80 Articles

The only time I sat on a jury was in the early aughts, when I lived in Manhattan. It was a traffic-injury lawsuit: A man who spoke little English had apparently rear-ended a Queens woman, who was wearing a neck brace in court and was loudly irate about her injury. We the jury were the typical motley assortment of New Yorkers, from all ethnic backgrounds and income levels. The one thing we had in common was that we took our role as jurors seriously, working through the evidence until a different story of the accident emerged: The man had been stopped at a red light, and the woman gunned her car in reverse to smash into him, making it look like a rear-end collision so she could collect. It was…

4 min.

Israel plans retaliation after massive Iranian attack

What happened The decades-long shadow war between Israel and Iran moved closer to open conflict this week, after Tehran launched an unprecedented aerial assault on the Jewish state and Israel pledged to strike back. Iran aimed more than 300 drones and missiles at Israel in a coordinated five-hour attack; Tehran said the barrage was in response to an Israeli strike on an Iranian diplomatic compound in Syria that killed two senior Iranian military commanders. Most of the Iranian weapons were intercepted before reaching Israeli airspace, with the help of the U.S., U.K., and Jordan. Israel’s air defenses destroyed almost all of the rest. The sole casualty was an Israeli Bedouin girl, wounded by falling debris. In a phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Biden urged restraint over fears…

1 min.

What next?

Israel faces “a quandary,” said David Ignatius in The Washington Post. Despite pleas from Biden and other world leaders, Israeli officials have resolved that to deter further aggression they must retaliate. But as they weigh their choices, they’re wondering how to send a “hard-nosed message” without “escalating the crisis” and risking all-out war. Israel has a range of options, said Jack Detsch in Foreign Policy. The most aggressive—and risky—would be a strike aimed at Iran’s nuclear program. A step down would be an attack on “another high-value target” on Iranian soil, which might include military sites, weapons depots, a top military leader, or even the headquarters of the elite Revolutionary Guard. Among the less provocative options are targeted strikes against military commanders or Iran-backed militias outside Iran, or a cyberattack…

3 min.

In historic first, Trump goes on trial in hush-money case

What happened The first-ever criminal trial of a former U.S. president began jury selection in a Manhattan courtroom this week, with Donald Trump calling the charges that he falsified records to cover up a hush-money payment “political persecution” and “election interference.” The trial centers on a 2016 payment of $130,000 made by Trump fixer Michael Cohen to porn star Stormy Daniels, which prosecutors say was intended to cover up her 2006 sexual encounter with Trump. Asked whether they could be impartial about the former president, many prospective jurors said they could not and were released; others were struck from the jury pool for their past social media posts, including one man who had posted “lock him up.” While Trump appeared to doze off during the proceedings several times, he took interest…

1 min.

It wasn’t all bad

In 1978, a science teacher named Patrick Moriarty promised his first group of students that he would organize an eclipse-viewing party for the next one to pass near their hometown of Rochester, N.Y. This month, the 68-year-old teacher delivered on that promise, as 100 of his former students watched the eclipse from Moriarty’s driveway. Moriarty had contacted them through a Facebook group he created two years ago to track down 1,000-plus students he’d taught. After the event, Moriarty suggested the group could meet in two decades for the next eclipse. “I had an impact on these kids,” Moriarty said. Three mariners were rescued from the uninhabited island of Pikelot, part of the Federated States of Micronesia, after making a giant HELP sign out of palm fronds. The men left Polowat…

3 min.

Abortion: Can the GOP still call itself a pro-life party?

The “Great GOP Abortion Retreat” has begun, said Laurie Roberts in The Arizona Republic. When Arizona’s Supreme Court last week resurrected the state’s 1864 near-total abortion ban, it extended a stunning legal winning streak for the pro-life movement—one that began with the U.S. Supreme Court’s repeal of Roe v. Wade in 2022. Yet rather than celebrate, many Republicans are now “backpedaling as if their political lives depend on it,” among them Arizona U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake. Two years ago, Lake was hailing the 1864 ban as a “great law.” But following its revival, she swiftly began lobbying for its repeal and the reinstatement of a 15-week ban to give women “more choices.” Lake didn’t freelance her reversal, said Shelby Talcott in Semafor. Like Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who now…

1 min.

Only in America

A white supremacist who beat up a journalist has been freed from jail, because the sentencing judge thinks prosecutors are soft on “Antifa.” Tyler Laube of California pleaded guilty, and prosecutors requested a six-month sentence. But U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney sentenced Laube to time served (35 days), saying anything more would “increase the disparity” between Laube’s punishment and “far-left groups who have committed the same violent conduct.” A California state lawmaker wants to ban companies from contacting their employees outside working hours. The “Right to Disconnect” bill from Democrat Matt Haney would make firms set start and end points to the workday, and pay fines if they repeatedly email, text, or call staff during nonworking hours. Haney says his goal is for Californians to sit down to dinner without…

1 min.

Good week/bad week

Snowflakes, after toy giant Mattel unveiled “Scrabble Together,” a “collaborative” version of the classic spelling game. Mattel said it hopes Scrabble Together, in which players work toward shared goals, will appeal to those who find “word games intimidating.” Kids these days, after Poland banned mandatory homework for grades 1–8. “I am happy,” said Ola Kozak, 11, of Warsaw. Ola said many of her classmates copied their answers off the internet anyway, so homework “didn’t make sense” as an educational tool. American carnage, after Donald Trump declared during a campaign speech in Schnecksville, Pa., that the Battle of Gettysburg—in which more than 50,000 Union and Confederate troops were killed or wounded—was “so beautiful in so many different ways.” Bad week for: Progress, after Nike’s new uniforms for the U.S. women’s Olympic track-and-field team were criticized…

1 min.

In other news

High court allows ban on transgender care for minors The Supreme Court this week said Idaho could enforce its ban on transgender treatment for minors. In December, a U.S. district judge struck down the 2023 law, under which health-care professionals can be sentenced to up to 10 years in prison for providing children with treatments such as hormones and puberty-blocking drugs. The judge issued an injunction blocking the law while the state appeals. Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador requested “emergency” action from the Supreme Court to stop that injunction. The court decided 5-3 that the judge overstepped his power by halting the law’s enforcement while the appeals case worked through the judicial system. Allowing the broad injunction, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote, would prevent Idaho “from executing any aspect of its law…

4 min.

The U.S. at a glance

Santa Fe ‘Russian roulette’: The armorer who worked on the Rust set in 2021, when a loaded prop gun killed the film’s cinematographer, received a maximum prison sentence this week. Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer sentenced Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, 27, to 18 months in prison for involuntary manslaughter, saying she lacked a “sense of guilt.” In the trial, a 12-person jury deliberated whether Gutierrez-Reed showed “willful disregard for the safety of others” when she gave Alec Baldwin a gun loaded with live ammunition, which discharged and killed filmmaker Halyna Hutchins. Baldwin is also charged, separately, with involuntary manslaughter. Gutierrez-Reed denied bringing live bullets to the set, but police found several on set. From jail, Gutierrez-Reed said she “didn’t need to be shaking” the prop guns to ensure the bullets were inert. “Every time…

8 min.

