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MAIN STORIES

WILL PUTIN HEED BIDEN’S WARNING? p.5

TALKING POINTS

A disputed treatment for Alzheimer’s p.17

PEOPLE

Martina’s lifelong rebellion p.10

THE BEST OF THE U.S. AND INTERNATIONAL MEDIA

A homicide surge

Why have shootings soared over the past year? p.6

JUNE 25, 2021 VOLUME 21 ISSUE 1033 ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT EVERYTHING THAT MATTERS

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Contents

3

Editor’s letter As President Biden returns from meetings with America’s allies and one of our chief adversaries, one thing is very clear: While the United States was focused inward, the world changed around us.

Donald Trump promised “America First,” a slogan that harked back to the isolationists of the mid-20th century. If going it alone was the promise, he delivered, leaving the U.S. alienated from Western allies and with a trade war with China that accomplished nothing. Now the U.S. returns to the world stage with at least three challenges: China is leveraging its economic power to cement repression at home and achieve political interests abroad. Vladimir Putin’s Russia is engaged in asymmetric warfare, poisoning dissidents, and tacitly encouraging cybercriminals to attack American businesses and infrastructure. And while Europe is happier with Biden, it is no longer willing to take U.S. primacy for granted. (See Main Stories, p.4, and Best European Columns, p.14.)

In recent years, Americans have understandably been consumed

by the bitter struggle for our own country’s soul. But what has happened abroad has been just as startling. China’s expansive intentions have long been clear, but no one predicted five years ago that China would put an end to Hong Kong’s special status.

While Putin’s belligerent behavior was more foreseeable, it has risen to baroque levels of gamesmanship, with only the thinnest of coy denials coupled with sarcastic jabs about American domestic politics. Every few weeks a new line is crossed—a plane diverted from its course by a Putin ally in Belarus to kidnap a dissident; Arab countries deporting Uighur Muslims to China’s concentration camps in Xinjiang, amid new reports of mass torture there.

The 21st century is witnessing a new struggle between authoritarianism and democracy, and this administration may well be measured by whether the U.S. can make its mark on this new era in history—or will let it pass us by.

Mark Gimein

NEWS 4 Main stories President Biden in Europe; a U.S.-Russia presidential summit; a Trump-era surveillance scandal

Editor-in-chief: William Falk Managing editors: Theunis Bates, Mark Gimein Assistant managing editor: Jay Wilkins Deputy editor/International: Susan Caskie Deputy editor/Arts: Chris Mitchell Senior editors: Chris Erikson, Danny Funt, Michael Jaccarino, Dale Obbie, Zach Schonbrun, Hallie Stiller Art director: Dan Josephs Photo editor: Mark Rykoff Copy editor: Jane A. Halsey Researchers: Joyce Chu, Ryan Rosenberg Contributing editors: Ryan Devlin, Bruno Maddox

6

Controversy of the week Have calls to defund the police led to a surge in murders and gun violence?

7 The U.S. at a glance Keystone XL pipeline terminated; Georgia grocery worker killed over mask rules 8 The world at a glance “Freedom Day” delayed in England; a man-made famine in Ethiopia 10 People Martina Navratilova’s tireless defiance; Hamas and Israel trade fi re 11 Briefing How the proliferation of drones is changing the nature of warfare

AP, Newscom

12 Best U.S. columns The case for prosecuting Donald Trump; why China won’t cooperate with a pandemic probe 15 Best international columns Benjamin Netanyahu plots a return to power 16 Talking points The fight over voting rights; the high price of a new Alzheimer’s drug; should employers mandate Covid vaccination?

Managing editor

President Biden and world leaders at the G7 summit (pages 4, 14)

ARTS 22 Books Lawrence Wright chronicles America’s battle with Covid-19 23 Author of the week Annette GordonReed’s history of Juneteenth 24 Stage & Music A theater show that makes strangers less strange 25 Home Media An end to Keeping Up With the Kardashians Martina Navratilova (p.10)

LEISURE 27 Food & Drink A chicken recipe from 13thcentury Arabia; hosting a post-vax dinner party 28 Travel Setting sail on a great American boat trip; touring an active Icelandic volcano BUSINESS 32 News at a glance Americans quit their jobs in record numbers; Novavax’s new Covid shot 33 Making money Millennials’ generational burden; moving your 401(k) when you switch jobs 34 Best columns How the mega-rich escape paying taxes; California’s economic comeback

Group publisher: Paul Vizza (paul_vizza@theweek.com) Associate publisher: Sara Schiano (sara_schiano@theweek.com) West Coast executive director: Tony Imperato East coast account director: Meg Power Group custom content director: Barbara Baker Clark Director, digital operations & advertising: Andy Price Media planning manager: Andrea Crino Direct response: Anthony Smyth (anthony@smythps.com) North American CEO: Randy Siegel SVP, finance: Maria Beckett Director, financial reporting: Arielle Starkman SVP, global marketing: Lisa Boyars VP consumer marketing: Yanna Wilson-Fischer Consumer marketing director: Leslie Guarnieri Senior digital marketing director: Mathieu Muzzy Manufacturing manager, North America: Lori Crook HR manager: Joy Hart Operations manager: Cassandra Mondonedo Chairman: Jack Griffin Dennis Group CEO: James Tye Group CRO: Julian Lloyd-Evans U.K. founding editor: Jolyon Connell Company founder: Felix Dennis

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THE WEEK June 25, 2021

4 NEWS

The main stories...

Biden reconnects with allies at G7 summit What happened

If the G7 hoped to demonstrate that Western democracies still offer the world more than autocratic China or Russia, said the Financial Times, they fell far short. The group has made “nowhere near enough progress” at reaching Paris climate agreement goals, and offered less than a 10th of the number of lifesaving vaccines needed to bring the pandemic to a close. By spending $50 billion for the needed number of doses, the G7 would add an estimated $9 trillion to the global economy. “It is hard to imagine a better return on investment,” and hundreds of thousands of lives would be saved.

It wasn’t all bad Q A Wisconsin man has broken a record by completing 1.5 million pushups over the span of a year. Nate Carroll averaged 4,100 push-ups a day, sometimes pushing his limit to 7,000 a day, while balancing life as a dad and a social worker. Carroll used the challenge to raise money for the Tunnel to Towers Foundation, which provides homes for injured veterans and first responders—and to set an example for his own children. Winning a small endurance battle each day, Carroll said, “builds strength and shapes one’s perspective of what is possible.”

THE WEEK June 25, 2021

Q A recent college graduate paid tribute to her roots with a cap-and-gown photo shoot at the farmer’s field where her Mexican-immigrant parents worked. Jennifer Rocha, who graduated from University of California, San Diego, worked in the fields alongside her parents in high school, at times until 2 or 3 a.m. That pushed her to want a better life as she studied at the university full-time and picked up late-night shifts in the school’s police department to pay for tuition. “I wanted to go back to the field because that’s what molded me as a person,” she said. Rocha plans to pursue a career in law enforcement Field of dreams

Q A bakery in small-town Texas has received an outpouring of love after getting backlash for supporting the gay community. Earlier this month, Confections posted a Facebook photo of its rainbow cookies with the caption, “More LOVE. Less hate.” The bakery lost social media followers; one customer canceled an order for five dozen cookies. But after co-owner Dawn Cooley expressed her sadness on Facebook, hundreds of customers came, forming a line that stretched for blocks. “That line brought me to tears,” Cooley said.

“We just wanted to be inclusive, and it was so heartwarming to see how many people felt the same.”

Illustration by Fred Harper.

Cover photos from AP, Newscom

Reuters, Branden Rodriguez

Biden received a warm welcome from leaders of other wealthy democracies as the first Group of Seven summit in two years wrapped up this week with new pledges on taxes, climate change, and public health.

“America is back at the table,” Biden said, signaling a return to pre-Trump, consensus-based foreign policy. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who hosted the summit at the English resort town of Carbis Bay, called Biden’s arrival “a breath of fresh air,” and French President Emmanuel Macron said he welcomed the arrival of a U.S. president who’s “very willing Jill and Joe Biden greeting Boris and Carrie Johnson to cooperate.” Leaders agreed to set a new What the columnists said 15 percent global minimum corporate tax, bring the total number The G7 summit “wasn’t perfect,” said Josh Wingrove and Jennifer of Covid-19 vaccines donated to poorer nations to 1 billion, and Jacobs in Bloomberg.com, “but, for Biden, it was enough.” He and halve carbon dioxide emissions by 2030. Their 25-page communithe other leaders “took pains to show unity” even as backroom qué criticized Russian and Chinese belligerence and requested an debates became thorny. The other leaders were clearly happy to be independent investigation into the origins of Covid-19 in China. dealing with Biden, who avoided major gaffes, and “quelled comBiden set a more amicable tone than Trump did at the 2019 confer- plaints about U.S. vaccine hoarding” with a promise to provide ence in France, where the combative then-president declined to par- 500 million of the 1 billion doses the G7 pledged to donate. ticipate in climate talks and strongly lobbied for Russia’s readmisBiden’s sunny demeanor and “the soothing pageantry of diplosion. Still, the G7 nations remained divided on several key issues. macy” have reassured U.S. allies shaken by Trump’s hostility, said They failed to adopt the United Kingdom’s proposal to eliminate Walter Russell Mead in The Wall Street Journal. It seems that coal power in 10 years, and language condemning Chinese forced labor was later dropped from the group’s statement. The G7’s vac- “America is back, the West is back, multilateralism is back, and all cine promise fell far short of the 11 billion doses the World Health is well.” But “China and Russia appear unimpressed, as does Iran,” with the G7’s stern language about their destabilizing behavior and Organization says are needed to inoculate 70 percent of the world territorial aggression. In the real world, “the U.S. and its allies are by next summer. losing ground to their adversaries,” and “autocracy is on the march What the editorials said at the fastest rate since the 1930s.” Unless Biden and Europe take Biden made modest headway at reasserting America’s global concrete action, “our adversaries’ progress will accelerate.” authority—“and we mean modest,” said The Wall Street Journal.

The G7 statement criticizes repression in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, Even our allies are wondering whether the U.S. is a reliable longterm partner, said Jonah Shepp in NYMag.com. They greeted Biden and it makes “a fleeting reference” to China’s commandeering of disputed outlying islands. But the threat of alienating a major trade “like a moderately dysfunctional family welcoming a cousin home partner made European leaders, including Italy’s Mario Draghi and from rehab,” but leaders know that Trumpism is still a persistent Germany’s Angela Merkel, balk at more decisive action. Biden may force in American politics and could produce another isolationist president in 2024. These nations are glad to have the U.S. “back have rejected his predecessor’s “America First” bluster, but the G7 at the table” for now, but as one European official put it, “Your just offered a perfect example of “the weakness of multilateralism democracy is in serious trouble.” backed only by gauzy, hopeful rhetoric.”

... and how they were covered

NEWS 5

U.S.-Russia summit stays civil despite clear differences What happened

What the columnists said

President Biden and Russian President This summit was striking for its “normality,” Vladimir Putin said they had a “constructive” said Luke Harding in TheGuardian.com. summit in Switzerland this week discussing Biden “cut a relaxed figure,” telling Putin cybersecurity, human rights, and Russia’s he wanted a “predictable” relationship—a military aggression in Ukraine, although the more modest goal than the sweeping “reset” leaders offered few specifics and Putin refused sought by the Obama administration. This to accept blame for recent cyberattacks against was a far cry from the “disastrous” 2018 the U.S. Biden, who deemed Putin a “worthy Helsinki meeting with Putin and former adversary” ahead of the three-hour meeting, President Trump, during which Trump’s after earlier calling him a “killer” without a groveling got so “humiliating” that his senior soul, brushed off questions about whether he adviser Fiona Hill “considered bringing it to A meeting of experienced adversaries could trust Putin, saying, “We need to have a close by whacking a fire alarm.” some basic rules of that road.” The two leaders agreed to conduct meetings on cybersecurity after a recent spate of attacks—including On cybersecurity, said Martin Matishak in Politico.com, Biden says a Russian criminal group’s ransomware attack on a U.S. pipeline and he warned Putin that the U.S. would retaliate with its own cyber the SolarWinds hack of U.S. government email—with Biden propos- operations if the Kremlin continues backing ransomware attacks ing 16 sectors of “critical infrastructure” that should be off-limits to and election interference. In a pointed question, Biden asked Putin cyberwarfare. They also pledged to return ambassadors to Moscow how he’d feel if ransomware took down Russian oil pipelines, arguand Washington, D.C., and collaborate on nuclear arms control. ing that cyber détente is in their mutual “self-interest.” Although Biden wouldn’t spell out specific threats he made if Russian misPutin praised the “very balanced” and “experienced” Biden and chief continues, he said Putin “knows I will take action.” said there was “no hostility” between them. But though Biden says he warned Putin there would be “devastating” consequences But Biden doesn’t have much leverage, said Paul Waldman in if jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny dies in custody, WashingtonPost.com. If Russia continues violating norms, Biden Putin refused to refer to Navalny by name when speaking with the says, Putin’s “standing” will be diminished, “which may not exactly press, instead pointing to the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection and saying, have Putin quaking with fear.” Why should it? Putin’s efforts to de“We have no desire to allow the same thing to happen in our counstabilize the U.S. are going swimmingly—“just imagine how tickled try.” Putin also rebuffed questions about human rights abuses in he was to see a pro-Trump mob invade the Capitol.” The White Russia by referencing gun violence and police shootings in the U.S., House hoped this summit could help turn the page on the Trump era, asking, “Who is the killer now?” but the damage Putin’s meddling did is “not so easily put behind us.”

Trump DOJ spied on Democratic lawmakers What happened

What the columnists said

The Justice Department pledged to reform its surveillance procedures this week, after it was revealed that the department under former President Trump had secretly seized communications data from House Democrats, reporters, and even Trump’s own White House counsel. Prosecutors searching for the source of leaks about Trump associates and Russia in 2017 and 2018 used grand jury subpoenas to force Apple to hand over the metadata of at least 12 people associated with the House Intelligence Committee, The New York Times reported. They included Democratic Reps.

Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, as well as their aides and family members—including one minor. A subsequent Times report revealed that the department in 2018 sought account data for then– White House counsel Don McGahn, who had angered Trump by resisting his entreaties to fire special counsel Robert Mueller.

“What has happened here are fingerprints of a dictatorship, not a democracy,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

Trump’s Justice Department looked bad when he was in office, said David Graham in TheAtlantic.com. It “now looks even worse.” Such targeting of federal lawmakers is alarming, and given that Schiff and Swalwell were prominent Trump critics, “the odor of revenge is especially strong.” Why else did the investigations continue after prosecutors found no evidence tying the Democratic legislators to the leaks? The whole affair bolsters the impression of a DOJ “weaponized for personal gain.”

“The rat-a-tat revelations raise more questions than they answer,” said Zachary Wolf in CNN.com. Why was the DOJ targeting “people Trump viewed as his enemies?” Were Schiff and Swalwell the focus or were they swept up in a probe aimed at others? Who ordered the investigations? What we’ve seen “points to alarming weaknesses in the backstops that are supposed to prevent abuse of the federal justice system”—and there’s surely more to come.

AP

The DOJ’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, announced an inquiry into the data sweeps, and House Democrats launched their own investigation. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said former Attorneys General Jeff Sessions and William Barr should testify before Congress about the seizures. Both men insist they had no knowledge of the subpoenas targeting Schiff and Swalwell, a claim Pelosi called “beyond belief.” Attorney General Merrick Garland promised to “evaluate and strengthen” the department’s policies around obtaining records from legislators.

When it comes to press freedom, President Biden is off to a shaky start, said the Houston Chronicle in an editorial. After the Obama administration spied on reporters and Trump declared war on them, it was heartening to hear candidate Biden talk about “the fourth estate’s role in preserving our democracy.” But his DOJ continued Trump-era leak investigations, seeking the email records of Times journalists. Garland says the department will no longer pursue such cases. If Biden truly believes in a free press, he will support legislation to bake that change into law.

THE WEEK June 25, 2021

6 NEWS

Controversy of the week

Crime: Why is the homicide rate surging? eral cities that did shift some of the fund“Get ready for a bloody summer,” said ing in their police departments’ budgets Rachel Cohen in TheDailyBeast.com. With to mental-health and crime-prevention American life “kicking back into high gear” efforts. How can we “blame a rise in as the pandemic subsides, the nation’s mayhomicides on defunding the police when ors and police officials are “bracing for the the police weren’t actually defunded?” worst” amid a historic spike in murder and gun violence that shows no sign of abating The nation’s “arms race” certainly played and has no single explanation. After years a role, said Sabrina Tavernise in The of steadily declining crime rates, in 2020 New York Times. Gun sales “exploded the homicide rate in 34 U.S. cities jumped in 2020,” as nervous Americans, react30 percent, and is up another 24 percent in ing to the tension of the pandemic in 2021. Rural areas saw big spikes in shooting a superheated political climate, sought deaths, too. Why? Experts aren’t sure but After a shooting spree in Chicago protection from a gathering storm of civil point to a 66 percent spike in gun sales in unrest. Last weekend alone, more than 120 people died in shoot2020, as widespread fear, illness, and school and business closures ings, according to the Gun Violence Archive, and an average of caused feelings of trauma, anger, and “disconnection.” It’s tempt54 lives are lost every day to gunfire. Guns have always been part ing to blame this national “killing spree” on “pandemic-related stresses,” said The Economist in an editorial. But the surge is con- of American culture, said USA Today in an editorial, but the dose makes the poison. With gun sales for the first time exceeding a fined to crimes of violence, not the robberies and burglaries you’d million per week, is it really a surprise that our “culture of guns expect from desperate people seeking money. It’s possible that last year’s nationwide protests and calls to “defund the police” demor- has become a culture of killing?” alized law enforcement officers and made them wary of aggressive policing. Communities also became much less willing to cooperate Statistics can’t prove causation, said Andrew Sullivan in Andrew Sullivan.substack.com, but it’s “one hell of a correlation” that with cops, so bad guys ran free. homicides really took off after the killing of George Floyd in May 2020. That’s when police were demonized in nationwide protests Let’s keep things in perspective, said Matt Ford in NewRepublic as racist murderers, and cops started retiring in droves and “pull.com. The 462 murders in New York City last year were up from ing back from the kind of aggressive, proactive policing” that pre318 in 2019, but were still “far below” the 2,245 in 1990. This vents violent crime. The good news is that the number of unarmed is true nationwide: Violent crime is ticking upward, but we still black men shot dead by police every year—18 in 2020, 13 in have “a long way to go before returning to the bad old days” of 2019—is down to only four so far this year. But what if the cost of the late ’80s and early ’90s. As for right-wing efforts to blame the that reduction is “a huge increase in the numbers of innocent black current spike on the Defund the Police movement, the homicide surge has occurred across the nation, not just in the handful of lib- lives lost to civilian murder?”

Q A New Jersey school district

is removing the names of all holidays from the school calendar so as not to offend anyone. The decision came after a raucous public meeting about the board’s decision to replace “Columbus Day” with “Indigenous People’s Day.” Every holiday will now be listed as a “day off” so “we don’t have to have anyone with hurt feelings,” explained board member Dorene Roche.

Q A Nevada conservative group wants teachers to wear body cameras to ensure they don’t teach “critical race theory.” Karen England, founder of the Nevada Family Alliance, says she’s received reports of teachers “contradicting the lessons taught by parents at home,” particularly on race, and that bodycams would create “a record that could be viewed by appropriate parties.”

