The Week (US Edition) - April 3, 2015

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U.S. special forces flee Yemen’s chaos What happened

a model for other anti-terrorism operations. “That wishful thinking has now Yemen was engulfed in a full-blown civil been exposed.” war this week, forcing the U.S. to suspend crucial anti-terrorism operations there. As Yemen now faces an “Iraq-Libya-Syria Houthi rebels began an assault on Aden, scenario,” with warring factions but no the last stronghold of the Yemeni governcentral government, said The Economist. ment, beleaguered President Abed Rabbo Hadi hopes to return to power, but he Mansour Hadi reportedly fled the country “cannot realistically hope to win a war by sea. The Iranian-backed militants have against the Houthis and Saleh.” So he is been in control of Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, now waiting for Saudi Arabia or other since September, and as they advanced Gulf nations to intervene and restore his south last weekend, they also seized rule, which is unlikely. But the Houthis control of the country’s third-largest city, Looters overrunning the U.S. special forces base also lack legitimacy to rule all of Yemen; Taiz. During that advance the U.S. pulled after their illegal seizure of Sanaa in September, they agreed to its team of around 100 special forces troops out of the southern share power with Hadi and withdraw from the capital.

Al Anad air base, where they had been gathering intelligence for drone strikes against the Yemen-based group Al Qaida in the AraWhat the columnists said bian Peninsula (AQAP). Houthi forces then seized the base.

“Yemen is obviously a public-relations disaster for Team Obama,” said Peter Brookes in the Boston Herald. It’s also a huge “strategic In response to the chaos—and amid fears over Iran’s growing distraction” when we’re already facing major challenges in Iraq, regional influence—Saudi Arabia amassed heavy artillery on its Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, and Ukraine. And the U.S. role in Yemen border with Yemen. The Houthi rebels, who practice a variant of will be limited: This civil war is just a proxy for the Middle East’s Shiite Islam, are receiving support from Iran’s Shiite government, newest “Great Game”—Saudi Arabia’s Sunni leaders fighting for and are also working with security forces still loyal to former dominance in the region with the Shiite mullahs of Iran.

President Ali Abdullah Saleh, the longtime Shiite president who was ousted in 2012. Adding to the turmoil, a group claiming alleThis will be “a protracted civil war with multiple protagonists,” giance to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria claimed responsibility said Brian Whitaker in TheGuardian.com. Former President Saleh for suicide attacks that killed 137 Shiite worshippers in Sanaa last will be “a key player.” Despite having constantly battled with the Friday. If the claims are true, it was the terror organization’s first Houthis during his 34-year rule, the opportunistic Shiite leader attack in Yemen. On Wednesday, Yemeni Foreign Minister Riad formed an unlikely alliance with the group in a bid to return to Yaseen pleaded for help from other nations, urging allies to send power and install his son as president. That ambition will continue “fighter jets, navies, and ground forces if necessary.” to be an obstacle to resolving this crisis.

What the editorials said

It wasn’t all bad Q Tristan Gareau just had a pretty memorable first date. The 21-yearold Canadian was driving with his new love interest when he saw a smoking car that had crashed into a condominium in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Gareau didn’t hesitate, stopping to pull the unconscious 65-year-old driver out of the smoldering vehicle just seconds before it burst into flames.

He’s happy he could help—for more reasons than one. “I’m just glad the guy is safe now and that nobody else got injured,” he said. “But trust me, the girl is probably pretty hooked on me. That’s the way to do it, I guess.”

THE WEEK April 3, 2015

“AQAP appears to be in position to gain the most from the turmoil in Yemen,” said Martin Reardon in AlJazeera.com. Counterterrorism experts consider it to be “the most dangerous terrorist organization in the world,” because of its determination to devise and plant undetectable bombs on airliners or other Western targets. If there’s a power vacuum in large parts of the country, AQAP will be much freer to operate, and “they’ll be bigger, stronger, and better.” For America and Europe, that’s a very alarming prospect.

Q Two years ago, when 35-year-old Asia Ford began experiencing serious health issues due to her weight, the Kentucky mother of three decided to turn her life around.

Since then she has lost 217 pounds, and last week she ran a 10K race. But in the final stretch, Ford began crying, fearing she would collapse. That’s when Louisville Police Lt. Aubrey Gregory came to her side, giving her the encouragement she needed to cross the finish line. “I asked, ‘God, please let me take a few more steps,’” Ford said.

“Right when I said that, God brought this man.”

Ford: An answered prayer

Q Derrell Alexander began his career as a car salesman in 1949—when gasoline cost 17 cents a gallon and a new set of wheels averaged $1,400.

Last week, the Wyoming man celebrated his 100th birthday at the Casper car dealership where he still works six days a week.

Alexander, who’s known for being honest with customers and who refuses to take any vacation time, credits both his work ethic and “the man upstairs” for his lasting health. “You sit around the house and watch TV, and you don’t last long,” he said.

“Just keep on trucking.”

On the cover: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Illustration by Fred Harper.

Cover photos from AP, Corbis (2)

Reuters, Jonathan Roberts

“Another week, another victory for disorder in the Middle East,” said The Wall Street Journal. The U.S. withdrawal from Yemen is a “major loss” in the fight against AQAP, the al Qaida group “most focused on hitting the U.S. mainland.” We still have nearby military bases and warships from which to launch attacks on terrorists, but the lack of ground forces will reduce “accurate targeting.” Only last September, President Obama hailed his Yemen strategy—drone attacks on targets identified by special forces—as

... and how they were covered

NEWS 3

Cruz kicks off White House race Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) fired the starting gun on the Republican Party’s crowded presidential race this week, as he became the first major figure from either party to launch a 2016 White House campaign. In a speech delivered at evangelical Liberty University in Virginia, Cruz, 44, vowed that as president he would repeal Obamacare, abolish the IRS, uphold the “sanctity of human life,” and defend the right to bear arms.

“I believe in the power of millions of courageous conservatives rising up to reignite the promise of America,” said Cruz. “It is a time to reclaim the Constitution of the United States.”

tive right.” As more prominent candidates like Bush and Walker battle each other for support, Cruz just might be able to score a breakout win in Iowa and build momentum from there.

“At best, Cruz will win a Fox News contract,” said Jamelle Bouie in Slate.com. But he’ll never become president.

The bombastic Texan has accomplished nothing in the Senate except nearly shutting down the government and antagonizing even his fellow Republicans. Cruz may be smart, said Charles C. W. Cooke in NationalReview.com, but his obnoxious manner “lands somewhere between the oleaginousness of a Joel Osteen and the selfassuredness of a Midwestern vacuum-cleaner salesman.” He’s simply too unlikable to win.

The Canadian-born son of a Cuban immigrant, Cruz is one of more than a dozen figures hoping to Cruz: A serious contender?

Still, Cruz’s candidacy will shape the Republiwin the GOP’s nomination for 2016. The first-term can race, said Danny Vinik in NewRepublic.com. A menacing opsenator captured 4 percent of Republicans in the latest CNN poll, ponent in any debate, he will gleefully rip into Bush, Walker, and trailing frontrunners Jeb Bush and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, other primary rivals he deems “squishy” on “immigration, taxes, who scored 16 percent and 13 percent, respectively. and health care.” When he does, his opponents may feel forced to tack right—sabotaging the GOP’s chances in the general election.

Cruz may not be polling well, but don’t count him out, said Ben “The senator who would hold the government hostage has beDomenech in TheFederalist.com. His passionate stand against come the candidate doing the same to his party.”

Obamacare in particular has been “sweet music to the conserva-

Doubts over Iran deal As the U.S. and other world powers scrambled to finalize a deal to constrain Iran’s nuclear ambitions ahead of a March 31 deadline, the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog this week reported that Tehran had failed to supply information that would prove its nuclear program was intended for peaceful purposes. Yukiya Amano, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said Iran had replied to only one of a dozen inquiries about the “possible military dimensions” of its nuclear activities. Tehran has also refused to let international inspectors examine its Parchin complex, where the regime is suspected of carrying out high-explosives tests linked to a possible nuclear-weapons program.

Even if an agreement is reached in the coming days, said David Sanger and Michael Gordon in The New York Times, it will lack one crucial element: “An actual written accord, signed by the Iranians.” The U.S. wants specific concessions now—including unfettered inspections and numerical limits on centrifuges. But

Iran is pushing for a vague statement of “understanding,” with a final deal in June. If Tehran refuses to get specific, President Obama will either have to walk away from the table or try to sell Americans on a “deal” that isn’t a deal.

The U.S. should walk away no matter what, said former CIA chief Michael Hayden in The Washington Post. Obama wants to keep Iran at least one year away from “breaking out” and building a bomb, “giving the world plenty of time to react to infractions.” But Iran could trick the world “with a cascade of small infractions” that our European partners might let go unpunished.

And as the world looked the other way, Iran could go nuclear.

Obama is blind to such issues, said Stephen Hayes in Weekly Standard.com. Tehran’s refusal to cooperate with the IAEA shows that the mullahs can’t be trusted. But in his desperation to rescue his tattered foreign policy and secure a lasting legacy, Obama is willing to gamble the world’s security on the “irrational hope that Iran will someday change for the better.”

AP

THE WEEK

The past six months have been uniquely disastrous for the National Football League. Ray Rice knocked his fiancée unconscious on videotape. Adrian Peterson beat his son with a tree branch. The league admitted that up to a third of players sustain brain trauma. And yet by season’s end, the NFL had not lost a single national corporate sponsor, and the Super Bowl was the most watched TV broadcast in U.S. history. So it’s easy to look at 24-year-old Chris Borland’s decision to retire from pro football out of concern for his long-term health and still conclude there’s nothing that could damage America’s favorite sport (See Talking points). Tens of millions of fans will continue to watch, despite the early-dementia cases and the suicides by brain-damaged former players. For every Borland who retires, a line of recruits will eagerly vie to take his place.

But the NFL would be mistaken to think that football cannot fall out of favor. In the first half of the 20th century, the biggest sports in the U.S. were baseball, boxing, and horse racing. The latter two are now a shadow of their former selves, felled by a combination of corruption scandals, failure to adapt to network TV, and in the case of boxing, revulsion over what repeated head blows did to beloved fighters like Muhammad Ali. When confronted with emotionally powerful evidence, public attitudes can change, sometimes radically; half the population once smoked, but smokers are now banished to society’s margins. Football risks a similar fate if it cannot solve the issue of head trauma. The damage to players’ brains may be invisible, but it is steadily accumulating. The same might be said of fans’ uneasiness.

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THE WEEK April 3, 2015

4 NEWS

Controversy of the week

Five years on: Is Obamacare working? estimate was that 26 million Americans would gain When President Obama signed the Affordable Care coverage under the ACA by 2015, said Jeffrey H. Act into law in March 2010, an open microphone Anderson in WeeklyStandard.com. In what unifamously caught Vice President Joe Biden calling it verse is “failing to hit a target by 10 million people a “big f---ing deal,” said Steve Benen in MSNBC ‘working even better than anticipated?’” .com. “Five years later, there’s little doubt that Biden was entirely correct.” Despite Republican predicObamacare is hardly perfect, said Sarah Kliff in tions that the ACA would be a catastrophic failure, Vox.com, but opinion polls are not a good measure the law now universally known as Obamacare has of its effectiveness. Thanks to a relentless camextended insurance coverage to 16.4 million previOpinions have hardened. paign of misinformation by conservative critics, ously uninsured Americans and its cost-saving meathe public remains shockingly ignorant of the law’s effects. In a sures actually helped to rein in overall U.S. health-care spending.

Health-care costs rose only 3.6 percent in 2013, the lowest increase recent Vox.com poll, for instance, only 60 percent were aware since 1960. This week the Congressional Budget Office revised the that Obamacare has increased the number of Americans with projected 10-year cost of the law down to $1.2 trillion, 11 percent health insurance, and just 5 percent knew that projections of less than last year’s estimate. As for the ACA’s supposed job-killing Obamacare’s 10-year cost have “consistently fallen.” More than three in four Americans either think the program is providing impact, 2014 “was the best year for job creation since the ’90s.” insurance to undocumented immigrants or aren’t sure if it does, Even though the “doomsayers have been wrong pretty much across the board,’’ said Jonathan Bernstein in BloombergView.com, even though the ACA expressly bars coverage to such immigrants. polls indicate that the law remains unpopular. Only 40 percent “Republican lies” may be soiling Obamacare’s reputation, said support it, while 45 percent oppose it.

Ron Fournier in NationalJournal.com, but “Democratic lies sold it” in the first place. Obama falsely promised that “if you like People oppose Obamacare because they are “feeling for themyour health plan, you can keep it—period,” and downplayed the selves the law’s impact,” said Grace-Marie Turner in Forbes.com. fact that his health-care plan “redistributes wealth” to the poor.

It forced millions of Americans to give up doctors and cheaper Obamacare carries such “an enduring stigma” because it’s “an insurance plans they liked. Plans purchased through Obamacare ugly reflection of today’s political culture.” Though the law is are deceptively costly, with huge deductibles averaging $5,081 for largely succeeding in its goals, said Ezra Klein in Vox.com, “the individuals in the cheaper “bronze” plans—42 percent more than average deductibles in plans sold outside the exchanges. As for the state of the Obamacare debate is depressing.” The ACA has become a central symbol in our country’s bitter debate over the claim that Obamacare has slowed health-care inflation, the law’s role of government, so no amount of factual information will supporters seldom mention that the slowdown began before the change the minds of either liberals or conservatives. Five years on, ACA was signed, as an effect of the recession, and that the rate “the hardening of opinion is, if anything, worse.” is projected to start climbing again next year. The CBO’s initial

Q A New York state high school

celebrating National Foreign Language Week caused an uproar when a student recited the Pledge of Allegiance in Arabic. Student Andrew Zink said reciting the pledge in different languages was meant to show that “what makes you American is not the language you speak, but the ideas you believe in.” But the district superintendent publicly apologized, saying the use of Arabic “divided the school in half.”

Q A Nevada lawmaker claimed racism was no longer a problem in the U.S., then used a racially offensive term to describe a black colleague.

While defending a proposed voter I.D. law, Republican assemblywoman Michele Fiore referred to Democrat Harvey Munford as a “colored man” shortly after imploring people to “stop using the race card.”

THE WEEK April 3, 2015

Good week for: Seducing carnivores, after Burger King said it would sell a

$40 cologne that smells like a Whopper at select locations in Japan. “Flame Grilled” will be available on April 1, Burger King said—an indication that it may all be an April Fool’s joke.

Law and order, after a Virginia condo complex announced that

all dogs must undergo DNA testing so that any unscooped poop can be traced to its owner, who will be fined up to $500.

Flexibility, after Republican presidential candidate Sen. Ted

Cruz, who says Obamacare is a disaster, lost his family health insurance and began shopping for a policy through Obamacare.

“I believe we should follow the text of every law,” Cruz said.

Bad week for: Crossing the boss, when White House florist Laura Dowling

was fired and escorted from the building after reportedly clashing with Michelle Obama, who did not like her “fussy style.”

Rocky Mountain highs, after laboratory testing found that

legal weed sold in Colorado is often contaminated with fungus and the chemical butane and has little or no cannabidiol, or CBD—the compound that makes medical marijuana “medical.”

Hasty diagnoses, after a New York woman sued a psychiatric

hospital that allegedly deemed her delusional because she told doctors that President Obama followed her on Twitter. Obama does follow Kam Brock, along with more than 640,000 other people. “Obama follows positive people,” Brock said.

Boring but important New fracking rules The Obama administration last week unveiled the first major federal regulations on hydraulic fracturing, the controversial drilling technique that has led to a boom in U.S. oil and gas production.

The rules will set new safety standards for the 100,000 oil and gas wells on public lands, in an effort to limit the risk of water contamination—the fracking process involves injecting chemicals underground to shatter rocks containing hydrocarbon deposits.

The Independent Petroleum Association of America said the regulations would impose “burdensome” costs on the industry. But Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said that the changes to outdated rules would allow “responsible development while protecting natural resources.”

Corbis

Only in America

The U.S. at a glance ...

AP (4)

Sacramento Sodomite Suppression Act: California’s ballot initiative process came under fire this week after a religious fanatic introduced a proposal to legalize the murder of gays and lesbians made progress in the state. Attorney Matt McLaughlin’s initiative, called the “Sodomite Suppression Harris: No legal choice Act,” calls for gays to be executed by “bullets to the head.” Because McLaughlin paid the $200 filing fee, California Attorney General Kamala Harris must now write a title and summary for the proposal. If McLaughlin wants the measure to make it onto the ballot, though, he will need to get some 350,000 signatures. Gay rights campaigners called on courts to block the initiative, while others said California should raise its filing fee to deter crank proposals. But lobbyist Jennifer Fearing said it was important to keep ballot measures affordable for ordinary Californians, “even if some jerks can get over the first and lowest hurdle.”

Longmont, Colo.

Gruesome attack: A vigil was held in Longmont this week for a pregnant woman who suffered a grisly knife attack that ended with her 7-monthold fetus being cut from her womb.

Police said alleged attacker Dynel Lane, 34, lured Michelle Wilkins, 26, to her house by placing an ad on Craigslist Lane: Slasher for baby clothes for sale. When Wilkins turned up to collect the items, Lane stabbed the expectant mother in the stomach and ripped out her baby. Lane, a former nurse’s aide who had for months told her family she was pregnant, took the deceased child to a local hospital, claiming to have suffered a miscarriage. She was arrested on multiple charges, including attempted first-degree murder, after doctors realized she hadn’t given birth to the baby. Wilkins’ parents said their daughter had been released from the hospital, but was “scarred beyond imagination” by the attack.

Washington, D.C. ISIS kill list: The Pentagon said it was contacting 100 U.S. military personnel whose names, photos, and purported addresses were published this week in an online kill list by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. The jihadist group claimed to have hacked the contact information from classified government documents and said it was releasing the service members’ details “so brothers in American can deal with you.” But defense officials said most of the names included in the list had been harvested from publicly available news articles about U.S.-led airstrikes on ISIS, and that there wasn’t any evidence that the individuals were in any imminent danger.

The FBI is investigating the incident; the Pentagon said it had advised troops months ago to remove any identifying material from social media in anticipation of such a threat.

Charlottesville, Va. Rolling Stone scandal: Charlottesville police this week announced that they had found no evidence to suggest a brutal gang rape had taken place at a University of Virginia fraternity house, as alleged in a controversial Rolling Stone article published in November. The piece claimed that a college student known as “Jackie” had been subjected to a horrific threehour assault involving seven men during a Phi Kappa Psi party in 2012. But investigators said that after conducting 70 interviews in a four-month investigation, they had not found proof that a party had actually taken place on the night of the alleged rape, nor had they been able to find the man that Jackie had previously identified as her date to the party.