The world at a glance

Copenhagen 17th-century spire collapses: Fire engulfed Denmark’s historic stock exchange this week, toppling its iconic dragon-tail spire and leaving much of the building a smoking ruin. “Four hundred years of Danish cultural history, up in flames,” said Culture Minister Jakob Engel-Schmidt. Videos showed Copenhagen residents looking on in horror as plumes of black smoke spewed from the brick building’s copper roof, while some rushed in to try to save the extensive collection of artworks inside. The Borsen building had been Denmark’s stock exchange from 1625, when the country was a major world financial power, until the 1970s. The loss is gutting, local craftsman Henrik Grage told Danish TV, saying, “This is our Notre Dame.” Brussels Far-right confab goes ahead: Police attempted to shutter a far-right conference in Brussels this week, leaving attendees railing…

1 min.

How Wilson shifted her shape

Rebel Wilson made a name for herself in Hollywood by playing the funny fat girl, said Megan Agnew in The Sunday Times (U.K.). Arriving from Sydney in 2009, the actress says she knew she wouldn’t be “taken seriously” like fellow Australians Cate Blanchett and Nicole Kidman. “But I quickly realized that the bigger you were, the more audiences laughed. So I’d have my gut hanging out and wear micro-shorts on stage, no makeup. It was part of my plan.” It worked, and she quickly began landing seven-figure roles in comedies. “People applauded me for being the size I was, telling me I was ‘brave.’” Soon, she was contractually obliged not to let her weight fluctuate by more than 10 pounds. But a few years ago, Wilson realized she had to…

1 min.

Townshend’s diminishing returns

Pete Townshend makes no bones about why he still gets onstage with the Who at age 78, said Rob Tannenbaum in The New York Times. “I don’t get much of a buzz from performing with the Who,” says Townshend, who formed the band 60 years ago with singer Roger Daltrey, bassist John Entwistle, and drummer Keith Moon. “If I’m really honest, I’ve been touring for the money. My idea of an ordinary lifestyle is pretty elevated.” He still makes music for his own pleasure, but says the Who are done recording. “There’s one thing the Who can do, and that’s a final tour where we play every territory in the world and then crawl off to die.” Getting old in rock is a complicated business, he notes. “Watching Keith Richards…

1 min.

Ritchson’s harrowing modeling days

Alan Ritchson was traumatized by the modeling industry, said Chris Gardner in The Hollywood Reporter. After dropping out of college, the 6-foot-3, 240-pound Reacher star was working at a Florida gas station when a customer suggested he cash in on his good looks. Moving to Miami at 19, Ritchson signed with a modeling agency, appeared in Abercrombie & Fitch ads, and traveled the world. But he has little good to say about the business. “It’s like legalized sex trafficking,” says Ritchson, 41. “The number of times I was put in horrific environments where sexual abuse was the goal and the paycheck you were desperate for to survive was the carrot, I can’t count on two hands.” Gigs like the J.C. Penney catalog were a respite. “It was like, ‘Thank God,’…

2 min.

In the news

Just three months after tying the knot, Golden Bachelor stars Gerry Turner and Theresa Nist are getting a divorce. Breaking the news on ABC’s Good Morning America last week, the senior sweethearts said they decided to split after failing to agree on a place to lay down roots together. Turner, 72, lives in Indiana while Nist, 70, is in New Jersey. “We looked at home after home,” Nist said. “But we never got to the point where we made that decision.” The couple, both widowed, had seemingly relished a second chance at finding romance in the Bachelor spin-off. “I know I’ve found a partner to share all of life’s experiences,” Turner said during their televised wedding ceremony in January. Bachelor fans were stunned that the marriage was so short-lived. “I…

5 min.

Bird flu’s evolving threat

Avian influenza is starting to spread among cattle and other mammals. Could it become a human pandemic? How dangerous is bird flu? The H5N1 strain circulating around the world is, for birds and other animals, the deadliest avian flu outbreak on record. First detected in China in 1996, it has ripped its way around the world, killing hundreds of millions of domestic and wild birds; more than 90 percent of chickens infected with H5N1 die within 48 hours. By the time the virus showed up in North America in 2021, it had evolved to become even more contagious. A highly pathogenic variant has now been detected on every continent apart from Australia and in more 100 different bird species, including migratory waterfowl that keep the virus circulating. The culling of more than…

1 min.

Activists are taking over universities

Tal Fortgang National Review For the dean of Berkeley law school, “the moral and behavioral rot at our elite law schools has hit close to home—literally,” said Tal Fortgang. When Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and his wife, law professor Catherine Fisk, held a pre-graduation dinner in their backyard for 60 students, a pro-Palestinian activist grabbed the microphone and launched into an attack on the law school for supposedly failing to stand up against Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. After Fisk and Chemerinsky refused to let the group stage a protest at their home, the lead activist accused them of Islamophobia and assault. Later, Chemerinsky said he was “enormously sad” that law students would use a “social occasion for their political agenda.” But why would he be surprised that law students would behave…

1 min.

Downplaying the threat of Trump

Jennifer Rubin The Washington Post Many business leaders are scoffing at the idea that a second Trump term will lead to “a MAGA autocracy,” said Jennifer Rubin. But the executive class may regret downplaying the consequences of a vengeful, wounded Trump returning to power. This time around, Trump’s populist impulses will not be constrained by aides with establishment credentials, and his radical policies and unhinged behavior will trigger “economic and political upheaval.” Trump is vowing to impose huge tariffs on Chinese and other foreign imports, to use the Justice Department as a weapon to punish his enemies, and to replace tens of thousands of federal civil servants with unqualified MAGA loyalists. Trump’s isolationism will mean cutting off U.S. military aid to Ukraine, victory for Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and a green light for…

1 min.

The many reasons for optimism

Matthew Yglesias SlowBoring.com We’re living in “the best of times,” said Matthew Yglesias. That statement might puzzle Americans caught in a constant doom loop of apocalyptic warnings about climate change, crime, poverty, health, and global conflict. But humanity has always faced serious problems, and in 2024, Americans “are living in what is indisputably one of the richest countries on the planet, at a time of unprecedented global prosperity.” After the pandemic, the U.S. economy bounced back vigorously; unemployment is at historic lows, while wealth and wages have grown “most rapidly at the bottom.” The murder rate has fallen three years in a row. After falling during Covid, U.S. life expectancy is rising again. Climatologists now say the worst-case scenarios for climate change are unlikely as the world moves in fits and starts…

1 min.

Viewpoint

“The social networks made it easy for anyone we’ve ever met, and plenty of people we never met, to friend and follow us. We could communicate with them all at once without communing with them individually at all. Or so we were told. The idea that we could have so much community with so little effort was an illusion. Too much ease carries a cost. We are digitally connected to more people than ever and terribly lonely nevertheless. Closeness requires time, and time has not fallen in cost or risen in quantity.” Ezra Klein in The New York Times…

1 min.

It must be true…

The owner of a Kansas bakery is warning customers they may find a diamond in one of her cookies. Dawn “Sis” Monroe, of Sis Sweets Cookies & Café in Leavenworth, announced on social media that she recently lost the center diamond from her wedding ring, and suspects it came off while she hand-mixed a batch of cookie dough. “I didn’t want anyone to break a tooth,” she said, adding that if a customer returned the stone, “I would be forever in [your] debt.” Bay Area residents were shocked to see a two-story house floating across San Francisco Bay. It turned out to be a houseboat that had been evicted from a marina in Redwood City and was moving to a new home in Sausalito. Pulled by a towboat, the wood-shingled…

1 min.

