TALKING POINTS
GENDER AND THE 2020 RACE p.17 Sen. Elizabeth Warren
CONTROVERSY
Do cheaters sometimes prosper? p.6
PEOPLE
The trauma that fuels Perez’s fire p.10
THE BEST OF THE U.S. AND INTERNATIONAL MEDIA
Keeping the lid on McConnell’s fight to keep new evidence out of the impeachment trial p.4
JANUARY 31, 2020 VOLUME 20 ISSUE 960 ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT EVERYTHING THAT MATTERS
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Contents
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Editor’s letter Hardly anybody is better at seeing how the economic transformations wrought by Amazon play out in real people’s lives than a journalist named Josh Dzieza at TheVerge.com. His story about the town of Roundup, Mont., (see Last Word) goes something like this: People from around the world buy things they find at low prices, put them in boxes, and ship them to Montana. There, all that stuff is taken out of the boxes and sent to Amazon. Later it’s put back in boxes and sent out. Except sometimes people buy things from Amazon and ship them to Montana, where they are taken out of their boxes and sent back to Amazon. You have to read the article to understand why, and you may still scratch your head a little; as you might guess, Montana’s lack of a sales tax comes into it. It’s a story about the inscrutable leveling of the global marketplace. And it’s also a story about how a few resilient entrepreneurs in a small town found a way to make the Amazon economy work for them.
But what about the rest of us? Two decades ago we worried that factories shutting down and big-box stores opening up would hollow out America’s towns and midsize cities. Those fears were justified. The hollowing out did happen, and we see its results in an epidemic of deaths of despair. Much the same happened generations ago in the great migration from farms to factories. The new modes of commerce now threaten a hollowing out that’s just as severe, as stores disappear and a new servant class emerges to invisibly pluck items off warehouse shelves and drop our purchases on the doorstep. In many ways, Amazon is making our society materially richer. But it also threatens to make many Americans— starting with store owners and continuing soon enough to big-city professionals—irrelevant. Prior upheavals led ultimately to new kinds of cities, jobs, and ways of living. As this economic revolution unfolds, will it create more winners, or Mark Gimein more losers and islands of desperation? Managing editor
NEWS 4 Main stories President Trump’s impeachment trial begins in Senate; a gun rights rally in Virginia; the Supreme Court considers religious school choice
Editor-in-chief: William Falk Managing editors: Theunis Bates, Mark Gimein Deputy editor/International: Susan Caskie Deputy editor/Arts: Chris Mitchell Senior editors: Alex Dalenberg, Danny Funt, Michael Jaccarino, Dale Obbie, Zach Schonbrun, Hallie Stiller Art director: Dan Josephs Photo editor: Mark Rykoff Copy editors: Jane A. Halsey, Jay Wilkins Researchers: Joyce Chu, Alisa Partlan Contributing editors: Ryan Devlin, Bruno Maddox
6 Controversy of the week Can baseball survive yet another scandal? 7 The U.S. at a glance Jeff Bezos hacked by Saudi Arabia; Vatican orders sex abuse investigation of Brooklyn bishop 8 The world at a glance Colossal snowfall in Canada; a deadly SARSlike virus spreads in China 10 People The childhood trauma that fuels Rosie Perez; Hollywood’s go-to divorce attorney
Getty (2)
11 Briefing Are Republicans trying to suppress the vote? 12 Best U.S. columns Getting rich in the White House; why the panic over vaping will cost lives 15 Best international columns Vladimir Putin’s plan to keep a lock on power 16 Talking points Prohibition’s 100th anniversary; Lev Parnas dishes on Trump world; Elizabeth Warren vs. Bernie Sanders
The Astros celebrate their now-tainted 2017 World Series win (p.6)
ARTS 22 Books How America lost its way after winning the Cold War 23 Author of the week William Gibson reckons with present shock 24 Film & Music Sunshine and heartbreak in the anime movie Weathering With You 25 Television After four seasons, The Good Place says goodbye Rosie Perez (p.10)
LEISURE 26 Food & Drink An unexpected foodie oasis on the edge of Death Valley 27 Travel A trip down Uruguay’s shabby-chic coastline 28 Consumer Five of the best Bluetooth speakers BUSINESS 32 News at a glance Trump warns of a new trade war; Google joins the trillion-dollar club 33 Making money The boom in socially responsible investing 34 Best columns Trump and Greta Thunberg hit Davos; why China no longer needs the U.S.
Chief sales and marketing officer: Adam Dub SVP, marketing: Lisa Boyars Executive account director: Sara Schiano Midwest sales director: John Goldrick Southeast director: Jana Robinson West Coast executive director: Tony Imperato Director, direct response: Alexandra Riera Research and insights manager: Joan Cheung Programmatic revenue and ad operations director: Isaiah Ward Chief executive officer: Sara O’Connor Chief operating & financial officer: Kevin E. Morgan Director of financial reporting: Arielle Starkman Consumer marketing director: Leslie Guarnieri HR manager: Joy Hart Operations manager: Cassandra Mondonedo Chairman: Jack Griffin Dennis Group CEO: James Tye U.K. founding editor: Jolyon Connell Company founder: Felix Dennis
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THE WEEK January 31, 2020
4 NEWS
The main stories...
The impeachment battle over witnesses consider this new information and conduct a fair and “thorough trial, with testimony As only the third impeachment trial in from witnesses in a position to confirm or American history got off to a tense start deny the allegations.” this week, Senate Republicans labored to preclude potentially damaging witness Republicans aren’t concealing anything, testimony and new evidence as Democrats said The Washington Examiner. The trial accused them of a cover-up. Minority Leader rules, as ratified by a Senate vote, will allow Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) 11 times senators an opportunity to vote to hear witproposed amendments to subpoena docuness testimony should they wish once both ments from the administration and summon sides have made their cases. Democrats witnesses such as former national security know their “weak, partisan” case “is flopadviser John Bolton and White House Chief ping” and are now desperate to strong-arm of Staff Mick Mulvaney. He was voted down the Senate into hearing the testimony “they along party lines, with Republicans voting to could not be bothered to obtain” during the shelve the witness issue until lawyers for the McConnell entering the trial: It’s his show. House’s rush to impeach. House and for Trump had presented their cases. Schumer called the Republicans’ blocking of new evidence “a national disgrace.” Majority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) What the columnists said Trump’s claim that impeachment requires an actual crime runs countered that it will create a “level playing field.” counter to what the Founding Fathers intended, said Ephrat Livni in Qz.com. In fact, Alexander Hamilton “saw this coming” and Shortly before Supreme Court Justice John Roberts administered flatly stated in the Federalist Papers that impeachment should be an oath for senators to do “impartial justice,” the Government Acprompted by “the abuse or violation of some public trust.” The countability Office, a nonpartisan government watchdog, issued a nine-page report stating that the administration had broken the law Constitution’s impeachment clause, Hamilton said, provides “a political” remedy for a president who uses his power to promote his by withholding $391 million in congressionally allocated military aid to Ukraine. Democrats want to enter that finding into evidence, own self-interest at the expense of our democracy. along with a trove of documents from Ukrainian-American businessman Lev Parnas that suggests Trump was aware of a campaign Trump’s choice of lawyers proves he’s not interested “in a substantive defense,” said Max Boot in The Washington Post. Kenneth to intimidate Ukrainian officials into announcing an investigation Starr was once the “overzealous Whitewater independent counsel” into Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son. (See who orchestrated Bill Clinton’s impeachment for having lied about Talking Points.) Trump is accused of withholding the military aid sex with Monica Lewinsky. Alan Dershowitz is “a notorious attenfrom Ukraine for more than two months to compel that investigation seeker” renowned for representing clients such as O.J. Simption. In his opening statement, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), one of son “whose guilt is hardly in doubt.” And both defended notorious the Democratic House impeachment managers, assailed the GOP sex offender Jeffrey Epstein from charges he trafficked girls. Starr contention that voters, and not Congress, should decide Trump’s and Dershowitz are regulars on Fox News, and Trump hired them fate, pointing to Trump’s attempt to sabotage a political rival in “not because of their legal skills but because of their television 2020. “The president’s misconduct cannot be decided at the ballot skills—which is where the court of public opinion is convened.” box,” Schiff said, “for we cannot be assured that the vote will be fairly won.” Don’t let the “endless chatter” over witnesses and evidence fool you, said Andrew McCarthy in National The White House previewed its deReview.com. Trump’s “bull-in-a-chinafense, calling the two impeachment What next? shop” excesses with Ukraine were articles—abuse of power and obstruction The Democrats need four Republican senators to unseemly, but Ukraine eventually got its of Congress—“structurally deficient” “break with the president” in order to call witnessaid. The Democrats have no proof of because they do not include an allegation es, said Burgess Everett in Politico.com. So far, the “historically extraordinary wrongs” or evidence of a crime. “Abuse of power three have indicated a willingness: Sens. Susan that should be necessary to invoke isn’t a crime,” the lawyers said. They Collins of Maine, Mitt Romney of Utah, and Lisa “the Constitution’s nuclear option”: said the GAO finding of a crime “is not Murkowski of Alaska. If witnesses are heard, impeachment. in the articles of impeachment,” and is Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has said he will force votes thus irrelevant to the trial. on the president’s “preferred witnesses,” includGiven the Republicans’ 53-47 majority, ing Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, and the whistlethe Senate’s acquittal is a foregone conWhat the editorials said blower who revealed the Ukraine scandal. Some clusion, said Lara Bazelon in The Wash“The Senate must not ignore the new Senate Democrats are mulling a “witness trade”: ington Post. The “real jury” is that evidence on Ukraine,” said The Washone of the Bidens for Bolton, said Rachel Bade “skeptical sliver” of swing-state voters ington Post. Since the House voted who have “yet to make up their minds” in The Washington Post. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) mostly along party lines to ratify two about the 2020 election. That’s why articles of impeachment on Dec. 18, new broached the idea at a “private GOP meeting.” But Democrats will focus relentlessly on the information has emerged that “signifiJoe Biden said he would not participate and turn GOP’s aversion to hearing witnesses cantly bolsters” the case against Trump. the impeachment trial into “a farce or political theand new evidence. “The perception that The Parnas cache alone is potentially ater,” and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer the Republicans can’t handle the truth” explosive. The Senate would be derelict said Biden testimony was “off the table.” could cost them in November. in its duty to the country if it didn’t THE WEEK January 31, 2020
Illustration by Fred Harper. Cover photos from Reuters, MLB, Getty
Getty
What happened
... and how they were covered
NEWS 5
Pro–gun rights activists rally in Virginia What happened
What the columnists said
Virginia’s Democratic-controlled legislature So much for the media’s “hysterical” predicpushed ahead with a package of gun-control tions, said Dan Gainor in FoxNews.com. laws this week, after 22,000 gun-rights activFrom the run-up coverage you’d have thought ists from across the nation—many dressed we were facing “the start of the second civil in camouflage and carrying military-style war,” or at least a repeat of the bloody 2017 rifles—gathered outside the Capitol to protest Charlottesville protest. Instead, we got “a ralthe planned restrictions. Fears of violence ran ly so peaceful that the protesters even picked high in the days before the demonstration. up their own trash.” The protesters should be The FBI last week arrested three members of a lauded, said the Washington Examiner in an white supremacist group called The Base who editorial. They’re speaking out against laws allegedly hoped to spark a race war by shoot- Armed protesters on the streets of Richmond that would “make a mockery of due process ing civilians and police officers at the rally. The and create more barriers for law-abiding potential presence of extremist groups led Gov. Ralph Northam, a citizens to exercise” their Second Amendment rights. Democrat, to temporarily ban firearms from Capitol grounds. But the hours-long demonstration in Richmond unfolded peacefully, Let’s call this rally what it really was, said Will Bunch in The with protesters chanting “We will not comply” and “USA! USA!” Philadelphia Inquirer: “An outbreak of terrorism on American soil.” Wearing face masks and carting “enough firepower to defeat After taking control of the state government last fall for the first the Ukrainian army”—one man packed a military-grade .50-caliber time in 26 years, Democrats promised to swiftly enact new limits sniper rifle—this armed gang aimed to terrify lawmakers. In part, on firearms. The package working its way through the legislature they succeeded. One legislator took shelter in a safe house after being includes bills that would impose universal background checks and bombarded with “death threats from these ‘patriotic Americans.’” a one-handgun-a-month purchase limit, and allow the temporary confiscation of firearms from people deemed a threat to themselves The protesters are being driven by fear, said Petula Dvorak in The or others. The bills have rankled many rural residents in a state that’s Washington Post. Many believe that a “red flag” law allowing long supported gun rights, and over 100 municipalities have declared weapons to be removed from mentally troubled individuals is part themselves “Second Amendment sanctuaries.” But Democrats said of a left-wing gun-confiscation conspiracy. But two-thirds of all gun they were responding to the concerns of their constituents, many of deaths in Virginia are suicides, and most of those who kill themwhom demanded action after 12 people died in a mass shooting in selves are rural white males over the age of 45. That almost perfectly Virginia Beach last year. “You will see sensible gun violence prevendescribes the demographic at the rally. “Think about it guys. The tion legislation pass this year,” said Democratic Del. Alfonso Lopez. biggest thing you have to fear, when it comes to guns, is yourselves.”
Zuma/Newscom
Supreme Court may allow public aid to religious schools What happened
What the columnists said
The Supreme Court appeared ready this week to knock down state rules that block government aid to religious schools, a potential watershed victory for the Christian right. The court’s five conservatives seemed to side with the Trump administration during oral arguments for Espinoza v. Montana, in which three low-income parents claim their rights were violated when the state excluded religious schools from a 2015 state tax credit program. The Montana Supreme Court ultimately struck down the entire program, saying it violated the state constitution’s ban on taxpayer dollars supporting religious education, even indirectly. Thirty-six state constitutions have “no-aid” provisions similar to Montana’s. Chief Justice John Roberts compared the parents’ plight to racial bias. “How is that different from religion, which is also protected under the First Amendment?” he asked.
This case could be a game changer for victims of religious discrimination, said Michael Helfand in The Wall Street Journal. It’s been “obvious for a long time” that laws like Montana’s “single out religious institutions for worse treatment than their secular counterparts.” In 2017, the Lutheran church playground case focused on “discriminatory impact,” but the justices now have an opportunity to dramatically broaden religious liberty, in areas such as school choice, by cracking down on “discriminatory intent.”
The case could have far-reaching consequences, as the court increasingly expands the ability of faith-based institutions to receive taxpayer dollars. In 2017, for example, the justices ruled 7-2 that a Lutheran church in Missouri could use public funds to resurface its playground, with Roberts calling the state’s restrictions “odious to our Constitution.” Montana’s tax credits were meant to benefit private schools in general, but the bulk of them ended up going to religious schools. Now that the program has been eliminated, several justices questioned whether the issue is still relevant. “I am having trouble seeing where the harm in this case is,” Justice Elena Kagan said. “There is no discrimination at this point.”
Justice Brett Kavanaugh correctly noted that the “no aid” laws are “rooted in grotesque religious bigotry,” said Nick Sibilla in TheAtlantic.com. These provisions are often called Blaine Amendments, after the congressman who nearly passed a federal constitutional amendment in 1876 barring state funding for religious schools. Blaine Amendments targeted Catholic immigrants who felt public schools clashed with their values. Across the country, these laws continue to “hide their prejudice behind a fig leaf of neutrality.” That has things exactly backward, said Rachel Laser in Washington Post.com. “Private religious schools don’t adhere to the same nondiscrimination laws that public schools do.” Those schools have denied admission “because a student or parent is LGBTQ,” and fired teachers “for being pregnant and unmarried.” Funding religious institutions while giving them exemptions from laws they don’t like “is not equal treatment—it’s religious privilege.” THE WEEK January 31, 2020
6 NEWS
Controversy of the week
Houston Astros: Do cheaters sometimes prosper? behind the outfield wall, said Will Leitch in Until last week, baseball’s Houston Astros NYMag.com. We learned a few years ago were considered the “defining team” of the that the New York Giants’ Bobby Thomson 2010s, said Jeremy Venook in TheAtlantic was tipped off to the pitch he hit for the .com. That may still be true, but in the worst “Shot Heard ’Round the World” homer way possible. Major League Baseball revealed to win the 1951 National League pennant. last week that the Astros ran an elaborate “Players will always try to gain an advansign-stealing scheme during their 2017 chamtage,” especially now that success can bring pionship season, using a video camera in their tens of millions of dollars. A periodic cheathome stadium to read the opposing team’s ing scandal is part of what makes baseball so signs from catcher to pitcher, decoding the colorful and “absolutely irresistible.” signs on a monitor near the dugout, and then Astros celebrating their tainted championship alerting their hitter—by banging on a garbage That view is both deeply cynical and wrong, said Thomas Boswell can—what pitch to expect. There is also unconfirmed speculation in The Washington Post. Baseball isn’t pro wrestling; most fans that some players wore electronic buzzers under their uniforms. want to believe that they’re watching fair contests, and this scanThe scheme was evidently highly effective: In the 2017 playoffs, dal “has been a giant boulder heaved in the center of the lake” of Astros star José Altuve batted .472 at home and only .173 on the road, while for catcher Brian McCann, the difference was .300 vs. baseball’s credibility. Just ask fans of the teams the Astros beat in .037. The league’s toothless response made this scandal even more the playoffs and World Series in 2017 if they think their cheating damaging, said Mike Downey in CNN.com. The Astros were fined was colorful and entertaining. a paltry $5 million and fired their manager and general manager after MLB suspended them. But not a single player “has gotten the Some cynicism is warranted, said Bryan Graham in TheGuardian .com. Thomson’s homer and the Giants’ victory stands. So does heave-ho or lost a red cent,” and their diamond-encrusted rings the Astros’ World Championship, and the New England Patriots’ “will still have ‘2017 World Series Champions’ etched into them, six Super Bowl victories after they were caught deflating footballs forever and ever.” Let’s face it: “The bad guys won.” and spying on other teams’ practices and coaches’ signals. After That’s not quite true, said Barry Svrluga in WashingtonPost.com. the 2008 economic collapse, Wall Street fraudsters didn’t go to Former Astros players Alex Cora and Carlos Beltrán—who were jail, and the banks that “separated millions of Americans from deeply involved in setting up the sign stealing—both lost managetheir homes, their jobs, and their life savings” got bailed out. In rial jobs this week, and the Astros’ championship will be “forever America, a “grudging respect” for winning at any cost is woven stained.” And how could MLB punish active players or void the into our “spiritual DNA.” We’re told as children that “cheaters Astros’ championship when sign stealing has been “baked into never win,” said Doug McIntyre in the Los Angeles Daily News, baseball culture for a century?” In 1876, the Hartford Dark Blues but we soon find out that life isn’t always fair. Cheaters do win. were caught stealing signs by hiding a man on a telegraph pole “Sometimes, they win bigly.”
Q A deaf man is suing Pornhub.com because some of its X-rated videos lack subtitles. Yaroslav Suris of Brooklyn claims that a lack of closed captions violates the Americans With Disabilities Act and prevents him from fully enjoying such titles as “Hot Step Aunt Babysits Disobedient Nephew.’’ Pornhub responded that “we do have a closed-captions category.” Q A proposed housing development in San Francisco would include tiny underground “sleeping pods” that could rent for $1,350 a month. The subterranean, windowless pods would be only slightly larger than a king-size mattress but could appeal to young workers who can’t afford the sky-high rents of aboveground San Francisco. “I can see this living arrangement isn’t for everyone,” concedes developer Chris Elsey. THE WEEK January 31, 2020
Good week for: Vladimir Putin, after radio station KCXL in Kansas City announced
it would broadcast six hours of daily content from Radio Sputnik, a Russian state-media outlet. KCXL’s website boasts of broadcasting “the things that the liberal media wont [sic] tell you.” Decluttering, after a Brazilian family cleaned out their late father’s cluttered storage room and discovered Manuela, the family tortoise, who went missing in 1982 but sustained herself by eating termites. “I went white,” said owner Leandro Almeida. Destiny, after a brawny visitor to Disneyland managed to pull a model of Excalibur, King Arthur’s legendary sword, out of a model stone, thus arguably revealing himself as the future king of England. A friend of the future king, whom he identified only as “Sam,” says he’s “a pretty buff dude.”
