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Choosing Covid As anti-vaxxers shun shots, Delta variant drives a new surge in infections p.4

JULY 23, 2021 VOLUME 21 ISSUE 1037 ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT EVERYTHING THAT MATTERS

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Editor’s letter A motorcyclist was roaring in and out of highway lanes on I-35 in Fort Worth when he decided that an SUV changed lanes to block him. The enraged biker, 19, raced past other vehicles, stopped the bike to block all lanes of traffic, and approached the SUV with a drawn handgun. The SUV driver jumped out and said he had kids in his vehicle. But when the motorcyclist didn’t lower his gun, he raised his own and fired multiple shots, leaving the biker dying on the road. This was just one of hundreds of gun deaths last week, as our nation continues to devolve into a heavily armed Wild West. In 2020, with the pandemic, protests, and a divisive election further weakening frayed social bonds, Americans purchased more than 23 million guns—a 66 percent increase over 2019. Up to 40 percent of new gun sales, the firearm industry estimates, went to first-time buyers—with sales jumping 50 percent among Black customers and 47 percent among Hispanics.

Jabril Battle, 28, an African-American account representative in Los Angeles, was one of the first-time buyers. He told The Washington Post he’d always hated “gun nuts” but was deeply unsettled by the pandemic’s apocalyptic, “Mad Max” feeling of anarchy. “I was like, Do I want to be a person who has a gun or doesn’t have a gun?” He bought two. The fear of being outgunned feeds on itself: Americans now own an estimated 390 million guns—a per capita rate more than double that of any other country. Deadly weapons may make people feel safer, but they also serve as impulse amplifiers, transforming arguments into homicides, gang turf battles into firefights, disaffected young men into mass killers, depression into easy suicide, and police stops into tragic deaths. As we celebrated our nation’s birth on the Fourth of July weekend, more than 230 Americans died by gun violence and 618 were wounded.

William Falk Editor-in-chief And so it goes.

NEWS 4 Main stories A new Covid wave driven by the Delta variant; Haiti’s president assassinated; the Taliban advance as U.S. troops leave Afghanistan 6

Managing editors: Theunis Bates, Mark Gimein Assistant managing editor: Jay Wilkins Deputy editor/International: Susan Caskie Deputy editor/Arts: Chris Mitchell Senior editors: Nick Aspinwall, Chris Erikson, Danny Funt, 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

Controversy of the week Surprising compromises at the Supreme Court

7 The U.S. at a glance Texas Democrats walk out over voting rights bill; Tennessee halts all vaccine outreach to adolescents 8 The world at a glance England prepares to lift all Covid restrictions; an Olympic emergency declared in Tokyo 10 People How Lil Nas X found his true self; Belinda Carlisle’s wild years 11 Briefing What authorities have discovered so far about the Capitol insurrection 12 Best U.S. columns The coming backlash against the “woke” left; funding the tax police

Getty (2)

Editor-in-chief: William Falk

15 Best international columns Massive pro-democracy protests in Cuba 16 Talking points The billionaire space race; Hunter Biden’s secret art sale; J.D. Vance’s Trumpian conversion

Security forces and protesters in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince (p.5)

ARTS

LEISURE

22 Books How mining threatens the fantastical creatures of the deep ocean

27 Food & Drink A recipe for spicy Adana kebabs; three jerkies to power your next road trip

23 Author of the week Francine Prose’s truth-telling

28 Consumer Tesla’s powerful new Model S Plaid; gear to keep you cool in the summer heat

24 Art & Music Wangechi Mutu’s Afrofuturist sculptures 25 Film & Home Media Remembering Anthony Bourdain in Roadrunner Lil Nas X (p.10)

BUSINESS 32 News at a glance Inflation worries rise as prices surge; a banner quarter for bank profits 33 Making money How the condo collapse in Surfside, Fla., has exposed the high cost of neglect 34 Best columns Biden’s plan to promote competition; a shameful opioid crisis settlement

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 July 23, 2021

4 NEWS

The main stories...

Delta variant drives surge among the unvaccinated What happened

chances.” These holdouts need to wake up and “recognize their growing risk.”

Covid cases surged across the U.S. this week, rising 50 percent in 31 states as the The Delta variant is “no cause for panic,” pace of vaccination stalled and the highly said the New York Post. Yes, it’s more contacontagious Delta variant spread among the gious, but numbers from Britain and Israel, unprotected. U.S. cases doubled to more which have both suffered Delta spikes, sugthan 23,000 a day over the past week and gest that “vaccines remain highly effective” hospitalizations rose 21 percent, driven against serious illness and death. Nonetheby the now dominant variant from India, less, “overcautious health bureaucrats” which spreads more than 200 percent are urging even the vaccinated to mask up faster than the original coronavirus. While indoors and questioning school reopening new infections rose in all but two states, plans. But “the only rational response is to the hardest hit were those with the lowest work harder to get the holdouts jabbed.” vaccination rates, including Missouri, Vaccinating a teen in Missouri, a Covid hot spot Arkansas, Nevada, and Louisiana. Nearly all hospitalizations and 99.5 percent of deaths were among the un- What the columnists said The Trumpist right wing “is becoming a death cult,” said Eugene vaccinated. “If they’re sick enough to be admitted to the hospital, Robinson in The Washington Post. How else to explain the “twistthey are unvaccinated,” said Howard Jarvis, an emergency room ed” scene at the Conservative Political Action Conference, where a doctor in Springfield, Mo. “That is the absolute common denominator.” Hospitals reported an influx of young adults and even some right-wing author drew cheers when he “crowed” that the U.S. had fallen short of its vaccination goal of 70 percent? Or the relentchildren—in Mississippi, where the 34 percent vaccination rate is well below the national average of 48 percent, seven children were less peddling of loony anti-vax propaganda by Fox News’ Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson? For this cult, “owning” scientists, in intensive care. “We have a vast pool of unimmunized people mask-wearing libs, and Joe Biden is worth anything—but “they’re who are a perfect breeding ground for the Delta variant,” said owning no one except themselves” and their “loved ones.”

State Health Officer Thomas Dobbs. “It’s going to kill folks—and it’s already killing folks.”

It’s hard to overstate the “sheer insanity” of what’s happening in red states, said Charlie Sykes in TheBulwark.com. You’d think the Pfizer representatives met with federal officials to seek authorizasame crew outraged by masks and distancing might “see the vaction of a booster shot for its Covid vaccine. The company says cines as a ticket back to normal life.” Instead, they’ve chosen this Israeli data show that its vaccine has reduced effectiveness against perilous moment “to go full anti-vax.” The conservative lawmakthe Delta variant, while Pfizer’s own research indicates that a third ers and pundits likening college vaccination requirements to apartshot produces a five- to 10-fold boost in antibody levels. But U.S. heid and health workers sent door-to-door to Nazi brownshirts are health officials said they needed more real-world data on how engaging in “performative demagoguery” that will result in lost vaccines are performing against Delta, and stated that vaccinated lives. Call it what it is: “depraved indifference to human life.”

Americans “do not need a booster shot at this time.”

“Covid-19 is not done with us yet,” said the Los Angeles Times.

With mask and distancing restrictions lifted and life returning to normal, “it’s easy to forget that a pandemic is still raging.” But after “steep declines” in infections, we now face “exponential growth” as the Delta variant preys on the tens of millions who’ve rejected safe and highly effective vaccines and “decided to take their

It wasn’t all bad Q Sixty years ago, Gwen Goldman wrote to the Yankees asking to be a bat girl, but was told that handling bats was a boys-only job and “a young lady such as yourself would feel out of place in a dugout.” Current general manager Brian Cashman learned about the rejection from Goldman’s daughter and invited Goldman, 70, to fulfill her childhood dream. “It took my breath away,” she said. The retired social worker threw a ceremonial first pitch, posed with the umpires, and got a round of applause from the crowd after the third inning.

THE WEEK July 23, 2021

As America hardens into two camps, those vaccinated and those not, the Delta variant “only exacerbates the divide,” said Sarah Zhang in TheAtlantic.com. For the vaccinated it poses little threat of serious illness—but for stubborn holdouts, “getting infected is probably a matter of time.” A year ago, vaccines were “a distant hope.”

Now here we sit, “with too many doses and too few willing arms, at a time when the advantages of vaccination are clearer than ever.”

Q Zaila Avant-garde last week became the first African-American winner in the 96-year history of the Scripps National Spelling Bee. The 14-year-old from Harvey, La., correctly spelled “murraya,” a type of citrus tree, then jumped in the air as confetti fell.

“To actually win the whole thing was like a dream come true,” she said. Zaila—whose father gave her the last name Avantgarde to honor jazz great John Coltrane—began competing in spelling contests just two years ago. She’s also a standout basketball player, with three Guinness World Records for dribbling and juggling multiple balls. Zaila hopes to play basketball at Harvard before becoming a NASA scientist or A winner, any way you spell it an NBA coach.

Q A father and son were deepsea fishing off the North Carolina coast when they were nearly hit by a rogue boat—only to realize there was nobody on board.

Andrew Sherman and his son Jack then used GPS data from the unmanned boat to frantically search for the missing captain.

They feared the worst when they found a pair of boat shoes drifting in the water, but they soon found Sascha Scheller, who had been treading water for nearly three hours. After he recovered, “he came in and we hugged, and it was like ‘thank you for saving my life,’”Andrew said.

Illustration by Howard McWilliam.

Cover photos from Getty (2)

Getty, AP

What the editorials said

... and how they were covered

NEWS 5

Turmoil in Haiti after president assassinated What happened

What the columnists said

Haiti was in political chaos this week fol“Distrust abounds” in Haiti about the lowing the brazen assassination of President official narrative, said Ishaan Tharoor in Jovenel Moïse by a squad of foreign merceWashingtonPost.com. People want to know naries, at least some of whom were allegedly how exactly an unknown figure like Sanon working for a Florida-based security firm. Authought that he was going to take charge? thorities in the violence-wracked Caribbean Why did the mercenaries meet no resistance country said that some 30 gunmen stormed when they entered the presidential palace, the presidential residence at around 1 a.m. on and why didn’t they have a getaway plan?

July 7, yelling, “This is a DEA operation!”

It’s understandable that many are wondering Moïse, who was in his bedroom, was shot if this was really an inside job.

12 times; his wife, Martine, was wounded Police guard some of the detained suspects. and flown to Florida for treatment. Police The U.S. must “get off the sidelines— later killed at least three of the alleged assailants and arrested 15 immediately,” said The Miami Herald in an editorial. The Trump Colombian commandos and two Haitian-Americans who said they and Biden administration turned a blind eye to Moïse’s growing had worked as translators for the hit squad. A Haitian-born docauthoritarian tendencies, even as gang violence surged and antitor who is based in Florida, Christian Emmanuel Sanon, was also government protests became weekly occurrences. Interim leader arrested in Port-au-Prince; police claimed the 63-year-old had hired Joseph has now asked the U.S. to deploy troops to help stabilize the mercenaries with an eye to taking over the presidency. the impoverished country, but Biden has agreed only to send FBI and Homeland Security officials. It’s not enough. If Haiti implodes, tens of thousands of refugees will seek safety in America. Biden Moïse, 53, was deeply unpopular in Haiti. Elected in 2016, the former banana exporter had ruled by decree since early last year— cannot “look away any longer.” legislative elections were repeatedly postponed—and was accused of using street gangs to attack and intimidate opponents and proAnother American intervention in Haiti is “a terrible idea,” said testers. His killing immediately sparked a succession crisis. Interim Jonathan Katz in ForeignPolicy.com. Over the past century we’ve Prime Minister Claude Joseph asserted that he was now in charge, repeatedly meddled in the country in the name of regional stability, but his power was challenged by Ariel Henry, a neurologist whom propping up brutal, kleptocratic leaders such as father-son dictaMoïse had appointed as prime minister two days before his death tors “Papa Doc” and “Baby Doc” Duvalier. If we step in again, and who was set to take up the role this week. The two men are even with noble intentions, we will only secure the power of Haiti’s negotiating over new elections. “The last thing we want right now corrupt elite. “Whatever the answer is to Haiti’s acute crisis, it is a power struggle,” said an aide to Joseph. must come from the Haitian majority.”

Taliban advance as U.S. prepares Afghanistan withdrawal What happened

What the columnists said

Taliban insurgents seized key cities across Afghanistan this week, overpowering the Afghan military as U.S. troops continued their withdrawal after slipping out of Bagram Airfield in the dead of night. Abandoning the sprawling base, which served as the U.S. operations center, left fewer than 1,000 American combat troops in Afghanistan ahead of Biden’s Aug. 31 deadline to end the 20year war. Remaining troops are defending the U.S. Embassy and airport in Kabul, leaving Kabul’s army outgunned as it battles a resurgent Taliban that have recently taken more than 50 of the country’s 400 districts, with hundreds of soldiers fleeing their advance.

CNN released a video from last month showing Taliban fighters executing 22 Afghan commandos as they tried to surrender.

When the U.S. invaded Afghanistan a month after the 9/11 attacks, said Michael Brendan Dougherty in NationalReview.com, the mission “was to destroy al-Qaida’s operations, get Osama bin Laden, and punish the Taliban” for harboring terrorists. “We accomplished these missions years ago.” American have expressed their will, and 62 percent of Americans back the decision to leave. As long as many Afghans practice a fanatical version of “political Islam,” the country won’t be a modern democracy.

American troops cannot be left indefinitely to “babysit.”

“The debate over ‘Who lost Afghanistan?’ has already begun,” said Max Boot in WashingtonPost.com. There will be plenty of blame to go around for the second—after Vietnam—major U.S. military defeat in history. A succession of presidents made fatal mistakes, and “their Afghan counterparts have been far worse,” with their “poor leadership and pervasive corruption.” But Americans can’t “wash our hands” of this country. It is part of our history now, and will “roil U.S. politics for decades to come.”

AP

Despite a recent U.S. intelligence assessment that Kabul could fall in six months without American military support, Biden was emphatic in defending his decision to withdraw. “Let me ask those who wanted us to stay,” he said, “how many thousands more of America’s daughters and sons are you willing to risk?” Former President George W. Bush criticized the pullout, saying “Afghan women and girls are going to suffer unspeakable harm.” In captured territories, the Taliban are reportedly prohibiting women from leaving home alone and forcing men to marry off their daughters to Taliban foot soldiers. Biden said the U.S. would help evacuate the thousands of Afghan people who assisted the U.S. military, but refused to call Afghanistan a lost cause. “The mission hasn’t failed—yet,” Biden said.

Biden wants it both ways, said Fred Kaplan in Slate.com. He ordered a withdrawal while reaffirming a “U.S. commitment to keep Afghanistan free of terrorist rule.” But without a U.S. presence, Afghan can’t hold off the Taliban. President Obama found a middle ground, leaving 3,500 troops to support the Afghan military without fighting themselves, and “no U.S. troops have been killed in Afghanistan since February 2020.” Biden knows this, and “if Afghanistan falls apart, many will blame him.”

THE WEEK July 23, 2021

6 NEWS

Controversy of the week

Supreme Court: What did we learn about the new majority? limitations on unions. But note how even “There were two very different Supreme the conservative rulings were made with Courts in the term that just ended,” said “judicial restraint and discipline,” said Jay Adam Liptak in The New York Times. The Michaelson in NYMag.com. In Fulton v. nation’s highest judicial body has spent the Philadelphia, the court unanimously ruled past nine months defying predictions that that the city of Philadelphia could not refuse the three Trump-appointed justices and their to give a contract to Catholic Social Services three conservative colleagues would “regularly because that agency will not consider samesteamroll” the court’s remaining three libersex couples as foster parents—but the narrow als. For most of the term, the 6-3 court was ruling “passed on an opportunity to redraw “fluid and unpredictable,” with liberals and church-state law from scratch.” The cautious conservatives joining to defend Obamacare, a A surprise to both fans and critics Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Barrett prefer to Catholic charity’s right not to violate its beliefs move the ball down the field toward conservative goals incremenon gay marriage, and college athletes fighting exploitation by the tally, rather than ignite political firestorms.

NCAA. But in this term’s last two cases, the court’s “conservative supermajority” reasserted itself in 6-3 rulings along ideological There was nothing restrained about how the court “turned back lines, upholding new voting restrictions in Arizona and striking the clock on voting rights,” said Richard L. Hasen in Slate.com. down a California law requiring nonprofit political groups to In the Arizona case, Justice Samuel Alito decided that even if new disclose their donors. Nonetheless, we clearly “do not have a 6-3 restrictions might affect minorities more than others, they did not conservative court,” said Josh Blackman in Reason.com. Because violate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Alito created a “new and Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh are not the fiery impossible test” for those challenging state voting laws: They must partisans Trump expected, and often join with Chief Justice John prove that a restriction is intentionally designed to suppress votes.

Roberts, we now have a 3-3-3 court containing “a conservative wing, a moderate wing, and a principle-fluid progressive wing.”

In other cases, the court proved itself a Bill of Rights champion, said David French in TheDispatch.com. It defended a cheerleader’s The term may not have been “a clean sweep for conservatives,” right to free speech on social media, and limited police officers’ said Ian Millhiser in Vox.com, but they got “about 80 to 90 perability to enter the homes of misdemeanor suspects. So far, the cent of what they realistically could have expected.” The attempt court has chosen judicial restraint and to “consistently confound to overturn the entire Affordable Care Act was so legally spurious fans and critics alike.” Yet “deep fissures” lie beneath the surface, that even Clarence Thomas, a longtime critic of the law, admitsaid Adam Winkler in The Washington Post. In the term that ted it in a begrudging concurrence to the 7-2 ruling. But make begins in October, the court will wade into cases that put gun conno mistake: With Barrett and Kavanaugh aboard, “the court’s trol laws and Roe v. Wade on the line. “Don’t be surprised next middle is really far to the right.” They clearly favor an expansion June if talk of surprising compromises has vanished.” of religious exemptions from law, state restrictions on voting, and

Q A Washington Post food

writer is advising people to stop calling foods “exotic” because it “reinforces xenophobia and racism.” In an essay, G. Daniela Galarza argued that the word reflects a “dominantwhite perspective” that diminishes other cultures and “lengthens the metaphysical distance between one group of humans and another.”

Q Residents of New York’s tony Hamptons are complaining that a post-pandemic labor shortage has forced them to do their own gardening and grooming. “You can’t get your nails done,” said an alarmed East Hampton resident. “Everyone’s going for the natural look.” Another Hamptonite said he had to “buy a lawn mower and cut my own lawn,” but found a silver lining. “I had to take my $800 sneakers off first,” he said, “but it was actually satisfying.”

THE WEEK July 23, 2021

Good week for: The hoi polloi, after Queen Elizabeth II opened the gardens at

Buckingham Palace to the public for summer picnics for the first time to raise revenue for the royals. For $23, about 2,000 people a day will enjoy the lawns and gardens—but no alcohol, please.

Sticking the landing, after a soldier on a training exercise miraculously survived a parachute failure as he crashed through the roof of a house in Southern California. First responders said he was found “stunned with complaints of pain but no visible serious injuries.”

Donald Trump, who—despite being impeached twice and botching the pandemic response so badly than 400,000 Americans died in less than a year—escaped being rated the worst president in U.S. history in a poll of 142 presidential historians. Franklin Pierce, Andrew Johnson, and James Buchanan came in behind Trump.

Bad week for: Rudy Giuliani, who has been suspended from practicing law in Washington, D.C., because of the many lies he told while helping Trump try to overturn the 2020 election. Giuliani’s license to practice law had already been suspended in New York.

The planet, after a 130-degree temperature was registered at Furnace Creek, Calif., amid another punishing Western heat wave. That may be the highest reliably measured temperature in human history.

Renters, after a 160-square-foot “micro studio” in Vancouver advertised for $500 a month was revealed to be a bathroom with a bed stuck in the corner, just feet from the toilet. “This unit is ideal for a single individual,” the landlord wrote, “who does not need much space.”

