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72 Articles

Editor’s letter

Bad news first: If there was ever life on Mars, it is likely to have disappeared close to 4 billion years ago, as Mars’ atmosphere thinned and any surface water froze or evaporated. Even if there is any residue of life in the Jezero Crater, by the shores of an ancient lake, the Perseverance rover that landed there this week may not find it. And in any case we won’t know for a long while. The rock samples Perseverance is taking will be left on Mars to get picked up in 2028—if all goes as planned. But still: We are looking for life on Mars. That is no small thing. Charles Fishman’s 50th-anniversary appraisal of the first moon landing, One Giant Leap, detailed how that mission was the catalyst for…

Texans freeze as power grid fails

What happened Texans faced more than $20 billion in damage and a rising death toll this week, after a winter storm overpowered the state’s electrical grid and left millions without heat and electricity for days in temperatures that plunged into the single digits. Desperate residents huddled in beds and cars and burned furniture to stay alive. “It was 10 degrees. There’s only so many covers you can use,” said Tosha Henderson, an aunt of three kids in Houston. More than 60 deaths were reported from hypothermia, carbon monoxide poisoning, and other related causes—a number that authorities said was certain to grow. After most power was restored, residents still faced gasoline shortages, empty supermarket shelves, and the need to boil drinking water; thousands faced extensive home damage from burst water pipes. “So…

Texans freeze as power grid fails

U.S. coronavirus deaths top 500,000

What happened President Biden this week stood outside the White House amid 500 glimmering candles—each representing 1,000 Americans lost to Covid-19—and held a moment of silence for the “grim, heartbreaking milestone” of half a million coronavirus deaths. “That’s more Americans who’ve died in one year,” Biden said, “than in World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War combined.” (See Last Word, p. 40.) While the number of new Covid deaths remains high, at about 2,000 a day, that’s down sharply from January, when up to 3,300 Americans were dying daily of the disease. Some 55,000 patients are hospitalized with Covid, the lowest number since November, and new cases have fallen about 70 percent in a month to 68,000 a day. Extreme weather slowed the delivery of vaccines across the U.S.,…

U.S. coronavirus deaths top 500,000

Garland warns of domestic terrorism threat

What happened Attorney General nominee Judge Merrick Garland vowed at his confirmation hearing this week to make fighting domestic terrorism his “first priority,” beginning with the prosecutions of the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill rioters. During a tense moment from a mostly low-key hearing, Garland, 68, called the riot “the most heinous attack on the democratic processes that I’ve ever seen.” He said America is facing “a more dangerous period” than when domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people—a prosecution he oversaw as a Justice Department attorney. He said that in combating extremism the DOJ must focus “on what is happening all over the country and on where this could spread, and where this came from.” Garland, who was denied a Supreme Court…

Rush Limbaugh: How he changed conservatism

“Conventional etiquette dictates that we do not speak ill of the dead,” said Erin Gloria Ryan in TheDailyBeast.com, but that never stopped Rush Limbaugh, who died of lung cancer last week at 70. After Kurt Cobain’s suicide in 1994, the conservative talk-radio pioneer called the young singer “a worthless shred of human debris.” At the peak of the AIDS epidemic, Limbaugh would mirthfully recite the names of dead gay men while playing “I’ll Never Love This Way Again.” He was no less cruel to the living. Women were “sluts” if they wanted publicly funded contraception, and castrating “feminazis” if they wanted careers, while the 12-year-old Chelsea Clinton was ugly—the “White House dog.” He once instructed a black caller to “take that bone out of your nose,” and consistently described African-Americans…

Rush Limbaugh: How he changed conservatism

Good week/bad week

Good week for: The bespectacled, with a new study from India suggesting that people who wear glasses may be up to three times less likely to contract coronavirus. Researchers theorize that glasses prevent their wearers from rubbing their eyes with contaminated hands. Grace, after Dolly Parton formally asked Tennessee lawmakers to shelve plans to erect a statue of her on the grounds of the state capitol. “Given all that is going on in the world, I don’t think putting me on a pedestal is appropriate at this time,” tweeted the country legend, 75. She suggested the state wait until “after I’m gone.” West Virginia, which is among the world and national leaders in Covid-19 vaccination rates, having administered 100 percent of the 436,000 doses it has received. “Not bad for a bunch of…

Only in America

The Republican Party of Oconto County, Wis., has rejected a resolution condemning political violence. The resolution condemns“all political violence of the past year” while calling for “free, open, and civil discourse.” But a majority of party members voted no, reportedly objecting to being “told ‘what is right and wrong.’” The Disney+ streaming channel is preceding replays of The Muppet Show with an “Offensive Content” warning. “This program includes negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures,” reads the warning—a reference to puppets sometimes wearing Asian, Middle Eastern, or Native American costumes. The warning expresses hope that airing these “harmful” images will “spark conversation to create a more inclusive future together.” In other news Manchin may sink Biden’s OMB pick Neera Tanden’s nomination to lead the Office of Management and Budget was in major jeopardy…