Good riddance to a woke national logo

José Diogo Quintela Observador The center-right government sworn in just two weeks ago has already made a literal mark, said José Diogo Quintela, by restoring the old logo for Portugal’s national symbol. The previous, leftist government had replaced Portugal’s traditional symbol—the 12th-century coat of arms on a red-and-green field resembling the national flag—with a spare and modernist new logo: a green rectangle, yellow circle, and red square laid out like “Lego blocks.” It looked like something created by “a PR bureaucrat” to appease woke Millennials. They don’t want official government documents to bear a crest whose shield commemorates the battlefield victory of the Portuguese over the Moors—it isn’t “inclusive.” No, they’d rather give us a bland new symbol, with no distinctive features, “so that there is not the slightest chance of anyone…

1 min.

A TV debate worthy of Fox News

Nathan Giwerzew Berliner Zeitung A German taboo against platforming the extreme right has been shattered, said Nathan Giwerzew. Ever since the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party reached the German parliament in 2017, politicians from left and center have avoided publicly engaging with its leaders, fearful of normalizing a hateful ideology. But last week, Mario Voigt of the center-right Christian Democrats took a chance on a televised debate and sparred with Björn Höcke, a Nazi apologist who is his AfD rival in September’s Thuringia state elections. The bet paid off, as “Höcke stumbled publicly for the first time.” A history teacher, he claimed he didn’t know that “Everything for Germany”—which he recently shouted at a rally—was a Nazi slogan. When pressed on the AfD’s plan to deport millions of migrants, he implausibly…

2 min.

European Union: A bitter compromise on migrants

Was it a great day for European unity, or did the EU just sell its soul? asked Josef Kelnberger in Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany). After a decade of buck-passing and finger-pointing, the 27 countries of the European Union finally agreed last week on a way to share the burden of refugees and asylum seekers: Member countries must either take in some of the thousands of refugees that land each day on Greek and Italian shores or pay up to help process them. That’s a great political victory. But the resulting Pact on Migration and Asylum is also harsh in the extreme. It allows the EU to “lock refugee families—with their children—in camps under prison-like conditions,” to fast-track denials of asylum, and to deport those rejected to a so-called safe third country.…

2 min.

Mexico: Fury at Ecuador over embassy raid

The crisis now escalating between Mexico and Ecuador might have been avoided if Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador hadn’t run his mouth, said Gerardo René Herrera Huízar in El Financiero (Mexico). In early April, López Obrador, a leftist, publicly insulted Ecuador’s right-wing President Daniel Noboa, casting doubt on the legitimacy of his election because he had benefited politically from the assassination of one of the candidates. The “very unfortunate” remark was intended for a domestic audience but soon reached Ecuador, which responded by expelling the Mexican ambassador. But Noboa didn’t stop there. Ecuadorean police then violently raided the Mexican embassy in Quito to arrest former Ecuadorean Vice President Jorge Glas, who had taken shelter there from what he called political persecution. In an unprecedented show of force, officers in…

1 min.

Where men barge into a ladies lounge

Jenna Price Canberra Times Is nowhere to be free from the lecherous gaze of men? asked Jenna Price. A court has ruled that Ladies Lounge, an art installation at Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art, must open its doors to men. Artist Kirsha Kaechele conceived the work as a lavish side space where those who identify as women can enjoy the museum’s choicest artworks, including Picassos, while being served champagne by male waiters. These paintings are off-limits to men. When New South Wales man Jason Lau sued, saying he was being discriminated against by being kept out of the room, the artist simply laughed. “The men are experiencing Ladies Lounge,” she said, “their experience of rejection is the artwork.” The point was to underscore the historic exclusion of women from galleries—indeed,…

1 min.

America’s hypocritical requests

Hu Xijin Global Times Janet Yellen came to China last week to “ask a favor,” said Hu Xijin. The treasury secretary was on a mission to beg us to slash investment in electric vehicles and solar panels, saying our factories were on track to produce more of these green technologies than “the global market can bear.” She has some gall. After decades of praising China’s transition to a market economy, the U.S. is now in the position of requesting that we “engage in nonmarket administrative intervention,” using the power of the state to order private companies to cut production. Yes, China is making these products at a low, competitive price. But that’s the result of “fierce market competition among manufacturers” here. Even if it wished, “the Chinese government may be unable to…

1 min.

Noted

Nearly 1 in 4 K-12 teachers reported that their school underwent a “gun-related lockdown” in the 2022-23 school year. Eight percent of teachers said they experienced more than one lockdown last year. NBCNews.com Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis last week signed a bill that bars local governments from mandating protections for workers who toil outside in sweltering summer heat. The law comes after officials in Miami-Dade—where the heat index topped 100 degrees for 46 days in a row last summer—considered rules requiring employers to provide access to water and shade breaks on hot days. NPR.org More than 120 measles cases have been reported in the U.S. so far this year, according to the CDC. That’s more than double the entire number for all of 2023. Health officials say the sharp rise…

2 min.

‘Tradwives’: A retro lifestyle goes viral

“The 1950s are back,” said Alise Morales in Jezebel, or at least they are on social media. Instagram and TikTok feeds are now clogged with “tradwives”: “perfectly coiffed” young influencers in hand-embroidered aprons who have accumulated millions of followers by gushing about the joys of keeping house and “traditional” womanhood. The movement’s first domestic icon, Alena Kate Pettitt, claims she was “stifled by modern feminism” and her job in marketing. But her marital woes vanished when she gave it all up to become a housewife—which included “submitting” to her husband as head of the house. A legion of tradwives soon appeared online. There’s “desexed Marilyn Monroe” clone Estee Williams, who posts videos with titles like “Biblically Submissive Wives”; former dancer Hannah Neeleman, who entered a beauty pageant two weeks after…

2 min.

Propaganda: The GOP’s pro-Putin wing

Russia’s info-war machine has breached the Capitol building, said Chris Brennan in USA Today. “That’s not just me talking.” In recent weeks, GOP House Foreign Affairs Committee chair Rep. Michael McCaul has warned that much of his party’s base has been “infected” by Kremlin propaganda, while Rep. Michael Turner has said fellow Republicans are repeating anti-Ukrainian talking points “on the House floor.” The two “didn’t name names. They didn’t have to.” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who’s threatened to boot House Speaker Mike Johnson if he advances an aid bill for Ukraine, has spouted lies about the Ukrainian government “executing priests” and “attacking Christians.” Putin’s useful idiots are also in the Senate, said Noah Rothman in National Review. In a New York Times op-ed last week, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance implied…

2 min.

O.J. Simpson: The Trial of the Century’s legacy

“What a sensation it was,” said Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal. The 1995 double-murder trial of O.J. Simpson, who died of cancer last week, was an epic Greek tragedy that “burned itself into our retinas,” putting every American “in the path of totality.” This saga had everything—a fallen football hero, a young, beautiful victim, and colliding themes of race, class, “hypercelebrity,” domestic abuse, and police misconduct. It began with a surreal Ford Bronco chase watched by millions in real time. The ensuing, televised trial provided an indelible cast of characters, including flamboyant attorney Johnnie Cochran, with his jury admonition that if the bloody glove said to be Simpson’s “doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” When the shocking jury verdict came in, virtually the entire country “ran to a TV…

2 min.

Student loans: Is Biden’s new plan legal?