Bad week for: The New York Times, which was widely mocked on both the
Left and Right for an editorial endorsing both, or either, Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar for the Democratic presidential nomination. “An endorsement,” explained editorial board member Mara Gay, “isn’t about supporting a candidate, necessarily.” Sustainable farming, after Polish police determined that a missing pig farmer was eaten by his own pigs after he either fell asleep or had a heart attack. “These pigs are gigantic,” said a neighbor. The cold-blooded, after temperatures dropping into the low 40s left stunned Florida iguanas dropping from trees. Iguana meat, often called “chicken of the trees,” immediately showed up on Facebook Marketplace.
White House brings burgers and fries back to school The Trump administration announced last week that it would roll back former first lady Michelle Obama’s signature initiative: school lunch nutritional standards. The reversal, which came on her 56th birthday, affects nearly 30 million students at 99,000 schools. Federal rules will now let schools serve half a cup of fruit and vegetables for breakfast instead of a full cup, replacing the calories with pastries and granola bars. At lunch, schools can now serve pizza and burgers as à la carte items and satisfy the daily vegetable requirement with French fries—a change requested by the potato lobby. Last year, the USDA reported that schools had improved the nutritional value of cafeteria food after cutting back on sodium, starch, and trans fats. AP
Only in America
The U.S. at a glance ...
Reuters (3)
Seattle Royal hack: Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman sent Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos a video file containing malware in a WhatsApp chat in 2018 that enabled his security service to WhatsApp, Jeff? hack Bezos’ phone, a cybersecurity firm hired by Bezos alleged this week. U.N. experts said the hack was part of a “massive online campaign” against Bezos in the months before the Saudi heir known as MBS ordered the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. Bezos, who owns the Post, and MBS allegedly exchanged friendly texts before Bezos received a file that let the Saudis siphon massive troves of data. Bezos has accused Saudi Arabia of feeding the National Enquirer photos and information about his affair with Lauren Sanchez. Months after the alleged hack, MBS appeared to taunt Bezos by sending him a photo of a woman who looked like Sanchez with a sarcastic caption. Riyadh called the claim that Saudi Arabia hacked the phone “absurd.” Washington, D.C. Redacted in full: The Justice Department ignored a court order and failed to release memos about Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-inlaw and senior adviser, CNN .com reported last week. Last Kushner’s secrets October, a judge granted a Freedom of Information Act request by CNN and BuzzFeed News, requiring that a batch of interview notes from Robert Mueller’s team be made public each month. The department has produced more than 800 pages of memos, many of which are heavily redacted, yet the Kushner documents set to be released this month were entirely missing. The Justice Department gave no reason for excluding the Kushner interview. The latest notes that were released detail how Fox News host Sean Hannity served as a “back channel” to Trump, especially in text messages with former campaign chairman Paul Manafort after he was indicted. Manafort told investigators that Hannity urged him to “hang in there” because “Trump had his back.”
New York Investigating the investigator: Pope Francis has ordered an investigation into a sexual abuse allegation against Brooklyn Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio, who himself was tapped last September by the Vatican to investigate an abuse scandal at the diocese in Buffalo. Mark Matzek, 56, alleges he was repeatedly abused in the 1970s by the late Rev. Albert Mark and by DiMarzio when he was a parish priest in Jersey City, the Associated Press reported this week. DiMarzio said he’d be “fully vindicated” by the probe. His investigation into accusations that the Buffalo diocese let an abusive priest remain on the job led to the resignation of Bishop Richard Malone last month. Matzek seeks $20 million in compensation, suing at the start of a two-year “look back” period in New Jersey that exempts sexual abuse victims from the statute of limitations.
Washington, D.C. Claim delayed: The Supreme Court denied a motion this week to review an attack on the Affordable Care Act before the presidential election. House Democrats and 20 Democratic-led states had pushed for an “emergency” appeal, hoping to draw voters’ attention to a Republican lawsuit that could gut the health-care law. The Trump administration argues that because Congress reduced the tax penalty on individuals who don’t buy insurance to $0, the rest of the ACA should be invalidated. In December, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed that the individual mandate is now unconstitutional, but didn’t address whether it can be “severed” from the statute. District Judge Reed O’Connor of Texas ruled in 2018 that the entire law must go, staying his decision pending appeal. Democrats said the case poses a “severe, immediate” threat to millions of Americans, but the Supreme Court could now take years to weigh in.
NEWS 7
Boston One-way ticket: Immigration officials defied a judge’s order this week and sent a student back to Iran who’d been granted a visa to attend Northeastern University. Shahab Dehghani Dehghani, 24, was detained at Boston’s Logan International Airport, and NBC News reports that he was deemed to have family connections to individuals “intricately involved” in a terrorist organization. At least 11 Iranians with valid student visas have been blocked from entering the U.S. since August, amid growing military tension with Iran. Dehghani’s attorneys filed an emergency petition, and Judge Richard Stearns ordered a 48-hour stay before a hearing. Nevertheless, Customs and Border Protection agents put Dehghani—who previously studied in Boston from 2016 to 2017—on a plane to France. Stearns said he couldn’t compel CBP agents to bring Dehghani back to the U.S. “I don’t think they’re going to listen to me,” he said.
Ponce, Puerto Rico Wasted aid: Puerto Ricans devastated by an onslaught of natural disasters Expired aid expressed outrage after a warehouse full of unused food, water, diapers, medicine, cots, and propane tanks was discovered last week. The disaster-relief supplies, many of which are now expired, date back to Hurricane Maria, which led to the deaths of an estimated 3,000 Puerto Ricans in 2017. After enduring hundreds of earthquakes and aftershocks this month, residents stormed the warehouse in the southern city of Ponce, leading Gov. Wanda Vazquez to fire Carlos Acevedo, director of the territory’s Office of Emergency Management, plus several senior officials. As Puerto Rico fights for the release of $20 billion in relief funds allocated by Congress, the Trump administration imposed strict terms last week for delivering most of that aid, including a requirement that Puerto Rico pay contractors working on disaster relief less than $15 an hour. THE WEEK January 31, 2020
8 NEWS
The world at a glance ...
St. John’s, Newfoundland Buried by blizzard: The Canadian military was deployed to help dig out residents of Newfoundland and Labrador this week after a howling blizzard dumped mounds of snow in a matter of hours, burying cars and houses. The storm underwent a process known as bombogenesis, Digging out its central air pressure dropping like a bomb and generating furious winds of up to 90 miles an hour. Those winds slammed snowdrifts up against houses and businesses, and residents posted images online of their open front doors blocked by solid walls of snow. On some highways, the drifts were up to 15 feet high. St. John’s and other cities declared a state of emergency. “Newfoundlanders are going to be talking about this for a very, very long time,” said meteorologist Ashley Brauweiler.
Oslo Anger over ISIS wife: Norway’s government was close to collapse this week after the populist Progress Party quit the ruling coalition over its decision to repatriate from Syria a woman with suspected links to ISIS. The unnamed 29-year-old—who left Norway in 2013 and married twice in Syria—was brought back to Norway from a Kurdish-controlled detention camp so that her seriously ill 5-year-old son could receive medical treatment. Progress Party leader Siv Jensen said his members were prepared to welcome the woman’s two children but opposed letting in “people who have voluntarily joined terrorist organizations” and want “to tear down all the values Norway is built on.” The government said the mother was arrested upon arrival in Norway and that the children were in state care. Hundreds of European jihadists and their families remain in Syrian detention camps.
Paris Hounding Macron: A weeks-long series of paralyzing national strikes over President Emmanuel Macron’s pension reform plan has largely petered out, as cash-short employees reluctantly head back to work. But now furious protesters have begun targeting Macron personally. Last week, after journalist and activist Taha Bouhafs tweeted that Macron was attending a play at a Paris theater and asked if he should throw his shoe at the president, protesters besieged the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord. Police said they had to briefly “secure” Macron and his wife, Brigitte; the couple then watched the play to its end. That same night, La Rotonde, a restaurant Macron frequents, was set on fire by arsonists. Protesters also broke into and trashed the headquarters of the moderate CFDT union, which supports Macron’s pension plan.
Pedro Juan Caballero, Paraguay Huge prison break: At least 75 inmates, including members of Brazil’s most notorious cartel, have escaped from a Paraguayan prison on the Brazilian border. Authorities said inmates dug a long tunnel out of the prison but noted that the tunnel may have been a ruse to cover the complicity of prison officials who let the inmates walk out of the main gate. “We are certain that there was a scandalous conspiracy with security guards,” said Justice Minister Cecilia Pérez. The escapees belong to the violent crime syndicate First Capital Command, which has some 30,000 members in Brazil and traffics in weapons and drugs. A day after the Paraguayan jailbreak, another 26 cartel members escaped The tunnel: A ruse? from a Brazilian prison. THE WEEK January 31, 2020
Brasília American reporter charged: Brazilian prosecutors have charged American journalist Glenn Greenwald with cybercrimes for his alleged role in obtaining damning mesGreenwald sages from the cellphones of several Brazilian officials. The messages, published on Greenwald’s website The Intercept Brazil, showed that Sérgio Moro—the judge who presided over the corruption investigation that brought down former President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva—was in improper contact with prosecutors. Moro is now justice minister under right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro. Prosecutors claim Greenwald didn’t merely report on the hacked messages but actively assisted in the hack. “I did nothing more than do my job as a journalist—ethically and within the law,” said Greenwald, who lives in Rio de Janeiro with his husband, city council member David Miranda, a socialist.
Reuters (2), AP (2)
Ciudad Hidalgo, Mexico Turning back migrants: There were violent scenes on the Mexican-Guatemalan border this week as Mexican security forces pushed back hundreds of Central Americans trying to enter the country and head north to the U.S. National Guard officers wielding plastic shields blocked the migrants when they tried to cross a bridge over the river that separates Mexico and Guatemala. Migrants then tried to ford Denied entry the river but were repelled by troops firing tear gas. Mexico once let caravans of migrants freely traverse the country, but changed the policy following threats of sanctions from President Trump. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said migrants should only enter the country legally, because if they go undocumented, “the criminal gangs grab them and assault them.”
The world at a glance ...
Reuters, AP (2), Newscom
Beirut New government, same problems: After three months of deadlock, Lebanon announced the formation of a new government this week—and it has a lot on its plate. The country is deeply in debt, and the massive anti-corruption protests that led Prime Minister Saad Hariri to resign last October are still raging. Hassan Diab, a former education minister, will now serve as prime minister; his candidacy was supported by Hezbollah—the Shiite militia and political movement—and its Christian ally, the Free Patriotic Movement. Diab said the new government “represents the aspirations of the demonstrators.” Lebanon’s governance is based on quotas for different religions and has resulted in a patronage system with an entrenched ruling elite. Protesters said those same elites chose the new government, and hours after the cabinet was announced, thousands took to the streets, throwing fireworks at riot police, who hit back with rubber bullets, tear gas, and water cannons.
Luanda, Angola Massive corruption: Angolan authorities have seized the domestic assets of Africa’s richest woman, Isabel dos Santos, saying she and her husband looted the state of more than $1 billion. Documents obtained by the Platform to Protect Whistleblowers in Africa revealed how Dos Santos acquired stakes in the country’s diamond industry, its biggest cement maker, two of its biggest banks, and state oil giant Sonangol through her father, José Eduardo dos Santos—strongman president of the resource-rich nation from 1979 to 2017. His hand-picked successor, João Lourenço, launched an anti-corruption drive soon after taking office. He fired Dos Santos as chair of Sonangol; hours after her sacking, $38 million was transferred from the oil firm to a shell company in Dubai run by one of her friends. Dos Santos, who lives in the U.K., denies the allegations and says she is the victim Dos Santos: Cash grab? of a “witch hunt.”
NEWS 9
Wuhan, China Virus goes global: A new respiratory illness that has killed at least 17 people in China and sickened hundreds more is spreading rapidly at home and abroad just as China’s busiest travel season gets underway. The disease, which broke out in the city of Wuhan, is a coronavirus, Hospital staff in Wuhan like SARS, and likely came from animals but is now being transmitted from person to person. At least 15 health-care workers have contracted the illness, which can cause pneumonia. China’s Lunar New Year holidays began this week, and some 400 million people are expected to crowd airports and pack into buses and trains to visit relatives; no one is being allowed in or out of Wuhan. Cases of the coronavirus have been confirmed in Thailand, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and the U.S. A Washington state resident who fell ill after returning from Wuhan last week has been placed in isolation at a hospital north of Seattle. He is faring well, and authorities are tracing people with whom he might have been in contact. China has a history of covering up epidemics—notably in 2003, when it underreported deaths from SARS and falsely claimed that the virus was under control. SARS killed nearly 800 people. This time, authorities are promising to be transparent and honest with the World Health Organization. A government agency said anyone who concealed new cases would “be nailed on the pillar of shame for eternity.” Al-Asad Air Base, Iraq Casualties from Iran attack: After saying that no Americans were harmed in the Iranian ballistic missile attack on a U.S. military base in Iraq in early January, the Pentagon has reversed its position, saying some two dozen personnel are being treated for possible Targeted by Iran concussions. Eleven service members were transported last week to U.S. medical facilities in Germany and Kuwait—where they can be screened for traumatic brain injuries—and another group followed this week. President Trump said he’d heard that some troops had “headaches,” but “it’s not very serious.” The perceived lack of casualties was believed to have played a role in President Trump’s decision not to further escalate the conflict. The Iranian attack was retaliation for a U.S. drone strike that killed Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad. Canberra, Australia Plague of hail: Australia can’t catch a break from the weather. Even as wildfires continued to blaze across much of the drought-parched country, a series of strong storms blew through the southeast this week, dumping baseball-size hailstones that smashed office windows and car windshields in Canberra, Sydney, and Melbourne. “It was like Armageddon,” said Canberra resident Hilary Wardhaugh. Powerful winds whipped up giant dust storms in rural parts of New South Wales, darkening the daytime sky. And in some areas, an inch of rain fell in only 30 minutes, causing flash floods. Despite the welcome rain, the fire danger continues. Since September, bushfires have killed at least 30 people, destroyed more than 2,000 homes, and consumed 38,000 square miles of land, Smashed by baseball-size hailstones an area nearly the size of Virginia. THE WEEK January 31, 2020
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People
Densmore’s tribute to Morrison The Doors’ drummer John Densmore was too angry to attend Jim Morrison’s funeral, said Jenny Stevens in The Guardian (U.K.). It took Densmore three years to visit the grave of his bandmate, who was found dead in a Paris bathtub in 1971. “Did I hate Jim?” Densmore asks. “No, I hated his self-destruction.” Morrison, the Doors’ lead singer and lyricist, was a charismatic rock star and poet who grew increasingly menacing as his alcoholism and drug use spiraled out of control; Densmore, 75, has called him a “psychopath,” “lunatic,” and “kamikaze.” The drummer was 21 when he met Morrison. Their friendship frayed as Densmore witnessed Morrison’s violent behavior, once walking in on him brandishing a knife at a woman. He even quit the band at one point after pleading with Morrison to slow down. “Some people wanted to keep shoveling coal in the engine,” he says. “I was like, ‘Wait a minute. So what if we have one less album? Maybe he’ll live?’” Over time, however, Densmore has become a fierce protector of Morrison’s legacy, once fighting with bandmates who wanted to take $15 million to let Cadillac use “Break on Through” in commercials. “It took me years to forgive Jim,” Densmore says. “And now I miss him so much for his artistry.”
The A-list’s divorce attorney
Q Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt ignited gleeful speculation this week when the former couple chatted happily and embraced backstage at the SAG Awards. Aniston, 50, and Pitt, 56, who are both single again 15 years after they divorced, were photographed beaming and briefly holding hands. Pitt teared up while watching Aniston accept an award for The Morning Show, while Aniston laughed and clapped at Pitt’s joke about his failed marriage to Angelina Jolie. “It was a difficult part,” Pitt said of his award-winning THE WEEK January 31, 2020
Where Perez gets her fire Rosie Perez can frighten directors with her intensity, said David Marchese in The New York Times Magazine. A famously ferocious performer, the actress has sometimes been told on film sets that she’s too “difficult” and emotionally explosive. “You’re hiring me because I wear my heart on my sleeve,” says Perez, 55. She admits to being easily triggered, because her childhood left her with what she calls “severe PTSD and chronic depression.” Born in New York City to a single mother, the young Perez was sent to an upstate Catholic group home, where she was sexually abused by nuns. “The patriarchy surrounded me,” she says. “That was one of the major reasons nuns were so angry. They have no power within the system.” As a young adult, Perez ignored the advice of her psychiatrist and decided to visit the group home in the hope that it would be cathartic. “There were just more demons brought in,” she says. “Night terrors started coming like a faucet. I never want to go back to that place.” The abuse ruined “dogma” and organized religion for her, but she still prays. “I do believe in energy. The energy of love is necessary for me. That’s my religion. I made my own church.”
role in Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood— “a guy who gets high, takes his shirt off, and doesn’t get on with his wife.” Brad has called Aniston “a good friend,” and they’ve both laughed off rumors about reuniting. Upon receiving his trophy, Pitt said, “I gotta add this to my Tinder profile.”
borderline personality disorder and Crohn’s disease. His exes include Ariana Grande, Kate Beckinsale, Margaret Qualley, and Larry David’s daughter Cazzie. “It got very overwhelming for Kaia,” a source told the New York Post. “Pete has a certain MO, and he’s very intense to his girlfriends.”
Q Saturday Night Live’s Pete Davidson may be seeking mental health treatment after yet another breakup with a celebrity—this time, model Kaia Gerber. Davidson, 26, dated Gerber, 18, for three months and reportedly held “crisis talks” with her parents, tequila tycoon Rande Gerber and model-actress Cindy Crawford, about his mental health. Seen this week walking in his hometown of Staten Island, N.Y., with multicolored painted nails and an apparent joint in hand, Davidson recently sought help for “long-term issues” and has openly discussed struggles with
Q In a new anti-gun protest song, Eminem raps from the perspective of Las Vegas mass shooter Stephen Paddock. “Darkness” imagines Paddock’s thoughts before he fatally shot 58 people and injured hundreds more at a Las Vegas music festival in 2017. “Law says sky’s the limit, so my supply’s infinite,” Eminem raps about his arsenal as an actor fires out of a hotel window at screaming crowds. The video ends with the text “When will this end? When enough people care. Register to vote.” The album is called Music to Be Murdered By.
Getty (2), Shutterstock
Laura Wasser is one of Hollywood’s go-to divorce attorneys, said Hunter Harris in NYMag.com. She’s represented Angelina Jolie (versus Brad Pitt and Billy Bob Thornton), Britney Spears (versus Kevin Federline), Maria Shriver (versus Arnold Schwarzenegger), and a handful of Kardashians. She also represented Jennifer Jason Leigh in her divorce from Noah Baumbach, who directed the Oscar contender Marriage Story and almost surely based Laura Dern’s character on Wasser. The portrayal toed the line between realistic and satirical, says Wasser, 51. Dern’s character, who lacerates her client’s ex in court, “served as a good character in a cautionary tale,” Wasser says: “If you don’t want to have somebody like this representing your spouse, you ought to really think carefully about how you embark upon the road to divorce.” While divorce will always be difficult, Wasser says, lawyers and courts now mostly strive to limit the damage to the people involved. There’s less emphasis on destroying the reputation of your former spouse, especially for celebrities. “I tell clients all the time, ‘You may not be married to this person anymore, but this person, particularly if you have kids, is still in your family. You better figure out a way to deal with them and not burn too many bridges.’”