Tiger Woods hospitalized

Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. Golfing great Tiger Woods’ career was in doubt this week after a one-vehicle crash in which he fractured his right leg and shattered an ankle. Woods, 45, was traveling at a “high rate of speed” just after 7 a.m. on a dangerous stretch of roadway about 20 miles from downtown Los Angeles when he hit a median, swerved across two oncoming lanes, hit a tree, and rolled several times, law enforcement sources said. His airbags saved his life, cops said. Surgeons later inserted a rod into his fractured leg and screws and pins into his foot and ankle. Police said Woods did not appear to be intoxicated and was alert after the accident. He underwent his fifth back surgery in December and was hoping to play in…

Tiger Woods hospitalized

Ottawa Only 3 percent of Canadians have received a Covid vaccine, compared with 27 percent of Britons and 13 percent of Americans, because of ongoing supply issues. Canada had ordered more than 10 times the amount of vaccine needed for its 37.5 million people. But rather than pick one or two vaccine providers and bargain for early access, the government spread its orders among seven companies, only two of which—Pfizer and Moderna—currently have vaccines approved for use in Canada. Delivery of those firms’ doses has been delayed by winter storms and production slowdowns in Europe. John Lewis, CEO of Alberta-based Entos Pharmaceuticals, said if the government had dumped its “risk-averse” approach and invested early in domestic vaccine makers—as the U.S. and U.K. did—Canada might have its own shot now. Cartel queen busted Mexico…

Zhao’s road to the Dakotas

Chloé Zhao took an unusual path to becoming an acclaimed Hollywood director, said Alison Willmore in New York magazine. A Chinese immigrant, she’s made films exploring the lives of people in the Upper Midwest, most recently Nomadland, a front-runner for this year’s Best Picture Oscar. Zhao, 38, was born Zhao Ting and grew up in Beijing as the rebellious daughter of a steel executive. At 14, after her parents divorced, Zhao left for boarding school in the U.K., despite not speaking much English. She then attended public high school in Los Angeles, living alone in a Koreatown studio apartment behind a Sizzler. “I had such a romanticized version of America,” she says. “This is not what I saw in the movies.” Her experiences left her fascinated with her adopted country.…

Zhao’s road to the Dakotas

When Lowe decided to get sober

Rob Lowe took a long time to hit bottom, said Cynthia Littleton in Variety. The addictions that nearly destroyed his career began in his early teens, when he started drinking. By 18 he was co-starring in The Outsiders, but at the time drinking and cocaine were ubiquitous in Hollywood. “There was always that wonderful moment when, as an active drug abuser, you’d go on the set and figure out which department was selling the coke,” says Lowe, 56. “Where are the Red Vines, and where is the great Peruvian blow?” While attending the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, Lowe and a friend met two young women and filmed a sex tape in Lowe’s hotel room. The tape leaked, and one of the women turned out to be 16. (Lowe…

When Lowe decided to get sober

Why Novak fled Hollywood

Kim Novak’s impressive acting career started and ended within a decade, said Simon Hattenstone in The Guardian (U.K.). At age 25, she starred opposite James Stewart in the 1958 Alfred Hitchcock thriller Vertigo. Written off at the time as hack work, Vertigo was voted the greatest film ever by the British Film Institute last year. Novak was close with Stewart and later with Frank Sinatra, with whom she starred in Pal Joey and The Man With the Golden Arm. The two became romantically involved. “He was very sexy,” says Novak, 88. “The real Sinatra was a very sensitive person. But he was affected by people putting him on a pedestal, so he let that simple, beautiful side of him go. That’s why I left Hollywood. I needed to save myself.”…

Kim Kardashian West filed for divorce from Kanye West last week, citing irreconcilable differences and seeking joint custody of their children North, 7, Saint, 5, Chicago, 3, and Psalm, 1. Married in 2014, the couple is jointly worth an estimated $2.1 billion and reportedly plan to honor a prenuptial agreement. They will divide their property holdings, which include a $60 million, lavishly renovated mansion in Calabasas, Calif., where Kardashian, 40, has lived in recent months, and two Wyoming ranches, each worth about $15 million, where West, 43, is living. The split was reportedly precipitated by West’s struggles with bipolar disorder and tension with Kardashian’s mother, Kris Jenner, but sources tell TMZ.com it’s “as amicable as a divorce can be.” President Trump was treated like an emperor at his hotel restaurant near…

The forgotten nuclear threat

Constraints on nuclear proliferation have lapsed or been loosened in recent years. How great is the danger? Who has nuclear weapons? The vast majority—some 91 percent—of the world’s 13,400 nuclear weapons are owned by the U.S. and Russia, which each have the power to render Earth an uninhabitable nuclear wasteland. The other early developers of nuclear arsenals were the U.K., China, and France. In an attempt to prevent further spread, the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) was adopted in 1970, pledging those five powers to eventually disarm in return for other states promising not to pursue the bomb. But more than 50 years later, all four of the countries that aren’t party to the treaty—India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea—have nuclear arsenals (although Israel has never confirmed it), and at least one signatory, Iran,…

The forgotten nuclear threat

When will we be back to normal?