“President Biden is at it again,” said LZ Granderson in the Los Angeles Times. He unveiled his latest plan to combat student debt last week—despite the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling that his attempt to cancel more than $400 billion in loans overstepped his authority. Biden’s new proposal—which his administration hopes to put into effect this fall—would help 30 million borrowers by eliminating up to $20,000 in accrued interest. All interest would be forgiven for low- and middle-income borrowers in income-driven repayment plans. Biden also canceled $7.4 billion owed by another 277,000 people who borrowed less than $12,000 and have made payments for 10 years. Biden has now eliminated about $153 billion in debt for 4.3 million Americans. Conservatives argue Biden is trying to buy young people’s votes, and that using…

1 min.

Wit & Wisdom

“Money, power, respect—the last one is better.” Rapper Kendrick Lamar, quoted in The Atlantic “There ain’t any answer, there ain’t going to be any answer, there never has been any answer, that’s the answer.” Gertrude Stein, quoted in The New York Times “The essence of war is violence, and moderation in war is imbecility.” British statesman Lord Macaulay, quoted in the Financial Times “There is no finer investment for any community than putting milk into babies.” Winston Churchill, quoted in the BMJ “The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.” Leo Tolstoy, quoted in Lexology “Sister is probably the most competitive relationship within the family, but once the sisters are grown, it becomes the strongest relationship.” Margaret Mead, quoted in Good Housekeeping “I keep having people say, ‘Gee, it’s like we’re living in a Stephen…

2 min.

Scarcity: The great AI data gap

The internet isn’t big enough for AI, said Deepa Seetharaman in The Wall Street Journal. The need for “high-quality text data” to help companies train their latest generative artificial intelligence models is threatening to “outstrip supply” in two to four years, AI researchers say. A fierce land grab is underway for what’s left. OpenAI’s most advanced generative AI model, GPT-4, “was trained on as many as 12 trillion tokens,” or words and parts of words. The next iteration of the model, GPT-5, could require up to “100 trillion tokens.” That’s more than all of the useful language and images available on the web. The supply is shrinking further because “social media platforms, news publishers, and others have been curbing access to their data for AI training.” AI companies are now scouring…

1 min.

Innovation of the week

An “all-hearing” gadget is here to capture everything you say at work, said Nate Berg in Fast Company. The Limitless Pendant looks like “a cross between a clamshell, a pair of castanets, and something you might use to seal a bag of chips.” But it is fitted with “an array of microphones” and a battery “that holds 100 hours of life.” The microphones send “recordings to a secure, encrypted, and AI-enabled place in the cloud.” Unlike a traditional audio recorder, Limitless automatically “transcribes audio recordings” and places them into a “deep archive of searchable information” to keep track of conversations. The AI will also “outline the big takeaways” from what it heard. An LED light is the only “subtle cue” that lets people nearby know that the device is on…

2 min.

Bytes: What’s new in tech

Battery tech will beat range anxiety Electric-vehicle battery improvements could make “range anxiety” seem quaint, said Christopher Mims in The Wall Street Journal. “Significant upgrades” to the batteries that power electric vehicles should hit the market “in the next five years.” In the works are things like “superfast charging,” led by an Israeli tech company, StoreDot, that “is working on new battery tech for making EVs charge so quickly” it will be comparable to filling up at a gas station. Multiple companies, including StoreDot, are working on new materials that can replace the graphite in today’s batteries to improve their energy density. As early as next year, BMW plans to introduce a new battery that it promises will increase energy capacity by 20 percent and charging speed by 30 percent. Google plays…

1 min.

Is dark energy weakening?

A new 3D map of the universe suggests that dark energy is “evolving”—a finding that would upend everything we thought we knew about our expanding universe. Dark energy, the mysterious force that accounts for about 70 percent of the universe, is thought to be responsible for the accelerating expansion of the cosmos. But new data show that it may not be a constant, unchanging force, but instead appears to be weakening. That would be “a very big deal,” Adam Riess, a Johns Hopkins University professor who won a Nobel prize for discovering dark energy, tells New Scientist. “It would be the first real clue we have gotten about the nature of dark energy in 25 years.” The current thinking holds that right after the Big Bang rapidly expanded the universe,…

1 min.

The healing magic of touch

Physical touch—from a handshake to a hug—can bring significant benefits for both mind and body, lessening depression, anxiety, and even pain. That’s the conclusion of a large new analysis of research on the subject, covering 212 studies involving nearly 13,000 people, reports The Guardian (U.K.). To their surprise, the researchers found that objects such as robots or weighted blankets provided similar physical benefits as human touch, although for mental health, humans were better. Women benefited more than men, and the sick or those in pain more than the healthy. Newborns benefited in particular, and a parent’s skin-to-skin contact helped them more than that of a stranger. The study also found that the type and duration of touch wasn’t important, but the frequency was—a single massage wouldn’t work wonders by itself.…

1 min.

Throw away your anger

The next time you get angry with someone, write them a letter laying out exactly why you find them irritating—then immediately destroy it. That may sound silly, says The Times (U.K.), but a new study suggests it can make you feel much better. Researchers in Japan deliberately wound up 50 volunteers by asking them to write their opinions on various social issues—whether smoking in public should be banned, say—and then criticizing what they had written to make them feel bad. Afterward, the volunteers were asked to describe their negative feelings in writing, and half were told to throw these pieces of paper away while the other half hung on to them. Those who kept the paper remained upset and stewing, but those who let it go experienced almost total catharsis,…

1 min.

Hope for Parkinson’s?

An Ozempic-type drug may be effective in slowing Parkinson’s disease. Lixisenatide is a GLP-1 receptor agonist, a drug that affects the gut hormone GLP-1, much like the new class of diabetes and weight-loss drugs. In a clinical trial, 156 people with early-stage Parkinson’s were given either lixisenatide or a placebo. Over 12 months, the symptoms of the disease—such as tremors, stiffness, and reduced balance—worsened in the control group but stayed stable among those taking the drug. The treatment did induce significant side effects, including nausea and vomiting, in more than half the participants, though that may have been because they went straight onto the highest dose possible rather than being gradually eased onto it, as Ozempic patients are. Hyun Joo Cho, from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke,…

1 min.

Sea otters saved the kelp

Kelp forests are an underwater wonderland, providing habitat for many sea creatures, protecting the shore from erosion, and sequestering vast amounts of carbon dioxide. But across the California coastline, they’ve declined precipitously over the past century, threatened by factors from agricultural runoff to climate change. The one bright spot, reports Smithsonian Magazine, is the Central California coast, which has seen a 58 percent increase in kelp—and a new study shows that’s thanks to sea otters. Otters have a fast metabolism that requires them to eat a quarter of their body weight every day, and they prefer sea urchins, which feed on kelp. While the otters had been hunted almost to extinction in the 19th-century fur trade, a small population survived off Central California. “We found a dramatic realignment, or shifting,…

2 min.

Ian Fleming: The Complete Man

(Harper, $45) If you only know Ian Fleming as the creator of James Bond, you’re missing most of the story, said Marc Weingarten in the Los Angeles Times. When Fleming wrote his first 007 novel, at age 43, “he had already lived multiple lives: as a war reporter, book collector, stockbroker, merchant banker, and naval intelligence operative.” In fact, by the estimations of his newest biographer, this British scion of one of the wealthiest men in the world had been so much at the center of the action during the war against Hitler’s Germany that he helped create the organizational template for the U.S. agency that became the CIA. Though Fleming’s life has been chronicled before, Nicholas Shakespeare is “the first Fleming biographer to get his hands on just about everything…

1 min.