Briefing
NEWS 11
The battle over voting Democrats accuse the GOP of trying to discourage millions of citizens from casting ballots. Is that true?
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What is the dispute about?
have come to feel that “you need to push up against the rules to Since the 2010 election, 25 states have win.” In many states, the rules have instituted new restrictions that make it changed, thanks to a 5-4 decision harder to vote. The measures include by the Supreme Court’s conservashorter voting hours; the shuttering of tive majority in 2013 that struck polling places in minority neighbordown parts of the Voting Rights hoods; new limitations on early votAct of 1965. That law had required ing, especially on college campuses; certain states and local governments new voter identification laws requiring (mostly in the South) to clear any a state-issued photo ID to cast a balchanges to their voting practices lot; and new restrictions on Election with the Justice Department. Within Day registration. All these provisions, 24 hours of the ruling, Texas instiDemocrats say, have a very distinct goal: tuted a strict photo ID law and to suppress voting among constituencies Mississippi and Alabama began that tend to vote Democratic, including Ex-felon Desmond Meade registering to vote in Florida enforcing photo ID laws that had blacks and Hispanics, the poor, young been previously blocked as discriminatory. (Minorities, the poor, people, and shift workers. Georgia, for example, has adopted an “exact match” system that rejects a voter’s registration form if the and the young are less likely to have driver’s licenses or other name on it differs from the person’s name in the state system by so photo ID.) Since the ruling, states formerly covered by the Voting Rights Act’s restrictions have shuttered 1,688 polling places. much as a hyphen, apostrophe, or middle initial—a law that critics have wryly termed “disenfranchisement by typo.” Other states Does voter suppression work? have conducted campaigns to purge voters who have not voted in consecutive elections, or have moved or failed to reply to mailings. Charles Stewart III, an expert on elections at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said research shows that voter suppression From 2014 to 2018, 33 million voter registrations were purged efforts “might reduce turnout by a percentage point or two.” In nationwide. “It’s shocking,” said Dr. Daniel A. Smith, chair of dozens of recent races, a single percentage point has proved decithe political science department at the University of Florida. “We sive. In Georgia’s 2018 midterm election, Democratic gubernatodon’t ask gun owners to fire their weapons every two years and rial candidate Stacey Abrams lost to Republican Brian Kemp by revoke their licenses four years later if they don’t.” only 54,723 votes out of a total 3.9 million cast. Some voters in predominantly African-American districts said they had to wait as What is driving these new rules and laws? Republicans claim the efforts are necessary to combat voter fraud. long as four hours to cast a ballot, while others claimed they never received requested absentee ballots. Kemp, who oversaw the elecNumerous studies, however, have shown that fraud—especially tion as secretary of state, had purged at least 1.4 million voters in impersonating someone else—is extraordinarily rare. After the the years preceding the election. Democrats also point to Florida, 2016 presidential election, in which 136 million votes were cast, where 65 percent of the public voted by referendum to “autolaw enforcement officials in 34 states found a total of eight credmatically” reinstate 1.5 million–plus felons’ ability to vote when ible instances of fraud. Conservatives they’ve completed their sentences. also argue that routine purging of voter Republicans responded by passing a rolls is necessary to remove those who Imprisoned for casting a ballot law prohibiting ex-felons from voting are dead or have moved away. A 2012 Crystal Mason has paid a very personal price until they’ve settled all court-ordered study by the Pew Center on the States for the debate over voter fraud. On Nov. 8, fines, fees, and restitution—which can found 24 million registrations that were 2016, the 44-year-old Texas mother of three add up to thousands of dollars. Critics either invalid or inaccurate. Claims that found her name was not on the voting registry at her longtime polling place, the Tabernacle call that costly requirement “a modern voter registration purges are partisan poll tax.” and unfair, said David Harsanyi, a senior Baptist Church in Rendon. She had recently concluded a five-year federal sentence for tax writer for the National Review, are fraud, and filled out a provisional ballot; offiHow are Democrats responding? “destructive scaremongering meant to cials told her that if her credentials checked out, In advance of the 2020 elections, the undermine American belief in the veracher vote would count. What she says she did party has filed lawsuits across the ity of our elections.” not know is that Texas bars felons from voting country challenging the new restriceven after they are released (a law that covers tions. Republicans are planning their Why change voting rules now? 500,000 released felons), and Mason was later own counterattack. Justin Clark, a Democrats say the campaign to arrested on charges of voting illegally. Although senior adviser to President Trump’s rerestrict voting is actually motivated her vote was never counted, she was sent back election campaign, was recorded at a by Republican fear that the white, to federal prison for 10 months for violating private event in Wisconsin on Nov. 21 older population is gradually losing its the terms of her parole, and a state judge senadmitting that “traditionally, it’s majority status to Latino and Asian tenced her to an additional five years in prison always been Republicans suppressing immigrants and younger, left-leaning for voting illegally. Mason is appealing that votes.” In 2020, Clark told a crowd of voters. Nathaniel Persily, a Stanford conviction. “I’m not going to say that I regret fellow Republican lawyers, “it’s going University law professor who studies my situation,” she said, “because it has eduto be a much bigger program, a much voter’s-rights issues, said that given the cated me and it has educated my family and it more aggressive program, a much changing demographics and the current has educated a lot of people.” better-funded program.” hyperpartisan atmosphere, Republicans THE WEEK January 31, 2020
How to help workers get paid more David Brooks
The New York Times
Best columns: The U.S. Like Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders has a simple explanation for what’s wrong with America, said David Brooks. Both blame “a malevolent, elite ‘they’” who are “destroying life for the rest of us.” In Sanders’ classwar narrative, capitalism itself is the problem, with evil billionaires and CEOs rigging the economy to benefit themselves and oppress the workers. Now, income inequality is a real problem, and it’s true that less educated workers need more “bargaining power” in dealing with employers. The root of the problem, however, is that in the “global, information-age economy,” highly skilled workers are in demand and are getting paid well while low-skilled workers have no real leverage. They lack the technological skills and specialized knowledge to provide the productivity that companies need and reward. The solution is not for government to punish “superstar companies” or shut down the global economy, which would hurt everyone. We need to help the left-behind workers catch up, “by having better schools and better vocational training” and by creating incentives for companies to invest in making their workforces more productive and valuable. An “us-versus-them political ideology” is “emotionally satisfying” but will solve nothing.
Trump has pulled off what no president in history has done, Getting away Donald said Anita Kumar: “fusing his private business interests with America’s public office.” Trump has made a mockery of his 2016 pledge with blatant highest to abstain from doing business while in the White House, leveraghis office to funnel millions of public dollars to his properties and self-enrichment ing creating a vast web of potential conflicts of interest. “The intersections Anita Kumar
Politico.com
Vaping panic will lead to more smoking Anthony Fisher
BusinessInsider.com
Viewpoint
between Trump Inc. and President Trump are everywhere.” To curry favor, conservative groups have spent more than $8 million at Trump properties since 2016, and T-Mobile executives stayed at Trump’s D.C. hotel while seeking approval for a merger. Foreign governments rent condos in his buildings, and state-owned companies in China, Saudi Arabia, and South Korea have built Trump-branded golf courses and condos. Trump himself has spent one out of three days as president at one of his own properties, charging taxpayers millions for not only the frequent flights but also the rooms used by aides and the Secret Service. In response to congressional investigations and lawsuits, Trump has dismissed the Constitution’s emoluments clause as “phony,” and insists the public doesn’t care. If he continues to get away with milking the presidency, he will be proved right. “It’s too late to unring the panic bell,” said Anthony Fisher, but America’s panic over vaping is the result of “mass ignorance.” The FDA’s pending ban on the sale of flavored vape cartridges will do nothing to prevent the lung illnesses caused by bootleg vapes. The CDC recently confirmed that the lung epidemic was “almost entirely confined” to users of bootleg THC cartridges laced with vitamin E acetate, not cartridges made by Juul or other companies. A second panic involved vapes with fruit and candy flavors, which critics say lured teens into becoming addicted to the nicotine in vaping fluid. Concerns about nicotine addiction are valid: A recent study found that 25 percent of high school seniors are vaping. But that statistic must be put into context. In 1996, 26.6 percent of 12th-graders smoked cigarettes daily; by 2018, just 3.6 percent smoked. That “is a remarkable public health victory.” For many teens and for millions of adults, vaping is an effective “smoking cessation tool”—less dangerous than cigarettes, which kill 500,000 Americans a year. Banning vape flavors will backfire, driving millions of teenagers and adults back into the arms of Big Tobacco.
“We’ve never made any gain in civil rights without constant, persistent, legal and nonviolent pressure. Don’t let anybody make you feel that the problem will work itself out. For those who are telling me to keep my mouth shut, I can’t do that. I’m against segregation at lunch counters, and I’m not going to segregate my moral concerns. And we must know on some positions, cowardice asks the question, ‘Is it safe?’ Expediency asks the question, ‘Is it politic?’ Vanity asks the question, ‘Is it popular?’ But conscience asks the question, ‘Is it right?’” Martin Luther King Jr. in a 1967 speech, quoted in TheAtlantic.com THE WEEK January 31, 2020
It must be true...
I read it in the tabloids Q A Kansas man has asked an
Iowa judge to let him engage in a sword duel with his exwife and her attorney so they can resolve their “disputes on the field of battle.” David Ostrom, 40, said in court papers that his former wife, Bridgette Ostrom, 38, and her attorney, Matthew Hudson, had “destroyed (him) legally,” so he is entitled to revenge. The judge, Ostrom contended, had the option to grant him trial by combat because it “has never been explicitly banned or restricted as a right in these United States.” He also requested 12 weeks’ time so he could obtain Japanese samurai swords. Q A British
TV reporter was pranked by an Australian camera crew into thinking that a koala bear was, in fact, a mythical maneating marsupial called a “drop bear.” Correspondent Debi Edward donned body armor and goggles during an on-air report as a park attendant handed her a koala and explained that it was a “really vicious” animal that drops from the trees to attack people with venomous fangs. A terrified Edward held the bear and gamely delivered her report before realizing she’d been scammed. “F---ing Aussies!” she exclaimed. Q Some moviegoers have
found a way to be entertained by the widely mocked film adaptation of Cats: taking hallucinogenic drugs beforehand. Hundreds of people have described their experiences watching it with the aid of LSD, magic mushrooms, or marijuana. “The most incredible cinematic experience of my life,” was how one viewer described it; a second said, “I swear to God my soul escaped me.” Another confessed he “vomited four times, but ultimately understood the film on a deep level.”
Sean Mulcahy/ITV
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14 NEWS ITALY
The mafias are now everywhere Dario Del Porto
La Repubblica
UNITED KINGDOM
Big Ben should sound our freedom Stephen Glover
Daily Mail
Best columns: Europe Organized crime gangs are operating all over Italy in every sector of society—including our government, said Dario Del Porto. That’s the grim takeaway from the most recent report by the police’s anti-Mafia investigation division, the DIA. The dreaded Calabrian ’Ndrangheta “is everywhere” in the north and is now being emulated by local clans. A gang in the southeastern province of Foggia tried to bomb a key witness in a criminal trial twice in the past month, drawing thousands of people into the streets there in protest. In Sicily, Cosa Nostra boss Matteo Messina Denaro is still in charge in the western province of Trapani, and the Palermo
Mafia “has intensified its relations with the U.S.” The Neapolitan Camorra, meanwhile, is so well structured that it sponsors gangs of youths that “constitute a sort of Camorra Academy.” These crime syndicates have expanded far beyond the traditional mob rackets of loan sharking and waste management. Public contracts are compromised at all levels, from city councils to Parliament, allowing gangs “to drain resources and launder money.” This infiltration of our politics and economy, the DIA says, is “more insidious than violence.” If the criminals can bribe their way to power, there’s not much hope for Italian democracy.
Our departure from the European Union on Jan. 31 will be a momentous occasion in British history, said Stephen Glover, and it ought to be marked by the bonging of Big Ben. The great bell in Parliament’s clock tower usually rings on the hour, but since renovation work began in 2017 it has been largely silent. Still, it does sound on Remembrance Sunday and New Year’s Eve—when a temporary floor is installed—so it could ring on Brexit Day. Naysayers, though, say sounding the bell would cause “grief and anguish” to those who voted Remain in the 2016 Brexit referendum. One peer, Lord Greaves, even claimed that official celebrations would “lead to scenes reminiscent of
Nazi Germany,” which seems rather fanciful. The House of Commons Commission, which controls such matters and is packed with Remainers, has been trying to portray the feat as impossible. It claimed that installing the temporary floor would cost a preposterous $650,000 and then, after Prime Minister Boris Johnson threw his support behind a crowdfunding scheme to raise the cash, announced it could not possibly accept donations. I can understand not wanting church bells to ring out, such as happens at the end of a war. Big Ben’s tolling, though, is not about thanks to God, but rather the national marking of time. Let it ring in our “new era.”
United Kingdom: Queen orders a ‘hard Megxit’
It’s “a hard Megxit,” said Clare Foges in The Times. The queen ruled that one must be all in or all out on royal duty, so her grandson is no longer a prince. But the deal looks like “a genuine win-win.” The Sussexes will get to winter in Aspen and summer in Tuscany, living their glamorous lives “without the drudgTHE WEEK January 31, 2020
With “legions of followers on Instagram, the couple are wellplaced to earn,” said Andrew Morton in The Sun. But a career as celebrities will hardly afford them the privacy they claim to desire. “If they thought they were under scrutiny before, they ain’t seen nothing yet.”
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ery of hospice openings in Carlisle.” And Despite their wish to be part-time royals, the quickness and cleanness of the decision Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have was a victory for the queen, whose “legend been booted from the family business, said as defender of the Firm is burnished.” No Victoria Ward in The Daily Telegraph. Foldoubt Harry will regret giving up his honlowing a summit with Harry, his brother, orary military titles; his decade in the BritPrince William, and their father, Prince ish army was reportedly one of the happiest Charles, Queen Elizabeth II made a warm periods of his life. “But there will be many but firm announcement last week that her consolations in a life which glitters.” 35-year-old grandson and his American-born wife would no longer be working members Oh, but Harry wants our pity, said Piers of the royal family. The couple will have to Morgan in the Daily Mail. In a poor-me stop using the title “Royal Highness” (they speech after the queen’s announcement, will remain the Duke and Duchess of SusHarry complained that the deal was not sex), will no longer receive public monies, what he wanted but that because of the and will repay the $3.1 million in taxpayer big bad media, he had “no option” but to funds used to renovate Frogmore Cottage, quit the monarchy. He’s still peddling the their home on the Windsor estate. Still, the tired narrative that racist coverage of his queen added, Harry, Meghan, and their biracial wife drove the couple away. In fact, 8-month-old son, Archie, will remain “much loved members of my family.” Despite being Meghan and Harry: No more public money Meghan and Harry have spent their “entire married life whining about everything cut off from the royal purse, the Sussexes won’t be hard up. Harry has an inheritance of $13 million from and everyone.” They’re nothing but “a pair of spoiled, entitled, hypocritical brats” who wanted to profit off being royals but his late mother, Diana, while Meghan has some $6.5 million not put in the work. The queen quite rightly said no, because she from her TV and endorsement work. Prince Charles will also won’t have royalty “flogging themselves to the highest bidders offer “private financial support” to the family “as they embark like grubby, tiara-clad second-hand car salesmen.” on a new independent life in Canada.”
Best columns: International
NEWS 15
Russia: Putin’s plot to stay in power he saw some secret polling that showed Russian President Vladimir Putin a deep plunge in his popularity. Even “no longer has an understudy,” said the “Russian establishment is tired of Ukrayinska Pravda (Ukraine). That is the him” and well aware of “his negative most obvious takeaway from Putin’s anrole as the main deterrent to Russia’s nouncement last week of a constitutional advancement.” Further evidence for shake-up and the subsequent mass resigthis theory is that Putin picked Mikhail nation of his government. Prime Minister Mishustin, the head of the tax service, Dmitri Medvedev—a Putin sidekick to be his new prime minister. Mishustin since the 1990s who obligingly served is known for one thing: “squeezing as placeholder president from 2008 to the remaining meager juices out of the 2012 when his boss bumped up against dying economy with an iron hand.” presidential term limits—has now been Putin has put him in charge because shunted to a new role as deputy head of he fears the eventual collapse of the the nation’s security council and is no A change in titles, not leadership, is coming. faltering economic system and he needs longer considered Putin’s automatic successor. Under Putin’s constitutional proposals, presidential powers someone “who will provide him cash at any cost—including the further strangulation of the Russian economy.” will be somewhat curtailed, with the national legislature choosing the prime minister and the government. The State Council, Mishustin is certainly no reformer, said Marc Bennetts in The up until now a largely decorative body, will get unspecified new Times (U.K.). Anti-corruption crusader Alexei Navalny published powers. These changes are likely Putin’s bid to preserve his authority when his final presidential term ends in 2024. Which post papers last week showing that Mishustin’s wife, Vladlena— named after Vladimir Lenin—declared income of nearly $13 milhe will then assume is uncertain, but he could be following the lion over the past nine years “despite not appearing to own a path set out by Kazakh dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev. After nearly 30 years as president, Nazarbayev transferred authority to business or have a job.” Little is known about Mishustin, 53, the obscure Security Council and then assumed leadership of that except that he owns a $10 million mansion and has a side hustle body. Today, in Kazakhstan, the new president “is forced to agree composing melodies for Russian pop idol Grigory Leps. Mishustin is irrelevant, said Boris Vishnevsky in Novaya Gazeta (Ruswith Nazarbayev on all key appointments and decisions.” sia). The new prime minister is just a “smoke screen for the main thing: preserving the existing system and Putin’s position at the Why shake things up now? asked Vladimir Milov in The Insider helm.” The constitutional rewrite won’t change ordinary Russians (Russia). Putin has four years until his term expires, and there is lives at all. And the “so-called transition that is talked about so no immediate economic crisis—just the usual slow decline and rot. The “only possible explanation is that Putin panicked” when much is merely from Putin to Putin.”
ISRAEL
Tell us what happened to Wallenberg Irwin Cotler
Haaretz
SOUTH KOREA
Our racist scorn for black athletes Editorial
AP
Hankyoreh
Seventy-five years after his disappearance, we still don’t know the fate of the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Jews during the Holocaust, said Irwin Cotler. Raoul Wallenberg, a non-Jew who was stationed at the Swedish Embassy in Hungary during World War II, is considered one of the Righteous Among the Nations because of his exceptional courage. Before he arrived in Budapest in July 1944, “some 440,000 Hungarian Jews had been deported to Auschwitz in 10 weeks—the fastest, cruelest, and most efficient mass murder of the Holocaust.” Over the next six months, Wallenberg rescued 100,000 Jews, by issuing diplomatic pass-
ports, setting up diplomatic safe houses, and warning Nazi generals that they would be executed for war crimes if they bombed Budapest’s ghetto. Yet “he was not himself saved.” The Soviets, who entered Hungary as liberators in January 1945, sent Wallenberg to the gulag and claimed he died there two years later. International inquiries, though, found compelling evidence that he was alive in the 1960s and possibly lived into the ’80s. Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was in Israel this week to speak at the International Holocaust Commemorative Forum, should open the archives and tell us the fate of this “hero of humanity.”