THE WEEK June 25, 2021

Good week for: Penance, after Jeffrey Toobin, the legal analyst fired last year by

The New Yorker for masturbating during a staff video call, returned to CNN’s airwaves with a confession. Not turning off his camera during that call was “deeply moronic,” Toobin conceded.

Self-parody, after anti-vaccine activist Sherri Tenpenny told Ohio state lawmakers that Covid vaccines make people “magnetized,” so that keys and forks stick to their foreheads. Another anti-vaxxer tried to prove it by sticking a key to her face, but it kept falling off.

Fishing yarns, after Cape Cod lobster diver Michael Packard claimed he was swallowed by a humpback whale while swimming under water. “I felt this huge shove and the next thing I knew it was completely black,” says the modern-day Jonah, who estimates he was in the whale’s mouth for 30-40 seconds before it spat him out.

Bad week for: Slipping and sliding, after NBC executives shut down produc-

tion of the upcoming action game show Ultimate Slip ‘N Slide amid an outbreak of explosive diarrhea that felled 40 crew members and sent some racing to porta-potties.

Fear of missing out, after Donald Trump sent a wistful message to President Biden before this week’s summit with Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Please give Putin “my warmest regards,” Trump said.

Congressional experience, after Jason Riddle, a New Hampshire man facing criminal charges for storming the Capitol during the Jan. 6 insurrection, announced that he’s running for a seat in the House. “If you’re running for office,” Riddle said, “any attention is good attention.”

In other news Delta variant brings new Covid-19 fears The Centers for Disease Control said this week that the Delta strain of coronavirus, first identified in India, is a “variant of concern” in the U.S., sparking fears of an outbreak similar to the Delta-driven case surge in the U.K. The strain, which now accounts for more than 10 percent of U.S. Covid cases, is thought to be 40 percent more transmissible than Britain’s Alpha variant. The Delta strain is also believed to cause more hospitalizations, although the CDC says the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are effective against it. Experts believe the Johnson & Johnson vaccine also offers good protection against the variant.

The U.S. passed 600,000 Covid deaths this week, with cases still falling in most states but spiking in some red states with relatively low vaccination rates.

AP

Only in America

The U.S. at a glance ...

AP (4)

Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska No flow: The Canadian company behind the A pipe too far Keystone XL pipeline ended plans for the embattled project last week, a win for President Biden and environmentalists. On his first day in office, Biden had rescinded Trump administration–era construction permits for the 1,179-mile proposal, which would have carried 800,000 barrels a day of petroleum from Canada to Nebraska.

Republicans said the pipeline would have created 10,000 jobs and lowered the price of gas. Construction stalled after a federal judge halted the project in 2018, saying the Trump administration had failed to perform sufficient environmental reviews.

Activists have turned their attention to the proposed Dakota Access pipeline and the Line 3 pipeline in Minnesota, where hundreds of protesters were arrested last week. “Terminate your fossil fuel projects now,” climate activist Kendall Mackey said, “or a relentless mass movement will stop them for you.”

Nashville Baptist vote: In a dramatic showdown, the Southern Baptist Convention elected a moderate pastor from Litton Alabama, Ed Litton, as its next president this week, narrowly thwarting an attempted takeover by the right wing of the country’s largest Protestant denomination. More than 15,000 attending delegates, or “messengers,” elected Litton by just 556 votes over Mike Stone, an ultra-conservative pastor from Georgia. “We are a family,” Litton said. “At times it seems we’re incredibly dysfunctional, but we love each other.” The convention was dominated by intense debates over racial reconciliation, “wokeness,” and sexual misconduct, with some delegates wearing stickers that read “Beat the Biden Baptists.” Rightwing delegates focused objections on critical race theory, an academic framework for understanding systemic racism.

Outgoing President J.D. Greear criticized “Pharisees” within the denomination obsessed with battling liberalism, asking, “What’s the more important part of our name: Southern or Baptist?”

Minneapolis Call for censure: House Republicans this week introduced a resolution to censure Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) for “defending terrorist organizations and inciting anti-Semitic attacks” after she appeared to liken U.S. and Israeli military activity to the actions of Hamas and the Taliban.

After Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that he opposed having the International Criminal Court investigate alleged U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan and Israeli offenses in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, Omar’s office posted a video of her exchange with Blinken and a tweet: “We must have the same level of accountability and justice for all victims of crimes against humanity. We have seen unthinkable atrocities committed by the U.S., Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban.” Pressed by Democrats including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to disavow her comment, Omar said she was not making a “moral comparison.”

Decatur, Ga. Mask shooting: A customer fatally shot a Big Bear Supermarket cashier this week after being asked to adjust his mask. Victor Lee Tucker Jr., 30, got into an argument with Laquitta Willis, 41, at around 1 p.m. Willis, “a very cautious person,” asked Tucker “to pull up his mask,” the store’s owner said. “He refused.” Police said Tucker left without making a purchase but returned immediately, walked toward Willis, pulled out a handgun, and shot her. Off-duty officer Danny Jordan, 54, was working security and intervened: Tucker shot Jordan in his bulletproof vest twice and grazed another cashier. Jordan fired back and hit Tucker, who was arrested while trying to crawl out the front door. The city’s mask ordinance, which requires masks in grocery stores, expires next week. There have been violent disputes over mask rules at stores nationwide as well as an increase in unruly airline passengers refusing to comply with Covid safety rules.

NEWS 7

Washington, D.C. SCOTUS politics: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) this week said his party would refuse to confirm a Supreme Court Breyer: Not leaving nominee from President Biden if Republicans regain control of the Senate, adding urgency to calls from some Democrats for the court’s oldest justice, liberal Stephen Breyer, to retire before next year’s midterm elections. McConnell—who blocked President Obama from filling Antonin Scalia’s seat after the conservative stalwart died nine months before the 2016 election—said “it’s highly unlikely” that Biden would get a pick if a vacancy opened in the 2024 election year, or perhaps even in 2023. Nominated by Bill Clinton in 1994, Breyer, 82, has rebuffed calls to retire; in a speech, Breyer cautioned judges against creating the appearance of loyalty “to the political party that helped to secure their appointment.” When Ruth Bader Ginsburg died last year at 87, having declined to retire under Obama, President Trump gave conservatives a 6-3 majority on the court.

Washington, D.C. Turning down Trump: Former President Trump’s staff pressured the Justice Department to pursue unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election for weeks before Trump left office, according to emails released by the House Oversight Committee this week.

The White House began pushing Jeffrey Rosen, the No. 2 at the DOJ, to chase baseless claims beginning at least 10 days before Rosen became acting attorney general: An hour before Trump announced William Barr’s resignation as AG, Trump sent Rosen an email via his assistant describing alleged tampering with Michigan voting machines—claims a federal judge had already thrown out. Later, Rosen received a series of requests for investigations from White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, including one that urged Rosen to probe whether Italians were using military satellites to tamper with U.S. voting machines.

Rosen refused the request and forwarded the message to his deputy, Richard Donoghue, who responded, “Pure insanity.”

Rosen: Stood firm THE WEEK June 25, 2021

8 NEWS

The world at a glance ...

London Freedom Day delayed: Prime Minister Boris Johnson disappointed millions of Britons this week with the news that England won’t lift its Covid restrictions for four more weeks because of the fast-spreading Delta variant from India. The country had been expecting An anti-lockdown protest to celebrate “Freedom Day” on June 21 with the full opening of pubs and theaters, but Johnson said it was wise to wait “just a little longer.” The U.K. is registering about 8,000 new infections daily—96 percent from the Delta strain—and caseloads are doubling every week in the worst-hit areas. Nearly half of all British adults are fully vaccinated, most with the twodose AstraZeneca shot. The Delta infections are mainly occurring in those who have received only one dose so far, as well as people under age 23 who aren’t yet eligible for shots.

Copenhagen, Denmark Should game have gone on? Danish soccer players say they were pressured into continuing a European Championship match this week after one of their teammates had a heart attack on the pitch. Christian Eriksen collapsed about halfway through the game Surrounding Eriksen against Finland; teammates surrounded the midfielder as a doctor resuscitated him with a defibrillator. The 29-year-old is now recovering in the hospital. After Eriksen was rushed off the field, Danish players said soccer officials made them decide whether or not to continue the game. “It wasn’t the time to take that decision,” said goalkeeper Kasper Schmeichel. Other players said they were too traumatized by fears that their friend had died to play their hardest; Denmark lost to Finland 1-0.

Budapest Anti-gay law: Thousands of Hungarians protested outside the parliament building this week after legislators passed a law that bans the discussion of homosexuality and gender change in schools, advertising, and public spaces. The broadcasting of LGBTQ content on TV will be restricted to between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. Nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban said the law, which will also create a public database of sex offenders, is aimed at protecting children from abuse. But LGBTQ activists said it’s an attempt to stigmatize the gay community and rile up Orban’s conservative Catholic base ahead of next year’s election. Political analysts said the new legislation will likely be struck down by European courts.

Lima Cash flight: Fearing that the apparent president-elect, Pedro Castillo, will impose Marxist policies, wealthy Peruvians have begun moving their cash overseas before he is sworn in. “All of my friends have taken their money abroad,” one attorney who serves on the boards of several large corporations told Reuters. Peruvian banks this week began importing piles of dollar bills to meet the demand of customers who wish to withdraw their savings in stable U.S. currency. Peru’s currency, the sol, has fallen 8 percent since Castillo, a leftist schoolteacher with no political experience, was the surprise winner of an April 11 first-round vote. His conservative rival, ex-lawmaker Keiko Fujimori, is contesting Castillo’s narrow win—50.14 percent to 49.86 percent—in Castillo the second-round vote.

THE WEEK June 25, 2021

Buenos Aires Offending the neighbors: Argentina’s president insulted much of Latin America last week while trying to curry favor with Spain.

During a televised appearance in Buenos Aires with visiting Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, Argentine President Alberto Sánchez and Fernández Fernández emphasized Argentina’s connection with Spain through immigration. “Mexicans emerged from indigenous people, Brazilians emerged from the jungle,” he said, “but we Argentines arrived on boats, on boats from Europe.”

Brazilians and Mexicans on social media called the comments racist and bemoaned how many Argentines consider themselves white and everyone else in the region brown or black. Fernández apologized and said he was quoting a Mexican poet; in fact, his comment was closer to a lyric from an Argentine rock song from the 1980s.

Reuters (2), AP, Reuters (2)

Managua, Nicaragua Arresting the opposition: Defying U.S. demands for the immediate release of four presidential candidates arrested in recent days, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega had five more opposition leaders detained this week. Among those arrested were Dora María Telléz—a former member of Ortega’s Sandinista National Liberation Front turned fierce critic—and former Gen. Hugo Torres, who fought alongside Ortega in the Nicaraguan Ortega revolution. All have been detained under a law passed last December that allows the government to declare any citizen a “traitor to the homeland.” Some family members said their relatives were beaten during the arrests and that they don’t know where their loved ones are being held. The authoritarian Ortega is sweeping the country of opposition ahead of the November elections, in which he is seeking a fourth successive term. The U.S. announced new sanctions on four Nicaraguan officials, including Ortega’s daughter.

The world at a glance ...

Getty (3), Reuters (2)

Gaza Attacks resume: Israeli warplanes bombed Hamas compounds in Gaza this week after incendiary balloons were launched from the Palestinian enclave—a major test for Israel’s new coalition government. This was the first eruption in violence since an 11-day conflict between Israel and Hamas ended last month. Militants released the balloons just hours after ultra-nationalist demonstrators waving Israeli flags marched through Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem. Some marchers shouted “Death to Arabs!” Arab and left-wing parties in the coalition had called for the cancellation of the annual march— which celebrates Israel’s capture of East Jerusalem in the 1967 war—and Hamas had warned it would retaliate. Right-wing parties argued the march should go ahead, saying that calling off the event would be Explosions in Gaza giving in to threats from terrorists.

Tigray, Ethiopia Mass rape and starvation: Soldiers from Eritrea are using rape and starvation to subdue the population in Ethiopia’s war-torn Tigray region, a top United Nations official said this week. Fighting broke out in the northern region last November, after Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed sent troops to crush what he believed was a budding rebellion by ethnic Tigrayans.

Neighboring Eritrea—which signed a peace deal with Abiy in 2018 that ended a decades-old frozen conflict—sent troops across the border to help Ethiopian government forces. “Eritrean soldiers are using starvation as a weapon of war,” said U.N. Emergency Relief Coordinator Mark Lowcock. “Rape is being used systematically to terrorize and brutalize women and girls. Aid workers have been killed, interrogated, beaten.” More than 350,000 people in Tigray are currently living in famine conditions.

Waiting for food aid

NEWS 9

Wuhan, China Lab leak denial: In a rare interview, the top scientist who led research into bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology has denied claims that Covid-19 originated at her lab. “I don’t know how the world has come to this,” Shi Zhengli told The New York Times this week, “constantly pouring filth on an Shi: No leak? innocent scientist.” International experts have struggled to gain access to Shi’s lab, and so while most virologists believe the coronavirus occurred in nature and jumped from an animal to humans, they have not been able to rule out the possibility that the virus leaked from the lab, perhaps after infecting a worker.

Shi told the Times she had not conducted so-called gain-of-function research—to make pathogens more powerful—and dismissed a U.S. intelligence report that three institute researchers fell ill with Covidlike symptoms before the first coronavirus infections were reported.

Baktawng, India Prolific father dies: An Indian man who touted himself as head of the world’s largest family—he had 39 wives and 94 children—died this week of complications from diabetes. Ziona Chana, 76, was the leader of a Christian sect, founded by his grandfather, that encourages polygamy. Neighbors said he liked to have seven or eight wives by his side at all times. “I have so many people to care for and look after,” he said in 2011, “and I consider myself a lucky man.” The clan lives in a four-story, 100room pink house, and curiosity about them has made their home village of Baktawng a tourist attraction. The Chana family isn’t the world’s largest, though: Canadian polygamist Winston Blackmore, who leads a splinter Mormon sect, is said to have 27 wives and 150 children living on a comChana and family pound in British Columbia.

Naypyidaw, Myanmar American freed: An American journalist who was allegedly tortured in a Myanmar prison has been released and deported to the U.S. after nearly three months in detention. Nathan Maung is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Kamayut Media news site, which reported on the mass protests that erupted after a February military coup toppled the elected government led by Aung San Suu Kyi. Maung was jailed on March 9 under a law criminalizing the dissemination of misinformation. Another American journalist, Danny Fenster, was detained in late May while trying to leave the country; his fate is unknown. The junta’s security forces have killed more than 860 civilians since the coup and arrested hundreds more, including Suu Kyi. She went on trial this week on charges of flouting coronavirus restrictions and inciting public disorder.

Gippsland, Australia Plague of spiders: The region of Gippsland in Australia’s Victoria state was blanketed by spiderwebs this week, a result of creepycrawlies fleeing heavy flooding that killed two people and left hundreds of homes without power. Sheet-web spiders normally live on the ground and escape wet conditions by ballooning out a single strand of silk and floating miles away to higher ground. But so many millions of them tried to float away at the same time that the threads joined together into a mass of gossamer teeming with tiny arachnids.

The event comes as Victoria and other Australian states have been battling a plague of mice, which have been breeding frenetically for months and are now eating their Covered by webs way through crops, homes, and cars.

THE WEEK June 25, 2021

10 NEWS

People

Porter’s hidden HIV diagnosis Billy Porter spent more than a decade struggling with a secret, said Lacey Rose in The Hollywood Reporter. In 2007, the Broadway actor and Emmy-winning star of TV’s Pose tested positive for HIV. “HIV-positive,” says Porter, 51, “where I come from, growing up in the Pentecostal church, is God’s punishment.” The Pittsburgh-born actor—who came out as gay at age 16—decided he would keep the diagnosis to himself, because his mother had already “been through so much persecution by her religious community because of my queerness. I didn’t want her to have to live through their ‘I told you so’s.’” His plan was to “let her die before I told her.” He figured that moment would arrive soon after he moved her into a nursing home, but five years later, he says, “She ain’t going anywhere.” So, earlier this year, Porter phoned her and revealed all. “You’ve been carrying this around for 14 years?” he says his mother told him. “Don’t ever do this again. I’m your mother. I love you no matter what.” Porter felt an immediate release. “It had felt like a hand was holding my heart clenched for years—for years—and it’s all gone.”

Littlefeather’s Oscar moment

Q President Biden and first lady Jill

Biden caused a small stir when he wore his trademark aviators while meeting Queen Elizabeth II for tea this week at Windsor Castle, the British monarch’s home outside London. The president, in the U.K. for a summit with world leaders, committed a minor etiquette breach by wearing his shades while greeting the queen, said Grant Harrold, a former butler to Prince Charles.

Harrold told Newsweek.com that it’s not proper to wear sunglasses while meeting the royals, “because eye contact is quite important with THE WEEK June 25, 2021

Navratilova’s tireless defiance Martina Navratilova has always blazed her own trail, said Matthew Futterman in The New York Times. Growing up in communist Czechoslovakia, the tennis legend hated being unable to speak her mind—or to tell anyone that she was a lesbian. And so, during the 1975 U.S. Open in New York, she defected to America. Outed as gay in 1981 by a sports journalist, she began appearing in public with girlfriends and living the life she’d always wanted. “I didn’t have to worry anymore,” says Navratilova, 64. “I didn’t have to censor myself.” Around the same time, she began cross-training: playing basketball, lifting weights, and sprinting daily at a track.

Her game became fiercer and she began racking up wins—she has 18 Grand Slam singles titles and 59 in all, the last won in 2006 at age 49. Her success on the court was matched by her growing assertiveness off it. Navratilova became an outspoken advocate of gay rights, but in recent years has received blowback from LGBTQ campaigners for arguing that trans athletes should undergo transition surgery before competing in women’s sports. She shrugs off the criticism. “I lived behind the Iron Curtain. You really think you are going to be able to tell me to keep my mouth shut?”

any introduction.” Biden also did not bow; when he first met Elizabeth as a young senator in 1982, Biden’s Irish-American mother told him, “Don’t bow down to her.” But after what he described as a warm chat with the queen, Biden said she “reminded me of my mother in terms of the look of her and the generosity.” Elizabeth, 95, has met a total of 13 U.S. presidents since sharing a limo ride with Harry Truman in 1951.

Q Fans of Billie Eilish are accusing the pop star of “queerbaiting” after she posted “i love girls” last week along with photos of herself dancing suggestively with other women at a slumber party. Eilish, 19, has never spoken publicly about her sexuality, but she’s reportedly dating actor Matthew Tyler Vorce, 29. LGBTQ fans were irked by photos of Eilish with Vorce, and said that Eilish

was using a music video of the slumber party to imply she’s open to same-sex relationships in order to enhance her popularity with gay fans. Seemingly in response to this controversy, Eilish posted, “I’m tired.”

Q Chris Harrison, host of ABC’s The Bachelor for nearly 20 years, announced last week that he’s leaving the popular dating series— months after he drew fire for defending a former white contestant accused of racism.

After photos surfaced of that contestant, Rachael Kirkconnell, attending a slave plantation–themed fraternity formal in 2018, Harrison, 49, argued that it was only “not a good look” by today’s standards. Harrison later said he “made a mistake” and was meeting with a “race educator and strategist.” He received an “eight-figure payoff” to leave The Bachelor, Deadline.com reports.