In other news FDA limits Alzheimer’s drug eligibility The Food and Drug Administration significantly narrowed its recommendation last week for a new Alzheimer’s drug, suggesting that patients with only mild memory or cognitive problems should receive it. The FDA approved the drug, Aduhelm, last month for all 6 million Alzheimer’s patients despite scant evidence of benefits; the new guidelines cut the number of Americans eligible for the $56,000-ayear treatment to 1.5 million.

Aduhelm is the first new Alzheimer’s drug in 18 years.

An independent committee opposed the earlier approval, and three members resigned in protest when the FDA defied that advice. Acting FDA head Janet Woodcock called for an investigation into interactions between the agency and Biogen, Aduhelm’s maker.

AP

Only in America

The U.S. at a glance ...

Nashville Teen vaccine: Dr. Michelle Fiscus, Tennessee’s top immunization official, said she Dr. Fiscus was fired this week in retaliation for spreading awareness about teens’ eligibility for the Covid19 vaccine. Republican lawmakers had criticized Fiscus for promoting the vaccine: first, with public service ads aimed at teens, then, by distributing a memo explaining how state law allows teens to get vaccinations without requiring parental permission. “The government is sacrificing public health to be in the good graces of our legislators,” she said. “It’s a horrid dereliction of duty.” In a hearing, GOP state Rep. Scott Cepicky called the health department’s ads directed at teens “reprehensible.” In Tennessee, where just 43 percent of the population has received at least one Covid shot, the state health department will halt adolescent vaccine outreach for all diseases, The Tennessean reports, including ending Covid vaccine events at schools and stopping the mailing of postcards reminding teens to get their second dose.

AP, Reuters, AP, Getty

Austin, Tex. Legislative escape: At least 59 of the 67 Democrats in Texas’ House fled for Washington, D.C., this week, denying the GOPcontrolled legislature the quorum necessary to vote on some of the country’s most contentious voting bills. Republicans instead voted to arrest the Democrats upon their return to Texas. “As soon as they come back,” Republican Gov. Greg Abbott said, “they will be cabined inside the Texas Capitol until they get their job done.” The Democrats hastily boarded planes to Washington, where they are staying indefinitely in hotels.

Abbott pledged to continue calling special legislative sessions until the Democrats return.

“This is a now-orGone to Washington never for our democracy,” said Democratic state Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer. The bills in question would ban 24-hour polls, outlaw drop boxes for mail ballots, and allow partisan poll watchers close enough to “hear and see” voters. Republicans are also advancing bills to ban drive-thru voting and further limit access to absentee ballots.

Chapel Hill, N.C. No thanks: Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer behind The New York Times Magazine’s controversial 1619 Project, rejected a tenure offer from the University of North Carolina last week, opting instead to teach at Howard University. Despite recommendations from UNC’s journalism faculty, the board of trustees initially refused to give a lifetime faculty position to Hannah-Jones, 45, who was denounced by the Right for her work on the history of slavery. The journalism school’s top donor, Arkansas newspaper publisher Walter Hussman, had called her work “highly contentious.” The trustees offered her tenure after weeks of outcry. “I cannot imagine working at and advancing a school named for a man who lobbied against me,” Hannah-Jones said, announcing her decision to teach instead at the historically black Howard. More than 30 UNC faculty members backed her, saying of the school’s treatment of her, “We will be frank: It was racist.”

Houston Voting arrest: After being praised for waiting nearly seven hours to vote in the March 2020 presidential primary, Hervis Rogers was arrested last week and charged with two felony counts of illegal voting. Rogers, 62, had three months left of parole for a 1995 second-degree felony conviction. Rogers, who is Black, was the last person in line to vote at his precinct, casting his ballot at 1:30 a.m. because of voting delays in Harris County. “It is insane, but it’s worth it,” he said while waiting. Rogers, who also voted in 2018, was jailed, but the nonprofit Bail Project provided $100,000 to bail him out. In Texas, a person must know he can’t vote to be guilty of a crime; Rogers’ lawyers say his seven-hour wait and cable news interviews show he did not know. A March study found that at least 72 percent of voter fraud charges brought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton were filed against Black or Latino voters.

NEWS 7

New York City Demoted: The Trump Organization stripped longtime CFO Allen Weisselberg of leadership roles in more than 40 of its subsidiaries Weisselberg last week, after he and the company were charged with running a 15-year tax-fraud scheme.

Weisselberg, 73, the company’s top executive outside of the Trump family, will remain at the company while he contests the indictment, but will no longer serve as director of Trump’s Scottish golf club, among other former roles. He’s accused of evading $900,000 in taxes on more than $1.7 million of income, mostly through unreported benefits such as cars, an apartment, and private-school tuition for his grandchildren. He pleaded not guilty and has refused to cooperate with prosecutors.

The Trump Organization is accused of keeping two sets of accounting books: a private one that counted Weisselberg’s apartment and cars in his $940,000 annual compensation, and one that didn’t, allegedly allowing him to pay taxes on less income.

Surfside, Fla. 99 likely dead: As the search drew to a close for victims of the June 24 Champlain Towers South condominium collapse, Miami police released the names this week of five more victims, including 1-year-old Aishani Patel, believed to be the youngest of the 95 confirmed dead.

She died along with her father, Vishal, 42, and pregnant mother, Bhavna, 38, who were dual British and U.S. citizens. With 18 million pounds of rubble removed from the disaster site, officials believe there are likely four people left to be recovered. Fourteen missing people remain unaccounted for, with the identification process growing more difficult as time passes and torrential rain floods the wreckage. Searchers are retrieving and securely storing valuable personal items, including jewelry, cash, art, firearms, and children’s toys. Recovered Bibles and other religious items from the condo’s many Jewish residents will be returned or buried in accordance with Jewish custom.

Surfside is considering erecting a permanent memorial on the An improvised goodbye property.

THE WEEK July 23, 2021

8 NEWS

The world at a glance ...

Manchester, U.K. Soccer racism: Three Black players on England’s national soccer team endured racist abuse this week after the team’s 3-2 loss to Italy in the final of the Euro 2020 championship. With England and Italy tied at 1-1 after extra time, the game went to a penalty shootout. England Rashford’s mural made its first two shots, taken by white players. But Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho, and Bukayo Saka— all of whom are Black—either missed or couldn’t get the ball past the Italian goalkeeper. The players’ social media accounts were quickly flooded with slurs and threats, and a mural of Rashford in his native Manchester was defaced. Hundreds of fans then covered up the abusive graffiti with their own messages of support for Rashford. Prince William, president of England’s Football Association, said that he was “sickened by the racist abuse.”

Paris Vaccine passports: More than 1 million French citizens made an appointment for their first shot of a Covid vaccine this week, after President Emmanuel Macron said proof of inoculation would soon be required to enter cafés and shops, board trains and planes, and attend concerts and amusement parks. France had been Proof of vaccination among the most vaccine-hesitant nations in Europe—just 37 percent of the population is fully vaccinated, compared with 52 percent in the U.K. and 43 percent in Germany. But that hesitancy ebbed as soon as visits to cafés were in jeopardy. In a live address to the nation, Macron warned that the Delta variant would soon overwhelm the country and urged everyone to get the vaccine. “It is what our freedom depends on,” he said.

London Grand reopening: Prime Minister Boris Johnson has announced that all remaining coronavirus restrictions in England will be lifted on July 19, saying Britons will have to “learn to live with” the virus even as the Delta variant spreads across the country.

England is now reporting 26,500 new infections a day, a nearly threefold increase in a month, and officials believe daily number could soon hit 100,000. While new infections are rising sharply, Covid deaths have remained low, at about 20 a day, thanks to the vaccination of most older adults and improved treatments.

Johnson said delaying the full reopening of restaurants and other businesses would simply push the inevitable surge in infections to the fall, when children return to schools Johnson and the virus spreads more easily in the colder weather.

Caracas Busting the opposition: A top ally of Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó was arrested this week and charged with terrorism and plotting a coup. Freddy Guevara was in his car on a Caracas highway when he was detained, and he livestreamed his arrest on social media. Guaidó said when he tried to get to his own car to come to Guevara’s aid, armed, hooded men burst into his garage and threatened him with detention. The arrest came as the opposition and the government of President Nicolás Maduro prepare for negotiations mediated by Norway next month. Guaidó was proclaimed interim president in 2019 by the Venezuelan Congress, the country’s only democratically elected body, after Maduro was accused of rigging his own re-election.

Maduro has held onto power with the help of the security forces.

Guevara: Arrested THE WEEK July 23, 2021

Brasília Impeach Bolsonaro: Facing mounting outrage over alleged corruption and his disastrous handling of the pandemic, President Jair Bolsonaro has sunk to a new low in opinion polls, with a In trouble majority of Brazilians for the first time saying they support his impeachment. He is also in serious legal jeopardy: At the request of the Supreme Court, federal police this week formally opened a probe into Bolsonaro’s role in alleged corruption in a $316 million contract for doses of an Indian vaccine.

The right-wing leader has even lost the support of the conservative press. O Estado de São Paulo, one of the nation’s leading dailies, said in an editorial that he should be booted from office. Bolsonaro downplayed the pandemic from the start; today, more than 530,000 Brazilians are dead of Covid-19.

Reuters, Getty, Reuters, AP (2)

Managua, Nicaragua U.S. sanctions: The U.S. State Department this week imposed visa restrictions on 100 Nicaraguan officials involved in President Daniel Ortega’s crackdown on political opponents. Among those barred from entering the U.S. are lawmakers, prosecutors, and judges, as well as some of their family members. More than two dozen Nicaraguan presidential hopefuls, opposition leaders, student activists, journalists, and other dissidents have been rounded up and jailed over the past month as the authoritarian Ortega tries to eliminate threats ahead of the November presidential election.

Nicaragua’s beleaguered opposition welcomed the highly targeted sanctions. Unnamed activists told local media that the U.S. was using “the right tools to support democracy,” unlike the European Union, which has threatened to implement economic sanctions that could further impoverish ordinary Nicaraguans.

The world at a glance ...

Moscow Ransomware sites go dark: Websites run by a notorious Russian hacker gang mysteriously went offline this week, just days after President Biden demanded that President Vladimir Putin take action against ransomware groups or face cyber consequences.

REvil, short for “Ransomware evil,” had claimed responsibility for a hack that affected thousands of businesses around the world over the July 4 weekend and is also believed to have been behind a June attack on the American meat-processing giant JBS. It’s unclear whether the Russian or U.S. government was responsible for taking REvil’s blog and payment sites offline, or whether the hackers themselves pulled the plug. Hacking victims who were in the middle of trying to negotiate ransoms with REvil are dismayed, saying they have been left without a clear path to getting their data unlocked.

NEWS 9

Tokyo Olympic emergency: With Covid cases climbing in Tokyo, a state of emergency has been declared in the city just two weeks before it is set to host the Summer Olympics. Organizers announced last week that spectators will be barred from all venues; under the new emerNo spectators allowed gency measures, restaurants and bars will be asked to close early and to not serve alcohol. The Olympic Torch, normally paraded through the streets of the host country, is being transported quietly from city to city with no public spectacle. Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga said he was imposing the new restrictions “as a proactive and preventive measure” even though Tokyo had not reached the infection and hospitalization level that would normally trigger an emergency. Japan is now recording some 2,200 new Covid cases a day, nearly half of them in Tokyo.

Reuters, Simularity, AP (2)

Manila Chinese sewage? Hundreds of Chinese vessels have been dumping tons of human waste into contested areas of the South China Sea, an American tech firm said this week. Liz Derr, CEO of Simularity, said satellite images gathered by her company showed vast plumes of sewage contaminating fishing waters and damaging coral reefs.

China keeps a constant presence of military and fishing boats in the South China Sea to assert its claim of sovereignty over waters claimed by the Philippines and other countries. “When the ships don’t move, the poop piles up,” Derr said. “It is so intense you can see it from space.” Philippine authorities said they would investigate Simularity’s findings.

Satellite images of the ships

Durban, South Africa Riots over Zuma jailing: Violent riots erupted across South Africa this week over the jailing of former President Jacob Zuma, and at least 72 people were killed in stampedes, fires, and clashes with police. More than 200 shopping malls were looted and some 800 people were arrested in the worst violence the country has seen since the anti-apartheid protests of the 1990s. The rioting began in Zuma’s home province of KwaZulu-Natal, where Zulu supporters of the former president blockaded roads and set trucks on fire. The BBC filmed a desperate woman throwing her baby Fury on the streets from an apartment building in Durban that caught fire after its lower-floor shops had been looted; a crowd caught the baby safely. Zuma, 79, was jailed last week for failing to appear before an inquiry investigating the rampant corruption that occurred during his 2009–18 presidency.

Tehran Regime-approved dating: In effort to boost flagging marriage and birth rates, the Iranian government has launched a state-approved dating app for those seeking a pious Islamic marriage. Hamdam, Farsi for “companion,” was developed by the regime’s Islamic Propaganda Organization. Users are asked to upload official documents and take a personality test. The app then automatically matches potential couples—choosing a potential soul mate is not an option—and a Hamdam employee will arrange a family meeting and counsel the happy couple through the first four years of marriage. Hamdam does not allow photographs of users, saying they are “manipulative” and that “what is achieved in a face-to-face meeting is much more complete than a soulless photograph.” Iran has plenty of other, racier dating sites, but those are officially illegal.

Nasiriyah, Iraq Hospital blaze: A fire swept through a Covid ward in an Iraqi hospital this week, killing at least 92 people and injuring dozens more.

Officials at al-Hussein Teaching Hospital in Nasiriyah blamed the fire on improperly stored oxygen canisters that exploded; a blaze that killed 80 people at a Baghdad hospital three months ago started the same way. Authorities ordered the arrest of the hospital administrator and the province’s health director, and President Barham Salih lamented the “persistent corruption and mismanagement that undervalues the lives of Iraqis.” Over the past two years, hundreds of Iraqis have died in violent demonstrations protesting government corruption and a lack of basic services. Iraq is in the midst of its biggest Covid surge since the start of the pandemic, with some 8,500 new cases being reported daily.

Burned to the ground THE WEEK July 23, 2021

10 NEWS

People

Carlisle’s wild years Belinda Carlisle had to prove herself in the punk music scene, said Emine Saner in The Guardian (U.K.), and drugs seemed like the easiest way.

Long before she became a polished solo star, Carlisle was the scrappy lead singer of the Go-Go’s, the first—and still only—female band to write their own music and play their own instruments to top the U.S. album charts, in 1982.

Growing up just outside Los Angeles, Carlisle was a “nightmare” teenager, she says: “Hitchhiking, running away, dropping acid.”

When she moved to L.A. at 18, drugs were everywhere and they gave the anxiety-addled teen the confidence she needed to get on stage. After being introduced to cocaine, she thought, “When I get money, I’m going to buy lots of this.” She did exactly that, partying hard with everyone from Andy Warhol and Liza Minnelli to notorious hellraiser Ozzy Osbourne. “I had a complete blast. It was fun until it stopped being fun, and then it became a real nightmare.

I mean, everyone was just off their trolley.” It took decades for Carlisle to get clean, but the 62-year-old is now a model of health, waking at 4 a.m. to do yoga or Pilates. “I have a very active life. I never really had that from the ages of 17 to 47.”

A Chicago stalwart bids farewell

Q Bill Cosby is already plotting his

comeback, with eyes on a documentary, book, and return to stand-up comedy, TMZ.com reports. Accused of sexual assault by roughly 60 women, Cosby, 83, served nearly three years in prison for drugging and assaulting a former protégée before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court freed him last month on a procedural error. “The world wants to see Mr. Cosby,” his publicist claims, saying that several comedy promoters have expressed interest in hosting him. The owner of New York’s legendary Comedy Cellar said Cosby isn’t welcome there. Cosby reportedly also wants to THE WEEK July 23, 2021

Lil Nas X’s awakening Lil Nas X enjoys taunting his haters, said Jazmine Hughes in The New York Times Magazine. Born Montero Lamar Hill, the singer rocketed to fame in 2019 with his rap-country crossover “Old Town Road.” Now he has another hit single, “Montero (Call Me by Your Name),” with a music video that features Nas sliding down a stripper pole to hell, where he grinds on the devil. Some Christian conservatives were horrified by the performance, just as Nas intended.

“It was liberating,” says the 22-year-old. “I know a lot of people aren’t gonna like this, and I’m going to do it anyway.” Nas spent years denying his sexuality. Raised in an Atlanta housing project by his drug-addicted mother, he moved to a well-to-do suburb at age 9 to live with his gospel singer father. The church became a bigger part of his life—as did his attraction to men. He believed this was a test by God, and felt intense shame when he watched gay porn in secret, “like I just laid in mud.” The success of “Old Town Road” inspired him to come out; his father asked if it was the devil tempting him. But after performing at a raucous Pride concert in the U.K., Nas felt that he’d finally become himself. “It was just so much excitement. I was like, ‘Oh, my God, this is it.’”

give motivational speeches on “being better citizens and curbing violence,” which could fetch up to $20,000 per appearance. He’s already working on a five-part docuseries about his life and prison experience.

Q NHL goaltender Matiss Kivlenieks was

killed in suburban Detroit after an errant Fourth of July firework hit him in the chest.

A native of Latvia, Kivlenieks, 24, was celebrating at the home of Columbus Blue Jackets assistant coach Manny Legace, whose daughter had been married that day. Kivlenieks and others were in a hot tub shortly after 10 p.m. when a nine-shot box of mortar fireworks accidentally tipped over. As partygoers scrambled to get out of the way, a shell struck Kivlenieks in the chest, causing major damage to his heart and lungs.

Police say they don’t believe the person

who accidentally launched the fireworks had been drinking. Blue Jackets President John Davidson said the team was coping with “layers of terribleness” from the tragedy.

Q Angelina Jolie and The Weeknd attended a private concert in Los Angeles this week, fueling speculation that they might be dating after the two had dinner together earlier this month at a high-end restaurant in Santa Monica, Calif. The Weeknd, 31, a Canadian pop star who headlined this year’s Super Bowl halftime show, has sung about “lips like Angelina,” and friends say he has long had a crush on the actress. He has previously dated supermodel Bella Hadid and singer Selena Gomez. Jolie, 46, was also recently spotted with ex-husband Jonny Lee Miller, as she continues her four-year custody battle with ex-husband Brad Pitt.

Getty (3)

Mary Schmich is one of a dying breed of journalists, said Paul Farhi in The Washington Post. She recently accepted a buyout from the Chicago Tribune, where she wrote some 3,000 columns over 29 years about her adopted metropolis. Among many things, Schmich, 67, revealed the complexities of Cabrini-Green, the vast public housing complex often reduced in news reports to adjectives such as “crime-ridden” and “troubled.” Columns like hers, Jimmy Breslin’s in New York City, and Herb Caen’s in San Francisco, she said, helped “people understand the place they live, including the places they wouldn’t ordinarily go.” Some readers adored her, others occasionally loathed her, but few could deny that Schmich—who won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2012—had an impressive sense of Chicago’s heartbeat. With roughly half of newspaper jobs gone since 2008, few papers can afford to fill a columnist’s distinct role, and with that loss comes a loss of “connection,” Schmich says.

Her most memorable piece was crafted in 1997 as a mock commencement address. “Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard,” she advised. “Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft.” What will city life be like without chroniclers like Schmich? “Local papers [provided] a shared experience,” she says. “What’s happening now is very disorienting.”

Briefing

NEWS 11

What we know about Jan. 6 A House select committee will soon investigate the Capitol insurrection. What have we learned so far about that day?

Who broke into the Capitol building?

strokes and died the next day; two officers who defended the Capitol died by suicide days later.