Mania

(Harper, $30) “Were Lionel Shriver not such a superb satirical novelist, we ‘woke’ types could just ignore her,” said Maureen Corrigan in The Washington Post. “Alas, her latest novel is one of her best.” In Mania, the literary provocateur and author of We Need to Talk About Kevin rails against cultural progressivism by depicting an alternate America in which it has become taboo to acknowledge that some people are stupider than others. Students get full marks for merely turning in assignments. Hospitals are declining because no one needs high scores or grades to become a doctor. The novel’s heroine, an adjunct professor of English, is pilloried for daring to teach Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. It’s all “occasionally offensive,” but “very funny, and yes, smart.” Shriver “clearly enjoyed writing Mania,” said Alexander Nazaryan…

2 min.

Fi: A Memoir

(Grove, $28) Alexandra Fuller’s “gutting” new memoir is “as hard to pick up as it is to put down,” said Marion Winik in The Washington Post. The author of the 2001 best-seller Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight lost her only son, Fi, at 21, when he died in his sleep shortly after the onset of seizures that a doctor had dismissed as nothing to be concerned about. Countless other mothers lose their children every year, Fuller reminds us. Her own mother, while raising a family in 1970s Rhodesia, lost one child at birth, another in infancy, and a third as a toddler. But that personal knowledge didn’t make Charles “Fi” Fuller Ross less beloved than he was, and it didn’t make Fuller’s grief less acute. When I closed this…

2 min.

Best books…chosen by Sarah Langan

Horror novelist Sarah Langan, a three-time Bram Stoker Award winner, is the author of Good Neighbors and The Keeper. In her new novel, A Better World, a family relocates to an idyllic, exclusive company town only to discover it has a sinister side. The Group by Mary McCarthy (1963). McCarthy follows eight Vassar graduates over about 15 years, introducing themes of mental illness, domestic abuse, abortion, gayness, and some serious frenemy action. When I picked up the book, I worried it would be about privileged chicks sweating the shininess of their tea services. It is, and you know what? Their lives aren’t so easy, either. Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin (1967). Levin’s feminist masterpiece about a woman gaslit so badly by her husband that she unwittingly carries Satan’s child still feels relevant…

2 min.

Also of interest…in big authors, short stories

Table for Two by Amor Towles (Viking, $32) Amor Towles’ new story collection “may be his best book yet,” said Leigh Haber in the Los Angeles Times. The author of A Gentleman in Moscow, “one of our most beloved contemporary novelists,” proves here that his shorter work can equal the deep delights of his novels. The book gathers six stories set in Manhattan and a “noir-ish” novella set in 1930s Hollywood, and “each tale is as satisfying as a master chef’s main course, filled with drama, wit, erudition and, most of all, heart.” Choice by Neel Mukherjee (Norton, $29) “Neel Mukherjee is brilliant at tracing the ways a choice deferred becomes a fate sealed,” said Jonathan Lee in The New York Times. That’s the unifying principle of the Booker Prize finalist’s “strangely uplifting, exquisitely droll”…

1 min.

Anne Lamott

Anne Lamott never guessed she’d be cashing Social Security checks before reciting wedding vows for the first time, said Manoush Zomorodi in NPR.org. Though the best-selling author of Bird by Bird and many other wise memoiristic books says she had hoped to find a soulmate to marry decades earlier, she’s relieved she didn’t jump too soon. “I was almost married a couple times, and I just thank God and all the saints that I didn’t marry those two men,” she says. It was only after she created a dating-site profile in her early 60s that she met Neal, a hospice volunteer who is now her husband. “We just got each other,” she says. “I knew that we could talk, keep the conversation going for the rest of our lives.” The…

1 min.

Lempicka

In the new Broadway musical about painter Tamara de Lempicka, “a big, messy, fascinating life is processed into a theater piece that is just big and messy,” said Philip Kennicott in The Washington Post. The Polish artist, whose “luminous, sensual, slightly chilly” art deco portraits and nudes should be familiar to 1990s Madonna fans, came of age amid the Russian Revolution of 1917, fled west to Paris with her first husband, and fled Europe altogether during Hitler’s rise. The show’s creators “want their title character to be many things: feminist, sexual revolutionary, trailblazing entrepreneur, tortured artist, victim, and survivor.” And while Lempicka arguably was all of those things, at least in part, the show pushes its agenda too hard, becoming “a breathless, up-tempo force-march through some of the darkest decades…

1 min.

The Outsiders

“The Outsiders slides more easily than might be expected into musical form,” said Sara Holdren in NYMag.com. Following its 2023 San Diego premiere, Adam Rapp’s adaptation of S.E. Hinton’s coming-of-age novel has now arrived on Broadway and is “taking a real swing at being the strongest entry in this season’s wave of singer-songwriter outings.” The story, of course, follows Ponyboy, a soulful 14-year-old ensnared in a gangland turf war in 1967 Tulsa. But if this Outsiders “sometimes traffics in cliché, it makes up for it with the tenderness and muscle of not just its songs but its staging and performances.” The songs, written by the folk-rock duo Jamestown Revival, reliably sound good even when the lyrics prove too vague to convey the characters’ emotions, said Emlyn Travis in Entertainment Weekly.…

1 min.

Maggie Rogers

Maggie Rogers, it turns out, “doesn’t need studio flourishes to bolster her transcendent songwriting,” said Ilana Kaplan in Spin. On her third album, the singer-songwriter, who became a star overnight eight years ago when her song “Alaska” went viral, puts aside electro-pop and the high-gloss pop-rock of 2022’s Surrender for a set of songs that “harnesses the ’90s folk-pop leanings of artists like Michelle Branch and Natalie Imbruglia, along with the tender gut-punch of Bonnie Raitt.” The album’s “more organic-feeling pop-rock sound” is partially a product of the way the record was made, said Maya Georgi in Rolling Stone. Its 10 songs were all written and recorded across five days and sketch the story of a woman in her late 20s on a road trip to a new city at…

1 min.

Khruangbin

Clearly, the three members of Khruangbin “know where their strengths lie,” said Rosy Alvarez in Pitchfork. After more than a decade of recording, the three Houston friends have become the chief purveyors of a streaming-friendly brand of groovy, laid-back instrumental music, and their fourth studio album finds them stripping their sound back to its origins. As always, that sound is “heavily inspired by ’70s psych rock and funk” and colored by Thai and West African modalities. Yet “breathing room is the big draw here,” as guitarist Mark Speer, bassist Laura Lee Ochoa, and drummer DJ Johnson prove again that rich moods can be generated by music with plenty of air built in. “Speer’s reverb-drenched guitar riffs tend to take the lead,” said Arwa Haider in the Financial Times. “But the…

1 min.

