Innehållsförteckning för October 31, 2025 från The Week Magazine

When American citizen Maria Greeley was stopped by ICE agents earlier this month, she was ready: She had her passport on her. Greeley knew ICE was combing Chicago and stopping people who, like her, looked Latino. Leaving her workplace one evening, she was indeed picked up. But her U.S. passport didn’t protect her from being arbitrarily detained, because the ICE agents decided it must be fake. She asked for the name and badge number of the man zip-tying her hands behind her back, but he simply sneered, “We don’t have to tell you anything.” A reporter texted White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt last week with a reasonable, easy question about the planned meeting (now canceled) between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin: Who picked Budapest as the meeting…

■ A class-action lawsuit has been filed against the makers of On sneakers, claiming the shoes emit a “noisy and embarrassing squeak with each and every step.” The plaintiffs accept that the issue may seem “inconsequential,” and note that members of online forums have developed “hacks” to minimize the squeaking. Still, says the lawsuit, no reasonable customer would spend up to $180 on a pair of sneakers knowing “they needed to make DIY alterations.” ■ Steak ’n Shake is installing colossal American flags at all of its 397 locations. Earlier this year, the burger chain announced it would start cooking its fries in beef tallow, in line with the Trump administration’s “MAHA” agenda, and it now also accepts payment in Bitcoin. In the latest play for right-leaning diners, the chain…

Portland, Ore. Troops approved: A federal appeals court ruled this week that the Trump administration can deploy National Guard troops to Portland over state and local objections, striking down a lower court’s order blocking the deployment. President Trump tried to federalize 200 Oregon National Guard troops earlier this month to guard an ICE facility in Portland’s downtown and quell surrounding protests. Federal District Judge Karin J. Immergut temporarily blocked the order, stating that Trump was acting in bad faith with his exaggerated claims that the city—where protests have been largely peaceful—was “war ravaged” and “under siege” by antifa. But a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel ruled 2-1 that it was “likely that the President lawfully exercised his statutory authority” and acted within “a range of honest judgment.” The…

Lionel Richie thinks he had a head start in life, said Simon Hattenstone in The Guardian (U.K.). The singer was raised on the campus of Alabama’s historically Black Tuskegee Institute, by a father who worked as a systems analyst for the Army and a school principal mother. “I grew up with these extremely bourgeois, aristocratic Black folk,” says Richie, 76. “The level of education was so heavy that you couldn’t help but just let it rub off on you.” At age 8, he saw a very different side of America. On a trip to Montgomery, Richie drank unknowingly from a whites-only fountain; a group of white men hurled the N-word at his father. Richie expected his dad to “kick some ass,” but instead he just quietly told Lionel to get…

Theodore R. Johnson The Washington Post President Trump has relentlessly put his name on everything from buildings to the border wall, said Theodore R. Johnson. But his latest branding scheme is “probably illegal.” The Treasury Department is planning to create a $1 Trump coin for the U.S.’s 250th anniversary next year with “the president’s effigy, fist pumping in front of a billowing American flag,” on one side and “an embossed bust of a coiffed Trump” with “IN GOD WE TRUST” on the other. Under U.S. law, only deceased people can be portrayed on U.S. currency; the Founders considered it “poor form to put living presidents on money,” with James Madison saying it “smacked of monarchy.” But Trump is openly seeking “national idolatry.” He has “gilded the Oval Office” to look…

Editorial The Asahi Shimbun Nobody should be obligated to sing “Kimigayo,” said The Asahi Shimbun. Many people associate Japan’s national anthem with World War II, “a conflict fought in the name of the emperor.” It stirs up “complicated feelings”—especially in the prefecture of Okinawa, “where a quarter of the civilian population perished in the fighting.” Yet the local assembly in the Okinawa city of Ishigaki has just passed a resolution to quiz elementary and middle-school children on whether they have been taught the anthem and whether they would like to sing it at school ceremonies. This violates the “political neutrality of education” required under Japanese law. The assembly says the questionnaire would be anonymous and therefore harmless. But some students would be “made to feel anxious” that their handwriting or…