Shutterstock, Newscom, AP

Sacheen Littlefeather was the star of one of the most surprising moments in the history of the Oscars, said Steve Rose in The Guardian (U.K.). At the 1973 awards ceremony, Marlon Brando was announced as the winner of the Best Actor category for his performance in The Godfather. But rather than Brando, it was Littlefeather—then 26 and wearing a buckskin dress—who took to the stage. The Native American activist told the audience, and the 85 million people watching at home, that Brando was rejecting the award to protest “the treatment of American Indians by the film industry.” Her speech drew a mix of applause and boos; backstage, people made stereotypical war cries at her and mimed tomahawk chops. Littlefeather had ended up at the Oscars by happenstance.

After hearing Brando speak about Native American rights, she got his address from Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola, a neighbor in San Francisco. She sent Brando a letter and the two became friends—though never lovers as some have claimed. “He was my mother’s age, for God’s sake!” Brando wrote her an eightpage speech to read at the Oscars, but on the night of the event she was told she’d be limited to 60 seconds, forcing her to improvise.

“I didn’t raise my voice,” says Littlefeather, now 74 and battling terminal breast cancer. “But I prayed that my ancestors would help me. I went up there like a warrior woman. I spoke from the heart.”

Briefing

NEWS 11

The future of drone warfare Unmanned aerial weapons are reshaping the battlefield—and starting to think for themselves When were drones first deployed?

Karabakh, an ethnic Armenian enclave inside Azerbaijan.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been in use for decades. Radio-controlled How were drones used there?

B-24s were sent on bombing missions over At the start of the war, Azerbaijan Germany in World War II, and American sent slow-flying Soviet-era aircraft that forces used remote-controlled surveilhad been converted to drones to bait lance aircraft to snap photos during the Armenian air defense units—tempting Vietnam War. But the real breakthrough them to fire and expose their location, at in drone warfare came in 1995 with the which point they could be hit by TB2s development of the Gnat—later renamed or Israeli-made kamikaze drones. Having the Predator—an American UAV with achieved aerial dominance, Azerbaijani a 49-foot wingspan that could stay airdrones then devastated Armenian forces, borne over a target for up to 12 hours, destroying at least 106 Armenian tanks, transmitting a live-video feed to a pilot A Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 146 artillery pieces, and scores of other who could be stationed hundreds or even vehicles. After six weeks of fighting, the Armenians had no choice thousands of miles away. On Oct. 7, 2001, the first targeted strike but to sign a humiliating truce. Nagorno-Karabakh, said Malcolm by a remotely piloted aircraft took place in Afghanistan. A CIA Davis of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, was “a potential Predator blasted a Hellfire-missile at a compound housing Taliban leader Mullah Omar; it missed and destroyed a nearby vehicle, kill- game changer for land warfare.” ing several bodyguards. The U.S. drone program steadily expanded in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, and by 2014 the Air Force was How else are drones changing warfare?

Experts worry that the proliferation of UAVs could make bloody training more drone pilots than airplane pilots. Some 20 countries conflicts more common, because countries that are reluctant to start now have UAVs in their arsenals, up from eight in 2015. a war and risk their soldiers’ lives won’t hesitate to send in drones.

“For states that seek to break long-standing geopolitical deadlocks, What advantages do drones have over warplanes? the rise of relatively cheap, disposable, armed drones offers a temptUnlike fighter jets, which need to be refueled regularly and have ing opportunity,” says Jason Lyall, an expert in military technology crews that get tired, drones can loiter in the air for up to 24 hours at Dartmouth College. Others fear a rise in autonomous drones that while carrying out surveillance, probing air defenses, or waiting for don’t need a human controller. The United Nations recently reported a suitable target. While drones such as the Predator are armed with missiles, a new generation of low-cost “kamikaze” drones are flown that a 15-pound Turkish-built quadcopter independently targeted into their targets and then explode. Pentagon officials worry that the and launched a suicide attack on retreating rebel forces in Libya.

If anyone died in that March 2020 strike, said security consultant spread of these cheap and deadly-effective drones could help shift the global strategic balance away from the U.S. “Our adversaries are Zachary Kallenborn, it would be the “first known case of artificial intelligence–based autonomous weapons being used to kill.” already fielding technologies that will hold our legacy platforms at risk,” acting Air Force Secretary John Roth recently told Congress.

Getty

Where are these drones being made?

China is a top exporter. At least 10 countries—including Nigeria and the United Arab Emirates—have used Chinese-made UAVs to kill adversaries.

Turkey has also emerged as a drone powerhouse. Its utilitarian Bayraktar TB2, a 21-foot-long UAV armed with four laser-guided missiles, first grabbed international attention in Syria in February 2020. After 36 Turkish troops were killed in a Syrian government airstrike, Turkey used a fleet of radio-guided TB2s—which are quiet and hard to spot on radar—to destroy Russian-made air defenses and kill hundreds, possibly thousands, of Syrian troops. TB2s also proved crucial in the Libyan civil war last year, helping the central government repel an assault on the capital, Tripoli, by the Russianbacked forces of rebel leader Khalifa Haftar. But the biggest demonstration of how drones are changing the nature of warfare was the 2020 conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-

Are other nations making AI drones?

The U.S., China, Russia, and India are all experimenting with AI-driven drone swarms, in which dozens or hundreds of UAVs act in Defending against drones concert to overwhelm enemy forces.

The drone arms race has sparked an anti-drone Some human rights organizations arms race. In 2019, the U.S. Army began using and AI researchers are calling for a the Raytheon-developed Howler system, which ban on killer robots, saying that even can be attached to tanks and other vehicles and if this technology does not result scans for enemy UAVs with radar. If it detects in the nightmare scenario from the an incoming UAV, the Howler launches a 3-foot interceptor drone called the Coyote that detoTerminator movies—in which intelnates on impact, destroying itself and the threat. ligent bots turn on their human But using such a defense in a heavily populated inventors—drone proliferation is danarea carries a high risk of civilian casualties, and gerous. “Lethal autonomous weapons so researchers are examining less explosive cheap enough that every terrorist options. One interceptor drone created by the can afford them are not in America’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency national security interest,” says MIT (DARPA) blasts what appears to be silly string at physicist Max Tegmark. But the major the UAV, gumming up its rotors and causing it to countries developing intelligent drones fall from the sky. China, meanwhile, has develhave shown no interest in a ban oped a 20-barrel Gatling gun, which weapons that they believe their rivals would experts believe is intended to counter the threat not honor. “We’re moving toward a of drone swarms by throwing up a wall of bulsituation with cyber or autonomous lets. But anti-drone research is still in its infancy, weapons,” said German Foreign says Dartmouth’s Lyall. “The defense is playing Minister Heiko Maas, “where everycatch-up, while the offense marches downfield.” one can do as they please.”

THE WEEK June 25, 2021

Why Trump must be prosecuted The Boston Globe

Editorial

Why China will block Covid probe Holman Jenkins

The Wall Street Journal

Garland’s institutional cop-out Elie Mystal

TheNation.com

Viewpoint

Best columns: The U.S. Former presidents have not been charged with crimes for good reason— to avoid politicizing the justice system. But “the Justice Department must abandon two centuries of tradition by indicting and prosecuting Donald Trump for his conduct in office,” said The Boston Globe.

Trump committed a host of potential crimes as president, culminating in fomenting “a full-on, violent assault on American democracy.” To allow his “extreme abuses of power” to stand unpunished would invite future presidents to descend even further into lawless authoritarianism.

Special counsel Robert Mueller laid out a clear case for prosecuting Trump for at least 10 acts of obstruction of justice in trying to block the Russia investigation. After the 2020 election, Trump committed “clear election interference” by pressuring Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” 11,000 votes. Trump then publicly incited an insurrection, which led to a violent assault on the Capitol in which five people died and lawmakers fled for their lives. When Senate Republicans acquitted him in a second impeachment trial, several said the ex-president was guilty but should be judged by the criminal justice system. So be it. Trump crossed so many lines as president that if he is not prosecuted, then “there is no line” left.

China will never allow outside investigators to pinpoint the origins of Covid-19—even if it emerged in nature, said Holman Jenkins. To get beyond “circumstantial” evidence, investigators would need full access to scientists at its Wuhan virology lab and workers and customers of the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, including blood testing. China won’t permit that, but not necessarily because it’s covering up the worst-case scenario—a man-made virus that escaped from the lab. “The truth is, China’s government would be as likely to cover up a natural occurrence as it would a lab accident.” China had long been criticized for allowing “wet markets” like the one in Wuhan to continue; mixing exotic animals taken from the wild increases the chances of a mutated virus making a leap into humans. So Beijing is frantically denying even that possibility, claiming the virus was likely brought into Wuhan by foreign athletes during the October 2019 Military World Games. In coming months, China’s “estrangement from the world” will grow as it blocks any real investigation. Sadly, Western governments fearing an escalation of tensions will probably “move on quickly from the lab theory without resolving it.”

“Slandering alleged rape victims is not one of the official duties of the president of the United States,” said Elie Mystal. You’d think that was obvious, but not to Attorney General Merrick Garland. Last week, Garland announced that the Department of Justice had filed an appeal to let its lawyers continue to serve as Donald Trump’s defense counsel in the libel suit filed against the former president by writer E. Jean Carroll.

When Carroll publicly claimed in 2019 that Trump had raped her in a department-store dressing room in the 1990s, Trump called her a “liar,” a “slut,” and “ugly,” and said she was “not my type.” She sued for defamation, and William Barr’s Justice Department sprang to the then-president’s defense, saying Trump’s statements were part of his official duties as president and thus should be protected against lawsuits.

That argument has been rejected by a federal court, but Garland’s DOJ decided to take Barr’s position and seek to continue to defend Trump.

Why? Garland said last week he had a legal obligation to protect the presidency. Nonsense. Taxpayers have no obligation to protect any president from using “the loudest microphone in the land to shame and bully women who accuse him of sexual assault or misconduct.”

“The recent public furor over cancel culture has not been about whether or not we will cancel people or ideas, but about which people or ideas we will cancel.

All cultures involve the ‘cancellation’ of certain behaviors and viewpoints. Without these taboos, there can be no social regulation of behavior and mores and hence no real culture at all. In the modern West, for instance, we cancel people who insist on being naked in public spaces. We also cancel racists and men who beat their wives, and our culture is all the better for it. Cancellation is the price we pay for civilization.”

Cameron Hilditch in NationalReview.com THE WEEK June 25, 2021

It must be true...

I read it in the tabloids Q A California nun who took a vow of poverty pleaded guilty to embezzling $835,000 from a Catholic elementary school to fund gambling sprees in Nevada. Mary Margaret Kreuper, 79, who’s now retired, admitted that over a decade she used her position as principal to drain donations and tuition fees from a school in Torrance, to cover “large gambling expenses incurred at casinos.” Kreuper is “very remorseful,” and “sorry for any harm she has caused,” said her lawyers.

One parent who faced off against Kreuper in a Texas hold ’em tournament at a school fundraiser had noted that the nun was “one hell of a poker player.”

Q An English artist who wanted to call attention to the damage caused by electronic waste used e-castoffs to construct a giant Mount Rushmore–like sculpture portraying the heads of the G-7. Sculptor Joe Rush built his creation, dubbed Mount Recyclemore, near the Cornwall hotel where the world leaders stayed during the summit. “Hopefully, we’re going to prick their conscience,” he said. “The key message is, talk to each other and let’s sort this mess out.”

Q A New Jersey professor is making music with the billions of cicadas swarming the East Coast. David Rothenberg, a clarinet player and professor of music, has recruited a group of musicians to jam with swarming cicadas at a Princeton, N.J., nature preserve, using the insects’ noises as a guide for improvisation. “We’re combining human musical ideas with nature’s musical ideas,” Rothenberg said. Guitarist Tim Blunk said cicadas are “ideal” to play with. “ They’re never late, they stay for the whole gig, and you don’t have to pay them.”

Reuters

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14 NEWS UNITED KINGDOM

Why the Brits eat better than the French Jonathan Miller

The Spectator

FRANCE

Our fight in Africa is lost Editorial

Le Monde

Best columns: Europe Move over, France. Britain is now Europe’s foodie mecca, said Jonathan Miller. Sure, 50 years ago, the U.K. culinary scene was “comically terrible,” a depressing slog of greasy fish and chips, while “everything French was better”—the bread, the cheese, the wine, the bistros. Now the reverse is true. We British have “shamelessly appropriated all the chefs and cuisines of the old empire,” so our streets teem with curry joints and dim sum cafés. Every cuisine in the world is represented or sublimely reinvented, and not just in London, but in small towns throughout the U.K. Across the Channel, the French ignore the cooking of their former colonies. And

the traditional brasseries that tourists flock to are “mere theaters pretending to be restaurants.” The food isn’t cooked on site, but supplied by giant industrial kitchens owned by American corporations.

What the French actually eat is McDonald’s—the country’s biggest restaurant business—when they aren’t scarfing down terrible imitations of pizza or gristly kebabs. Even home cooking has died in the French kitchen, where the ritual of preparing dinner now consists of microwaving a boeuf bourguignon from the frozen-food giant Picard. Am I “Froggy bashing”? Yes. That’s because “the French should be ashamed of themselves.”

For eight years, our troops have been battling jihadists in the Sahel region of Africa with dispiriting results, said Le Monde. So it was no surprise that— after the second military coup in Mali in less than a year—President Emmanuel Macron announced last week that Operation Barkhane would be drastically scaled back, with at least half the 5,100 French troops in the Sahel to be withdrawn by 2023. The results of this operation “are not brilliant.” It’s true that the initial French intervention in 2013, at the request of Mali’s government, “stopped the advance of jihadist groups in its tracks and prevented the collapse of the Malian state”—for a while.

Since then, Islamist militias have spread through

the former French colonies of Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Chad, and Macron now calls the Sahel the “epicenter of international terrorism.” Over these years, jihadists have killed some 8,000 people, mostly civilians, and forced 2 million to flee their homes. Fifty French soldiers have been killed, and French citizens wonder why their sons and daughters should die in defense of a Malian army that keeps toppling its own government, even as Malians accuse Paris of colonialist designs. The pullout, therefore, is prudent. A small French force will continue to conduct counterterrorism strikes aimed at militant leaders. But the illusion that we can free the Sahel of jihadists has been forever lost.

Chancellor Angela Merkel summed up So, are we back to “sunshine, unity, and Europe’s position, stating, “China is a harmony”? asked Peter Rásonyi in the rival in some fields, a partner in others.”

Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Switzerland). Not quite. After enduring Donald Trump’s bulBiden is peddling typically American lying and isolationism, European leaders black-and-white thinking, said Lucie were certainly thrilled to welcome U.S. Robequain in Les Echos (France). He President Joe Biden at the annual summits wants us to believe that China, like for the Group of Seven, held in the U.K., Russia, is an “evil empire” against and NATO, held in Brussels. The polished which Western nations must “unite and personable Biden said all the right their political, economic, and why not, things, emphasizing America’s enduring one day, military forces.” But make support for democracy and, crucially, for no mistake: While Biden describes the NATO’s Article 5, which commits the alstruggle in terms of democracy vs. auliance’s members to come to one another’s French President Emmanuel Macron and Biden thoritarianism, he is really focused on defense. But the core issues that divided Eupreventing China from overtaking the U.S. as the world’s major rope and America over the past four years haven’t disappeared. economic power. The U.S. is “defending its economic interests, European Union nations “continue to hope in vain for the nothing else,” and Europe—which depends upon Russia for abolition of tariffs” that Trump imposed to protect U.S. indusenergy and China for trade—must do the same. Biden’s America try from foreign imports, and for America to agree to a global “speaks with two tongues” with regard to China, said Michael carbon-pricing plan to fight climate change. The biggest schism Sauga in Der Spiegel (Germany). While it condemns human of all is on China, where Biden has essentially adopted Trump’s rights abuses against Uighur Muslims and warns of Chinese get-tough policy, minus the off-putting rhetoric. expansionism, it also allows U.S. tech giants and banks to invest billions of dollars in China. Yet when the EU pursued a similar Tackling Beijing is an issue “obviously close to Biden’s heart,” investment deal last year, “there was great anger in Washington.” said Giovanni Maria Del Re in Avvenire (Italy). The president talked about it at both summits, and he lobbied hard to get language denouncing China as a strategic threat into a communiqué Biden was smooth, said Jorge Tamames in Público (Portugal).

Where Trump ticked off Europeans with “insults and obtuse tarissued at the end of the NATO meeting. After much wrangling, iffs,” Biden wooed them with flattering talk of shared values. Yet the alliance’s 30 members did agree, for the first time, to include America’s goal remains the same: “to retain the global primacy of multiple paragraphs discussing the challenges posed by China. the U.S. in a world that is no longer unipolar.” Europe is AmeriBut the Europeans insisted on adding language about their deca’s ally. But keeping America on top is simply not our priority. sire to “maintain a constructive dialogue with China.” German THE WEEK June 25, 2021

Reuters

How they see us: Failing to unite allies against China

Best columns: International

NEWS 15

Israel: Angry Netanyahu plots his comeback began an economic outreach, betting Israel’s longest-serving prime minister that many countries’ “interest in Israeli went out on a spiteful note, said Limor know-how and technology” would Livnat in Yedioth Ahronoth. After 12 trump their “ideological commitment years in office, Benjamin Netanyahu is to the Palestinian Arabs.” Now Israel livid that he has been unseated by a fraghas good relations with countries from ile coalition of parties from the left, right, Latin America to the Arab Gulf to and center that are united only in their India. But Netanyahu was so certain desire to end his tenure. And Netanyahu that his fortunes were Israel’s fortunes, made no attempt to hide his fury as the said Gidi Weitz in Haaretz, that he was new government was sworn in at the willing to tear down the justice system Knesset this week, after winning a confito cling to power. He was charged with dence vote by the narrowest of margins, corruption following the 2019 leak of 60 to 59. When new Prime Minister NafVowing to return to power within months damning tapes in which he offered a tali Bennett was speaking, Netanyahu almedia mogul regulatory help in exchange for favorable coverage. lowed lawmakers from his Likud party and their ultra-Orthodox Paranoid and punitive, Bibi used the weight of his office to harass allies to shout and heckle, forcing security to usher member after and possibly spy on the attorney general and chief prosecutor. member out of the chamber. Netanyahu’s own farewell speech Even Supreme Court justices “show signs that they fear being tarwas “a verbal assault.” He called Bennett’s government fraudugeted by Netanyahu’s aggressive machine.” lent, saying the right-wing voters who picked Bennett’s tiny party would never have done so had they known it would ally with Don’t count him out, said Israeli journalist Akiva Eldar in Alleftists and Arabs. In the most “outrageous” slander, Netanyahu Jazeera.com (Qatar). Netanyahu says he will return to power claimed that Iran was celebrating the new “weak and unstable within months, and he has “the backing of hot-headed legions government,” because it won’t be able to stop the Biden adminof supporters.” One way he could topple the government is istration from reviving the Iran nuclear deal. He was unbearably by working through the ultra-right lawmaker Itamar Ben-Gvir “smug” in his assertion that only he can protect Israel. “and his Arab-hating coterie.” Ben-Gvir is exploiting his parliaThat arrogance is earned, said Gary Willig in Arutz Sheva. Netan- mentary immunity to stage provocations at Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem. Netanyahu is betting that Palestinian militants will reyahu’s mastery of the security narrative dragged Israeli politics taliate with missiles, and Bennett’s government—which contains far to the right, perhaps permanently. And in foreign policy, Bibi was “the best prime minister Israel has ever had.” Before he took an Israeli-Arab party—will collapse rather than mount a military response. Netanyahu has “declared war on his successor,” and office, our international standing was defined by the Palestinian he will do anything to win this fight. issue and we were shunned by much of the world. Netanyahu

NORTH KOREA

Risking everything for K-pop Kim Dami

Arirang.co.kr (South Korea)

PERU

Don’t worry, this isn’t Venezuela Patricia del Río

AP

El Comercio

Bopping to the infectious melodies of K-Pop can now land you 15 years in a North Korean labor camp, said Kim Dami. If you share the songs or music videos with your friends, you could even be executed. These draconian new penalties were enacted last December and apply to any North Korean who is caught watching or listening to South Korean songs, videos, or movies. When people go through regime checkpoints—which are everywhere in the repressive country—security personnel scan their cellphones to ensure they have no banned content. But the law is not working. South Korean culture continues to “steal the hearts” of

young North Koreans, and they are willing to risk their freedom for it. “When there’s a crackdown, USB sticks are small so they’re easy to hide,” says defector Yoon Mi-so. “You could toss it in the stove or put it in your mouth.” In April, dictator Kim Jong Un ordered young people to “recognize the evil and bad results of the reactionary ideological culture, which is like a malignant cancer.” Anyone who possesses “anti-socialist” media, he said, must be denounced. Yet the “craving for foreign entertainment” is, if anything, growing stronger.