Shabaka

“Imagine being celebrated as one of the greatest saxophonists of your generation, only to announce you are giving it all up to concentrate on the Japanese flute,” said Will Hodgkinson in The Times (U.K.). In the 2010s, Shabaka Hutchings helped ignite a British jazz revival as a member of Sons of Kemet, but when touring halted in 2020, the veteran musician became obsessed with a bamboo shakuhachi he’d picked up in Japan. Shabaka learned to play nearly a dozen other traditional flutes—including a Teotihuacán drone flute and a Slavic svirel—and put the knowledge to use on his “transcendentally involving” new album. The record’s “immersive power” derives from the interplay of not just flutes but also harp, bass, percussion, electronics, and vocals, said Larry Blumenfeld in The Wall Street Journal. Shabaka…

1 min.

Sasquatch Sunset

(R) A year in the life of four cryptids “If a movie ever seemed destined for cult status or ignominy, Sasquatch Sunset is it,” said Jeannette Catsoulis in The New York Times. “Sometimes tiresome” yet “oddly endearing,” the new indie comedy directed by brothers David and Nathan Zellner “mimes the beats of a nature documentary” as it observes a family of sasquatches eating, drinking, fighting, playing, breeding, and roaming around the misty forests of the Pacific Northwest. Four actors, including Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough, wear suits of matted hair and impressive prostheses to play the lumbering cryptids, who never speak but “grunt and yowl and gesture with a seriocomic zeal.” Even so, the performances impress, as “little by little, personalities seep out.” From the opening scene, unfortunately, “there’s a lot of…

1 min.

Wicked Little Letters

(R) Hate mail roils a quaint seaside town. Olivia Colman is always worth watching, said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast. Unfortunately, even the Oscar-winning star of 2018’s The Favourite and 2021’s The Lost Daughter can’t elevate Wicked Little Letters beyond “airline-viewing amiable.” In the quirky British comedy now in theaters, Colman plays Edith, a prudish, self-righteous spinster who’s shocked when she starts receiving spiteful, colorfully profane letters in the mail. Suspect No. 1 is her neighbor Rose, a bawdy Irish immigrant and single mother played by The Lost Daughter’s Jessie Buckley. The movie, based on a real-life scandal that stirred up 1920s Littlehampton, is “a cursefest most cute, designed to make older audiences giggle with astonished glee at naughty words.” And while Colman and Buckley “do their damnedest to make the…

1 min.

New art from Pompeii: Stunning ancient frescoes unearthed

The ruins of Pompeii are still giving up new secrets, said Angela Giuffrida in The Guardian. Nearly 2,000 years after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius buried the ancient Roman city in rock and ash, archaeologists have unearthed a series of remarkably preserved frescoes painted sometime between 15 B.C. and A.D. 50. Found amid the ruins of what appears to be a large villa, the frescoes adorn a banquet hall whose four walls were painted black in an apparent effort to mask the soot from boiling oil lamps. Also painted on those walls are remarkably well-preserved scenes from ancient Greek legends, including Helen of Troy meeting Paris and Apollo attempting to woo the priestess Cassandra. The so-called black room and its frescoes “offer a glimpse of how some of the wealthier denizens…

1 min.

Streaming tips

Secrets of the Octopus Is there a more intriguing and utterly alien creature than the octopus? A three-part documentary from James Cameron follows marine biologist Alex Schnell as he teases out the many talents of the shape-shifting, surprisingly social cephalopods. Disney+ and Hulu Our Living World Cate Blanchett narrates this epic new four-part series that highlights the hidden connections that bind and sustain the natural world. You’ll never question again whether the lives of sub-Saharan hippos and Arctic reindeer are intertwined. Netflix Tiger As with its animated features, Disney excels at making nature documentaries that compellingly anthropomorphize animal stories. This one, narrated by Priyanka Chopra Jonas, follows Ambar, a tigress raising two cubs in the Indian forest and protecting them from pythons, male tigers, and other perils. Disney+ Predator v Prey Lions, cheetahs, and crocodiles, oh my!…

2 min.

The Week’s guide to what’s worth watching

The Express Way With Dulé Hill We are a nation of artists. In this new four-part series, actor Dulé Hill (Psych, The Wonder Years) leads a cross-country expedition in search of fellow actors, musicians, painters, and creatives who are pushing boundaries and shaping or reshaping culture. The journey begins in California, where he encounters an extraordinary deaf dancer, a senior-citizen cabaret, and the beginnings of an LGBTQ revolution in mariachi. Tuesday, April 23, at 9 p.m., PBS; check local listings 2024 NFL Draft The dream of achieving NFL greatness is about to become almost real for hundreds of players moving on from the college game. In this year’s draft, a record number of quarterbacks could be first-round selections, led by USC’s Caleb Williams, who’s expected to be chosen by the Chicago Bears as…

1 min.

The Big Door Prize

Anyone who watched the funny, bighearted first season of The Big Door Prize couldn’t help but wonder what they’d learn about their own untapped strengths from the series’ mysterious novelty machine. When the Morpho started dispensing its advice cards, all the characters in the show’s fictional small town became motivated to chase their best selves. In Season 2, the Morpho has more to say, telling residents to prepare for “the next stage.” And changes do come, as Chris O’Dowd’s Dusty and Gabrielle Dennis’ Cass elect to spend time apart while Father Reuben and Hana dig into the machine’s origins. Wednesday, April 24, Apple TV+ • All listings are Eastern Time.…

2 min.

A well-dressed white fish: Grab your paprika, olives, and limes

Everyone needs some dishes that come together quickly when people are coming over, says Yasmin Fahr in Cook Simply, Live Fully (Harper). In this one, “citrus slices are the colorful cushion for the fish,” and the fish is topped with citrusy herbs and olives that can be made in advance. I paired the dish with a salad that’s also a great way to go through fresh celery and parsley before they’re too long forgotten in the fridge. Recipe of the week Baked white fish with citrusy olive and herb topping ¼ tsp red pepper flakes½ tsp ground cuminSalt and freshly cracked pepper2 limes: 1 zested and juiced (about 2 tbsp juice), 1 thinly sliced2 navel oranges: l juiced (about ¼ cup juice), 1 thinly sliced2 tbsp olive oil, plus more as needed1 small…

1 min.

Cool beer: 2024’s most exciting breweries

Though the industry’s boom years have passed, “it’s still an exciting time for craft beer,” said Courtney Iseman in Punch. The breweries that have survived a post-pandemic dip in demand and the oversaturation of the market are “innovating more than ever.” Some are betting on “in-demand” categories like hop water and nonalcoholic beer while others are “streamlining their lineups to highlight just a few styles” and committing to educating customers about them. Below, five breweries on our 2024 “Who’s Who of Beer Cool” list. Dovetail Brewery Chicago A brewery “built on a passion for traditions,” Dovetail has become “the place to go” to experience Kölsch service, Bierstacheln, and other European beer customs. Dovetail’s “standout brew” is its Rauchbier, made with smoked malt. North Park Beer Co. San Diego With IPAs still dominating…

1 min.

Chile crisp: Names to know

“The world of chili crisp is getting bigger,” said James Park in Eater. Variations on the “spicy, crunchy, oily condiment” have doubled in the past few years as more Americans discover it belongs on everything, from fried chicken to pizza. Lao Gan Ma Spicy Chili Crisp ($3) remains the classic and Fly by Jing Sichuan Crisp ($17) the “new classic.” But don’t overlook these variations. Momofuku Chili Crunch ($13). David Chang’s version is notable for its addition of shiitake mushroom powder (and because Chang just dropped his attempt to trademark the phrase “chili crunch”). “It’s garlicky, oniony, and deliciously spicy.” Homiah Sambal Chili Crunch ($14). Made with dried shrimp or seaweed, this chile crisp reduces the oil and celebrates “the spicy, savory, sweet profile” of Southeast Asian cuisine. S&B Crunchy Garlic With Chili…

2 min.