Joe Pinsker TheAtlantic.com “The end of the pandemic is on the horizon at last,” said Joe Pinsker, but the question everyone is now asking is, When does normal life return? The coronavirus variants have introduced some uncertainty, but as vaccine doses become available to all Americans and warm weather returns, “summer could, miraculously, be close to normal.” Most experts think that at some point after July 1 it will become safe to socialize with vaccinated friends and family indoors, to work in offices, to dine inside restaurants, and to travel domestically. But because of vaccine resistance here and slower vaccination abroad, indoor concerts, indoor sporting events, and full international travel will likely not yet resume. The fall could see some “isolated flare-ups,” with a real risk that variants will set us back.…

Biden’s Afghanistan choices

David Ignatius The Washington Post President Biden faces an “agonizing choice” in Afghanistan, said David Ignatius. Eager to end U.S. troop presence abroad, President Trump agreed to a tentative peace deal with the Taliban to withdraw the remaining 2,500 U.S. troops by May 1. But the Kabul government, headed by President Ashraf Ghani, “may be too corrupt and fragile to survive,” and a total U.S. withdrawal will very likely lead to its fall and a Taliban takeover. Images of the fall of Kabul to celebrating Islamist extremists “would embolden jihadists” and re-energize a movement that’s been in retreat, with Afghanistan once again becoming a safe haven for terrorists. A Taliban takeover would also lead to horrific violations of human rights, particularly for the Afghan girls and women, who’ve enjoyed far more freedom…

Anti-Asian violence on the rise

Qian Julie Wang The New York Times Two assailants in Brooklyn slapped an 89-year-old woman in the face and set her shirt on fire. In San Francisco, an 84-year-old man died after he was attacked on a morning walk. Over the past year, Asian-Americans have been the targets of a “frightening wave of attacks,” said Qian Julie Wang. We’ve always experienced discrimination and harassment, but hostility escalated dramatically after the coronavirus originated in China and President Trump “incited hatred” with racist language like “kung flu” and “China plague.” Between last March and December, there were more than 2,800 reported incidents of violence or discrimination against Asian-Americans. And those reported cases are just the tip of the iceberg. After the pandemic began, people made a show of avoiding me in public, and someone…

“Is there anything that politics can’t ruin? The answer, it appears, is a resounding ‘no,’ as partisan conflict creeps into all areas of American life. People’s partisan identities influence the range of people with whom they are willing to have relationships, the brands they purchase, and the jobs they take. People often choose positions on matters such as vaccines or mask wearing not based on a rational assessment of the issues but on a plug-and-play adoption of their tribe’s stances. This sort of politicized decision making can stand in the way of rational choices and healthy connections.” J.D. Tuccille in Reason.com…

I read it in the tabloids

A two-timing Florida man has been charged with stealing engagement and wedding rings from one girlfriend—and using them to propose to his other girlfriend. Police said Joseph L. Davis, 48, saw his scam blow up once the first girlfriend heard that he had a fiancée, looked up her rival on social media, and saw the woman wearing the rings she’d got in her first marriage and had stored in a jewelry box. The two women, who live about 30 miles apart, agreed to cooperate with police. Davis remains at large, and police said he has a tattoo on his left arm that reads, “Only God can judge me.” A 6-foot-wide residence in west London has gone on the market for $1.3 million. The home, which was advertised as “possibly the skinniest…

I read it in the tabloids

A Christian ritual that tortures babies

ROMANIA Mihai Copaceanu Adevarul The accidental drowning of a 6-week-old baby during baptism is sparking a call for religious reform, said Mihai Copaceanu. Traditionalists in the Romanian Orthodox clergy insist that baptism requires that the naked child be fully immersed in water three times. At one such christening recently, in the city of Suceava, the baby was unresponsive, his lips blue, when he was lifted the third time. He died in the hospital the next day, the parents’ joy at welcoming their child into the faith turned to grief. But the only real surprise is that such tragedies don’t happen more often. Some priests approach the ceremony “like firefighters, splashing water with incredible force.” They lack all empathy for an infant’s fragility and fear. Wouldn’t we be outraged if we saw a video…

Showdown over academic freedom

TURKEY Andrew Wilks AlJazeera.com (Qatar) Student demonstrations that began last month have escalated into Turkey’s most widespread unrest in nearly a decade, said Andrew Wilks. They started when President Recep Tayyip Erdogan appointed an operative from his Islamist party—rather than a professor, as is traditional—to be rector of Istanbul’s liberal Bogazici University. And the protests escalated in early February after two students were charged with inciting hatred over an art exhibition that included a poster of Islam’s holiest site, the Kaaba in Mecca, festooned with LGBT flags. The students’ arrest was seen as an attack on academic freedom and protests spread through Istanbul and to other cities. Erdogan responded brutally, sending troops to campus and arresting hundreds. His government is demonizing the protesters, “labeling them terrorists and employing homophobic slurs.” But the people…