Racist Koreans are making African-American basketball players feel unwelcome, said the Hankyoreh in an editorial. Ricardo Ratliffe, the star center of South Korea’s national team, started playing here in 2012 and became a naturalized citizen in 2018. Legions of young Koreans look up to him. Yet, he revealed last week, whenever he has a bad game, fans send him messages on social media telling him to “go back” to his own country and calling him “the Korean equivalent of the N-word.” After Ratliffe’s complaint, Brandon Brown, another AfricanAmerican player, came forward to say that he, too, is a victim of racist posts, including messages
hoping he will die in a car crash. The abuse is particularly upsetting when we consider that Korean athletes have themselves been subject to racism when they play abroad. Just last year, the South Korean women’s volleyball team was mocked by its Russian opponents, “who tugged at the corners of their eyes in a degrading parody of Asians.” Koreans must ask themselves “why we get so angry whenever we hear this sort of news,” yet still mock black people, for it’s undeniable that white foreigners are tolerated here while darker ones are not. South Korea is becoming a multicultural society, yet “the severity of racism” here is “embarrassing.” THE WEEK January 31, 2020
16 NEWS Noted Q Andrew Peek, the top Russia expert on President Trump’s national security staff, left his job last week for unknown reasons just three months after he was hired, and was escorted from the White House grounds. Peek’s predecessors, Tim Morrison and Fiona Hill, both testified in the impeachment inquiry. Axios.com
Q A court-appointed adviser to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has rejected FBI Director Christopher Wray’s proposed plan to ensure the bureau does not repeat the 17 mistakes outlined in the inspector general’s report into the 2016 surveillance of former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. David Kris said the FBI’s plan was “insufficient and must be expanded and improved.” Reason.com
Talking points Prohibition’s centennial: Why drinking won regulating morality. Legal A century after Prohibition saloons merely gave way to began, alcohol is clearly “Amerillegal speakeasys, as about ica’s favorite poison,” said Olga a million legitimate workKhazan in TheAtlantic.com. ers were replaced by “an Pushed by Protestant reformunderground economy” of ers, mainly women, the 18th bootleggers and mob bosses Amendment took effect on like Chicago’s Al Capone. As Jan. 17, 1920, outlawing the a result, “Americans found production and sale of booze. themselves entrenched in the The ban was a reaction against criminal world just because rampant alcoholism, which they wanted to drink a beer.” had plagued the U.S. since the Dumping illegal beer in New York City Prohibition, the liberal “great 19th century, and ended with experiment,” shows what happens when crusadProhibition’s repeal in 1933. Today, drinking still causes widespread misery: Alcohol-related deaths ers use the state to “remake” society, said Richard Major in WashingtonExaminer.com. We see that have doubled over the past two decades, and research has shown that even moderate consump- same “progressive Puritanism” today in efforts to tion of wine, beer, and spirits—as little as a glass a regulate “how we hire, whether we smoke, and what we eat.” All are attacks on liberty. day—can “wreak havoc on the cells,” raising the risk of liver disease, heart failure, dementia, and Prohibition is grossly misunderstood, said Mark cancer. But in 2020, virtually no one rails against Lawrence Schrad in NYTimes.com. Its advocates the “demon drink.” Indeed, polite society hapwere not “Bible-thumping, rural evangelicals,” pily indulges in bottomless brunches and office happy hours, and problem drinking is viewed as a but rather leaders such as Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Susan B. Anthony. Back personal failure, not as proof that alcohol is danthen, saloonkeepers “were seen as parasites,” gerously addictive. “Why,” the average drinker making “outlandish profits” as poor men blew thinks, “ruin everyone else’s fun?” their paychecks on after-work binges. Alcohol Americans should “raise a toast” to Prohibition’s was the early 20th century’s opioid crisis, and the “vast majority” of Americans supported Prohibidemise, said Patrick Riccards in The Hill. Rather tion. The fact that it ultimately failed “doesn’t than improving public health, the temperance mean its proponents were crackpots.” movement provided a cautionary tale against
Trump: The rant that stunned his Cabinet
The Washington Post
Q The Virgin Islands government has sued to force the estate of disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein to forfeit two islands near St. Thomas worth $86 million. The suit says Epstein trafficked hundreds of young women and girls, some as young as 11, to the islands. Miami Herald THE WEEK January 31, 2020
Americans know that President Trump often acts like a “middle-school playground bully,” said Joe Klein in The Washington Post. But in a new book, entitled A Very Stable Genius, we get a jaw-dropping example of Trump at his worst, as he launched an “astonishing verbal assault” on his national security team. The incident occurred six months into Trump’s term, when former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, and national security adviser H.R. McMaster convened a meeting between the president and the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon to educate him about the importance of America’s strategic alliances. Feeling that he was “being patronized,” Trump went ballistic. He demanded to know why the generals weren’t charging allies for “our soldiers” and military bases. “We should make money off of everything!” he yelled, berating his Cabinet as “losers” and “dopes and babies.” In an insult that left the military brass looking down at the table, the red-faced president shouted, “I wouldn’t go to war with you people.” Undoubtedly, Trump comes off as a clueless toddler in the book, said Jack Holmes in Esquire.com. But “in fairness,” he does have a point about the military insisting we must maintain bases “all over
the world, always.” Not only does this “relentless meddling and interventionism” cost a lot of money, but there are “negative consequences” to our playing global policeman. That said, I don’t think that Trump—with his “emotional meltdowns and irrational spasms”—is the right person to tackle this problem. The episode at the Pentagon is but one in a book that reads like a “comic horror story,” said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. Other passages reveal that Trump once implored Tillerson to help get rid of a law prohibiting U.S. companies from bribing foreign officials to win business, and that during a trip to Hawaii Trump “appeared to have no idea” about what happened at Pearl Harbor. Trump once told an astonished Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, “It’s not like you’ve got China on your border,” despite 2,500 miles of shared frontier. Trump is not the only one who comes off badly in this book, said Paul Waldman in The Washington Post. Tillerson, Mattis, and other administration officials had a patriotic responsibility to sound the alarm on “how dangerous Trump is” and how utterly unfit he is for the presidency. Instead, they remain “shamefully silent” to this day.
Getty (2)
Q The National Archives and Records Administration has apologized for doctoring an image of participants in the 2017 Women’s March in order to blur at least four signs that were critical of President Trump. The organization said it wanted to avoid “political controversy,” but after the alterations became public, its officials said they would display the original photo (above).
Talking points Parnas: Political scandal as farce been indicted for trying to Will Lev Parnas turn out to make illegal campaign conbe the “Joe Pesci version of tributions to U.S. politicians John Dean”? asked Rosalind using money from Ukraine. Helderman and Paul Sonne Facing prison, he has sudin The Washington Post. denly seen the light and Like the White House lawyer begun “accusing Trump of whose testimony linked Richall the same things liberals ard Nixon to the Watergate accuse Trump of,” in hopes cover-up, the “fast-talking, his sudden conversion will Ukraine-born businessman” win him an immunity deal has “directly implicated” Lev’s photo album: Lots of Trumps from desperate Democrats. President Trump in a scheme Parnas’ wild allegations won’t save the Demoto trade military aid and favors in return for help crats’ “ridiculous impeachment case.” in damaging Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. Last week, Parnas turned over to It won’t be so easy to wish Parnas away, said House Democrats a trove of personal text mesAaron Blake in The Washington Post. He’s lifted sages and photos that, he says, show how he and the lid on a disturbing campaign to arm-twist Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, carried out the Ukraine pressure campaign. Dozens of the Ukrainian officials into interfering in the 2020 photos show Parnas grinning and thumbs-upping election in Trump’s behalf. Parnas documents a successful effort to get rid of then–U.S. Ambassawith Trump at the White House, Mar-a-Lago, dor to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, an ethical dipand Trump’s Washington, D.C., hotel; Parnas lomat whom Giuliani saw as an obstacle. Parnas’ is also seen hobnobbing with Donald Jr., Eric, text messages show Trump fanboy Robert F. Hyde Ivanka, and Jared Kushner. The failed attempt talking about surveilling Yovanovitch and bribto manufacture dirt on Biden “was never about corruption,” Parnas said. “President Trump knew ing Ukrainians to get rid of her. “They are willing to help if we/you would like a price,” Hyde tells exactly what was going on.” In response, Trump Parnas. Yovanovitch was later urgently recalled to said, “I don’t know him.” the U.S. because of security concerns. “The whole Parnas is not the impeachment “bombshell” Dem- thing is like The Sopranos” remade as a slapstick comedy, said Charlie Sykes in TheBulwark.com. ocrats would have you believe, said Eddie Scarry in WashingtonExaminer.com. The 47-year-old has “It’s Watergate meets the Three Stooges.”
Warren and Sanders: A serious rift?
AP
It’s “the handshake that wasn’t,” said Helaine Olen in The Washington Post. When Elizabeth Warren declined to take Bernie Sanders’ outstretched hand following last week’s Democratic debate, tensions that had simmered between the two progressive candidates’ camps hit a boiling point. Sanders backers, inflamed about Warren’s claim that Sanders had told her he doubted a woman could beat President Trump, bombarded Twitter with snake emojis and the hashtag #Never Warren. Warren supporters, incensed at Sanders’ implication that Warren had lied about the remark, hit back with charges of misogyny. Progressives panicked, fearing the feud could inflict lasting damage to the party’s left flank, leaving centrist Joe Biden an open path to the nomination. To have any chance to win, either Sanders or Warren will ultimately need the support of the other’s followers. “They’ve now made that task a lot harder.” If Sanders did question a woman’s viability in 2020, said Katha Pollitt in The Nation, he was only saying what many Democrats are thinking. We both “love Warren and fear she can’t be elected.” A potentially pivotal number of Americans still think of the presidency as a man’s job, and of any woman who seeks it as “shrill”
and suspiciously ambitious. As we saw in 2016, Trump’s appeals to sexism and bigotry “can be weaponized all too easily against a woman opponent,” said Michelle Cottle in The New York Times. Hillary Clinton may have won the popular vote, but the bottom line is she lost to the “most patently unfit opponent” in history. Warren’s supporters are so angry about Sanders’ alleged comment because they fear that “he might be right.” It’s not just Warren’s supporters who are furious at Sanders, said Jennifer Rubin in WashingtonPost .com. This week, Bernie had to apologize to Joe Biden for an op-ed written by a Sanders surrogate accusing Biden of having “a big corruption problem.” Another Sanders adviser egregiously distorted a 2018 comment by Biden to imply he supported cuts to Social Security—the opposite of what he was saying. Meanwhile, Clinton ripped Sanders in an interview, saying he campaigned against her by “insult and attack,” and is a twofaced phony whom “nobody likes” and who “got nothing done” in Congress. Ouch. Sanders may have a fanatically loyal following, but other Democrats “are sick of giving him a free pass to present himself as an honest, pure idealist” while he plays “Trumpian politics.”
NEWS 17 Wit & Wisdom “Young person worry: What if nothing I do matters? Old person worry: What if everything I do does?” Novelist Jenny Offill, quoted in NYMag.com
“There’s nothing that cleanses your soul like getting the hell kicked out of you.” Football coach Woody Hayes, quoted in Chattanoogan.com
“He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.” Philosopher Michel de Montaigne, quoted in Harper’s
“Never write if you can speak; never speak if you can nod; never nod if you can wink.” Boston politician Martin Lomasney, quoted in OpenLettersReview.com
“There are no such things as bad plants or bad men. There are only bad cultivators.” Novelist Victor Hugo, quoted in The Wall Street Journal
“We have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy.” Economist John Maynard Keynes, quoted in The Guardian (U.K.)
“You can teach someone how to dance, but you can’t teach someone how to boogie.” Actress Rosie Perez, quoted in The New York Times
Poll watch Q 66% of Democrats do not believe the U.S. is prepared to keep the November election safe from foreign interference, while 85% of Republicans think the country is prepared. 59% of all Americans say they are worried that it’s gotten harder to tell the difference between factual information and what is false. 82% expect to see disinformation on social media about the presidential candidates. NPR/PBS/Marist
THE WEEK January 31, 2020
18 NEWS
Technology
Law enforcement: A backdoor into the iPhone? Kara Swisher in The New York Times. Yet again, the federal government is girdThat’s why you should “believe nothing ing for a fight with Apple over encrypted Mr. Barr says.” The Florida case is an exphones, said Sara Morrison in Vox.com. cuse to try to get what Barr really wants: As it has in previous high-profile cases, “the power to go in and out of any phone, it wants access to iPhones owned by a any time.” Guarding against that trumps terrorist—the two locked phones of the any public safety concerns Barr is raising. Saudi cadet who killed three U.S. sailors and himself in Pensacola, Fla., in DecemBarr, though, is far from the only one ber. Apple has refused, mirroring “its with those public safety concerns, said refusal four years ago to give the FBI acthe New York Daily News in an editocess to a locked iPhone belonging to San rial. Other law enforcement officials Bernardino shooter Syed Farook.” The have asked for the same thing for years. agency ultimately paid $1.3 million to Two iPhones may hold Pensacola attack evidence. Apple has “already turned over materials hackers who were able to break into the from the gunman’s iCloud account, undercutting the claim that phone. This time, Apple says it allowed access to its cloud, but personal data is sacrosanct.” Yes, dictators would be eager to use there may be other text messages stored directly on the phones. encryption backdoors for their own benefit, but Barr is not one. While the courts never made a ruling about the creation of a backdoor into encrypted devices, “[Attorney General William] We sympathize with the AG’s concern that “encryption could Barr has reopened the debate.” slow an investigation,” said The Wall Street Journal in an It’s not clear the government actually needs Apple to unlock these editorial, but far more is at stake here than one criminal case. phones, said Mark Gurman in Bloomberg.com. The Florida gun- “Encryption protects business executives, journalists, politicians, and dissenters.” A backdoor for the U.S. government would also man used older models of the iPhone, and security experts have be exploited by the world’s “bad actors.” Meanwhile, criminals become adept at finding flaws that let them crack those. “A 5 and terrorists would switch to phones that give the U.S. even less and 7?” says one former iPhone hacker who now runs a security access. Apple “has responded to more than 127,000 requests company, “You can absolutely get into that.” Data extraction from U.S. law enforcement agencies over the past seven years. We firms such as Cellebrite, which helped the FBI on the San Berdoubt Huawei would be as cooperative.” nardino case, should be able to do the job. Barr knows that, said
Innovation of the week
Bytes: What’s new in tech
“The first true smart contact lens” could bring augmented reality right to the surface of your eye, said Julian Chokkattu in Wired.com. California-based Mojo Vision has been working for five years on such a prototype, and it’s still “a few years away from becoming a real product.” But they are now able to demo a lens that lets you “look to the corner of your eye to activate an interface” for what is billed as the “smallest, densest display ever made.” One demo app, Speech, acts as a teleprompter in your eye, projecting a speech so you don’t have to look down at notes. The lens— which also corrects vision just like a regular contact lens—could also be used to improve night vision by outlining objects and figures.
THE WEEK January 31, 2020
such as words and grammar, facial expressions, Men in Silicon Valley are turning to plastic sur- and the tonality of the job applicant’s voice”— and uses them to score “whether the candidate gery and Botox to upgrade their professional is tenacious, resilient, or good at working on image, said Peter Holley in The Washington a team.” That’s made students “guinea pigs Post. Long gone are the pleated khakis; the tech industry’s obsession with “youthful brain- for a largely unproven mechanism for evaluatpower” has put added pressure on middle-aged ing applicants.” Sarah Ali, a Duke University undergraduate, started thinking about ways to male workers to comply with “beauty standards that have long tormented women.” If in “optimize certain qualities or gestures,” after going through eight HireVue interviews. Los Angeles men might try to match the look of movie stars, in Silicon Valley mid-career The NSA won’t hack Microsoft workers are trying to match the “fresh-faced The National Security Agency informed vigor of Elon Musk” or “look good in a fitMicrosoft last week that it had found a “serited shirt,” like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. Says one 40-year-old who gets Botox every three or four ous vulnerability” in its Windows 10 operating system, said Lily Hay Newman in Wired.com, months, “From my perspective, a $2,000-aprompting the company to quickly release a year investment to make more money longpatch. The bug “in Windows’ mechanism for term is definitely worth it. Right now, I can confirming the legitimacy of software” could definitely pass for 30, no problem.” have let hackers take control of a device. TellRise of the hiring algos ing Microsoft marks a significant change for the NSA: Tasked with creating tools for U.S. “College career counselors are trying to brace counterintelligence, the agency has often kept students for a stark new reality: They may be vetted for jobs in part by artificial intelligence,” its knowledge of tech vulnerabilities to itself. It was criticized in 2017 for devising a hacking said Rachel Metz in CNN.com. More busitool, Eternal Blue, to exploit a Windows bug. nesses are filling postcollege openings by turnThe NSA “lost control of Eternal Blue,” letting ing to services like HireVue, which uses AI to pore over videos sent in by candidates answer- hackers around the world “have a field day” while Microsoft looked for a fix. ing preset questions. The AI analyzes “details
EPA/Shutterstock, Mojo Vision
Tech bros go under the knife
Turning empty chairs into ½³íçíæѳ íùùíŜČçÑćѽĀ˙ In 500 cities worldwide.
SHEARSHARE in McKinney, Texas uses Google Ads to promote its app that matches empty salon seats with independent stylists looking for a space to work, helping local salons triple their revenue.
American businesses are growing with tools and training from Google. google.com/economicimpact
20 NEWS
Health & Science
The parrots who look out for their pals
A tektite thrown up by the impact
A missing meteorite crater Some 800,000 years ago, a massive meteorite smashed into Earth, blasting a hole that was several miles in diameter and hundreds of feet deep. Scientists have found plenty of evidence of this collision: The impact threw millions of chunks of glassy, rocky debris known as tektites across 10 percent of the planet, from Southeast Asia to Antarctica. Researchers spent a century searching for the crater made by this impact but kept coming up empty, reports The New York Times. Now geologists think they’ve located the crater, underneath lava beds in Laos that are up to 1,000 feet deep. The team first discovered that tektites found in Australasia contain elements characteristic of the Laotian volcanic field. They also determined that the lava beds had a relatively weak gravitational pull—likely a sign of a crater filled with broken-up, less densely packed matter. Finally, boulders were found nearby that appear to have been ejected at high speed from the crater, which the researchers believe is 11 miles long, 8 miles wide, and some 300 feet deep. The next stage, says study leader Kerry Sieh, is to “drill down a few hundred meters to see if the rocks below the lavas are indeed the rocks you’d expect.”
Liver transplant breakthrough A team of Swiss scientists has developed a new machine that can keep donated human THE WEEK January 31, 2020
Immediately, the parrot with the tokens started passing them through the opening to its neighbor, who could then exchange them for food. The first parrot carried on helping its feathered friend even though it received nothing in return. To make sure the birds weren’t just playing, Brucks blocked the hole at the front and didn’t hold out her hand—and the parrot passed far fewer tokens. This “prosocial” behavior isn’t apparent in all birds; when the experiment was repeated with blue-headed macaws, the birds only acted selfishly. It’s unclear why African greys have evolved to be helpful. But the study adds to a grow-
livers alive for a week, a breakthrough that could save thousands of lives each year. Some 13,000 people in the U.S. are currently waiting for a liver transplant, a backlog that is partly caused by the organ’s short life span outside the body, reports NewScientist.com. Livers can generally be kept on ice for only about 12 to 18 hours before they die. The new machine expands the organ’s viability by mimicking many of the body’s functions: It pumps blood through the liver, introduces nutrients and hormones, and regulates oxygen levels and blood pressure. It even moves rhythmically to replicate breathing. “The idea is that we trick the liver and let it believe it is still in the body,” says study co-author Pierre-Alain Clavien, from University Hospital Zurich. Initially developed with pig livers, the machine has been tested on 10 human livers that were stored on ice but too damaged for transplantation. Six recovered full function within a week and showed a decrease in injury and inflammation levels. The developers are now planning to transplant organs preserved by the machine, to assess whether the process affects liver function.