This week’s dream: Meditating in Kyoto’s Zen gardens

“Change in Kyoto is a quiet evolution,” said Paula Deitz in The New York Times. Even though U.S. tourists have fallen in love with the cultural capital of Japan, it’s still easy to enjoy quiet moments of contemplation in the city’s beautiful temples, gardens, palaces, and shrines. Recently, I toured Kyoto’s “serene and eternal” rock gardens, or karesansui, where Buddhist monks rake fine gravel into ripples that represent the flow of water. Verandas look out on the artful landscaping, “offering the heightened experience of traveling through it in the imagination.” Some dry gardens depict specific landscapes, while others are delightfully abstract. At the iconic 15th-century garden at Ryoan-ji, 15 rocks emerge from islands of moss scattered across a rectangular expanse of smooth pebbles. For visitors, “the puzzle is that only…

1 min.

Loving Heart Retreats

Burnet, Texas Glamping spots are “popping up left and right,” said Evie Carrick in Travel + Leisure. But Loving Heart Retreats is special, “a standout example of how glampgrounds are getting creative in their efforts to marry luxury and access to nature.” The 25-acre Texas Hill Country property offers guests a choice of seven safari tents and geodesic domes, each set on a private deck with a built-in hammock. Every unit is equipped with AC and furnished with a king-size bed, a kitchenette, a clawfoot tub and shower, and a telescope for stargazing. America’s No. 1 camping platform, The Dyrt, recently named Loving Heart the year’s best glamping destination—and no wonder.…

2 min.

Getting the flavor of…

A Ritz-Carlton cruise Since Ritz-Carlton broke into the cruise business two years ago, it has marketed its ships as yachts. “Clearly, it’s about status,” said Christopher Muther in The Boston Globe. But a distinction feels justified, because my recent cruise aboard the 298-passenger Evrima was an experience “unlike any I’d previously had.” Whatever label you give the vessel, it’s “more of a hotel or resort on water than a cruise ship,” a place to unwind without distractions. The head count is limited enough that passengers never have to scramble to find a dinner table, and there are no waterslides, buffets, or Broadway shows. On my $5,300 Caribbean tour, I instead enjoyed a tasting-menu dinner created by a three-Michelin-starred chef, a cabin that felt like a hotel suite, and lounging by the…

1 min.

How to plan a road trip

Though spontaneity is essential to any great road trip, “it’s always smart to head into a long drive with a game plan,” said Ashlea Halpern in Condé Nast Traveler. For detailed planning, load up on apps. Start with Google Maps’ My Maps feature, which allows users to add almost endless points of interest to mapped route and driving instructions. ScenicByways.info has its own mapping tool and shows every scenic byway in the country. For good food along the way, consult iExit for interstate stops or a specialty app like RoadFood. Atlas Obscura remains “unmatched for finding offbeat things to see,” and you’ll also want to choose sites you like for booking hotel rooms or campsites. If pre-planning makes your head spin, “you can always pay the professionals to do it…

3 min.

This week: Homes for car lovers

1 Oak Bay, B.C. The eight-car garage of this four-bedroom Uplands lodge has glass doors, cabinets and sink, an epoxy floor, and a dehumidifier system. The renovated 1968 house has vaulted ceilings, skylights, four fireplaces, and a main living space with an open kitchen, a dining area with a stone feature wall, and French doors to an expansive deck with a custom outdoor kitchen. Uplands Park and the beach are walking distance; downtown Victoria is a 15-minute drive. $4,995,000 CAD. Jason Binab, The Agency, (250) 589-2466 2 Lake Oswego, Ore. Besides a two-car attached garage and separate RV garage, this Lake Grove cottage comes with a light-filled 14-car showroom with coated oak floors over a heated mechanic’s garage with lifts. The refreshed 1940 four-bedroom home features vintage details, living room with…

1 min.

The bottom line

Tesla is laying off more than 10 percent of its global staff following the company’s first year-on-year sales decline since 2020. Before the layoffs, Tesla said, it employed more than 140,000 workers globally, including over 20,000 at its Fremont factory in California. Business Insider Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz said this week that it raised $7.2 billion across five different funds. The biggest chunk of new funding is in its later-stage growth fund, which reeled in $3.75 billion. CNBC.com Basketball superstar Caitlin Clark will be paid about $76,500 in salary during her first year as a WNBA player. That pales in comparison with the roughly $3 million she’ll receive over the next year in advertising deals, according to data tracker On3. Bloomberg The White House has asked trade officials to…

1 min.

Finance: Investment banks see pickup in deals

Wall Street dealmakers are back in business after a “long slowdown,” said Telis Demos in The Wall Street Journal. The largest investment banks this week “finally started to report a pickup” in quarterly earnings. Revenue from “sales of stocks and debt, and for advising on mergers and acquisitions, was collectively up 27 percent at the five largest Wall Street banks from a year earlier.” Bank of America’s investment-banking revenue soared 35 percent in the first quarter, while Goldman Sachs saw a 24 percent increase. Many deals had been put on hold after the Federal Reserve began hiking interest rates in 2022, but two years in, there are “signs of capitulation.” Bankers’ advice to clients: “Stop waiting out the Fed.” Hold the champagne, said Paul J. Davies in Bloomberg. “Beneath the surface,”…

2 min.

Audacity: Musk asks shareholders to reinstate pay

Tesla will ask shareholders to vote again on Elon Musk’s multibillion-dollar pay package, said Andrew Ross Sorkin in The New York Times. The 2018 pay package gave Musk the right to buy up to 304 million shares “if he met a series of increasingly difficult-to-achieve financial milestones,” all of which Tesla did achieve. But a Delaware court voided the award, currently worth about $47 billion, calling the process “deeply flawed.” This week, Tesla said shareholders have now been “armed with all of the information that was revealed about the negotiations in court,” which should render the Delaware ruling “moot.” Hollywood: CBS parent Paramount close to a sale Skydance Media, the production company behind Top Gun: Maverick and Mission: Impossible, was closing in this week on a deal to buy Paramount Global, said…

1 min.

In fast food jobs, the robots aren’t ready

A new robot-staffed restaurant left me looking for old-fashioned fast food, said Lois Beckett in The Guardian. CaliExpress in northeast Los Angeles opened on April 1, “the same day California’s new $20 hourly minimum wage for fast food workers went into effect.” No issues there—CaliExpress uses “a system of AI-powered robots” to cook burgers and fries, and self-checkout terminals at the counter. At checkout, a message offered me $10 to enroll in face-ID and ‘pay with my face.’ The french fry–making robot, named Flippy, was “just humanoid enough to be disturbing.” As I watched its “giant metal arm encased in rubber pick up the fry basket and shake it roughly,” I thought that if this is how robots handle food, “the future of sex robots is going to be very…

2 min.

Credit cards: Will a war on ‘swipe fees’ kill rewards?