France: Finally, an age of consent

Child-protection activists have for decades demanded that France institute an official age of consent, said Solène Cordier in Le Monde. Now the National Assembly is at long last drawing up a law that will classify sexual relations with a child under age 15 as statutory rape. It’s already illegal for an adult to have sex with a minor, but the perpetrator can only be charged with rape if prosecutors can prove the use of “violence, coercion, threat, or surprise.” That loophole has complicated attempts to prosecute alleged predators, who can defend themselves by claiming the sex was consensual. The campaign to change the law has reached critical mass in recent months thanks to best-selling memoirs from high-profile child-abuse victims and their family members. In Consent, publisher Vanessa Springora revealed how…

France: Finally, an age of consent

Australia: Facebook unfriends, then refriends, a nation

Australia has tamed Big Tech, said The Australian in an editorial. After the lower house of Parliament passed legislation last week that will force digital companies “to pay for news content they currently take for free,” Facebook threw a tantrum. While Google grudgingly began striking deals with big Australian media firms, Mark Zuckerberg’s company called the legislation “unworkable” and barred users in Australia from sharing or viewing content from any news outlet (see Technology, p. 22). Facebook’s faulty algorithm also blocked government and charity pages that provide information on everything from bushfire mitigation to domestic violence advice, and even blacked out the accounts of state health agencies on the eve of our coronavirus vaccine rollout. This sweeping shutdown sparked bipartisan outrage in Australia and across the West, and so—after our…

Australia: Facebook unfriends, then refriends, a nation

Forgotten casualties of the pandemic

BRAZIL Clara Assunção Brasil de Fato The pandemic has hit Brazil’s black domestic workers the hardest, said Clara Assunção, and the government is doing almost nothing to help. The very first Covid-19 fatality in Rio de Janeiro was a 63-year-old black maid, Cleonice Gonçalves, who died in March “after her wealthy employer returned from Italy,” where the virus was already widespread. Since they work in people’s homes, maids are at particular risk of infection. Many have complained that their employers refuse to wear masks or maintain social distance. But President Jair Bolsonaro’s right-wing government hasn’t included them on the list of those to be vaccinated first—even as truckers, who make up far less of the population and work largely solo, get priority. Of course, many maids are no longer employed at all. Since…

More reason to oppose U.S. base

JAPAN Shinichi Fujiwara Asahi Shimbun Is the U.S. building an air base on top of the remains of war dead? asked Shinichi Fujiwara. The Pentagon is in the process of relocating a Marine air base from the densely populated Okinawan city of Ginowan, whose residents have long protested its noise and pollution and complained of crimes by the Americans. A new site was chosen on Okinawa’s remote northern coast, and the military is reclaiming ground for it with a giant landfill. The soil for the landfill is being excavated in the south, and now “disturbing signs are emerging that human remains from the ferocious 1945 Battle of Okinawa might be mixed” with that soil. Some 200,000 Japanese—including a quarter of the civilian population of Okinawa—perished in the U.S. invasion, among them many civilians…

Flyin’ Ted: A gaffe for the ages

In Washington, there is near-universal agreement that “nobody likes Ted Cruz,” said Dan Zak in The Washington Post. But the loathing of the Texas Republican hit new heights last week after he flew off to the Cancún Ritz-Carlton while more than a million of “his ice-blasted constituents” were sitting in blacked-out, frozen homes watching their pipes burst, boiling water to drink, and “defecating in buckets.” After being photographed at the airport on the way to 80-degree Mexico with his wife and two daughters, Cruz was shamed into lugging his bulging suitcase back to Houston three days earlier than planned. He had the gall to blame his daughters, saying they had begged for the trip, but leaked group texts showed Cruz’s wife whining to friends that she was “FREEZING” and saying…

Flyin’ Ted: A gaffe for the ages

Iran: Is a new deal possible?

President Biden has made his “opening gambit” to restart the Iran nuclear deal, said Alex Ward in Vox.com. Last week, he withdrew a request the Trump administration had made to the United Nations to reimpose sanctions on Iran because it was no longer in compliance with the 2015 accord signed by the U.S. and five other nations. The Biden team then jumped on an idea from a European diplomat to host an “informal meeting” of all parties to “discuss the way forward.” So far, however, Iran has said it will not begin any talks until the U.S. first lifts all sanctions former President Trump imposed as part of his “maximum pressure” campaign. Iran also “handed Biden his first credibility test,” said Michael Knights in Politico.com. An Iranian-backed militia is believed…

The pandemic cut U.S. life expectancy by a year, to 77.8, in the first half of 2020, the largest drop since World War II. People of color saw the biggest impact, with blacks losing nearly three years and Hispanics losing nearly two. “This is a huge decline,” said CDC official Robert Anderson.NBCNews.com The more than 500,000 Americans who’ve died of Covid-19 exceeds the number of war veterans buried in Arlington National Cemetery. The cemetery dates to the Civil War and holds the remains of troops from every major U.S. military conflict.The Washington Post Six Capitol Police officers have been suspended for their actions in the Jan. 6 insurrection, and 29 others are under investigation. Those under suspension include an officer who took a selfie with a member of the mob and one…