Rise of the living robots In a development that’s hopefully not as terrifying as it sounds, scientists have created the world’s first living robots. Researchers created these millimeter-wide “xenobots” by scraping living stem cells from frog embryos and leaving them to incubate. The resulting skin and heart cells were then reshaped and combined into “body forms” designed by a supercomputer to complete certain tasks— walking, for
A parrot passes its neighbor a token for food.
ing body of evidence that birds are smarter than their small brains suggest. “I think we have underestimated birds,” Brucks tells CNN.com. “We’ve been too focused on our close relations like primates.”
example, or swimming. The pulsing heart cells serve as a miniature engine that powers xenobots until their energy reserves run out—after about 10 days at present. Because they are made from biological matter, the bots’ skin cell bodies naturally heal when damaged. “These are entirely new life-forms,” study co-leader Michael Levin, from Tufts University, tells The Guardian (U.K.). “They are living, programmable organisms.” The researchers have already created xenobots that can work together in groups, and they hope the tiny creatures can one day be programmed to do tasks such as cleaning up microplastic pollution or removing plaque from artery walls.
Health scare of the week Mismatch in the flu shot An unusual strain of flu that can hit children especially hard is circulating in the U.S., and this season’s influenza vaccine isn’t well suited to fighting it, reports The Washington Post. Each spring, health officials decide which strains of the virus vaccine makers should target for the following flu season— a process that’s essentially educated guesswork. But the flu strain that’s now predominant is atypical: It’s an influenza B virus, which normally arrives in the spring after an influenza A strain has circulated. Influenza B isn’t as dangerous as influenza A to people ages 65 and over, who account for most flu hospitalizations. But it is far more likely to cause complications in children and young adults. So far this season, 32 children have died of the flu. That’s more than in any year since records began in 2004, except for the 2009–10 swine flu pandemic. Thousands of kids have also been hospitalized. Lynnette Brammer, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says children should still have the flu shot, because it “offers some protection” against influenza B. It is also a good match for H1N1, the influenza A strain that is doing the rounds.
Anastasia Krasheninnikova, Alamy, Science Source, Douglas Blackiston
Researchers in Germany have observed parrots carrying out seemingly “selfless” acts of kindness—behavior that has previously only been seen in humans and a few other primates. Désirée Brucks, a biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, trained several African grey parrots to pass her small metal tokens when she held out her hand, in exchange for a walnut treat. She then placed two of the birds in adjacent clear-walled compartments with a small opening between them; one compartment also had a hole at the front. Brucks gave the tokens to one parrot, but only the other bird could reach her hand.
Pick of the week’s cartoons
For more political cartoons, visit: www.theweek.com/cartoons.
NEWS 21
THE WEEK January 31, 2020
ARTS Review of reviews: Books or by suffering the traumas of combat. President Trump, meanwhile, “gets off relatively easy.” Though Bacevich is contemptuous of the current commander in chief, he “reserves his greatest ire for establishment types who spend their time griping about Trump while refusing to examine their own role in creating the inequalities and foreign policy disasters of recent decades.”
Book of the week The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory by Andrew Bacevich (Metropolitan, $27)
The collapse of the Berlin Wall signaled a sweeping ideological win for the American way of life, said David Holahan in USA Today. But “where are the fruits of that great victory? Why is America still armed to the teeth and bogged down in the Middle East? Why are its citizens so angry and divided?” Such questions have often been asked before, but author Andrew Bacevich brings a unique perspective: A historian and combat veteran, he has been, even before his son died fighting in Iraq, a forceful critic of America’s use of its post-1989 might. In his latest work, a book packed with insights, he argues that the U.S. has wasted its chance to build a better world by instead promulgating an empty vision of freedom that champions unfettered global capitalism and mindless consumerism while insisting on American military hegemony.
Protesters atop the Berlin Wall in 1989
Bacevich’s case “departs from an arguably more popular narrative”—that political polarization has torn us apart, said Beverly Gage in The Washington Post. A former Ronald Reagan supporter who twice voted for Barack Obama, he doubts the rift between the elected elites in Washington even matters. He considers the country’s class divide more salient. In his view, both Democrats and Republicans promote free trade and authorize long-running wars while poor and working-class Americans make the sacrifices—either in lost jobs
The indictment Bacevich delivers is “ultimately a spiritual one: of obsessive consumption, and freedom defined as escape from restraint rather than self-mastery,” said Noah Millman in The New York Times. But prominent social critics of the past, including Thorstein Veblen and Christopher Lasch, made similar arguments about U.S. culture, so the faults he finds in the American way probably predate 1989. Beyond that, the U.S. might not be meaningfully different in the way it has stumbled from any past empire. “If America neglected to look inward after the end of the Cold War, is that a reflection of its failures, or of the natural temptations of our position? History records few if any emperors who willingly set aside power’s poisoned chalice.”
Novel of the week Long Bright River
But maybe he should have written it as SAM: One Robot, a Dozen comedy, said Josh Tyrangiel in The New Engineers, and the Race to York Times. In a saga intended to celebrate Revolutionize the Way We Build
by Liz Moore (Riverhead, $26)
by Jonathan Waldman (Avid Reader, $28)
Liz Moore’s new novel is “equal parts literary and thrilling,” said Hamilton Cain in O magazine. In the so-called Badlands of Philadelphia, patrol cop Michaela “Mickey” Fitzpatrick has been raising a 4-year-old son and trying to keep tabs on her sister—an opioid addict who has been turning tricks to pay for her habit. But with a serial killer on the prowl, Kacey goes missing, and Mickey takes up the hunt. She proves to be the kind of narrator who “leads you into unexpected places, and keeps surprising you until the end.” The good sibling/bad sibling dynamic is an overly familiar device, but Moore’s handling of character “banishes all reservations,” said Maureen Corrigan in The Washington Post. Mickey doesn’t fit in with other mothers at preschool or into the neighborhood she escaped, and Moore’s depiction of her isolation is “sharp-eyed to the point of pain.” Meanwhile, as this “extraordinary” book fulfills its promise of twists and suspense, “it also manages to grow into something else: a sweeping, elegiac novel about a blighted city.” THE WEEK January 31, 2020
SAM is above all a story about a potentially gamechanging robot, said Michael Upchurch in The Boston Globe. But beyond that, it “reveals a world that surrounds us but mostly eludes our notice—and that’s quite a feat.” Construction Robotics, a Rochester, N.Y., startup, was founded earlier this century by two men who dreamed of a machine that could lay bricks. That might seem small beer: After all, only 4 cents of every dollar spent on construction goes into masonry. But that’s still a $10 billion industry in the U.S. alone, and author Jonathan Waldman uses his tale of entrepreneurialism to open the reader’s eyes to the ubiquity of brick, and to all that has made it a feature of the built environment that emotionally resonates even with those of us blind to it. “Waldman is clearly exhilarated by the story he’s telling.”
the persistence of innovators, Construction Robotics’ “semi-automated mason,” or SAM, proves a poor hero. The machine looks, for starters, “less like the future than a souped-up hot-dog cart,” and initially it could lay only 108 bricks per day, less than a sixth of a human’s output. The company’s co-founders, Scott Peters and his fatherin-law, Nate Podkaminer, rolled it out onto construction sites anyway, hoping to work out bugs on the fly. “What follows is numbing”: anecdote after anecdote about various fails. Then, after the whole heavily padded story is over, “it’s revealed that none of this matters.” Once SAM could finally lay 3,000 bricks a day, Construction Robotics replaced it with a better machine. “The company now looks to be solvent,” said Matthew Hutson in The Wall Street Journal. Less clear is whether SAM’s sibling will revolutionize the construction biz. Humans might always be better at laying bricks, which Waldman calls the world’s second-oldest trade. Sure, we can’t be counted on for perfection, as this book understands. Still, “there’s much to celebrate in quirk and inefficiency. That goes even for bricks.”
AP
22
The Book List Best books...chosen by Ezra Klein Journalist Ezra Klein is the editor-at-large and co-founder of Vox.com. His new book, Why We’re Polarized, argues that our political system isn’t broken: Its very design made the damaging current cultural divide inevitable. Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity by Lilliana Mason (2018). This is the academic book on identity polarization. It’s a touchstone for understanding politics in this era, and one of the works that have done the most to shape my thinking. Drift Into Failure: From Hunting Broken Components to Understanding Complex Systems by Sidney Dekker (2011). For the most part, the way we think about problems afflicting complex ecosystems is reductive and wrong. Neither this book nor any other has all the answers, but this one offers a better frame. White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide by Carol Anderson (2016). Anderson’s book compellingly recenters America’s racial narrative on the propulsive power of white fury. The sentiments she traces, and the force they carry, don’t just explain our political past; they also reveal our political present. Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows by Melanie Joy (2009). Over the past few
years, I’ve become convinced that the way we treat animals is a signal moral horror of our age. But then why is it so easy to ignore? Why do so many of us ignore it? This book is about how we think about how we treat animals, and it’s a powerful lesson in how dominant ideologies protect and hide themselves in all areas of life. The Final Days by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (1976). All the President’s Men is Woodward and Bernstein’s best-known book, but The Final Days is, for my money, more revelatory. It’s particularly good on the way Nixon’s circle justified what they had done, and what they were protecting. Why is it relevant now? Well... On Press: The Liberal Values That Shaped the News by Matthew Pressman (2018). The media want to be a mirror held up to reality. In truth, we shape reality in what we choose to highlight and how we choose to report on it. What Pressman shows is that the decisions we make are, in turn, shaped by broader forces around us, and that different technological and social eras create very different forms of media.
Lucas Foglia, Michael O’Shea
Also of interest...in manners and mores Kill Reply All
Between Two Fires
by Victoria Turk (Plume, $16)
by Joshua Yaffa (Tim Duggan, $28)
You’d think that by now there’d be established norms of internet etiquette, said Steve Donoghue in OpenLettersReview.com. “Anyone who’s participated in online communication can, alas, report otherwise,” which is why the need for a book like this one has never been greater. Victoria Turk is an editor at Wired UK, and you won’t agree with everything she says. Still, “she’s strong on the basics.” Much of the advice she offers “ought to be akin to common writ.”
The eight Russians profiled in this book “exist in strange moral tidal zones,” said Annalisa Quinn in NPR .org. All have risen to prominence in their fields, and almost all who are seeking to do good have made compromises to avoid falling afoul of Vladimir Putin’s punitive state. Author Joshua Yaffa, The New Yorker’s Moscow correspondent, implicitly argues that living righteously is impossible under Putin, and the result is “a good book about Russia” and “a great book about ethics, choice, and coercion.”
You’re Not Listening
The Evolution of Knowledge
by Kate Murphy (Celadon, $26)
by Jürgen Renn (Princeton, $35)
A book that argues for the importance of listening is “frighteningly easy to dismiss,” said Viv Groskop in TheGuardian.com. But author Kate Murphy, a New York Times writer, has combined “smart and playful” analysis with some “inspiringly profound” insights capable of changing how you live. At a time when we are all listening less, she shows us how to live better by listening better. When, for example, was the last time you initiated a conversation with a stranger?
“Science has had its fair share of visionary reformers,” said Deborah Coen in ScienceMag.org. With “this tour-de-force,” Jürgen Renn, a historian of science, bids to join them. Renn argues that the vast environmental changes humans have wrought require a rethinking of how knowledge is generated. His history of knowledge is “ultimately triumphant and tragic,” but he sees possible redemption in abandoning the idea of science as a value-free pursuit and embracing its capacity to generate ethical guidance.
ARTS 23 Author of the week William Gibson Time has caught up with William Gibson—sort of, said Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker. For decades, the American-born, Vancouverbased novelist has “imagined the near future more convincingly than anyone else,” and since 1999 has mostly done it, he says, by deep-reading the present and its technologies: He scrutinizes the now for what he calls its “f---edness quotient,” then extrapolates. “It’s not prescient—it’s about what I can bring myself to believe,” he says. But beginning in 2001, events have sometimes overtaken his method. The 9/11 attacks compelled him to rebuild a novel-in-progress, Pattern Recognition. And to complete his new novel, Agency, he had to blow through two hard deadlines to accommodate the disruptions of the Trump era. After months of struggle, Gibson devised a solution, said Sam Leith in TheGuardian.com. The action in Agency now unfolds in two settings, including a present in which Hillary Clinton is president. But that present turns out to be a truncated alternate reality, or “stub,” generated by time travelers of the future. The idea arose from wishful thinking on Gibson’s part. “I wanted to believe I was living in a stub, that something had split off and that things weren’t supposed to be this way,” he says. Today, as he worries about U.S. democracy collapsing and the planet burning, he can’t toy with future scenarios with the same detachment he once had. The part of him, he says, that always believed “This isn’t happening” abandoned him the day after Trump’s election. “I woke up and it was gone. It was just gone, and it’s never come back.” THE WEEK January 31, 2020
Review of reviews: Film & Music
The Gentlemen Directed by Guy Ritchie (R)
++++ A London weed baron tries to step away.
Weathering With You Directed by Makoto Shinkai (PG-13)
++++ A ‘sunshine girl’ meets a runaway in rainy Tokyo.
McConaughey plays Mickey Why Guy Ritchie gets to keep Pearson, a London-based drug making movies like this one is baron who’s trying to cash out, a mystery, said Mike McCahill but sharks are circling, including in IndieWire.com. “Visually Hugh Grant as an “amusingly unexceptional when it’s not venal” journalist who hopes to plain squalid,” this star-studded blackmail Mickey into bankrollbut crass underworld caper ing a screenplay about Mickey, might be the British director’s Inc. Though Britain’s landed elite reward for finally scoring a are deeply entangled in Pearson’s box-office success with 2019’s McConaughey’s inscrutable Yank crooked enterprise, “this isn’t an live-action Aladdin. But Ritchie anti-establishment diatribe,” said Clarisse Loughrey has flopped regularly with shaggy-dog crime tales, in The Independent (U.K.). “It’s an act of pure nihiland this one combines the usual violence and reacism,” one that denigrates every demographic except tionary banter with a Matthew McConaughey wily white grifters. “Ritchie’s gangster films have performance that renders the protagonist “an uninalways walked a thin line between boys-will-be-boys teresting cipher.” The humor is sharper this time, flippancy and plain cruelty.” This one crosses the line. though, said Peter Bradshaw in TheGuardian.com. inexhaustible. Despite its many Rain is many characters in pleasures, though, Weathering Makoto Shinkai’s “gloriously doesn’t feel like a film that will sodden” new anime feature, find a large U.S. audience, said said Richard Whittaker in The Peter Debruge in Variety. Once Austin Chronicle. Drizzles Hina discovers that she becomes and downpours keep Tokyo weaker every time she conjures wrapped in a range of gray the sun, the story also “falls moods as two poor teenagback on tropes seen far too freers meet and one reveals a quently in kids’ movies.” But it secret ability to bring out the Hina lets the sunshine in. “wears its watery heart on its sun—which the pair turn into sleeve,” and does so proudly, said Alison Willmore a business. “Part high school rom-com, part fairy in NYMag.com. The young people in its world have tale, and part eco-warning,” Shinkai’s follow-up to been conscripted into martyrdom. They’re “contendYour Name—a 2016 film that became the highestgrossing anime of all time—“defies simple labels” as ing with an awareness that their futures may have been sacrificed by the generations before them.” it explores the limits of resources that only appear
Halsey
Mac Miller
Marcus King
Manic
Circles
El Dorado
++++
++++
++++
“Ashley Frangipane was seemingly born for this moment,” said Chris DeVille in Stereogum.com. For pop music’s audience, fluidity is in, and Frangipane, a biracial and bisexual 25-year-old who performs as Halsey, is “uniquely suited to move across cultural spheres.” With her new album, the New Jersey native continues to defy genre boundaries even as she scales back the bombast of past work for 16 “softer and more spacious” songs that explore bipolar disorder. What emerges is a portrait of a young woman “in constant tumult, alternately blind with confidence and paralyzed with self-doubt.” As a lyricist, Halsey specializes in “radical transparency,” said Ben Beaumont-Thomas in TheGuardian.com. By the time you reach “929,” the album’s gorgeous closer, “it feels like you’re crying after stealing a look at her diary.” A few short tracks that feature star guests are mere sketches. “Otherwise, this is that rare thing: a major-label pop album with real humanity.”
“It’s only appropriate that Mac Miller’s final musical act be one of self-reformation,” said Sheldon Pearce in Pitchfork.com. A month before he died at 26 of an accidental 2018 overdose, the widely loved rapper had released Swimming, “an album that was like a quantum leap of self-discovery.” Opening up about addiction, mental illness, and the perils of fame, Miller sounded like an artist who’d “finally cleared his mind and found his footing.” This posthumous companion piece, which features the artist singing rather than rapping over mellow live arrangements, provides “a fitting epilogue to an aspirational life.” As a singer, “Miller is no Aretha Franklin,” said Andrew Chow in Time.com. But on songs like “Hand Me Downs,” his voice’s “husky sweetness” lends “a startling intimacy” to an album “haunted by anxiety and drift.” Instead of an epic finale, “Circles is a heartbreaking plea for peace from a man who had spent a relentless decade in the spotlight.”
Given Marcus King’s range of talents, “it’s clearly best not to lay any expectations on him,” said Jon Young in NoDepression.com. A blues-rock guitar prodigy who has been recording since he was 19, the Greenville, S.C., native is also “an authoritative singer whose sense of urgency commands attention.” For his first album as a solo artist, the 23-year-old has enlisted the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach as his producer, and the pair have set aside big beats and flashy solos to focus on King’s high, scruffy, engagingly soulful vocals. Monster guitars appear here and there, but softer sounds prevail, “ranging from outlaw country to mournful folk to rousing gospel.” If only the songwriting had proved more distinctive. “Time, and his existing fan base, will tell if this is a successful remodel for King,” said Hal Horowitz in AmericanSongwriter.com. But as a collection of heartfelt Americana ballads, the new album impresses. “It’s arguably his finest recorded moment.”
THE WEEK January 31, 2020
STX Entertainment, GKIDS
24 ARTS
Television Movies on TV Monday, Jan. 27 Unstoppable Denzel Washington and Chris Pine co-star in a reality-based thriller about two railroad workers trying to stop a runaway freight train loaded with explosive cargo. (2010) 8 p.m., Cinemax Tuesday, Jan. 28 Year of the Dog Saturday Night Live alum Molly Shannon takes top billing in a dark comedy about a single woman unhealthily attached to her beagle. Mike White directs. (2007) 9:30 p.m., Flix Wednesday, Jan. 29 Thoroughly Modern Millie Julie Andrews and Mary Tyler Moore shine in a musical about two naïfs in 1920s New York City seeking adventure and fulfillment. (1967) 11:15 p.m., TCM Thursday, Jan. 30 Donnie Brasco An undercover FBI agent infiltrates the Mafia and begins to lose his moral bearings. Johnny Depp and Al Pacino co-star. (1997) 8 p.m., Epix Friday, Jan. 31 The Apartment Jack Lemmon plays an office doormat who lets his bosses use his flat for extramarital trysts in a finely honed Billy Wilder romantic comedy classic. Shirley MacLaine co-stars. (1960) 10 p.m., TCM
TBS, NBC
Saturday, Feb. 1 Alita: Battle Angel An envelope-pushing semianimated action thriller from directors James Cameron and Robert Rodriguez unearths a lithe cyborg who discovers she possesses unique fighting talents. (2019) 8 p.m., HBO Sunday, Feb. 2 The Impossible A family vacation in Thailand becomes a test of survival when a tsunami slams a tourist resort. Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor co-star. (2012) 8 p.m., the Movie Channel
• All listings are Eastern Time.