Banks and credit card companies are “desperate to head off an effort in Congress to slash the lucrative swipe fees” they get from every credit card purchase, said Paul J. Davies in Bloomberg. That’s why last month they cut a deal with some retailers to end a 20-year-old lawsuit over the fees. The deal saves merchants $30 billion over five years, which should be a win for consumers. But it reduces swipe fees, more formally known as interchange fees, which average 2.26 percent, by a “tiny” 0.07 percent (yes, you read that right). Even that is guaranteed for just five years. The settlement does let stores charge customers more for high-end reward cards, which come with even higher merchant fees. But merchants also don’t like being made to “look like…

2 min.

What the experts say

The rising costs of owning a home Homeowners who think they can handle the mortgage are getting “sticker shock” from other bills, said Nicole Friedman in The Wall Street Journal. Property taxes are on the rise nationwide, jumping 4.1 percent in 2023 from a year earlier to an average of $4,062 for a single-family home. Some areas are seeing much bigger increases, like Charlotte, N.C., where the average property tax rose a staggering 31.5 percent. Meanwhile, it “cost an average of $6,663 a year to maintain a home in the fourth quarter of 2023, up 8.3 percent from a year earlier.” That’s according to the home-repair platform Thumbtack, which considers “regular upkeep like gutter cleaning and lawn care” as well as occasional expenses. But the biggest financial drain is home insurance,…

1 min.

Charity of the week

Founded in 2010, World Central Kitchen (wck.org) has become the leading nonprofit delivering food to conflict zones around the world. The organization, which this month lost seven aid workers in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza, works in some of the world’s most dangerous and difficult places. While WCK has paused its Gazan operations until an independent investigation is completed, it continues to supply urgently needed food to civilians in other countries facing war and violence. In Haiti and Ukraine, WCK’s emergency-response teams have served 260 million meals since 2022. WCK also responds to natural disasters; this year, it has served hundreds of thousands of meals to victims of wildfires in Chile and Texas and an earthquake in Japan. Each charity we feature has earned a four-star overall rating from Charity Navigator,…

2 min.

Economy: A bump in inflation upends forecasts

“Sticky” inflation is forcing tough questions at the Federal Reserve, said Howard Schneider in Reuters. For the most part, America’s “economic engine keeps motoring above its potential.” The inflation numbers released last week, which saw consumer prices ticking up at an annual rate of 3.5 percent, are the unwelcome side effect. Inflation that’s still “well above” the Fed’s 2 percent target is the lingering thorn in the side for the Fed and the Biden administration, and the highest interest rates in a quarter century haven’t quelled it. Economists are still hopeful that there is a “golden path” of both strong growth and falling inflation. This week, though, Fed chairman Jerome Powell noted the “lack of progress” on inflation. If that doesn’t change, the Fed could even “resort to rate hikes…

1 min.

Crypto cons return with a vengeance

Joel Khalili Wired Bitcoin’s record highs have brought crypto FOMO raging back, said Joel Khalili. “The number of memetoken presales increased fivefold between February and March,” around the time that Bitcoin crested above $72,000. What’s a “memetoken,” you ask? A memetoken or memecoin is a completely speculative digital asset that serves “no purpose and promises no innovation” other than that it can make holders rich overnight—as long as they can sell before it vanishes. A presale plays precisely “on the desire among investors to get in before the crowd.” But few people seem to be checking on the veracity of the listings. A third of the 369 crypto presales advertised in March alone were identified as scams by Blockaid, a crypto security company. One victim was Ryan, “who put $750 into the…

1 min.

Welcome to ‘personalized pricing’ hell

Christopher Beam The Atlantic “Personalized pricing” is making our economy feel increasingly unfair, said Christopher Beam. Bottom-line prices are now obfuscated by a wall of hidden fees tacked on at the last possible second. This has broken “the expectation that prices are transparent.” At the same time, “dynamic pricing”—the constant changes pioneered by airlines—has overthrown the ordinary assumption that things have a fixed price. As originally practiced by airlines, dynamic pricing at least gave everyone the same price “at a given moment.” But it has evolved into a careful division of customers based on “their calculated willingness to pay.” This happens from the biggest purchases down to the smallest. Colleges collaborate with an “enrollment-management industry that bases financial-aid offers not on students’ need, but on how much an algorithm suggests they and…

3 min.

The celebrity athlete who was acquitted in the Trial of the Century

No American celebrity has ever fallen from grace as fast and hard as O.J. Simpson. “The Juice” was launched to stardom in the 1970s through his astounding speed and grace as a running back, first at the University of Southern California and then over a record-setting 11-year NFL career. He leveraged his football success, charisma, and good looks into roles as an actor, TV commentator, and pitchman, most notably in a series of Hertz ads where he sprinted through airports. All that changed in June 1994, when his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman were found brutally murdered outside her Los Angeles home. Extensive forensic evidence—and a history of battering Nicole—implicated O.J. But after an eight-month televised trial that riveted the nation, lead attorney Johnnie Cochran’s insistence…

2 min.

The Nobel physicist who came up with the ‘God particle’

Peter Higgs never sought accolades for predicting the particle that underpins the Standard Model of physics. While walking the Scottish Highlands in 1964, the British physicist had a profound insight into why matter exists: The universe, he thought, might be pervaded by an invisible field that drags on particles as they pass through it to give rise to mass. Such a field would have to generate its own particle, and the hunt for the Higgs boson—which would come to be known as the God particle—became an international obsession. Governments spent billions building particle accelerators big enough to generate one. When scientists finally confirmed the existence of the boson at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva in 2012, Higgs, a famously shy and modest man who had assiduously avoided his growing…

10 min.

Putin’s gulag

In its far-flung prison camps, Russia has revived and refined the most terrifying elementsof Stalin’s repression, said Arkady Ostrovsky in The Economist’s 1843 magazine. THE WAKE-UP CALL in cell number nine of the IK-6 prison colony in the Siberian town of Omsk comes at 5 a.m. in the form of the Russian national anthem blasting from a loudspeaker. Vladimir Kara-Murza, a journalist and politician, knew as soon as he heard the opening chord that he had only five minutes to get up before prison guards would take away his pillow and mattress. By 5:20 a.m. his metal bed frame, attached to the wall, would be locked up so that he could not use it for the rest of the day. Kara-Murza’s cell, painted in bright blue, was 5 meters long and…

1 min.

The Week Contest

This week’s question: A German museum fired an employee who secretly hung his own painting alongside works by Picasso and Dalí in hopes of achieving an “artistic breakthrough.” If the ex-worker were to paint a new work based on his foiled bid for greatness, what would it be titled? Last week’s contest: An Indian man who has lost 238 bids for public office over four decades has now launched his 239th election campaign; K. Padmarajan says his goal is not to win but to model graciousness in defeat. If he were to write a self-help book on the joys of losing, what should it be titled? THE WINNER: “Soar, Loser!” Tiger Bye, Bluffton, S.C. SECOND PLACE: “Loss Leader” Carol Louer, West Milford, N.J. THIRD PLACE: “On the Sunny Side of Defeat” John Parry, Eldersburg,…

Mostly good. Occasionally they are not careful about accuracy, as for instance in an article last year about nuclear power (they were 100% in favor, with no thought about serious downsides, including cost such that alternative energy sources would get sidelined, and the fact that it takes about 10 years to plan and build a nuclear plant). Sometimes the inaccuracy is not that important, as in a recent article about health, which was clearly not thought out. But I appreciate getting the long look on the big events, so that after the first appearance of an event, I find out more about the follow-up.

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The Week April 26, 2024 (Digital)

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