“When you want to do something and they tell you you can’t,” said Yoon, “you want to do it more.”

The Peruvian elite is hyperventilating because our new president is a Marxist schoolteacher, said Patricia del Río. Pedro Castillo, 51, eked out a win last week over right-wing ex-congresswoman Keiko Fujimori, thanks to overwhelming support from rural areas for his pledge to redistribute the nation’s mineral wealth. Fujimori and her backers shriek that Castillo will remake Peru into a socialist hellhole like Venezuela, where Presidents Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro destroyed the economy and crushed democratic opposition. But let’s “put panic aside.” Castillo has already backed away from early hints that he might nationalize the mining industry,

and now says he simply wants it to pay higher taxes. Any drastic changes to our economic system are “unfeasible without a majority in Congress,” which Castillo does not have. Nobody should believe that this political neophyte, “without a solid political platform to sustain him and without the support of the military or the economic powers, is going to be able to do whatever he wants.” Castillo will likely accomplish little besides boosting spending on social programs and education for the poor and the indigenous, who have long been ignored by Peruvian leaders. If he can manage that, he might just “transform us into a more just society.”

THE WEEK June 25, 2021

16 NEWS

Talking points

Noted

Democracy: Why it’s in peril

Q The worldwide Covid death toll for 2021 has already exceeded that of 2020, largely because of the pandemic’s spread and intensification in parts of Asia and Latin America.

So far this year, the virus has been responsible for nearly 1.9 million deaths.

legislation” that nullifies all Don’t let the veneer of “sleepy state voter ID laws, mannormalcy” fool you, said dates same-day registration Dahlia Lithwick in Slate.com. everywhere, and unconsti“This is a profoundly dangertutionally restricts political ous moment” for American spending and redistricting. democracy. One of our two It offers a “nonsolution to major political parties has a noncrisis”: Studies have become “radicalized,” passshown that voter ID laws do ing restrictive voting laws in not depress turnout. “But a dozen states so far based this is an emergency, norm on the Big Lie that the 2020 A protest against Texas’ voting bill breakers will tell you,” said election was marred with massive fraud. In Georgia and Texas, Republican David Harsanyi in the New York Post. That’s why legislatures have set up new processes for election they have to kill the filibuster and ram through results to be overturned. Rabid Trump supporters national election laws that favor Democrats. But have been intimidating state election officials with if the filibuster dies, what happens when Demodeath threats, and in Arizona, they’re conducting crats are again the minority party and the Repuba bogus “audit” that the ex-president believes will licans enact their own sweeping “reforms”? get him reinstated. Nearly 3 out of 4 Republicans Removing the need for any consensus building in a sharply divided country is a guarantee of even say that President Joe Biden was illegitimately elected. Meanwhile, elected Republicans are “gas- more partisan anger and social unrest. lighting” the country, refusing to participate in a If Democrats truly want to protect democracy, commission to investigate the violent attempt to said Mona Charen in TheBulwark.com, they overturn the election on Jan. 6, insisting it’s time should forget about the shoddily crafted and to move on. Wake up: Trump was not merely “an aberration.” Today and in coming years, this doomed For the People Act. Instead, they need to amend the little-noticed Electoral Count Act country is facing “a crisis.” of 1887, which authorizes state legislatures to appoint their choice of presidential electors in Spare us the hysterics, said Rich Lowry in the event of a “failed election.” That’s a ticking Politico.com. Progressives insist that democracy time bomb. “It’s not the vote casting, but the vote is dying to justify passing H.R. 1, or the “For counting that needs attention. Now.” the People Act.” The bill is “objectively terrible

The Wall Street Journal

Q Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and his wife went into hiding after receiving multiple death threats stemming from Raffensperger’s refusal to overturn the state’s election results. A family member’s home was broken into, and members of the militia group the Oath Keepers were found outside the Raffenspergers’ home the night they left.

Reuters

Inflation: Is Bidenomics to blame?

The New York Times

Q Only 1.3 percent of white Americans are experiencing poverty that goes back three or more generations, a new Brookings Institution study found. Among Black Americans, 21.3 percent are the third generation of their family to be poor.

Bloomberg.com THE WEEK June 25, 2021

Suddenly, soaring inflation has Wall Street and Washington worried, said Heather Long in WashingtonPost.com. Inflation, which has been running under 2 percent a year in the U.S. for years, jumped to 5 percent from May 2020 to May 2021, “triggering fears that the economy is overheating.” That spike has been fueled by an explosion of pent-up buying after a year of pandemic restrictions. In response to demand, supplychain problems, and labor shortages, the cost of many consumer items is rising steeply, including gas (up 56 percent), airfare (24 percent), jewelry (15 percent), and home appliances (30 percent).

Soaring used-car prices (30 percent) caused a third of the May inflation spike; over the past year, Americans bought up used cars to avoid public transportation. Investors, economists, and the White House think the “eye-popping price hikes” will settle down as the reviving economy and consumption return to normal and demand subsides.

“Let us pray” that optimism doesn’t prove to be disastrously naïve, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. Prices are bound to rise as the pandemic recedes, but “this is a price shock largely made by the government.” The Federal Reserve kept interest rates at zero to fuel economic growth,

while President Biden signed a $1.9 trillion stimulus bill in February despite the $4 trillion spent on relief the prior year. While pumping money into an already recovering economy, Congress kept funding generous unemployment benefits, contributing “to an enormous worker shortage” that forces companies to raise wages and offset those costs with higher prices. The Fed believes it can cool inflation by hiking interest rates if necessary, said Philip Klein in NationalReview.com. But “once inflation gets going, it will be hard to get under control.” Biden’s proposed $4 trillion in new spending would pour gasoline on a fire.

What really seems to infuriate Republicans, said Jonathan Chait in NYMag.com, is that employers are being forced to pay higher wages. Chipotle, for example, said it would raise salaries by 4 percent to $15 an hour so it could attract an additional 20,000 workers; Republicans immediately blamed Biden and the Democrats “for having engineered this catastrophe.” Much of our economy is based on low-wage workers doing really unpleasant jobs for “crummy” pay, said Ezra Klein in The New York Times. That raises the question, Which is more “intolerable”—“the poverty of others,” or paying a quarter more for a burrito?

AP (2)

Q Police retirements surged 45 percent between April 2020 and April 2021 compared with the previous year, according to a survey of 200 police departments. Resignations were up 18 percent.

“It is an extremely difficult time to be a police officer,” said Maria Haberfeld, who trains police officers at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

Talking points Vaccination: Employers’ fraught decision about even asking the quesAs companies move toward tion,” said Brian Kropp of the reopening workplaces, they’re consulting firm Gartner. That’s “stepping up the pressure on as it should be, said Aaron workers to get vaccinated,” Kheriaty and Gerard Bradley said Chip Cutter and Orla in The Wall Street Journal.

McCaffrey in The Wall Street The FDA has granted three Journal. Last week, Goldman vaccines emergency-use authoSachs ordered its U.S. workers rization, not full approval. to disclose their vaccination That’s why even U.S. soldiers status, and other companies Goldman Sachs: Status, please aren’t compelled to get a are also “taking a more assershot. Forcing workers or college students to do so tive and urgent tone.” The tech giant Salesforce violates “basic principles of medical ethics” and .com is inviting workers back to its offices—but tramples on “fundamental liberties.” only vaccinated ones. The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has ruled that Nonsense, said medical ethicists Ruth Faden and employers can require all on-site workers to be Nancy Kass in The Baltimore Sun. Personal liberty vaccinated, with some exceptions, and many hospitals and other health-care operations are already ends when people’s choices endanger others. Companies are obligated to provide a safe workplace, doing so. Houston Methodist suspended 178 and unvaccinated employees could subject their workers who refused to meet a vaccine mandate. vaccinated co-workers to “breakthrough” infecA group of them sued, likening the vaccination tions that can lead to death or hospitalization— requirement to Nazis’ medical experiments on especially with the spread of new variants. Conconcentration camp prisoners. But last week a servatives fighting such mandates have forgotten judge threw out the lawsuit, ruling that unvaccinated staff “are jeopardizing the health of doctors, their principles, said Quin Hillyer in Washington nurses, support staff, patients, and their families.” Examiner.com. Normally, they would support the right of a private business to set its own rules to “protect its workers and customers,” just as it can Still, few employers plan to require proof of vacban customers without shoes or shirts; if you don’t cination, said Martha White in NBCNews.com. like it, you are free to go elsewhere. Sadly, anti-vax Most “have little appetite for the potential legal hysteria has knocked conservatives off their “philand public relations headaches.” Employers are osophical and constitutional moorings.” “getting a lot of pushback from their employees

Alzheimer’s drug: An expensive experiment?

Getty

“Science took a back seat” last week when the Food and Drug Administration made one of its most contentious decisions in years, said Max Nisen in Bloomberg.com. The agency granted “accelerated approval” to Massachusetts-based Biogen’s Aduhelm, the first-ever Alzheimer’s drug purporting to slow cognitive decline for victims of a “devastating illness” affecting 6.2 million American seniors. “The FDA seems to have yielded to the pressure to give hope to patients,” green-lighting a drug that reduces the buildup of beta-amyloid plaques in the brain—despite no proof that these knots of protein actually cause Alzheimer’s symptoms. The drug failed to produce any improvement in one group of patients during clinical trials, and made slight improvement in another, while causing painful brain swelling in 35 percent of patients.

An 11-member FDA advisory panel vehemently opposed approving Aduhelm, said Michael Hiltzik in the Los Angeles Times, and three advisers resigned in protest after the FDA defied their recommendation. Aduhelm will cost $56,000 a year, but it’s no “breakthrough.”

“Tell that to patients and their caregivers,” said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. It’s true that “researchers haven’t figured out exactly what

causes Alzheimer’s,” but some scientists believe removing the “hallmark” buildup of amyloid plaque “could slow disease progression.” Aduhelm does just that. In one trial, patients receiving a high dose of Aduhelm showed 28 percent less memory decline than the placebo group did, “and benefits were greater for everyday tasks like making meals.” Aduhelm may be imperfect, but people with Alzheimer’s deserve any relief they can get.

They don’t deserve false hope, said Natalie Shure in NewRepublic.com. Despite weak results in trials and serious side effects, “it will still be immensely difficult for desperate patients, along with their families and physicians, not to roll the dice on Aduhelm.” Medicare will presumably cover Biogen’s “outlandish” price for the drug, but recipients will be on the hook for an $11,200 annual coinsurance payment—nearly $1,000 a month. Taxpayers will be on the hook, too, said Nicholas Bagley and Rachel Sachs in TheAtlantic .com. “If even one-third” of Alzheimer’s patients receive the new treatment, “health-care spending could swell by $112 billion annually”—more than Medicare’s entire Part D spending on prescription drugs last year. A drug that “may not work” could “break American health care.”

NEWS 17 Wit & Wisdom “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.”

Steve Jobs, quoted in CNN.com

“Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”

Ursula K. Le Guin, quoted in GoodReads.com

“There is no more volatile compound known to man than that of decorum and despair.”

Critic Anthony Lane, quoted in PasteMagazine.com

“Nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.”

James Baldwin, quoted in BrainPickings.org

“Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.”

Journalist and editor Hazel Rochman, quoted in Country Living

“There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.”

Philosopher Francis Bacon, quoted in the San Francisco Examiner

“You can lead a man to Congress, but you can’t make him think.”

Comedian Milton Berle, quoted in the Lock Haven, Pa., Express

Poll watch Q A survey of 16 countries has found that America’s image abroad has dramatically improved under President Biden, with a median of 62% who have a good opinion of the U.S. compared with 34% last year. 77% think that President Biden is wellqualified, compared with 16% who said that about Trump. 72% labeled Trump as dangerous, compared with 14% who think Biden is dangerous.

Pew Research THE WEEK June 25, 2021

18 NEWS

THE WEEK June 25, 2021

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20 NEWS

Technology

Antitrust: New bills would limit Big Tech’s power and “the repeal of a liability shield for Democrats in the House last week online companies.” One conservative launched their “biggest broadside advocacy group called the package yet” against Big Tech, said Dana of bills “Washington meddling at its Mattioli and Ryan Tracy in The Wall worst.” The tech industry itself has also Street Journal. A package of five quickly “come out swinging” against separate bills takes direct aim at “the the legislation, said Shirin Ghaffary and most richly valued” companies in Sara Morrison in Vox.com. Its lobbyAmerica, seeking to limit how tech An unprecedented concentration of corporate strength? ists argue that stricter regulation “could companies can use their overlapping jeopardize the economic strength of the American tech sector and lines of business to enhance their power. The most far-reaching, inadvertently help competitors in China, as well as limit the abilthe Ending Platform Monopolies Act, could force Amazon to ity of tech companies to offer free products to consumers.” “split its business into two separate websites”—one for its own products and one for other sellers—or even to “shut down the Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have raised “thorny speechsale of its own products.” It could make Google split up its related issues” about the tech giants, and “nothing in the bills” search engine and its YouTube video business. The package is would address them, said Jon Healey in the Los Angeles Times. very carefully tailored to strike at a small group of technology They provide no privacy protections, and do nothing “to stop companies; almost all of its provisions apply only to companies the spread of misinformation and hate speech.” Despite these with a market value of at least $600 billion, effectively exemptlapses, though, the House bills “tee up a debate worth having.” ing Walmart, which runs a marketplace similar to Amazon’s.

Most attention has been focused on the parts of the legislation While several House Republicans have signed on to the legislathat could break up Google and Amazon, but there are other tion, gaining “sufficient Republican support” to get it through parts that could be even more important. One bill would stop the Senate “will be an uphill battle.”

“Big Tech companies from buying up potential competitors,” preventing a repeat of Facebook’s purchases of Instagram and Though GOP representatives supported the House’s antitrust WhatsApp. But maybe the most critical is a bill that would reinvestigation last year, trying to turn the panel’s conclusions into quire giant tech companies to let users “transfer their data to law has “opened a rift among Republicans,” said Leah Nylen competing platforms,” letting loose the flood of innovation that in Politico.com. Many are reluctant to support legislation that the dominance of a few giant companies has held back. does not “include their concerns about anti-conservative bias”

Elon Musk’s Boring Company opened its first underground “Loop,” said Claire Reilly in CNET.com. The 1.7-mile conduit beneath downtown Las Vegas consists of three passenger stations “connected by stretches of 12-foot-wide tunnels, all lit with color-changing LED lights.” Inside, a fleet of 62 Teslas pick up and drop off passengers, “turning a 25-minute walk across a mammoth convention center into a two-minute ride.” It doesn’t exactly look like the “giddy vision of the future” Musk once promised, which involved “cars descending on elevator platforms” before “zooming along tracks inside a massive network of subterranean tunnels.” But the Boring Company “has plans to extend the Loop from downtown Las Vegas to the city’s stadium and airport,” where riders might eventually hail a driverless car via an app.

THE WEEK June 25, 2021

Bytes: What’s new in tech Tracing Bitcoin ransoms The FBI put a serious dent in Bitcoin’s reputation as a “hard-to-trace medium of exchange,” said David Uberti in The Wall Street Journal, and its techniques could thwart future ransomware cases. After Colonial Pipeline paid $4.4 million in the digital currency to hackers last month, the “hackers transferred the 75 Bitcoins to other digital addresses” called wallets. While the wallets require “private keys, or passwords, to access them,” the funds transferred into them actually get recorded on a public ledger known as a blockchain. The group behind the attack, DarkSide, later said its servers had been seized, and the FBI eventually cracked the private key for one wallet containing 63.7 Bitcoins. Investigators are eyeing another wallet with “crypto tied to ransom payments” that holds about 108 Bitcoins.

Extremists recruit via kids’ games Far-right extremists are grooming kids on the gaming platform Roblox, said Cecilia D’Anastasio in Wired. “It’s not all mermaids and pizzaiolos” on the $55 billion video-game behemoth that lets tens of millions of kids play in virtual worlds. In May, Roblox shut down two re-creations of the Christchurch mosque shooting. And a Nazi-themed role-playing

game “received more than 1 million visits between mid-2019 and June this year,” when Roblox finally removed it. A Roblox simulation of Rome after its collapse (in the game) in 2015 involved 20,000 players in a hierarchy under a fascist ruler, whose laws prohibited “race mixing, feminism, and gay people” and required “one player in the group, who is Jewish in real life, to wear ‘the Judea tunic or be arrested on sight.’”

A global race to subsidize chips More countries are lavishing subsidies on domestic tech industries, said Jeanne Whalen in The Washington Post. The Senate last week passed a rare bipartisan bill that would provide $52 billion for new semiconductor manufacturing and research. The measure was partly a response “to the enormous sums the Chinese government is investing” in its tech sector—including $200 billion through 2025 earmarked for semiconductor companies. With a single chip factory now costing $10 billion or more, the U.S. is far from alone in feeling a sense of urgency “to secure production” of critical electronic components. “European nations are aiming to use part of a 145 billion euro digital fund to double their share of worldwide chip manufacturing by 2030.”

Alamy, Getty

Innovation of the week

21 NEWS

Health & Science

An animal awakes after 24,000 years on ice

Carbon keeps building up in the atmosphere.

CO2 levels hit record high Coronavirus lockdowns led to a big drop in global greenhouse gas emissions—but they weren’t enough to stop atmospheric carbon dioxide levels reaching their highest point since records began 63 years ago. Atmospheric CO2 reached a monthly average in May of nearly 419 parts per million, according to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That’s up from 417 parts per million in May 2020; daily levels have twice exceeded 420 parts per million so far this year. Scientists weren’t surprised by the increasing CO2 concentration, reports The Washington Post. But many are troubled by the fact that the drop in emissions during the pandemic didn’t really slow the increase. “At certain points, more than half the world’s population was under lockdown, and emissions only fell 6 percent,” says Jason Bordoff, from Columbia University. “[That] should be a sobering reminder of how staggeringly hard it will be to get to net zero and how much more work we have to do.”

NASA heading to Venus After decades of focusing exploratory efforts on Mars, NASA is setting its sights on another world: Venus. The space agency is planning to launch two missions to Earth’s closest planetary neighbor between THE WEEK June 25, 2021

14 degrees Fahrenheit. Back in the lab, the rotifers soon awoke from their hibernation and were even capable of reproducing.