ARTS 25
The Week’s guide to what’s worth watching Miracle Workers: Dark Ages Daniel Radcliffe and Steve Buscemi must be having fun. The two stars are returning for a second season of their anthology comedy series ready for new roles. This time, the setting is medieval and Radcliffe assumes the part of a bumbling milquetoast who is also the son, presumed heir, and greatest disappointment of a bloodthirsty king. Buscemi, who played a dissolute God in Season 1, this time returns as a commoner. Tuesday, Jan. 28, at 9 p.m., TBS Expedition With Steve Backshall: Suriname In today’s Instagram world, it’s often hard to believe there are still coordinates where no human has taken a selfie. But English naturalist and adventurer Steve Backshall is finding untouched territory every week in this new nature series. For Episode 3, he’ll be exploring South America’s Guiana Shield, home to stunning waterfalls, vast flat-top mountains, and jungles alive with animals that have never seen his kind before. Wednesday, Jan. 29, at 10 p.m., PBS; check local listings The Stranger This isn’t a new gloss on the Albert Camus novel but a polished take on a Harlan Coben thriller. British actor Richard Armitage stars in the miniseries as a father of two boys whose happy suburban life rapidly unravels after a woman he doesn’t know shares a secret about his wife that turns out to be true. And once his wife has confessed, she disappears. Available for streaming Thursday, Jan. 30, Netflix 30 for 30: Vick From the moment Michael Vick took his first NFL snap at age 21, he was a unique threat. Gifted with a cannon arm and more speed than any quarterback before or since, he revolutionized the position and became one of the game’s most popular players. But his career crashed when, at 26, he was charged with killing and torturing dogs while participating in an illegal dog-fighting ring. He did manage a second act, though, and ESPN’s two-part documentary tells the whole story. Begins Thursday, Jan. 30, at 9 p.m., ESPN
Harry’s Dark Ages: Radcliffe as laughingstock
Seven Worlds, One Planet The BBC’s Natural History Unit and naturalist Sir David Attenborough have been amazingly prolific in the 21st century. The team’s latest marvel of a docuseries has been surveying our planet one continent at a time, and with its third episode it reaches South America. Expect close and highly cinematic communion with jumping fish, relentlessly tenacious pumas, and mudgobbling macaws. Saturday, Feb. 1, at 9 p.m., BBC America Other highlights American Experience: Poison Squad Prefer your milk free of plaster and formaldehyde? Thank chemist Harvey Wiley, the father of the Food and Drug Administration, whose crusade for food standards a century ago put 12 brave test subjects in harm’s way. Tuesday, Jan. 28, at 9 p.m., PBS; check local listings Ragnarok Norse mythology gets an update for the age of climate change in this imported series, featuring a teen who realizes he is a descendant of the rulers of Asgard. Available for streaming Friday, Jan. 31, Netflix Super Bowl LIV The San Francisco 49ers meet the Kansas City Chiefs in Miami for football’s grand showdown. Jennifer Lopez and Shakira will share headlining duties for the halftime show. Sunday, Feb. 2, at 6:30 p.m., Fox
Show of the week The Good Place
Bell: Fighting for a better afterlife for all of us
Stick a forking fork in it. After four brain-twisting, too-smart-for-network-television seasons, NBC’s afterlife comedy is coming to an end. Over countless years and in untold scenarios meant to test and torture them, Kristen Bell’s Eleanor Shellstrop—like Chidi, Tahani, and Jason— has proved she’s not the solipsistic idiot she seemed during her time on Earth. All four are, unquestionably, capable of improving. But what does that mean for the future of the afterlife, not just for them, but for everyone? The Good Place has 90 minutes to finish on a good note. Thursday, Jan. 30, at 8:30 p.m., NBC THE WEEK January 31, 2020
26
LEISURE Food & Drink
Shrimp étouffée: Your weeknight ticket to Louisiana In a Dutch oven or deep-sided pot over medium-high heat, heat oil until shimmering. Add garlic and cook, stirring, until fragrant, about 2 minutes. Add onion, celery, bell pepper, scallion, and parsley. Cook, stirring, until vegetables are soft and onions just turning translucent, about 10 minutes. Remove from heat.
The word étouffée means “smothered,” and you probably have a dish like it in your repertoire, one that involves softening vegetables in a sauté pan, adding a quick-cooking protein, and creating a comforting sauce to spoon over a starch or grain. An étouffée calls upon a fundamental skill in Cajun and Creole cooking: making a roux. But don’t be intimidated. This roux requires very little butter and flour, which you combine over medium heat and stir until they reach the desired color. “If you go too far and scorch the roux, pitch it and start again.” My étouffée includes garlic and also swaps out some butter for olive oil. But you can alter it as you like, including by adding lemon juice or tomato. “That’s the beauty of cooking at home, right? You get to make a dish the way you like it.”
A fine chance to master the art of the roux
Recipe of the week Shrimp étouffée ½ cup extra-virgin olive oil 3 medium cloves garlic, minced 1 large white onion, finely diced 1 stalk celery, finely diced ¼ cup finely diced red bell pepper 3 scallions, white and green parts, finely diced 2 tbsp chopped flat-leaf parsley leaves 3 tbsp unsalted butter 3 tbsp flour 1½ lb peeled, deveined medium shrimp (41–50 count), thawed if frozen ¼ tsp cayenne pepper 1 tsp Creole seasoning (such as Tony Chachere’s) Cooked white or brown rice, for serving
In a small pot over medium heat, melt butter. Add flour; stir until smooth. Cook, stirring, until roux is light brown, about 5 minutes. Remove from heat and keep stirring to let roux darken a bit more. When roux is the color you want (lighter for thick sauce; darker for deep flavor), add to vegetables and stir until fully incorporated. Return Dutch oven to medium heat. Add shrimp, cayenne, and Creole seasoning and stir to combine. Cover and simmer, stirring occasionally, until shrimp turn pink and are cooked through, about 10 minutes. (The cooking time will vary with the shrimp size.) Taste and add more cayenne and Creole seasoning, if desired. Serve étouffée right away over rice (or riced steamed cauliflower). Sprinkle with chopped green onion or parsley (optional). Serves four.
Wine: Serbia 101
Road trip: A foodie haven just outside Death Valley
Serbia’s artisanal wine industry is “looking to make a name for itself,” said Mark Stock in TheManual.com. Though this corner of the former Yugoslavia still cranks out some poorly made commercial wines, its smaller producers are creating more and more carefully crafted wines that showcase unique Serbian grapes. Below, three bottles to look for. 2015 Vino Budimir Tamjanika Zupska ($17). Tamjanika is an indigenous Serbian grape closely related to Muscat blanc. It yields a bright white wine with “nice focus.” This one is also “dry as a sand dune.” 2015 Janko Bas Prokupac ($12). Prokupac, a red grape, could become Serbia’s calling card. Here, it’s “good and rustic with a lot of vigor. If you’re looking for a good everyday food wine, this is it.” 2017 Chichateau Fabula Mala Bijela Chardonnay ($15). “A nice mix of fruity and funky,” this chardonnay proves Serbia can go its own way with familiar grape varieties too.
“The rumors are true,” said Robert Earle Howells in the Los Angeles Times. Should you ever pass through tiny Tecopa, Calif., on your way to or from Death Valley National Park, you should at least stop for a meal. The desert town of 150 may look bleak at first—a couple of run-down motels, a smattering of trailer homes. But a lot can change in five years once a community catches the entrepreneurial spirit. Tecopa Bistro Ground zero for the town’s emergence as a miniature foodie haven, this humble Tecopa Brewing Co.: A welcome oasis stop has been an eatery for 40 years. But only in 2014 did Ryan Thomas refashion it as “a culinary arts gallery”—where visiting chefs take over the menu for a weekend or a season. Thomas, who raises chickens for his eggs and sources his produce from local gardens, cooks and serves the bistro’s breakfasts. 860 Tecopa Hot Springs Rd., (760) 852-1011 Steaks and Beer Just down the road, former Las Vegas chef Eric Scott runs another friendly roadhouse that’s now three years old, and sources all its pork and beef locally. Scott’s steaks are amazing. The $42 filet can feed two and is so tender it “barely requires teeth to eat.” 120 Old Spanish Trail Highway, (702) 334-3431 Tecopa Brewing Co. One of two microbreweries in town, Westley McNeal’s operation occupies a converted gas station, serves up Texas-style brisket and Memphis-style pulled pork, and sits at the entrance of an idiosyncratic “resort” called Delight’s that features mineral hot baths and guest trailers and cottages with unobstructed views of the Nopah Range. 368 Hot Springs Road, (760) 852-4343
THE WEEK January 31, 2020
Stacy Zarin Goldberg/The Washington Post, Tecopa Brewing Co.
Some nights, you need true comfort food in 30 minutes or less, said Ann Maloney in The Washington Post. This shrimp étouffée is a recipe I picked up from my husband, a Cajun from southern Louisiana, and when we were unpacking recently after relocating from New Orleans to Washington, D.C., it was “just what we needed to warm our bellies and push back against the strangeness of new surroundings.”
Travel
LEISURE 27
This week’s dream: Cruising Uruguay’s ‘shabby chic’ coastline Uruguay’s Atlantic coast “often confounds those who expect South America to be undeveloped, underprivileged, or troubled,” said Mark Johanson in the Chicago Tribune. Here, South America is “none of those things.” Over the past 30 years, as investors from Argentina and Brazil have placed bets on Uruguay because of its relative stability, the continent’s secondsmallest nation has become a playground for South American vacationers—as well as U.S. celebrities, who come to stroll Uruguay’s golden sands in near anonymity. I had heard stories about the resorts springing up between Punta Ballena and José Ignacio, and when I finally visited, I discovered it’s also a place where humble travelers like me can feel like celebrities— “even when we’re driving barefoot down dirt roads covered in sand.” Still, “it’s easy to see why Punta del Este has built a reputation as the Miami of South America.” With its glass towers, pulsing bars, and golden beaches, the coast’s largest
Hotel of the week
A terrace off the dining pavilion
Aman Kyoto
Alamy, Aman Kyoto
Kyoto, Japan At the world’s newest Aman hotel, “it’s all about the grounds,” said Amelia Lester in The New York Times. Set in the foothills of Hidari Daimonji, Aman Kyoto is a secluded “garden within a forest” where guests can wander mossy stone paths that curve between Japanese cedars and maples. The hotel’s 11 pavilions almost disappear into the landscape until you enter one. “Inside, the structures allude to a classic ryokan, with tatami mats, orb-shaped lanterns, and hinoki tubs.” Guests who visit the spa can enjoy a shiatsu massage followed by a soak in the open-air onsen. aman.com; rooms from $1,270
lage that now counts Shakira among its homeowners. There, “everyone seems to be dressed in flowing white linen and tossing back glasses of rosé as if to coax the setting sun into lingering a few minutes longer.”
Frolicking on the beach at José Ignacio
resort town is electric enough that Brazilian supermodels and Argentine movie stars jet in “as much to relax in their seafront condos as to be captured by paparazzi doing so.” Even so, anyone can grab a seat at its “see and be seen” restaurants, including I’marangatú, where I enjoyed a seaside lunch of fresh mussels and grilled octopus. A different sort of scene awaited in “shabby chic” José Ignacio, a former fishing vil-
“José Ignacio manages to be moneyed without ever feeling snobby or staid.” There are no nightclubs, the roads are mostly unpaved, and “it’s perfectly fine to walk barefoot into the town’s most popular eatery, La Huella.” A nearby winery, Bodega Garzón, is meanwhile “changing perceptions of Uruguayan wine,” and I was shocked to learn that the world-famous grill master Francis Mallman had built his own restaurant minutes away. The celebrity chef has acquired “a legion of fanboys,” and I’m one of them. “To find him cooking in an old general store in this dirt-road gaucho town was like watching a Western movie set come to life.” At Bahia Vik in José Ignacio (bahiavik.com), suites start at $720.
Getting the flavor of... Eunice’s madcap Cajun Mardi Gras
Spiritual tourism in New Mexico
Not all Louisiana Mardi Gras celebrations involve parade floats and big-city crowds, said Andrea Sachs in The Washington Post. In the heart of Cajun country, the small city of Eunice caps five days of revelry with a Courir de Mardi Gras, or Mardi Gras Run, a century-old riff on a medieval French tradition. On Fat Tuesday itself, the Eunice townsfolk don masks, conical hats, and wildly colored homemade costumes to ride on horseback or otherwise parade into the countryside to beg neighbors for chickens and other gumbo ingredients. There’s music and drinking, and “to add to the madcapness, the capitaine will release a chicken or guinea fowl for a game of catch and release.” Meanwhile, the revelers who remain in town dance in the street and feast on Cajun and Creole cuisine. In the afternoon, when the foragers return from their mischievous hunt, they march in the best kind of Mardi Gras parade: “a parade that ends with bowls of gumbo.”
Today’s pilgrims aren’t just heading to Jerusalem and Mecca; “they’re flying to specialty wellness centers,” said Jean Hopfensperger in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Curious to see what has made “spiritual tourism” so popular, I recently spent a few days in New Mexico at the Sunrise Springs Spa, a 70-acre resort outside Santa Fe. Like many such properties, Sunrise Springs wants guests to look inward and to feel calm and grateful, whether that requires meditation, yoga, hiking, or hypnotherapy. Usually, “I’m wary of New Age woo-woo such as aura readings,” and the resort’s mishmash of East Asian and Native American teachings “reminded me of the Introduction to World Religions class I took in college.” Still, I enjoyed trying qigong and hiking to a nearby petroglyph site. And one night when I was able to take a relaxing soak alone in hot spring–fed waters, “the worries of the world drifted away with the blue mists rising from the pool.”
Last-minute travel deals Free skiing for kids Twenty-two ski areas across Colorado are participating in the Passport program, which lets fifth-graders ski for three days at no cost. Sixth-graders can pay $130 to ski for four days. Properties in Utah, Idaho, and Vermont offer similar passes.
Romance in Rome Celebrate Valentine’s Day by splurging on a stay at Rome’s luxurious Hotel Eden, where, for an extra $775, guests will be welcomed with a bottle of spumante and chauffeured around in a vintage red Fiat 500. Request the “Romantic Ride.”
Explore the unexplored Wander ancient Uzbek cities or get lost in Omani souks with Travel the Unknown, a U.K.-based tour operator that specializes in overlooked destinations. Book any group tour by Jan. 31 to receive a discount of roughly $260.
coloradoski.com/passport
dorchestercollection.com
traveltheunknown.com THE WEEK January 31, 2020
Consumer
28 LEISURE
The 2020 Hyundai Sonata: What the critics say The Detroit News “Welcome back to the catwalk, Hyundai.” Nine long years after an aggressively sculpted 2011 Sonata scandalized defenders of monotonous midsize sedans, the Sonata badge once again belongs to a “curvaceous hottie.” What’s more, the interior is beautiful, too. Opt for the middle and upper trims, and once you step inside, “you might as well be staring at the dash of a BMW 3-series—the detail is that good.” CNET.com And if you like the idea of Tesla-level tech in a car that starts at $23,600, “well, friend,
step right this way.” The 2020 Sonata can be unlocked and started with a keycard or Android phone, and you can even share temporary digital keys with friends. The car can also be commanded remotely to pull into or out of a tight parking spot—a feature exclusive to luxury vehicles until now. Car & Driver “If there’s one thing the new Sonata is missing, it’s power.” The 191-hp base engine does average 32 mpg, though, and the Sonata “may well give the Honda Accord a run for its money in terms of driving sophistication.” Expect two hybrid models
Tesla-level tech, from $23,600 and a performance variant to arrive soon— “because if there’s one thing that’s certain, it’s that Hyundai is going to keep pushing.”
The best of...Bluetooth speakers
With its ample bass and “overall clear, clean sound,” this 11 inch– long JBL “approaches the sound of a good small stereo system yet is rugged enough to take almost anywhere.” It can survive submersion in water, and its battery lasts 15 hours.
The first portable Sonos speaker “seems to sound excellent everywhere” because it autotunes its sound signature depending on where you place it. The Move streams primarily over Wi-Fi, but the weatherproof party starter will switch to Bluetooth if you take it outside.
$350, jbl.com Source: TheWirecutter.com
$399, sonos.com Source: Wired
JBL Xtreme 2
Ultimate Ears Wonderboom 2
Marshall Woburn II
“A better version of an already great Bluetooth speaker,” UE’s applesize wonder boasts a deeper bass than most small speakers, plus a new mode that optimizes the sound for outdoor listening. “It’s ultraportable, fun to be around, and built like a tank.”
Tribit XSound Go “For an inexpensive Bluetooth speaker, the Tribit XSound Go is hard to beat.” The fully waterproof and “attractively designed” minispeaker gets loud for its small size, and it “sounds pretty natural,” too. The battery lasts an impressive 24 hours.
Want a retro look? Marshall, the guitar amp manufacturer, makes Bluetooth speakers of all sizes, and the monster at the top of its lineup “delivers a powerful sonic experience” that can be shaped with the tone knobs or an in-app equalizer.
$100, ultimateears.com Source: Gizmodo.com
$35, tribitaudio.com Source: CNET.com
$500, bestbuy.com Source: PCMag.com
Tip of the week... Three mythical no-no’s of driving
And for those who have everything...
Best apps... For when you need to be offline
Q Going barefoot: “No state actually has any laws making barefoot driving illegal, so don’t take any guff from people trying to tell you it’s against the law.” In fact, the sensitivity of bare feet allows for more precise pedal control. “Your feet are not criminals—they’re just the hands of your legs!” Q Leaving the dome light on: An illuminated interior light reduces outward visibility, and if you’re ever pulled over for distracted driving, “the light may be cited as part of the reason why.” Keeping the light on isn’t illegal, though. “So have at it—unless you’re having trouble seeing from the interior glare.” Q Rear windows that roll all the way down: In many older cars, rear side windows roll only halfway down, and many people assumed this was because of a safety regulation meant to protect children. But there was no rule—just a lot of lazy engineering that prevented the windows from retracting.
There’s a new way to keep a pet close forever. Nine Lives Twine is one of several businesses on Etsy that will turn brushings from a dog or cat into hand-spun yarn for knitting. The business’ owner, Theresa Furrer, can also knit or crochet the yarn into a custom keepsake, such as a scarf, teddy bear, pair of mittens, or the $145 beanie shown here. Furrer, after receiving the pet’s hair, will often suggest blending it with another fiber such as alpaca or merino. One ounce of hair yields 45 to 65 yards of yarn.
Q Pocket lets you save webpages for later reading, “so you can catch up on a long flight, for example.” Any article you bookmark downloads to your phone or tablet. Q Google Maps easily outperforms Apple Maps for offline route plotting. To save a chunk of a map to a phone, open the main menu and select “Offline maps.” Q Guides by Lonely Planet also comes in handy when traveling. Before leaving, open any of the free app’s city guides, select “Places” from the menu bar, then choose “Tap to download offline map.” Q Wikipedia can save entire articles for offline viewing. Simply open a page and tap the toolbar’s bookmark icon. Q Netflix and Spotify both make it easy to download content. Netflix has an “Available for download” section, while Spotify’s toggle switches let you download entire playlists, albums, and artist pages.
