. The daughter of East-Coast Haitian immigrants, she moved to lily-white Utah, where in 2014 she become the nation’s first Black GOP congresswoman. A reliable conservative, she opposed the 2016 election of Donald Trump, who in his first year ended protections for Haitian refugees and in his second called Haiti a “shithole country.” At one Republican caucus meeting, Love challenged a fellow member who echoed Trump’s disparaging views. “If you don’t see me as an equal, you can remove me from this conference,” she said. “If we don’t see everyone as equal under God, we have bigger problems.” Born Ludmya Bourdeau in Brooklyn, she was raised in Connecticut. While attending the University of Hartford, she converted from Catholicism to the Church of Jesus Christ…

This week’s question: Polish researchers have concluded that getting married triples obesity rates among men, but has no equivalent effect on women. Please come up with a medical term to describe the tendency for men to pile on the pounds after saying “I do.” Last week’s contest: An amateur photographer in Ontario went viral after capturing images of a 20-minute battle between a Canada goose and a bald eagle; the clash on a frozen lake ended with the feisty goose fighting off America’s national bird. In seven or fewer words, come up with a photo caption for this symbolism-laden image. THE WINNER: Canada meets U.S., flips the bird Erica Avery, Greenfield, Mass. SECOND PLACE: This beatdown is exempt from tariffs John Parry, Eldersburg, Md. THIRD PLACE: Say Uncle, Sam!…