Radiocarbon dating confirmed their ancient age. “We revived animals that saw woolly mammoths,” says co-author Stas Malavin.

“Which is quite impressive.” This isn’t the first time ancient life has been revived from frozen stasis. Stems of 1,000-yearold Antarctic moss have been regrown, and 30,000-year-old nematodes—a kind of simple worm—have been awakened.

But the rotifers are perhaps the strangest creatures to be revived. Despite being limited to asexual reproduction—there are no males—rotifers have diversified over

2028 and 2030, reports TheAtlantic.com.

NASA says that while Venus is “hot, hellish, and unforgiving”—it has a surface temperature of 900 degrees—the planet is worth examining because it has “so many characteristics similar to ours.” The first mission, DAVINCI+, will analyze gases as it plunges through Venus’ ultradense atmosphere and will try to determine whether the planet ever had an ocean. The second mission, VERITAS, will orbit Venus, charting its topography with radar and mapping infrared emissions to examine rock types. “The combined results of these missions will tell us about the planet from the clouds in its sky through the volcanoes on its surface all the way down to its very core,” says NASA’s Tom Wagner. “It will be as if we rediscovered the planet.” Venus became a hot astronomical topic last year, when a team of scientists said they’d found signs that microbes might be living in the planet’s clouds. DAVINCI+ could potentially confirm whether or not that evidence actually exists.

A bdelloid rotifer: Deep-freeze survivor

several million years into more than 450 different species. And scientists still have no idea how they can survive on ice so long. “The outcome of this [study],” says Malavin, “is more questions than answers.”

Fresh fruit and diabetes Eating two portions of fresh fruit a day may lower your risk of developing type 2 diabetes by as much as one third, a new study suggests. Researchers in Australia analyzed the diets of 7,675 people over five years.

They found that those who ate at least two servings of fruit a day had higher levels of insulin sensitivity—meaning they could better control their blood sugar levels—than the people who had less than half a serving a day. When they looked at the prevalence of diabetes, they found that the people who ate at least two servings daily had a 36 percent lower chance of developing the disease.

Interestingly, the researchers found no association between fruit juice intake and reduced risk of type 2 diabetes. Lead author Nicola Bondonno tells the New York Post that fruits contain phytochemicals that may increase insulin sensitivity. She notes that they are also a good source of vitamins, minerals, and fiber, “which helps regulate the release of sugar into the blood and also helps people feel fuller longer.”

recited a 30-second script to the puppies in a baby-talk voice while Dogs don’t have to learn how to gazing down at the dogs. The pupinteract with humans, a new study pies responded in a similar way to has found—they’re born with those adult pooches: They looked at the skills. Researchers gave eighttalker’s face for about six seconds, week-old puppies that had spent slightly less time than their fully almost no time with humans grown peers. To see whether these several basic tasks to test traits were inherited, the researchtheir social cognition, reports ers looked at each dog’s family SmithsonianMag.com. For the tree—the puppies came from a first two tasks, a researcher service-dog charity that keeps pointed at one of two cups extensive pedigree records. containing a treat or a fake They found that more than Primed for people treat. The puppies headed to 40 percent of success achieved the correct cup two-thirds of the time— in the three tasks was due to genetics. much better than the 50 percent that Lead author Emily Bray, from the Univerwould be expected by chance alone, and sity of Arizona, says the findings suggest about the same success rate as adult “that dogs are biologically prepared for dogs. For the third task, a researcher communication with humans.”

Puppies born ready for us

Michael Plewka, Reuters, Newscom

A microscopic animal renowned for its resilience has been revived after spending 24,000 years frozen in Arctic permafrost, reports The New York Times. Bdelloid rotifers are complex multicellular invertebrates: Despite being only a few dozen microns wide, they have brains, guts, muscles, and reproductive systems. And they are extraordinarily tough, able to survive high levels of radiation, acidity, starvation, oxygen deprivation, and years of dehydration. Russian scientists found the rotifers in an ice sample they had drilled out of the Siberian permafrost; the wormlike creatures came from a depth of 11 feet, where the temperature stays about

ARTS Review of reviews: Books dential response. Pottinger, who appears frequently in the narrative, is not the most compelling of protagonists, said Carlos Lozada in The Washington Post. We see him indulging “in the classic laments of conflicted Trump officials—This time I’ll resign; no, maybe next time!’” It’s hard to credit him with selfless courage.

Book of the week The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid

by Lawrence Wright (Knopf, $28) “We aren’t the people we thought we were,” said Michael King in The Austin Chronicle. Lawrence Wright’s masterful new book about the first year or so of the Covid-19 pandemic shows readers as much, and what that tells us about our capacity to handle future crises is “not reassuring.”

Wright, a veteran New Yorker writer, is “an extraordinary reporter,” and “though little in the book will be surprising for anyone who has closely followed the news, having it all recounted in one place will make the book indispensable as a coronavirus compendium.” Wright details failures inside both China and the CDC before he takes President Trump fully to task. “But The Plague Year is by no means a polemic.” It doesn’t blame Trump for the lives needlessly lost; it blames the America that elected him.

“This is not a book of heroes,” said Andrew Anthony in TheGuardian.com. Wright

Novel of the week Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch

A Covid-19 memorial in Washington, D.C.

reminds us that China was slow to warn the world, that the compromised World Health Organization accepted China’s word that no contagious disease was spreading, and that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control muffed early testing. In the end, “very few government figures emerge with their reputations enhanced.”

But Wright proves fairly sympathetic to Deborah Birx, the former White House coronavirus response coordinator, and to Deputy National Security Adviser Matthew Pottinger. Both Trump administration officials argued for a more constructive presi-

Inside Money: Brown Brothers Harriman and the American Way of Power

by Zachary Karabell (Penguin, $30)

by Rivka Galchen (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27)

“Witch hunts have made a comeback in recent years,” said Sarah Hagi in The New York Times. At least the term has, which makes this a good moment for Rivka Galchen’s “very funny” novel about a 17th-century German woman accused of witchcraft at a time when execution was a common sentence. Katharina Kepler’s primary offense is her independence, and as the widowed mother of three shares her version of events while various townspeople make accusations against her, Galchen expertly weaves together their perspectives, “showing how easy it is for a mob mentality to take hold.” Alert readers will notice that one of Katharina’s adult children is the astronomer Johannes Kepler. But the focus stays on Katharina, who is “sharp and bright” on the page, said Carolyn Kellogg in the Los Angeles Times. Galchen, acclaimed for Atmospheric Disturbances, has written another smart novel that highlights the tension between science and superstition, “all while being funny and deceptively easy to read.”

THE WEEK June 25, 2021

The family that founded Brown Brothers Harriman produced wealth, not drama, said Roger Lowenstein in The New York Times. In Zachary Karabell’s history of the influential private investment bank, Alexander Brown and his 19thcentury progeny live in plain homes, manage risk carefully, and prioritize community.

Obviously, “this is not exactly miniseries material.” Yet Karabell ably dramatizes the firm’s key role in the nation’s growth, making it “quietly stirring” to read of Alexander arriving in Baltimore from Belfast in 1800 and evolving from linen merchant to financier. He and his sons astutely invested in the first passenger railroad and regrettably facilitated the growth in slave-picked cotton too. They became, along with others, the money that built America.

Wright is “at his commanding best when he places the pandemic in historical context,” said Hamilton Cain in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. His passages on the Black Plague and the 1918 Spanish flu are “narrative marvels,” and they also help us imagine how our own world could be lastingly altered by the current pandemic. For most of the U.S., the worst of the plague itself seems behind us, said Eric Allen Been in The Boston Globe. “But are we really in the clear, in a more existential, non–magical thinking sense?” Too many Americans still proudly resist being vaccinated. Too many institutions failed. Wright credits those who saved us from a worse fate, including first responders and Barney Graham, the architect of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, but he chooses not to end on a hopeful note. “How could you at this point?”

The firm’s partners were “neither saints of capitalism nor perfect managers,” said Robert Armstrong in the Financial Times.

The bank needed a Bank of England bailout to survive the panic of 1837, and its domination of the finances of Nicaragua before World War I offers “a remarkable case of economic imperialism.” But the true power elites don’t have to excel to hold power.

Consider Brown Brothers Harriman partner Prescott Bush, who did “approximately nothing” as a U.S. senator yet had a son and grandson who each became president.

Still, Karabell argues, the old ways were better in one sense: The financial system was more stable when investment banks followed the Brown Brothers model, investing only their partners’ money.

Brown Brothers Harriman took a different path through the 20th century than many rivals, said Peter Thal Larsen in Reuters .com. As it spins off its investment bank during the Depression and sends wise men to Washington, D.C., to guide the nation through World War II and into the quagmire of Vietnam, “Karabell tells the tale with vigor, bringing the leading characters to life.” Today, the firm is “Wall Street’s forgotten bank,” quietly toiling in a low-risk sector. If the old ways ever return, “Brown Brothers Harriman will be ready.”

AP

22

The Book List Best books…chosen by Alex Michaelides Alex Michaelides is the author of The Silent Patient, a psychological thriller that became a No. 1 best-seller. His second novel, The Maidens, also draws on Greek myth, as death stalks the female acolytes of a charismatic classics professor.

Mythos by Stephen Fry (2019). Growing up on the island of Cyprus, I was immersed in Greek mythology from a young age, and it has been a powerful source of inspiration for me. So I first must recommend Mythos. Not only does Stephen Fry record all the (often unwieldy) genealogies and stories, he retells the myths with such style and readability. Mythos is an epic achievement, both educational and hugely entertaining. I love this book.

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller (2012). I’m very excited by the increasing interest in retelling Greek mythology, in taking it apart and putting it back together to provide a modern perspective. Miller retells the story of the Trojan War from the point of view of Patroclus, reframing the story so it becomes about the relationship between Patroclus and Achilles, and the love they had for each other.

Circe by Madeline Miller (2018). Reclaiming Circe from Odysseus’ (and Homer’s) narrative, Miller recasts this supporting player, this “baddie,” as a troubled and fascinating heroine, at once ancient and modern. Miller’s Circe is an

exploration of what it means to be an independent woman in a man’s world.

The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker (2018).

Barker similarly plucked from The Iliad the relatively minor character of Briseis and elevated her from a pawn in the dispute between Achilles and Agamemnon into narrator of the novel.

A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes (2019).

I had the pleasure of witnessing this book being brought to life by an incredible cast of female actors in a series of monologues, a kind of Vagina Monologues for the ancient Greeks.

Haynes gives a voice—or rather, many voices— to the marginalized, forgotten, and silenced women of the Trojan War. Ariadne by Jennifer Saint (2021). This is a retelling of the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur from a female point of view—specifically Ariadne’s perspective, examining her love for Theseus. She was prepared to betray her family and her country for him, and Saint considers her huge sacrifices in the context of her upbringing and the world around her.

Wolf Marloh, Harvard

Also of interest...in empty hookups and true romance Nothing Personal

¡Hola Papi!

by Nancy Jo Sales (Hachette, $28)

by John Paul Brammer (Simon & Schuster, $26)

Nancy Jo Sales’ new book is “very very personal,” said Judith Newman in The New York Times. Seeking to demonstrate that dating apps prevent people from finding lasting love, the veteran author “joins the Hunter S. Thompson school of gonzo journalism,” combining in-depth reporting with tales of her own appenabled hookups. Fortunately, “she has a gift for sex scenes.” But she seems to yearn for a world that can’t exist. “I kept thinking: Pick a lane. Have sex with hookups, but accept that there’s risk.”

“When John Paul Brammer started his ‘Hola Papi’ advice column in 2017, it filled a void,” said Shanicka Anderson in AVClub.com. The young, queer, mixed-race MexicanAmerican journalist offered healing and humor to readers who found the column on the Grindr dating app, and he often answered questions by sharing personal anecdotes. His new memoir mimics that Q&A format, and it works.

The book’s bite-size essays are “just as poignant, hilarious, and addictively readable as his column.”

Barcelona Dreaming

Seven Days in June

by Rupert Thomson (Other Press, $16)

by Tia Williams (Grand Central, $27)

In Rupert Thomson’s Barcelona, “much hinges on the lingering implications of old emotions,” said Nicholas Wroe in TheGuardian.com.

The English novelist lived in the city in the mid-2000s, and his new book offers three engaging linked novellas in which the protagonists nurse wounds from past relationships or unrequited love. As we explore the city with them, “there is tenderness, and much sex,” but like Thomson’s Barcelona, his conception of love remains “defiant in its insistence on complexity.”

“The roller-coaster ride of seeing an old flame is a story many can relate to,” said Leora Arnowitz in USA Today. In a novel that the Los Angeles Times has called the summer’s best romance, two successful Black authors who spent an intense week together as teenagers rekindle the flame after a chance meetup 20 years later. Because Seven Days is “filled with important observations and tidbits about Black life,” it gives readers “something that goes a step beyond the basic rom-com.”

ARTS 23 Author of the week Annette Gordon-Reed When Annette Gordon-Reed first heard of non-Texans celebrating Juneteenth, she was simply annoyed, said H.W. Brands in The New York Times. Growing up in East Texas, the future Harvard historian had always gathered with family on June 19 for a picnic with plenty of red soda and firecrackers, and so marking the day in 1865 when enslaved Texans were freed felt like a Lone Star–only thing.

But Gordon-Reed, who won a 2009 Pulitzer for a work that illuminated Thomas Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings, has now written a slim book, On Juneteenth, that complicates the history of the day while explaining how deepening her perspective convinced her that it should be a national holiday. “This is a day to celebrate a human rights victory,” she says. “This is not just about Black Texans.

It was a major development in human progress—for the country, for the world.”

Gordon-Reed’s book asks readers to confront a hard truth about Juneteenth, said Angela Ards in Texas Monthly. The end of slavery in Texas was special in part because Texas had been founded to extend plantation slavery into what was then a Mexican province. A century later, in 1965, Gordon-Reed herself helped push Texas forward another step when she became the first Black student to enroll in a white grade school in the town of Conroe.

Mostly, she felt at ease despite her isolation, said Lisa Gray in the Houston Chronicle. “My teachers were wonderful,” Gordon-Reed says. “The kids, some were good and some were not.” Only a longer perspective allowed her to see that a deep racial division lingered. “It was,” she says, “sort of the background noise.”

THE WEEK June 25, 2021

Review of reviews: Stage & Music

A Thousand Ways: An Encounter ++++

seated across a table and separated by plexiglass as you talk. This time, a stack of notecards provides a set of prompts. My interlocutor and I laughed together, sang “Jingle Bells,” and finished each other’s sentences. I was sad when our time was up.

Scripted bonding at New York’s Public Theater

“Looking directly in a stranger’s eyes for an hour of one-on-one interaction may not be for everyone,” said Pam Kragen in The San Diego Union Tribune. But the experimental stage troupe 600 Highwaymen has devised a three-part project that is sparking joy across the country by engineering heart-toheart connections as we all fitfully emerge from the pandemic lockdown. Part 1 of A Thousand Ways connected each ticket buyer with another by phone and prompted rewarding conversations. Part 2, which is “just as cleverly written and designed,” pairs participants so that, at a theater in one of several cities, you and a stranger wind up

Film: The Sparks Brothers

++++ “To watch The Sparks Brothers is to listen to a superfan corner you at a party and Russell and Ron Sparks evangelize about a favorite band with all the verve of a street preacher,” said Clint Worthington in Consequence.net. Director Edgar Wright’s “giddy” new music documentary celebrates California-born Ron and Russell Mael, who as the band Sparks have been making cheeky yet influential art pop since 1967. Never heard of them?

Beck, Mike Myers, Weird Al Yankovic, Fred Armisen, and Flea are among the more celebrated artists who appear to extol Sparks for their pranksterism and musical innovation. The movie becomes “an exhaustive (at times too exhaustive) primer.” Still, “if you’ve only sort-of heard of Sparks, The Sparks Brothers is a great place to begin,” said Stephanie Zacharek in Time.com. “If you’re already a fan, you’ll go nuts for it. And if you’re like me, you’ll never lose track of Sparks again.”

(In theaters only) THE WEEK June 25, 2021

“Even if it scares you, go,” said Laura Collins-Hughes in The New York Times.

An Encounter is exhilarating, “a work of inquisitive humanity and profound gentleness, which over the course of an hour buffs away the armor that lets us proceed through our days brusque, numb, and antagonistic.”

The first scripted line was “Hello,” followed by “Hi.” All the questions we asked of each other could be answered only with “Yes” or “No.” But the process forced us to listen, to imagine our way into the other person’s experience and feelings. Then, as instructed, we left separately and didn’t talk again. Was this theater? “Not really, though the script has a beautifully solid structure and the ending is both startling and powerful.” The experience “left me in an altered state.” Out on the street, the many strangers around me suddenly seemed “so alive with possibility, complexity, depth.” ($10–$25, 600Highwaymen.org)

A Pulitzer for The Hot Wing King When a pandemic shuts down your play early, a Pulitzer Prize makes a nice consolation, said Ryan McPhee in Playbill .com. Katori Hall’s The Hot Wing King was just two weeks into its Hall run on an off-Broadway stage last March when the country shut down, but the comedy-drama set in a Memphis kitchen prevailed in the Pulitzer voting while competing against the first virtual productions considered for the award, including the finalist Circle Jerk. Hall is no stranger to prizes, said Julia Jacobs in The New York Times. She won a 2010 Olivier Award for The Mountaintop, and she is Tonynominated for her book for Tina: The Tina Turner Musical. Her acclaimed TV series, P-Valley, is now filming a second season. The Hot Wing King centers on a gay couple who are prepping for a hot wings competition while debating whether to take in a 16-year-old whose mother has just been killed in a police altercation. The Times’ Ben Brantley had called the play “likable but lumpy,” buoyed by “aura of good fellowship.”

Sleater-Kinney

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard

Path of Wellness

Butterfly 3000

++++

++++

Sleater-Kinney’s 10th album “flouts the accepted wisdom about what happens to bands when the most beloved lineup changes,” said Craig Jenkins in NYMag .com. Drummer Janet Weiss left the trio in 2019, citing creative differences with guitarists and songwriters Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein. But fans of Olympia, Wash.’s riot-grrrl icons shouldn’t bemoan that Tucker and Brownstein have recently experimented with brighter, breezier sounds. “Sleater-Kinney is whatever Sleater-Kinney says it is,” and this potent collection “offers undisputed proof this band can still hang.” Although “the dominant musical mode on Path is spiky post-punk,” said Katie Rife in AVClub.com, “the record also reintroduces the warm, organic hard-rock sound that dominated 2005’s The Woods.” The pair have shed the burden of trying to do what fans expect, though. “Instead, it seems they’re turning their gazes inward, to see how they can still surprise each other. Because, when you get down to it, it’s always been Corin, Carrie, and their guitars.”

“Butterfly 3000 is the work of a band with a million ideas and the skills to make them all work like a dream,” said Tim Sendra in AllMusic.com. The chameleonic Australian musicians who call themselves King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard “have made a career of doing the unexpected in glorious fashion,” and the psych-rockers’ 18th album in 11 years is, of all things, “a deep dive into synth-driven dream pop.” In a major left turn for a band that recorded a thrashmetal album just two years ago, this record is laid-back and sunny, its songs laced with drum and synth loops “as bubbly as soda pop and as light as helium-filled balloons.”