Cuomo: His troubles are mounting

Andrew Cuomo “should be worried,” said John Daukas in The Wall Street Journal. Federal prosecutors are now investigating the Democratic New York governor’s attempt to underreport nursing-home deaths in his state, and he may face charges of deliberately providing false information to federal Medicare officials and the Justice Department. Back in March, Cuomo’s administration ordered nursing homes to accept recovering Covid-19 patients from hospitals—a decision that may have led the virus to spread among vulnerable residents. Then the administration limited its count of nursing-home deaths to those who actually died in the homes, excluding those who died after being sent to hospitals. That cover-up imploded last month when Democratic state Attorney General Letitia James revealed that Cuomo had undercounted the 15,000 nursing home deaths by about 50 percent. Top Cuomo…

Cuomo: His troubles are mounting

1/6 commission: A needed reckoning?

America can’t move on from the “trauma” of the Capitol insurrection “until the full story is told,” said The Boston Globe in an editorial. There’s only one way to achieve that: the “9/11-style commission” recently proposed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and backed by a growing group of lawmakers from both sides of the aisle. In the wake of a “truncated impeachment process,” many questions still loom about the attack. We must understand the security failures, whether members of Congress were “complicit” in providing help to the insurrectionists, why hours passed until the National Guard was summoned, and what President Trump was doing during this awful interval. A small, bipartisan commission that can subpoena witnesses will get us “to the bottom of what happened and why,” said Henry Olsen in…

“When our children love what we love, it is a blessing, but O, when they hate what we hate!” Author Elizabeth McCracken, quoted in Harper’s Magazine “History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.” Kurt Vonnegut, quoted in Forbes.com “It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.” Graham Greene, quoted in ArtsJournal.com “Live for the sensation of life, not for the story you tell about your life.” Philosopher John Gray, quoted in Vox.com “Keep your eyes wide open before marriage; half shut afterwards.” Benjamin Franklin, quoted in Inc.com “A bird does not sing because he has an answer. He sings because he has a song.” Children’s author Joan Walsh Anglund, quoted in Vice.com “Meetings…

Media: Should Google, Facebook pay for news?

“Do tech companies need publishers more than publishers need tech companies?” asked David Pierce in Protocol.com. We might be closer to getting an answer. Australia introduced a bill last week that will make Google, Facebook, and other tech platforms pay for news links. The tech industry initially saw the proposed law as little more than an excuse to force them to write “a big check with Rupert Murdoch’s name on it.” Facebook even thought it could simply tell the Australian government “to shove it,” blocking Australians from posting any news links on its site (see Best International Columns, p. 15). But after a few days of brinksmanship, both Facebook and Google are at the bargaining table, negotiating how much they will pay to Australian news outlets after the law’s enactment. This…

Media: Should Google, Facebook pay for news?

What’s new in tech

Amazon games India’s online market Amazon has been using a small number of friendly large sellers to “circumvent increasingly tough regulatory restrictions” in India, said Aditya Kalra in Reuters.com. In India, unlike in the United States, Amazon can’t sell goods directly to customers and can only act as a middleman between buyers and sellers. The restriction is aimed at protecting small retailers, and Amazon has long contended that it is a “friend of the small business.” But Amazon gave two of its largest sellers in India, Cloudtail and Appario, subsidies and “access to its global retail tools” that helped them account for 35 percent of the platform’s online sales. In early 2019, just “35 of Amazon’s more than 400,000 sellers in India accounted for around two-thirds of its online sales.” Still no…

Innovation of the week

Apple is already moving on to 6G, said Mark Gurman in Bloomberg.com. Just months after launching its first 5G-enabled smartphones, Apple posted job ads last week “seeking wireless system research engineers” to “design next generation (6G) wireless communication systems.” The standards for 6G are still “loosely defined, but some analysts say the technology could enable speeds more than 100 times faster than 5G.” To reach that, signals would likely have to attain higher frequencies than are used for wireless communications today. This would take them past the millimeter wave bands used for 5G and push into the terahertz (or infrared) spectrum, potentially unlocking wide swaths of unused bandwidth. The technology, though, remains largely untested, and “industry watchers don’t expect a 6G rollout until about 2030.”…

Innovation of the week

Perseverance begins its search for life

After a nearly seven-month, 293-million-mile journey—with a heart-stopping final descent—NASA’s Perseverance rover safely landed on Mars last week to begin a new search for signs of past Martian life. The $2.7 billion, car-size explorer is fitted with an array of sophisticated equipment—including cameras, lasers, and ground-penetrating radar—that scientists hope will find chemical evidence of fossilized microbial life. Project scientist Ken Farley tells The Washington Post that the mission—the most ambitious yet of NASA’s 20 trips to the Red Planet—will “really make the first step in answering the question of whether life exists elsewhere.” If there is proof that microbes arose on Mars billions of years ago, when it was warmer and wetter, it will strongly suggest we are not alone in the universe. The vehicle carrying Perseverance entered the Martian…