Phi Kappa Psi said it is “now exploring its legal options to address the extensive damage caused by Rolling Stone.”

NEWS 5

New York City Sabbath tragedy: Seven Orthodox Jewish children from the same family were killed in a Mourning the children Brooklyn house fire last week when a hot plate used to keep food warm over the Sabbath apparently caught fire. The four boys and three girls, ages 5 to 16, were asleep upstairs in their home when investigators believe the hot plate— which had been left on overnight, since Orthodox Jews are barred from turning on stoves or ovens during the Sabbath— malfunctioned, sparking a fast-spreading fire. The children’s mother, Gayle Sassoon, 45, and her 15-year-old daughter survived the blaze by jumping out of second-floor windows. Sassoon “valiantly tried, although badly burned, to get out and get help for her children,” said fire department commissioner Daniel Nigro. The mother and her daughter remained in critical condition this week, unaware of the deaths of their family members.

Washington, D.C. Bergdahl charged: Almost a year after being released in a controversial Taliban prisoner swap, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl was charged by the U.S. Army this week with desertion and “misbehavior before the enemy.’’

Bergdahl was captured by militants Bergdahl: A deserter? after he walked off his base in eastern Afghanistan in 2009. In letters written to his parents during his five years in captivity, Bergdahl said he went AWOL because “leadership was lacking, if not nonexistent. The conditions were bad and looked to be getting worse for the men that where actuly [sic] the ones risking thier [sic] lives.”

The 28-year-old was freed last May in exchange for five Taliban prisoners being held in Guantánamo Bay. Military insiders said Bergdahl was unlikely to face a lengthy prison sentence if found guilty, but could have his rank reduced.

THE WEEK April 3, 2015

6 NEWS

The world at a glance ...

Leicester, U.K. Richard III reburied: England is giving Richard III a burial fit for a king, 530 years after he died. The last Plantagenet king was killed battling the forces of Henry Tudor in 1485, but his grave was not found until 2012, when archaeologists discovered a twisted Saying farewell to a maligned king skeleton under a parking lot. The royal remains were identified through DNA. Portrayed by Shakespeare as a wicked hunchback who murdered his two nephews to seize the throne, Richard has long had supporters who say he was unfairly maligned. They turned out in droves, many of them in period costume, to view his casket, before he was to be laid to rest in a cathedral.

Edinburgh Cardinal resigns in disgrace: In a rare demotion, a Scottish cardinal has been stripped of all priestly rights and duties because of allegations that he pressured young priests into sex—but he is allowed to keep the title of cardinal.

Keith O’Brien, 77, was known for his preaching against homosexuality and gay rights. He resigned as archbishop of St. Andrews two O’Brien: Pushed out years ago, when the allegations surfaced, and has admitted that his sexual conduct was “below the standards expected of me.” Some clerical abuse victims criticized Pope Francis for allowing O’Brien to keep his title and pension, while other Catholic observers said the pontiff’s action was revolutionary. Cardinal resignations are extremely rare; the last was in 1927.

Seyne-les-Alpes, France Plane smashes into mountain: A Germanwings flight from Barcelona to Dusseldorf crashed in the French Alps this week, killing all 150 people on board, including three Americans.

French officials said that while terrorism was unlikely, they did not yet know why the Airbus A320 suddenly went into a steep descent moments after reaching its cruising altitude of 38,000 feet. French crash investigators said that an audio file recovered from the plane’s black-box cockpit voice recorder included “sounds, voices, alarms.” But the recording suggested there was no “midair explosion” or “classic depressurization situation.” Among the victims of the crash were 16 German high school students returning from a Spanish exchange program.

Germanwings is a budget subsidiary of Lufthansa.

Conguillío, Chile Old forests burn: Wildfires are raging out of control in some of Chile’s oldest protected forests. Hundreds of acres of old growth have been destroyed in Conguillío National Park, which is known for its centuries-old “monkey puzzle” trees. This is a “massive environmental catastrophe,” said Luis Mariano Rendón of environmental group Acción Ecológica. Chile is in its eighth year of severe drought, and reservoirs that could have been used for firefighting have dried up. President Michelle Bachelet said the country would start investing in more desalination plants to ensure that Chileans will have drinking water in the Wildfire rips through a national park. dry years to come.

THE WEEK April 3, 2015

Rio de Janeiro Dirty games: Brazilian officials have conceded that the disgustingly polluted Guanabara Bay won’t be cleaned up in time for the 2016 Fit for the Olympics?

Olympics, but said sailing events could still be held there. Some Olympic sailors had protested holding their events in the bay, saying they feared becoming sick from the contaminated water or ramming their boats into floating garbage.

Sailors touring the area said they saw animal carcasses and piles of junk, including sofas, bobbing in the water. But officials said the sailing lanes would be clear of debris and filth even if the goal of cleaning the whole body of water could not be met. “It is a lost opportunity,” said Rio Mayor Eduardo Paes. “Depolluting Guanabara Bay is something we should have done.”

AP (3), Corbis, AP

Teyu Cuare Park, Argentina Nazi lair found: Argentine researchers have discovered what appears to be a Nazi hideout deep in the jungle. The Nazis built shelters in remote areas around the world for their top leaders to retreat to in the event of defeat, and last week the ruins of three stone houses, containing five German coins minted around 1940, were found near the border with Paraguay. It’s a German A jungle home for Nazi exiles? tradition to place coins in the foundations of buildings. As it turned out, many Nazi officers did not need to go into hiding after Germany’s defeat in World War II. Then– Argentine President Juan Perón welcomed thousands of Nazis, including war criminals, into the country.

The world at a glance ...

Kabul U.S. troops to stay: The U.S. will delay its pullout of troops from Afghanistan for at least a year. The 10,000-strong force was scheduled to be reduced by about half in the coming months. But after meeting in Washington this week with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, President Obama announced that the military personnel would remain in the country through 2015 to help train the Afghan army and assist in operations against the Taliban.

Not going home The American troops will also support CIA bases that operate drone strikes in Pakistan against Pakistani Taliban and al Qaida militants. “We want to make sure that we’re doing everything we can to help Afghan security forces succeed,” said Obama.

NEWS 7

Beijing Fear of warming: In a surprise reversal, China’s top weather official said climate change could have a “huge impact” on Chinese agriculture and infrastructure. “As the world warms, the risk of climate change and climate disasters to China could become more grave,” said Zheng Guogang, head of China’s meteoro- A warmer world could hurt crops. logical administration. China has fueled its rapid development over the past few decades by building hundreds of coal-fired power plants. The country has become the world’s top emitter of greenhouse gases, and its major cities are frequently blanketed in choking smog. Zheng said average temperatures have been rising in China faster than elsewhere in the world, and climate change could cause waterways to dry up and threaten hydroelectric projects such as the Three Gorges Dam. Okinawa, Japan Clash over U.S. military base: Okinawa residents are trying to block construction of a new U.S. Marine base there. Takeshi Onaga, who was elected Okinawa’s governor three months ago on a promise to stop the base, ordered a halt to construction this week, claiming builders had damaged delicate coral reefs.

The base, to be sited on reclaimed land on the less populated northeast side of the island, is intended to replace the Futenma airbase in the south. The U.S. agreed to close Futenma after the 1995 rape of a 12-year-old girl by three American servicemen, which sparked mass protests. The relocation has been repeatedly delayed because of environmental concerns. Japan’s government insists that construction at the base will continue.

Corbis (2), AP (2)

Bangkok Slaves on shrimp boats: The Thai seafood industry, which supplies most of the shrimp eaten in the U.S., is partly powered by slave labor, an Associated Press investigation has found.

Reporters interviewed current and former slaves, many from Myanmar, who said they had been Forced labor kidnapped and sold to, or tricked into coming to work on, trawlers in Indonesia, where they were beaten and forced to labor up to 22 hours a day. Those too starved or sick to work were thrown overboard. In response to the report, Thailand’s biggest seafood company, Thai Union Frozen Products, said it would immediately stop using the suppliers named in the AP report.

Jerusalem Denying the spying: The Israeli government has officially denied allegations that it spied on the U.S. government’s nuclear negotiations with Iran and leaked information to Republicans in Congress. “Israel does not spy on the United States, period, exclamation mark,” said Yuval Steinitz, Israel’s minister for intelligence. Unnamed current and former U.S. officials told The Wall Street Journal that the Israelis acquired information on the closed-door talks on Tehran’s nuclear program through eavesdropping and from confidential U.S. briefings, informants, and diplomatic contacts in Europe. That inside information was then “passed back to U.S. legislators,” said a senior U.S. official, “to undermine U.S. diplomacy.” Israeli officials told the Journal that their agents didn’t spy directly on the talks, but instead collected information through other means, including surveillance of Iranian leaders as they received reports back from the talks.

Kabul Lynching sparks activism: Thousands of Afghans this week protested against the brutal lynching of a woman falsely accused of burning a Quran. Farkhunda, a 27-year-old religious scholar, was beaten to death last week after she criticized a mullah she saw selling Protesting a brutal murder talismans outside a shrine. During the argument, the mullah accused her of burning a Quran—a claim that was overheard by a group of men, who proceeded to beat Farkhunda unconscious. Her body was then tossed from a roof and run over with a car, before being set on fire. The attack was filmed on multiple cellphones and posted on social media.

At least 28 people have been arrested in the killing, and 13 police officers have been suspended for failing to intervene.

THE WEEK April 3, 2015

People

8 NEWS Why Withers called it quits

Bill Withers walked away from music at the peak of his career, said Andy Greene in Rolling Stone. The soul singer–songwriter abruptly abandoned the industry in the 1980s, fresh off of hits “Ain’t No Sunshine” and “Just the Two of Us,” and he has no intention of making a comeback. “This just isn’t my time,” says Withers, 76. “I grew up in the age of Barbra Streisand, Aretha Franklin—where a fat, ugly broad that could sing had value. Now everything is about image.” Back in his heyday, however, Withers faced racism that reached to the very top of the industry. One record executive defiantly told Withers he didn’t like his music—or any black music. “I am proud of myself that I did not hit him,” says Withers. “I met another who was looking at a photo of the Four Tops. He actually said to me, ‘Look at these ugly n-----s.’” Disgusted, Withers bailed out after eight years of recording. He’s kept so quiet since then that when he recently introduced himself to two ladies at a restaurant, they refused to believe who he was. “They were talking about this Bill Withers song they sang in church that morning. I got up on my elbow, leaned into their booth, and said, ‘Ladies, it’s odd that you should mention that because I’m Bill Withers.’ This lady said, ‘You ain’t no Bill Withers. You’re too light-skinned to be Bill Withers!’”

Roger Pasquier has a keen eye for spotting stray coins, said Nicholas Thompson in The New Yorker. The retired ornithologist has found almost two thousand dollars’ worth of coins dropped onto New York City’s sidewalks. His strange hobby started back in 1987, when he began collecting loose coins and bills. “But then I said, be scientific, keep track of this,” says the 67-year-old. So he developed some strategies. Pasquier hovers around bars, targeting careless drunk people, and avoids eye contact with other pedestrians. “It’s important that I keep my eyes on where the money is.”

Crucially, he deploys his expert knowledge of birds—and their use of “search images”—as a guide. “They have a general sense of what their food looks like and they become very attuned to those shapes.” Pasquier, too, can spot a coin by its shape or by the sound it makes when it drops. But his biggest boon has been the iPhone. Since its invention in 2007, Pasquier’s annual takings have nearly doubled, because most people are too busy staring at their phones to notice coins on the street. Do the coins bring him luck?

Nope, Pasquier says. “The penny is the luck.”

Q Angelina Jolie has revealed she recently underwent a second round of preventive surgery following her double mastectomy in 2013: having her ovaries and fallopian tubes removed in a bid to further lower her chances of getting cancer. The actress carries a defective gene that puts her at risk of developing breast and ovarian cancers, and both her mother and grandmother died of ovarian cancer.

In a New York Times column, the actress and mother of six wrote that she made the decision to undergo the preventive procedure after a blood test showed a pos-

THE WEEK April 3, 2015

Bellucci’s Bond woman Monica Bellucci is about to become the oldest Bond girl in history, says Giles Hattersley in The Sunday Times (U.K.). The Italian actress, 50, prefers a more dignified description of the role she plays in the latest installment of the 007 film series. “I am a Bond lady,” she purrs. The divorced mother of two is three years older than her co-star, Daniel Craig—and although confident in her own sex appeal, she was taken aback when director Sam Mendes made her the job offer. ‘“Why do you call me?” she says she asked. “‘I’m 50 years old. What am I going to do in James Bond?

Do I have to replace Judi Dench?’” Mendes is a hero for casting an older woman, Bellucci says, but he’s right—older women actually can be sexier. “Many 50-year-old women feel invisible to men, but it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s worth remembering that what you project outside comes from inside.” Aging doesn’t frighten her; in fact, Bellucci finds it fascinating. “I don’t want to be 20. Not at all. I’ve been through that. I want to know my story.

How am I going to deal with getting older? How am I going to deal with death?”

sible early marker of cancer. “It is not easy to make these decisions,” said Jolie of the surgery, which has brought on menopause at age 39. But “I know my children will never have to say, ‘Mom died of ovarian cancer.’”

Q Three years after their divorce, Katie

Holmes and Tom Cruise are still not on speaking terms and communicate about their daughter, Suri, through intermediaries.

“There is no desire on either Tom’s or Katie’s part to mend fences,” a source told TMZ .com. Cruise, 52, is still angry that Holmes, 36, gave him no warning when she filed for divorce in 2012, said the source, while Holmes has reportedly told friends that her relationship with Cruise—which was overshadowed by his involvement in the Church of Scientology—“sucked the life out of her.”

Cruise’s once-close friend, actor Jamie Foxx,

was recently photographed holding hands with Holmes—strengthening the rumors that the two are an item. Foxx still insists he and Holmes “are just friends.”

Q Thousands of teenage hearts have broken over the news that Zayn Malik has quit the boy band One Direction to escape the stress of constant attention. “I’d like to apologize to the fans if I’ve let anyone down,” Malik said, “but I have to do what feels right in my heart.” Malik had dropped out of two of the band’s world tours over the past year, and had been dogged by rumors of drug abuse and speculation that he was cheating on his fiancée. He was recently photographed with his arms around a female fan. “I am leaving because I want to be a normal 22-year-old who is able to relax and have some private time out of the spotlight,” Malik said.

Max Rossi/Reuters/Corbis, AP, Getty

The man who hunts for dropped coins

Briefing

NEWS 9

Fouling Mount Everest Littered with discarded equipment, corpses, and human excrement, the world’s highest mountain is now a dump.

Getty

Why is Everest so dirty?

Who are all these climbers?

Everest has gone from being the ultiMany of them are tourists, not true mate challenge for the most-skilled mountaineers. Sherpas spend weeks mountaineers to a bucket list item before each climbing season setting for adventure seekers. Every year up ropes, ladders, and other equiphundreds of climbers try to scale the ment along the route to make it 29,029-foot peak, and this huge influx easier to ascend. As a result, anyone of climbers has left its once pristine with a bit of training and in decent slopes covered in garbage, discarded shape can climb Everest—provided, equipment, and human waste. A of course, they pay from $30,000 to recent report by Grinnell College esti$100,000 per person to an expedimated that 12 tons of feces are left on tion company. Advances in equipthe mountain each year, either buried ment and weather forecasting have in the snow around the four camps also significantly improved success near the peak or deposited in rudimenrates: In 1990, only 18 percent of A Sherpa collecting garbage at 26,000 feet tary toilets that are emptied near water climbers made it to the top; by 2012, supplies further down. An estimated 50 tons of garbage—from it was 56 percent. While the Nepali government has encouraged broken tent frames to used oxygen canisters to food wrappers— this dramatic influx—it makes more than $3 million a year from are strewn along the route up the mountain, along with many of the $11,000-a-head climbing permits—overcrowding on steep the frozen, half-buried corpses of the more than 200 climbers who slopes 20,000 or 25,000 feet high carries very real dangers. have perished attempting the ascent. Little wonder the mountain has earned the nickname World’s Highest Garbage Dump.

What sort of dangers?

When climbers have to stand in line for as long as two hours, they waste precious body heat and valuable oxygen supplies. Larger Is anyone trying to clean it up?

Last year, the Nepali government began requiring each climber to groups usually have to be roped together—meaning if one person bring back at least 17.6 pounds of trash or lose his or her $4,000 falls, and the safety ropes fail, everyone else goes down, too. For Sherpas, who spend so much time on the mountain preparing deposit—although there are questions about how strictly that rule is enforced. Several expedition companies organize voluntary the routes, the risk is heightened. Last year, an avalanche on the notoriously dangerous Khumbu Icefall killed 16 Sherpas—the cleanup trips and offer Sherpas, the local mountain guides, cash deadliest accident in Everest’s history. The Nepali government’s rewards for bringing down extra rubbish. In 2013, a joint Indounderwhelming response to the tragedy—offering the victims’ Nepali army expedition collected an impressive 4.4 tons of trash families just $400 each in compensation—prompted the Sherpas in just six weeks; more than half was classified as “biohazardous to end the climbing season early and sparked a debate on their waste.” Sherpas are now finding less trash to bring back, which pay and working conditions. But in a region where the only real suggests cleanup efforts are working. But “there is no way to say alternative to mountaineering work is subsistence farming, the how much garbage is still left,” says veteran guide Dawa Steven stakes are high. “No mountaineering means no tourists,” Nima Sherpa. “It is impossible to say what is under the ice.”

Doma Sherpa, the wife of one of the victims, told The Wall Street Journal. “No tourists means no jobs.”

How many people climb Everest?

More than 4,400 climbers have reached the peak since Edmund How can Everest be made safer?

Sushi and white wine, please Hillary and his Sherpa, Tenzing Nepali officials have changed the During their historic ascent of Everest, Edmund Norgay, first “summited” it in route up the mountain this season Hillary and Tenzing Norgay survived on sardines, 1953—most of them very recently. to avoid the treacherous Khumbu dates, and tinned apricots. Today’s climbers can pay In 2013 alone, Everest was climbed Icefall. There have been calls for all to enjoy a much higher degree of luxury while conby 658 people during the yearly two- quering nature. At base camp, 17,598 feet up the Sherpas to be given an avalanche mountain, high-end expeditions offer yoga classes, month climbing window in spring. beacon, a $300 device that helps ressushi, and bars fully stocked with wine, beer, and The previous year, 234 climbers cuers find buried climbers. Ultimately, liquor. On the peak, there is even enough cell reached the peak on a single day. climbing the world’s highest peak— reception for climbers to send a celebratory tweet.