Source: Jalopnik.com THE WEEK January 31, 2020
$33 per oz. of yarn, ninelivestwine.com Source: The New York Times
Source: Gizmodo.com
Nancy Andrews/The New York Times/Redux
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Best properties on the market
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This week: Homes in the Piedmont
1 W Richmond, Va. The Piedmont, a fertile plateau
between the Atlantic coastal plain and the Blue Ridge Mountains, drew many early European settlers, and Virginia’s capital is one of its oldest cities. This 1928 home downtown is one of three condos sharing a landscaped courtyard. Renovated in 2001, it has a kitchendining area with fireplace; family room; library; master bedroom; second bedroom with bunk space; and offstreet parking. $635,000. Anne Pace, The Steele Group Sotheby’s International Realty, (804) 426-6818 3 7 1 5 4
6
2
2 X Atlanta This 2008 three-bedroom home stands on a
wooded acre in Buckhead. The house features a great room with a double-height ceiling, walls of windows, and a floorto-ceiling wall set with a gas fireplace; a chef’s kitchen with full-size wine refrigerator; and a floating steel and mahogany staircase. Outside are a deck with a fire pit and a water feature; lawns; and a pool. $2,925,000. Michael Ross, Atlanta Fine Homes Sotheby’s International Realty, (404) 824-1776
3 X Philadelphia Elfreth’s
Alley, a National Historic Landmark, is the country’s oldest residential street, and this two-bedroom brick townhouse on the block dates to the early 18th century. The wide-plank wood floors, exposed-brick walls, and two brick fireplaces are original; updates include a renovated bath, central air, and new electric. The cobblestone alley is walking distance to museums, restaurants, and Penn’s Landing. $2,800,000. Andrew Frank, Long & Foster Real Estate, Inc./Christie’s International Real Estate, (215) 385-0060 THE WEEK January 31, 2020
Best properties on the market
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4 X Charlotte, N.C. This
four-bedroom Tudor Revival house in the Myers Park neighborhood was built in 1928. Original details include dentil crown molding, decorative plaster ceilings, and leaded-glass windows; the foyer has marble floors and a sweeping staircase. The 0.8-acre lot features a pool, a slate patio, a koi pond, a four-car garage, a detached one-bedroom guesthouse, and a dog cottage with a dog run. $2,895,000. Pamela Temple, The Temple Team, Keller Williams Realty, (704) 400-6701 5 W Durham, N.C. Built in 2000, this four-bedroom Victorian-
style home was recently renovated. The open-concept main space includes a kitchen with multiple pantries and an eat-in island; a dining area; and a living room with fireplace. The master bedroom features a vaulted ceiling, two walk-in closets, and a spa-style bath. The nearly half-acre property in the Vantage Pointe neighborhood has a deck, a yard, and a two-car garage. $399,900. Kristina Woods, Mike Woods Real Estate, (919) 724-8386 6 W Raleigh, N.C. Designed
by Raleigh Architecture Co., this 2015 three-bedroom home comes with geothermal HVAC, rainwater recycling, and an EV charger. Skylights and clerestory windows illuminate the open-plan first floor, which features a chef’s kitchen, woodstove, and central lofted ceiling. The screened-in porch looks out on a Japanese garden and a yard planted with native pollinators. The neighborhood, ThompsonHunter, is just southeast of downtown Raleigh. $935,000. Cecilia Zuvic, Monarch Realty Co., (919) 210-5571
Steal of the week
7 S Washington, D.C. Near the H Street corridor, this twobedroom, two-bath condo is the last of four units for sale in a renovated 1920 building. The home features wood floors, exposed brick, a living-dining area, and a kitchen with quartz counters, recess lighting, and built-in Bluetooth speakers. Outside there is ample street parking, and a permanent parking space is available for an additional $15,000. $399,900. Jonathan De La Cruz, Samson Properties, (301) 768-1099 THE WEEK January 31, 2020
The bottom line Q More than 1.6 million secretarial and administrativeassistant jobs have vanished since 2000, an almost 40 percent decline, comparable to that in manufacturing. Some 30 percent of admins now have a college degree, compared with 10 percent two decades ago.
The Wall Street Journal Q The six biggest banks in the U.S. saved $18 billion from their tax bill in 2019, thanks to the 2017 tax cuts, helping them post a record $120 billion in combined net profits.
Bloomberg.com
BUSINESS The news at a glance Digital tax: Trump threatens new trade war The “de-escalation” with France President Trump ratcheted up the is not a solution to the tax quespressure on Europe in a tech tax tion, said Lionel Laurent in dispute, even as French President Bloomberg.com. “Things would Emmanuel Macron agreed to a be different if Europe could set temporary truce, said Andrew aside its differences and agree” Restuccia and Greg Ip in The on a single digital tax, but that Wall Street Journal. American hasn’t happened. France’s deciconsumers faced the possibility sion to go ahead with such a of 100 percent tariffs on wine, tax on its own was “politically cheese, and handbags if France An awkward partnership popular” but “allowed Trump didn’t back off a plan to tax to poke the soft underbelly of European unity by U.S.-based tech companies. But other European training his tariff weapon on Paris.” Even tech countries aren’t backing down, though Trump leaders like Apple’s Tim Cook acknowledge the threatened “tariffs on some $60 billion worth of European automobiles and car parts if he couldn’t need for an international consensus “on how to strike a trade pact with the European Union.” The tax digital profits.” Unless European countries U.K. still plans to introduce the digital tax in April can come together on one, they’re just inviting more trade wars. if there is “no comprehensive, multilateral deal.”
Boeing: 737 Max delays grow even longer
Q In 2018, the average global financial company stored about 16.2 petabytes—that’s 16.2 million gigabytes—of customer data. That’s up more than 10-fold in just two years.
The Wall Street Journal Q BlackBerry no longer makes phones, but it still earns more than $1 billion per year in revenue, including $600 million for selling security software and another $200 million to $250 million per year for licensing its more than 38,000 patents.
Axios.com Q Warren Buffett was America’s biggest philanthropist in the five years between 2014 and 2018, giving away $14.7 billion, or 16.3 percent of his net worth, mostly to causes selected by his friends Bill and Melinda Gates, who gave $9.9 billion of their own.
Boeing said this week that it doesn’t expect regulators to clear the 737 Max before summer, said Leslie Josephs in CNBC.com. The new forecast is “a far cry from the end-of-2019 estimate of the aircraft’s return to service that former CEO Dennis Muilenburg stood by.” Several separate problems have been discovered in recent months, including the finding that wire bundles on the plane may have been placed too close together, “which could lead to a short circuit and potentially result in a crash.”
#MeToo: Award for exec fired on vague charges A top Universal Studios executive who was fired amid a misconduct investigation won a $20 million arbitration case against the studio, said Kim Masters in The Hollywood Reporter. No details were given in February 2018 when NBCUniversal executives sent a memo to staff that the studio’s president of worldwide marketing, Josh Goldstine, was being investigated, with “the strong implication that Goldstine had committed a #MeToo offense.” While the “details of the judge’s decision in the private arbitration are confidential,” the large award, revealed this week, suggests the case was “a devastating misfire of the #MeToo era.”
Fed: Two new nominees, one backs gold “President Trump this week said he would formally nominate Judy Shelton and Christopher Waller to the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors,” said Jeanna Smialek in The New York Times—roughly six months after floating their names. “Shelton, a critic of the Fed who has long supported backing the dollar with gold, has spent the intervening time tweeting her support of Trump’s administration and policies.” More recently, she has echoed Trump’s calls for lower rates, despite having criticized the Fed for holding rates down after the Great Recession. Waller has “spent his career in academia” researching the Fed. The nominees will need to be confirmed by the Senate.
Forbes
Alphabet: Just another trillion-dollar company
Q WeWork signed only four
Add Alphabet to the trillion-dollar club, said Amrith Ramkumar in The Wall Street Journal. Google’s parent company became the fourth U.S. firm to hit a $1 trillion market value last week, joining Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon, which reached the mark in 2018 but has since fallen back below the magic 13-digit threshold. “Google faces investor concerns about antitrust probes into its dominance in advertising,” but its shares surged after co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin announced they were stepping down in December.
new leases covering 184,022 square feet of space in the last three months of 2019, down 93 percent from an average of 2.54 million square feet in recent quarters. CNBC.com THE WEEK January 31, 2020
Recommended for ages 4 to 99 “Lego, the world’s largest and most profitable toymaker, is zeroing in on a growing demographic: stressed-out adults,” said Abha Bhattarai in The Washington Post. Facing stagnant sales growth and “smartphones and apps that are devouring a bigger portion of children’s allowances,” the 87-year-old Danish company is tapping into Gen X nostalgia and finding that parents are more likely to “drop $800 on a 7,541-piece Star Wars Millennium Falcon set” for themselves. The company’s newest kits include “the Central Perk café from the sitcom Friends,” while a DeLorean time machine from the film Back to the Future is said to be in the works. More adults are also using Lego in their “search for modern-day tranquility.” The toy giant has been “revamping instruction manuals to make kits foolproof for frazzled adults,” and has “introduced a line of koi and shark models with soothing movements.”
AP, Alamy
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Making money
BUSINESS 33
Doing good: A boom in socially responsible investing closely and you’ll see surprises. “You might Money surged into sustainable funds last year at not expect to own a stock such as Procter & a record pace, said Greg Iacurci in CNBC.com. Gamble” in an environmentally focused fund, “Mutual funds and exchange-traded funds with but it’s a staple of ESG investments. a focus on sustainability raked in $20.6 billion in new assets in 2019,” quadrupling their inflow That might be because socially good stocks from a year before. The funds typically invest in have struggled to outperform the bad, said companies based on certain environmental, soJohn Authers in Bloomberg.com. Famed investcial, or governance factors—hence the often-used ment adviser Dan Ahrens’ “gloriously named label ESG. That might include “avoiding energy Vice Fund,” which holds only alcohol, tobacco, companies focused on fossil fuels, investing in gambling, and defense stocks, outperformed firms with diverse workforces, and selecting ones the market every year from 2002 until 2019. whose boards have the expertise to help navigate Famed investor Warren Buffett is also skepticlimate risk.” BlackRock, the world’s largest cal of the moralistic approach to investing, asset manager, said last week it would double its said Robert Armstrong in the Financial Times. number of ESG funds to 150 as part of a pledge Buffett recently said it was “wrong for comto address climate change. As their number panies to impose their views of ‘doing good,’” grows, these funds are also getting cheaper—the Rich soil for good deeds? and thinks public firms should stick to maxiinexpensive ones now charge roughly 0.1 percent mizing shareholder value. on their assets annually, 80 percent less than they did in 2013. Despite those falling fees, the Securities and Exchange Commission has questions, said Juliet Chung and Dave Michaels in The Wall Street Journal. As more funds “broadly market themselves” as strictly adhering to ESG principles, the agency is sending letters to investment managers to better understand just what that means. SEC officials are especially concerned that promises to vote based on “corporate morality could undermine a money manager’s duty.” Another worry, said Lizzy Gurdus in CNBC .com, is how the funds are choosing their investments. Look
That doesn’t mean you can’t “make great investment returns while also helping the world,” said Ben Winck in BusinessInsider .com. At least 20 ESG vehicles managed to beat the market last year. Many of the top performing funds focused on clean energy, like BlackRock’s iShares Global Clean Energy ETF, which surged 41.3 percent in 2019. But some broader funds have also done very well. A Vanguard ESG fund started in 2018 and based on an “index of U.S. companies screened for ESG qualities” gained an impressive 32.6 percent last year.
What the experts say Women managers face harassment A survey of more than 26,000 women found that workplace sexual harassment got worse the further they advanced in their career, said Arianne Cohen in FastCompany.com. “Female supervisors experience 30 to 100 percent more harassment” than rank-and-file female employees, according to a study involving women in Japan, Sweden, and the U.S. “Lowlevel leaders receive the brunt of it.” They face harassment both from “subordinates and from higher-level management,” so they have it “coming at them from all sides.” When reporting the misbehavior, “supervisors face more professional and social retaliation,” say researchers at the Swedish Institute for Social Research, who surmise male subordinates demean women managers because of jealousy.
Alamy
The long-term toll of college costs “The difference in net worth between college and noncollege graduates has plunged,” said Benjamin Reeves in Worth.com. New research by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found that while college graduates still earn twice as much as nongraduates, “wealth accumulation is a different story.” White college grads born in the 1930s had 247 percent more in assets than nongraduates of the same age. For those
Charity of the week born in the 1980s, the “wealth premium” had dropped to 42 percent. It’s even worse for black grads: Their wealth premium has dropped from 177 percent for those born in the 1960s to zero for the cohort born in the ’70s. The causes include housing prices and consumer debt. But the “biggest culprit” is the surging cost of higher education itself: College costs have risen by a factor of 14 since 1978.
Big risks in big mortgages Jumbo mortgages are back on the rise, even as decade-old failing mortgages still “haunt the housing market,” said Keith Jurow in Market Watch.com. Confidence in the housing market has triggered a resurgence in jumbos—home loans that exceed the guarantee limits set by Fannie Mae ($510,400, or $765,600 in a few high-cost areas). We’ve seen this play out before. “During the four wildest bubble years, about $3.1 trillion of jumbo mortgages was originated.” Hundreds of thousands of these loans have defaulted more than once—in many cases, “borrowers have not paid for years.” But banks have been reluctant to foreclose for fear of hurting the housing market. These bad loans are a “ticking time bomb” that could wreak havoc on housing prices, even as banks bet on the new crop of jumbos.
Located in Kansas City, Mo., Sheffield Place (sheffield place.org) aims to provide homeless women and their children a safe place to stay, help women recover from trauma, and bring them to self-sufficiency. Homeless families are first housed in Sheffield’s residential facility. While there, they receive trauma, mental health, and addiction-recovery services as well as help applying for jobs. Once families gain stability to transition into permanent housing, the charity may offer them an agency-owned house where they pay reduced rent, or help them move into government-subsidized Section 8 housing. Families continue to receive treatment and services after they leave the shelter. The charity, which helped 129 families in 2018, has been recognized nationally for its innovative work with homeless children. Each charity we feature has earned a four-star overall rating from Charity Navigator, which rates not-for-profit organizations on the strength of their finances, their governance practices, and the transparency of their operations. Four stars is the group’s highest rating. THE WEEK January 31, 2020
Best columns: Business
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Eco-Davos: Jetting to Switzerland to save the world
Now China no longer needs us Zachary Karabell
Politico.com
Amazon readies the mortal blow Alex Shephard
The New Republic
THE WEEK January 31, 2020
China was the clear winner in the past two years of trade negotiations, said Zachary Karabell. “At best, the Phase 1 agreement” signed last week by President Trump “modestly revises the status quo before Trump came into office.” The main takeaway— China’s pledge to increase its imports of American goods by as much as $200 billion over the next two years—barely restores China’s agricultural purchases to where they were before 2017. “If one of your main customers boycotts you and then agrees to start buying again but buying less, it would be disingenuous to announce that they had promised to buy more.” Meanwhile, our small gains on intel-
lectual property protections are now barely relevant. “China conceded on intellectual property because it now cares far more about developing its own than stealing from the United States.” The main effect of the trade war was to reinforce China’s sense that the U.S. “was no longer a reliable economic partner.” With China shifting to a consumer economy, the U.S. “could have continued to benefit from China’s economic rise.” Instead, the U.S. has ceded whatever leverage we might have had and speeded China’s push to “build a domestic economy and military that are immune from the coercive whims of the United States.”
Amazon’s deal to sign two of America’s best-selling authors should terrify publishers, said Alex Shephard. The industry has come to believe that Amazon is a monster it has “learned to live with.” Wrong. Novelists Dean Koontz and Patricia Cornwell each recently signed with Amazon to publish, market, and sell their thrillers, cutting out publishers altogether. Like other Amazon-published authors, “they are being blacklisted by many booksellers.” But this time it doesn’t matter. Amazon’s “digital muscle makes print sales irrelevant”—with Audible and Kindle, Amazon “controls both the audio and digital book markets” and can offer lucrative tie-ins to its “ever-growing
video offerings.” Cornwell’s new book, Quantum, has “reached 600,000 readers across print, audio, and digital sales” since October. Amazon’s first blockbuster publishing effort came in 2011, when it “inked expensive deals with actress Penny Marshall and wellness guru Tim Ferriss.” Those books flopped because the e-commerce giant sold books the way it sold washing machines, believing no editors were needed. Amazon’s failures “lulled publishers into a false sense of security.” They forgot the “existential threat” that Amazon poses. Now Amazon has learned from those mistakes, and it’s back in full force, with “yet more power and leverage.”
Getty
tators have failed. Even the do-gooders “Davos is cloaked in white, but its agenda have realized that “everyone who matters is green,” said Peter Coy in Bloomberg is here—even if they disagree.” Businessweek. Don’t snicker. Yes, there was the typical swarm of private jets to Ah yes, “100 billionaires descending, whisk “some of the world’s wealthiest and often by private jet, on an exclusive most powerful people” into Switzerland, Swiss ski resort” to wring their hands where they paid $70,000 a ticket, plus over climate change will surely solve $140,000 if they wanted to rent a chalet the world’s problems, said Walter Rusfor the week. But climate change and the sell Mead in The Wall Street Journal. environment topped the agenda at the The new era of Davos feels like “Marie World Economic Forum, which celebrated Antoinette and her friends dressing up its 50th anniversary this year. Many sesas shepherdesses to celebrate the simple sions were devoted to climate change, with Thunberg: A critic on the Davos stage life.” As always, the “Davoisie” are cona particular emphasis placed on ending fident that goodwill and “technocratic competence” will win the “free-riding,” or the tendency for businesses to shirk their own day. Have they failed to notice that outside this rarified gatherclimate efforts “while benefiting from the efforts others make.” Seeing the hypocrisy in having billionaires jet in for lectures about ing no one is listening? their carbon footprints, the conference tried to be as green as posOne person at Davos was not buying all the climate talk, said sible. Attendees got “shoe grips” to help them “walk the snowy promenade between meetings rather than take cars,” said Andrew Anne Gearan and Toluse Olorunnipa in The Washington Post: Edgecliffe-Johnson in the Financial Times. The conference rooms President Trump. Flying in for two days, he mocked environmental activists as “perennial prophets of doom” while trumpeting were “decorated with seaweed-based paint and carpets made “America’s extraordinary prosperity.” Running through economic from end-of-life fishing nets.” Also discouraged: paper maps of statistics “with a salesman’s delivery,” he demanded credit for resthe Alpine town. cuing “an economy in shambles before he took office.” Attendees might not all like Trump, but the plutocrats have warmed to his Along with the new eco-conscious sensibility, Davos has invited policies, said Andrew Ross Sorkin in The New York Times. “With speakers to match, said Lionel Laurent in Bloomberg.com. the stock market at record highs, two trade deals announced, Among the 2020 attendees were Greta Thunberg and Micah and the possibility that Trump may be in office for another four White, the co-founder of the Occupy Wall Street movement. years,” the skepticism that greeted him at Davos in 2018 has How’s that? “Davos has shrewdly realized that offering a stage to an anti-Davos crowd can work in its favor.” Davos “was sup- dissipated. Trump’s “economic results have yet to prove as disasposed to be ‘canceled’ by now.” Instead, it’s going strong as imi- trous” as many expected. He may just be “the new Davos Man.”