At least 800 people smashed their way into the building from eight locations. Most had marched in a crowd of thousands that Were GOP officials involved? swarmed the Capitol after then-President At least 57 state and local Republican Trump held a “Stop the Steal” rally in officials have been identified among Washington, D.C. During that rally, Trump the rioters. Among members of repeat his false claim that the 2020 election Congress, the picture is less clear. Some was stolen and urged the crowd to march Republicans have ties to extremist on the Capitol and “fight like hell” to save groups: Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar met the country. Some marchers, court filings with members of a local chapter of reveal, had brought knives, baseball bats, the Oath Keepers in 2017. Colorado a crowbar, sharpened sticks, bear spray, Rep. Lauren Boebert has met with and tasers. Most of the more than 535 members of the Three Percenters miliparticipants now facing a variety of charges ‘Fight like hell’: Trumpists storm the Capitol. tia and tweeted the morning of Jan. 6 appear to have acted spontaneously, but at that “today is 1776”—a phrase many of the insurrectionists also least 80 have connections with organized extremist groups. The most prominent are the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, a mili- used. Some congressional Democrats claim they saw Republicans giving Trump supporters tours of the Capitol before the attack, tia that recruits followers from the military and law enforcement. in violation of pandemic restrictions—a claim Republicans deny.

At least 55 current or former members of the military and more Unnamed White House aides told reporters that Trump was gleethan a dozen current or former police officers from around the ful as he watched the riot unfold on television, and for two hours country have been charged with participating in the Capitol riot. ignored pleas to call the crowd off. He never summoned the National Guard, which the Pentagon finally sent in.

Was the attack planned?

Videos captured by participants show a core group of dozens of What has happened since? people outside the Capitol wearing riot gear, moving in single-file military-style formations, and shouting directions to the rest of the More than a dozen people have pleaded guilty to, among other charges, picketing in a Capitol building, obstruction of Congress, crowd. For weeks beforehand, there were at least 1 million social media mentions of storming the Capitol to prevent Congress from and conspiracy. Attorney General Merrick Garland has reportedly decided against prosecuting rioters for sedition, the rarely certifying Joe Biden’s electoral victory. Local and national lawused charge of trying to overthrow the government, believing it enforcement agencies were aware of these threats, and the intelwill be far easier to get convictions on more concrete violations ligence arm of the Capitol Police received a tip about “detailed of law. The most potentially serious plans to storm federal buildings.” But charges—assaulting police officers and neither the FBI nor the Department of How the rioters portray their motives obstructing an official proceeding— Homeland Security deemed those threats During court hearings and in interviews, parcarry prison sentences of up to 20 credible, and the officers stationed on the ticipants in the Capitol riot have offered various years, although first-time offenders Capitol grounds were not warned of a justifications for their actions. Some have tried are unlikely to get maximum terms. possible attempt to invade the building. to paint themselves as victims: The lawyer for

Getty

What else went wrong?

Few of the badly outnumbered frontline police officers at the barricades had crowd-control tools or riot gear. At least four were dragged into the crowd, including Metropolitan Police Officer Michael Fanone, who was beaten, kicked, and tasered while pleading for his life. “Some guys started getting a hold of my gun,” he said. “They were screaming out, ‘Kill him with his own gun.’” Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell was battered with a flagpole and had his hand sliced open. “We’re going to kill you,” he recalled rioters shouting.

“You’re a disgrace. You’re a traitor.”

It took three hours for National Guard troops to arrive, and by the end of the day, more than 150 police officers were injured—some suffering broken bones, burns, concussions, and a heart attack.

Officer Brian Sicknick, 42, suffered two

Jacob Anthony Chansley, the so-called QAnon Shaman, claims he was “brainwashed” by QAnon websites and Trump propaganda, while the lawyer representing Anthony Antonio, seen in videos shouting at officers, says he contracted “Foxitis” from Fox News. The lawyer for retired NYPD officer Thomas Webster, seen in a video attempting to gouge a Washington police officer’s eyes out, says that Webster acted in selfdefense; he also conveyed Webster’s dismay that he was being jailed alongside “inner-city” criminals. Several defendants have argued that Trump “invited” them into the Capitol, and that they were just following their president’s orders.

Many accused rioters, however, resent rightwing conspiracy theories that the Capitol attack was a false-flag operation. “Don’t you dare try to tell me that people are blaming this on antifa and BLM,” Jonathan Mellis posted on Facebook.

“We proudly take responsibility for storming the Castle.” He’s been accused of trying to stab police officers with a sharp stick.

What remains unknown?

The House committee aims to find out why it took hours for the National Guard to arrive, what role militias played, why police were so unprepared, what Trump did during the riot, and whether any Republicans were in contact with the rioters.

Far-right activist Ali Alexander said he and Reps. Gosar, Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), and Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) “schemed up” a plan to put “maximum pressure on Congress” not to certify Biden’s victory, but this claim remains unconfirmed. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and most other Republicans have opposed any investigation into Jan. 6, which frustrates those directly affected.

“Some things supersede politics,” said Officer Fanone. “This is about right and wrong.”

THE WEEK July 23, 2021

The message of Babbitt’s martyrdom Jonathan Chait

NYMag.com

A coming cultural backlash Peggy Noonan

The Wall Street Journal

Funding the tax police Catherine Rampell

The Washington Post

Viewpoint

Best columns: The U.S. The Trump right’s portrayal of Ashli Babbitt as an innocent “martyr” is sending a “chilling message” about the Jan. 6 insurrection, said Jonathan Chait. Babbitt, an Air Force veteran, had become radicalized by online conspiracy theories such as QAnon and was in the forefront of Trump supporters who assaulted the Capitol. Ignoring shouted warnings by police, Babbitt was shot as she tried to enter the House chamber through a broken window. In rallies and interviews, Donald Trump is now promoting the idea that Babbitt was “an innocent, wonderful, incredible woman” who was executed by a rogue cop affiliated with the Democrats for “no reason.” This marks an important turning point. In the immediate aftermath of the riot, nearly all Republicans condemned the mob’s actions and criticized Trump for inciting the assault. But over six months, Trump has intimidated the GOP into describing the riot as a “regrettable episode” that bears no further investigation or discussion. Now, by embracing Babbitt as an admirable martyr, Trump is insisting that cowed Republicans adopt an even more radical narrative: “The insurrection was good,” the culmination of “a glorious uprising” of patriots. To save our country, in other words, violent coups are entirely justified.

The Left is “overplaying its hand” on social issues, said Peggy Noonan, and this extremism may lead to Republican gains in 2022 and 2024. It may still be “conventional wisdom on the Left and in the mainstream media that it is conservatives who are culture warmongers,” but the numbers tell a different story. In a telling blog post last week, liberal journalist Kevin Drum looked at data about Americans’ views on such hot-button topics as immigration, abortion, and LGBTQ rights. He found that Republicans have moved slightly to the right on these issues since 2000, while Democrats have moved much further to the left. On abortion, for example, the percentage of Republicans who advocate a total ban has risen only a couple of points, while 20 percent more Democrats favor no restrictions at all. Because America’s corporate and academic institutions are largely embracing “woke” views, the Left acts as if it’s “got everyone on the run.” But Drum warns that the leftward shift among college-educated white progressives is already alienating many moderate Black, Hispanic, and independent voters, who favor a sensible middle ground on policing, immigration, abortion, taxation rates, and other issues. “A backlash” is coming.

It’s time to stop defunding the tax police, said Catherine Rampell. Paying taxes is a “civic duty,” but scofflaws, frauds, and cheaters—including major corporations—are getting away with denying the federal government an estimated $554 billion a year in owed taxes. Republicans have deliberately starved the IRS of resources it needs to detect fraud, cutting its budget by 20 percent in inflation-adjusted terms. As a result, audit rates of large corporations have plummeted by nearly two-thirds since 2012. This is enormously counterproductive: For each dollar the IRS spends on enforcement, it “generates several dollars in return.” Heightened tax compliance keeps tax rates down for honest Americans. When a corporate executive hides income and benefits, taxpayers like you pay for “his wife’s Mercedes, his holiday tips, his grandkids’ tuition,” and his free luxury apartment. Unfortunately, the GOP’s “pseudointellectual brain trust,” including billionaire Robert Mercer and Trump ally Stephen Moore, is lobbying against President Biden’s proposal to increase funding to the IRS by $80 billion over the next decade, to bring back $700 billion in revenues. We need more tax cops on the beat, so that tax law doesn’t apply only to “the little people.”

“Journalists and activists with passionate views are often driven to find the most ruthless and most poisonous appellations for those they wish to defeat or demonize. But even in the heat of rhetorical battle, casual Holocaust and Hitler analogies are at least as odious as casual rape analogies and casual slavery analogies. They are disrespectful and hurtful and indecent. To my mind, rhetoric that evokes one of the ghastliest genocides in human history should be used only in reference to monstrous crimes committed on a shattering scale.”

Jeff Jacoby in BostonGlobe.com THE WEEK July 23, 2021

It must be true...

I read it in the tabloids Q A New Zealand woman

who suffered chronic sinus pain was shocked to discover that a tiddlywink had been lodged in her nose for 37 years. Mary McCarthy spent decades feeling discomfort and finally sought out a doctor when a Covid swab test worsened the pain.

Under his questioning, she remembered putting a tiddlywink in her nose as a child, accidentally inhaling it.

“I remember being terrified, thinking, where has it gone,” she said. Afraid to tell her mother, she put the accident out of her mind. “I always had difficulties breathing through my nose,” McCarthy said after the yellow disc was removed, “but never gave it much thought.”

Q A team of 30 artists

joined forces to build the world’s biggestever sandcastle in the Danish seaside town of Blokhus. The sculptors used more than 5,000 tons of sand reinforced with clay to construct the intricately designed pyramid, which stands just under 70 feet tall.

Chief artist Wilfred Stijger of the Netherlands said he wanted the structure, which is topped with a coronavirus wearing a crown, to represent the way the coronavirus “is ruling our world, and not allowing us to do what we want to do.”

Q It’s billed as the perfect

gift for the “gassy people in your life”: a fart vacuum that “reduces the stench of flatulence.” The FartVac is a handoperated pump with a nozzle that fits beneath your pants, where it claims to filter “fart gas” using activated carbon technology. The device can be worn throughout the day or operated at short notice as the need arises. “You can now fart without shame,” the manufacturer says. “No more pain while fighting nature and holding in gas.”

Getty

12 NEWS

On it.

Ending racial injustice requires all of us to work together and take real action.

What can you do to help?

Educate yourself about the history of American racism, privilege and what it means to be anti-racist. Educate yourself about the history of American racism, privilege and what it means to be anti-racist.

Commit to actions that challenge injustice and make everyone feel like they belong, such as challenging biased or racist language when you hear it.

Vote in national and local elections to ensure your LSLJ[LK V JPHSZ ZOHYL `V\Y ]PZPVU VM W\ISPJ ZHML[` Donate to organizations, campaigns and initiatives who are committed to racial justice.

Let’s come together to take action against racism HUK ÄNO[ MVY YHJPHS Q\Z[PJL MVY [OL )SHJR JVTT\UP[` =PZP[ SV]LOHZUVSHILSZ JVT ÄNO[MVYMYLLKVT

14 NEWS POLAND

Americans will fight for a free press Adam Grzeszak

Polityka

UNITED KINGDOM

London is where Putin is vulnerable Tom Newton Dunn

The Times

Best columns: Europe Having ground much of Poland’s independent print media under its boot, the ruling Law and Justice party now has its eyes on TV, said Adam Grzeszak. Since taking power in 2015, the nationalist Law and Justice has been relentless in its pursuit of newspapers and news sites that criticize its anti-democratic ways. It “uses the methods of Vito Corleone from The Godfather”: One enemy might be bought out, another bribed, another intimidated. If those fail, there is always brute force— the power of the state. That’s the tactic Law and Justice is using now against TVN, the nation’s largest independent news network, which is up for

a license renewal. TVN is owned by the U.S. firm Discovery Inc., so the government is trying to kill the station with a bill to ban non-European ownership of Polish media. But taking on the Americans could be a costly mistake. “Media freedom is almost a religious matter for Americans,” and TVN management has the backing of the U.S. government. Washington, of course, tends to get what it wants from Warsaw. When Poland tried to claw back the Polish power utility PKP Energetyka from U.S. investment firm CVC capital, then–President Trump intervened, and Warsaw lost. We’ll soon see whether President Biden is “similarly effective.”

Britain can make Vladimir Putin change “his malevolent ways,” said Tom Newton Dunn. The Russian president lives in constant fear of being toppled by Western-backed forces, and so he keeps the U.S. and U.K. permanently distracted by sowing mayhem abroad—a proxy war in Syria, territorial aggression in Ukraine, cyberattacks everywhere.

But Putin’s power depends on the wealth of his oligarchs, and they depend on London for their finances. The Kremlin uses the City of London to raise sovereign debt by selling bonds, and oligarchs use our financial institutions to “launder their often ill-gotten riches.” Some $140 billion in dirty money flows through the British capital every single year,

“the bulk of it linked to Russian nationals.” Russians have also pumped money into prime London real estate, buying mansions and penthouses across the city. Igor Shuvalov, Russia’s former first deputy prime minister, owns two apartments in Whitehall Court, “a 19th-century riverside landmark from where he could literally throw a stone through the Ministry of Defense’s windows.” Squeeze Russian assets in London and cut off Putin’s ability to raise debt, and his power will evaporate. U.S. President Joe Biden recognizes that weakness, which is why he ordered crippling restrictions on Russian debt and froze oligarchs’ assets following the Solar Winds hack. Will the U.K. follow his lead?

dealing cocaine and heroin, shipping The Dutch are in shock after an assassinatheir wares across Europe via Dutch tion attempt on our best-known journalports. With so much money at stake, ist, said Wil Thijssen in De Volkskrant “violent gang disputes” have erupted (Netherlands). Peter Rudolf de Vries, and “spilled over to affect reporters 64, had just left a TV studio in central and the public.” The Nabil B. case Amsterdam last week when he was shot had already seen two murders: Nabil’s five times—including once to the head. brother in 2018 and his attorney the He is now fighting for his life in the following year. Dutch police complain hospital. The dashing host of a former that their country is becoming “a prime-time investigative reporting show, narco-state.” The Netherlands should de Vries is synonymous with the search take a lesson from Italy, said Maarten for truth and justice. He tracked down van Aalderen in De Telegraaf (Nethone of the crooks who kidnapped beer erlands). It’s been decades since the magnate Freddy Heineken in 1983 and Police at the site of de Vries’ shooting Mafia murdered a politician, judge, has advised witnesses in numerous trior journalist there. Why? Because Italy went after murderous als. In recent years, de Vries has been a confidant of Nabil B., a mafiosi with “exceptional harshness,” locking them away for former member of a Dutch-Moroccan drug gang who is testifylife in monitored cells with just one hour a month of visitation ing against his old associates. Many believe that gang is behind behind glass. Faced with losing their assets and their freedom, the shooting. Two suspects were quickly arrested for the hit: mobsters changed tactics and opted for less bloodshed.

Kamil Pawel E., a 35-year-old Polish national who allegedly drove the getaway car, and Delano Geerman, 21, a Dutch rapper We can’t police our way out of this, said Marian Husken in NRC allegedly paid $175,000 to pull the trigger. De Vries’ fans have placed 4,000 white roses in an Amsterdam square, and they want Handelsblad (Netherlands). We effectively abandoned the “policy of tolerance” in the late 1980s and began arresting drug lords. to know: “Why didn’t the state protect him?”

Others soon took their place, “because where there is demand, there will be supply.” Rather than continuing a failed “war on The growing power of drug gangs is the “dark, dangerous side drugs,” we need to look at total legalization and regulation. That of Dutch tolerance,” said Ben Coates in Politico.eu (Belgium). doesn’t mean allowing a free-for-all drug orgy: We should simulMarijuana is technically illegal in the Netherlands, but since the taneously pour money into programs to treat addiction. It was a 1970s authorities have tolerated its sale and use, “including in public health campaign that won the fight against Big Tobacco, the famous Amsterdam ‘coffee shops’ where people consume after all, and now few Dutch smoke. We’ve tried everything else— a lot more than just coffee.” As drug tourism to Amsterdam why not “give the doctor precedence over the policeman”? boomed, criminal gangs took over the weed cafés and began THE WEEK July 23, 2021

Reuters

Netherlands: Narco-terrorism on the streets of Amsterdam

Best columns: International

NEWS 15

Cuba: Mass protests and a growing economic crisis homegrown uprising, and it has terriCubans are crying out for democracy, fied the authorities. Díaz-Canel is the said José Meléndez in El Universal first non-Castro to lead the country (Mexico). In an unprecedented dissince the 1959 revolution, and he has play of anger and frustration, thoulittle popular support. Like any weak sands of people joined spontaneous leader, he resorted to violence. “The anti-government protests across the order to fight has been given,” he said island nation this week. “Down with at the end of a televised speech. “Into communism!” they cried in Santiago the street, revolutionaries!” de Cuba, the cradle of the revolution and the final resting place of authoriSecurity forces and pro-government tarian leader Fidel Castro. “Freedom!” thugs were quickly unleashed on the they demanded in Pinar del Río. “End protesters, said dissident Cuban news the dictatorship!” shouted a crowd in site 14YMedio.com. At least 140 the capital, Havana. The spark that set Police arrest a protester in Havana.

Cubans are now missing and possibly off this explosion of protest is an ecoin detention; exact numbers are hard to come by because “the nomic crisis with overlapping causes: the collapse of the tourist industry amid the pandemic, a surge in Covid cases, the ongoing internet and telephone lines are cut off.” Activists struggled to U.S. embargo, and a recent change in currency policy. Some pro- get reports to the outside world of the beatings they witnessed.

Some said the police set attack dogs on civilians. The day after testers chanted “My children are starving,” while others looted the hard-currency stores where the lucky few with access to dol- the protests, Havana was like a ghost town, patrolled by a heavy lars can buy scarce goods. But the overarching cry was for politi- police presence. “The repression is as unprecedented as the protest itself,” said one Havana priest. Both the U.S. and the Cuban cal freedom: an end to the Communist regime’s one-party rule and its repression of the press and dissent. Patriotic Cubans have authorities are to blame for this convulsion, said Joven Cuba .com (Cuba). The “current health, economic, and political crisis suffered “with endless patience” for decades, but on July 11, a that the country is going through” is largely the fault of a Cuban date that marks a new revolution, “that patience ran out.” government that has failed to “ensure everyone’s rights.” Couple President Miguel Díaz-Canel was quick to blame the Americans, that with the “inhumane attitude of the U.S. government,” which continues to enforce a suffocating economic embargo, and even said Carlos Manuel Álvarez in El País (Spain). U.S. President limits the remittances that Cubans abroad can send home to their Joe Biden did signal his support for the Cuban people, saying the protesters were “bravely asserting fundamental and universal poor families. What we need now is dialogue among Cubans of rights.” And Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, son of a Cuban exile, all political persuasions, “the opposition and the government,” to has “stupidly called for U.S. intervention.” But this is an entirely create a “prosperous, democratic, and plural society.”

CHINA

How Xi sounds just like Hitler Andrew Bolt

Herald Sun (Australia)

SOUTH AFRICA

Even a president must submit to the courts Natasha Marrian

Getty

Financial Mail

Well, that was terrifying, said Andrew Bolt. The speech that Chinese President Xi Jinping just delivered in Beijing for the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party was an eerie echo of a 1937 speech by Adolf Hitler. Xi hit the same notes, in the same order, as if working from the same aggressive and dictatorial template. It’s all there: “The paranoia. The fake appeals for peace, and gory threats of blood.” Xi told of China’s humiliations and colonization by foreign forces, as Hitler complained about the Allies’ punishment of Germany after World War I. Both dictators compared their domestic critics to a virus and praised their

growing militaries. Both threatened any potential adversary. “The Chinese people will never allow foreign forces to bully, oppress, or enslave us,” Xi thundered. “Whoever nurses delusions of doing that will crack their heads and spill blood on the Great Wall of steel built from the flesh and blood of 1.4 billion Chinese people.” Message received.