Preteens who spend more time on social media show poorer reading, vocabulary, and memory skills by early adolescence than those who use it little or not at all, a new study has found. Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, looked at data from more than 6,000 children ages 9 and 10 whose social media use and cognitive performance were tracked over several years. Those who spent three or more hours a day on social media by age 13 scored up to 5 points lower on reading and memory tests than nonusers. Even moderate users—about an hour a day—scored 1 to 2 points lower, reports NPR.org. “That really speaks to the dosage effect of these apps,” says psychologist Sheri Madigan of the University of Calgary, who wrote an accompanying…

(Grove, $28) Lily King’s latest best seller begins as “a wry, witty campus tale,” said Priscilla Gilman in The Boston Globe. Before it’s over, though, the book stands as “one of the most emotionally devastating and soulfully wise novels I have ever read.” In the late 1980s, when the unnamed narrator is a college student and aspiring writer, she falls into a love triangle with Sam and Yash, two bright English majors who nickname her Jordan, after The Great Gatsby flapper. A love of literature helps connect the trio, yet “like all of King’s fiction, Heart the Lover is literary without pretension, emotional without maudlin sentimentality.” Once this “deeply satisfying” novel leaps forward two decades, it becomes “a tender farewell to youth,” said Heller McAlpin in The Wall Street Journal.…

The Last Wolf (New Directions, $14) For readers curious about literature’s newest Nobel laureate, this 2016 novella is a great place to start, said Jacob Brogan in The Washington Post. At a glance, the fiction of Hungary’s Laszlo Krasznahorkai is “unusually daunting,” because a single sentence can span hundreds of pages. Here, a narrator tells the story of the last wolf in a region of Spain in a sentence that runs just 70 pages, and “many of Krasznahorkai’s preoccupations are on display, as is his sly, despairing wit.” The Melancholy of Resistance (New Directions, $17) This 1989 novel, Krasznahorkai’s “greatest,” concerns a town undone by the visit of an odd circus, said Walt Hunter in The Atlantic. Here, as always, “Krasznahorkai writes about the stultifying effects of political oppression, but…

Fela Kuti: Fear No Man (Higher Ground) Fela Kuti was a pioneering musician and complex man, and this new 12-part series “leaves no stone unturned” in bringing his story to life, said Fiona Sturges in the Financial Times. The so-called godfather of Afrobeat was considered so dangerous to Nigeria’s authoritarian regime that his compound was regularly raided, and his courage as an activist and achievements as an artist get their full due. But so, too, do the 27 singers and dancers he married in a self-glorifying 1978 ceremony. Fear No Man is hosted by Radiolab creator Jad Abumrad and produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground, and “you can hear the love and money that have been poured into it.” It can be shocking to learn “just how much…

Though there was “no discernible need for a new Frankenstein,” said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast, Guillermo del Toro’s “visually opulent” and “emotionally rich” adaptation of Mary Shelley’s classic novel easily justifies its existence. “A tortured saga of fathers and sons, hubris and humility,” the Netflix film, which is briefly appearing in theaters before its Nov. 7 release for home viewing, casts Oscar Isaac as Dr. Frankenstein and an “outstanding” Jacob Elordi as the monster the mad scientist creates from the stray parts of battlefield cadavers. Until the creature stirs, however, much of this handsome film “feels busy but weirdly lifeless,” said Bilge Ebiri in NYMag.com. Del Toro seems to want his Dr. Frankenstein to appear damaged and less than fully human, which sets the stage for the cruel…

Warner Bros. Discovery is officially for sale, said Meg James in the Los Angeles Times. The media giant announced this week it has initiated “a review of strategic alternatives” after receiving “unsolicited interest” from multiple parties. One of those parties, Paramount Skydance, has made three offers to buy the entire company, which includes cable networks like CNN, the HBO Max streaming service, and the Warner Bros. film studio. Those bids were all rejected. It’s the third time that Warner Bros.’ assets have been up for auction since AT&T bought Time Warner in 2016. Autos: GM soars after new tariff exemption General Motors raised its financial guidance after saying that a change by the Trump administration would lower the impact of tariffs, said Neal E. Boudette in The New York Times.…