As a result, the top of the world has with its deep crevasses and fragile ice When last year’s tragic Khumbu Icefall avalanche a serious overcrowding problem. towers—will always be a dangerous left a section of the mountain all but impassable, a Long lines form below the toughest pursuit. But despite the risk, not to wealthy Chinese businesswoman provoked uproar climbing spots, and Sherpas have mention the garbage, there will never by paying for a helicopter to ferry her and her even considered erecting a ladder be a shortage of willing adventurteam of Sherpas above the accident site. Before to ease congestion at the Hillary ers. “I don’t think Everest has that his death in 2008, Hillary himself lamented the Step, the iconic final obstacle before sense of the unknown anymore,” says commercialization of Everest. “Having people pay the summit. Climbing Everest, says British climber Adele Pennington. $65,000 and then be led up the mountain by a coumountaineer and author Graham “But it still has that majesty. There is ple of experienced guides,” he said in 2003, “isn’t Hoyland, “isn’t a wilderness experistill something about standing on top really mountaineering at all.” ence. It’s a McDonald’s experience.” of the world.”

THE WEEK April 3, 2015

Best columns: The U.S.

the U.S. does not reach a nuclear agreement with Iran, said Hans What war with IfBinnendijk, war may be inevitable. But Americans should be “cleareyed about what that would mean.” Before the U.S. could launch any Iran would airstrikes on Iran’s multiple nuclear complexes, it would first have to take out the country’s air force and sophisticated air defense systems. look like “Such an operation could require hundreds of sorties over several Hans Binnendijk

The Washington Post

No, Starbucks, let’s not talk about race Jonah Goldberg

NationalReview.com

days.” Tehran would respond by attacking oil tankers in the Persian Gulf, potentially triggering a global oil crisis, and by launching terrorist attacks on American interests around the world. These attacks would fuel outrage in America and demands for regime change. Ousting Iran’s leaders would require yet another ground war in the Middle East—this time, with a nation of 80 million people. Thousands of Americans could die in fighting that would go on for years. None of this means we should rule out war with Iran if negotiations fail and Tehran does attempt to build nuclear weapons. “But war must be a last resort. Sugarcoating its consequences does no one any favors.”

With its astronomical prices for pretentiously named coffee concoctions, “Starbucks is easy to make fun of,” said Jonah Goldberg. But the upscale coffee chain’s recent attempt to ignite a national debate on race is almost beyond mockery. Launched last week, the bizarre scheme encouraged employees—sorry, “baristas”—to write “Race Together” on customers’ coffee cups to start a conversation about their “race journey.” That element of the campaign was quickly shelved amid widespread derision, but Starbucks insists its overall Race Together initiative will continue. Company CEO Howard Schultz is apparently so proud he’s running a “progressive” company that he thinks a coffee vendor is qualified to lead a national discussion about race. You might as well ask the guys changing your oil at Jiffy Lube what to do about radical Islam. Besides, why does this polarized, overly politicized country need more conversations about race? We already talk about it incessantly, and if you dare to accept the invitation to be “frank” and “honest,” progressives instantly “denounce your insensitivity, micro-aggression, or alleged racism.” Progressives don’t really want a conversation about race—“they want to speechify and indoctrinate.”

If you thought Pope Francis was already making Catholic Republicans The pope’s mighty uncomfortable, said Tom Krattenmaker, wait until he issues his on climate change. The popular pope aggravated conservaclimate-change encyclical tives when he strongly criticized economic inequality and the excesses of capitalism, but he will really challenge their worldview this summer challenge with an official statement on the moral need to act on climate change.

Tom Krattenmaker

USA Today

Viewpoint

“A Christian who does not protect creation,” Francis has said, “is a Christian who does not care about the work of God.” His encyclical will portray global warming “as a reality with dire moral implications— especially for the poor and vulnerable, who are at the heart of Catholic social teaching.” His call to action may sway people who are on the fence—and it will present a real challenge to the many Republican leaders who are Catholic, including House Speaker John Boehner and possible presidential candidates Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio. As evidence of climate change mounts, there are reports that some congressional Republicans are looking for an excuse to admit that the world has a problem. “Who better than the widely respected pope to provide one?’’

“Charm is not a 21st-century attribute. It is a lost language, a forgotten skill. How did this happen? The digital revolution has sped up, flattened out, and depersonalized communication, stripping away the necessity for charm. When rapid-fire emails have replaced lengthy imploring epistles, who needs charm? When sexts precede conversation, who needs charm? When nobody feels an obligation to entrance/allure/captivate anyone else—now that we all suffer from high self-esteem, we cannot wrap our heads around the idea that another individual might need to be ‘won over’—what use is charm? If things go a bit soggy, we pull out our phones and perk things up with a little social media blitz. Who can be bothered charming others when you can amuse yourself with selfies?”

Simon Doonan in Slate.com

THE WEEK April 3, 2015

It must be true...

I read it in the tabloids Q Trendy adults in Brooklyn

are spending hundreds of dollars to relive their childhoods at the world’s first preschool for grownups. Preschool Mastermind charges up to $999 for a fiveweek course in which adults play dress up, sing “Wheels on the Bus,” and make PlayDoh sculptures. The attendees include photographers, teachers, and corporate lawyers. “It sounded so freeing, to go play and not deal with adult problems,” said pupil Sarah Fader, 35, CEO of a nonprofit organization. She and other students will bring their families to the school to view their finger paintings.

“My parents are psyched,” said Fader.

Q Keith Urban has demanded that Nicole Kidman stop using Botox, because her frozen face is scaring their kids, says the National Enquirer. The country music star issued the ultimatum after his wife, 47, got more Botox injections and the couple’s two daughters asked why their mom looked so strange. “Keith has had it with Nicole’s love of cosmetic treatments,” said a family friend. “She looks like a statue and the kids are rattled by it.”

Q A man in Ningbo, China, was faced with a tough choice after his new girlfriend and his jealous ex jumped into a river to see who he’d save. Wu Hsia and girlfriend Rong Tsao had arranged to meet ex Jun Tang at a riverside park, where they intended to tell Jun to stop trying to break them up. But to find out if Wu still loved her, Jun jumped into the river and screamed for him to save her. Rong then jumped in too. Wu waded into the river and pulled out his girlfriend; Jun was later rescued by emergency workers.

Corbis

10 NEWS

Best columns: Europe UNITED KINGDOM

We were once as depraved as ISIS Mathew Lyons

New Statesman

BELGIUM

Our tradition looks racist to outsiders Remy Amkreutz

De Morgen

NEWS 11

The English were once as evil as ISIS, said Mathew Lyons. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria slaughters women and children by the hundreds, beheads people in public to terrify their families, and smashes priceless artifacts to dust. Under Queen Elizabeth I, we did all those things in Ireland. We, too, drank of “the poisonous cocktail of religious self-righteousness and nascent nationalism that so intoxicates ISIS.” In a 1569 campaign, for example, Protestant English troops massacred every Irish Catholic they found, beheaded the corpses, and laid the heads in a path to the British commander’s tent. Five years later,

the Earl of Essex “hunted down and butchered 400 women and children.” A few years after that, Lord Grey had 600 Spanish troops who surrendered in Ireland executed, along with all the Irish they were protecting. An approving Elizabeth told Grey, “You have been chosen the instrument of God’s glory.” Throughout the colonization of Ireland, Catholic churches and ancient Irish sites were demolished, and all of this was done in the name of God. As we condemn ISIS and fight against it, we must remember that “the human talent for depravity does not belong to one people or one faith or one era.”

Suddenly, the whole world thinks Belgians are racists, said Remy Amkreutz. Last week, hundreds of Belgians put on blackface and white top hats and ruffs for the annual Noirauds festival and walked through Brussels collecting money for children’s charities. It’s a tradition that began under King Leopold II in 1876, when participants would don the costume of an “African notable” to disguise their identity. Belgians find the event amusing, and foreigners have never taken notice. This year, though, French TV ran images of Foreign Minister Didier Reynders in blackface, and the global outrage machine swung into high gear. International

human rights activists said Reynders would no longer be able to face African diplomats, while Western media claimed that “such shenanigans do not belong in a civilized country.” Belgians are bewildered by the accusations of racism, as we’ve always seen Noirauds as simply a masquerade for charity. Now that we are forced to look at it through foreign eyes, though, we “have to admit” that the event “can’t be completely separated” from the history of Leopold’s bloody colonization of the Congo. Reynders has certainly done nothing wrong. In the future, though, Belgian officials will have to “think twice” before blacking their faces.

Germany and Greece: An end to the war of words?

AP

minister. Instead, he has spouted “exCalmer tempers have finally prevailed, treme opposition rhetoric” and even said Nikos Meletis in Ethnos (Greece). “allowed an anti-European climate Relations between Athens and Berto develop.” Germans, meanwhile, lin seemed close to collapse in recent have been doing their own stereoweeks, as cash-strapped Greece scramtyping, said Anna Sauerbrey in Der bled to make $7.1 billion in bailout reTagesspiegel (Germany). We love the payments and Germany refused to offer way we look in comparison with the another deadline extension. The two profligate Greeks. We see ourselves countries’ officials spat insults at each as “living in well-earned prosperity, other. Greek Finance Minister Yanis while southern Europe sinks into selfVaroufakis said the European Central inflicted poverty.” Once again, we Bank, guided by Germany, was trying get to be “the boss of Europe,” the to suffocate Greece, while German Fionly “guarantor of order in a chaotic nance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble got world.” Merkel plays the role well. personal, calling Varoufakis “foolishly Tsipras and Merkel: Trying to make nice naïve.” Greece then threatened to seize But in her meeting with Tsipras, our supposed Iron ChancelGerman assets as reparations for Nazi war crimes. But when Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras met with German Chancel- lor did nothing! said David Böcking in Der Spiegel (Germany). lor Angela Merkel in Berlin this week, the two leaders took “an Merkel claimed it wasn’t up to her to renegotiate the terms of Greece’s repayments. “Reforms have to be discussed with the important step toward appeasing passions.” Tsipras called for lending institutions, not with Germany,” she said. She refused an end to “harmful stereotyping,” saying, “The Greeks are not layabouts; neither are the Germans to blame for Greece’s woes.” to get into specifics with Tsipras—perhaps because “to argue The German people saw that our leftist leader was “no demon” with him would mean having to take him seriously.” Merkel is after he condemned German magazine Der Spiegel for running a dodging and weaving because she simply isn’t willing to boot Greece from the euro, said Peter Tiede in Bild (Germany). As cover that jokingly portrayed Merkel as one of Greece’s former long as she refuses to do that, we Germans “will pay and pay.”

Nazi occupiers. Tsipras even backtracked on the reparations The simple truth is “Greece is too bankrupt to pay even the inissue, saying it should be separate from Greek bailout talks. terest,” much less its $366 billion debt. It has been resorting to expensive emergency loans just to stay afloat. Germans simply He should have taken this rational tone much sooner, said want to know how much we will end up shelling out. “Mrs. Ekathimerini (Greece) in an editorial. During his two months Merkel, the check, please!” in office, the Syriza party leader has failed to act like a prime

THE WEEK April 3, 2015

12 NEWS

Best columns: International India: Raising a generation of cheats

SOUTH AFRICA

Tear down this white supremacist Mzukisi Qobo

Business Day

CANADA

Watching our every move Christopher Parsons

National Post

THE WEEK April 3, 2015

A statue honoring a white supremacist has no place at a South African university, said Mzukisi Qobo. Over the past month, students at the University of Cape Town have begun agitating to get the statue of Cecil Rhodes removed. Several students kicked off the protest by flinging excrement at Rhodes’ head, and now the monument stands covered in black plastic while administrators consider its fate. Rhodes is a giant figure in the history of the region. A British mining magnate who bribed his way to become prime minister of the Cape Colony, he was given “unfettered authority to colonize parts of Africa.” He sponsored a vile

piece of legislation that gave white farmers the right to whip black workers. More than anyone else, Rhodes laid the foundations for apartheid.

In later years, he sought to rehabilitate his image through philanthropy, endowing the Rhodes scholarships and giving “vast tracts of his residency” to establish the University of Cape Town.

It was “a selfish attempt to atone for his earthly sins,” and students and lecturers need not be grateful. Tearing down the statue is just the first step. The historically white university should do more to hire black professors. Instead of statues to whites, we need “black role models.”

“Canada has a spy problem,” said Christopher Parsons. The Communications Security Establishment, an agency responsible for spying on communications abroad as well as “helping other federal departments spy on Canadians,” has been gathering metadata on everybody. The government claims that the information is merely swept up incidentally in a program designed to monitor potential terrorists. But that’s simply not the case. According to documents leaked by former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, Canadian spies “secretly deployed masssurveillance technologies” at 200 locations across

the world to track everything that goes over the internet. It looks at our email addresses, Facebook chats, Google searches, phone numbers, and the websites we visit. Whether Canadians are specifically targeted is not the point, since the end result is the same. The agency has turned “the Canadian citizenry into 35 million Canadian lab rats—none of whom consented to having their personal information collected.” And it won’t tell us what it is doing with the data. “Even when caught redhanded, the government refuses to have a reasonable conversation” about the uses of its technology. Isn’t this supposed to be a democracy?

AP/Press Trust of India

But Bihar has always had a culThe shocking image of parents ture of cheating, said The Times clambering up a school building in of India. From the 1960s to the the city of Hajipur and passing test ’90s, exams were like “carnival answers through the windows to time,” when thousands of people their children has shamed India, said camped out around the schools.

The Financial Express in an editoEach student had a team to help: an rial. The “greater shame,” though, older male relative to supervise, “a is that authorities in Bihar state say sprightly kid who could scurry fast there is nothing they can do to stop into the school and fetch the paper,” it. Days after the photo went viral and somebody smart to actually anon the internet, the cheating was still swer the test questions. The student going on. Police tried to turn back simply sat in the exam room and crowds of relatives at exam sites, and waited for the answers. That system some officers fired their guns into the was supposed to have been reair as a warning. But they had to reformed, but apparently, “organized treat when parents pelted them with Parents scale school walls to pass cheat sheets to students. cheating is still deeply entrenched.” rocks. Bihar officials have expelled hundreds of students but lamely say they can’t end the epidemic It’s not just Bihar state, said Abhishek Saha in the Hindustan “without the cooperation of students and parents.”

Times. Cheating is endemic in India. Can any of us honestly say we have never “hidden chits in socks” or “copied from the adjaDon’t blame Bihari students, said Manoj Kumar in FirstPost cent student’s answers”? Last week in Odisha state, high school .com. Education is vitally important in this impoverished, rural students locked their principal in his office when he refused to state, where more than half the population is under age 25. Yet students can’t learn the material needed to pass the matriculation allow them to cheat. In Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, students routinely bribe teachers and break school surveillance cameras exam because Bihari teachers are themselves poorly educated. so they can copy freely. What we need to change is “the entire One quarter of all teachers recently failed a test with “very concept of Indian exams,” which are based on rote memorizasimple questions, such as which part of the potato is eaten” and what is 20 + 5? These incompetents come from the massive tion. Many other countries use open-book exams, in which recruitment drive of 2005, when Bihar realized it needed tens of students apply knowledge rather than regurgitating facts. If we thousands of teachers to serve the surging youth population and continue to tolerate blatant cheating, our children “might take to committing graver offenses when they grow up.” promptly hired anyone with a high school diploma.

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14 NEWS

Talking points

Netanyahu’s victory: Israel may now stand alone some “daylight” between Israel and U.S. policy and hoping “Well, it’s pretty clear now: Benjamin Netanyahu is going to to forge better relations with Israel’s Arab neighbors. Since be a major figure in Israeli history,” said Thomas Friedman then, Obama has repeatedly shown himself hostile to Israel’s in The New York Times. He won his third term last week by security needs. Bibi’s comments gave Obama the ammuniunofficially becoming “the father of the one-state solution.” tion he needed to make a final break.

Trailing in the polls, Bibi made a last-minute plea for the extreme right-wing vote by warning that Israeli Arabs Israel’s problems are much greater than the were voting “in droves,’’ and vowing that no Palestinian Netanyahu-Obama feud, said Fred Kaplan in Slate state would be established on his watch. Netanyahu’s .com. Now that the fiction of the two-state soludesperate ploy worked—but at the price of hammertion has been removed, Israel faces “the real possiing the final nail into the coffin of the peace process. bility of the loss of international legitimacy’’—and If there is no hope for a Palestinian state, then the 2.7 total isolation. The U.N. General Assembly has million Palestinians in the West Bank are doomed to already recognized Palestine as a “nonmember live as noncitizens in a country that denies them the observer state.” The European nations that previvote, and Israel will become a nondemocratic apartously abstained out of deference to the U.S. will heid state. The two-state solution wasn’t the only probably now approve Palestinian statehood. The victim of Bibi’s “scorched earth campaign,” said boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign against Michael Cohen in The Boston Globe. “The second Israel will only grow, while the International Criminal casualty: the U.S.-Israel relationship.” For decades, Court could condemn Israel’s West Bank settlements the U.S. has blocked efforts at the United Nations A Pyrrhic victory? and “even indict Israeli leaders for war crimes.” to recognize Palestinian statehood on the grounds Israelis may pay a terrible price for Netanyahu’s reckless rhetoric. that “the Arab-Israeli conflict should be resolved through direct negotiation.” But now that Bibi has confirmed that he has “zero “Given all of this, why did Israeli voters reward Netanyahu with interest” in a peace deal, “the U.S. has little choice but to respond a third consecutive term?” asked Shlomo Ben-Ami in Huffington accordingly.” As President Obama angrily hinted last week, that Post.com. If you lived there, you would understand. We’re a tiny might mean dropping U.S. opposition to a U.N. resolution that country “surrounded by enemies, in a chaotic region of failing sets out a Palestinian state based on pre-1967 borders. states and vicious nonstate actors like Hamas, Hezbollah, and now the Islamic State.” With memories of the Holocaust still If the two-state solution is dead, blame Palestinians, said Charles fresh, many Israelis don’t trust the so-called international comKrauthammer in NationalReview.com. Israel has made “three munity or care what it thinks. “There are still plenty of Israeli astonishingly concessionary peace offers within the last 15 liberals,” said Paul Waldman in Prospect.org, but they’re being years”—two of which gave Palestinians their own state “with swamped by ultranationalist settlers, ultra-Orthodox Jews, and its capital in Jerusalem and every Israeli settlement in the new other believers in “Greater Israel’’ who—like their Republican Palestine uprooted.” Every offer was rejected, because Palestinallies in the U.S.—openly see all Arabs as the despised enemy. ian leaders refuse to formally recognize the Jewish state’s right to That poses a huge dilemma for liberal American Zionists, who’ve exist. In the meantime, Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 only to see the strip quickly become the terror headquarters for Hamas long supported Israel despite our uneasiness over the brutal West Bank occupation and repeated Gaza wars. We’ve told ourselves and the launch site for countless Israel-bound missiles. As Netanthat one day, the Palestinians would be granted their autonomy. yahu clarified this week, yes, Israel supports a two-state solution Netanyahu’s victory has now yanked that justification away, in principle. It’s just not realistic under the current circumstances. exposing an ugly reality. Where does that leave liberal Jews?