The only real difference is that Xi telegraphs his intent more clearly. While Hitler kept his coming invasion of Poland secret, Xi brazenly declared his plan to take over democratic Taiwan in what he calls a historic mission of reunification. “Compare the two speeches—and tremble for tomorrow.”

Former South African President Jacob Zuma is finally putting on those “orange overalls,” said Natasha Marrian. In a landmark ruling, the Constitutional Court sentenced him to 15 months in prison for contempt of court, for failing to appear before a commission investigating corruption during his nine years in office. Zuma actually plotted to defy that sentence too, refusing for a full week to present himself to police before finally giving up when it became clear that his African National Congress party could no longer back him. How ironic that contempt was the least of the many charges he faces: The larger trials include one over alleged

bribes from a French arms company as well as the grand scandal of “state capture,” in which he is alleged to have allowed the Gupta brothers, Indianborn billionaire businessmen, to name cronies to government ministries. In sentencing Zuma, acting Chief Justice Sisi Khampepe referred to founding father Nelson Mandela’s declaration in establishing the court, that it should act “not only against direct assault on the principles of the constitution, but against insidious corrosion.” Such “insidious corrosion was the leitmotif of the Zuma presidency.”

Zuma flouted every ethic and norm, but in the end he could not flout the authority of the court.

THE WEEK July 23, 2021

Talking points

Noted

Billionaires in space: What are they achieving?

Q Of the 610,000 Americans who’ve died of Covid, just 331—or 0.05 percent— were under the age of 18. In an average year, about 2,000 American kids and teenagers die in car crashes, and 1,000 die of drowning.

to demonstrate the safety “The space race used to be of Virgin Galactic’s vehicle. between superpowers,” said That is no small thing.”

Chandra Steele in NBCNews Soon, people willing to .com. “Now it’s between the spend $250,000 will be able super-rich.” British billionaire to repeat Branson’s experiRichard Branson fired the ence, said Michael Greshko starting gun this week, joining in NationalGeographic.com. five Virgin Galactic employees And ticket prices will drop on a rocket that ascended over time, bringing us closer 53.5 miles above New Mexico to the dream of “democratizto the edge of space, giving Branson floats in zero gravity. ing space.” passengers several minutes of weightlessness. “Honestly, nothing could prepare you for the view of Earth from space,” said Bran- It’s an empty dream, said Jacob Silverman in NewRepublic.com. The superwealthy may enjoy son, 70. He leapfrogged ahead of Amazon chaira chance to take the world’s most expensive Insman Jeff Bezos, who will achieve his “boyhood dream” next week by traveling to suborbital space tagram photos, but we’ve already discovered that radiation and low gravity damage the body and for 11 minutes aboard his Blue Origin shuttle. make sustained human presence in space unlikely Elon Musk’s SpaceX company, meanwhile, will for generations, “if ever.” And while megacharge a lucky few $55 million apiece for a ride billionaires squander fortunes on their childhood on its Dragon capsule and an eight-day stay on fantasies, Earthlings are struggling to meet the the International Space Station. Space travel once fostered scientific curiosity and national pride, but urgent issues of climate change, health care, housing, and a growing, grotesque wealth gap. The billionaires using their astronomical wealth “to new space race is “scientifically useless”—a mere leave the planet” isn’t exactly inspirational. repeat of what NASA achieved 60 years ago, said Michael Hiltzik in the Los Angeles Times. The It’s easy to scoff at these “boys and their toys,” real future of space is robotic exploration, like said Eric Berger in ArsTechnica.com. But Bezos, Branson, and Musk have committed two decades NASA’s missions to Mars, which is vastly cheaper and more practical. Establishing colonies on other of work and billions of their personal fortunes worlds is “the dream of schoolchildren, and it’s to open “space tourism” to private citizens. time that the billionaires grew up.”

Branson “put his billion-dollar ass on the line

New York magazine

Q One in five TV news directors surveyed said their crews had been attacked over the past year, and 86 percent said they’d added security precautions due to physical and verbal hostility toward news crews. “It’s the expected consequence of [Donald Trump] calling the media ‘the enemy of the people,’” said Syracuse University communications professor Bob Papper, who conducted the survey.

The Washington Post

Q Last month was by far the hottest June in the U.S. in the 127 years of record keeping, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

California had a statewide average 6.8 degrees above normal, while during a prolonged heat wave in the Pacific Northwest, temperatures soared 40 degrees above average.

NBCNews.com

Q Two-thirds of churches in America delivered at least one overtly political sermon or message in the last two months before the 2020 election, a recent Pew Research Center analysis found. In evangelical churches, 48 percent of sermons that referred to the election also mentioned specific political issues or candidates, including pleas to “pray for our president.”

Axios.com THE WEEK July 23, 2021

Cybercrime: Will Biden punish Putin?

Joe Biden has given Vladimir Putin another “clear ultimatum” after two Russia-linked cyberattacks, said Dmitri Alperovitch and Matthew Rojansky in The Washington Post. Just before the July 4 weekend, hundreds of American businesses were hit by a massive ransomware attack carried out

by Russian cybercriminals. Around the same time, Russia’s SVR intelligence agency allegedly hacked a contractor for the Republican National Committee. These attacks follow a series of “major cyberbreaches,” including ransomware attacks on the Colonial gas pipeline and the meat processor JBS, that are testing Biden’s “evolving approach of tough engagement” with Russia. Last week, Biden called Putin directly to demand that he stop the attacks. Now he must follow through with painful new sanctions on Russian oil and gas companies, or Putin may conclude “Biden is bluffing.”

Biden has talked tough, but will he actually “enforce his own red lines?” asked The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. In his recent summit with Putin, the president warned the Russian autocrat that the U.S. will retaliate “with cyber” if Russian hackers attack 16 critical infrastructure areas. If Biden fails to follow through after these latest brazen attacks, “it will be open season on

America’s digital infrastructure.” An emboldened Russia could paralyze U.S. businesses and shut down our electrical grid, said Martin Schram in the Chicago Tribune. Biden must tell Putin that America and its democratic allies are prepared to declare him “Global Cyberenemy No. 1” and refuse to deal with Russia or its companies at all.

“Putin will get it: Russia’s global trade and global capital sources would suddenly shut down.”

Good luck playing that card, said Eric Geller in Politico.com. Europe “relies overwhelmingly on energy imports from Russia,” and its leaders will resist withdrawing from trade deals. Biden could push to regulate cryptocurrency exchanges to “block ransom payments and starve out the hackers,” but this may just drive cybercriminals to even more anonymized currencies. Offensive U.S. cyberattacks on Russia could lead to even more aggressive attacks on America’s infrastructure. Biden’s options are “limited, challenging, and fraught with peril.” Putin, a former Soviet KGB agent, is determined to prove that Russia is America’s equal, said Leon Aron in TheDispatch .com. He believes respect can be achieved only through aggression and fear. “Welcome to the new Cold War.”

Reuters, Getty

16 NEWS

Talking points Hunter Biden: Selling his art to secret buyers tion,” while Scott Indrisek, “The Biden administration the former editor-in-chief of has gone out of its way to Modern Painters magazine, contrast its behavior with said the works demonstrated that of the previous admin“a hotel art aesthetic.” istration,” said John Fund in Clearly, no one would care NationalReview.com. So why about these paintings if the has it “hatched an elaborate artist’s father “were not the Rube Goldberg scheme” to most powerful man on the smooth the path for Hunter planet.” You’d think Hunter Biden’s career change from would stay away from milkhighly paid consultant to The artist with some of his work ing his father’s name after foreign businesses to highly paid artist? A New York City gallery is preparing his infamous $50,000-a-month job with a Ukrainian gas company, said Kris Kolesnik in TheHill to launch Hunter’s first solo exhibition in Octo.com. Now, with the White House’s explicit ber, and last week the White House announced guidelines for sales of any of the 15 works. It has thumbs-up, he has entered the art market, which instructed the gallery’s owner to keep the process a Senate report last year called a corrupt haven for Russian oligarchs seeking to elude internaanonymous—even to Hunter—and reject any tional sanctions. “Imagine the endless conspiracy bids that seem suspicious or go above the asking possibilities.” prices, which reportedly range from $75,000 to $500,000. Press Secretary Jen Psaki’s “Orwellian” defense of the secretive auction is that it provides Hunter Biden isn’t the first presidential relative to trade on the family name, said Karen Tumulty “a level of protection and transparency,” said in The Washington Post, and the Trump children Miranda Devine in the New York Post. “Indeed. “set a new standard for shamelessness.” Still, a So much transparency that no one is allowed to gallery owner’s promise to keep potential buyers know anything.” of Hunter’s art anonymous hardly stops corporate or foreign powers from trying to curry favor.

Art critics have reacted to Hunter’s blown-ink The buyers could out themselves to Hunter or Joe abstractions with “a mixture of curiosity and derision,” said Robin Abcarian in the Los Angeles Biden afterward. If these shady sales are going to Times. Jerry Saltz of New York magazine deemed take place, let them be conducted with real transparency, “the more of it, the better.” them “generic post-zombie formalism illustra-

Elizabeth Weinberg/The New York Times/Redux

J.D. Vance: A Senate hopeful’s Trump flip-flop Best-selling author J.D. Vance was once a fierce critic of Donald Trump—but now that he’s running for a GOP Senate seat in Ohio, he’s had an awakening, said Molly Ball in Time.com. Vance is the author of the 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, which “traced his rise from troubled Appalachian roots” to Yale Law School grad and provided a widely praised, insider’s “diagnosis of rural white Americans’ disillusionment.” At the time, he lambasted then-candidate Trump, calling him “unfit” and “reprehensible,” with policies ranging “from immoral to absurd.” But now that he’s joined a crowded field jockeying to replace outgoing GOP Sen. Rob Portman, Vance has deleted critical tweets, journeyed to Mar-a-Lago to kiss Trump’s ring, and begged forgiveness for “being wrong about the guy.” His convenient conversion includes a new persona as a “right-wing provocateur” modeled on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson.

Vance hasn’t just flip-flopped on Trump, said Greg Sargent in The Washington Post. In groveling to the MAGA base, he’s embraced the very “demagoguery” he once rejected as “immoral”— Trump’s blaming of Hispanic immigrants for “struggling Americans’ problems” while doing nothing to fix them. Now he calls Trump’s border

shutdown “one of the smartest immigration policies of the last 30 years.” It’s the latest sad example “of how Trump has co-opted or corrupted an entire generation” of young conservatives, said Matt Lewis in TheDailyBeast.com. Vance’s history and thoughtful perspective could have been a credit to a sane Republican Party. But he’s calculated that even in a state that’s elected many moderate Republicans like Portman and Gov. Mike DeWine, he can win only by going full MAGA. So now he’s mocking mask wearing, hedging on whether Biden rightfully won, and calling New York City a “disgusting and violent” hellhole.

Vance is being pilloried because he scares “elites” on both the Right and Left, said Henry Olsen in The Washington Post. He’s a powerful voice for the forgotten working class who says that “the powerful have moral and social obligations to other Americans that transcend the pure pursuit of profit.” That horrifies establishment conservatives who think Trump populism “was a mirage” and pine for a return to country-club, supply-side Republicanism. The Left hates Vance because he doesn’t view big government as the solution.

They’re both rooting for Vance to fail, “because they know their goose is cooked if he wins.”

NEWS 17 Wit & Wisdom “The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.”

George Eliot, quoted in INews.co.uk

“To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.”

Anthony Burgess, quoted in PasteMagazine.com

“Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.”

Author Donna Tartt, quoted in the San Francisco Examiner

“Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.”

Salvador Dalí, quoted in TheBrowser.com

“If I insist on giving you my truth, and never stop to receive your truth in return, there can be no truth between us.”

Trappist monk Thomas Merton, quoted in The Washington Post

“The main dangers in this life are the people who want to change everything—or nothing.”

British-American lawmaker Nancy Astor, quoted in Forbes.com

“Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what’s for lunch.”

Orson Welles, quoted in GoodReads.com

Poll watch Q 59.2% of Americans now say they are “thriving,” the highest number in 13 years. When Covid infections were soaring and restrictions were in full swing in April 2020, only 46.4% said they were thriving. 69% now rate their satisfaction levels at 7 or higher on a scale from 1 to 10, and only 38% say they are worrying a lot, down from 58% in March 2020.

Gallup

THE WEEK July 23, 2021

18 NEWS

THE WEEK July 23, 2021

Pick of the week’s cartoons

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

Pick of the week’s cartoons

NEWS 19

THE WEEK July 23, 2021

20 NEWS

Technology

Power play: China gives tech tycoons a short leash munist Party’s founding.” In some ways, “China’s crackdown on Big Tech just keeps China’s actions “aren’t radically different growing,” said Laura He in CNN.com. Last from equally aggressive measures conweek, just days after Didi, China’s version templated by” lawmakers in the U.S. and of Uber, raised $4.4 billion in its debut on European Union, said Zachary Karabell in the New York Stock Exchange, the Chinese Time.com. This is part of a power struggle government banned the company’s flagship “between powerful tech companies and ride-hailing app from Chinese app stores. established governments that are not preSoon after, it followed up by banning 25 pared to cede control to private actors that more Didi apps and proposing that “any often arrogantly claim they serve a higher company with data on more than 1 milcalling.” The difference is that unlike their lion users” must seek government approval Chinese counterparts, Western authorities before listing its shares overseas. China’s Didi: Punished days after its IPO “can’t exactly detain Mark Zuckerberg for regulators say they want tech companies vague, sweeping, and largely unspecified violations.” to “move from the stage of ‘barbaric growth’ to one of ‘orderly development under the rule of law,’” said Keith Zhai and Frances Yoon in The Wall Street Journal. To ensure that orderly develop- Actually, this is very different from what’s happening in the West, said The Economist. It’s a “systemic attack on tech” by the Comment, they’re asserting mastery over every part of the tech indusmunist Party. “China’s tech industry has been one of the most try. Ant Group, a financial giant, and ByteDance, owner of the social media sensation TikTok, have shelved IPO plans under gov- dynamic areas of the global economy in the past decade,” led ernment pressure. China is making a very public display of power, by Didi, Alibaba, Tencent, and other makers of China’s “super apps.” Their rise has been made possible by foreign capital, openly advertising the prospect of further action as a “Sword of Western-educated talent, and “a flow of ideas across borders.”

Damocles dangling over the heads of China’s tech giants.”

But China’s “paranoid rulers” are signaling that powerful tech firms’ free rein is over and they “must defer to the Communist “Imagine the reaction of Washington’s China hawks if the likes Party.” One question about China has always been whether “it of Twitter and Amazon were only listed in Shanghai,” said Tom Mitchell in the Financial Times. That’s essentially what Didi was can combine thuggish, autocratic politics with the predictable rules and property rights that entrepreneurs and capital markets doing when it spurned Hong Kong to list in New York “on the need to survive.” The war on China’s tech industry suggests not. eve of celebrations marking the centennial of the Chinese Com-

Bytes: What’s new in tech AI fails a job-interview test

Researchers are teaching robots how to collaborate with humans by building Ikea furniture, said Matt Simon in Wired. It’s not really “about developing highly specialized robots that come to your house and help you build bookcases”— useful though that may be. Rather, researchers have found “that building Ikea furniture is actually a great way to teach robots how to handle the chaos of the real world.” A group of researchers at the University of Southern California recently trained a robotic arm to watch people constructing Ikea furniture, learn the patterns, and hand over the part a builder will need next. The goal is to let robots and humans work together on higher-stakes tasks, such as keeping an auto assembly line running.

THE WEEK July 23, 2021

Artificial intelligence–powered interview software still leaves a lot to be desired, said Sheridan Wall and Hilke Schellmann in MIT Technology Review. We tested software from two firms, MyInterview and Curious Thing, that help employers sift through applications.

We uploaded a fake job posting for an office administrator/researcher role on both platforms. One of us “then applied for the position and completed interviews for the role” on the sites. On Curious Thing, she “responded to each interview question by reading the Wikipedia entry for psychometrics in German,” yet the software awarded her 6 out of 9 for English competency. A repeat of the same experiment on MyInterview “put her in the top half of all applicants.” MyInterview said that the software doesn’t actually look for content; instead, the “algorithm pulled personality traits” from our applicant’s voice.

A burner phone from the FBI Phones developed and sold by the FBI to track criminals are now showing up for sale online, said Joseph Cox in Vice.com. At first glance, the phone looks like a normal “Google Pixel 4a with some common apps: Tinder, Instagram, Facebook, Netflix, and even Candy

Crush.” But none of those apps work. Instead of Google’s Android operating system, the phone runs on something called “ArcaneOS.” Hidden in the calculator app is “a concealed messaging app called Anom,” through which criminals “believed they could communicate securely.” Little did they know that an international group of law enforcement agencies had created ArcaneOS and was monitoring those messages. Now the phones appear to be circulating beyond the criminal underworld. We obtained ours from someone in Australia who had bought it from an online classifieds site.

Murdoch’s Google competitor folds A “conservative friendly” news aggregator site founded by Rupert Murdoch shut down after less than 18 months, said Jim Salter in Ars Technica.com. Operated by Murdoch’s News Corp., the company behind Fox News, the New York Post, and The Wall Street Journal, Knewz claimed to be “free of the bias bubbles and vacuous verticals.” Like Google News, it “scraped content from hundreds of sources, with human editors highlighting a selection of headlines.” But a 2020 study found that the vast majority of those headlines were from the New York Post, along with Fox News and the Daily Mail (U.K.).

Newscom

Innovation of the week

Health & Science

NEWS 21

‘Dragon man’ skull prompts evolution rethink The story of Homo sapiens’ evolution may have been rewritten by the discovery in China of a large skull that some researchers suspect belongs to an entirely new species of ancient human. The perfectly preserved cranium was first unearthed in 1933 by a laborer in the northern Chinese city of Harbin. Rather than see the find fall into the hands of the country’s Japanese occupiers, the laborer wrapped it up and hid it in a well, reports The Guardian (U.K.).

It remained there until 2018, when the man—who may have been ashamed of having worked for the Japanese—told his grandson his secret. A Chinese-led team of researchers now reports that the skull

Bereavement can be a killer.

Chuang Zhao, Xijun Ni, Getty Images, Getty Images/iStockphoto

Dying of a broken heart It’s well established that people really can die from a broken heart. Now researchers have identified two molecules that play a key role in the development of “broken heart syndrome,” reports The Times (U.K.).

Takotsubo syndrome, as it is properly known, occurs when a physical or emotional shock, such as a bereavement, causes a spike in adrenaline. This triggers a loss of movement in part of the heart wall, leading to acute heart failure. Mainly seen in older women, it affects at least 50,000 Americans a year. The two molecules—microRNAs named -16 and -26a—had often been seen in the blood of Takotsubo patients, but it wasn’t clear if they played a role in the condition. To find out, researchers at Imperial College London exposed heart cells to the microRNAs and looked at how they affected the cells’ sensitivity to adrenaline. The results showed the molecules made the cells more sensitive, meaning that they required less adrenaline to create Takotsubo-like changes.

As these molecules are linked to depression, anxiety, and stress, the finding suggests that people who have experienced prior stress may be more susceptible to dying from a sudden shock. Further research is needed “to determine if drugs that block these microRNAs could be the key to avoiding broken hearts,” says Professor Metin Avkiran of the British Heart Foundation.

is at least 146,000 years old and belonged to a male in his early 50s who had a brain about as large as that of a modern human.

He had facial features of earlier hominids, such as a broad nose and a low brow, combined with others more typical of Homo sapiens, including delicate cheekbones. The researchers say the skull is distinct enough to make it a new species, which they have named Homo longi, after the Chinese word for dragon, and think this branch of the human family tree could be more closely related to us than Neanderthals are. Other experts dispute the idea of a new lineage and say dragon man may be something equally exciting: a Denisovan, a mysterious

human ancestor from Asia mainly known from DNA. Either way, says co-author Chris Stringer from the Natural History Museum in London, this is “one of the most important finds of the past 50 years.”