■ Citi’s premium-credit-card debacle When Citi launched the Strata Elite credit card this summer, it was supposed to mark the bank’s “re-entry into the premium-card market, giving it a foothold to compete with American Express’s Platinum card and the Chase Sapphire Reserve card,” said Imani Moise in The Wall Street Journal. It’s been a disaster. Across the country, customers who acquired a Strata Elite card for an annual fee of $595 say they’ve been “locked out of their accounts for weeks, unable to make purchases or redeem rewards.” To unlock the cards, Citi has required customers to submit an IRS income-verification form. The bank won’t say why accounts were frozen or how many customers were affected. Those cardholders, meanwhile, still have to pay the full $595 for this “nightmare.” ■…

Adam Lashinsky The San Francisco Standard It was a tough week for Marc Benioff, “San Francisco’s formerly favorite socially conscious plutocrat,” said Adam Lashinsky. Like other Silicon Valley oligarchs, Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce, has made a demonstrative rightward political turn in recent months. But this time the CEO really stepped in it. First, Benioff told The New York Times that he thinks President Trump should send the National Guard to “set San Francisco straight.” Then he “huffed and puffed about all he has done for his hometown, even though he lives in Hawaii now.” This got him raked over the coals by former pals and city officials, prompting Benioff to issue a half-hearted apology. He tried to make amends by pledging a $15 billion investment by Salesforce in…

D’Angelo left everyone wanting more. An acclaimed neo-soul singer, guitarist, and producer in the 1990s and 2000s, he reimagined R&B, armed with a falsetto that grew into a euphoric shriek. Hits like “Lady,” “Brown Sugar,” and “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” mixed hip-hop beats with soothing melodies and reached the Top 10 on Billboard’s R&B chart. Voodoo, released in 2000, won the Grammy for best R&B album, and “Untitled” won best male R&B vocal performance. The video for the song, which lingered over the singer’s nude, sweat-drenched body, turned him into an instant sex symbol, a role he hadn’t sought and didn’t know how to handle. He coped with drugs and alcohol, releasing just three albums in two decades. “Sometimes, you know, I feel uncomfortable,” he said in 2000. “To…

What happened Millions of Americans braced this week for a sharp rise in health insurance costs and a halt to a vital food-assistance program as the second-longest federal shutdown in history continued with neither Democrats nor Republicans ready to budge. Enhanced Affordable Care Act insurance subsidies—the centerpiece of the funding fight—are set to expire at the end of the year. With open enrollment launching next month, Obamacare premiums could rise 18% on average, according to analysts, but some Americans might see far greater increases. A 60-year-old couple earning $85,000 could expect to pay $28,000 for a plan in Oregon or $44,000 in Vermont, according to the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Democrats say they won’t approve any stopgap funding measure until the enhanced subsidies are made permanent, but…

Fox and friends, after Fox News host Laura Ingraham—who repeatedly criticized the business dealings of President Biden’s son Hunter—announced she was joining a business venture with President Trump’s son Donald Jr. The firm, Colombier Acquisition Corp. III, said it plans to “fund the next chapter of American Exceptionalism.” Swagger, after researchers concluded that even short men can project “physical dominance” by the way they walk. Key to a macho strut, they said, are “lateral torso oscillation” and “internal rotation of the shoulder.” Oscar Wilde, after the British Library posthumously reissued a library card to the novelist and playwright, 130 years after revoking his original one following his conviction for “gross indecency.” The library said its intention was to “acknowledge the injustices and immense suffering” inflicted on Wilde for the then-crime…

Jennifer Aniston’s reproductive choices have been a media obsession for decades, said Frances Hedges in Harper’s Bazaar. Through the 2000s, tabloids ran seemingly endless stories on whether the Friends star was or was not pregnant. And when Aniston and Brad Pitt announced their divorce in 2005, rumors quickly circulated that the split was the result of Aniston prioritizing her career over starting a family. In fact, she’d been going through IVF—unsuccessfully—but stayed quiet because she didn’t want to give gossip columnists more material. Then in 2016, she decided to speak out in a Huffington Post op-ed slamming the media’s “lies” and “dehumanizing” views of women. “They didn’t know what I’d been going through over the past 20 years to try to pursue a family, because I don’t go out there…

Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling (ret.) The Bulwark Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s demand that Pentagon-based journalists halt all independent reporting violates the First Amendment, said retired Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, and will be “poisonous to public trust.” Reporters from dozens of media outlets from The New York Times to Fox News were expelled from their Pentagon press offices last week after they refused to sign a 21-page “obedience” pledge to refrain from soliciting any information that the Pentagon hasn’t precleared for release. Obsessed with leaks, the insecure Hegseth wants journalists to publish only what he wants the public to know—an unconstitutional form of prior restraint. As a career military officer, I can assure you that this attempt at censorship will backfire. I didn’t love answering reporters’ questions, especially when the news…

“The crossing-over from freedom into authoritarianism may be marked not by a single dramatic event but by the slow corrosion of our ruling institutions—and that corrosion is well underway. Trumpism can be seen as a multipronged effort to amputate the higher elements of the human spirit—learning, compassion, science, the pursuit of justice—and supplant those virtues with greed, retribution, ego, appetite. If you think Trumpism will simply end in three years, you are naive. Left unopposed, global populism of the sort Trumpism represents could dominate for a generation. This could be the rest of our lives, and our children’s, too.” David Brooks in The Atlantic…

John Kamau The Daily Nation Kenya has lost its “ultimate dealmaker,” said John Kamau. Former prime minister Raila Odinga, who died last week at 80, “strode across Kenya’s political stage like a colossus.” An “engineer turned insurrectionist turned statesman,” Odinga had been on the public stage throughout much of Kenya’s long march from British colonial rule to multiparty democracy. His father, Kenya’s first vice president, was accused of financing a failed coup in 1982, and Odinga himself was imprisoned for treason. After he was released in 1989, he became a political force, someone who could “conjure a crowd with a whisper, still a riot with a glance.” He ran for president five times, and while he never achieved that goal, he “outlasted rivals, protégés, and coalitions.” Over his decades in…

Andreas Rosenfelder Die Welt “Congratulations, you’re being drafted!” That’s the letter thousands of young men will get if Chancellor Friedrich Merz gets his way, said Andreas Rosenfelder. With the Russian bear growling at Europe’s borders, Merz’s center-right Christian Democrats want to beef up the army, currently some 182,000 service members, to 260,000. Rather than mandatory conscription, they plan to fill the ranks by lottery. It’s clear “the Bundeswehr, which is no longer fit for military service, must be rebuilt”—but not like this. The example of the U.S. draft during the Vietnam War shows that even “a seemingly neutral lottery hurts the underprivileged” most, since “elites can afford good lawyers who can find a way out.” The injustice of that scheme, remember, fueled unrest in the U.S. in the ’60s and…

The Supreme Court appears poised to gut the 1965 Voting Rights Act, said Ed Kilgore in New York, and that ruling could shatter the partisan balance in the House for years to come. During oral arguments last week on Louisiana’s challenge to the seminal law, the court’s conservative justices seemed skeptical that it is still necessary for states to draw majority-minority congressional districts to “prevent the dilution of Black voting influence.” Without this provision in the law, Republican states could gerrymander their maps to eliminate mostly Black and Latino congressional districts. That could enable the GOP to gain 19 House seats and ensure its control of the body for the foreseeable future, according to voting rights advocacy groups. And if the justices rush to decide the momentous case by January,…

(Avid Reader, $32) “Joyride might be the best craft book on writing you will ever read,” said Laurie Hertzel in The Boston Globe. Though Susan Orlean’s latest is written as a memoir, it’s the memoir of a journalist who dreamed of telling great stories and achieved great success doing so, and “there is so much brilliant advice in the first half that I yellow-highlighted nearly every page.” Orlean is a veteran New Yorker staff writer who is best known for The Orchid Thief, a book about an unlikely obsessive, and her tips defy convention. “Write about what you don’t know, she says, over and over.” Also, find a topic that intrigues you, and dive in until you find a story you can’t resist sharing. “The message is not just to…