As for the hostility between Netanyahu and Obama, said David “With questions they can’t answer, ideals they can’t reconcile, and Bernstein in WashingtonPost.com, this “has little to do with the emotions that cause no end of agita.” events of the past week.” Obama came into office vowing to put

Noted

Slate.com

Q San Francisco has the highest concentration of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people in the nation, with 6.2 percent of residents identifying as LGBT. Portland, Ore., is second with 5.4 percent of residents, and Austin is third with 5.3 percent. Mormon stronghold Salt Lake City is seventh at 4.7 percent—ahead of New York City, at 4 percent.

The New York Times

THE WEEK April 3, 2015

Q Americans are expected to spend roughly $9 billion illegally gambling on the NCAA tournament this year— significantly more than the $3.7 billion spent to influence the 2014 midterm elections.

But the March Madness total was bet by roughly 40 million people—or 12.6 percent of the nation’s population—whereas only 0.2 percent of Americans made contributions to the 2014 elections.

WashingtonPost.com

Q Despite the fears of modern parents, children today are much safer than they were

two decades ago. The physical abuse of children declined by 55 percent between 1992 and 2011, while sexual abuse declined 64 percent. From 1997 to 2012, abductions by strangers also went down, by 51 percent.

NYMag.com

Q Since taking office, President Obama—who prefers the golf course to the woods—has visited the presidential country retreat at Camp David only 35 times, spanning 86 days.

At this point in his presidency, George W. Bush had visited Camp David 119 times, covering 375 days.

The Washington Post

AP (2)

Q Since February 1985, the average global temperature has been hotter every month than the 20th-century average for that month. That’s 360 consecutive months of warmer-than-average global temperatures.

Talking points Football: Quitting to avoid brain damage playing in the NFL “can’t possibly help your “What am I doing?” NFL linebacker Chris long-term mental health.” And with a degree Borland said to himself. “Is this how I’m in mathematics and “numerous published going to live my adult life, banging my papers in major mathematical jourhead, especially with what I’ve learned nals,” I’m not without other options. and know about the dangers?” What But I play because I’m addicted to Borland learned by doing some the rush that comes when “you lay research, said The New York Times everything on the line and physiin an editorial, was “that the game’s cally dominate the player across repetitive head trauma could leave from you.” Some fans “may have him gravely and permanently daman existential crisis” watching aged.” So after just one season as gladiators sacrificing their future a bruising, 248-pound linebacker to deliver crushing tackles, said for the San Francisco 49ers, Borland, Andrew Sharp in Grantland.com, but 24, quit, leaving behind a dream career this year’s Super Bowl broke ratthat promised fame and immense Borland: Take this job... ings records, and football remains fortune. It is both a brave and a immensely popular. Plenty of players smart decision, said Dave Zirin in will gladly take Borland’s job—risks be damned.

TheNation.com. Brain injuries from repeated concussions have left thousands of former players racked with debilitating headaches, anger, and “But for how long?” said Thomas Boswell confusion, and the league itself admits that more in The Washington Post. Studies show that “repeated blows to the head at any age” can lead than one-third of players will suffer early-onset dementia. “History shows that playing NFL foot- to chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, and that those most likely to develop it started ball is like playing Russian roulette.” Will other players now follow Borland’s lead and choose to playing football early in life. The NFL’s future draftees are now playing high school football, “put the gun down”? and they all need signed permission slips from home. With parents now realizing that the NFL’s “I envy Chris Borland,” said John Urschel in ThePlayersTribune.com. As an offensive lineman “billions in wealth is built on decades of human wreckage—how many signatures will they get?” for the Baltimore Ravens, I am fully aware that

Mandatory voting: Would it work in the U.S.?

Getty

“There are two types of people in our country,” said John Wellington Ennis in HuffingtonPost .com. “Those that want everyone’s voice to count, and those that don’t.” Last week, President Obama proved he was in the first camp.

Asked how to offset the influence of big money in politics, he suggested introducing mandatory voting. Citing the system in Australia, where the threat of fines for not voting has increased turnout to 95 percent, Obama said requiring everyone to vote “would be transformative” for American politics. This wasn’t an official policy proposal, but it should be. With a record-low participation of 36 percent in 2014 and widespread voter disenfranchisement, “American democracy is anemic.” Decisions affecting the entire country should “involve the entire country.”

What is this, the Soviet Union? said John Fund in NationalReview.com. The Soviets and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq also had mandatory voting.

In the U.S., where we have freedom of speech, “not voting can send a message just as much as voting.” Obama’s interest in mandatory voting is obvious: He himself said nonvoters tend to be young, poor, and “skewed more heavily toward immigrant groups and minority groups”—in

other words, Democrats. It’s hard to see why mandatory voting would reduce election spending, said Karin Klein in the Los Angeles Times.

Reaching so many voters would surely require more expensive TV ads and campaign staff. Plus, forcing people to vote wouldn’t make them more engaged with politics—many low-information voters would just “fill in the blanks” on the ballot sheet without a clue as to whom they’re supporting. “Unwilling voters do not make for better democracy.”

But in a true democracy, a majority of citizens should determine “who runs the country,” said Matt Steinglass in Economist.com. What right does a government have to pass laws governing behavior, jail people when they break them, or tax people’s income if it has not made participation in voting “as widespread as possible”? Maybe Oregon has a workable alternative, said Francis Barry in BloombergView.com. Everyone there with a driver’s license is now automatically enrolled as a voter. Those who wish to remain unregistered can opt out—but the onus is on them. “No one’s choice is taken away,” but registering to vote becomes painless. It makes perfect sense—unless, that is, you’d prefer that most citizens not vote.

NEWS 15 Wit & Wisdom “They say marriages are made in heaven. But so is thunder and lightning.”

Clint Eastwood, quoted in the Anniston, Ala., Star

“The amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained.”

Philosopher John Stuart Mill, quoted in WWD.com

“In societies where men are truly confident of their own worth, women are not merely tolerated but valued.”

Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, quoted in Independent.co.uk

“Without style, playing and winning are not enough.”

Tennis champion René Lacoste, quoted in Condé Nast Traveler

“There are no such things as guilty pleasures, only pleasures.”

Quentin Tarantino, quoted in The Boston Globe

“Bad taste is simply saying the truth before it should be said.”

Mel Brooks, quoted in The Daily Telegraph (U.K.)

“It is a bad idea, usually, to investigate piteous weeping but always a fine thing to look into a giggle.”

Children’s author Lois Lowry, quoted in PasteMagazine.com

Poll watch Q 49% of Americans think that standardized testing in schools has “done more harm than good.” 20% think it’s done more good, and 31% aren’t sure.

Huffington Post/YouGov

Q 62% of Boston voters would sentence Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to life in prison without parole if he were found guilty in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. 27% think he should be put to death.

WBUR

THE WEEK April 3, 2015

16 NEWS

Technology

Streaming: Time to say goodbye to cable TV Comcast are getting in on the game. Time The “demise of traditional TV” Warner recently announced plans to offer might finally be upon us, said Henry its premium HBO content on a stand-alone Blodget in Yahoo.com. “For years, pundits streaming service, while CBS, NBC, and have predicted the death” of the cable TV ESPN all have similar plans in the pipeline. bundle. But “with the very notable excepYou know the TV landscape is truly changtion of Netflix,” few compelling streaming ing, said Miriam Gottfried in WSJ.com, alternatives have really emerged. The news when even media companies finally “apthat Apple is developing a Web-based digipear prepared to move past the bundle.” tal TV service to launch this fall arguably changes all that. For one, Apple will reportUnfortunately for consumers, “the new edly “allow subscribers to stream Fox, ABC, world is an ever-changing, mystifying CBS, and other networks,” including ESPN. array of choices,” said Cecilia Kang in The Live sports broadcasts have long been conApple’s TV service: A “game changer”?

Washington Post. And for some, it won’t sidered cable’s most attractive assets and the necessarily be cheaper. Consumers who want Netflix or a spekey to any streaming service’s wide adoption. “Just as important,” Apple’s service, likely priced around $25 to $35 a month, cific mix of other channels “may end up paying close to what they used to pay their cable companies.” Apple’s new service, will be available across multiple devices, including iPhones and which is effectively just a “skinny bundle” of some 25 channels, iPads, allowing consumers to “watch what we want to watch “will be a better breed of dinosaur,” said David Lazarus in the whenever and wherever we want to watch it.”

Los Angeles Times. “But it’ll still be a dinosaur.” The future is true “à la carte” TV, and we aren’t there yet. Apple’s “stature Of course, Apple isn’t the only major player “looking for ways and credibility” suggest its service will still be a “game changer,” to target ‘cord cutters,’” said Keach Hagey and Shalini Ramespecially among Millennials. But when you’re paying $30 a achandran in The Wall Street Journal. Sony’s Vue, now in month for Apple, $15 for HBO, another $20 for Yahoo and limited release, offers about 50 channels for $50 a month; Dish Hulu—on top of “an additional $50 or so for high-speed InterNetwork’s Sling TV offers 17 channels, including ESPN, CNN, net access”—suddenly the new TV landscape begins to look a and TBS, for $20 a month, with the option of add-ons for lot like the old one. extra fees. Even traditional media giants like Time Warner and

Bytes: What’s new in tech ‘Mario’ headed to mobile market

In New York City, a shot in the dark just got a whole lot easier to track, said Gothamist.com. The Police Department unveiled its new ShotSpotter detection system last week, a state-of-theart network of 300 sensors deployed over 15 square miles that can “triangulate the location of gunshots to within 25 meters.” Police officials estimate that up to 75 percent of shots fired in the city don’t result in 911 calls, “a phenomenal underreporting of incidents of violence,” said police commissioner Bill Bratton. The new system will be linked to closed-circuit TV cameras, “license plate readers, radiation sensors, and 911 calls” to give police more real-time information on locations where shots were fired. “It’s going to send a message to our communities,” said Mayor Bill de Blasio.

“If you fire a weapon, the police are going to know immediately.”

THE WEEK April 3, 2015

Nintendo is finally going mobile, said Chris Kohler in Wired.com. “After years of pleading by investors, analysts, and reporters,” the Japanese gaming giant announced last week that its massive catalog of games will soon be available on smartphones and tablets.

Nintendo is teaming up with Japanese developer DeNA, one of the new “powerhouses to emerge from the mobile revolution,” to help develop the adaptations. The company is “bucking conventional wisdom” by not “simply dumping classic games” like Super Mario Bros. onto smartphones, saying the experience just wouldn’t be the same. That helps explain why the announcement came alongside the launch of a new console, Nintendo NX.

Microsoft ditches Internet Explorer “It’s the end of the line for Internet Explorer,” said Jessica Guynn in USA Today. Microsoft’s “much maligned” Internet browser will soon be junked to make way for a “flashier, speedier browser code-named Project Spartan” designed expressly for the mobile era. The move is a “warning shot” to Google’s Chrome, Mozilla’s Firefox, and Apple’s Safari browsers that Microsoft is “now ready to rumble” in the rapidly growing market of mobile users.

But the computing giant isn’t straying too far from its “mainstay of desktop computers and laptops”; the launch of Project Spartan will coincide with this summer’s release of its much anticipated Windows 10 operating system, which is expected to be compatible with every device available and feature biometric authentications in place of traditional passwords.

“Cue up the browser wars version 2.0.”

What Facebook bans and why In a bid to clarify its notoriously “opaque and inconsistent” content rules, Facebook updated its “community standards” last week, said Vindu Goel in The New York Times. Bullying, threats of physical or financial harm, and posts that “encourage suicide or eating disorders” or promote “sexual violence or exploitation” are now specifically banned. Facebook will still rely on users to report violations and has “no plans to automatically scan for and remove potentially offensive content.” With a review process that can take up to 48 hours, some graphic posts could still go viral before being removed, but that’s a trade-off the company says it has to make to ensure freedom of expression. “We have a single guiding principle,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said: “to give the most voice to the most people.”

Corbis

Innovation of the week

Health & Science

NEWS 17

Another melting Antarctic glacier The warming of the world’s oceans is causing a glacier the size of California in East Antarctica to melt, and scientists fear its collapse could eventually cause global sea levels to rise by as much as 11 feet.

The Totten Glacier was long thought to be stable and isolated from the warm-water currents that are degrading ice sheets in West Antarctica. But recent observations have shown that the glacier is thinning by a very rapid 33 feet a year. To find out why, an international team of scientists carried out an extensive aerial survey of the glacier using planes fitted with ice-

penetrating radar. They discovered two massive undersea valleys beneath the ice sheet, one of which is 3 miles wide.

Those canyons allow warm, salty water sitting on the ocean floor—the salt makes it heavier than the frigid waters above—to reach the glacier’s base, causing it to melt from below. If the glacier were to vanish completely, oceans around the world would rise by at least 11 feet, on top of the 1- to 3-foot rise the United Nations already expects by 2100. “While the Totten melt may take several centuries,” study author Jamin Greenbaum tells CNN.com, “once

A solitary life is often a shorter life.

LDL or “bad” cholesterol from the blood.

The two drugs, Repatha, made by Amgen, and Praluent, from Sanofi and Regeneron, both cut bad cholesterol levels by about 60 percent, according to separate studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine. That could be good news for the millions of people who don’t respond well to statins, the most commonly used anticholesterol drug. The studies also noted that patients were half as likely to suffer a major cardiac complication, such as heart failure or chest pain, after just a year to 18 months of treatment. “Cardiologists are very excited and encouraged by [the findings],” says Dr. Tara Narula, a cardiologist at New York City’s Lenox Hill Hospital. Researchers cautioned that the studies, which involved only a few thousand patients, were too small to draw definitive conclusions. Larger studies are now underway and are expected to be completed by 2017.

The toll of loneliness Too much alone time can kill you. That’s the conclusion of a study from Brigham Young University, which found that isolation and loneliness are as bad for a person’s health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day or being an alcoholic. Researchers examined data from 35 years’ worth of studies on loneliness, and after accounting for participants’ socioeconomic status, age, gender, and pre-existing health conditions, they discovered that people who feel lonely have a 26 percent greater risk of premature death.

Living alone or being socially isolated is even more damaging to a person’s health, increasing the risk of early death by roughly 30 percent. The BYU team believes the U.S. will see soaring numbers of lonelinessrelated health problems in the near future, because more people than ever are living alone. “We are predicting a possible loneliness epidemic,” the study’s co-author Tim Smith tells ScienceDaily.com.

Reuters, Corbis, AP

Cholesterol breakthrough A promising new class of cholesterol drugs might have an extraordinary added benefit: reducing a patient’s risk of heart attack, stroke, or other major cardiovascular problems by up to 50 percent, reports CBSNews.com. The experimental drugs, known as PCSK9 inhibitors, are injectable antibodies that block the PCSK9 protein, which hampers the liver’s ability to clear

Warm waters are shrinking Antarctica’s ice.

change has begun, our analysis reveals it would likely be irreversible.”

ish far from the sun’s rays. Those hydrothermal vents provide all the basic ingredients needed to host life: “energy, nutrients, and liquid water,” says study lead author Hsiang-Wen Hsu, a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder. But Hsu cautions that while conditions on Enceladus might be hospitable to microbial life, that doesn’t guarantee the moon is home to such organisms. “We don’t know if the water was warm enough for long enough,” Hsu says. “If the temperature wasn’t stable, life may not have happened there.”

Health scare of the week Diet soda’s fatty downside

Diet soda may not have the sugar and calories found in regular soft drinks, but people who drink it daily often wind up with fatter stomachs. A study in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society followed 749 people ages 65 and over for nine years, and found that regular diet A new water world soda drinkers gained nearly three times as much belly fat as those who didn’t touch Saturn’s ice-covered moon Enceladus could the beverage. Expanding waistlines are harbor a warm-water ocean beneath its frozen surface, opening up new possibilities particularly worrisome because belly fat is associated with an increased risk of chronic for life beyond Earth, says The Guardian health issues, like heart disease and type 2 (U.K.). Enceladus has fascinated astronodiabetes. Scientists are still puzzling over mers since 2005, when NASA’s Cassini why diet sodas are associated with weight probe caught geysers on the moon’s south gain. It could be that people who switch pole spewing out plumes of salty water— to low-calorie soda think that means water that is thought to have originated in they can “have an extra slice of pizza or an ocean buried beneath the moon’s a candy bar,” says study lead author 25-mile-thick ice crust. Now a Sharon Fowler, of the University of new study of Cassini data Texas Health Science Center at San suggests that Enceladus Antonio. Those people might end has a hot, porous core up consuming more calories than that heats water on if they’d just had a regular soda. the seabed to at least Alternatively, Fowler speculates, 190 degrees. Similar the high acidity of diet sodas could conditions exist at kill off certain gut microbes, changvolcanic hydrothermal ing how the body processes food. vents on the bottom of “Calorie free,” she tells Reuters.com, the Atlantic Ocean, where strange forms of life flour- Enceladus: Hidden ocean “does not equal consequence free.”

THE WEEK April 3, 2015

18 NEWS

THE WEEK April 3, 2015

Pick of the week’s cartoons

For more political cartoons, visit: www.theweek.com/cartoons.

Pick of the week’s cartoons

NEWS 19

THE WEEK April 3, 2015

ARTS Review of reviews: Books profession’s cozy ties with Big Pharma or the doubts other medical professionals have raised about psychiatry’s diagnostic criteria.

The book also doesn’t mention that the field has yet to identify even one reliable biological marker of mental illness.

Book of the week Shrinks: The Untold Story of Psychiatry

by Jeffrey A. Lieberman (Little, Brown, $28)

Jeffrey Lieberman has taken up “an unenviable task,” said Gary Greenberg in Bookforum.com. In Shrinks, the recent former president of the American Psychiatric Association has attempted to repair the reputation of his profession by apologizing for its appalling past mistakes while celebrating the successes it has achieved since drugs that effectively control certain psychiatric symptoms began emerging in the 1950s. To make his case, Lieberman has to ignore mountains of evidence that psychiatrists provide ever-shifting definitions of mental illness, turn normal human suffering into pathology, and promiscuously prescribe handfuls of powerful pills whose effects they can’t predict and don’t really understand. “Psychiatry, in his view, isn’t in need of rethinking; what it needs is better public relations.” It’s a reassuring view, but one that’s in conflict with reality.