Colon cancer and sugary drinks

A truly colossal comet

Researchers have a new theory for why colorectal cancers are rising in younger adults, reports FoxNews.com—sugarsweetened drinks. Rates of these cancers in people under 50 have rocketed: Those born around 1990 have twice the risk for colon cancer and four times the risk for rectal cancer as those born 40 years earlier. To examine whether our increased consumption of sugary drinks may be a factor, researchers looked at data from 94,464 female registered nurses who took part in a health study from 1991 to 2015. They found that the women who consumed less than one weekly 8 oz serving of soft drinks, sports drinks, or sweetened teas had half the relative risk of developing colorectal cancer compared with those who averaged two or more servings.

Each additional sugary drink equated to a 16 percent increase in risk. One possible factor is weight gain from the sugary drinks.

“Metabolic problems, such as insulin resistance, may play an important role in the development of this cancer in younger adults,” says senior author Yin Cao.

Astronomers have identified what appears to be the largest comet ever seen. Named C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein) after its discoverers—University of Pennsylvania professors Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein—the comet is between 62 and 125 miles long. That’s about five times the size of Manhattan, and at least double the size of the previous largest known comet, Hale-Bopp. “[It’s] certainly the largest comet we’ve seen in the modern astronomical era,” Alan Fitzsimmons, of Queen’s University Belfast, tells ScientificAmerican.com. “We’ve had tremendously bright comets over recorded history, but that was before the invention of the telescope.” Currently inside Neptune’s orbit, the rocky, ice-covered object will travel to within a billion miles of the sun in 2031. The comet will shine brighter and brighter in the night sky as its ice melts, to the point where anyone with a telescope should be able to spot it. When the comet fades from view, it won’t be visible for another 3 million years, when it completes another orbit of the sun.

The skull and an artist’s impression of its owner

males were evolving to have less melanin in their wing patterns. This helps them Climate change is making keep cool—but makes it harder for male dragonit harder for females flies to get lucky, accordto recognize them. The ing to a new study. Many researchers fear that as male dragonflies have global temperatures conornamental black patterns tinue to rise, this problem on their wings to help will only worsen. “Males them attract female memand females of these bers of their species. But Those black patterns absorb heat. dragonfly species are this dark pigmentation going to shift in pretty absorbs more of the sun’s heat and can different ways as the climate changes,” raise the insect’s body temperature by up lead author Michael Moore, from to 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit. For the study, Washington University in St. Louis, tells researchers cross-referenced a database CNN.com. “These changes are going to of more than 300 species with the wing happen likely on a much faster timescale colors of nearly 3,000 individual dragonthan the evolutionary changes in these flies. They found that in hotter areas, the species have ever occurred before.”

Dragonflies losing their ‘bling’

THE WEEK July 23, 2021

ARTS Review of reviews: Books rebranded the orange roughy. Mining for rare metals is destroying other precious habitat and kicking up sediments that could release great volumes of sequestered carbon and tip the planet into a climate disaster. It’s tragic that we could cause so much harm to the deep sea just as we are beginning to understand it, but this “luminously written” book might have arrived just in time to spread a message we urgently need.

Book of the week The Brilliant Abyss: Exploring the Majestic Hidden Life of the Deep Ocean, and the Looming Threat That Imperils It

by Helen Scales (Atlantic Monthly Press, $27)

“Life is strange, but nowhere on Earth is it stranger than in the abyss, the deepest part of the ocean,” said Laurence Marschall in Natural History magazine. Though we rarely think about them, the vast seabed and all the water that lies below the reach of sunlight comprise 95 percent of the planet’s habitat, and the creatures we are finding there seem like nature’s way of saying, “You just can’t make this stuff up.” Think sea cucumbers with squirrel-like tails, sponges that sneeze, even a crab named after David Hasselhoff owing to its hairy chest. And because “abyssal research is experiencing a golden age,” marine biologist Helen Scales has a menagerie of bizarre life-forms to share with us. “A gifted storyteller,” Scales stirs awe for half the book before turning to

Novel of the week Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

by Quentin Tarantino (Harper Perennial, $10) Quentin Tarantino may have a future in fiction writing, said Charles Arrowsmith in The Washington Post. The director’s first book loosely novelizes his hit 2019 movie, yet it’s “a distinct experience— rangier, sexier, and bloodier,” a pulpy paperback that pushes the Charles Manson murders to a side role while focusing again on the friendship between fading movie star Rick Dalton and his stunt double Cliff Booth. Though Tarantino could be more disciplined in his story craft, “his exuberant excess is the dominant charm.” There are also the usual racial slurs and “shades of misogyny” that Tarantino likes to pass off as reflections of the era, said Katie Rosseinsky in the Evening Standard (U.K.). But the filmmaker isn’t trying to win friends, said Dwight Garner in The New York Times.

“He’s here to tell a story, in take-it-orleave-it Elmore Leonard fashion, and to make room along the way to talk about some of the things he cares about”— such as movies. In doing so, he makes page-turning writing “seem easy.”

THE WEEK July 23, 2021

A deep-sea anglerfish, carrying its own light

environmental disruptions that put this odd world—and ours—in grave danger.

“It is hard to imagine a more timely or important book,” said Tim Flannery in NewStatesman.com. Though Scales “does an excellent job of animating the almost unbelievable panoply of life in the deep,” it is the book’s second half that “brought gasps to my throat.” The fishing industry is now reaching into the ocean’s depths and destroying 4,000-year-old coral to catch a fish that was known as a slimehead until a market was created for it and it was

Fox & I: An Uncommon Friendship

by Catherine Raven (Spiegel & Grau, $28) Catherine Raven’s new book about a wild fox she came to know is not a typical tale of animal-human bonding, said Annabel Gutterman in Time.com. “Yes, Fox does give Raven a sense of purpose.

More crucially, he shows her that there is no fixed definition of friendship.” But as you might guess from the simple name she gave him, she never tamed the runty yearling who began appearing outside her isolated cottage in Montana every afternoon. She didn’t even feed him. Instead, she watched him, and spoke to him, and when he didn’t reply, started reading The Little Prince to him, several pages at a sitting.

Raven, a biologist and former National Park ranger, was initially reluctant to tell anyone about her new friend. “For someone like me,” she writes, “anthropomorphizing wild animals was very uncool.”

Scales sounds the alarm by “leaning into the mind-boggling scale of the disaster taking place in the deep,” said Jo Livingstone in The New Republic. She alternately zooms in and out from minuscule life-forms that have contributed to climate moderation to vast ocean currents that have—up until now— done the same. At both scales, natural systems are endangered, but this book excels at helping us imagine the billions of zooplankton, fish, krill, squid, and jellies that rise every night like a wave to devour carbon matter and carry it downward to help prevent the planet’s overheating. The overall effect of Scales’ account “is not to clarify the waters, but to insist that what’s already down there matters, even or especially when it is hidden from our view.”

As a memoirist, “Raven is sometimes reticent to a fault,” said Danny Heitman in The Wall Street Journal. A lifelong loner, she does mention leaving her parents at 15 but doesn’t make clear exactly when she first encountered Fox and watched him mature. She also, when attempting to transcribe what Fox might have been thinking at various moments, does so with “a certitude that feels unearned.” But this “magical and mystical” book prefers to dwell in a world where friendship is possible between a human and a fox and offers readers “an abiding invitation to do the same.”

Raven doesn’t actually like all animals, and seems to dislike lots of scientists as well, said Barbara King in NPR.org. Her suggestion that animal-behavior scientists all resist acknowledging animal emotion ignores the work of Jane Goodall, Franz de Waal, and many others. But her friendship with Fox does seem real, built upon her appreciation of the complexity of his individuality. “The very antithesis of a fox-taming tale, Fox & I tells us that, nearly wherever we live, we are surrounded by wild animals who make thoughtful decisions and experience joys and sorrows on their own terms.” Above all, it “takes us out of a relentless focus on the human-built world in ways that invite compassion for nature.”

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

22

The Book List Best books…chosen by Bernd Heinrich Bernd Heinrich is a renowned biologist whose two dozen books include Mind of the Raven and A Year in the Maine Woods. In Racing the Clock, his new book, he examines aging through the lens of his decades as a long-distance runner.

No Mercy by Redmond O’Hanlon (1996).

O’Hanlon’s account of an epic journey he made into the heart of the Congo to Lake Télé, accompanied by two companions, delivers nonstop adventure. It switches from sorcerers to scientists, dreads to dreams, biology to sociology.

There is no holding back.

The Mottled Lizard by Elspeth Huxley (1962).

Those who live or travel in Africa may wonder what life was once like there. Huxley’s vivid and moving memoir describes, in evocative prose, growing up in Kikuyu country in Kenya. It reminds you of what was, and what can be.

Gorillas in the Mist by Dian Fossey (1983).

Fossey’s classic account of studying gorillas as individuals in Virunga National Park, over 15 years, is a classic. Fossey, a biologist, changed our minds forever about these noble primates, and she was still living among them when she was murdered in 1985.

The Rise of Wolf 8 by Rick McIntyre (2019).

Wolf No. 8, in Yellowstone Park, was a runt of

his pack who rose to become the alpha. This incredible story is the result of McIntyre’s dogged and renowned close following of the Yellowstone wolves and their ecosystem after wolves were reintroduced to the park in 1995.

The Journey Home by Edward Abbey (1977).

The American West has long been a big topic for those of the East, and Pennsylvania native Edward Abbey chose it as his eventual home. In this book, Abbey considers some of his previous writing about the West. He professes an inability to maintain “a constant level of high thinking,” disavows any claim to being a naturalist, and says he has a “yearning for the howling wilderness we call modern American life.”

The Unexpected Universe by Loren Eiseley (1969). This is a book of intellectual explorations of both the known and the unknown, and hence unexpected, universe, which geneticist J.B.S. Haldane once said “may not only be greater than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”

Eiseley’s ruminations engendered wonder a halfcentury ago, and they do so more than ever now.

Lynne Jennings, Stephanie Berger

Also of interest...in reinventions Wayward

Till the End

by Dana Spiotta (Knopf, $27)

by CC Sabathia (Roc Lit 101, $28)

Dana Spiotta has written yet another “fiercely intelligent” novel about a woman who refuses to conform, said Joanna Rakoff in The New York Times. Sam, the book’s middle-aged protagonist, decides on a whim after nearly 20 years of marriage and motherhood to buy a second house and move into it—alone. In the aftermath of 2016’s election, Sam is uncertain what to do with her fury, and Wayward becomes a “virtuosic and very funny portrait of a woman seeking purpose in a world gone mad.”

CC Sabathia’s memoir “opens in high drama,” said Roger Lowenstein in The Wall Street Journal. It’s the 2015 playoffs, and the Yankees pitcher, wrecked after a bender, asks to be taken off the active list. “Beautifully rendered” with journalist Chris Smith, this book isn’t just about Sabathia’s journey to rehab. “It has plenty of stirring baseball moments,” and offers a moving look at the social awkwardness that led the baseball legend to start drinking as a teen. “Readers and fans will be rooting for him.”

Palace of the Drowned

Becoming Trader Joe

by Christine Mangan (Flatiron, $28)

by Joe Coulombe (HarperCollins Leadership, $20)

“Drenched in dread” and “awash in atmosphere,” this psychological thriller follows a novelist to Venice in 1966 just before the city is struck by a major flood, said Maureen Corrigan in The Washington Post. Frankie Croy is trying to put a breakdown behind her when she moves into a spooky palazzo and begins exploring the city with a woman who claims to have known her. As the storm bears down, the sinister tale that unfolds “will give readers renewed appreciation for the stability of dry land.”

The founder of Trader Joe’s tells “a fascinating origin story,” said Mary McNamara in the Los Angeles Times.

In this posthumous memoir, Joe Coulombe recounts transforming a struggling grocery chain into the ubiquitous, irreverent retail brand we know today.

The book, written mostly for entrepreneurs, who’ll learn from his pivots, is “a crazy-like-a-fox exploration of California culture through the lens of one wildly creative man always looking for a new way over, around, or through.”

ARTS 23 Author of the week Francine Prose One of the secrets of Francine Prose’s success is that she doesn’t assume you care about the same things that she does, said Elizabeth Harris in The New York Times. In her 22 novels, the Brooklynborn author and critic has often tackled weighty themes while writing for highly distracted readers—like herself. “I’m easily bored by books, I hate to say,” she admits. “And so I want there to be some sort of suspense or some sort of payoff.” Her new novel, The Vixen, manages to be hilarious and suspenseful even though it’s essentially about the 1953 execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.

The book focuses on a lowlevel publishing employee who’s torn when he’s assigned to edit a potboiler that depicts the Ethel stand-in—who once knew his mother—as a nymphomaniac spy. “We have to entertain ourselves somehow,” Prose says.

But there’s a purpose to those inventions, said Daniel Lefferts in Publishers Weekly.

Prose wrote the novel, she says, as a way of thinking through the “horrible polarization of our era,” the threats to free speech, and many Americans’ perception that we are routinely being lied to.

The former president of the PEN American Center has a track record of speaking out about the misuses of language and writing even as she has defended writers’ freedoms.

Once, she rebuked PEN for giving an award to Charlie Hebdo, arguing that the terrorist shooting of 23 people at the satirical weekly’s Paris offices did not make it heroic that the publication had previously run cartoons that mocked Islam.

In such cases, staying silent doesn’t feel like an option. “I couldn’t not do it,” she says.

“It’s a kind of compulsion.”

THE WEEK July 23, 2021

Review of reviews: Art & Music

Exhibit of the week

the tragedy. Inside, rather than being sectioned off in dedicated rooms, Mutu’s work is displayed throughout the galleries, often “in one-on-one dialogues” with various pieces in the Legion’s “Eurocentric permanent collection.”

Wangechi Mutu: I Am Speaking, Are You Listening?

Legion of Honor Museum, San Francisco, through Nov. 7

“Wangechi Mutu is hot right now,” said Sebastian Smee in The Washington Post. As the art world reckons with a legacy of sexism, racism, and colonialism, the Kenyan-American artist’s “talismanic” sculptures and mixed-media works, many currently on display at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor, “do much to encourage fresh thinking.” The show, “I Am Speaking, Are You Listening?” features female human figures that seem to have morphed into hybrid animal and vegetable forms, “often with a futuristic look.” Several encircle Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker in an open courtyard, the visual contrast slyly suggesting that the pensive giant “might be confounded by the implications of Afrofuturism.” Inside, other works are made of earthy materials such as shells, hair, and soil, which “aspire to look ancient” but sometimes come off more as “the kind of clay-and-driftwood assemblages you might encounter in the backyard of a hippie commune.” Still, Mutu’s work breathes new life into the galleries, reintroducing “a heightened, holistic awareness of our animal and spiritual natures.”

“Some sculptures may be assertively grotesque,” yet “they always exude power,” said Peter-Astrid Kane in TheGuardian.com.

Shavasana I and Shavasana II, bronze sculptures of two Black women lying under woven mats as if they have been found dead, may be the most arresting. The 49-year-old artist has said the paired works were inspired by the 2018 fatal stabbing in Oakland of Nia Wilson, a young Black woman. Both figures lie supine below The Thinker in the entry courtyard, and the high-heeled shoes that have slipped half off their feet underline

The Legion has staged similar shows before, said Jessica Zack in the San Francisco Chronicle, but the Mutu exhibition is “the museum’s most powerfully realized example of how engaging these interventions can be.”

Two goddess figures in the courtyard, the half-woman, half-animal Mama Ray and Crocodylus, function almost as gatekeepers to Mutu’s world. “With their shell-like eyes and chimerical forms, they have the sleek hybrid power of feminine superheroes ready for battle.” Inside, the bronze Water Woman is part-woman, part-fish, yet a “far cry from the seductive mermaids of traditional artwork,” said Robert Taylor in the San Jose Mercury News. The titular sculpture, meanwhile, consists of two figures with ears made of jawbones and conch shells, who notably look past instead of directly at each other.

Rodin, for one, was similarly fascinated with transformation, sparking another conversation between old and new. There are many here, and they’re so pronounced, “you can almost hear them.”

Faye Webster

Vince Staples

Hiatus Kaiyote

I Know I’m Funny Haha

Vince Staples

Mood Valiant

++++

++++

++++

Faye Webster “has no intention of playing it straight,” said Timothy Monger in AllMusic.com. Ever since the Atlanta singersongwriter debuted at age 16, irony has been an integral element of her “smartly written, country-inflected indie pop,” and she deploys it even when sincerity would be more effective. Still, the 24-year-old’s follow-up to her critical breakout, Atlanta Millionaires Club, is loaded with slow, “pleasantly sighing” ballads that are committed enough to lovelornness that they achieve a satisfying “cotton-soft lounginess.” Webster can, at any moment, deliver a deadpan phrase that’s either “witheringly funny or totally devastating,” said Jeremy Larson in Pitchfork.com. But her “great gift as a young saint of the bummer jam” is “how she captures emptiness”—how she makes every laugh or tear part of a lonely journey through life that’s almost absurd in its sadness. Not that this album will get you down. “The mood reminds me of smoky old Billie Holiday tunes.” It’s “probably one of the best records of the year.”

Vince Staples “has lived his life in the shadow of death,” said Danny Schwartz in Rolling Stone. The terse, quick-witted rapper from Long Beach, Calif., now 28, has always been up-front about how he grew up in and around gangs. He chronicled his grim adolescence on his 2015 debut, Summertime ’06. But the former Crip’s “sense of mortal peril” casts an even darker shadow over his brief, 22-minute fourth album. His paranoia suffuses these 10 “brilliantly concise” songs, whether he’s visiting the graves of childhood friends (“Are You With That?”), toting a gun in his swim trunks at the beach (“Taking Trips”), or feeling too paranoid to shake fans’ hands (“Sundown Town”). Kenny Beats’ “soft” and “laid-back” production work complements the “raw, plainspoken” lyrics, said Andrew Sacher in BrooklynVegan .com. “Vince’s albums are often sonic adventures, but this one feels like a diary put to tape. You can pore over every word, or you can just let the music wash over you. Vince Staples succeeds either way.”

Hiatus Kaiyote’s first album in six years is “an undeniable showcase of the band’s vast musical range,” said Nicholas Russell in NPR.org. Known for its genre-blending brand of futuristic neo-soul, the Australian quartet, fronted by R&B vocalist and guitarist Nai Palm, has built a cult following and been sampled by Beyoncé, Jay-Z, and Kendrick Lamar since 2015’s Choose Your Weapon. The band’s third release adds horns and strings, yet Mood Valiant is the group’s “most cohesive album yet.” Here, the staples of the Hiatus Kaiyote sound— “intricate arrangements, flawless rhythmic feel, wondrous melodies, evocative lyrics”— are all “seamlessly interwoven.” Nai Palm, 32, battled breast cancer during the album’s creation, said Tom Morgan in PopMatters .com. The mood is thus “rich and complicated but always hopeful and deeply in love with life.” Listening to the record feels like “a journey through a vibrant jungle,” especially during the bright bossa nova of “Get Sun.” Throughout, “the amount of color, movement, and life on display is a joy to behold.”

THE WEEK July 23, 2021

Mutu’s Mama Ray, sunning in the courtyard

Gary Sexton

24 ARTS

Review of reviews: Film & Home Media

Bourdain: An insatiable hunger

Roadrunner ++++ “Watching Roadrunner feels like engaging in a kind of collective mourning,” said Clint Worthington in Consequence.net. Three years after Anthony Bourdain took his own life, many fans still wonder why, which helps explain how a documentary about the irreverent chef and beloved globe-traveling TV host is getting a wide summer release.

The urge to know why “bleeds through every inch” of Morgan Neville’s empathetic film. But Roadrunner doesn’t pretend to come away with a final answer about its subject’s suicide. Instead, it sketches “a portrait of the man as he was: a vibrant, prickly, deeply feeling student of the world.”