Chris Kraus is forever moving on, said Sophie McBain in The Guardian. When her autobiographical 1997 novel, I Love Dick, become a cult hit about a decade later and eventually an Amazon series, she hated having to make publicity appearances and talk as if it were the work she cared about most. “Who can stand by a book they wrote 20 years ago?” she says. “It was massively embarrassing.” Not that Kraus was ashamed that she had become obsessed, while married, with a cultural theorist named Dick. “My character is just a character in the book,” she says. “It’s never yourself—you’re never the same person, you’re constantly changing.” With her new novel, The Four Spent the Day Together, she has, in fact, kept a promise to herself to write just…

(PG-13) A rock star on the rise turns inward. The new Bruce Springsteen movie “isn’t just another assembly-line biopic—and that’s a blessing,” said Peter Debruge in Variety. But while the brief chapter of the rock star’s life that the film focuses on is “as good as any,” it’s also “a fairly dull story.” In the early 1980s, as Springsteen reached his early 30s, he was just a short step away from megastardom when he instead began recording the dark, radically stripped-down tracks that became the album Nebraska. We see him return home to New Jersey—but “looking for what exactly?” You have to go in already treasuring the 1982 album to find the story fully rewarding. Jeremy Allen White, in the lead role, “manages to create an ineffably convincing Springsteen,” said…

Richard Linklater’s latest movie “would make a fantastic play,” said Johnny Oleksinski in the New York Post. But don’t wait for the stage version, because Ethan Hawke is “transfixing” in the role of lyricist Lorenz Hart, and the film’s “stunningly smart” screenplay brilliantly imagines the night in 1943 when Hart realized his career was over. He has just walked out on the opening night of Oklahoma!, the new musical packed with songs that his longtime partner, Richard Rodgers, wrote with a new wordsmith. Hart settles onto a barstool, and as he awaits the cast’s postshow arrival, he “hurls insults, tells outrageous tales, hits on anyone with legs,” turning the night into a drunken, wrenching, “intellectually intoxicating” ride. Hart was short, balding, and gay, and the efforts made to change Hawke’s…

Chianti Classico keeps upping its game, said Elin McCoy in Bloomberg. The small Tuscan region where the wine is produced recently defined 11 official subzones, known as UGAs, to call attention to terroir’s effects on its best bottlings. The best of the 2021 vintage “belong on your bucket list of collectible Tuscany reds,” whether you choose a basic Classico, a Riserva (aged 24 months), or a Gran Selezione (aged 30 months). 2020 Vecchie Terre di Montefili ($30). Produced by an estate that’s become a cult favorite, this Classico “has a dark color and deep fruit flavors, with a soft texture and plenty of structure.” 2021 Querciabella ($33). A “bright, juicy,” rose-petal-scented Classico, Querciabella’s is “more compelling and complex than many Riservas.” 2021 Barone Ricasoli Castello di Brolio Gran Selezione ($60).…

High Point University is prepping students for high-paying jobs by turning its campus into “a glorified country club,” said Roshan Fernandez in The Wall Street Journal. A small Methodist college in North Carolina, High Point is becoming a “blueprint” for how to attract “families who will pay full sticker price.” In exchange, the school promises to teach “life skills” on a campus that treats its students like “customers first.” That includes an on-campus steakhouse, because “job interviews and client deals often happen over meals.” Servers are instructed to coach young diners “on body language, professional attire, which fork to use, and when to salt their food.” Also on campus is an airplane-cabin interior that allows students to rehearse their interactions in the event they are ever “sitting next to an…

Parmy Olson Bloomberg OpenAI’s “pivot to porn” points to “an uncomfortable truth about the state of AI today,” said Parmy Olson. Artificial intelligence is expensive, and OpenAI has needed to raise billions of dollars from investors. Sam Altman keeps promising “that his tech will eventually, one day, solve intractable human problems,” and it might. But in the meantime, he needs money. Well, sex sells. Starting in December, ChatGPT will be “imbued with the ability to engage in ‘erotica’ with verified adult users” who are paying for a subscription. OpenAI says it is simply meeting a growing audience looking for simulated companionship. “Roughly 30% of the prompts being typed into general-purpose AI assistants including ChatGPT are romantic or sexual in nature,” according to Lauren Kunze, CEO of AI chatbot company Iconiq,…