Perseverance begins its search for life

Kids are half as susceptible…

People under age 20 may be almost half as susceptible to coronavirus as their elders—and less likely to transmit the disease to others. That’s the conclusion of a new Israeli study, which fitted statistical models of transmission to a data set of Covid testing results from 637 households. The researchers calculated that under-20s were 43 percent as susceptible as those over 20, and 63 percent as likely to spread the virus to others. They also found that children were more likely to receive a negative PCR test result despite being infected, suggesting they have a lower viral load. Lead researcher Itai Dattner, from the University of Haifa, tells ScienceDaily.com that understanding children’s role in transmission is a “top priority” for efforts around the world to reopen or keep open schools.…

Kids are half as susceptible…

…But MIS-C cases are rising

Doctors across the country have been seeing a significant increase in the number of children sickened with a dangerous syndrome linked to the coronavirus, The New York Times reports. The syndrome, called multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, or MIS-C, remains rare: The Centers for Disease Control has recorded 2,060 cases in 48 states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia, including 30 deaths. The median age of those affected was 9. But the data show cases climbing since mid-October, and doctors say more of MIS-C patients require treatment in the intensive-care unit. “A higher percentage of them are really critically ill,” said Dr. Roberta DeBiasi, chief of infectious diseases at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C. Symptoms—which seem to be connected to coronavirus infections—start with fever, rash, red eyes, and…

A drug to fight obesity

In what scientists say is a “game changer” for obesity, an appetite-suppressing drug has helped people lose up to 20 percent of their body weight. The treatment, semaglutide, is already used for type 2 diabetes. It is a synthetic version of GLP-1, a naturally occurring hormone released by the body after a filling meal. In a new trial involving 2,000 people in 16 countries, scientists administered a much higher dose of semaglutide to people wanting to lose weight. Over 15 months, the participants who received the drug lost an average of almost 15 percent of their body weight compared with only 2.4 percent for those who got a placebo. Almost a third of recipients lost 20 percent of their weight. Those who lost weight also saw substantial reductions in risk…

Was the dinosaur-destroyer a comet?

Scientists broadly agree that a large extraterrestrial object slammed into Earth 66 million years ago, wiping out the dinosaurs. But a new study proposes that instead of an asteroid, the planet was bombarded by high-speed chunks of an icy comet that broke apart when it flew too close to the sun. The researchers, from Harvard, argue that Jupiter’s gravity pulled a comet into the solar system and then slung it toward the sun. They say that when this unfortunate comet was then torn asunder by solar forces, it could have produced enough shards—of the right size, rate, and trajectory—to cause the cataclysm that wiped out the dinosaurs. They note that the impactor was composed of carbonaceous chondrites, a rocklike material found in only 10 percent of asteroids. Many scientists aren’t…

Was the dinosaur-destroyer a comet?

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

(Knopf, $27) Bill Gates, the Mr. Fixit of mega-billionaires, has just handed us a blueprint for how to address “the most alarming crisis of all,” said The Economist. Global warming, the philanthropist and Microsoft founder warns, poses an existential threat that requires reducing annual global carbon emissions to net zero by 2050. But How to Avoid a Climate Disaster isn’t a scare screed. Rather, “the most refreshing aspect of this book is its bracing mix of cold-eyed realism and number-crunched optimism.” Today, the world produces 51 billion tons of greenhouse gases, and Gates argues that zeroing it out will require technological innovation and breakthroughs that make noncarbon energy cheaper than fossil fuels. He advocates quintupling R&D spending to meet the 2050 goals—but points out how modest such spending would still be. Gates…

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

No One Is Talking About This

(Riverhead, $25) In her first novel, Patricia Lockwood “pulls off something unexpected,” said Emily Bobrow in The Wall Street Journal. Though it’s not a surprise that the Poet Laureate of Twitter makes good use of her social media fluency, she has also found a way to successfully stitch light comedy to “a moving portrait of love and grief.” The unnamed protagonist is, like Lockwood, a celebrated bard of Twitter, and the book’s first half unfolds in tweet-like fragments—many trafficking in irony—as she travels the world speaking about life online. Then she receives a call in which she learns that her sister is about to deliver a child whose health is seriously compromised. From there on, said Anthony Domestico in The Boston Globe, our heroine “experiences love and pain she couldn’t have…