Despite all of the unresolved grief that Bourdain’s friends share, the majority of the movie is “not grim by any means,” said Leah Greenblatt in Entertainment Weekly.

Bourdain pals Iggy Pop, David Chang, and others “have enough wild stories to fill a bar till closing time.” It’s also a joy to watch Bourdain transform from a stiff TV newcomer into the charismatic globetrotter viewers admired. But Roadrunner “also shows the damage that his almost pathological search for the next thrill could do.” Too much blame, it seems, is put on Bourdain’s stormy relationship with actress Asia Argento, said Daniel Fienberg in The Hollywood Reporter. Still, this is a film that’s “hard to look away from, whether your takeaway is catharsis or something uncomfortably unresolved.” (In theaters only) Not rated

Other new movies The Woman Who Ran South Korea’s Hong Sang-soo is “the most prolific great director since Rainer Werner Fassbinder,” said Richard Brody in The New Yorker. His latest drama, one of his best, achieves “exceptional poignancy” via the sparest means: a series of conversations between a young wife and the two friends she visits separately when her husband briefly leaves town. As the women chat about the nature of happiness, Hong evokes “the passions that boil volcanically beneath the smooth surfaces of middleclass life.” (In select theaters) Not rated

ARTS 25

in the best way,” said Bill Goodykoontz in the Arizona Republic. The Blindspotting director shared screenwriting duties with 25 poets, who perform their spoken-word odes and laments in character as various everyday Angelenos. As their stories intersect, “not every segment works, but pieced together they tell a rich tale of a city and the people who live there.” (In theaters only) R

The Loneliest Whale This nature documentary is “both invigorating and calming,” said Stephanie Zacharek in Time. Filmmaker Joshua Zeman set out to find a whale that’s known as “52” because its call rings out at 52 hertz, making it unique among ocean creatures. The Loneliest Whale blends “surprisingly exciting” clips of the team’s sea expeditions with wondrous underwater footage. “Who doesn’t feel better after a glimpse of these beautiful beasts?” (In select theaters or streaming on demand) PG

Scales

Carlos López Estrada’s “richly rewarding” love letter to Los Angeles is “experimental

The film that Saudi Arabia submitted for 2021 Oscar consideration “tests your tolerance for ambiguity,” said Joe Morgenstern in The Wall Street Journal. “Yet the spell it casts justifies the intense anxiety it creates.” In the black-and-white fable, set in a fishing village where each family must sacrifice a daughter to the sea, one young woman unexpectedly escapes that fate. (In theaters) Not rated

Edith!

Aack Cast

The Designated Mourner

(Crooked Media and QCODE)

(iHeart Radio)

(Gideon)

Edith Wilson’s role in U.S. history has been “ripe for dramatization,” said Andrea Marks in Rolling Stone. When a stroke incapacitated Woodrow Wilson in October 1919, the president’s wife shielded him from visitors and quietly helped him run the government from bed. It’s unknown if the first lady actually made any executive decisions herself, but this “witty, irreverent” podcast presents Rosamund Pike as a foulmouthed Edith who seized the chance to secretly operate as the first female president. “Antics and carryings-on ensue.” The writing in the eight-part series is “fast and fun,” evoking shades of Veep, said Fiona Sturges in the Financial Times. Edith narrates from the grave, opening plenty of room for her sardonic take on the usual ceremonial duties of a first lady and on the men who get in her way. Wisely, the producers focus on dialogue, not sound effects. When, in an early scene, we hear her advising Woodrow on how to handle Republican opposition, she murmurs, “God, I’m good at this!”

Comedian Jamie Loftus “has a way of seeing things the way no one else does,” said Nick Zaino in The Boston Globe. Her follow-up to this winter’s acclaimed Lolita Podcast, a feminist deconstruction of the classic Vladimir Nabokov novel, is a re-examination of the comic strip Cathy, which Loftus considers greatly underrated. The working-woman comic created by Cathy Guisewite, which debuted in 1976 and ran until 2010, is mostly known today from mocking asides in popular culture, such as Tina Fey dropping Cathy’s catchphrase, “Aack!”, on 30 Rock. But Loftus aims to recontextualize Cathy, and “does so in customarily Loftusian fashion: vociferously, and with sly, swashbuckling energy,” said Nicholas Quah in NYMag.com. Loftus seems to see Cathy the character less as “a certain kind of Boomer woman with a certain kind of Boomer relationship to feminism” than as a figure who, even now, can be admired. The results are “very, very good, at least based on the first episode of Aack Cast.”

The dystopian world of The Designated Mourner “isn’t too far off from our own,” said David Gordon in TheaterMania.com. In this podcast version of Wallace Shawn’s “astonishingly prescient” 1996 play about a trio of artist-intellectuals living under a totalitarian government, Shawn once again teams with director André Gregory, his co-star in the 1981 film My Dinner With Andre and a friend with whom he has been “theatricalizing the end of the world” for decades. Shawn’s brutal satire has been “beautifully rethought for the ear,” said Jesse Green in The New York Times. Set in an unnamed country “where revolutions, juntas, and purges have become as unremarkable as weather,” its main character, played by Shawn, is a hanger-on of flexible loyalties. He’s awful: “an apologist for the worst of humanity’s outrages.” But that makes him memorable. Shawn, in his mainstream movie roles, is usually “a twinkling human Yoda.” In his own plays, he’s often “a schlump concealing a shiv.”

Summertime

Everett

New and notable podcasts

THE WEEK July 23, 2021

Streaming tips Olympic trials and triumphs...

Tokyo Olympiad One of the greatest sports documentaries of all time, Kon Ichikawa’s impressionistic chronicle of the 1964 Summer Olympics captures the focus and jitters of elite athletes facing their defining moments. HBO Max

Golden: The Journey of the USA’s Elite Gymnasts Competing for an Olympic medal is tough. Getting the chance may be tougher for America’s women gymnasts. This six-part prequel series focuses on the ups and downs of several of the athletes as they vied for their tickets to Tokyo. Peacock

16 Days of Glory The 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles was special for U.S. athletes, who won a whopping 174 medals. Gymnast Mary Lou Retton and other Americans get their due in Bud Greenspan’s 1985 documentary, but the film climaxes with a U.K.–West Germany showdown in the men’s decathlon. HBO Max

One Day in September Kevin Macdonald’s Oscarwinning 1999 documentary offers an unflinching look at the most devastating day in Olympic history: when 11 Israeli athletes and coaches died in Munich during a 1972 hostage-taking by Palestinian terrorists. Pluto TV (free)

Top Spin If you harbor any doubt that table tennis is Olympicsworthy, this charming 2014 documentary about three teenage Olympic hopefuls will erase it. Amazon Prime

Television The Week’s guide to what’s worth watching Sexy Beasts Could you fall for a man with the face of a baboon? The weirdest show of the summer has arrived, and it might forever change how you view dating. Contestants hit the costume room hard, going on blind dates disguised as beavers, dolphins, demons, and assorted other creatures to find out if romantic chemistry transcends prosthetics. Catastrophe’s Rob Delaney narrates.

Available Wednesday, July 21, Netflix Ultra City Smiths A murder mystery that unfolds in stop-motion animation, acted out by dolls and narrated by Tom Waits? Say hello to the season’s secondstrangest show. The six-part drama is set in Ultra City, a crime-ridden and corrupt metropolis where a wealthy mayoral candidate has gone missing. The animation is handled by the makers of Robot Chicken. The voice cast includes Kristen Bell, Alia Shawkat, John C. Reilly, and Bebe Neuwirth. Available Thursday, July 22, AMC+

THE WEEK July 23, 2021

Available Friday, July 23, Amazon Prime

The Last Letter From Your Lover Should romances be more your style, this feature-length drama, adapted from a novel by Jojo Moyes, interweaves two. Felicity Jones plays a journalist who finds a love letter from 1965 and becomes obsessed with finding out what happened to the writer and his intended recipiTokyo Olympics Opening Ceremony ent: a married socialite he was imploring to leave Even sports are weird this year, as there will be no her husband. Shailene Woodley and Callum fans in the stands when Tokyo welcomes athletes Turner co-star in the period love story. Jones participating in the “2020” summer Olympic pairs up with Nabhaan Rizwan in the contempogames. NBC has planned to air the opening rary tale. Available Friday, July 23, Netflix ceremony live for early birds, then again during Other highlights prime time, kicking off two weeks of network, streaming, and online coverage. Expect plenty of Turner & Hooch The 1989 buddy-cop comedy that paired Tom medals for the Americans and heavy attention Hanks with a sloppy French mastiff gets a focused on sprinter Noah Lyles, beach volleysequel series co-starring a sloppy French mastiff ball teammates Alix Klineman and April Ross, and Josh Peck of Drake and Josh. Available controversial hammer thrower Gwen Barry, and Wednesday, July 21, Disney+ gymnastics legend Simone Biles. Friday, July 23, at 6:55 a.m. and 7:30 p.m., NBC Masters of the Universe: Revelation Kevin Smith unleashes the power of Grayskull Jolt on nostalgic Gen Xers with an animated conIn a summer so hot that thinking feels like a big tinuation of the 1980s cartoon series. Available ask, Jolt might be the perfect action movie. Kate Friday, July 23, Netflix Beckinsale stars as a woman with a neurological condition that causes her to go on violent rampages at the barest hint of toxic male behavior. When she finally meets a worthy man and he’s killed the next day, no one can contain her quest for vengeance. With Bobby Cannavale, Laverne Cox, Susan Sarandon, and Stanley Tucci.

Eden: Untamed Planet A multipart series from the BBC Natural History Unit focuses on regions of the planet still relatively untouched by humans. Helena Bonham Carter narrates. Saturday, July 24, at 8 p.m., BBC America

Show of the week

Freedom’s Fury Tempers flared in both the pool and the visitor stands when Hungary met the USSR in a 1956 Olympics water polo semifinal that became known as the “Blood in the Water” Match. This 2006 documentary revisits the memorable clash, which occurred just weeks after the Soviet army had crushed the Hungarian revolution. $3 via Amazon Prime

Last Letter’s Woodley and Turner

Ted Lasso

Sudeikis’ Coach Lasso (left) with his two top aides

Like the character the show is named for, Ted Lasso seemed set up to fail. A comedy about an American football coach hired to lead an English Premier League soccer team? Little did anyone realize that Jason Sudeikis was about to make Ted so sincerely upbeat and charming that he’d thwart the owner’s bid to embarrass him, turn the series into the surprise hit of our first Covid summer, and take home a Golden Globe. This year, Ted will be working to push the club back into the Premiere League, even if he has to turn hothead to do it. Available Friday, July 23, Apple TV+

• All listings are Eastern Time.

Netflix, Apple TV+

26 ARTS

LEISURE Food & Drink

27

Adana kebabs: A peppery grilled Turkish specialty mix well, using your hands. Wet hands with water, divide mixture into 8 portions, and form into 6-inch logs.

Adding butter or ghee to ground meat “may sound extravagant,” said Courtney Hill in Milk Street magazine.

But in the spicy Adana kebabs that we learned to make in Istanbul, the added fat is indispensable, greatly improving texture and flavor.

Insert a flat metal 10-inch skewer lengthwise into each log. Lay on a lightly oiled baking sheet and press your fingers in kebabs to slightly flatten them and create ridges perpendicular to skewers. Cover and refrigerate while you prepare grill or for up to overnight.

Serve the kebabs with lavash (also known as Armenian flatbread), plus sliced onion and tomato, and the yogurt sauce described.

Recipe of the week Turkish minced-meat kebabs 1½ lbs boneless leg of lamb or boneless beef short ribs, trimmed of silver skin and cut into 1-inch chunks ¾ cup plain whole-milk yogurt ½ cup lightly packed fresh mint, chopped 2 tsp lemon juice 2 medium garlic cloves, finely grated Kosher salt 3 tsp ground cumin, divided ½ medium red bell pepper, stemmed, seeded, and roughly chopped 1 tbsp tomato paste 2½ tsp sweet paprika 2¼ tsp Aleppo pepper or 1 tsp red pepper flakes 1 ⁄ cup ghee or salted butter, room 3 temperature Neutral oil (such as grapeseed)

The kebabs with all their fixings

Place meat in a single layer on a large plate and freeze, uncovered, until firm but not frozen, 30 to 40 minutes. In a small bowl, combine yogurt, mint, lemon juice, garlic, and ¼ tsp salt. Cover and refrigerate. In another bowl, stir together 2 tsp cumin and ½ tsp salt; set aside.

In a food processor, combine bell pepper, tomato paste, paprika, Aleppo pepper, the remaining 1 tsp cumin, half the meat cubes and half the ghee. Process to a coarse paste, about 30 seconds. Transfer to medium bowl. Add remaining meat and ghee to food processor and roughly chop in 6 to 8 pulses; transfer to bowl. Add ¾ tsp salt and

Connie Miller

The new jerkies: Road snacks to elevate any journey America is finally getting serious about its jerky game, said Ryan Sutton in Eater.com. Though most of the dried meat products you’ll find at a gas station or convenience store are still “massproduced and thoughtless,” consumer tastes are changing, and small producers are elbowing into the market with offerings that make a better case for a culinary tradition that spans many cultures and many, many centuries. Jerky, derived from an ancient Andean practice and the Quechua word “ch’arki,” has always been “easily the most Gourmet dining in a pouch gourmet” snack you can grab during a typical road-trip pit stop. Below, a sample of the best we found in a wide survey.

Urban Cowboy vegan jerky Don’t let the word “vegan” distract you. This is “my favorite American jerky at the moment,” and it can be found on Amazon. With every flavor it packages, Austin-based Urban Cowboy is proving that “high-quality mushrooms dried with care can exhibit eons more nuance than most commodity sirloins.” You’ll taste mushroom in the salty Black Pepper flavor. The Sriracha ’shrooms “pack a balance of heat and acidity while emitting a hint of smoke.”

Buc-ee’s mesquite beef jerky The beef jerky at Buc-ee’s, a growing chain of Texas-based convenience stores, actually tastes like beef and “exudes a musk that recalls fire-torched cumin and hardwood smoke.” Buc-ee’s jerky can also be found online.

Good Jerky habanero trout With this jerky, “the scent of clean fish” hits you as you open the bag and the soft flesh “pulls apart easily and coats the tongue with luxurious and luscious oils.” If you want neither the scent nor the oil and don’t mind aggressive salting, try Alaska Smokehouse king salmon jerky, yet another option findable on Amazon.

For a charcoal grill, ignite a large chimney of coals, let burn until lightly ashed over, then spread evenly on one side of grill; open bottom vents. For a gas grill, turn all burners to high. Heat grill, covered, 5 to 10 minutes, then oil grate.

Turn off 1 burner, leaving others on high.

Place skewers on hot side of grill. Cook without disturbing until lightly charred on bottom, about 4 minutes. Using tongs and a spatula, carefully flip skewers. Cook until second sides are charred and release from grill, about 2 minutes. Move skewers to grill’s cooler side and cook, turning occasionally, until nicely charred on all sides, 5 to 8 minutes.

Transfer to a platter and serve with sides, including the cumin salt (for sprinkling) and the yogurt sauce. Serves 4.

Wine: Savoie whites You could say there are many other historic wine regions that the world has just discovered, said Eric Asimov in The New York Times. “Then again, there’s only one Savoie”—a small Alpine region in easternmost France where the white wines, made from regional grapes, are “as cool, crystalline, and refreshing as a mountain stream.”

2019 Romain Chamiot Savoie Apremont ($17). This “light, fresh, floral” wine made from the jacquère grape is uncomplicated, straightforward, and “absolutely perfect for summer days.”

2019 Domaine Labbé Vin de Savoie Abymes ($17). “A great bottle to open at lunch,” this lively jacquère combines floral and lemon tones with rich texture. “Drinking it feels almost like standing in an Alpine meadow.”

2013 Domaine Dupasquier Rousette de Savoie Marestel ($28). “Pure, balanced, and stony,” this wine made from the altesse grape is “an excellent example of how well these Savoie whites can age.”

THE WEEK July 23, 2021

Consumer

28 LEISURE

The Tesla Model S Plaid: What the critics say The Wall Street Journal “This car. Marone.” Maybe you’ve already heard the stats: The newest Tesla is the first production-line sedan to do a 0-to-60 mph sprint in under 2 seconds and has also set a new record for the quarter mile. Its three carbon-encased AC motors deliver an “unfathomable” 1,020 hp. But speed isn’t the Model S Plaid’s only selling point. “Not enough has been said about its race car– like roadholding,” about how this “technical tour de force” tears through tightly snaking curves.

Bloomberg Businessweek “It’s hard to shake the sense that the Plaid

is engineering overkill.” Before unleashing this “rampaging beast,” you actually have to lean into the headrest to avoid a neck injury.

That’s “more power than anyone really needs,” and because the Plaid’s full power can’t be enjoyed legally, it amounts to “a costly piece of marketing”—albeit marketing that proves electric cars are simply better.

Motor Trend Put aside the acceleration numbers, though. The Model S Plaid is “absolutely among the best cars on the market today.”

Though its yoke-style steering wheel is “a total pain to use at low speeds,” the Plaid is otherwise a “remarkably well-rounded”

Tesla’s best car yet, from $129,990 vehicle. It charges quickly, has a range of 348 miles, and exhibits “a combination of comfort, luxury, performance, and efficiency” that only a decade ago “would have been a sci-fi fantasy.”

The best of...heat relief

Oxo Good Grips Ice Cube Tray

Vornado 610DC Air Circulator

Midea U-Shaped Air Conditioner

Kafka’s Kool Tie

Unlike traditional fans, a Vornado produces a vortex to circulate air throughout a room.

This model, though pricey, is 80 percent more efficient than an AC-powered fan.

It’s also backed by a 10-year warranty.

This unusually quiet and efficient 10,000-BTU unit is “one of the best smart air conditioners you can buy.” It requires extra effort to install, but it has a cutout that makes it easier to regularly open and close the window.

Popular among hikers, this cotton necktie is stuffed with polymer crystals that absorb “a lot of water.” As the water evaporates, it cools the blood flowing through the arteries in your neck, lowering your core temperature.

A well-designed ice cube tray “can improve your daily life in a small but meaningful way.”

This Good Grips model features a lid that prevents spills and encourages stacking, and the half-moon-shaped cubes “can be pushed out easily.”

$120, vornado.com Source: TheWirecutter.com

$399, midea.com Source: TomsGuide.com

$11, rei.com Source: Wired.com

$5 each, oxo.com Source: TheWirecutter.com

Slumber Cloud UltraCool Pillow Hot sleepers will love the “cool-to-the-touch” cover on this machinewashable, polyesterfilled pillow. Its temperature-regulating fabric, originally designed for NASA, “stores and releases heat to keep you at a stable body temperature.”

From $69, slumbercloud.com Source: GoodHousekeeping.com

Tip of the week...

Surprising uses for aluminum foil

And for those who have everything...

Best apps...

For accessing free audiobooks

Q To sharpen scissors: The easiest way to sharpen slightly dull scissors is to fold heavy-duty aluminum foil into six layers and cut through it.

Q To iron clothes: Because foil reflects heat, it can reduce ironing time. Remove your ironing board’s cover, line the board with foil, then put the cover back on. “You probably won’t need to flip your clothes anymore (or at least not as much).”

Q To clean pots: Remove crusted-on food by crumpling up foil and using it to scrub with water and dish soap.

Q To polish silver: Line a pot with foil, fill it with water, add 1 tbsp baking soda, and bring to a boil. Drop in silverware without letting the pieces touch. In just 10 seconds, an ion exchange will remove tarnish. For jewelry, add dish soap, baking soda, and salt to a foil-lined bowl and pour in boiling water. Let the jewelry soak for 10 minutes.