Over her 50 years as correspondent and anchor at NPR, Susan Stamberg proved a woman’s voice could convey authority. Many doubted that in 1972, when she became America’s first female anchor of a nightly news program. Local stations phoned NPR to object to her hosting All Things Considered, complaining also that she had a distinctive New York accent. But program director Bill Siemering wanted a voice that sounded like your neighbor—“calm, conversational, chatty over the back fence, tough when need be,” Stamberg said in 2021. “He felt if he just let me go, listeners would get used to it, and things would be fine. And, in fact, that happened.” Born Susan Levitt, she was raised by working-class parents on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Her mother “introduced her to the power…

This week’s question: Bars in Washington, D.C., are trying to drum up business during the government shutdown by offering discounted meal-and-drink combos and specialty cocktails to furloughed federal workers. Come up with a shutdown-themed name for a cocktail that one of these establishments could serve to our nation’s civil servants. Last week’s contest: Amazon sparked outrage after it digitally scrubbed James Bond’s signature Walther PPK pistol from 007 promotional images on its streaming platform, leaving the likes of Sean Connery and Pierce Brosnan awkwardly brandishing thin air. If Amazon were to further sanitize the superspy series, what new violence-free title might it give an old Bond movie? THE WINNER: “The Man With the Golden Retriever” Jeff Jerome, Northampton, Mass. SECOND PLACE: “On Her Majesty’s Tea Service” Lidia Zidik, Reading, Pa.…

Republican Sen. Rand Paul is pairing with two Democrats to introduce a bill that would prevent the U.S. from attacking Venezuela without congressional approval, said James P. Sutton in The Dispatch. But other Republican lawmakers have shown “little appetite for asserting the legislature’s authority over war powers.” Some analysts are skeptical that ground action is forthcoming, but others believe it’s just a matter of time. To pressure military leaders to oust Maduro, the U.S. “is totally going to strike land” targets in Venezuela in the relatively near future, said Will Freeman, a Latin American expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. Administration sources say any land attack would likely be “a targeted operation on alleged trafficker encampments or clandestine airstrips,” and not a direct effort to oust Maduro, said Karen…

Trump could demand $230M in damages from DOJ President Trump this week said he might seek $230 million in compensation from the Justice Department, setting up an ethical conflict unprecedented in U.S. history. Trump submitted claims to the government in 2023 and 2024, before his re-election, seeking damages for Justice Department investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election and his alleged mishandling of classified documents. After The New York Times disclosed that Trump was looking to file suit to collect on those claims, the president said he didn’t know the specifics but that the DOJ “would owe me a lot of money.” Trump-appointed senior Justice Department officials, many of whom represented him in those earlier cases, would have to approve any potential settlement. Bennett L. Gershman, an ethics professor…

Charlie Sheen is grateful to have a second chance at life, said Georgina Roberts in The Times (U.K.). The actor had spent much of his career struggling with substance abuse, but in 2011 he went fully off the rails. In an interview with ABC’s 20/20, he boasted about “bangin’ 7-gram rocks” of crack cocaine and having “tiger blood.” Rather than illegal drugs, Sheen, 60, blames his “embarrassing” behavior on the high doses of testosterone cream he was slathering on at the time. “The whole thing was really roid rage.” Used responsibly, testosterone can have benefits, he says. “But ‘drugs’ and ‘responsible’ are two words I wasn’t fitting into that many sentences at the time.” It was an incident one morning in 2017 that finally led him to get clean. He’d…

■ In a rambling social media post filled with references to the 2014 Disney film Maleficent, Britney Spears claimed this week that she had suffered “brain damage” and that her “wings” had been “taken away.” The pop star, 43, seemed to be referring to her four months in rehab in 2018 while under a conservatorship. But she posted the cryptic comments just days after her ex-husband Kevin Federline made a series of bombshell claims in a new memoir. Federline, 47, writes that Spears once punched their now 20-year-old son, Preston, “in the face” when he was a child, and that as boys Preston and his brother Jayden, now 19, would often wake in the night to see Spears standing in their doorway with a knife in her hand. Given their…