No One Is Talking About This

Calhoun: American Heretic

(Basic, $35) “A respectful biography of the ideological father of the Confederacy may feel as welcome as an exhumed corpse,” said Andrew Delbanco in The New York Times. But John C. Calhoun’s impact on U.S. history can’t be wished away because he championed noxious ideas, and Robert Elder’s lucid portrait of the senator from antebellum South Carolina helps us understand the full weight of the man’s legacy. Calhoun’s stubborn independence and fiery intelligence provided a template for Moby-Dick’s Captain Ahab. His staunch defense of slavery and advocacy of its westward expansion helped ignite a bloody civil war that began a decade after his death. But even contemporaries who loathed him esteemed his intellect. To this day, thinkers on both the left and right lean on Calhoun’s arguments about the rights of…

Calhoun: American Heretic

Chosen by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s new novel, The Committed, is a sequel to The Sympathizer in which the central figure of that 2016 Pulitzer Prize winner becomes a drug dealer in 1980s Paris. Below, Nguyen recommends other books that interrogate commitment. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963). I read Plath’s novel as a student in an all-boys Jesuit high school and was suitably disturbed by its story of an ambitious young woman who suffers a mental-health crisis and is committed to a psychiatric hospital. Red Comet by Heather Clark (2020). The Bell Jar returned to my thought after I read Heather Clark’s new biography of Plath, a compelling reminder of how committed Plath was to her writing. At 1,118 pages, the biography is itself an example of commitment, both on the part of…

Chosen by Viet Thanh Nguyen

In forbidden indulgences

Drug Use for Grown-Ups by Carl L. Hart (Penguin, $28) This book by a Columbia University neuroscientist “represents a calculated risk,” said Sally Satel in The Wall Street Journal. Carl Hart has concluded, after close study of test subjects, that heroin, methamphetamine, and other widely feared drugs can be used safely by most adults. Yet “as persuasive as Hart can be,” the vexing reality, as he admits, is that the same drugs can destroy the lives of the small minority of people who are not psychologically equipped to resist overdependence. Aimlessness by Tom Lutz (Columbia, $20) The nuanced argument advanced in this essay collection “may be lost on the linear-minded,” said Scott McLemee in InsideHigherEd.com. The industrialized world prizes focus and productivity, but writing professor and Los Angeles Review of Books founder Tom Lutz draws…

In forbidden indulgences

When Rosa Brooks decided to become a cop several years ago, she didn’t enjoy much family support, said Terry Gross in NPR.org. The pushback was especially strong from her mother, Barbara Ehrenreich, the best-selling author and lifelong leftist. “Oh, we had a lot of pretty tense conversations,” Brooks says. “She said, The police are the enemy; you’re joining the enemy.” Still, Brooks’ curiosity won out. A law professor at Georgetown University who was already in her 40s, she was simply amazed that Washington, D.C., offered an unusual program in which she could become a “reserve police officer”—an armed volunteer working three patrol shifts each month. Only once she’d started did she decide to write a book about the experience. In Tangled Up in Blue, Brooks recalls a few incidents from her…

Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America

The New Museum, New York City, through June 6 “The most ambitious exhibitions help to usher in new ways of seeing,” said Sebastian Smee in The Washington Post. Curator Okwui Enwezor, who died at 55 before seeing “Grief and Grievance” realized, excelled at assembling such shows: “If you saw them or even read about them, you knew you were seeing the shape of future conversations about art.” Before cancer took his life, the Nigerian-born Enwezor envisioned an exhibition that would express what he called the “crystallization of black grief” that emerged in response to the recent rise of the politics of white grievance. Grief turns out to be a rich subject—because grief remains “fundamentally a psychological phenomenon,” with no straight line from the privacy of grief to community. That helps explains…

Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America

New and notable podcasts

Chicano Squad (Vox Media) Their badges said they were Houston cops, said Cat Cardenas in Texas Monthly. But in the eyes of at least some fellow officers, “they were Mexicans first.” The odds were stacked against the five members of America’s first all-Latino police squad when they were tasked in 1979 with trying to crack 52 unsolved homicides in the city’s barrios. But with police-community relations at a nadir, the “Chicano Squad” quickly managed to clear 40 cases, and this docuseries about their work blends “vividly reported” details of those distant cases with the host’s anecdotes about personal experiences that parallel those of her subjects. The squad was in part a PR play, said Sarah Larson in The New Yorker. In 1977, white officers had fatally beaten a Mexican-American Houston native and…

New and notable podcasts

Anthony Hopkins’ latest screen performance reminds us why he has been venerated for so long, said Richard Lawson in VanityFair.com. Playing an aging retiree, also named Anthony, who is sinking into dementia, the 83-year-old Oscar winner creates a character who “goes from sweetly doddering to hectoring, charming to frightened, obstinate and then, sometimes, resigned to the limits of his failing perception.” It’s “a towering piece of acting,” one that’s “as precise and exacting as it is enveloping.” Florian Zeller, directing an adaptation of his own hit play, stages most of the action in the protagonist’s tasteful London flat, said A.A. Dowd in AVClub.com. But after Olivia Colman is introduced as the protagonist’s daughter, Anne, the film begins scrambling time lines, casting, and even the apartment’s layout to immerse viewers in…