Obituaries The Tolkien heir who guarded his father’s legacy Christopher As a boy in England, Christopher Tolkien Tolkien grew up hearing fan1924–2020 tastical tales of hobbits and a realm called Middle-earth. Those tales would bring renown to his father, The Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien, and for Christopher, they would become a life’s work. As literary executor following his father’s death in 1973, the younger Tolkien edited or steered two dozen editions of his father’s poems, translations, and stories of wizards, elves, and giant spiders, pulling them together from vast troves of notes and unfinished works. The resulting books included the 1977 best-seller The Silmarillion, drawn from 12 volumes of myths and legends his father had been unable to wrest into publishable form, and The History of Middle-earth, published in a dozen volumes over 13 years. “For me,” he once said, “the cities of The Silmarillion are more real than Babylon.” The youngest of three brothers, Tolkien spent much of his childhood in Oxford, where his father lectured in linguistics, said The New York Times. Christopher “was a sickly child” for a period and often stayed at home, “giving him and his father a chance to develop a close working relationship.” He became his father’s assistant, earning twopence for each mistake he found in
the published text of 1937’s The Hobbit. While Christopher was stationed in South Africa during World War II, his father sent him chapters of what became The Lord of the Rings trilogy, said The Guardian (U.K.). Christopher “responded with detailed, constructive critiques” and later drew the famous maps of Middle-earth that adorned the books when they were published in the 1950s. Tolkien followed in his father’s footsteps, becoming a University of Oxford linguist, specializing in Old and Middle English, said The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). After his father’s death, Tolkien left academia to devote himself to his literary inheritance. The job “was far from straightforward.” His father had left boxes and boxes of material spanning decades, with overlapping versions of stories and notes scrawled on napkins. Tolkien was “fiercely protective” of his father’s work and despised director Peter Jackson’s bigscreen adaptations of The Lord of the Rings. The sale of the books’ film rights in 1969 left the family with no control over the movies, which Christopher considered shallow and trivializing. “Tolkien has become a monster,” he said in 2012, “devoured by his own popularity and absorbed by the absurdity of our time.”
The sculptor who gave a face to the faceless In 1967, authorities in Oklahoma were struggling to identify the 1930–2020 remains of a Native American man who’d been murdered while hitchhiking. They called in Betty Pat Gatliff, a medical illustrator with the Federal Aviation Administration, and asked her to reconstruct the victim’s face using a new forensic technique. She was handed the skull and proceeded to glue small plastic markers to the bone to match the average depth of tissue at key points around the face. Using the plastic pieces as guides, she spread clay across the face, producing an eerily lifelike bust that resulted in a positive ID within days. Over the next five decades, Gatliff would become the doyenne of forensic facial reconstruction, working on some 300 cases and achieving an estimated 70 percent ID rate. Gatliff, who founded her own forensic reconstruction firm in 1979, gave a face to victims of serial killers and re-created the visages of Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun and U.S. soldiers killed at the Battle of Little Big Horn. “Everybody,” she said, “deserves to be identified.”
Florida Gulf Coast University
Betty Pat Gatliff
ness,” said The New York Times. Betty Pat painted and sculpted from a young age and after graduating from college, joined the FAA in Oklahoma City. There she worked with renowned forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow, who encouraged her to read up on a new technique of using clay to put a face on a skull. Gatliff thought the approach might help identify plane crash victims, said The Washington Post. But after her sculpture of the unknown hitchhiker resulted in a positive ID, law enforcement across the U.S. began sending her boxes of bones and requesting her help in giving “a name to John or Jane Doe.”
She likened her work to “putting a puzzle together without a picture,” said SmithsonianMag.com. Forensic anthropologists and detectives provided information about a victim’s race, age, and gender, and Gatliff made informed anatomical guesses about a nose’s shape. “They never look exactly like the person,” she admitted of her sculptures. “A skull will just tell you so much.” Gatliff never found the reconstruction process to be gruesome. “I’m more amazed by the human skull every time Gatliff was born in El Reno, Okla., to an architect I work with one,” she said in 1980. “What the Creator has given us just can’t be improved on.” father and a mother “who had a quilting busi-
35 The freethinking engineer who invented the laser printer Gary Starkweather was a junior engineer at Xerox in the late 1960s when he realized how to revolutionize the firm’s signature product. At the time, Xerox Gary Starkweather machines used 1938–2019 light and a photographic lens to copy an image from one sheet of paper to another. Starkweather thought he could use a laser—a new technology—to convert digital data sent by a computer into a physical image. His bosses weren’t impressed. Calling lasers “toys,” they told him to scrap the project. Instead, he got himself moved from Xerox’s Rochester, N.Y., headquarters to its California research lab in 1971, and nine months later he unveiled the first laser printer. “We still use the same fundamental engine to print billions of pages a day,” said computer historian Doug Fairbairn. “It was all Gary’s idea.” Born in Lansing, Mich., Starkweather “spent much of his youth taking apart and reassembling whatever mechanical and electrical equipment he could scavenge,” said The Wall Street Journal. Neighbors complained that his experiments interfered with TV reception. After studying physics and optics at college, he joined Xerox. The company introduced the first commercial laser printer based on Starkweather’s work, the Xerox 9700, in 1977. It “weighed more than a ton and was priced at $295,000.” After 24 years at Xerox, Starkweather “moved to Apple and then Microsoft,” said The New York Times. By then, his great invention had shrunk both in size and price: In a 1997 speech, he held up the $38 circuit board that drove a modern printer. Starkweather was amazed that his technology had become so accessible. “Even as technologists,” he said, “when we think we are on the edge, we are not on the edge.” THE WEEK January 31, 2020
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The last word
The great unboxing of Roundup, Mont. A vast economy of resellers collects the world’s goods to resell on Amazon, said journalist Josh Dzieza in TheVerge.com. In a small Montana town, readying all those shipments for Amazon is the local industry. in the online directory. Sensing an opportunity, she decided to give prepping a try. She chose a name—Selltec—and put it up on the directory, too.
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arriving from Walmarts and Targets across the country, bought by sellers as far away as the Philippines. Kristal expanded to her garage, At first glance, Roundup does then to an abandoned not appear to be a hub for Ford dealership on Main much of anything. Founded Street, then to a wareby homesteaders and ranchhouse last used to pour ers in the late 19th century, concrete for fracking it enjoyed boomlets as a coal wells. She hired 10, then Kristal Graham: ‘It’s amazing how much this stuff travels around the world.’ town and a station along the 20 people. But the flow Milwaukee railroad, but the of goods had become a flood. She soon found herself sucked into the coal tapped out and the train shut down, Kristal hired a friend, Linda McAfee, whose world of Amazon Marketplace, the comand the town’s population has now sunk grandson was dating Kristal’s daughter. pany’s platform for third-party sellers that below 2,000. Its Main Street is lined with They broke up, and it was bad. Kristal now represents the majority of goods sold homages to its frontier past: silhouettes of confronted her friend about it, and it grew on the site. Though she had exhausted her cowboys painted on boarded-up windows; heated. Linda says she quit; Kristal says she supply of books, she found she could buy dust-covered wagon wheels in otherwise all manner of goods (razors, K-Y Jelly, first- fired her. empty storefronts; a noose dangling from “the hanging tree,” which a plaque explains aid kits) from other retailers and sell those It was this schism that caused prep centers was used to execute three cattle rustlers and on Amazon for a profit too. to proliferate in Roundup, because shortly two unlucky bystanders. With a lone traffic This sort of arbitrage is common and has after, Linda went into business for herself. signal flashing red, it just makes the cut for helped Amazon both expand its catalog and She had moved to the area when her husbeing a one-stoplight town. Roundup is, in band got a job in a nearby mine. At 59, sap its competitors. It’s hard for competishort, just about the last place you might tors like Target to lure customers away with she’s both laconic and blunt, someone for expect to become a nexus of international whom, in her words, “stuff just flies out of steep discounts when someone like Kristal e-commerce. can just buy their wares and resell them at a my mouth, I don’t care.” She put up a shingle as MT Prep ’n’ Ship Pro and started getmarkup. Amazon has made buying stuff so But the geography of Amazon is strange: frictionless and habitual that many shoppers ting deliveries to the shop on her property. more than 150 million square feet of waredon’t bother checking prices anywhere else. From there, Amazon prepping started to houses, distribution centers, and sorting depots located mostly in exurban sprawls spread through Roundup as fast as a rumor. But Amazon only accepts goods that are and industrial zones, out of sight of the First, Linda’s neighbor told her another packaged a certain way. Products need to millions of customers who receive its goods be made ready for the automated gauntlet resident, Jill Johnson, had heard about her on their doorstep. Even by Amazon’s stannew gig and wanted to learn the ropes. Jill of the fulfillment center. Old bar codes and dards, Roundup is an oddity. There’s no ful- prices need to be covered up and new ones apprenticed in the shop, and they became fillment center, Amazon’s term for the ware- added. Glass needs to be bubble-wrapped. fast friends. houses where it stores and dispatches goods. As Kristal’s business grew, she needed help Soon Jill needed more space to store all In fact, there’s no official Amazon presence with all this unboxing and reboxing, so the packages she was getting, so she drove of any kind. Instead, Roundup is home to a she started looking for a prep center. There down Roundup Road to the outskirts of growing industry of prep centers, businesses were about 15 at the time, she says, mostly Billings to buy a shed. She told the woman that specialize in packing goods to meet in New Hampshire, Oregon, and Delaware, selling sheds what she needed it for, and that the demanding requirements of Amazon’s which have no sales tax. That way, sellers woman, Chris Redger, thought it sounded highly automated warehouses. can enter the address of their prep center like a good side hustle. So Chris made a when they buy from Target’s website and It all started in 2015. Kristal Graham, 39, website called Rolling “R” Prep and Ship pad their margins by a couple percent. had moved to the area 10 years earlier to and set up a prepping operation in her Montana has no sales tax, either, Kristal work on a ranch. When her brother died, store’s side room, which is now stacked with mused, and there wasn’t a single center she turned to Amazon to sell off his books. inflatable Santas, cans of chili, and leave-in THE WEEK January 31, 2020
Josh Dzieza/The Verge (2)
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N ANY GIVEN day, thousands of packages from Walmarts, Targets, and stores around the country travel north along a two-lane road out of Billings, Mont.—past the Tumbleweed Saloon, past cows grazing on empty rangeland, past the Busy Bee Cafe and stands of short pines—to the town of Roundup, where they will be unboxed, reboxed, and sent off to Amazon.
The last word conditioner sent in from Walmarts, Targets, REIs, and Big Lots, all destined for Amazon. And so it went. Between Selltec and the splinter group, every day Roundup receives 3,000 to 4,000 Amazon-bound packages— about double the number of people who actually live there. The preppers are one part of a vast, informal, and mostly hidden workforce that stocks Amazon’s shelves. The majority of goods sold on the site come from third-party sellers, many of whom got their start going to brick-and-mortar stores looking for products to buy and resell. Prep centers, automated software, and Amazon’s logistics network let arbitrage globalize. Now someone sitting in Ontario or Manila or Ljubljana can buy a hundred toasters from a Target warehouse in San Bernardino, Calif., and send them to a prep center in Roundup and on to Amazon, which might automatically divide the toaster shipment between fulfillment centers in, say, Illinois, Kentucky, and Utah based on projected demand, before shipping the toasters to smaller local warehouses and finally out to customers. Many sellers now have about as much relationship to the goods as commodity traders to do pork bellies, just directing goods from one company’s warehouse to another. “I’m basically moving inventory from one warehouse to my fulfillment center, and then to Amazon to a third fulfillment center, and then to finally being sold to some customer at the end point,” says Chris Grant, a seller based in Orlando who just contracted with a prep center in Montana. “Which when you kind of take a 50,000-foot view of it, it kind of seems really inefficient.” The women in Roundup are mostly bemused by their role in this system. They did not expect when they came to Roundup to be a way station on a highway of thousands of consumer goods. Jobs here of any sort are hard to come by, much less ones that give them the flexibility to go herd cattle, or care for ailing family, or work from an off-thegrid house miles from town. Each item shipped nets the preppers a dollar. If the items are small and the women work fast, they can make good money. One prepper, who tracks her work in a spreadsheet on her desk, calculates that she made $49.55 per hour bagging 353 small animal toys the day before. Their income drops if they have to prep, say, strollers or televisions, but the work is flexible and still pays better than most of the jobs available in the area. “The jobs we get here are so close to almost minimum wage,” Linda says. “And it really doesn’t cost a lot to start a prep. I mean, you started with one printer.”
Servicing Amazon sellers is more stable than actually selling on Amazon, and the preppers have seen plenty of new customers quickly go bust. They speak fondly of the ones who have managed to stick it out, talking about who just had a kid, whose business is growing fast, who’s looking to quit their day job. Jill has had clients invite her to visit them in Greece and Slovenia. Linda works with clients in Australia, Canada, and Malaysia. A seller from Philadelphia actually flew out to inspect Linda’s operation— “If you’re expecting a big warehouse with little robots running around, you’re going to be disappointed,” Linda says, laughing—but such in-person contact is rare.
37 times seems absurd. “My thought was always, ‘If Amazon knows this person is buying it, why don’t they just add it to their inventory?’” Linda asks. “Instead of shipping it, why not just move it across the warehouse?” After coffee with Linda at the Busy Bee, I drive up the road three minutes to Selltec. It’s a much bigger operation: a beige warehouse sitting in a dusty lot, a delivery truck parked out back. It’s dim inside, and Kristal sits at a desk in front of towers of boxes, examining inventory lists displayed on her monitor. She thought she’d never fill up the warehouse, and now products are stacked in the loading bay. We walk down an aisle: televisions, biochemistry textbooks, popsicle makers, power drills, Lego sets piled in Toys R Us shopping carts, and many, many pairs of shoes. They’re coming in from Targets, Walmarts, and Barnes & Nobles in Waco, Salt Lake City, Phoenix, and Minneapolis. “It’s amazing how much this stuff travels around the world,” she says. I ask her if it ever seems strange that all this stuff is just cycling around from warehouse to warehouse.
Chris Redger set up operations in a side room.
With the products repackaged, the preppers log on to Amazon, which tells them the fulfillment center to which they’ll send the products. The end result is a bizarre, looping supply chain. Some hair conditioner might get sent from a Walmart warehouse in Grantsville, Utah, to Roundup, then from Roundup to an Amazon fulfillment center in Joliet, Ill. Finally, Amazon sends it out to a customer.
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R MAYBE IT doesn’t.
Maybe another seller buys the item and sends it to another prep center. The preppers are constantly getting packages from Amazon, which they unbox and repackage and send back to Amazon. This is what’s called an Amazon flip. Sometimes it happens when one seller buys something from another seller who isn’t using Prime shipping, then marks it up and sends it back to Amazon in the hope that the Prime designation will cause the algorithm to give them better billing. Other times, sellers will buy products from Amazon when the price drops, then send them right back. Customers, of course, have no idea any of this is happening: They just see the magical efficiency of their inflatable Santa appearing the day after they clicked on it. But the preppers have a better view of the flow of goods, and to them it some-
“It is strange,” she says, as we pass towers of body butter. “And it amazes me, if somebody actually thought about how many warehouses or how many people’s hands touch their product, it would creep them out.” But no one thinks about that, and why would they? Amazon has designed the sleekest, most efficient consumer gratification interface ever devised: just a click on a screen or a command to Alexa and an item arrives. It’s what allows the whole arbitrage ecosystem to exist, that the ease and speed outweighs the effort of Googling other options, to say nothing of going to a physical store. “It’s the convenience, 100 percent,” Kristal says. She gets the appeal. There are only two grocers in Roundup, both very small; several shuttered buildings along Main Street appear to be memorials to general stores, with dusty tins in the windows and dioramas of settler women in floral dresses. “We are so rural. You have to drive to Billings to get most things,” she says. So she ends up shopping on Amazon all the time, even just to get dog food. Knowing what she knows, she tries to remember to check the price, but sometimes even she can’t be bothered. Excerpted from an article that originally appeared in TheVerge.com. Used with permission. THE WEEK January 31, 2020
The Puzzle Page
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ACROSS 1 Disappear, like an icicle 5 Fun on a snow day 9 Colorado resort area 14 “Not guilty,” for one 15 Buzzing home 16 Company that created the Frisbee and Hula Hoop 17 Supermodel recently screened as a potential juror in Harvey Weinstein’s trial 19 Piece of paper used in bookmaking 20 Agitated 21 The Farewell director snubbed in recent Oscar nominations 23 High shot in pickleball 24 “Give ___ break!” 26 Animation frame 27 Opus ___ (Catholic institution) 28 “___ be a cold day in hell...” 30 Cheese in a Greek salad 32 Late dinner hour 33 Where Rigoletto fans go 36 Humongous 38 15-year-old U.S. tennis phenom who beat Venus Williams in the 2020 Australian Open 40 Butterfingers 42 “Don’t move a muscle” 46 Enemies 47 Biblical garden location THE WEEK January 31, 2020
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Medical school subj. Nest egg fund Sad music genre Color like khaki Defective firecracker Pop superstar who recently appeared with Oprah Winfrey to discuss mental health issues “Ain’t Too Proud ___” Belgian painter James Pop singer who was a coach on The Voice in 2019 Important decision for an author God of love Golf bag supply Hightail it “Cut that out!” Tacks on
DOWN 1 Abbr. on a new car’s sticker 2 Director of Hostel and Knock Knock 3 Easy to read 4 Wagger on a wolfhound 5 It’s found under a tree 6 Thermos topper 7 More than mean 8 Take away 9 Horrific 10 Indicate 11 Heroic knight 12 Highly regarded 13 Knuckles-on-scalp rub on the playground 18 Edge of a skirt
For runners-up and complete contest rules, please go to theweek.com/contest.
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This week’s question: A 100-year-old giant tortoise named Diego is being allowed to retire from a captivebreeding program in the Galapagos after helping to save his endangered species by fathering more than 800 offspring over four decades. If a movie studio were to make a rom-com about Diego’s passion-filled life story, what should the film be titled? Last week’s contest: A North Carolina couple called the cops and cowered in a closet after hearing what they thought was a burglar in their home; it turned out the “intruder” was just their robot vacuum cleaner, which had gotten stuck and was banging against a wall. If Hollywood were to make a movie about a robo vacuum cleaner that actually turns to crime, what title could it give the film? THE WINNER: “The Dirty Dyson” —Laurel Rose, Pittsburgh SECOND PLACE: “My Life in Grime” Joe Ayella, Wayne, Pa. THIRD PLACE: “Law & Order: Special Vacuums Unit” Lloyd Grass, Fulton, Mo.
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22 The L of AL or NL 23 Put a match to 25 Hairstyle for Lenny Kravitz 29 Latin for “place” 31 Highest scout rank 32 Recently renegotiated deal 34 Houseplant’s “house” 35 Condition for a dermatologist 37 Yet-to-be-determined questions 39 “___ that the truth!” 40 Like some religious scholarship 41 Results in 43 Organized alphabetically 44 Let out a guffaw 45 Inc., in Britain 46 Butcher’s cuts 48 Furniture in a pet owner’s house 51 Bird on the shore 53 “This is only ___” 54 Partner of neither 57 Hedonist’s word 58 Prefix with dynamic 60 Alpha follower 63 “___ appetit!” 64 Numbskull
Correction: A clue in last week’s puzzle mischaracterized the film Whiplash. The 2014 drama won three Oscars but not Best Picture.
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 “Love Diego” in the subject line. Entries are due by noon, Eastern Time, Tuesday, Jan. 28. Winners will appear on the Puzzle Page next issue and at theweek.com/puzzles on Friday, Jan. 31. In the case of identical or similar entries, the first one received gets credit. W The winner gets a one-year subscription to The Week.
Sudoku Fill in all the boxes so that each row, column, and outlined square includes all the numbers from 1 through 9. Difficulty: super-hard
Find the solutions to all The Week’s puzzles online: www.theweek.com/puzzle.
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