Vocalist Stu Mackenzie is known for writing out-there lyrics, said Brian Coney in Pitchfork.com. Here, he makes himself “oddly relatable” because even when he’s singing about floating through clouds of glue or the lens flares of the subconscious he appears to be mirroring the fragmentary nature of sleep. In its own strange way, Butterfly 3000 is this band’s “most concise and carefree” album yet.

Maria Baranova, Getty, Anna Webber

24 ARTS

Review of reviews: Home Media

ARTS 25

Kardashians Inc.: The end of a show and the end of an era “At this point, we can pretty much all agree that the Kardashians’ quest for fame has been successful,” said Kyndall Cunningham in TheDailyBeast.com. As the final episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians aired on E! last week, ending a 14-year, 20-season run for the hit reality show, the Jenner-Kardashian clan had become, to Variety, “arguably the most famous family in the world.”

Self-styled “momager” Kris Jenner and her daughters Kim, Kourtney, Khloé, Kendall, and Kylie aren’t about to disappear; they’ll launch a new show on Hulu late this year. Meanwhile, Kim has become a billionaire, the much younger Kylie is nearly there, and all their sisters long ago ceased being famous for desperately chasing fame, said Jordan Julian, also in TheDailyBeast.com. Like them or not, the Kardashians “deserve much of the credit for originating the brand of social media celebrity that dominates pop culture today.”

In 2007, when the show debuted, “there were few things more compelling to an audience than a nobody who was on their way to becoming somebody,” said Alyssa Bereznak in TheRinger.com. The entertain-

their notoriety, including in 2015 when Bruce, now Caitlyn, came out as a transgender woman.

Kris’ army: Five daughters, five brands

ment industry’s gatekeepers were losing power, and many of us found it amusing to root for a family at the edge of fame who were covetous of more. Kris’ first husband had been one of O.J. Simpson’s lawyers; her second was former Olympian Bruce Jenner. Oldest daughter Kim was widely known for a sex tape that had leaked months earlier. Five or six years later, the Kardashians had become the A-list celebrities they’d aspired to be, with Kim and her new husband, Kanye West, even gracing the cover of Vogue. The family was still terrible, “but they were our terrible family.” And for a while, their dramas matched

“At a certain point, the family became bigger than the show,” said Elizabeth Wagmeister in Variety. All along, the Kardashians were endorsing products, launching product lines, and feeding content to the gossip industry. They also cultivated followings on social media. While KUWTK’s U.S. cable audience peaked about a decade ago at 10.5 million, the stars’ Instagram followings soared past 100 million each, even 200 million. Kim and Kylie now demand roughly $1 million for a single post. “The world has changed,” Kris said recently, referring to the proliferation of social media apps that give celebrities instant access to their fans. “We can give them all of the information anyone would ever want to know in real time.” Once the Kardashians were dreamers; now they’re merely marketing experts, said Lovia Gyarkye in The Hollywood Reporter. By the final episodes of KUWTK, the ability of these women to generate capital had become “the entire point of not just the series, but the empire.”

Video games: A dazzling upgrade for a space cat and his sidekick

E! Entertainment, Insomniac Games

Ratchet: The cat with the silliest guns

“A modern masterpiece,” Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart feels like “the first great game of the new console generation,” said Gene Park in The Washington Post. For nearly 20 years, the Insomniac Games franchise built around a fuzzy alien cat and his robot sidekick has served up family-friendly capers full of silly characters, wacky weapons, and comic wisecracking. But everything about the “practically flawless” new Ratchet & Clank, a Sony PlayStation 5 exclusive, “elevates it above the series’ past high-water marks.”

Think animation that surpasses Pixar’s in its detail, “dazzling set-piece action,” and a timeless, all-ages story. Once again, you play as the title characters, who this time are on a dimension-hopping adventure seeking to stop the evil Dr. Nefarious,

said Andrew Webster in TheVerge.com.

But Rift Apart “pushes things quite a bit forward” by separating Ratchet and Clank and having each of them pair up with a new character. “A story with real heart” emerges as Rivet, a pessimistic female counterpart to Ratchet, learns to trust and work with others. You’ll feel as if you’re “inside a gorgeous animated film.” Apart from the interdimensional rifts that give the game its title, Rift Apart doesn’t innovate, said William Hughes in AVClub.com. The core appeal remains wreaking havoc with cartoonish guns that can, for example, shoot black holes or encase enemies in ice. In that sense, the game mostly offers a reunion with “the same old Ratchet & Clank.” But “there are worse things you could wish for” than reuniting with “one of gaming’s most energetically silly franchises.”

Other new games Subnautica: Below Zero “Unknown Worlds’ art direction continues to be astounding,” said Leana Hafer in IGN .com. The San Francisco studio behind Subnautica—“one of the best open-world survival games”—has filled the “exhilarating” sequel with even weirder and more wonderful alien biomes to explore. You play as a xenobiologist who searches for

her lost sister in a watery exoplanet’s polar ocean. “I was filled with wonder” as I swam through crystal caverns or alongside glowing whales in forests of giant lily pads. “It’s just a beautiful, beautiful game,” one whose sound design deepens your immersion. “The icy, oppressive, yet beckoning feeling of the arctic sea really comes alive when you hear the distant calls of massive oceanic life-forms through the shimmering gloom.”

Knockout City “The joy of Knockout City is quite simple: Pick up a ball and throw it at your opponents,” said Ari Notis in Kotaku.com. The popular multiplayer dodgeball game has quickly amassed more than 5 million players, and not just because it resembles colorful, cartoonish hits such as Fortnite. The “surprisingly fun” gameplay nails the frenetic energy of the classic schoolyard sport. “It’s as easy to learn as it is hard to master,” because timing is everything. Adding to the chaos (and the hilarity) are special dodgeballs that explode, reduce the force of gravity, or trap opponents in a metal cage. “Getting taken out is maddening. Could you have dodged a second earlier? Or maybe timed that catch a little bit better?”

THE WEEK June 25, 2021

Streaming tips The wonders of time travel...

Timewasters Time travel is typically the domain of white people, as one character in this British comedy series observes.

Here, four young Black musicians stumble upon a time machine that takes them back to 1920s London. Playing jazz is actually in; being Black, not so much. IMDb TV

12 Monkeys The series that rebooted Terry Gilliam’s 1995 mindbending sci-fi thriller shook off an uncertain 2015 start to put together four solid seasons. And think of the plot: In 2043, a nobody is recruited to return to our present to prevent the spread of a devastating pandemic. Hulu

Outlander For those who want romance in their time travels. In 1945, a combat nurse touches an ancient standing stone and is transported to 18thcentury Scotland, where she falls in love with a strapping Highland warrior. Outlander grows more outlandish as the seasons progress, but the scene-by-scene richness sucks you in. Netflix

Future Man In this series-length spoof of video games, Josh Hutcherson is perfect as an ambitionless janitor called upon to save the world by a duo from the future who value his uncommon gaming skills. Hulu

Doctor Who Any list of this kind would be incomplete without the Time Lord. Classic 1963–89 episodes of the British sci-fi series are hard to find, but the dozen post-2000 seasons are enough to make a Whovian out of any viewer. HBO Max

Television The Week’s guide to what’s worth watching Mysteries of Mental Illness The human brain, in all its complexity, struggles to fully understand mental illness. This fourhour series, airing across two consecutive nights, reminds viewers how common mental illness is as it profiles various individuals wrestling with disorders and traces the history of society’s response to abnormal patterns of thought and behavior. Among the series’ subjects: a female Olympic boxer, an aspiring astrophysicist, and a New York City pastor. Begins Tuesday, June 22, at 9 p.m., PBS; check local listings False Positive Pregnancy is hard enough even before the fear sets in that you might be carrying an evil spawn.

In a new horror movie that she produced and co-wrote, Broad City’s Ilana Glazer portrays a woman who comes to suspect the worst of the charismatic fertility doctor who helped her finally conceive. Pierce Brosnan plays the suspected evil mastermind. Justin Theroux and Sophia Bush also co-star. Available Friday, June 25, Hulu The Ice Road Too hot outside? Liam Neeson is ready to transport you to a Canadian winter and a mad dash in an 18-wheeler across a frozen lake. The bankable 69-year-old action star’s latest thriller casts him as a hard-nosed trucker who answers the call when 26 diamond miners are trapped north of Lake Winnipeg and the rescue requires a dangerous run by three 18-wheelers across the failing ice. With Amber Midthunder, Laurence Fishburne, and some shady bigwigs who don’t want the truckers to succeed. Available Friday, June 25, Netflix The Mysterious Benedict Society Four gifted orphans are recruited to undertake a dangerous mission in this wry adaptation of a beloved book series by Trenton Lee Stewart.

Tony Hale of Veep is often the adult in the room, setting the tone with a delightful dual performance as both Mr. Benedict, who recruits the children, and as Mr. Benedict’s evil twin, who aspires to mass mind control. Available Friday, June 25, Disney+

Bosch Harry Bosch isn’t done seeking justice yet. The seventh and final season of the acclaimed series built around the hard-boiled L.A. homicide detective throws him a fatal arson case that even the feds don’t want to see solved. Bosch won’t let up, though, even as the chase puts his life in danger and compels him to risk his career and reputation. Either way, this won’t be the end for Bosch.

Star Titus Welliver and co-stars Mimi Rogers and Madison Lintz have signed on for a spinoff series that will follow Bosch into a new career phase.

Available Friday, June 25, Amazon Prime Other highlights College Bowl NFL Hall of Famer Peyton Manning hosts a revival of a classic quiz show in which college teams compete for big-time scholarship prizes.

Tuesday, June 22, at 10 p.m., NBC Good on Paper In a rom-com she wrote herself, Iliza Shlesinger stars as a comedian who suspects the dorky guy she’s dating isn’t as rich or Yale-educated as he claims to be. Margaret Cho co-stars. Available Wednesday, June 23, Netflix The Choe Show Eccentric street artist David Choe hosts a one-of-akind interview show in which each soul-searching conversation ends with him painting a portrait of his guest. Friday, June 25, at 10 p.m., FX

Show of the week David Makes Man

Quantum Leap America’s answer to Doctor Who ran only from 1989 to ’93 but still offers much enjoyment. Scott Bakula plays a scientist who leaps into the bodies of historical figures.

NBC.com Patterson as David: He still means well.

THE WEEK June 25, 2021

The Benedict Society’s bad Tony and good Tony

David grew up fast. At the end of Season 1, the promising 14-year-old from the projects had just won admission to a Florida prep school. As Season 2 of this acclaimed series begins, he’s in his 30s. Kwame Patterson of The Wire, stepping into the role, delivers an inspired performance as a striver who is still carrying scars from his youth as he stumbles into a battle with the very community he had aspired to lift up. Writer Tarell Alvin McCraney, who won an Oscar for Moonlight and a Peabody Award for this series, continues to map Black manhood like no one else. Tuesday, June 22, at 9 p.m., OWN

• All listings are Eastern Time.

Disney+ (2), OWN

26 ARTS

LEISURE Food & Drink

27

Herb-stuffed chicken: Sumac, pistachio, and a handsome look “Recently I discovered a recipe for pistachioand-herb-stuffed chicken in a 13th-century Arabic cookbook,” said Reem Kassis in The Arabesque Table: Contemporary Recipes From the Arab World (Phaidon).

It felt familiar because I regularly prepared lamb with similar ingredients—“what Arab pantry doesn’t have pistachio, sumac, and fresh herbs?” But even though that dish was a favorite in our household, the anonymous author of the Kitab al-Wusla ila al-Habib may have had an even better idea. I tried a variation on the 13th-century recipe and discovered that the mild flavor of the chicken allowed the pistachio stuffing to truly shine, and “the contrast of bright green against white was stunning.”

Try experimenting with the greens you use; “each blend will yield a slightly different flavor profile, but all will be delicious.”

Mint and cilantro is a combination I return to again and again.

Recipe of the week Chicken breasts stuffed with pistachio, radish greens, and sumac For the chicken: 4 boneless, skinless chicken breasts 2 tbsp olive oil, plus more for frying 2 tbsp pomegranate molasses 2 tsp salt ½ tsp freshly ground black pepper

fatter side of each chicken breast to create a large pocket, but avoid cutting through; keep the breast intact. Place breasts in a bowl. Add olive oil, pomegranate molasses, salt, and pepper and rub chicken all over— inside and out—with the mixture. Cover and refrigerate for a couple of hours or up to overnight.

Make the pistachio stuffing: In a mini food processor, combine stuffing ingredients and process into a coarse paste.

Preheat oven to 350.

Colors as complementary as the flavors

For the pistachio stuffing: 1 cup shelled pistachios 1 cup packed mixed green leaves: any combination of radish tops, cilantro, mint, watercress, parsley 2 cloves garlic, peeled 1 tbsp olive oil 2 tsp fresh lime or lemon juice 1 tsp sumac 1 tsp grated Parmesan cheese Scant 1 tsp salt ¼ tsp freshly ground black pepper Prep the chicken: With the tip of a sharp knife, make a horizontal incision in the

Dan Perez, Media Bakery

Back to life: How to host a post-vax dinner party For many of us, it’s finally time to roll out the tablecloth, dust off the extra chairs, and break out the wine, said Adam Roberts in The Washington Post. Following a long winter of avoiding indoor gatherings, hosting a dinner party is no longer a foolish idea. It’s inspired—provided you recognize where your guests’ heads are likely to be at and take these steps to meet them where they are.

Trim your ambitions. Showstopping meals are nice, but “stress is contagious—no matter how delicious the food—and the last thing people want after being stressed out all year is to be Masks off, smiles on stressed out at dinner.” Plan a simple menu, with dishes from the appetizers to the dessert that require little time and no fussing.

Keep things light. “It may be tempting to serve something rib-sticking and hearty,” but most people have been pigging out at home for months. A lighter entrée, such as slow-roasted salmon, is the right move.

Consider individual portions. Your guests’ risk tolerances may vary. Because some may feel uncomfortable with shared food even in a fully vaccinated group, “family style is probably still a no-no.” Appetizer dips can be served in ramekins on individual plates arrayed with sliced fresh vegetables. Desserts can be baked separately, too.

Build in time. More than the food, “what everyone craves right now is the chance to savor one another’s company.” Make time for cocktails (including nonalcoholic options) to get the conversation flowing. After dinner at your table, try orchestrating a change of venue for dessert, such as a porch or patio. Or simply a return to the living room. “That works, too. As long as there’s a chance to linger.”

Spoon stuffing into the chicken breast pockets, using your hands or the back of a spoon to smooth it into an even layer. You can use toothpicks to hold the edges of the breasts together.

In a large cast-iron skillet or ovenproof frying pan, heat 2 tbsp olive oil over medium heat. When oil is hot but not smoking, add breasts in a single layer and cook for 3 to 4 minutes per side, flipping only once when chicken easily releases from pan.

Transfer pan to oven and bake until a meat thermometer inserted into thickest part of the breast registers 165, 10 to 15 minutes.

Remove chicken from oven and allow to rest for 5 minutes. Serves 4.

Wine: Summer’s go-to red “This summer, make it Chianti Classico,” said Eric Asimov in The New York Times.

Some meals simply demand red wine, and “sangiovese in its Chianti Classico form is a great match for steaks, burgers, sausages, and even grilled chicken. It has the depth to match their flavors, and acidity to refresh.” What’s more, “it takes nicely to a light chill.”

2018 Vigna Istine ($24). “Fresh and graceful, floral and elegant,” this Chianti is made from sangiovese grown in high-altitude vineyards where the soil is a mix of schist, sandstone, and limestone marl.

2018 Fèlsina Berardenga ($25).

“Bigger and rounder than the Istine,” this wine will grow even better with age. It has firm tannins and “earthy, stony flavors of ripe red fruits.”

2017 La Misse di Candialle ($24).

“This lovely wine has spicy, peppery flavors of red cherries and flowers, with firm tannins that will soften with a few years aging.”

THE WEEK June 25, 2021

28 LEISURE

Travel

This week’s dream: The great American boat trip A great American road trip sure sounds appealing—until you consider this summer’s crowded roads and packed campsites, said Stephanie Vermillion in National Geographic. “Luckily, there is another epic U.S. adventure that few know about.”

The Great Loop is a 6,000-mile nautical journey that circumnavigates the eastern third of the continental United States, taking boaters up the Atlantic seaboard, across the Great Lakes, down inland rivers to the Gulf of Mexico, and then around Florida.

Fewer than 200 “loopers” complete the journey annually, and most are retirees who April Smith aboard One Eye Dog, her catamaran travel in big motorboats. But some loopers journey by sailboat, and a growing number rivers. They overwinter in Florida, then of families are living the dream, too. sail up the East Coast in spring. When Ben and Laura Stein traveled the loop with Though the Loop can be completed in two their daughters, ages 9 and 12, the family’s months, it’s typically done in a year, said 57-foot yacht served as a mobile classroom, Beth DeCarbo in The Wall Street Journal. with New York’s Hudson River, for examYou can start anywhere, but it’s best to ple, prompting lessons on the American travel the northern portion during the sum- Revolution. Retirees Larry and April Smith mer. Come fall, loopers head south via the have completed the loop several times, and Illinois, Mississippi, Ohio, and Tennessee each trip yields new discoveries. “Never

Getting the flavor of...

Iceland’s erupting volcano

The lobby’s bar and lounge

Montage Healdsburg Healdsburg, Calif.

“Sonoma County’s most significant hotel opening in years” makes blending in the new extravagance, said John Wogan in Travel + Leisure. The 130 bungalowstyle rooms and suites at Montage Healdsburg “seem to disappear into the landscape,” and vineyards and oak groves blanket the resort’s 258 acres. Guests can hike miles of trails, join yoga classes in a garden framed by grapevines, or borrow e-bikes to visit roadside markets. At Hazel Hill, the resort’s restaurant, locally caught salmon and site-grown produce figured prominently in the best dishes I’ve eaten all year. montagehotels.com; doubles from $1,118 THE WEEK June 25, 2021

“The beauty of this route is that your unique experience is shaped by the choices you make along the way,” said Brian Lind in PassageMaker.com. Take your time to explore ports, towns, and historical sites as you travel. One backwater gem is Columbus, Miss.—“the perfect stop for pure Southern charm.” Another highlight: Tilghman Island, Md., “an ideal place to take in Chesapeake Bay.” If the Canadian border reopens in coming weeks, venture into Ontario’s Georgian Bay, because the Grotto at Bruce Peninsula National Park “makes a great day stop.” The Grotto is a pool of turquoise water framed by a limestone cave, and it’s “a perfect place to swim and explore.”

To learn more, visit GreatLoop.org or WaterwayGuide.com, a site that offers planning tools.

America’s newest national park

West Virginia is calling, said Christine Loomis Active volcanoes don’t get much more touristin USA Today. This summer, hikers, bikers, friendly than Fagradalsfjall, said Laura Dannen rafters, and rock climbers will flock to the New Redman in Afar. Located 20 minutes from River Gorge, “a pristine swath of nature” that Reykjavík’s international airport, the mountain that’s been oozing lava since March 19 continues recently became the 63rd U.S. national park.

Thick forests, whitewater rapids, and sandstone to lure curious Icelanders and vaccinated travelcliffs create a natural playground. Visitors can ers to the Geldingadalir valley. It’s an effusive also explore eerily abandoned coal mines and eruption—slow, steady, and likely to continue learn about how time transformed the once for years—which means you can approach the bleak landscape. One memorable attraction, the molten rock. “Words don’t do justice to the Bridge Walk, spans the gorge at 851 feet, offering sensory overload: Even from hundreds of feet “an exhilarating stroll with photo ops galore.” away, you can feel the heat. Up close, the air Rafting and kayaking, seems to shimmer. The though, are the park’s bigchange in pressure, the Cruises: What to know gest draws. “No matter disbelief that you’re that More than a year after all anchors which part of the river you close to lava—it’s almost dropped, cruises are slowly returning, said Andrea Sachs in The Washington choose, it will be the kind too much to process.