Psychiatry in 2015: A real science?

“There’s nothing ‘untold’ in this story of psychiatry either,” said Carol Tavris in The Wall Street Journal. Other authors before Lieberman have detailed the misguided and sometimes cruel therapies that were inflicted on psychiatric patients well into the 20th century, and he’s not the first to explain how Sigmund Freud’s ideas and methods led the profession astray for a good half century. Unfortunately, “it’s always easier to see the follies of the past than our own,” and when Lieberman arrives at psychiatry’s post-Freudian era, “he loses critical perspective.” Shrinks never tackles the

Novel of the week The Discreet Hero

The Barefoot Lawyer: A Blind Man’s Fight for Justice and Freedom in China

by Mario Vargas Llosa

by Chen Guangcheng (Holt, $30)

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26)

There goes one of Hillary Clinton’s campaign talking points, said David Feith in The Wall Street Journal. In her 2014 memoir, Hard Choices, the former secretary of state boasted that she did everything within her power to get blind dissident Chen Guangcheng out of China in 2012. “That’s not how Chen tells it.” In his new memoir, Chen writes that he only briefly enjoyed the full backing of American officials after his daring escape from house arrest and arrival at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. He says that with Clinton anticipating a summit with China’s president, he was soon pressured to leave the embassy and to accept that the government he’d been imprisoned and tortured by for years could now be trusted to guard his safety. Chen, unsurprisingly, refused.

“When did a near-octogenarian Nobel Prize winner last publish a novel as enjoyable as this?” asked Boyd Tonkin in The Independent (U.K.). Peru’s Mario Vargas Llosa has long been adept at Dickensian mystery and melodrama, and he flashes that talent again in his “thoroughly entertaining” 17th novel, which cunningly braids twinned stories about two prosperous Peruvians and the extortionists aligned against them. Vargas Llosa relates both tales “with verve and some high drama,” said Jane Smiley in the Los Angeles Times. A mistress is kidnapped in one plotline and a faithful employee menaced in the other. “More than once, this reader was tempted to turn to the end of the book to make sure that everything would turn out well.” Yet Vargas Llosa’s gift for capturing passing moments slowed me down again and again. The Discreet Hero isn’t a terribly ambitious novel. Still, “its ease is that of a master playing at his craft, using danger, fear, evil, and empathy to carry the reader along.”

THE WEEK April 3, 2015

The Barefoot Lawyer does much more than

The critics may be causing more harm than they realize, said Matthew Hutson in The Washington Post. Psychiatry “inspires fears that aren’t completely baseless.” But it “more closely resembles a science” today than ever before, and its practitioners can save lives when people trust them.

“Perhaps I’m biased, since without psychiatry I might not be alive”: I began taking prescribed medications as a teenager when depression nearly overwhelmed me. My use of such medications raises difficult questions about who I’d be without them, but as Lieberman knows, modern psychiatry is modest enough in its ambitions not to worry that its targeted medications and other therapies can’t solve the deepest questions about self. Instead, it “cuts through philosophy and offers tools for improving one’s daily functioning. If you want to be a certain way, it can help you get there.” revisit Chen’s historic escape to freedom, said The Economist. In fact, “it is Chen’s dogged determination to scale another wall around him—the ubiquitous prejudice against the blind—that makes his memoir truly inspiring.” Born to a poor farming family, Chen lost his sight in infancy and received no education until he was 18— when he was shipped to a boarding school where he nearly starved. His experience turned him into a fighter, and he taught himself the law as he began building court cases to fight corruption, environmental destruction, and forced abortions and sterilizations. Authorities responded by making Chen a prisoner of the state for seven years.

“Without a surfeit of stubbornness, Chen might well have disappeared permanently,” said Margaret Quamme in the Columbus, Ohio, Dispatch. After his unlikely escape, he and his wife won permanent refuge in the U.S. only because he loudly demanded protection. But the author’s combativeness reduces his effectiveness as a storyteller. “As Chen drives one person or another to distraction with his demands and unalterable beliefs,” the memoir sometimes achieves “moments of unintentional comedy.” Everyone around him is either with him or evil; “he doesn’t have much time for anyone who doesn’t fall neatly into one camp or the other.”

Media Bakery

20

The Book List Best books...chosen by Hanif Kureishi Hanif Kureishi is a British playwright, novelist, and film writer whose celebrated screenplays include My Beautiful Laundrette. His new novel, The Last Word, focuses on a famously difficult author who is sharing his life story with a biographer.

Psychopathology of Everyday Life by Sigmund Freud (Penguin $16). A seminal work of psychology. Freud looks at memory, the loss of it, misremembrances, words, and malapropisms to investigate the mental mechanics of his subjects and their engagement with the quotidian.

In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust (Modern Library, $100). I remember reading this when I was on the dole. I spent three hours reading it every afternoon, and it was a joy. This book had a profound impact on my own writing. Proust’s gimlet eye and focus on everyday minutiae, and its reflective transcendence, have continued to inspire me. Perhaps the greatest examination of memory in fiction, it also bursts with colorful characters and gorgeous prose.

To Sir, With Love by E.R. Braithwaite (Jove, $7).

Maybe the first book to deal with what it meant to be black in postwar Britain. An ex-serviceman from British Guiana begins work as a teacher at a school in London’s East End and has to negotiate not only the prejudice of his peers but also the scorn of his pupils. He slowly gains respect and

motivates his despondent class. A heroic book, guided by the integrity and heroism of one man.

The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant (Bloomsbury U.K., $28). Mavis Gallant was one of the most sagacious observers of the human condition. Her portraits of struggling individuals— particularly in her stories set in Paris—are among the most moving things I’ve read.

Erotism: Death and Sensuality by Georges Bataille (City Lights, $17). Bataille looks at sex through the cipher of transgression in his 1957 book, describing how, to surpass loneliness and ephemerality, we must overcome taboos and engage with the erotic. Bataille’s prose is coruscating, and his insights are brave, startling, and unique.

The Year of Dreaming Dangerously by Slavoj Zizek (Verso, $15). Zizek’s reconsideration of the events of 2011 is an essential text in this “age of riots,” when apathy and fury, fundamentalism and neoliberalism, and prohibition and enjoyment combine to create the venomous exploding effluence in which we now live.

Kier Kureishi, Beowulf Sheehan

Also of interest...in tales of human folly The Great Beanie Baby Bubble

Spring Chicken

by Zac Bissonnette (Portfolio, $27)

by Bill Gifford (Grand Central, $27)

In hindsight, the Beanie Baby craze of the late 1990s looks pretty silly, said Daniel Akst in The Wall Street Journal. Some parents emptied their children’s college funds to buy up the small plush toys, and one specimen sold in 1998 for $10,000. In this artfully crafted account, the perfectionist behind the boom comes across “like some Steve Jobs from a parallel universe ruled by satirists.” The story isn’t oversold as being emblematic of today’s culture, but “it is all that and more.”

“You’ve got to be a tad loony to think you can defy death, and so it is with Bill Gifford’s cast of anti-aging researchers and obsessives,” said Lei Wang in Mother Jones. Gifford roamed the world to study how some people resist mortality, and he considers why extreme dieting, ice-cold showers, or antifungal compounds might hold answers. But the common denominator among people who do achieve longevity suggests there’s no silver bullet. In short, “nothing seems to beat sheer will.”

Circus Maximus

American Ghost

by Andrew Zimbalist (Brookings, $25)

by Hannah Nordhaus (HarperCollins, $26)

Andrew Zimbalist’s new polemic about the economics of global sporting events “leaves little doubt” that the host cities always wind up losers, said The Economist. The International Olympics Committee now seizes 70 percent of TV revenue, up from 4 percent in 1980, and makes pre-construction promises that are shockingly misleading. Fortunately, cities have begun wising up. If the IOC doesn’t make some changes, only dictatorships will bother bidding to host the games.

Here’s a ghost story that “appeals to both the mystery-craving and truthloving parts of the brain,” said Jenny Shank in 5280 magazine. Journalist Hannah Nordhaus decided not long ago to investigate the stories long told about a New Mexico hotel haunted by her great-great-grandmother. In this by turns funny, moving, and suspenseful tale, the good-natured Nordhaus “follows her research wherever it leads her,” from Santa Fe to Germany and back again for a final night in the hotel’s spookiest room.

ARTS 21 Author of the week Nina MacLaughlin For Nina MacLaughlin, writing may never provide the kind of satisfaction she gets from her day job, said Edan Lepucki in TheMillions.com.

Several years ago, the author of the new memoir Hammer Head quit journalism to try something new and found greater happiness as a carpenter. “I was not good company for stretches while working on the book,” she says, admitting that the challenges of putting her story on paper resurrected the depleted, short-tempered feeling she used to get when she was filing stories a decade ago for The Boston Phoenix. But she eventually pushed past those tough patches as well as her doubts about whether her story would matter to readers.

“Those voices are still there,” she says. “I try to hush them by reminding myself that everyone, really everyone, has at one point or another wanted to do something other than what they’re doing.”

Hammer Head is “a mustread for anyone considering shifting careers,” said KC Ifeanyi in FastCompany.com.

MacLaughlin didn’t have her next phase planned—“there has to be this hands-in-the-air leap of faith,” she says. She had only a vague idea about exploring more physical work when she answered an ad for a carpenter’s apprentice, then had to adjust on the fly to her new identity as a woman who banged nails. “It was a surprise to me how much it impacted my perception of myself,” she says. “Now I feel more powerful in the combination of it—being able to feel feminine in this very masculine work.” Even writing has a place in her new life. “The best days,” she says, “usually involve some combination of the two.”

THE WEEK April 3, 2015

22 ARTS

Review of reviews: Art & Stage

Exhibit of the week

cliché to say that Native Americans were unusually in tune with nature, no culture “produced more vivacious and emotionally empathetic depictions of animals.” A circa 1850 Arikara shield depicts a buffalo—its owner’s spirit animal—and the animal’s direct, solemn gaze proves “unforgettable.”

The Plains Indians: Artists of the Earth and Sky Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, through May 10

“All art should be so essential,” said Jonathon Keats in Forbes.com. Much of the work in this “spectacular” survey of Plains Indian art was produced by people so nomadic that they owned only what they could carry. But despite that constraint—or perhaps because of it—the region’s greatest artisans produced work of a quality “comparable to the best of any other culture in history.” Consider the horse masks that the Blackfeet created in the late 19th century. Made to abstractly evoke buffalo heads, the beaded leather masks protected horses in battle both literally and symbolically, endowing the animals “with buffalo strength and speed.” Such artwork was a necessity rather than an embellishment—“a sort of spiritual technology” that the Blackfeet depended on for survival.

America’s indigenous people weren’t always so peripatetic, said Holland Cotter in The New York Times. The very weight of a 2,000-year-old carved stone pipe found in Ohio suggests a more stationary

A circa 1900 Lakota horse mask

lifestyle. But once Spanish colonizers introduced horses to the West, native people got moving, and their art began to tell of epic adventures, such as those depicted in an early-19th-century Lakota Sioux garment “fittingly known as the Grand Robe.” The values and social structures of the tribes peek through everywhere. Men generally did the painting and drawing, while women did the beadwork, some of which glows “with a kind of self-generated light.” And while you might think it’s mere

The way of life celebrated by the show lasted only a couple centuries, said Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker.

Following the 1890 massacre of more than 200 Lakota at Wounded Knee, N.D., the surviving populations— having been ravaged by disease—were forced to settle on reservations. Yet the Met show includes “an ameliorating epilogue.” Beginning in the 1980s, Plains Indian art experienced a revival, with artists like sculptor Edgar Heap of Birds and collagist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith finding forceful ways to express ancestral grievances. While some of that era’s works “epitomize both the force and the burden of identity politics in art,” they also paved the way for more subtle efforts, such as the “stunningly lovely” We Pray for Rain, a feathered fan created by Navajo artist Monty Claw in 2011. “What sinks in,” when viewing such works, “is the spiritual spell of the Great Plains.”

The Heidi Chronicles

Music Box Theatre, New York City, (212) 239-6200 ++++

Wasserstein’s play, here getting its first Broadway revival, retains some “baffling” limitations, said Jesse Green in NYMag .com. In a post-pill America that’s undergoing “carnivalesque” contortions as the years pass, Heidi remains mostly an observer rather than a participant. Though Elisabeth Moss (Mad Men) convincingly captures Heidi’s sense of herself as at once superior to her peers and hopelessly out of THE WEEK April 3, 2015

Moss (right), with Ali Ahn: Honesty first

step, Heidi doesn’t get much to do. “She’s not just an emotional wallflower but a dramatic one.” Everybody around her, meanwhile, comes across as a caricature— including a gay longtime best friend and a magnetic but arrogant journalist who’s the other man in her life. Tracee Chimo, at least, takes on several broadly drawn roles—as a radical women’s libber, for instance—and “adds something to them.”

Still, when it matters most, Moss “totally nails Heidi’s single greatest asset and her most inconvenient flaw,” said Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune. Our heroine insists on

honesty above all, and while giving a speech to fellow alumnae of her all-girls high school, she admits to feeling as she nears 40 that she’s been “stranded” by peers she’d believed would be moving in step with her instead of competing. “That one monologue is Wasserstein at her very greatest,” and Moss brings to it “a real freshness and even some modernity.” Yes, Heidi has to wrestle with some very generation-specific obstacles to fulfillment, but she remains a heroine to be reckoned with, “now and forever.”

In other openings...

On the Twentieth Century American Airlines Theatre, New York City, (212) 719-1300

“Looking for a good time? Look no more,” said The Wall Street Journal.

Betty Comden and Adolph Green’s 1978 musical about a director on the comeback trail features a “jaw-droppingly virtuosic” Kristin Chenoweth as his egomaniacal ex-protégée. Chenoweth is so adept at both operatic trills and screwball comedy, “it’s as if Beverly Sills and Carol Burnett were the same person.”

Joan Marcus

It’s remarkable how strongly—“and at times painfully”—the questions posed by this 1988 play still resonate, said Charles Isherwood in The New York Times. So much of Wendy Wasserstein’s script, which garnered her the distinction of being the first woman to win a Tony Award for Best Play, speaks to the particular experiences of Baby Boomer women as they weathered the changes wrought by second-wave feminism. As Heidi Holland evolves from bookish 1960s teenager to emotionally fragile 30-something art historian, the play suggests that her determined bid to fulfill her potential in her career and her personal life may have been futile. Sound familiar?

Review of reviews: Film While We’re Young Directed by Noah Baumbach (R)

++++ The highs and lows of cross-generational friendship

Danny Collins Directed by Dan Fogelman (R)

++++ A pop-music sellout re-evaluates his life.

Jauja Directed by Lisandro Alonso (Not rated)

++++ A Dutch officer searches for his daughter in the Argentine desert.

ARTS 23

Stiller and Watts play a childNoah Baumbach has just made less Manhattan couple wal“the most hilarious Woody lowing through their late 40s Allen film in years,” said Lou who throw themselves into a Lumenick in the New York Post. new friendship with a hipster Casting Ben Stiller in a role couple half their age, and when that Allen might have played a rivalry develops between the 25 years ago, the director of two men, gangly Adam Driver Frances Ha and The Squid and proves Stiller’s “perfect foil.” the Whale has created a comedy In the end, though, Baumbach that uproariously skewers the Former cool kids Stiller and Watts shows no real connection to the anxieties of a white, privileged Millennials played by Driver and Amanda Seyfried, world. Stiller remains “the most enjoyably hardsaid Richard Lawson in VanityFair.com. Young to-like actor in movies,” and he’s paired here with doesn’t fail to be funny, but “Baumbach does, for Naomi Watts in her loosest, funniest performance the first time, seem kinda, well, old.” in years, said Tim Robey in The Telegraph (U.K.).

outline,” said Stephen Holden Al Pacino’s turn as a far-pastin The New York Times. When his-prime pop star “qualifies Pacino’s Danny Collins flies as his best and most easygoeast to make peace with an ing film performance in a estranged adult son (Bobby good decade,” said Ignatiy Cannavale), the movie reveals Vishnevetsky in the A.V. Club. itself to be a “shameless piece Pacino plays a millionaire of Boomer bait,” one that showman who begins working peddles the highly questionable to redeem himself after being notion that it’s never too late to presented with a letter that John Pacino with his entourage be the person you should have Lennon wrote 45 years earlier been. But “like an uneven album,” the movie has a urging him to nurture his songwriting gift and not sell out. The part doesn’t stretch Pacino, but “what few very good moments, said Claudia Puig in USA Today. When Pacino meets Annette Bening’s downhe captures is the essence of the aging celebrity to-earth hotel manager, the push-pull flirtation they who’s always on.” Unfortunately, the screenplay conjure proves “a pleasure to watch.” proves “little more than an efficiently executed

ment. When his 15-year-old Lisandro Alonso’s new foreigndaughter (Viilbjork Mallin language Western unfurls like Agger) runs off with a soldier, “a harsh, gorgeous dream,” said Dinesen sets off into the desert Bob Strauss in the Los Angeles to find her, and things turn Daily News. Also, “Jauja strange. He crosses paths with makes no sense”—because the a mystical dog and a former Argentine director is aiming general who’s gone mad, and for an effect beyond logic. “An the landscape is so cruelly beauarthouse favorite,” Alonso is tiful, “you can almost see the working with his first bona Agger and Mortensen in Patagonia earth itself refusing to accept fide movie star here in Viggo Mortensen, said Stephanie Zacharek in The Village European imperialism.” Movies about solitude in nature “tend to morph into tales of survival,” said Voice. The setup is simple: Mortensen plays Capt.

Tomas Harchard in NPR.org. “Jauja, to Dinesen’s Gunnar Dinesen, a Dutch engineer who’s stationed surprise as much as anyone else’s, transforms into in 1870s Patagonia with Argentine troops while something more akin to a vision quest.” overseeing the establishment of a European settle-

Jon Pack, Hopper Stone, Cinema Guild

New on DVD and Blu-ray Wild

The Imitation Game

(20th Century Fox, $30)

(Anchor Bay, $30)

Interstellar (Paramount, $30)

A rejuvenated Reese Witherspoon helped turn this adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s recent hit memoir into a “graceful and gutting” film, said Entertainment Weekly. The author undertook a 1,000-mile solo trek to shake off grief and what it had done to her, and Witherspoon lent the role “real grit.”