Jonathan Chait The Atlantic As President Trump strong-arms his Justice Department into indicting his political enemies, said Jonathan Chait, his defenders are claiming that “Democrats brought it on themselves.” The prosecutions of Trump that took place while Joe Biden was president, Republicans say, were partisan “lawfare” that inevitably invited vengeance. This is factually and morally wrong. During his first term, Trump “endlessly demanded that the Justice Department go after a long list of targets,” including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. He failed only because his attorneys general and other aides refused such vengeance prosecutions. After he left office, Trump was found liable for both extensive business fraud and sexual assault and was indicted for the greatest political crime in our nation’s history: trying to overturn the 2020 election and inciting…

Petr Honzejk Hospodarske Noviny Andrej Babis’ first big decision as incoming prime minister is an easy call, said Petr Honzejk. He must scrap the idea of naming Filip Turek, of the right-wing Motorists for Themselves party, as his foreign minister. Turek was a shoo-in until the news outlet Denik N published a slew of racist, sexist, and homophobic comments he made on Facebook years ago. The posts referred to “daddy” Hitler and described Barack Obama with a racial slur, saying the then U.S. president should be selling “hashish at the train station.” Turek also reportedly called the 2019 massacre of 51 Muslims at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, “a cleanup.” (He has denied making some of the comments.) Babis, who first served as prime minister from 2017 to 2021,…

President Trump can “add another check mark to his enemies list,” said Steve Benen in MSNBC.com. John Bolton, a former Trump national security adviser turned Trump critic, was indicted last week by a grand jury on charges of mishandling classified information. Coming on the heels of charges against former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, the Bolton case can be seen as another example of the Justice Department “being weaponized” against a Trump foe. Still, there’s “a qualitative difference” between those indictments and Bolton’s, namely that his contains “credible evidence of alleged wrongdoing.” Prosecutors said that as a Trump adviser in 2018 and ’19, Bolton used his personal email to share “diary” notes containing classified information with his wife and daughter. None of that classified…

“Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.” John Maynard Keynes, quoted in Fortune “Most of us over 60 have come to the point where we recognize that our accomplishments are diddly-squat in the grand scheme of things.” Diane Keaton, quoted in The Atlantic “Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.” Mark Twain, quoted in The Times (U.K.) “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.” Hannah Arendt, quoted in CBSNews.com “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading…

■ Moon contract at risk for SpaceX Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said this week that he planned to reopen the Artemis moon-shot contract to other companies after SpaceX fell “behind” President Trump’s timeline, said Samantha Subin in CNBC.com. Elon Musk’s space firm won a multibillion-dollar contract from NASA in 2021 to build the next crewed lunar lander, which aims to send the first human astronauts to the moon’s South Pole. But Duffy said this week that the Artemis missions have again been delayed by SpaceX, raising concerns that China could beat the U.S. in the race back to the moon. Duffy mentioned Blue Origin, the space company started by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, as “a potential competitor that could take over” SpaceX’s contract. In a series of posts on X,…

Researchers in Germany have had the closest look yet at a mysterious “streak” in the universe but say they are no closer to understanding why it is there. The anomaly appears in the cosmic microwave background, the faint afterglow of the Big Bang. Standard models of cosmology predict that the radiation should be roughly uniform everywhere. Instead, a temperature gradient, or dipole, runs across the entire universe, an axis along which the radiation goes from cooler to hotter. To look into the discrepancy, Lukas Böhme of Bielefeld University analyzed data from six telescopes, effectively dividing the entire sky into pixels and calculating how many sources of radiation were in each one. “This is a really small thing that we want to measure,” Böhme tells New Scientist. “It’s really hard to…