“Don’t have a green thumb? No problem.” Lego introduced two new plantadjacent products for adults this year, and both are widely available again after initial sellouts. The Lego Bonsai Tree invites purchasers to enter a Zen state as they engage with a centuries-old tradition, albeit while clicking together 878 manufactured plastic parts. The tree stands 7 inches tall and can be constructed with full greenery or seasonal blossoms that are actually composed of small pink frogs. A second set allows builders to create a unique 14-inchtall flower bouquet. Lego says that the sets “bring a touch of nature” into any home.

Some of the plastic, after all, is plant-based.

Q Loyal Books and LoyalBooks.com grant access to over 7,000 audiobooks featuring professional voice actors. Most of the books are in the public domain—in other words, they’re old. But there are a lot of classics here.

Q OpenCulture.com and DigitalBook.io are worth exploring, too. Together they offer thousands of public domain audiobooks.

Q OverDrive lets you borrow audiobooks and e-books from your local library. All you need is a library card. If your library doesn’t use OverDrive, try Hoopla or Libby.

Q LibriVox.org is a nonprofit whose global network of volunteers has so far recorded 15,000 audiobooks. The website’s growing catalog of public domain texts includes 2,000 titles in languages other than English.

Q AudioFileMagazine.com is currently hosting Sync, a summer reading program for teens that features free YA and New Adult audiobooks.

Source: Lifehacker.com THE WEEK July 23, 2021

$50, lego.com Source: People.com

Source: BookRiot.com

Marketplace

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Best properties on the market

30

This week: Houses of glass 1 W Washington, Conn. Oversize and floor-length

windows wrap both stories of this four-bedroom home by architect Tom Babbitt. The open-plan house, built in 1970, includes a living room with redwood-beamed cathedral ceilings and fieldstone fireplace, skylit main bedroom, vintage kitchen, and second-floor deck with a spiral staircase to the back patio and lawn. The 61-acre property features old stone walls, perennial plantings, a gunite pool, and an outbuilding housing a squash court, indoor pool, and workshop. $2,600,000. Madonna & Phillips Group, William Pitt/Sotheby’s International Realty, (860) 800-3344 2 X Honolulu The floor-to-ceiling windows of this 1990s split-level,

three-bedroom penthouse look out on Diamond Head, the ocean, and the mountains of Oahu. The home has an open layout; vaulted ceilings; floors and details of rare stone sourced from around the world; a circular-stage kitchen with quartz island and counters; a mezzanine lounge with vintage honey-onyx wet bar; three full bathrooms, two with glass walls and soaking tubs; and two lanais, and comes with three parking spaces. Building amenities include a clubroom, a pool, a spa, and an outdoor kitchen with barbecue. $4,600,000. Denise Takara, Locations/Luxury Portfolio International, (808) 221-5738

4

6

5 3 1

2

3 X Waynesboro, Pa. This contempo-

rary three-bedroom home has a great room with windows that reach from the floor to a 17-foot-high ceiling. The house, built in 2004, features geothermal heating and cooling, two fireplaces, hardwood floors and custom cabinetry, a rec room, a sunroom opening to a stone patio, a workshop, and a principal bedroom with en suite bathroom with soaking tub and walk-in shower. The 3-acre wooded hilltop property offers views of the valley below. $1,300,000.

Paul Gunder, Coldwell Banker Realty, (717) 729-0200 THE WEEK July 23, 2021

Best properties on the market

31

4 X Cannon Beach, Ore. Set above Arcadia Beach, this glass-encased two-bedroom home has views of the ocean in front and the coastal forest in back. Designed by BORA architects, the house features honed-basalt, white-oak, and waxed-steel interiors; a motorized shade system; radiantheat floors; and a roof planted with ferns and native grasses in soil excavated on site. The 1-acre landscaped property includes a spa, a wood deck, and a two-car garage. $4,995,000. Sally Conrad, Cascade Sotheby’s International Realty, (503) 440-2111

5 W New Buffalo, Mich. The all-glass walls of this 2011

three-level, four-bedroom home offer panoramic views.

The house has maple floors and custom cabinets; an elevator; a main bedroom with en suite bath with heated floors, steam shower, and yoga platform; two guest rooms each with en suite bath and balcony; a chef’s kitchen; a wine cellar; a gym; and a media room. The 1-acre landscaped lot features a swimming pool, stone terraces overlooking Lake Michigan, and 125 feet of private lake frontage. $4,550,000.

Liz E. Roch, @properties/ Luxury Portfolio International, (312) 636-8751

Steal of the week

6 W Coralville, Iowa This

two-bedroom corner condominium has wallto-wall, floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on the city below. The apartment is finished with bamboo floors, recessed lighting, electric blinds, and custom built-ins, and comes with storage and two parking spaces; rooms include a gourmet kitchen with center island and pantry, a primary bedroom with walk-in closet and custom-tiled steam shower, and a second bedroom with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. The building is near the library, a community park with a pool, and shopping. $475,000. Jill Armstrong, Skogman Realty, (319) 631-5455 THE WEEK July 23, 2021

BUSINESS The news at a glance

The bottom line Q Real-estate commission revenue is on pace to surge 16 percent in 2021, surpassing $100 billion for the first time. In 2021, the average commission rate is expected to be 4.94 percent.

Bloomberg.com Q Between April and June, Toyota sold 688,813 vehicles in the U.S., giving it a razor-thin 577-unit margin of victory over GM. It was the first time a Japanese car maker took the top position in the U.S.

The Wall Street Journal Q Consumer demand for auto loans and leases, generalpurpose credit cards, and personal loans was up 39 percent in April compared with the same period last year, according to credit-reporting firm Equifax. Lenders had already extended a record number of auto loans and leases in March.

The Wall Street Journal Q Just 56 percent

of Gen Z and 58 percent of Millennials said they always tip servers at sit-down restaurants, compared with 80 percent of Gen Xers and 88 percent of Baby Boomers, according to a study by CreditCards.com.

Yahoo.com Q Wall Street banks have earned $6.4 billion in fees by underwriting Chinese IPOs since 2014, when Alibaba began trading in New York.

Chinese firms have raised about $76 billion through first-time share sales in the U.S. in the past decade.

Bloomberg.com Q A 25-year-old copy of Super

Mario 64 in its original packaging sold for $1.56 million at a live auction last week. The sale was announced just two days after the same auction house, Heritage Auctions, sold an early production copy of the video game The Legend of Zelda from 1987 for $870,000.

The New York Times THE WEEK July 23, 2021

Inflation: Consumers see sharp rise in prices The longer inflation persists, the New data released this week more likely the expectation of showed that prices rose in June rising costs will harden into realby the most in 13 years, raising ity, said Lisa Beilfuss in Barrons fears that “inflation is spreading .com. We’ve now recorded a beyond the sectors at the center string of month-to-month numof the economy’s reopening,” said bers that suggest inflation may Lucia Mutikani in Reuters.com. be “stickier” than the Federal Though year-over-year inflation Reserve expected. The “transirose to 5.4 percent, White House tory” camp can still point to officials remain optimistic that Gas and used-car priced surged. the fact that, “excluding used the increase will be “transitory,” vehicle prices, total prices would have been up just citing a drop in lumber prices and the clearing of 0.5 percent” from a month earlier, instead of the other supply chain bottlenecks. The soaring cost 0.9 recorded in June. But even rents, which don’t of used vehicles (up by a record 10.5 percent) is typically move abruptly, jumped the most in two likely to cool as well. But with signs that conyears. It’s getting harder for the Fed, which has sumers are paying more for food, gas, rent, and played down inflation risks, to convince people apparel, the course of inflation could now be set that “its ‘transitory’ narrative remains valid.” by consumers’ and businesses’ perceptions.

JEDI: U.S. ends controversial defense contract The Defense Department canceled a prized cloud-computing agreement with Microsoft that was mired in a lengthy court battle, said John McKinnon in The Wall Street Journal. The deal was awarded to Microsoft over Amazon and Oracle in 2019, but a federal judge recently refused the Pentagon’s motion to dismiss Amazon’s case that former President Donald Trump “exerted improper pressure” to keep the $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract out of its hands. The Pentagon cited “advances in cloud computing” and its own “evolving needs” in backing out of the program last week.

Tesla: Musk defends SolarCity deal Tesla CEO Elon Musk gave testimony in a Delaware courtroom this week to defend Tesla’s $2.1 billion acquisition of SolarCity, said Dave Michaels and Rebecca Elliott in The Wall Street Journal. A group of shareholders is “alleging that Musk controlled the 2016 takeover while having a financial interest in both companies,” and that conflict of interest is why Tesla overpaid for “a home-solar company on the verge of insolvency.” Sparring with the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Musk said that he didn’t enjoy running Tesla: “I rather hate it, and I would much prefer to spend my time on design and engineering.”

Google: France demands new deals with publishers Regulators in France fined Google $593 million for breaching an April 2020 ruling that ordered the company “to negotiate ‘in good faith’ licensing deals with French news publishers,” said Ryan Browne in CNBC.com. In January, Google said it agreed to pay $76 million to French publishers for their content. However, several publishers complained to France’s Competition Authority that the partnership didn’t offer sufficient compensation for the use of content in search results and required publishers to participate in Google’s new News Showcase.

Earnings: A banner quarter for bank profits The nation’s biggest banks kicked off earnings season this week with big profits, said Lananh Nguyen in The New York Times. Bank of America and JPMorgan both doubled their net earnings in the second quarter from a year ago, while Goldman Sachs’ “profit was $2 billion more than expected.” The banks’ bottom lines were “buoyed by a hot market for mergers and acquisitions,” and investment banking fees “were the highest they had ever been.” But some investors noted that trading revenue has diminished compared with the first three months of the year, and growth in borrowing was only modest.

Classic failures get collectible editions A toy startup is modeling products after some of the most infamous commercial flops, said Abrar Al-Heeti in CNET .com. Dead Startup Toys, an offshoot of the aptly named artists’ group MSCHF, is reaching out to “big fans of failure” with its new line of gifts. One toy product is based on the Theranos MiniLab, the portable blood-testing machine that became the centerpiece of a multibillion-dollar collapse after the company’s founder, Elizabeth Holmes, was charged with multiple counts of fraud. Dead Startup Toys’ website says the MiniLab belongs “alongside such storied historical grifts as the Mechanical Turk.”

Other products include a replica Juicero, the $699 juicer with hightech fruit and vegetable packets that could just as easily be squeezed by hand, and a toy version of the Coolest Cooler, a “combination cooler/speaker/blender that failed to deliver so thoroughly it was investigated as fraud.”

Reuters, Media Bakery

32

Best columns: Business

33

Biden’s rules: Will they encourage competition? “scratching the surface of all the ways A sweeping executive order signed by businesses take advantage of their cusPresident Biden aims to restore more tomers, but it’s a start.” competitive balance to a slew of American industries, from health care to farming to Yes, we can all agree on the hearing aids, tech, said Jeff Stein in The Washington said The Wall Street Journal in an editoPost. The signing last week follows the rial, but the main effect of these orders prescriptions of “a new generation of will be to “make big business bigger.” economists” who have moved antitrust Packaged together with some genuinely policy reform from “the liberal fringe” to pro-competitive measures, this is a colthe mainstream of the Democratic agenda. lection of rules to enhance government Containing 72 initiatives, the order blames power. Biden points to Teddy Roosevelt’s corporate consolidation for higher contrust-busting as a model. In reality, sumer prices, stagnant wages, and reduced A president’s effort to reshape business Roosevelt’s regulation of railroad rates advantages for workers. Not surprisingly, “was among the great policy failures,” reducing private invest“the most impactful part of the order relates to Silicon Valley,” ment and service until Congress finally abandoned it in 1980. including recommendations that regulators strictly scrutinize Closer to the present day, after Obamacare rules went into effect, acquisitions by major tech companies and set firmer guidelines around user surveillance and data gathering. But other consumer- hospital mergers reached a record pace because only bigger comfocused initiatives include allowing imports of cheaper drugs from panies “can absorb the regulatory costs.”

Canada and clearer labeling on prices for broadband service.

There may be less here than either proponents or foes see, said Elizabeth Nolan Brown in Reason.com. The orders use the This is “the most concerted effort in recent times” to “tilt the word “encourage” a lot, because “Biden is wading into terriplaying field toward workers,” said Neil Irwin in The New York tory he doesn’t actually have the power to control.” The White Times. Look, for instance, at the provisions asking regulators to House will establish a council to monitor the progress, but much bar unnecessary occupational licensing requirements and limit of this “executive bloviating is technically toothless.” Judges noncompete agreements, now so pervasive that even “sandwich shops and hair salons” use them. The White House is finally chal- and lawmakers will determine the success of his efforts, said Felix Salmon in Axios.com, but with this order Biden is trying lenging the proliferation of corporate “indignities,” said Michael to set the narrative. His view is that capitalism is endangered by Hiltzik in the Los Angeles Times, for example making airlines companies that have built “moats” that unfairly insulate their refund fees “when baggage is delayed or when the plane’s Wi-Fi businesses from competition. If that view prevails, it will “ineviis broken.” Another no-brainer order ends the silly practice of tably show up in legislation and jurisprudence.” having to go see a specialist to obtain a hearing aid. This is only you take seriously anything in Donald Trump’s Trump’s tech Ifridiculous lawsuits against Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, you’re getting scammed, said Dan lawsuits are and McLaughlin. There are “legitimate reasons to be conthat too few companies have too much power just fake news cerned over the access of Americans to platforms for public Dan McLaughlin

NationalReview.com

debate.” But “no amount of creative lawyering” can fill the holes in Trump’s argument that the social media giants “violated the First Amendment” when they banned him following the Capitol insurrection.

The basis of this flimsy theory is that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act—the provision that insulates online platforms from what gets shared

end, “the Sacklers got away with it,” said The price of InMatttheStieb.

Last week, 15 states’ attorneys general to drop their claims against the Sackler 500,000 lives? agreed family, the now disgraced owners of Purdue in exchange for a $4.5 billion settlement. $4.5 billion Pharma, For decades, the Sacklers, who fueled a national Matt Stieb

AP

NYMag.com

epidemic with their massive marketing of opioids, “successfully art-washed their fortune by donating to prestigious museums.” Since their all-out efforts to “turbocharge” sales of their OxyContin pills were exposed, the museums and other institutions will no longer take their money. But they’ve pulled off an even bigger trick by buying off any chance of

on their sites—turned Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook into state actors. Unfortunately, this is “entirely inconsistent with case law, the Constitution, and the Anglo-American tradition.” There are fair arguments about reforming Section 230. But without it, “social media companies would still be private companies that are not bound by the First Amendment.” On top of this, Trump’s lawyers want to frame their case as a class action, as if the position of Trump— who says he used Twitter as an “instrument of his presidency”—were somehow akin to that of other Twitter users. Complaining about Twitter is Trump’s right. Abusing the judicial process to do it is not. criminal liability. “The $4.5 billion sum is hefty, but the Sacklers can pay it”; their total fortune is about $11.5 billion. The Sacklers are barred from asking for their names to be put on “any hospitals, schools, or art institutions” until the full sum is paid. After that, presumably, they can return to buying their way back to respectability. Between 1999 and 2019, opioids killed 500,000 Americans. Yet “at a press conference announcing the settlement, attorneys general from New York, Massachusetts, and Minnesota noted they were unable to secure a public apology or an admission of culpability.” In other words, the Sacklers don’t even need to say they’re sorry.

THE WEEK July 23, 2021

34 BUSINESS

Making money

Condos: The costs of persistent neglect $7 trillion of property nationwide. Social The tower collapse in Surfside, Fla., has cast pressure makes it “hard for neighbors to a spotlight on the challenges of condo living, impose big assessments on one another or said Mike Baker and Kimiko de Freytasbuild up ample reserves.” And residents are Tamura in The New York Times. While an often interested only in the short term— investigation into the tragedy involving the “half of condos are resold in less than a Champlain Towers South complex remains decade.” Older buildings were constructed ongoing, the condo’s board for years had with “little or no thought about the even“wrestled with how to come up with the tual effects of climate change,” said Evan $15 million needed to fix the building’s diMcKenzie in The Washington Post. Surfside lapidated roof, a poorly designed pool deck, was a 12-story condo tower “built 40 years and crumbling support columns.” The homeago on reclaimed beachfront wetlands owners’ association had only $800,000 in re- Champlain Towers A worst-case scenario under constant threat from a rising ocean, serves, so 135 condo owners would have had saltwater, and gradual land subsidence.” There are 350,000 other to pay an average of $110,000 each to make up the difference.

Although structural failures in the United States are rare, similar condo and homeowners’ associations nationwide facing increased incidences of storms, flooding, wildfires, and the other “unprec“debates over deferred maintenance, money management, and edented infrastructure challenges that climate change poses.” escalating homeowners’ association dues are hardly unfamiliar to condo residents across the country.” Industry leaders have Beachfront living isn’t ending, said Nathan Crooks in Bloomberg pressed homeowners’ associations to maintain “robust reserve .com, but it could get much more expensive. Florida lawmakfunds.” But according to one expert estimate, “about one-third ers “are weighing proposals to ensure that coastal condo asof associations have 30 percent or less of the money needed to sociations have sufficient oversight and funding to make timely prepare for big-ticket projects.” repairs,” potentially raising HOA fees and special assessments Condo board meetings are about to get uglier, said Henry Grabar by tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Prices for insuring in Slate.com. The great condo boom came in the 1960s and ’70s, beachfront properties, in Florida and elsewhere, could also rise. and “that first generation of buildings is getting old at once.” Re- These costs can become “a burden that many retirees and others furbishments require “complex and expensive decisions” that are on a fixed budget can’t shoulder.” That will open the door for developers to “simply raze the more-affordable condos” in favor “left up to people like you or me”; volunteers on condo boards of high-priced new towers. and homeowners’ associations are responsible for the upkeep of

What the experts say “Elite universities have awarded thousands of master’s degrees that don’t provide graduates enough career earnings to begin paying down their federal student loans,” said Melissa Korn and Andrea Fuller in The Wall Street Journal. The most extreme example is Columbia University’s film program, whose students graduated with a median debt of $181,000.

“Two years after earning their master’s degrees, half of the borrowers were making less than $30,000 a year,” according to Education Department data. In the 2020–21 academic year, graduate students will have borrowed as much as undergrads for the first time.

“Free-flowing federal loan money” has most benefited universities with “legacy branding that lets them say, in effect, their degrees are worth whatever they charge.”

Planet of the ‘Apes’ Movie theater chain AMC abandoned an effort to issue 25 million new shares after the plan drew outrage from retail investors on social media, said Thornton McEnery in MarketWatch.com. Retail fans of the stock, who sometimes call themselves ‘apes,’ are “now thought to hold roughly 80 percent of the company’s shares,” which have soared in THE WEEK July 23, 2021

recent weeks. AMC, which has been a “meme stock” favorite on forums like Reddit, was planning to sell shares to pay down its debt.

But the prospect of diluting the stakes of existing stockholders didn’t go over well with its investors. CEO Adam Aron, “who has made a habit of engaging directly” with investors on Twitter, posted a picture of the words “I see you, I hear you, I value you.”

No flight and no refund Travelers are finding it difficult to use the rebates and vouchers for last year’s canceled flights, said Eric Taub in The New York Times.

Most airlines and travel companies granted reimbursements or covered cancellation fees with credits after countries began closing borders.

But with restrictions easing, many travelers are “experiencing frustrating delays in rebooking flights, and even outright refusals by travel companies to honor” those credits. Meanwhile, many travelers who opted for refunds haven’t gotten them yet. One passenger, owed a $4,500 refund for an Aer Lingus flight canceled in February 2020, was still waiting for her money this month—and Orbitz, her online travel agency, said that because of a computer glitch she might not get it until the end of 2021. (Orbitz did issue the refund after a reporter called.)