Benedict Cumberbatch gave “his finest performance to date” in this lively historical drama, said The Miami Herald. The star plays Alan Turing, the condescending but charismatic British math prodigy who cracked the Nazis’ Enigma code, only to be persecuted years later for his homosexuality.

In this sci-fi epic, Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway are astronauts seeking to save humanity by locating an inhabitable planet. Director Christopher Nolan’s reach has occasionally exceeded his grasp here, said Time. But that’s OK: “These days, few other filmmakers dare reach so high.”

THE WEEK April 3, 2015

Movies on TV Monday, March 30 On Her Majesty’s Secret Service George Lazenby made his only appearance as James Bond in one of the franchise’s best and most seriously plotted outings. (1969) 8 p.m., Encore Tuesday, March 31 Au Revoir, Les Enfants A Catholic boarding school becomes a haven for Jewish students during the Nazi occupation of France in this autobiographical tearjerker from director Louis Malle. (1987) 10 p.m., TCM Wednesday, April 1 Dances With Wolves A Union Army officer posted on the Western frontier befriends a Sioux tribe in an Oscar winner directed by star Kevin Costner.

(1990) 6:55 p.m., Cinemax Thursday, April 2 Predator An invisible alien does battle in a jungle with a special-ops team anchored

by Hollywood he-men Jesse Ventura, Carl Weathers, and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

(1987) 10:30 p.m., IFC Friday, April 3 Django Unchained A freed slave and a German bounty hunter become vigilantes in the antebellum South. With Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Kerry Washington. (2012) 9 p.m., Showtime Saturday, April 4 Goodfellas Martin Scorsese’s Mafia epic tracks the messy 25-year career of Henry Hill, a real-life associate of the brutal Lucchese crime family. Ray Liotta stars alongside Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci. (1990) 11:15 p.m., IFC Sunday, April 5 Easter Parade Fred Astaire and Judy Garland sing and dance to the marvelous music of Irving Berlin in an MGM classic. (1948) 8 p.m., TCM

THE WEEK April 3, 2015

Television The Week’s guide to what’s worth watching Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies It’s our most formidable enemy. But what do we really know in 2015 about cancer? This threepart series based on Siddhartha Mukherjee’s Pulitzer Prize–winning “biography” of the disease uses its first night to recount the centurieslong pursuit of a cure through the 1940s, when Boston pathologist Sidney Farber defied conventional wisdom to demonstrate the power of chemotherapy. The six-hour film was directed by Barak Goodman and produced by Ken Burns.

Begins Monday, March 30, at 9 p.m., PBS; check local listings The Dovekeepers Four women’s lives intersect in a fortress held by 1st-century Jewish rebels in this two-night miniseries based on Alice Hoffman’s best-selling 2011 novel. Cote de Pablo, a former fan favorite on NCIS, stars as a healer with a complicated romantic past who joins the refugees at Masada shortly before Roman troops lay siege. With Kathryn Prescott, Fiona O’Shaughnessy, and Rachel Brosnahan. Begins Tuesday, March 31, at 9 p.m., CBS Outlander If you haven’t explored the world of Outlander yet, you’re missing out on a budding cult hit.

Based on Diana Gabaldon’s popular sci-fi novels, the series combines Game of Thrones–style world building with escapist romance. Irish actress Caitronia Balfe captivates as Claire, a timetraveling heroine torn between her 1940s husband and an 18th-century Scottish hunk, who takes over narrating duties as the show returns from a sixmonth hiatus. Saturday, April 4, at 9 p.m., Starz Sinatra: All or Nothing at All Ol’ Blue Eyes is back. Or so it may seem while you’re watching Alex Gibney’s smashing assemblage of interviews and performances by the legendary singer. Using the set list of Sinatra’s 1971 “Retirement Concert” as a backbone, the Oscarwinning director creates an alluring biographical narrative that feels guided by Sinatra himself.

Sunday, April 5, at 8 p.m., HBO

‘Dovekeeper’ Cote de Pablo

American Odyssey The quality is not exactly Homeric, but NBC’s new global political drama does have epic ambitions. Anna Friel plays a special-ops soldier trying to fight her way out of North Africa after she discovers evidence that a U.S. contractor is funding jihadists. Back in the U.S., a corporate attorney (Peter Facinelli) and a wealthy young activist (Jake Robinson) separately pick up the trail of the same cover-up. Sunday, April 5, at 10 p.m., NBC Other highlights Younger Sex and the City creator Darren Star has cooked up a new series featuring Sutton Foster as a 40-year-old mom who tries passing as a 26-yearold to land a job. With Hilary Duff as a coworker. Tuesday, March 31, at 10 p.m., TV Land A.D.: The Bible Continues This 12-part sequel to the hit 2013 miniseries The Bible picks up the New Testament story after Jesus’ crucifixion, as his followers fight persecution while building a church. Sunday, April 5, at 9 p.m., NBC Mad Men Smoke ’em if you got ’em: Just seven episodes remain for viewers who’ve watched Don, Peggy, and the rest of the crew navigate the entire 1960s in AMC’s phenomenal period drama.

Sunday, April 5, at 9 p.m., AMC

Show of the week Wolf Hall

Rylance’s cunning power broker

Mark Rylance is a marvel as Thomas Cromwell in this six-part adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize–winning novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. You may recognize his dour expression from a famous 16th-century portrait of Cromwell. But Rylance also gives the enigmatic adviser to King Henry VIII the canny humanity Mantel bestowed on the man who toppled Anne Boleyn and ushered in the English Reformation. Damian Lewis, who also directs the drama, proves equally good as a randy and ruthless Henry. Sunday, April 5, at 10 p.m., PBS; check local listings

• All listings are Eastern Time.

Kurt Arrigo, Ed Miller/PBS

24 ARTS

LEISURE Food & Drink

25

Critics’ choice: New directions in Japanese dining Shuko New York City The spicy tuna roll is a throwaway in most sushi bars, but “nobody who has had Shuko’s version is going to forget it,” said Pete Wells in The New York Times. At this relaxed, speakeasy-like room in Manhattan’s East Village, chefs Jimmy Lau and Nick Kim excel at “bringing out flavors without appearing to do much,” so only once you bite into the spicy tuna roll do you realize that the heat from the chopped, pickled red Thai chiles will engage in a fierce, pitched battle inside your mouth against the cooling, dripping oils from the grilled bluefin belly. Lau and Kim, who are both protégés of the elite eel slicer Masa Takayama, create $135 and $175 tasting meals whose highlights may surprise you. Not that there’s anything wrong with “guaranteed bell ringers” like the pairing of toro and Osetra caviar. But one of Shuko’s most memorable nigiri is a livery bite of squab cartilage. Mid-volume Debbie Harry fills the air as a bearded bartender pours a craft cocktail nearby. Lau and Kim “have taken all the preciousness out of omakase and kaiseki dining”—and replaced it with “a relaxed, sophisticated cool.” 47 E. 12th St., (212) 228-6088 Momotaro Chicago Momotaro, too, “breaks a lot of rules,”

toasts smeared with sea urchin and finely ground chorizo. One of these days, the bold entrepreneurs behind Momotaro are going to swing and miss.

“This is not one of those days.” 820 W. Lake St., (312) 733-4818

Shuko’s Nick Kim presents a sushi course.

said Phil Vettel in the Chicago Tribune.

Forget “the minimalist, white-wall, orchidsand-posters decor” that so many Japanese restaurants aim for. This “busy and boisterous” three-tier restaurant seats 250, with a buzzing sushi bar at the heart of the main floor and a cocktail-focused space downstairs that generates “a mysterious, back-alley vibe.” You can order a nice sushi omakase and be done with the seven-page menu. But go for individual pieces, like the aji yakusagi—jack mackerel smoked with shavings from a 1,000-year-old cypress tree.

Dishes prepared on robata grills reach a peak with soy-seasoned hard-boiled quail eggs wrapped in bacon and drizzled with maple syrup. The izakaya downstairs offers unique dishes of its own, highlighted by

Recipe of the week It doesn’t matter to us that making a cookie with matcha, the popular Japanese green tea powder, is “new and interesting and fresh,” said Ali Slagle in Food52.com.

The point is that pastry chef William Werner, of San Francisco’s Craftsman & Wolves, is a genius, and his matcha snickerdoodles are really good—with “a vegetal freshness that’s reminiscent of freshly brewed green tea but butterier and sweeter.”

Evan Sung/New York Times/Redux, James Ransom

Matcha snickerdoodles 2 cups all-purpose flour • ¾ tsp baking soda • ½ tsp kosher salt • 2 tbsp plus 1½ tsp matcha, divided • 1 cup plus 2 tbsp unsalted butter, cut into pieces, at room temperature • ½ cup packed light brown sugar • 1½ tbsp honey • 1 large egg • 1 large egg yolk • 2 tsp finely grated lemon zest • 3 oz white chocolate, chopped • ½ cup granulated sugar • Whisk flour, baking soda, salt, and 2 tbsp matcha in medium bowl. Using an electric mixer on medium high, beat butter, brown sugar, and honey until light and fluffy, 4 minutes. Add egg, egg yolk, and lemon zest; mix until very pale, 4 minutes. Reduce mixer speed to low and add flour mixture; mix until no dry spots remain. With wooden spoon, stir in white chocolate. Wrap dough in plastic and chill at least 2 hours. If chilling

longer, let dough sit at room temperature 1 hour before baking.

• Preheat oven to 350. Whisk granulated sugar and 1½ tsp matcha in small bowl. Scoop dough by scant tablespoonful onto two parchmentlined baking sheets. Bake cookies, rotating sheet once, until bottoms and edges are barely golden, 8 to 10 minutes. Immediately toss cookies gently in matcha sugar; place on wire racks to cool. Makes 50.

Craft Izakaya Atlanta Weighing the merits of our city’s first truly ambitious izakaya, “I find myself of two minds,” said John Kessler in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Craft Izakaya gives chef Jey Oh a new stage, and as a result, this expansive Japanese pub at Krog Street Market has instantly become “the best sushi bar on the east side of town.” But the joy of a traditional izakaya is the parade of simple, light grilled foods that pair so well with cocktails and Japanese beers, and Oh’s collaborators grill almost nothing well except yellowtail collar.

Fortunately, “the kitchen likes to fry, and does so well,“ and you shouldn’t miss the ochazuke, “a kind of porridge made from green tea, rice, salmon roe, and tangy pickled plum.” So plan on taking advantage of the smart cocktail program and order just a couple of izakaya plates before settling into a chef’s choice of sushi. “You want Oh and Co. to select your uni, cut your hamachi, and to hand-form your nigiri.” That’s what this restaurant is “really all about.”

99 Krog St., Suite X, (470) 355-9556

Wine: Beaujolais cru Nothing goes better with roast chicken than Beaujolais cru, said S. Irene Virbila in the Los Angeles Times. Though made from the same Gamay grape used in the “thin” Beaujolais nouveau sold each November, it’s “serious wine” that’s also eminently drinkable, especially if you seek these labels.

2011 Stéphane Aviron Julienas ‘Vieilles Vignes’ ($16). The fruit in this classic Julienas is “velvety, with a bright acidity, tasting of blackberries, cherries, and sweet spices.”

2011 Paul Janin ‘Clos du Tremblay’ Moulin-à-Vent ($22). Here’s “a great example of a mediumbodied red with grace and presence.”

2011 Jean Foillard Fleurie ($42).

“Expect a mouthful of blackberries, spice, and a touch of smoke.” This is a specialoccasion wine, “a bottle to break out for chicken with truffles.”

THE WEEK April 3, 2015

Travel

26 LEISURE

This week’s dream: The other Dutch cultural center The fourth-largest municipality in the Netherlands is about to have a moment, said Diane Daniel in The Washington Post. Located just a half-hour south of Amsterdam, Utrecht has long been “a vibrant, architecturally distinctive, and happening place.” But this summer will be special, because the compact university city of 330,000 is hosting both the kickoff of the Tour de France and the 60th anniversary of a beloved picture-book character. Even visitors who miss the July 4 start of cycling’s most watched road race will find that in Utrecht, “there’s always something going on—and a lot of people going out.”

Bicycles happen to be a great way to get around, and rentals are plentiful. Arriving by train, you’re forced to pass through a large, sleek retail mall. But I quickly pointed my bike toward the Oudegracht, or Old Canal, which is lined by a brick promenade and packed with shops and cafés.

Cocktail hour at the casita

Alta Gracia Pérez Zeledón, Costa Rica The “serene” Pérez Zeledón mountains provide the backdrop for this new hacienda-style luxury retreat, said Alyssa Bird in ArchitecturalDigest.com. A private plane or helicopter picks guests up at the San José airport and deposits them 40 minutes later on the 860-acre property. Fifty spacious private casitas share the grounds, where cooking classes, horseback riding, and spa treatments help pass the time. Two national parks sit nearby, and resort staff can also arrange for ultralight tours, a yachting adventure, and whale-watching excursions on the nearby Pacific. altagracia.cr; doubles from $668

THE WEEK April 3, 2015

The focus of the city’s center is Dom Tower: a 368-foot, 14th-century structure built as part of a never-finished cathedral. It sits above tourable ruins that mark Utrecht’s Roman origins, and from the tower’s crown you can see all the way to Amsterdam. Back on the street, grab a copy of the shopping Café life on a Utrecht street and dining guide created by Puha, a Below street level on the curving 11thhip clothing and lifestyle boutique that “put century canal lies “the city’s most distinctive the stylish side of Utrecht on the map.” architectural feature”—the brick cellars You’ll find Puha on Voorstraat, which used that have been converted into another layer to be “a not-so-nice back alley.” Now it’s of shops and apartments right at water the heart of an art and design scene that level. Nearby, the Centraal Museum diswould make even Miffy proud. plays “a fantastic assortment” of De Stijl At Utrecht’s canalside Mary K Hotel furniture and art dating from Roman (marykhotel.com), doubles start at $137.

Getting the flavor of...

Renting a fire tower

An East Coast cruise

We had no water or electricity in our 15-by15-foot shelter, but the views were spectacular and they were all ours, said Charles Bethea in Outside. My girlfriend and I were renting one of the dozens of retired fire towers and lookouts now available to hikers in our national parks (via firelookout.org), and this one was a dream. The Shorty Peak Lookout, in the Idaho Panhandle National Forest, could be “a cabin torn from the pages of a Danish architecture magazine,” and it affords a panorama across two mountain ranges. The first lookout we’d rented, on Hornet Mountain in Montana, had been slightly less stylish, but had a nice desk and woodstove. The third was “neither endearingly cluttered nor elegantly spare,” but outside its windows, “the view was the best yet.” At $75 a night, northern California’s Hirz Mountain Lookout cost three times as much as Shorty Peak, but the views of Mount Shasta were worth more than that.

Don’t expect drama if you book a seven-night cruise from Baltimore to Charleston, S.C., said Susan Stewart in The New York Times.

The 50-passenger American Glory (american cruiselines.com) cruises the shallow waters of the Intracoastal Waterway at 8 mph, and the onboard nature lectures—at least when I went— “weren’t always riveting.” Granted, some of the supposed highlights delivered. Walkable Norfolk, Va., had a pretty downtown and a rewarding art museum, and one of the trip’s best tour guides got me charged up about Kitty Hawk, N.C., and the first airplane flight all over again. But while Beaufort, N.C., had charm and Charleston unfolded “street after street” of stunning antebellum houses, I most enjoyed our dinners on board, sharing admittedly mediocre food with Jane, Ray, four hilarious Brits, and the rest of a gang of older shipmates “who seemed, at least this week, like my very best friends.”

Last-minute travel deals Springtime in Tuscany Florence’s Hotel Il Salviatino, a restored 15th-century villa overlooking the Tuscan hills, is offering big savings on its luxurious suites for stays through May 15. For example, a Fresco suite right now costs $970, down from $2,437 a night.

Culinary New Mexico Santa Fe’s Inn on the Alameda is offering a $480 two-night package for two that includes a wine-and-cheese reception and a restaurant walking tour hosted by the Santa Fe School of Cooking. Valid for select dates through April 30.

Sailing the seven seas Save up to $6,600 on 2016 cruises in Europe, Australia, the Caribbean, and Alaska with Regent Seven Seas Cruises.

The offer includes open bars, shore excursions, and free airfare from most major airports.

Book by April 1.

salviatino.com

innonthealameda.com

rssc.com

Huber/Sime/eStock Photo, courtesy of Alta Gracia

Hotel of the week

times. The museum also runs the Dick Bruna House across the street, home to Miffy, Bruna’s minimalist cartoon bunny, who turns 60 this year and appears all around town, in signs, sculptures, and even some traffic lights.

Consumer

LEISURE 27

The Porsche Cayman GT4: What the critics say Car and Driver Porsche has finally built a small car that encroaches on the supremacy of its 911 models, and “what a glorious encroachment it has turned out to be.” This ultimate edition of the Cayman borrows its 385-hp flat-six engine from the $131,000 911 GT3 but remains the more balanced of the two coupes because of its mid-engine layout and “outstanding” chassis. Oh, and the GT4 comes only with a stick, whereas the 911 has no manual option. “Which would you choose as your track toy?”

Road & Track Only 1,250 GT4s will be shipped to the

U.S. each year, so “get yourself on a wait list now.” That big engine is “a masterpiece”—with “a haunting, deafening, flat-six wail” and enough torque to get from 0 to 60 mph in 4.2 seconds.

Meanwhile, “every part of this car feels like it was engineered for racetrack duty,” producing exemplary grip and generating confidence.

Motor Trend “The result is a car bewilderingly easy to drive fast.” The new six-speed shifter is the best manual transmission on today’s market, and the steering proves “unimpeachable.” You might have to push it to

A mid-engine rocket, from $85,595 dangerous speeds to challenge it, but “it’s inescapably clear that this is a car built by people who love to drive above all else.”

The best of…beard maintenance

Kiehl’s ‘CloseShavers’ Squadron

Beard Trimming Scissors

Texas Beard Co. Big Beard Comb

Wahl Lithium Ion All-in-One Trimmer No other cordless beats this trimmer for overall performance. “It has the sharpest blades, most reliable beard guides, the longest run time, and the strongest overall stubble-cutting power.”

Most shaving creams “whip into a foamy lather,” but with this nononsense product, you’ll be able to see the edges of your beard as you shave stray whiskers. It’ll even do the job when you have no water.

Tom Ford Beard Oil

Ideal for taming long beards, this “simple, stylish” comb is made of hand-polished cherrywood, an ideal medium for distributing oils and keeping whiskers healthy and frizz-free.