Post. This summer, vaccinated seafarers of day you remember.”

Listen closely: It sounds have a few dozen cruises to choose Expect crowds at the new like a fireplace crackfrom, most of which will depart from park, because “the secret ling, or glass breaking.”

Caribbean rather than U.S. ports. is fully out,” said Zach Naturally, the erup(Celebrity, for example, is sailing from Harold in TheGuardian tion site is constantly St. Maarten; Royal Caribbean will oper.com. Some locals worry changing, said Brittnee ate from Nassau.) Nearly all cruise lines there simply aren’t yet Kiner in The Reykjavík require passengers to be vaccinated. enough campsites, parkGrapevine. On June 7, Unlike the handful of trial cruises bearing unvaxxed volunteers, fully vacciing lots, or tourist highlava swallowed a trail nated ships are exempt from Covid testlights to support the flood that had led to a popular ing and mask requirements.

So far, the of visitors. Others are lookout hill. There are CDC has cleared two all-vax Celebrity hopeful, including local many vantage points, ships to depart from Florida ports, but rafting operator Dave though, “so don’t fret!” because Gov. Ron DeSantis passed a Arnold. “We’ve gone from Just make sure to check law banning vaccine passports, cruise the minor league to the local news before making lines may withdraw from the state. majors,” he says. the 4-mile round-trip trek.

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30

Best properties on the market

This week: Homes in New England 1 X New Canaan, Conn.

Historic Extown Farm includes a five-bedroom house, built in 1846, with handhewn beams, wide-board floors, plank doors, and antique mantels; a three-bay garage with gym and apartment; and an AIA award– winning farm cottage with two bedrooms, great room, and chef’s kitchen. The property, 17.5 acres of trees and fields protected by a conservation easement, also features a barn with silo; a hobby house; a smokehouse; and lawns, gardens, fruit trees, and raised vegetable beds. $3,495,000.

Laura Edmonds, Houlihan Lawrence, (203) 966-3507 2 W Nantucket, Mass. This three-

bedroom home sits on a half-acre lot abutting forested conservation land with walking trails and is less than 2 miles from the beach. Built in 2016, the cedar shake house has radiant floor heating, a large open kitchen with center island and dining area, a living room with floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace, and a main bedroom with a walk-in closet and spa bathroom with soaking tub. A wraparound porch looks out on landscaped gardens and lawns. $3,795,000. Gary Winn, Maury People Sotheby’s International Realty, (508) 330-3069 3 X Charlestown, R.I. Seawell cottage stands on a

0.59-acre lot with panoramic views of Block Island and Block Island Sound. The four-bedroom summer home, built in 1934, features polished wood floors, wainscoting, insulated-glass windows, a stone floor-to-ceiling fireplace, and a private upper deck looking out to the salt pond. The covered front porch is large enough for a dining table and is steps away from a boardwalk leading down to the waterfront. $2,750,000. Becki Donnell, BHHS New England Properties, (401) 932-0862

THE WEEK June 25, 2021

Best properties on the market

31

4 X North Hampton, N.H. This 1902 Georgian-style

four-bedroom near the Little River overlooks a working horse farm and is within a mile of beaches, wetlands, and a nature preserve. The home has detailed moldings, pocket doors, coffered ceilings, wainscoting, four fireplaces, a kitchen with breakfast nook, and a main suite with spa bathroom featuring a claw-foot tub. The 1.95-acre property includes a bluestone patio with fireplace, a barn with finished second story, and mature gardens. $2,795,000. Lauren Stone, Carey & Giampa Realtors, (603) 944-1368 6 5

1

4 2 3

5 W New Haven, Vt. Sir Wilfred Grenfell, a mission doctor, built a tavern

on this site in the 1930s as an outlet for native handicrafts. The tavern burned down, but a 19th-century meeting house survived and has been renovated as a four-bedroom home, centered on a great room with stone fireplace and floor-to-ceiling windows with New Haven River views.

Outside are a screened porch with hot tub, a deck with pizza oven, and 5.2 acres of grounds including a firepit, flower and vegetable gardens, a garage with guest quarters, and 884 feet of riverfront with swimming holes. $1,950,000. Story and Dia Jenks, LandVest, (802) 238-1332

Steal of the week

6 X Hope, Maine This two-bedroom home incorporates

a geodesic dome built in 1972 using 105 triangles and a glass wall looking out toward the hills. The dome has a living room, bath, kitchen, and sleeping loft with skylights. The wood-frame addition has a den, bedroom, and sunroom with interchangeable screens and windows.

The property, 37 acres of woods and meadows near Camden, features lawns, fruit trees, an organic garden, two streams, and a swimming pool. $447,000, Kenneth Twaddel, Camden Real Estate Co., (207) 542-7731 THE WEEK June 25, 2021

BUSINESS The news at a glance

32

The bottom line Q Meat supplier JBS paid

$11 million in Bitcoin to cybercriminals that held up processing plants in the U.S. for ransom earlier this month, more than twice what Colonial Pipeline paid to recover its systems from a ransomware attack in May. The Wall Street Journal Q An auction winner paid

more than $28 million for an 11-minute ride into space alongside Jeff Bezos.

Nearly 7,600 people from 159 countries registered to bid on the July 20 flight aboard the New Shepard—a rocket developed by Bezos’ company, Blue Origin.

Work: Americans quit jobs in record numbers “American workers have been U.S. workers are finding themlosing power since 1980,” said selves in high demand, said Jeffry Felix Salmon in Axios.com.

Bartash in MarketWatch.com.

But the tables are turning. A The Bureau of Labor Statistics booming stock market, stimulus said last week that a record checks, and expanded unem2.7 percent of all workers—a ployment benefits have made total of 4 million workers—quit workers feel “rich enough that their jobs in April. With millions they can afford to” flex their of positions still unfilled, workers muscles. Total job openings are who are switching jobs or lookat a record 9.3 million, growth ing for new ones can be “pickier Job offers abound. in the labor force has stalled about which jobs they accept.” since August, and jobs are just getting harder to A recent study by Bank of America found that fill. A New York Fed labor market survey found “job switchers earned an extra 13 percent in that “the lowest wage that workers without a wages from their new positions”—an appealing data point for those who “have re-evaluated their college degree would be willing to accept for a new job stands at an all-time high of $61,483, a careers, decided they didn’t like their old jobs, rise of $10,000 in just one year.” and want to try something different.”

The New York Times

futures fell 18 percent last week, the biggest decline for most-active futures in records going back to 1986.

The price of lumber has now dropped almost 40 percent from the record high reached on May 10, as sawmills have begun to catch up to demand.

Bloomberg.com Q The world’s top commod-

ity traders said this week they expect oil to return to $100 per barrel for the first time since 2014. Prices have reached their highest in two years, as Brent crude moved above $73 a barrel.

Fed: Central bank likely to raise rates in 2023 The Federal Reserve “signaled that the pace of the U.S. economic recovery from the pandemic” could make the central bank raise rates earlier than projected said Matthew Boesler and Craig Torres in Bloomberg.com. Meeting this week for the first time since a 5 percent inflation surge was reported in May, most officials on the Federal Open Market Committee saw the likelihood of two rate hikes in 2023.

While the outlook was more hawkish than many analysts anticipated, Chairman Jerome Powell cautioned that specific discussions of rate increases were still “highly premature.”

Aerospace: Truce in long Boeing-Airbus tariff war The U.S. and European Union agreed to end a 17-year dispute between Boeing and Airbus over aircraft subsidies, said Jim Brunsden in the Financial Times. The two sides reached “a five-year accord to suspend punitive tariffs linked to the original disagreement,” amid an escalating threat of competition from China. The battle, which began in 2004 over subsidies provided to Airbus, escalated under the Trump administration, which used the dispute as justification for “targeting European exports worth $7.5 billion with extra tariffs” in 2019.

Financial Times

Pharma: Novavax vaccine will add to world stockpile

Q The Girl Scouts have 15 mil-

A vaccine from the pharmaceutical maker Novavax was found to be 90 percent effective against illness from Covid-19 in a stage-3 trial, said Carolyn Johnson in The Washington Post. With the U.S. already seeing diminished vaccine demand, Novavax “will have its biggest initial impact globally,” and plans to “apply for regulatory clearance from a half-dozen countries” next month. The Maryland company had never “pushed a vaccine across the finish line” when it received $1.6 billion from Operation Warp Speed last year.

lion boxes of unsold cookies after Covid-19 nixed troops’ traditional cookie booths.

The Girl Scouts normally sell around 200 million boxes of cookies per year, or about $800 million worth.

Associated Press Q Total charitable donations

rose 5 percent to $471.4 billion in 2020, a record level, according to the annual Giving USA Foundation report.

Giving by companies fell 6.1 percent to $16.9 billion, which the report attributed to a decline in corporate profits and the economic slump.

The New York Times THE WEEK June 25, 2021

Amazon: A constant churn of hourly workers Amazon has burned through so many workers that executives fear they are running out of prospects, said Jodi Kantor in The New York Times. The e-commerce giant is “on pace to become the nation’s largest private employer within a year or two.” But the numbers mask that “many workers cycled out of Amazon within months or even days.” In 2019, Amazon hired more than 770,000 hourly workers but reported that it had only grown by 150,000, meaning “roughly 620,000 people left and were replaced.” The churn is partly by design: Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, never wanted “hourly workers to stick around for long, viewing a ‘large, disgruntled’ workforce as a threat.”

The oil company, my Instagram friend Oil companies are sneakily promoting their brands with Instagram influencers, said Molly Taft in Gizmodo.com.

“Cherrie Lynn Almonte is an influencer with 192,000 Instagram followers” whose posts typically “follow standard travel-influencer protocols.” Then there was one “interspersed with shots of her and her fellow road tripper filling up at a Shell gas station.” Former masters of “the art of quiet persuasion”—Exxon Mobil once “underwrote several seasons of PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre—fossil fuel giants are now hitting up social media. Phillips 66 recently launched a campaign called “Live to the Full” with parenting-focused Instagram influencers whose ads have featured “kids snacking on pastries” purchased at a gas station. Recently, Shell paid a photographer to tell his 74,000 Instagram followers about its efforts to “reduce our carbon footprint” over a reel “of kids playing in the snow.”

Getty, Reuters

Q Lumber

BLUE

Making money

BUSINESS 33

Millennials: The generation that can’t catch up buying a house, getting married, or inMillennials are starting to enter their vesting in a car” longer than previous 40s without much to show for it, said cohorts. The wealthiest Millennials, Olivia Rockeman and Catarina Saraiva though, “are doing better than people in Bloomberg.com. “In almost every at the same age decades ago.” Young way measurable,” those born between white families are roughly as wealthy 1981 and 1999 are doing “worse finanas young white families decades ago; cially than the generations that came young Black families are poorer. before them.” At 40, Millennials’ average net worth is $91,000, compared There is still reason for optimism, said with $113,000 (in today’s dollars) for Megan Leonhardt in CNBC.com. In Baby Boomers when they hit their 2016, an alarming report from the fifth decade. Only 61 percent of these St. Louis Fed found that Millennials older Millennials own a home, versus 68 percent for members of Gen X and Millennial burden: College debt and rising home prices were at risk of becoming a “lost generation,” with an average net worth 66 percent for Boomers at the same age.

34 percent lower than previous generations. But that wealth gap The drop-off is no surprise: To buy a home, Millennials need to spend 50 percent more, after inflation, than their peers did three managed to shrink to 11 percent by 2020. “The momentum may continue, thanks to higher education levels among this gendecades ago. Meanwhile, “more Millennials borrow to pay for eration and steadily rising homeownership rates.” In terms of college than previous generations, and the loans are bigger,” work, Millennials seem to be in good shape, said Alicia Munnell trailing these borrowers for longer. “If predictions of a long, in MarketWatch.com. The labor force participation rate among post-Covid economic boom are to be believed,” hope is not lost for a recovery before retirement. But there should be a new sense men has been steadily rising—to a point where it looks “very much like that of” earlier generations before the pandemic. of urgency.

“Unfortunately, the good news does not carry over to retirement preparedness.” The reason is student loans. “Of Millennial “In terms of income and, especially, wealth, Millennials as a households ages 28 to 38, 40 percent are burdened by student class have fallen behind,” said Annie Lowrey in The Atlantic, but the overall numbers mask “growing variation in the Millen- debt” that exceeds 40 percent of their income. Even as Millenninial experience.” The 2008 financial crisis hit just as Millennials als are starting to save more, that hard-to-pay education debt is were starting their careers, and many have “put off having kids, dragging them down.

What the experts say Looking beyond the college degree The labor shortage is prompting more hiring managers to drop college degree requirements for certain jobs, said Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez in Fortune.com. The jobs site Glassdoor “found that companies such as Google, EY, and Penguin Random House” are no longer requiring degrees for roles such as “network specialists, financial services managers, and software engineers.” Other companies, like IBM, Microsoft, and Apple “have focused on measuring skills through projects or tests.”

Policy experts say the tight labor market has forced companies to re-evaluate their hiring standards. “Degrees will continue to persist as a measure of skills and competency.” But especially in the tech fields, more applicants are coming through alternative routes, such as coding boot camps.

Getty

Rolling over your 401(k) There’s no simple way for former employees to move their retirement savings, said Alexis Leondis in Bloomberg.com. The process is still generally not electronic, and most workers simply “leave their 401(k) accounts where they are” when they switch employers. But no matter how organized you are, if you’ve had multiple jobs, it’s “usually prudent to roll

Charity of the week over money from an old 401(k) into a new retirement account.” Choose a direct rollover, “which means the funds will be headed straight for a new account.” If the funds are sent to you instead of directly to a new account, you have only 60 days to put them in your new 401(k). If you have company stock in your account, you may be responsible for calculating the cost basis. “Also, remember, that if you’ve taken a loan from your 401(k), it’s usually due when you leave your employer.”

Bigger discounts on wireless service Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile are dangling free iPhones for a long-term commitment, said Drew FitzGerald in The Wall Street Journal. “AT&T kicked off the trend in October by offering high-end smartphones such as the iPhone 12 free with an eligible trade-in device.” Its discount has since dropped to $700, which is still enough to cover “the entire price of an iPhone 12 Mini and most of a standard iPhone 12.” Verizon matched the $700 offer (or $800 for an Android model), while T-Mobile is going even further, offering $1,000. The companies are willing to foot the bill for those purchases “in exchange for reliable revenue.” The deals require that you keep the wireless services for at least two years.

The Appalachian Trail Conservancy (appalachiantrail.org) was founded in 1925 to protect the world’s longest hiking trail. Conceived 100 years ago, the 2,190-mile trail is marked by white blazes and stretches from Maine into northern Georgia. It depends on constant maintenance from 6,000 volunteers who keep the trails clear, relocate paths, and repair bridges and other structures. In addition to maintaining the footpath, ATC advocates for and protects the areas surrounding the trail, endangered species, fresh drinking water, and historically significant landscapes. The Conservancy also educates the next generation of nature enthusiasts with curricula for educators and courses that connect students to the history, heritage, and natural beauty of the Appalachian Trail.

Each charity we feature has earned a four-star overall rating from Charity Navigator, which rates not-for-profit organizations on the strength of their finances, their governance practices, and the transparency of their operations.

Four stars is the group’s highest rating.

THE WEEK June 25, 2021

Best columns: Business

34

The mega-rich: Should the U.S. start taxing wealth?

California’s economic miracle Matthew Winkler

Bloomberg.com

A Michigan implosion, born in D.C. Editorial

The Wall Street Journal

THE WEEK June 25, 2021

The doomsayers were wrong about the Golden State, said Matthew Winkler. Last year, headlines abounded “of people leaving the world’s fifth-biggest economy for lower-cost states because of high taxes and too much regulation stifling business.” But recent data suggest otherwise. Since last April, California has added 1.3 million jobs to non-farm payrolls, “equal to the entire workforce of Nevada.” If anything, Covid-19 accelerated California’s productivity; California’s public companies take in almost two-thirds more revenue per employee than they did a decade ago. “Pundits have long insisted California policies are bad for business.” But the state’s gross domestic

product has “increased 21 percent during the past five years.” That’s well ahead of Texas; if you look at just manufacturing jobs, it’s the same story. California’s smaller corporations are doing just fine, too.

“The 373 California-based companies in the Russell 2000 Index, which includes small-cap companies across the U.S., appreciated 39 percent the past two years and 85 percent since 2016,” beating both benchmarks. Thanks to the surging economy and capital gains taxes, California’s government expects to post a $75 billion operating surplus—which is funding the largest state tax rebate in American history.

Too bad for those who believed the pundits and left.

There’s plenty of blame to go around for the Lordstown Motors fiasco, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. The buzzy electric-truck startup’s chief executive, Steve Burns, and chief financial officer, Julio Rodriguez, resigned this week after the company’s board found they’d misrepresented Lordstown pre-orders—seemingly confirming a short sellers’ March prediction that all the optimism around Lordstown was based on a “mirage.” Lordstown wasn’t just any startup. Former Vice President Mike Pence hailed “a manufacturing comeback at the maiden plant in Lordstown, Ohio, which General Motors had discarded in a fire sale.” Then–President Donald

Trump went on to unveil a model of Lordstown’s truck at the White House. Democrats have also helped fuel an EV frenzy, with promises to “pour trillions of dollars into green energy.” All the “political cheerleading” has combined with a rage for SPACs— companies that raise cash to merge with a startup— to create an investment boom. Lordstown went public through a SPAC; so did Nikola, another electrictruck maker that has crashed since “questions soon arose over the viability of its technology.” Lordstown and Nikola are already taking a lot of investors along in their swift downfall. If more EV startups blow up, “taxpayers will eventually get smashed, too.”

Elizabeth Lippman/The New York Times/Redux

Yes, billionaires should follow the “Paying taxes is an expression of citisame rules as ordinary Americans— zenship,” said Maureen Dowd in The and ordinary Americans don’t pay New York Times. So what gives Jeff income taxes when the value of the Bezos and his billionaire brethren the home “jumps in a hot market,” said right to think they can keep “rolling Megan McArdle in The Washington around in gobs of dough and displays Post. Progressives say they’re all about of obscene consumption” without fairness. But a tax on unrealized gains paying their fair share? Last week, “wouldn’t feel very fair if it applied ProPublica “cracked open the vault on to you and me.” These numbers were America’s biggest tax grifters, revealing almost surely leaked by someone inhow the Midas men dip, dodge, and tending to “weaponize the IRS for poduck, paying pennies on the dollar, if litical purposes,” said Jonah Goldberg that, while we suckers have to pony in TheDispatch.com. They reveal no up.” Amazon founder Bezos, for inBezos: A winner in the U.S. tax code scandal. In America, “we do not tax stance, paid $0 in federal income taxes wealth.” The tax code was written that way to encourage longin 2007 and 2011. “Everyone was outraged” when former Presiterm investment, and to promote other policies that legislators dent Donald Trump “refused to show his tax returns,” while it turns out “real billionaires were skating.” What they did may not liked. Billionaires are using it just as it was intended. be against the law, but it isn’t right.