Founded in 1983, The Advocates for Human Rights (theadvocatesforhumanrights.org) is dedicated to protecting the rights of women, immigrants, asylum seekers, and other marginalized communities at home and abroad. The charity is one of the primary pro bono legal service providers to asylum seekers, immigrants, and victims of human trafficking in Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota. To advocate for women’s, LGBTQ, and noncitizen rights, the organization documents government abuses directed at marginalized communities worldwide. It also provides technical assistance and training for international human rights organizations and advocates. Last year, The Advocates provided legal assistance to 1,500 individuals and connected 1,250 additional asylum seekers with legal services and resources in their area through its national helpline.

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.

AP

A master’s degree in debt

Charity of the week

Obituaries

35

The hawk who oversaw the U.S. invasion of Iraq On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was seated at his desk in the Pentagon 1932–2021 watching news footage from New York City, where two planes had just smashed into the World Trade Center. Suddenly, his office began to shake—a hijacked Boeing 757 had slammed into the Pentagon’s southwest wing. Rumsfeld ran to the crash site to help in the rescue work, then moved to the military command center. He quickly emerged as the hawkish face of the Bush administration’s War on Terror, achieving fleeting popularity as U.S. forces ousted Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers, who had harbored al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden. But Rumsfeld and fellow neoconservatives were soon pushing President George W. Bush to strike Iraq, claiming—with no hard evidence—that dictator Saddam Hussein also had ties to al-Qaida, and weapons of mass destruction. “The best and in some cases the only defense,” Rumsfeld said, “is a good offense.” No WMDs were found following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and the country rapidly descended into bloody sectarian conflict. Rumsfeld offered no mea culpas in his 2011 memoir, insisting that the Iraq War, which cost the U.S. $700 billion and resulted in the deaths of 4,400 American service members and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, “created a more stable and secure world.”

Donald Rumsfeld

Rumsfeld was born in Evanston, Ill., to parents who were successful real estate agents, said The New York Times. He earned a scholarship to Princeton University, where he was captain of the wrestling and football teams. After a stint as a Navy fighter pilot, Rumsfeld won a long-shot bid in 1962 for a House of Representatives seat in an affluent Chicago suburb. “A strikingly handsome Midwesterner radiating confidence,” the Republican formed a group of aggressive young lawmakers dubbed “Rumsfeld’s Raiders” and easily won three more terms. Richard Nixon admiringly called Rumsfeld a “ruthless little bastard” and hired him after winning the presidency.

As head of the Office of Economic Opportunity, Rumsfeld pared the anti-poverty agency down sharply, said The Times (U.K.).

Then, having rankled Nixon’s top aides, he was dispatched to Brussels as ambassador to NATO in 1973, leaving him “untainted when the full fury of the Watergate scandal broke.” President Gerald Ford named Rumsfeld his chief of staff, then defense secretary, where he clashed with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, foiling a major arms-control deal with the Soviet Union. The Pentagon’s youngest-ever chief— he took the post at age 43—Rumsfeld was an intense manager who sent out flurries of memos that came to be known as “snowflakes.” After Ford’s 1976 election defeat, Rumsfeld went into business as a pharmaceutical and tech executive, making millions of dollars from his role in the development of NutraSweet and high-definition TV. In his second Pentagon stint, Rumsfeld had ambitious plans to “streamline and modernize the military,” said The Wall Street Journal. He dismissed a request from top generals for a 480,000-strong Iraq invasion force, calling it “old thinking,” and capped the maximum deployment at 125,000 troops. Baghdad fell in three weeks, but the occupying force was too small to restore order. “Stuff happens,” Rumsfeld remarked when Iraqis went on a looting spree.

Pentagon officials said the chaos was fueled by the defense secretary’s decision to disband Iraq’s army, which left some 300,000 men jobless; many went on to join ISIS. Rumsfeld often “came across as insensitive to strains on the U.S. military,” said The Washington Post. In 2004, he told Army reservists worried about the lack of armor on their vehicles that “you go to war with the Army you have.” Asked about the failure to find WMDs, Rumsfeld insisted that “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

“As the war dragged on with little sign of progress,” President Bush resisted calls to fire Rumsfeld, said The Guardian (U.K.). But after Republicans suffered a drubbing in the 2006 midterm elections, “Rumsfeld was immediately sacked, and largely disappeared from public life.” In a 2015 interview, he said the U.S.’s fatal mistake in Iraq was trying to build a democracy. “You can be helpful, you can provide assistance,” Rumsfeld said, but eventually, “you’re going to have to take your hand off the bicycle seat.”

The director who brought Superman to the big screen Richard Donner was at home nursing a hangover when the call came in that would change his life. A veteran 1930–2021 TV director, he’d just made his movie breakthrough with 1976’s The Omen, about parents who adopt a young boy who is secretly the Antichrist.

Now he was being offered $1 million by a producer to bring the comic-book hero Superman to the big screen.

After insisting on a rewrite of a script he found too cartoonish and casting an unknown Christopher Reeve in the title role, Donner struck gold with the global smash Superman in 1978. Other hits followed, including the kids’ adventure film The Goonies (1985) and Lethal Weapon (1987), the buddy-cop blockbuster starring Danny Glover and Mel Gibson that spawned three sequels. The genre-hopping director said his aim was to tell human tales, and credited Superman’s success to his insistence on playing it straight. “Anything I’ve been involved with or have been surrounded by,” Donner said, “it’s about story.”

Getty, Everett

Richard Donner

Richard Schwartzberg was born in the Bronx, where his father, a Russian-Jewish immigrant, worked for the family furniture business, said The New York Times. On visits to his maternal grand-

father’s Brooklyn movie theater, Richard “became fascinated by film,” but with “no specific career ambitions” he joined the Navy in his teens. He then studied business at New York University, but dropped out to try his hand at acting, adopting the stage name Donner. He landed some small roles, but quit when a director, Martin Ritt, told him, “I’d never make it as an actor because I couldn’t take direction, but he thought I could give it.” After “several years of directing commercials,” Donner moved to Los Angeles in 1959 and “made his way in television drama,” said The Times (U.K.). He directed episodes of The Twilight Zone, Perry Mason, and Gilligan’s Island and made three unsuccessful films before finding big-screen success with The Omen.

While Donner directed few post-1980s hits, he “continued working steadily,” said The Guardian (U.K.). The production company he founded with his wife, Lauren Shuler Donner, was behind box office smashes including Free Willy (1993), X-Men (2000), and Deadpool (2016). A convivial man with an outsize personality, Donner lacked any pretense about his cinematic contributions. His sole boast: “I’m pretty good at meeting a schedule and a budget.”

THE WEEK July 23, 2021

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The last word

Learning that your family owned slaves Stacie Marshall found out that her family once enslaved seven people, said Kim Severson in The New York Times.

Now the Georgia farmer is trying to find a way to make things right. lived in two small shacks on her land.

“She is deep in Confederate country trying to do this work,” Raiford said when he went to visit her farm this spring.

As the only young woman running a farm in the valley, Marshall already feels like a curiosity. You can’t really hide from your neighbors here, which is the best and the worst thing about tight communities. Not long ago, she ended up in a CrossFit class with Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right Republican this region elected to Congress in 2020.

She stood out, and not just because she was one of only two white people in the room. Marshall, 41, still had the long blond hair and good looks that won her the Miss Chattooga County title in 1998.

The win came with scholarship money that got her to a tiny Baptist college and a life away from Dirt Town Valley, Ga., the small Appalachian valley where her family has farmed for more than 200 years.

Marshall hasn’t told most of her extended family what she is doing. “I will get some hell,” she said. “There are people in this community that are totally going to turn when I start telling these things.” At the same time, she is protective of her corner of the South. “I don’t want my family to be painted out as a bunch of white, racist rednecks,” she said. “God, I am proud of every square inch of this place—except for this.”

Leading the seminar was Matthew Raiford, 53, a tall, magnetic Gullah Geechee chef and organic farmer who works the coastal Georgia land his forebears secured a decade after they were emancipated from slavery.

He asked if there were questions.

Marshall raised her hand, ignored the knot in her stomach, and told her story: She was in line to inherit 300 acres, which would make her the first woman in her family to own a farm. She had big plans for the fading commercial cattle operation and its overgrown fields. She would call it Mountain Mama Farms, and sell enough grass-fed beef and handmade products like goat’s milk soap to help support her husband and their three daughters.

But she had discovered a terrible thing.

“My family owned seven people,” Marshall said. She wanted to know how to make it right. Raiford was as surprised as anyone in the room. “Those older guys have probably never heard that from a white lady in their entire lives,” he recalled.

For almost three years now, with the fervor of the newly converted, Marshall has been on a quest that from the outside may seem quixotic and even naïve. She is diving into her family’s past and trying to chip away at racism in the Deep South, where every white family with roots here benefited from slavery and almost every Black family had enslaved ancestors.

“I don’t have a lot of money, but I have property,” she said during a walk on her farm last winter. “How am I going to use that for the greater good, and not in like a THE WEEK July 23, 2021

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Marshall: ‘I will get some hell.’

paying-penance sort of way but in an it’sjust-the-right-thing-to-do kind of way?”

It’s not easy finding anyone in this farming community of 26,000 she can talk to about white privilege, critical race theory, or renewed calls for federal reparations. She can’t even get her cousins to stop flying the Confederate flag. It’s about heritage, not hate, they tell her. Hers is the national soulsearching writ small: Should the descendants of people who kept others enslaved be held responsible for that wrong? What can they do to make things right? And what will it cost?

After the seminar, the farmers offered some ideas: She could set up an internship for young Black farmers, letting them work her land and keep the profit. Maybe her Black neighbors wanted preservation work done on their church cemetery. Or maybe— and this is where the discussion gets complicated—she should give some land or money from the sale of it to descendants of the Black people who had helped her family build wealth, either as enslaved people in the 1800s or, later, as sharecroppers who

VER THE YEARS, Marshall’s father and grandfather drove trucks or took shifts at the cotton mill to keep the farm running.

At 68, her father, Steve Scoggins, still works 3 p.m. to midnight as a hospital maintenance man.

Her father, who lives down the road, is as proud of his farm daughter as a man could be. He unabashedly supports her work against racism, but at the Dirt Town Deli, he sometimes stays quiet when an offensive comment passes among his friends.

Marshall’s childhood was steeped in conservative rural politics and the power of the evangelical church. She left home to attend Truett McConnell University, a Baptist school near the Tennessee border, on a scholarship for students with ambitions to become a minister or marry one. There she met Jeremy Marshall, a product of the Atlanta suburbs who was studying for the ministry. They married when both were 21, and went on to earn master’s degrees.

The couple lived and worked for a decade at Berry College, a liberal arts school in northwest Georgia where they helped care for 400 evangelical students in a program paid for by the conservative WinShape Foundation. But last year, as the coronavirus hit, they decided it was time to move to the family farmhouse she had inherited.

Nydia Blas/The New York Times) (2)

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started to take the pandemic seriously, Stacie Marshall slipped into the back of a conference room in Athens, Ga., and joined two dozen Black farmers in a marketing seminar called “Collards Aren’t the New Kale.”

UST BEFORE PEOPLE

The last word Growing up, Marshall heard that her family had once enslaved people, but the history hit her in a visceral way 12 years ago, just after her first daughter was born. The baby was struggling to nurse. Marshall was nearly in tears. Her grandfather, Fred Scoggins, tried to offer some comfort. “You know,” she recalled his saying, “you get that from the Scoggins women. Your greatgreat-great grandmother couldn’t produce milk, either. So they had to buy a slave.”

If anyone in the valley could help Marshall begin those conversations, it was Melvin Mosley. He had been the assistant principal at her high school. He is also her father’s best friend. The two men met as boys, when Mosley’s uncle lived in one of the shacks on the Scoggins farm and worked for Marshall’s grandfather.

Scoggins went to the white school, Mosley to the Black one. Every book at Mosley’s school was a hand-me-down from the

They called her Mammy Hester, he said, and he spun the same false narrative that some white Southerners use to soften the harsh reality: The family had treated Hester so well that after the Civil War, she remained with them.

37 tract in the 1950s. No one knows exactly when the generations of people who lived in them started calling themselves renters instead of tenant farmers or sharecroppers.

Gene Kirby sometimes worked for Marshall’s grandfather, and one of the first things Marshall did when she moved to the farm was to ask the Kirbys if her grandfather had left any debt to them unpaid.

Gene asked her to untangle a small land dispute. Marshall promised to pay him for the land once they get it surveyed.

Marshall can’t imagine offering them anything that they might see as charity.

They wouldn’t even accept the gift of her grandmother’s chair. But one afternoon last winter, Marshall walked across the road specifically to speak about racism. She brought a copy of the slave records, and arranged for Paulette Perry, 77, a cousin of Melvin Mosley’s who is something of a family historian, to join them.

Marshall began thinking a lot about Hester, whose milk had fed her ancestors. Then, about five years ago, she learned that there was more. Her mother-in-law, an amateur genealogist, delivered the news. “Did you know your family owned slaves?” she asked, producing documents she had discovered. “I felt like I needed a shot of whiskey,” Marshall said.

At first, no one had much to say. They talked about Gene’s tractors and who called Marshall the last time her cows got out.

Then they turned to issues of race.

But it was easy to shove the family history aside. Her daughters were growing up. Her mother got sick with cancer and died. She lost her grandparents. “I picked out three coffins in five months,” she said.

“We never really had any problem with Black and white,” Perry said.

Her father gave her the family farmhouse and 3 acres. When he dies, she will take control of the remaining few hundred acres.

Marshall started clearing out the house. She was sorting through her grandparents’ castiron pans and old furniture when she came across a dusty boot box filled with wedding announcements and newspaper clippings.

The two laughed about how their brothers had to protect them from some white boys who threw stones as they walked home from school. How they hid under a bed in fear for a half-day after someone pulled a prank and said the Ku Klux Klan was on its way. The laughter faded. There were the hotel rooms Gene was refused when he was on the road driving 18-wheelers, and the times he had to put up a fight to get paid.

Inside was a copy of the county slave schedule from 1860 that her mother-in-law had discovered. This time, Marshall really studied it. Seven people were listed under the name W.D. Scoggins, her great-greatgreat-grandfather, identified only by their ages, genders, and race. Her family had owned two men and one woman, all in their 30s, and four children. The youngest was 5 1/2 months old.

W.D. Scoggins had another unsettling legacy. He acquired the family’s first tract of land, a mile or so from her farm, in an 1833 lottery that gave Creek and Cherokee land to white people. Key portions of the Trail of Tears start not far from her valley.

“So you figure out that you got stolen land that had the enslaved put on it, and your family benefited off that for a lot of years,” said Raiford, the Gullah Geechee farmer who has become her friend and adviser.

“Now you have to have two different conversations. It gets complicated real fast.”

“You just kind of knew where you stood and knew everybody,” Nancy said.

Nancy and Gene Kirby, Marshall’s neighbors

white school, but the boys didn’t understand that their educations were different until they started comparing notes.

For decades, Mosley taught in public schools and prisons. At 67, he is a preacher and lives with his wife, Betty, on 50 acres near Marshall’s farm.

On a summer day in 2019, Marshall sat in their yard and told them she wanted to start sharing the whole, hard story of Dirt Town Valley and to make some kind of amends. She asked if she was on the right path. “In all of our families, Black or white, there are some generational things that are up to us to break,” he told her. “And when we break it, it is broken forever.”

He stood and took her hand. Mosley joined them in a prayer circle. “Father in heaven,” he prayed, “we ask you just to continue to give her the courage and the desire to break the chain of racism, Lord.”

N

ANCY AND GENE KIRBY,

a couple in their late 70s, live right across the road from Marshall’s farm. When Nancy was young, she and her family were renters, living in one of the farm shacks before Marshall’s grandparents bought that

And there was the death, at age 4, of the Kirbys’ son Gordon Eugene. A photo, with a lock of his hair, hangs in their den. On Sept. 10, 1967, a white teenage driver sped down the road not far from the Scoggins farm and struck him. Gene saw it happen.

“I was across the road holding my other baby in my arms,” he said.

The teenager’s mother denied that her son was the driver. Gene said he called the sheriff and the state patrol, but they never showed up to take a report. Standing on the Kirbys’ porch, Marshall said her goodbyes and headed back across the road. The path to reconciliation still wasn’t clear.

“These are people that I love dearly,” she said. “How do I put a number on what they have lived through?”

A version of this article first appeared in The New York Times. Used with permission.

THE WEEK July 23, 2021

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Crossword No. 608: Rio No, Tokyo Yes by Matt Gaffney 1

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This week’s question: Richard Branson reached the edge of space in a Virgin Galactic rocket this week, just days before Amazon founder Jeff Bezos planned to do the same in his Blue Origin shuttle. If Hollywood were to make a comedy about a space race among billionaires, what should it title the film?

Last week’s contest: Foo Fighters recently played to a capacity crowd of 20,000 vaccinated-only fans at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, the first concert in the iconic arena in more than a year. If the band were to rewrite a rock song and turn it into a pro-vaccination anthem, what should the track be titled?

THE WINNER: “We Are Gonna Take It”

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Charles R. Meek, San Angelo, Texas

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SECOND PLACE: “Sweet Vial O’ Mine” Kelsey Richters, Lincoln, Neb.

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THIRD PLACE: “Vax the Way (I Like It)”

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

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ACROSS 1 Sport making its Olympic debut in Tokyo this month; its name is Japanese for “empty hand” 7 Some summer births 11 Expert with tax docs 14 How a present is presented, often 15 Healthy berry 16 Latin for “king” 17 Wacky 18 Women-only sport that returns for Tokyo after being excluded from the 2012 and 2016 Games 20 Buccaneer’s domain 22 Sprawling hotel room 23 Free Solo star Alex Honnold says he’s “excited” to see this event debut in Tokyo 29 Sugarcane cutter 30 “___ that the truth!”

31 Arts patron John Jacob ___ 32 “Brava!”

33 ___ butter (lotion ingredient) 37 Waze suggestion (abbr.)

38 As an island nation, Japan is well suited for this sport’s 2020 Olympic debut 42 ___-tempered (volatile) 43 “Toodles!”

45 “___ that I care, but...”

46 Slowly, on piano 48 CBS drama since 2003 50 Use, as a stepladder THE WEEK July 23, 2021

52 Tony Hawk admitted to “a mixed feeling” about this counterculture sport debuting at the 2020 Olympics 54 Gems mostly from Australia 56 Wave-lapped land 57 Due to restrictions on pro players, Shohei Ohtani won’t represent Japan as this sport returns to the Olympics after a 13-year hiatus 60 Ukrainian port 65 Alternative to a JPEG 66 Being searched for by MPs, maybe 67 Forces on the waves 68 “That’s awesome news!”

69 Cuts, as wood 70 Can’t look away DOWN 1 One of the Kardashians 2 Actress de Armas 3 Super-cool 4 The Hustler network 5 They have slots for slices 6 Await 7 Drink often made with mango 8 Environmentalist’s prefix 9 Klutzy type 10 Occupies, as a recliner 11 Bond since 2006 12 Hit, as with stones 13 Chevy shaft

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19 They shouldn’t go too far from home 21 Tavern order 23 Clever 24 Food made in many shapes 25 Four pairs, when combined 26 P, to Greeks 27 Neighbor of Senegal 28 It’s good in Montreal 32 Frequently, poetically 34 Language that gave us “pajamas” and “shampoo” 35 John on a bench 36 Go ___ for the ride 39 The U of Law & Order: SVU 40 Activist actress McGowan 41 Intimidated wordlessly 44 ___-length socks 47 Complete 49 “Rock the ___” (Clash hit) 50 Plea for rescue 51 Business ends of buzzards 52 Like Gloria on Modern Family 53 Water, electric, et al.

54 Carry out orders 55 Dad 58 Leave stunned 59 Coldest temperature of the day 61 Longoria or Mendes 62 Male customer, to a store clerk 63 Get a visual on 64 Fool

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 “Space race” in the subject line. Entries are due by noon, Eastern Time, Tuesday, July 20. Winners will appear on the Puzzle Page next issue and at theweek.com/puzzles on Friday, July 23.

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.

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