“The Cadillac of beard oils,” this conditioner can make “a huge difference” in your beard’s health. It feels light when applied, and the sweetyet-masculine “Tobacco Vanille” scent lasts all day.

“You’ll want a good pair of snips,” especially for the little mustache hairs that creep into your mouth. These are “wicked sharp and awesomely easy to get the hang of, thanks to mansize handles.”

$24, texasbeardcompany.com Source: HiConsumption.com

$40, bestbuy.com Source: TheSweethome.com

$16, kiehls.com Source: HiConsumption.com

$50, neimanmarcus.com Source: InStyle.com

$45, beardbrand.com Source: Outside

Tip of the week...

How to encourage kids to do chores

And for those who have everything…

Best apps…

For adventurous seniors

Q Watch your language. Say “Let’s do our chores,” not “Do your chores.” Children should be taught that being helpful is a family value, so you also want to model that by never complaining about your own chores. Also, it’s better to tell a child, “Thanks for being a helper” than to say, “Thanks for helping.” Kids respond when they feel they’re building a positive identity.

Q Keep to a schedule. If you have a calendar listing sports practice and other extracurricular activities, times for chores should get space there, too.

Q Don’t mix chores and allowances. Paying for chores often reduces motivation, “turning an altruistic act” into “a business transaction.” Ask which regular chore a child wants, and make sure the chore is one that helps the whole household, like doing family laundry or dusting the living room.

Even in our current golden age of minicampers, the Sealander “beats them all.”

This “curious hybrid” is part personal yacht, part pop-up camper. You can hitch it to your SUV and tow it down the highway, then plop it in calm water and motor out to the horizon. Fold-down beds and “sleek” cabinetry create a home away from home, while the roll-back roof can open to the heavens.

“It’s perfect for largemouth casting or sipping margaritas in the moonlight.”

Q Skyscanner makes finding and booking flights a cinch. You can filter out flights that make layovers and choose the range of departure and arrival times you’ll accept.

Q Localeur becomes useful when you land.

It provides locals’ recommendations about where to eat and what to do, and it covers most big U.S. cities.

Q EyeReader turns a phone into a relatively hip magnifying glass. Next time you can’t read a menu, just point the phone’s camera at the text, and this $2 iOS app will display an enlarged version on the phone’s screen.

Q Big Keyboard helps with typing on a touch screen by displaying a large image of each letter just after you type it.

Q Brainscape is a flashcard-based educational app that can teach you a new language, how to read the stars, even how to mix a better cocktail.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Starting at $17,000, sealander.de Source: Outside

Source: The New York Times

THE WEEK April 3, 2015

28

Best properties on the market

This week: Houses with game rooms

1 W Pittsfield, Mass. Morewood Manor was built in

1911 and is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Sir Edwin Lutyens designed the six-bedroom Tudor-style house. Details include leaded-glass windows, crystal chandeliers, and a game room with a fireplace. The 11.3-acre property sits on the Pittsfield Country Club grounds and has a carriage house and formal gardens. $3,950,000. Gladys Montgomery, William Pitt/Sotheby’s International Realty, (413) 822-0929 6

3

1 2

4 5

7

2 X New Canaan, Conn. Built in 2003, this 11,000-squarefoot home has seven bedrooms, five fireplaces, a velvet-seated cinema, a gym, and a game room with pool-table lighting and a built-in corner booth. The 4-acre property includes a heated pool, a tennis court, and a converted 1850 barn that serves as a two-bedroom guesthouse. $6,495,000. Jaime and Kendall Sneddon, Halstead Property, (203) 966-7800

3 X Upper Arlington, Ohio

Sitting on 7.5 acres, this sevenbedroom house was built in 1970. The interior includes an indoor basketball court, a media room, and a billiards and pub room with a bar imported from Ireland. The exterior features a pool, a trampoline, a hot tub, and tennis courts. $2,450,000.

Paula Koontz-Gilmour, Coldwell Banker King Thompson, (614) 657-6884 THE WEEK April 3, 2015

29

Best properties on the market 4 X Woodland Hills, Calif. This five-

bedroom gated estate on a half-acre lot has tropical foliage and a gazebo once owned by Dean Martin. Amenities include a combined kitchen and dining room area that opens to the outdoors, and a master suite that leads to the pool area. The entire third floor is a Vegas-style game room. $1,799,000. Emily Rose Newmark and Nicole Kleoni, Keller Williams Realty, (818) 355-9988 5 W Arden, N.C. This five-bedroom house sits on a golf course in a planned community in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

The interior features a theater, a craft room, and a game room with a kitchen. Community amenities include access to neighborhood restaurants, wellness centers, seven golf courses, and a private marina. $2,195,000. Josh Smith, The Cliffs, (888) 247-3466

6 W Orono, Minn. Lying along a bank on

Crystal Bay, this four-bedroom house is just outside of Minneapolis. The interior features three fireplaces, hardwood floors, and a master suite with a conservatory. The third-story guest quarters include a game room with a built-in seating area and bay windows. $1,450,000.

Jenifer Enos, Coldwell Banker Real Estate Burnet, (952) 473-3000

Steal of the week

7 S Pacific, Mo. This three-bedroom ranch is set on a 2.3-acre lot with a 360-degree view. Interior features include an open floor plan, vaulted ceilings, a kitchen with custom oak cabinets, a fireplace, and double doors that lead to a patio area. The lower level has a theater and billiards room with a bar area. $345,000. Joyce Ugarte, Coldwell Banker Real Estate Gundaker, (636) 368-7254 THE WEEK April 3, 2015

The bottom line Q Singapore’s Changi International Airport has been named best airport in the world for the third year in a row by the World Airport Awards, which evaluates more than 400 airports around the globe. Changi’s amenities include a butterfly garden, a rooftop pool, movie theaters, spas, and even a four-story slide.

BusinessInsider.com Q Google has reportedly patented an air bag that would be mounted on the outside of the company’s driverless car, in order to protect pedestrians in the event of a collision.

Google has said it wants the high-tech cars on the road within five years.

Qz.com Q Transcripts of Fed-

eral Reserve meetings painstakingly document every instance of laughter. An analysis of meeting notes from 1990 to 2009 (the most recent available year) show that humor peaked in late 2007, before falling precipitously. Former Chairman Alan Greenspan successfully landed the most jokes of any participant—559 during his 18-year tenure.

TheAtlantic.com Q The NFL will stream one game next season exclusively online, rather than broadcast it on national television. Online viewership for the Oct. 25 Buffalo-Jacksonville game, to be played in London, will be used to help the league better understand the market for digital rights.

The Wall Street Journal Q The cybersecurity market

is projected to expand from $95.6 billion in 2014 to $155.7 billion by 2019. Startups that tap the skills of freelance “ethical hackers,” who are paid to uncover vulnerabilities and bugs in websites and apps, are a rapidly growing sector.

Bloomberg Businessweek

THE WEEK April 3, 2015

BUSINESS The news at a glance Food: Kraft and Heinz team up in megamerger Billionaire Warren Buffett “played a Kraft Foods and H.J. Heinz Co., significant role in bringing the deal two icons of the American dinner together,” said David Gelles in The table, are merging in a blockbuster New York Times. Buffett’s Berkshire $40 billion deal that will create Hathaway, along with Brazilian the fifth-largest food and beverinvestment firm 3G Capital, bought age company in the world, said Heinz two years ago. Kraft has Dana Cimilluca in The Wall Street struggled in recent years to adapt Journal. The combined comto changing consumer tastes, and pany, to be called Kraft Heinz, in 2014 its profits fell 62 percent “will have revenues of about to $1 billion. But Buffett and 3G $28 billion” and include wellexecutives say they hope to find known brands like Jell-O, Weight savings of $1.7 billion annuWatchers, Maxwell House, A recipe for success? ally by the end of 2017 through Oscar Meyer, and Planters. Heinz cost cuts and efficiencies of scale. “This is my shareholders will hold a 51 percent stake in the combined company; Kraft shareholders will hold kind of transaction,” said Buffett, “uniting two 49 percent. Kraft shareholders will also receive a world-class organizations and delivering shareholder value.” special cash dividend of $16.50 per share.

Small biz: SEC makes it easier for firms to fundraise Small and midsized businesses now have more options for attracting funds for an expansion, said J.D. Harrison in The Washington Post.

The Securities and Exchange Commission this week approved rule changes contained in the JOBS Act—signed into law three years ago— that will allow companies to raise “up to $50 million a year, up from a long-standing cap of $5 million,” through small public offerings. The SEC will also exempt firms in need of capital from registering with state financial regulators in every state in which prospective shareholders reside, simplifying the fundraising process.

Media: BBC fires Top Gear host Jeremy Clarkson British TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson has lost his job as host of the BBC’s hit car show, Top Gear, said Henry Mance in the Financial Times. BBC brass fired the controversial Clarkson after determining that the star had “launched an unprovoked physical attack” on one of his producers, reportedly because he couldn’t order a steak dinner at a hotel. Top Gear, with a global audience of 350 million, is one of the BBC’s most lucrative programs, earning hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue each year.

Tech: Google taps Morgan Stanley’s CFO Ruth Porat, one of Wall Street’s top female executives, will soon head up Google’s finances, said Michael Liedtke in the Associated Press.

Currently the chief financial officer of Morgan Stanley, Porat, 58, will move to Google next month following the retirement of Patrick Pichette, the tech giant’s CFO for the past seven years. Porat, a 28-year veteran of Morgan Stanley, is widely respected on Wall Street for “helping the bank regain its financial stability” after the 2008 financial crisis.

Housing: New-home sales at seven-year high “In a hopeful sign for the housing market,” sales of new homes surged in February to their highest level since early 2008, said Lucia Mutikani in Reuters.com. Contract signings for single-family homes jumped 7.8 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 539,000 units, the Commerce Department said, and January’s sales were also revised slightly up. The gains came “despite cold and snowy weather slamming large parts of the country” in the first months of the year. A sustained pickup could nudge homebuilders to increase construction, which would be a boon to the overall economy.

Silence falls on open trading pits It’s the end of an era, said William Alden in The New York Times.

The open market pits in Chicago and New York City, “where generations of sweating traders in colorful jackets once bellowed out orders for wheat, corn, and cattle contracts,” are set to close by July, choked by a decade of computer advances that have “made face-to-face trading largely obsolete.” The trading-floor culture so memorably captured in films like Trading Places will soon be a thing of the past. Gone, too, will be a career path that for more than 150 years allowed scrappy working-class teenagers “to hustle their way to wealth” by elbowing and shouting down the competition. “Now the traders are different,” said Franco Calascibetta, who has run a barbershop for decades in the Chicago Board of Trade Building. “The traders who trade on the computer, they don’t know what a tip is.”

Alamy (2), AP

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32 BUSINESS

Making money

Money: Spring-cleaning your finances April 15, 2015,” and you can typically deduct some or all of the amount, depending on your income level and whether you are covered by a retirement plan at work.

Reviewing your insurance might also save you a bundle. If you’ve been with the same property and casualty insurance company for years, “you could be overinsuring, or underinsuring, your house.” Review your current policies, and then “get quotes from another reputable company or two to see if your rates are still competitive.”

Spring’s arrival doesn’t just signal it’s time to “spruce up your home and organize your closets,” said Vera Gibbons in Market Watch.com. “It’s also an ideal time to clean up your finances.” Now that we’re three months into 2015, take a moment to refresh your budget for the year. Have you spent more or less than you anticipated? If you’ve veered off track for a specific reason, such as a job change, new baby, or a home purchase, revisit your spending so that you can meet your “current needs as well as shortand long-term savings goals.”

If you don’t regularly monitor your credit, get your free annual credit reports from Next, turn to your retirement portfolio, the three main credit agencies, said Erik said Kelly Campbell in USNews.com. “Start Time to tidy up your accounts.

Carter in Forbes.com. Up to 20 percent by adjusting your contributions to your of consumers have errors on their credit reports, so now’s the 401(k) or retirement plan,” especially if you recently received time to “dispute any incorrect items you may find that could be a raise. The IRS has raised the maximum 401(k) contribution hurting your score.” AnnualCreditReport.com is a good place for 2015 to $18,000, and anyone age 50 or over can make a to start. Finally, take a moment to protect your identity, said Jill “catch-up contribution” of up to $6,000 for total annual savSchlesinger in the Chicago Tribune. Change your passwords on ings of $24,000. And if you have money in retirement plans your bank and credit card accounts and “install firewalls and from previous jobs, now is a good time to think about whether virus-detection software” on your home computers. Then clean it makes sense to roll them into a consolidated IRA, which may out your filing cabinet and “shred unwanted financial docuoffer more investing options. You might also have time to cut ments.” Even the IRS says the longest you need to keep old tax your 2014 income taxes, said Eric Jones in KansasCity.com. documents is seven years.

“You can make IRA contributions for the 2014 tax year until

What the experts say Now that Charles Schwab has gone robo, said Jason Zweig in WSJ.com, “the fledgling industry of automated investment advice is going mainstream.” The discount brokerage giant launched its Intelligent Portfolios service last week, replacing some traditional brokers with “robo-advisers” programmed to “generate and monitor a portfolio of exchangetraded funds,” automatically rebalancing your investments when the market moves. It’s true that “having a machine manage your money isn’t for everyone,” but robo-advisers do have some advantages over their human counterparts: They stick to the investment plan that you select, won’t panic during a crash, and won’t be tempted to try “timing or outsmarting the market.” Plus, they’re cheap, costing anywhere between .04 and .48 percent, compared with the 1 or 2 percent typical of a flesh-and-blood adviser.

How to claim old tax breaks If you missed out on a tax credit last year, it might not be too late to claim it, said Kimberly Lankford in Kiplinger.com. “You have up to three years after the date you filed your original return to file an amended return and get a refund for the extra credit.” And THE WEEK April 3, 2015

with some discounts—such as the American Opportunity Credit, which is worth $2,500 per student for each of the first four years of college—it’s clearly “worth the effort.” You need to file a 1040X form for each tax year you are amending, along with any tax forms that are affected by the change. It can take a while—up to 16 weeks—for amendments to be processed, but “reducing your federal tax bill could also lower your state income tax,” so the savings are probably worth the wait.

Small caps’ big gains If you want to hit it big in the market, think small, said Brett Arends in MarketWatch.com.

A new study shows that over a 50-year period, a portfolio of “small cap, high quality” stocks has outperformed the overall market by nearly 5 percentage points a year, “an absolutely stunning performance.” But not all small caps are created equal. The key, say the authors, is quality—investing only in small companies that show “balance-sheet strength, profitability, stability, and growth.” Of course, coming off 50 years of gains, it’s possible these stocks may soon show weaker returns, but the advantages have proven “persistent over a long period of time” both in the U.S. and abroad.

“Could it really be this easy?”

Fourth grade marks a crucial educational shift from learning to read to reading to learn. But two out of three American fourth-graders read below grade level, and among low-income families, four out of five read below standard. Reading Partners (readingpartners.org) works to unlock the skills of children who struggle to read by partnering with schools in low-income neighborhoods across the U.S. and offering students one-on-one reading instruction with volunteer tutors.

Volunteers in eight states and Washington, D.C., work with students in kindergarten through fifth grade twice a week for 45 minutes each session, following a structured curriculum designed to improve literacy. Students typically double their rate of learning for each month they work with Reading Partners, and teachers often report a one- or two-grade jump within weeks of a student’s participation.

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.

Media Bakery

Robo-trading hits the big time

Charity of the week

Best columns: Business

33

Issue of the week: Debacle over a new development bank making room for it to do so.” Congress “Historians may record March 2015 as the has repeatedly “blocked efforts to dilute moment when China’s checkbook diploU.S. dominance of the World Bank” or macy came of age,” said Paul Taylor and give China more influence at the IMF, William James in Reuters.com. Beijing has where Beijing’s voting share is just 4 perspent several years trying to persuade Westcent versus Washington’s 17 percent. Reern nations to join its Asian Infrastructure publicans have also shot down President Investment Bank (AIIB), which will soon Obama’s attempts to increase U.S. funding open its doors and begin handing out bilfor the World Bank and IMF, said Charles lions of dollars in development loans to fund Kenny in Bloomberg.com, leaving those roads, ports, water and sanitation systems, institutions “undersize compared with the and telecom projects across Asia. The bank demands they face.” But if the Obama adwill also not so subtly expand China’s influShaking up the global economic order ministration can’t persuade the GOP to put ence “at the expense of the United States,” up the cash needed to underwrite development projects that will which has dominated the international economic system since the end of World War II. The Obama administration has pressed save lives and foster global growth, “it should at the very least get out of the way of other countries willing and able to lead.” allies in Europe and elsewhere to boycott the bank, arguing that it would have less scrupulous lending and environmental standards than rival U.S.-backed institutions like the World Bank and The U.S. has emerged from this diplomatic debacle looking “churlish and ineffectual,” said The Economist. But it “is not International Monetary Fund. But last week Washington lost the wrong to be suspicious of China’s motives.” The AIIB is dediplomatic “arm-wrestling match,” said Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times. In quick succession, the U.K., France, Italy, and signed expressly “to project Chinese power” throughout Asia, Germany all agreed to become founding shareholders of the AIIB, and China has a history of providing international loans that are “opaque, careless of environmental concerns, and shot through a sign that they are eager to cozy up to Beijing and its $4 trillion with dodgy political dealings.” But the best way to address such in foreign reserves. Once upon a time, “the world was said to concerns “is to join the bank and improve it from inside, not to bow down before the mighty dollar. These days, even many of throw brickbats from outside.” The fact that so many European America’s closest allies have renminbi signs in their eyes.” countries have now signed on also “makes it more likely” that the AIIB’s lending standards will be aboveboard. The U.S. still This is an impressive “soft-power victory for China,” said has the opportunity to become one of the bank’s founding memBloombergView.com in an editorial, and “Washington largely bers. “That would be the best way to accommodate Asia’s mashas itself to blame.” The U.S. has long called on China to take sive infrastructure plans—to say nothing of a rising China.” more of a role in international financial institutions, “without

Wall Street’s loss is the economy’s gain Neil Irwin

NYTimes.com

The enduring power of business cards

Corbis

The Economist

Silicon Valley just poached one of the most powerful women on Wall Street, said Neil Irwin, and I, for one, couldn’t be happier. That Ruth Porat, the chief financial officer of Morgan Stanley, would jump ship for Google isn’t all that surprising; she’ll oversee finances for “one of the world’s most valuable and most innovative companies,” not to mention “the weather is far better in Mountain View, Calif., than in New York.”