Actually, many legislators do not like the current approach, said Steve Wamhoff in Fortune.com. Last year, Sen. Ron Wyden (D.It’s why we need an aggressive tax overhaul, said Jennifer Rubin Ore.) proposed to “change the rules to include unrealized capital in The Washington Post. The progressive tax code is supposed gains as income for tax purposes each year.” By one analysis, to make the rich pay more. Instead, “we’ve created a paradise having to pay taxes every year would have cut Warren Buffett’s for billionaires without improving the lives of the rest of Ameriwealth by 85 percent. The tax code includes an “even more cans.” What’s especially “insidious is how much of the wealth problematic tax break”: These untaxed gains are exempted from has been founded on public services,” said Michael Hiltzik in the taxes “forever when individuals die” without selling their assets.

Los Angeles Times. Elon Musk, for instance, became the world’s The Biden administration has already proposed fixing this, and second-richest man thanks to Tesla, which has “been assisted by taxpayer-funded incentives” for customers and $2.5 billion in tax that’s the least that should be done. We can go a lot further in credits. It’s time to take seriously Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s proposal limiting the upper extremes of riches, said Christine Emba in The Washington Post. Maybe a better approach to wealth would be of “a 2 percent tax on the net value of stocks, bonds, and any“focused less on what is allowed and more on what is enough.” thing else of value exceeding a total of $50 million.”

Obituaries The actor whose calling card was versatility Ned Beatty’s remarkably prolific career spanned hundreds of film and 1937–2021 TV roles, but his first big-screen appearance was for many viewers his most memorable. Playing a genial businessman on a canoeing trip in rural Georgia, Beatty gave the 1972 movie Deliverance its harrowing standout scene, in which guntoting hillbillies force him to strip and “squeal like a pig” before one of them rapes him. Such chilling fare wasn’t typical—but for Beatty there was no typical. The character actor could be menacing, buffoonish, tough, funny, or sentimental. He was a racist sheriff in White Lightning (1973), an unscrupulous promoter in Nashville (1975), Lex Luthor’s bumbling henchman Otis in Superman (1978), and TV executive Arthur Jensen in Network (1976), who delivers a raging three-minute monologue about global capitalism that earned Beatty an Oscar nomination. That he didn’t become a major star suited Beatty just fine. “Stars never want to throw the audience a curveball,” he said, “but my great joy is throwing curveballs.”

Ned Beatty

Beatty was born in Louisville, “the son of a traveling salesman,” said The Hollywood Reporter. His mother worked in a high school cafeteria. The young Beatty sang “in barbershop

quartets and at Baptist revivals,” and earned a music scholarship to Transylvania University in Lexington, Ky., where he considered becoming a minister before turning to theater. “Most preachers are frustrated actors,” he said, “and most actors are frustrated preachers.” For 13 years he worked steadily at regional theaters, including Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., where he appeared in a production of The Great White Hope that moved to Broadway. “His life changed forever” after Deliverance, said the Associated Press. The film launched his career “as an actor whose name moviegoers may not have known but whose face they always recognized.”

Beatty was “a familiar face on television as well,” said The New York Times. He played Detective Stanley Bolander in the gritty police drama Homicide: Life on the Street (1993–95) and made repeat appearances on Roseanne as the jovial father of John Goodman’s character, Dan. “One reason I work so much is that I do a lot of what I call mortar acting,” he said, filling in “the cracks of the movie.” But at another point Beatty—who married four times—offered a different reason for his prodigious output. “I have eight kids!” he said. “That’s my excuse for everything.”

The publisher who created a kids’ book giant It’s hard to overstate the influence of Richard Robinson on the 1937–2021 nation’s youngest readers. During his 46 years as the CEO of Scholastic, he turned what had started out as a publisher of classroom magazines and organizer of book fairs into a $1.4 billion titan of children’s literature. Under Robinson, Scholastic published such blockbuster series as Harry Potter, Goosebumps, Clifford the Big Red Dog, and The Hunger Games, and the company now estimates that it distributes 1 in every 3 American children’s books. But Robinson cared about much more than market share. He called reading “a civil right” and joyfully battled censors who argued that Potter, Captain Underpants, and other Scholastic books were inappropriate for youngsters. Robinson noted last year that eight of the 10 titles on the American Library Association’s Most Challenged Books List of 2020 were there because of LGBTQ content. “And we are proud that two of them were published by Scholastic.”

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times/Redux, Scholastic

Richard Robinson

He was born in Pittsburgh to a homemaker mother and a father who founded Scholastic in 1920 as “a magazine covering high school sports and other activities in Western Pennsylvania,” said

The Wall Street Journal. At the start of his career, Robinson made clear he would not join the family business.

But after graduating with a degree in government from Harvard and a few years spent teaching English and trying to write a novel, he “decided to give the family firm a try.” He joined Scholastic as an associate magazine editor in 1962 and was named CEO in 1975. Robinson “vastly transformed the company,” said the Associated Press, expanding into educational computing and TV with PBS adaptations of Clifford and The Magic School Bus. But books were the company’s primary focus, said The New York Times, and “Scholastic shattered sales records by venturing into uncharted territory.” The publisher snapped up the U.S. rights to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by a then unknown J.K. Rowling in 1997; Scholastic has since sold more than 180 million copies in the Potter series. Those magical tales, he said, “brought kids to the reading process who had never been readers.” That, he argued, was ultimately a civic good. Getting children to read more and expand their worldview, he said in 2019, aids “the larger goal of helping kids know how to build and maintain a fragile democracy.”

35 The house cleaner who sparked a civil rights protest Martha White had just finished another exhausting day working as a house cleaner in Baton Rouge when she stepped aboard a packed city bus on June 15, 1953.

Martha There was White one seat left, 1922–2021 in the “whites only” section at the front of the bus. “I was tired,” recalled White, an African-American.

“I looked at the seat, and I sat down.” The white driver ordered her to get up; the then–31-year-old refused and was thrown off the vehicle, prompting Black residents of Louisiana’s capital to stage a bus boycott. That protest provided the framework for a more famous bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala., two years later—one triggered

by Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her seat to a white man, and which ended with a landmark Supreme Court ruling outlawing segregation on Alabama’s intrastate buses. “We can make the argument that none of the rest of that history happens without Martha White,” said Eugene Collins, president of the Baton Rouge NAACP. Born to sharecropper parents in Woodville, Miss., White moved to Baton Rouge in her early teens after the death of her mother, said The New York Times. The boycott she inspired hit the city bus company’s finances hard, because 80 percent of its riders were Black. “To stem the red ink,” the city struck an agreement with protest leaders to partially desegregate the buses, reducing the number of “whites only” seats. Some activists called the deal “a sellout” and said White’s case “should have been allowed to proceed through the courts.”

White “never stopped speaking out for social justice,” said the Baton Rouge Advocate. Today, several of her relatives work for the city’s public transit system.

“Her bloodline,” said one of her nephews, John Denman, “is deep into that bus line.”

THE WEEK June 25, 2021

The last word

36

The lives a shot could have saved Though Covid-19 vaccines are now widely available, vaccine skeptics are refusing them, said Julia Reinstein in BuzzFeedNews.com. Inevitably, some of them have died, leaving survivors with complicated grief.

T

HEY WEREN’T PEOPLE

you’d typically pin as antivaxxers. He was a retired engineer, and she had worked as a nurse. But the Florida couple, both in their 80s, refused to get inoculated against the coronavirus, and now he’s dead.

Just over a month since her father-in-law died, Marie is still grappling with the painful fact that he and his wife ignored the science to devastating results.

“It’s been worse for [my husband] because it’s his father,” says Marie. “But I’m mostly just angry at them, because this didn’t have to happen.” (Marie asked, for privacy reasons like others in this story, that her last name and identifying details about her family not be used.)

It didn’t have to happen, but it is happening, and will likely keep happening, to some of the roughly 1 in 5 Americans who’ve said they will not get a Covid-19 vaccine. With every Anti-vaxxers have taken protests directly to vaccine sites (above); some centers are nearly empty (bottom right). adult in the U.S. eligible for shots since April 19, and for older Americans which research suggests may lead to heart trust in modern medicine and slipped into months before that, there are now people issues, or the medication he took, which dying of the deadly virus who were already vaccine skepticism over the past decade, the FDA has said can cause death. influenced by the right-wing media they eligible for vaccination before they became avidly consumed. infected. As officials continue to work to “I’m angry that they didn’t listen to science. overcome issues of accessibility and more Knowing their views, it came as no surprise I’m angry they let the conservative view of and more Americans achieve immunity, their state government and of the conservato Marie or her husband that his parents a sense of optimism and semi-normalcy tive media convince them that Covid is not did not opt for the vaccine when they is returning to the U.S., and the once that much of a threat,” Marie said. became eligible months ago. “There really merciless death toll will continue shrinkwasn’t anything we could say to sway “I feel guilty that I’m not more sad, [but] ing to new, welcome lows. But as long as them,” she said. “Maybe if we lived near I know that anger is part of grief, and I Covid-19 exists and people keep making them we could’ve been enough of a presexpect that the real grief will come.” the choice to remain unvaccinated, some ence to counter some of that, but they were will, inevitably, die, leaving their loved RIEF LIKE MARIE’S can be a unique adults and they made up their own minds.” ones grieving a death that could have been experience—the grief of losing a After her father-in-law came down with avoided. loved one because of a choice they Covid-19 in April, Marie said, he did not made.

Smith, the therapist and author, said “I think the preventable death aspect that seek professional medical care. Instead, he anger is a normal and expected reaction to we’re now headed into is going to be really self-treated with ivermectin, a drug used such a death. “Anger is a powerful emohard for people who lose people to it,” said to treat parasitic worms that has joined tion, so it’s an easy one to take on when grief therapist and author Claire Bidwell hydroxychloroquine as yet another false you’re grieving—it’s much more powerful Smith. “It’s not that we could ever get Covid “miracle drug.” At best, officials than sadness,” Smith said. “And there are closure or feel resolved about a death, but warn, it has inconclusive results; at worst, some justifiably angering cases here, where I think when it was so apparently preventit can be dangerous. Just days after getpeople didn’t take precautions, didn’t able, it’s something people end up really ting sick, Marie said, he died suddenly and believe in things.” struggling with.” unexpectedly at home of what is thought Despite their scientific backgrounds, Marie said, her father- and mother-in-law had lost

THE WEEK June 25, 2021

to have been a heart attack. Marie does not know whether it was caused by Covid-19,

According to Smith, many people who were close to someone who died in this

Reuters

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The last word grieving,” Wortman said. “These people who experienced the loss of a loved one who didn’t have to die, that was preventable, are going to have a really difficult time getting support and love from their own family, friends, and neighbors.”

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SABELLA, A 21-

year-old who lives in Michigan, lost her great-aunt and great-uncle, both of whom were in their late 70s, in just a three-day span late last month.

In France, Fabienne Garbo (top) rejected a shot for her 86-year-old father.

way may experience “complicated grief,” a condition in which a person experiences an intense, long-lasting, and disruptive period of mourning.

“Say you had a very stubborn uncle who didn’t want to get the vaccine and then died of Covid—his loved ones will still somehow assume responsibility,” Smith said. “They may struggle for months, maybe years, with the idea that maybe they could’ve changed his mind and done something to prevent his death.”

Reuters, AP

To make matters worse, the upcoming few months may be a particularly difficult time to be mourning, according to Camille Wortman, a psychology professor at New York’s Stony Brook University who specializes in traumatic loss and bereavement.

Americans are largely entering a joyful period as the pandemic ebbs toward a muchhoped-for end, which could feel surreal and isolating for people going through grief.

“Everybody wants to put the pandemic behind them...they don’t want to think about grief, they don’t want to talk about it, they don’t want to see anyone’s

Throughout the pandemic, Isabella had felt like a bit of a black sheep in her conservative, Covidflippant family. Even so, she was shocked when she found out that her great-aunt and great-uncle had died after not getting vaccinated. Both had been eligible for a dose since the beginning of January.

“I wanted to go back in time and tell them, ‘You should get the vaccine—it’ll help,’” Isabella said.

But recently, more and more of her family members have started getting vaccinated.

Much of this, she believes, is because they saw her safely receive a dose, but she also suspects that losing two of their own was a reality check.

“It opened their eyes a little bit,” she said.

“I truly think in the back of their minds they kind of realized more that this is serious and not something to play around with.”

B

has spent much of the past year reflecting on how gravely consequential people’s actions can be to those around them. In April 2020, her 37-year-old husband, Lew, died of Covid-19 despite the couple having taken precautions to avoid getting sick. She spoke out at the time through his obituary, urging people to take the pandemic seriously so that more people like Lew wouldn’t face such tragic repercussions.

RIANNA BERRY, 32,

37 Berry said last year’s frustration over people not wearing masks has evolved into similar feelings about people opting out of vaccination. “I think if I had my husband die because he refused to get vaccinated...I would be so angry at him,” Berry said.

“I think it would make my grief so much more complicated, because there would’ve been something that could’ve been done, and he wouldn’t have done it.”

While just over 50 percent of the adult U.S. population is now fully vaccinated, seeing the nationwide drop-off in vaccinations has been upsetting to Berry. She hopes the loved ones of unvaccinated people who die will take it as a wake-up call to get their shot. “When you go through grief, you already think of all the things you could’ve done differently leading up to their death,” she said. “Knowing there’s something that was free, accessible, and could have prevented their death, it’s heartbreaking.”

“I just keep saying to so many people, ‘It can’t happen to you until it does,’” Berry said. “I never thought I would’ve been a widow at this age.”

Mourning the death of someone who refused a vaccine may be complicated for many; not everyone will feel an outpouring of sympathy for a person lost to a choice that put themselves and others in danger.

But Kristin Urquiza, whose father died nearly a year ago and who went on to found the organization Marked by Covid, urges people to think about where they’re placing blame.

“It actually kind of boils down to a leadership failure, to me,” she said. “I don’t get angry so much at the individual—I can be disappointed, but I get infuriated at the fact that our government led us to this place.”

Urquiza said she hopes people grieving the deaths of unvaccinated loved ones don’t hesitate to seek out support from others who’ve lost people to the virus. She said that just a few weeks ago one man spoke at her online support group about losing his father, who’d refused a vaccine.

“The rawness of his anger and frustration and pain was just so plain on his face,” she said. “Every single person on that Zoom [was] just so crestfallen and heartbroken for this 30-something-year-old who now has to go through his life without his dad.”

“I know what that pain is like,” she said.

“And it takes so much to be able to get up every single day and start to piece together your life.”

This article originally appeared in BuzzFeed News.com. Used with permission.

THE WEEK June 25, 2021

The Puzzle Page

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Crossword No. 605: Making Waves by Matt Gaffney 1

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This week’s question: Germany has announced that before it withdraws its 1,100 NATO troops from Afghanistan, it will first fly home their huge stockpile of alcohol—more than 60,000 cans of beer and hundreds of bottles of wine and Champagne. What operational name should the German military give this boozy rescue mission?

Last week’s contest: An unknown buyer has paid $18,350 for Io Sono [I Am], an invisible sculpture by Salvatore Garau. The Italian artist, 67, describes the work as a “density of thoughts.” Please come up with the name of a permanent exhibition where art lovers could admire high-concept sculptures or paintings that can’t be seen.

THE WINNER: The Air and Space Museum

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David Nordstrom, San Antonio

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THIRD PLACE: The UnMet

Maridith Janssen, Long Beach, Calif.

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For runners-up and complete contest rules, please go to theweek.com/contest.

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THE WEEK June 25, 2021

Shirley Pagluica, Wells, Maine

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ACROSS 1 Enjoy sunshine or attention 5 Goldfish, e.g.

9 Earthy shade of brown 14 E’s followers 15 Shaving gel ingredient 16 Cook quickly in a pan 17 “Take it ___ me...”

18 Actor McDonough 19 Mr. T’s group, in the 1980s 20 English band whose hits include “Fluorescent Adolescent” and “Do I Wanna Know?”

23 Despite that, when texting 24 Fly like an eagle 25 2013 action movie starring Charlie Hunnam and Idris Elba 30 Lovers’ quarrel 34 Stat for southpaws 35 ___ Wonderful Life 36 Jeweler’s piece 37 Entertainment company founded in 1947 41 Actress Esther of Good Times and Driving Miss Daisy 42 Roof part 43 First aid ___ 44 In need of a map 45 Force led by General Bipin Rawat 48 Increase 50 “What am ___ do?”

SECOND PLACE: Wherefore Art Thou?

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51 Body of water officially recognized by the National Geographic Society earlier this month; its four cousins are found north of it in this puzzle (and on a globe) 57 Flick 58 Hamilton event 59 On the water 61 Wide gulf 62 Told a tall tale 63 Suffix with Kazakh or Kyrgyz 64 NFL team with a horseshoe logo 65 Grinds to a halt 66 It is, to Spaniards DOWN 1 Closest pal, briefly 2 City where Akbar the Great’s tomb lies 3 Stock trader’s maneuvers 4 Cabbage dish 5 “Pretty please?”

6 Guinness or Waugh 7 Satisfy one’s wanderlust 8 Congresswoman in a recent kerfuffle with Rep. McCarthy over wearing masks on the House floor 9 Naomi who withdrew from the French Open earlier this month 10 Targets, as an audience 11 Long or Lewis

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12 Train station info 13 “Superman” band 21 “Closer ___” (Indigo Girls hit) 22 ___ de plume 25 Word before Jam or Harbor 26 Star Wars android, casually 27 Cousin ___ (The Addams Family critter) 28 Show set in Nevada 29 Went quickly 31 Slow-cooker dishes 32 “___ supposed to believe that?”

33 Easily angered 36 Like lovely views 38 Selfless type 39 Bollywood’s Aishwarya ___ Bachchan 40 Longoria of 2018’s Overboard 45 Kinda sorta 46 Sharp thing with an eye 47 With one’s guard down 49 Objects 51 Neighborhood of New York or London 52 Mirror shape, often 53 Sabotage 54 “I really don’t ___ this!”

55 Ransom noted for cars 56 Unlike slobs 57 1,200, in Roman numerals 60 Santa ___ winds (California phenomenon)

How to enter: Submissions should be emailed to contest @theweek.com. Please include your name, address, and daytime telephone number for verification; this week, type “Booze rescue” in the subject line. Entries are due by noon, Eastern Time, Tuesday, June 22. Winners will appear on the Puzzle Page next issue and at theweek.com/puzzles on Friday, June 25.

In the case of identical or similar entries, the first one received gets credit.

W The winner gets a one-year subscription to The Week.

Sudoku Fill in all the boxes so that each row, column, and outlined square includes all the numbers from 1 through 9.

Difficulty: medium

Find the solutions to all The Week’s puzzles online: www.theweek.com/puzzle.

©2021. All rights reserved.

The Week (ISSN 1533-8304) is published weekly with an additional issue in October, except for one week in each January, June, July, and September.

The Week is published by The Week Publications, Inc., 155 East 44th Street, 22nd fl., New York, NY 10017. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and at additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send change of address to The Week, PO Box 37252, Boone, IA 50037-0252. One-year subscription rates: U.S. $199; Canada $229; all other countries $267 in prepaid U.S. funds. Publications Mail Agreement No. 40031590, Registration No. 140467846. Return Undeliverable Canadian Addresses to P.O. Box 503, RPO West Beaver Creek, Richmond Hill, ON L4B 4R6.

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Sources: A complete list of publications cited in The Week can be found at theweek.com/sources.

H M R S

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