Journalist Beth Macy is the author of four books about the hollowing out of the American dream, including the 2018 best seller Dopesick. Her new book, Paper Girl, blends memoir and reportage to chart the rise of political despair in her Ohio hometown. Achieving Our Country by Richard Rorty (1998). Rorty, a philosopher, predicted the ascent of a strongman like Trump and all the discrimination, selfish behavior, and weakening of societal institutions that followed. But he didn’t spare his fellow liberals, asking hard questions of the Left, which stood by as unions were destroyed, jobs sent away, and regulations squelched. The Fire Is Upon Us by Nicholas Buccola (2019). It’s worth revisiting this page-turning deep dive into a historic 1965 debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr. I…

(R) A stressed mother begins to unravel. “Can a film succeed too wildly in accomplishing what it sets out to do?” asked Glenn Whipp in the Los Angeles Times. Mary Bronstein’s new pitch-black comedy about motherhood as a lonely, relentless crisis is exhausting and anxiety-inducing, and yet Rose Byrne’s “vivid, impassioned performance” makes the frazzled protagonist both sympathetic and unforgettable. Byrne plays Linda, a mom and therapist whose young daughter requires a feeding tube and constant attention, and as if it’s not bad enough that her scolding husband is never around to help, their apartment ceiling soon collapses in a flood that forces Linda and her daughter to relocate to a motel. That’s just the beginning of Linda’s downward spiral, said David Fear in Rolling Stone, because Bronstein’s movie is…

The Godfather Keaton delivered a quiet yet forceful performance as Kay Adams, the Waspy wife-to-be of Michael Corleone. Kay starts out clueless about the lawless ways of her future in-laws; her education becomes a gripping subplot in 1972’s classic Mafia epic. $4 on demand Annie Hall Keaton, serving as Woody Allen’s early muse, was effortlessly funny as Annie, a flibbertigibbet nightclub singer who enchanted Allen’s Alvy Singer. Keaton enchanted everyone else too, earning an Oscar and becoming an overnight fashion icon. $3 on demand Reds Another great performance in another epic, this one set amid the Russian Revolution. Keaton earned a Best Actress nomination for her portrayal of Louise Bryant, an ambitious journalist and activist whose political passions are entwined with her feelings for leftist journalist John Reed, played by…

■ Onliveclock.com “looks gorgeous” on a browser screen. The site defaults to a digital clock whose digits float atop a nature scene, but you can change the background in settings. You can also select an alarm from four sounds, any of the built-in radio stations, or any YouTube video. Unfortunately, there’s no snooze button and no way to set multiple alarms. ■ Timeme.com stands out for its flexibility. It lets you set up to 25 alarms and to put them on a repeating cycle. You can also save your settings and use a link to re-access them. The visuals are bare bones, though. The only background options are a black screen or a white screen. ■ Onlinealarmkur.com is a “no-nonsense” web clock, created in Turkey, that displays a digital clock…

It’s one of the great mysteries of economics, said Greg Rosalsky in NPR.org: After a technological breakthrough—the invention of the printing press, say, or the personal computer—why do only some countries experience “monumental improvements” in prosperity? Northwestern University professor Joel Mokyr was co-awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics last week for his research explaining how Britain “became the epicenter of the Industrial Revolution in 1800.” Other European nations also experienced the Enlightenment, but Britain, Mokyr argues, “operationalized” science by putting “new ideas to practical use.” The other half of the prize was shared by Philippe Aghion of the Collège de France and the London School of Economics and Peter Howitt of Brown University. They examined the pros and cons of “creative destruction,” when innovation displaces older products, inevitably leading…

Ace Frehley was 21 in 1972 when his life was changed by a Village Voice ad. “Lead guitarist wanted,” it read, “with flash and ability.” The Bronx native was still living with his parents, and his mom drove him to the audition. But his muscular blues-rock riffing impressed bandleaders Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley, and the theatrical glam-metal act Kiss was born. Decked out in platform boots, spandex, and face paint, the foursome (including drummer Peter Criss) were worshiped by teenage boys around the world, selling over 100 million albums. A top concert draw, they lit up arena audiences with fire and smoke, spitting blood and pumping out pop-metal anthems like “Rock and Roll All Nite.” Frehley’s wailing Les Paul solos were a staple of the sound, and he contributed…