What’s more interesting to me is the trend line: “Thousands of less famous names” are increasingly deciding that “technology offers a more compelling opportunity than banking.” In 2008,

45 percent of Harvard Business School graduates “went into financial services, versus 7 percent into technology.” By 2014, it was 33 percent banking, 17 percent tech. Finance “exists to channel capital effectively from savers to investment,” and as vital as that role is, “it’s essentially a back-office function” for the economy as a whole, akin to human resources or “the janitorial service that keeps your office clean.” That’s why an inflated financial sector “actually reduces the growth rate of an economy.” Any sign that we’re funneling more top talent into industries that create the “goods and services people use” is nothing but promising.

“There is much about business that is timeless,” said The Economist. For proof, look no further than the thriving trade in business cards. Plenty of people predicted that exchanging paper cards would fall out of fashion as our daily lives migrated online. Instead, swapping cards remains “as close to a universal ritual as you can find in the corporate world.” Even at the trendiest Silicon Valley gatherings, “people still greet each other by handing out little rectangles made from dead trees rather than tapping their phones together.” Why? Because even as technology takes over more and more formerly human functions, machines “can-

not transform acquaintanceships into relationships.” Building social bonds remains an essential part of business, and cards still fill an important role in establishing connections and reinforcing bonds. In a world dominated by “both globalization and virtualization,” they serve as a powerful, “physical reminder that you have actually met someone rather than just Googled them.” Just as having dinner is a better way to get to know someone than Skypeing, exchanging paper cards is still an “excellent way to initiate a lasting relationship.” They may be old-fashioned, but “business cards are here to stay.”

THE WEEK April 3, 2015

Obituaries

34

The uncompromising statesman who built modern Singapore Lee Kuan Yew masterminded Singapore’s transformation from a British colonial backwater into 1923–2015 a financial and trading powerhouse. After becoming the first prime minister of the tiny island nation in 1959, he relentlessly pushed business-friendly policies, strictly enforced public order, and cracked down on corruption—helping lure foreign investment and companies to Singapore. Within a generation, living standards in the 280-square-mile city-state shot up from Third World to First World levels. But Singaporeans never got to enjoy First World freedoms during Lee’s 31-year rule. Convinced that Western-style democracy would result in chaos, he locked up his political opponents without trial and sued the owners of critical newspapers into submission.

“Nobody doubts that if you take me on,” Lee said, “I will put knuckle-dusters on and catch you in a cul-de-sac.”

Lee Kuan Yew

Born into a wealthy Chinese family in Singapore, Lee graduated top of his class at the city’s prestigious Raffles College, “but his higher education plans were interrupted by the outbreak of World War II,” said The Washington Post. Japan’s occupation of the British colony from 1942 to 1945 had a profound impact on Lee: He was beaten and abused by Japanese soldiers and narrowly avoided being killed in an anti-Chinese purge. Such experiences, he said, made him and other Singaporeans “determined that no one—neither Japanese nor British—had the right to push and kick us around.” After the war, Lee studied law at the University of Cambridge, before returning to Singapore and setting up a legal practice with his wife. In 1954 he co-founded the People’s Action Party, a “populist, socialist organization seeking independence from Britain,” and won a legislative seat the following year. When Singapore gained self-governing status in 1959, Lee was elected the country’s first prime minister. A veteran BBC correspondent who reported on the leader’s first press conference said Lee came across as “a man it would be very dangerous to cross.”

One of Lee’s “early achievements was persuading Malaysia’s prime minister to merge with Singapore in 1963,” said the Los Angeles Times. But the fiercely ambitious Lee butted heads with officials in Kuala Lumpur, and in 1965, Singapore was expelled from the Malaysian federation and forced to become an independent nation. As the city-state was home to a combustible mix of ethnicities— Malay, Chinese, and Indian—he developed a new “Singapore model” that would bind the island’s people together. Embracing “centralized power, clean government, and economic liberalism,” he encouraged foreign investment and fostered a deep sense of nationalism, said The New York Times. As Singapore grew, the nation began to reflect the man: “efficient, unsentimental, incorrupt, inventive, forward looking, and pragmatic.”

Singapore’s prosperity came at the cost of “anything resembling free political debate,” said The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). Lee’s ruling party so harassed and obstructed its rivals that an opposition member didn’t win a single seat in Parliament until 1981.

Singaporeans also had to obey Lee’s “all-encompassing diktats on personal behavior.” Chewing gum was banned; fines were imposed for spitting, swearing, and not flushing public toilets; and drug smugglers and armed robbers were “regularly hanged.”

In 1990, Lee voluntarily stepped down as prime minister “but retained cabinet-level advisory roles,” said The Wall Street Journal. His son has led the country since 2004. In recent years, voters have bristled at the ruling party’s “paternalistic brand of governance,” and when the opposition won an unprecedented 40 percent of the vote in the 2011 elections, Lee left Singaporean politics for good. He admitted that his brand of soft authoritarianism probably wasn’t sustainable in Singapore. But he always stood by his decisions and fiercely defended his record. “At the end of the day,” he said after leaving politics, “what have I got? A successful Singapore. What have I given up? My life.”

The 60-minute man who epitomized football toughness

“They called him Concrete Charlie,” said The New York Times, and although the nickname was inspired by his off-season job as a THE WEEK April 3, 2015

concrete salesman, it “perfectly captured his fearsome presence” on the gridiron. The son of Eastern European immigrants, Bednarik played high school football in Bethlehem, Pa., before enlisting in the Army Air Forces during World War II. He served as a gunner on a B-24 bomber and later credited his 30 combat missions with giving him some of his legendary toughness, said USA Today. “When I survived the war and went out on a football field,” he said, “I figured, ‘Shoot, this is easy.’”

A two-time All-American at the University of Pennsylvania, Bednarik “was selected first overall in the 1949 NFL draft by the Eagles,” said The Washington Post, and he led his team to the NFL Championship that same year.

Bednarik retired in 1962, then returned to the Eagles as a coach in the 1970s. But he remained skeptical of modern players, who he said were prone to “suck air after five plays.” When asked about the Dallas Cowboys’ Deion Sanders, who in 1996 became the first player since Bednarik to regularly play both offense and defense, Bednarik was dismissive: “He couldn’t tackle my wife.”

Getty, AP

As one of the last and greatest NFL players to play both offense and defense, Chuck Bednarik was the very 1925–2015 symbol of “old school” football. A starting linebacker on defense and center on offense, the career Philadelphia Eagle missed just three games over the course of his 13-year career, winning two championships and playing in eight Pro Bowls.

But it was two plays in 1960 that came to define his career. Early in the season, Bednarik knocked New York Giants running back Frank Gifford out cold with a blind-side hit that kept Gifford off the field until 1962. Later that season, Bednarik made a game-saving tackle in the waning seconds of the NFL Championship game, driving Green Bay Packers running back Jim Taylor into the ground, then holding him down as time ran out.

“You can get up now, Jim,” Bednarik said when the final whistle blew. “This game is over.”

Chuck Bednarik

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36

Baked Alaska If Alaska is the canary in our climate coal mine, said Eric Holthaus, the planet is in trouble.

E

ARLIER THIS WINTER, Monica

Zappa packed up her crew of Alaskan sled dogs and headed south, in search of snow. “We haven’t been able to train where we live for two months,” she told me.

Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, which Zappa calls home, was practically tropical this winter.

Rick Thoman, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Alaska, has been dumbfounded. “Homer, Alaska, keeps setting record after record, and I keep looking at the data like, Has the temperature sensor gone out or something?”

Something does seem to be going on in Alaska. Last fall, a skipjack tuna, which is more likely to be found in the Galápagos than near a glacier, was caught about 150 miles southeast of Anchorage, not far from the Kenai. A few weeks ago, race organizers had to truck in snow to the ceremonial Iditarod start line in Anchorage.

Of course, it’s not just Alaska. This February was the most extreme on record in the Lower 48, and it marked the first time that two large sections of territory (each more than 30 percent of the country) experienced both exceptional cold and exceptional warmth in the same month, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. All-time records were set for the coldest month in dozens of Eastern cities, with Boston racking up more snow than the peaks of California’s Sierra Nevada. A single January storm in Boston produced more snow than Anchorage saw all winter.

A

LASKA IS ON the

front lines of climate change. This year’s Iditarod was rerouted—twice—because of the warm weather. The race traditionally starts in Anchorage, which had nearrecord-low snowfall this winter. The city was without a single significant snowstorm between October and late January, so THE WEEK April 3, 2015

Alaska’s fire season now begins a month earlier, a shift officials attribute to climate change.

race organizers decided to move the start from the Anchorage area 360 miles north to Fairbanks. But when the Chena River, which was supposed to be part of the new route’s first few miles, failed to sufficiently freeze, the starting point had to move again, to another location in Fairbanks.

On March 9, Zappa set out with her dogs on the 1,000-mile race across Alaska as one of 78 mushers in this year’s Iditarod. For most of the winter, the weather across the interior of the state had been abnormally warm. To train, many teams of dogs and their owners had to travel, often “outside”— away from Alaska. Zappa ended up going to the mountains of Wyoming.

A recent study said that Alaska’s rivers and melting glaciers are now outputting more water than the Mississippi River. Last year was Alaska’s warmest on record, and the warm weather has continued right on into 2015. This winter, Anchorage essentially transformed into a less sunny version of Seattle. As of March 9, the city had received less than one-third of its normal amount of snow. In its place? Rain. Lots of rain. In fact, schools in the Anchorage area are now more likely to cancel school because of rain and street flooding than because of cold and snow.

Of course, it wasn’t always this way.

Alaska’s recent surge of back-to-back warm winters comes after a record-snowy 2012, when the National Guard was employed to help dig out buried towns. Then, about two years ago, something in the climate system switched. The state’s recent brush with extreme weather is more than just year-to-year weather variability. Alaska is at the point where the long-term trend of warming has begun to trump seasonal weather fluctuations. A recent shift toward warmer offshore ocean temperatures is essentially adding more fuel to the fire, moving the state toward profound tipping points like the irreversible loss of permafrost and increasingly violent weather.

If the current warm ocean phase (which began in 2014) holds for a decade or so, as is typical, Alaska will quickly become a different place.

The Pacific Ocean near Alaska has been record-warm for months now. This year is off to a record-wet start in Juneau.

Kodiak experienced its warmest winter on record. A sudden burst of ocean warmth has affected statewide weather before, but this time feels different, residents say. In late February, National Weather Service employees spotted thundersnow

Josh Turnbow/USFS

Alaska is heating up at twice the rate of the rest of the country—a canary in our climate coal mine. A new report shows that warming in Alaska, along with the rest of the Arctic, is accelerating as the loss of snow and ice cover begins to set off a feedback loop of further warming. Warming in wintertime has been the most dramatic— more than 6 degrees in the past 50 years.

And this is just a fraction of the warming that’s expected to come over just the next few decades.

The last word in Nome—a city just 100 miles south of the Arctic Circle. “As far as I know, that’s unprecedented,” Thoman told me.

Thunderstorms of any kind require a level of atmospheric energy that’s rarely present in cold climates. To get that outside of the summer is incredibly rare everywhere, let alone in Alaska.

Climate scientists are starting to link the combination of melting sea ice and warm ocean temperatures to shifts in the jet stream.

For the past few winters, those shifts have brought surges of tropical moisture toward southern Alaska via potent atmospheric rivers. This weather pattern has endured so long, it’s even earned its own name: the Ridiculously Resilient Ridge. The persistent area of high pressure stretching from Alaska to California has shunted wintertime warmth and moisture northward into the Arctic while the eastern half of the continent is plunged into a deep freeze, polarvortex style.

Arctic cold toward the East Coast. Barrow was briefly warmer than Dallas or Atlanta.

T

HE WARM WEATHER isn’t

all bad news. The city of Anchorage has saved an estimated $1 million on snow removal this year and is instead pouring the money into fixing potholes and other backlogged maintenance issues. But getting around the rest of the state hasn’t been so easy.

There are few roads in rural Alaska, so winter travel is often done by snowmobiles over frozen rivers. Not this year. Warm temperatures in February led to thin ice and open water in the southwest part of the

37 For now, the most visible change is still in the shifting habitats of the fish, birds, trees, and animals. Permafrost still covers 85 percent of the state, but “almost everywhere, the depth of the active layer is increasing over the last few decades,” said Thoman.

Since the active layer—the zone of soil above the permafrost that thaws out each summer—now penetrates deeper down, that means landforms are shifting, lakes are draining, and new forests are springing up.

Patricia Owen is a biologist at Denali National Park and Preserve who studies grizzly bears. Last winter, warm weather brought blueberry blossoms earlier than normal. The blossoms then froze, making foraging for food more challenging for bears. Mother bears need to have good health in the fall to support their cubs during the long winter months of hibernation.

Owen is seeing evidence of other changes within Denali: More episodes of freezing rain are having a big impact on sheep, which Bear Glacier in Kenai Fjords National Park in 2002 (left) and 2007 (right) The warm water is makhave to scrape through ing its way north into the Arctic Ocean, state near Galena and Bethel. David Hulen, ice to eat.

In low-snow years like this one, too, where as of early March, sea ice levels managing editor for the Alaska Dispatch wolves seem to suffer, since caribou and were at their record lowest for the date.

News in Anchorage, has spent nearly 30 moose can escape more quickly.

The resurgent heating of the Pacific (we’re years in the state. He says the freeze-thaw officially in an El Niño year now) is also expected to give a boost to global warming over the next few years by releasing years of pent-up oceanic energy into the atmosphere, pushing even more warm water toward the north, melting Alaska from all sides.

USGS (2)

That means Alaska’s weather, according to one Alaska meteorologist, is “broken.”

Dave Snider, who reports statewide weather daily for the National Weather Service’s Alaska office in Anchorage, tweeted the sentiment back in mid-January. Snider emphasized that this isn’t the official view of the National Weather Service, “of course.” Snider told me he made the comment “sort of in jest” but pointed to the nearly snow-free Iditarod start as evidence.

Here’s another example he could have used: In early November, Super Typhoon Nuri morphed into a huge post-tropical cyclone, passing through the Aleutians very near Shemya Island on its way to becoming Alaska’s strongest storm on record. Despite winds near 100 mph, Shemya emerged relatively unscathed. A few days later, the remnants of that storm actually altered the jet stream over much of the continent, ushering in a highly amplified “omega block” pattern that dramatically boosted temperatures across the state and sent wave after wave of

cycle is out of whack, “changing the nature of the place.” Usually, things freeze in the fall and unfreeze in the spring; this winter, they’ve seen a nearly constant back and forth between freezing and thawing.

That’s made it difficult for skiers and those enjoying other outdoor activities, like riding fat-tire bikes attuned to the snow.

Julie Saddoris, of the Bike Me Anchorage Meetup, says attendance in her group was down this winter. Hulen agrees that it’s been frustrating. “I mean, what’s living in Alaska if it’s not cold and snowy?”

Those are city problems. Along the state’s west coast, some native coastal villages are facing an existential threat, as sea levels rise in response to the warm water. Earlier this winter, Washington Post climate reporter Chris Mooney visited Kivalina, one of the six villages considering plans to relocate because of climate change.

“Here, climate change is less a future threat and more a daily force, felt in drastic changes to weather, loss of traditional means of sustenance like whale hunting, and the literal vanishing of land,” Mooney wrote. Another village, Newtok, is a bit further along in the relocation process, with construction on their new village— Mertarvik—already underway.

Recent warming also appears to have pushed Denali’s poplar forests across a threshold toward rapid expansion. Carl Roland, a Denali plant ecologist who has compiled a trove of repeat photographs around the park spanning decades of environmental change, says that what he’s seeing is “dramatic.”

Once the permafrost goes, Roland says, we can expect a “regime shift” in the park and across the state. The northward spread of tree-killing insects is also a “really big unknown” in interior Alaska.

Last spring, a huge forest fire in a beetle kill area of the Kenai Peninsula sent smoke plumes hundreds of miles northward toward Fairbanks.

For southern Alaska, fire season has been coming earlier in recent years, and 2015 looks to be no exception. A few years ago, the Alaska Division of Forestry statutorily moved the start of the fire season up from May 1 to April 1 “as a result of climate change,” Tim Mowry, a division spokesman, told me. The change, Mowry says, was intended to elicit “a sense of urgency.”

Excerpted from an article that originally appeared on Slate.com. Reprinted with permission.

THE WEEK April 3, 2015

The Puzzle Page

Crossword No. 303: Won’t Get Fooled Again by Matt Gaffney 1

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ACROSS 1 News organization that announced on 4/1/1980 that Big Ben’s analog clock face would soon be replaced by a digital one 4 Defibrillator user 9 Perfect 14 Hot tub sigh 15 Actress Durance of “Smallville” 16 Sky blue 17 Suffix with señor 18 “Judge Judy” set prop 19 Vaccine man Salk 20 The New York Daily Graphic reported on 4/1/1884 that he had invented a way to turn soil directly into food and water into wine 23 Popular bagel variety 24 Take to the pulpit 28 Husky voice feature 30 He directed Ralph in The Grand Budapest Hotel 31 Maiden name preceder 32 Clicked message 35 Country on the Arabian Sea 37 Gawk at 38 Newspaper ads announced on 4/1/96 that a certain fastfood restaurant had purchased an iconic piece of American history and would be renaming it this 41 UVA athletes THE WEEK April 3, 2015

42 Auctioneer’s shout 43 Island seen in The Godfather, Part II 44 Misstep 45 Lisa Simpson’s hobby, for short 46 “Slammin’ Sammy” 48 ___ franca 50 Sensors 54 NPR announced on 4/1/1992 that this 80-year-old would be running for president later that year 58 Deck with the Fool and the Devil 61 Story of a famous siege 62 Prefix with morphous or thermal 63 Valentine’s Day note phrase 64 Unexpected visit at home, in a Seinfeld episode 65 Columbus coll.

66 Eight hours out 67 Person with a pad 68 This university’s newspaper announced on 4/1/1998 that the school had sold itself to the Walt Disney Corporation for $6.9 billion

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Last week’s contest: Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams have been ordered to pay $7.3 million to Marvin Gaye’s family, after a jury decided their hit “Blurred Lines” copied the general “feel” of Gaye’s 1977 song “Got to Give It Up.” If you were to write a pop song that left no doubt it was plagiarism, what would it be called?

THE WINNER: “Oops, You Heard It Again” Gina Bryant, Calabasas, Calif.

SECOND PLACE: “(I Did It) Your Way” Dewey Cornell, Charlottesville, Va. THIRD PLACE: “With a Little Intellectual Property From My Friends” —Scott Merrow, Albuquerque, N.M. For runners-up and complete contest rules, please go to theweek.com/contest.

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