Allen v. Farrow: The docuseries that could torch Woody Allen’s legacy

“Is Woody Allen’s career finally toast?” asked Lorraine Ali in the Los Angeles Times. Across the three decades since the prolific filmmaker was accused of sexually abusing his daughter Dylan Farrow when she was 7, Hollywood has answered the question by awarding Allen an Oscar (in 2012), a lifetime achievement award (in 2014), and, until recently, the backing to make a new movie every year. But for Allen, now 85, “things might be about to change.” HBO’s new four-part docuseries Allen v. Farrow “threatens to burn what’s left of his career and legacy to the ground.” Folding in interviews from former babysitters, child-welfare workers, and prosecutors, the series mounts a “devastating” case against Allen that depicts a pattern of inappropriate behavior with Dylan prior to the alleged 1992 assault. It…

Allen v. Farrow: The docuseries that could torch Woody Allen’s legacy

The Week’s guide to what’s worth watching

Debris It doesn’t take long for the scientists in this new drama series to determine that mysterious space junk falling to Earth came from an alien spaceship. But the material seems to defy the laws of physics and has startling effects on people. Riann Steele and Jonathan Tucker co-star as officers for MI6 and the CIA who team up to investigate. From J.H. Wyman, onetime showrunner of Fringe, another sci-fi procedural. Monday, March 1, at 10 p.m., NBC Moxie What can Gen X teach Gen Z? In this feature-length comedy directed by Amy Poehler, a meek 16-year-old adopts the riot grrrl tactics from her mom’s past to lead a revolt against toxic masculinity in her high school. Hadley Robinson plays the kid who ignites the revolt by publishing a protest zine called Moxie!…

The Week’s guide to what’s worth watching

Divas reconsidered… Framing Britney Spears A pop star since 17, Spears has endured a withering male gaze, which becomes the subject of this New York Times documentary that sparked a recent barrage of essays castigating the fickle entertainment industry. Hulu Homecoming: A Film by Beyoncé In 2018, Beyoncé ruled Coachella. Her stunning concert film captures that instantly legendary two-night festival engagement while revealing the hard work that went into transposing her catalog of hits into a dazzlingly communal celebration. Netflix Miss Americana Taylor Swift played innocent before she played brash, but this recent portrait catches her moving beyond games. She emerges as a remarkable musical talent and a pop star determined not to be felled by the same forces that brought down Britney Spears. Netflix Whitney: Can I Be Me With her otherworldly voice and screen-star beauty, Whitney…

Coming 2 America

It only took 33 years, but Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall are back in a sequel to their 1988 fish-out-of-water comedy, and the antic energy is back, too. Hall plays sidekick to Murphy’s King Akeem, who returns to Queens long enough to locate his only male heir, then ushers the young man to distant Zamunda and straight into a palace drama. Akeem’s wife and oldest daughter are less than thrilled about bowing to patriarchal tradition, and that’s not the only threat to the crown. With James Earl Jones, Shari Headley, Leslie Jones, Tracy Morgan, and Wesley Snipes. Available Friday, March 5, Amazon Prime…

Coming 2 America

Birria de res: The Mexican stew that has Instagram abuzz

“It’s hard to say exactly what makes birria birria,” said Tejal Rao in The New York Times. The word suggests a delicious hot mess, and there are too many regional variations on the Mexican stew to count. But birria has seen “a meteoric rise in popularity recently,” particularly for the soupy style made with beef and popularized by birria vendors in Tijuana. On Instagram, “the hype for birria is relentless.” Below is a version adopted from a recipe that Texas-born chef Josef Centeno learned from his grandmother. Goat or lamb can be substituted for the beef, and you could choose to shred the meat for tacos. That said, “the best way to serve birria is immediately and simply, in a bowl, with some warm corn tortillas.” Recipe of the week Birria de res 2…

Birria de res: The Mexican stew that has Instagram abuzz

Hotel-room dining: The luxuriously safe new way to eat out

The next time you feel like dining out, try phoning a hotel, said Allie Volpe in Eater.com. With vacancies high, many upscale properties are trying to keep their in-house restaurants alive through the pandemic by letting them offer private group dining in vacant guest rooms, and many customers are loving it. After all, this new service option combines “all the perks of indoor dining (like warmth, for one)” with the safety of eating at home. Though steep spending minimums are common, some fans might not want to return to crowded dining rooms when crowds finally return. “In a hotel room, you’re shielded from the masses,” says Hector Tamez, a regular at Uni, in Boston’s Eliot Hotel. “You feel important.” While dining in a room at the Riggs Hotel, said Tom…

Hotel-room dining: The luxuriously safe new way to eat out

Wine: California zinfandel

“Zinfandel may not be the first grape that comes to mind when you think of California wine, but that doesn’t mean it’s second-rate,” said Wine Enthusiast. It’s been a stalwart for the state’s vintners since the 1880s, producing a wide range of expressions. “From bold, jammy, fruit-laden wines to nuanced, earthy pours,” there’s a Golden State zin for every taste. 2018 Brady Vineyard ($24). In this Paso Robles zinfandel, rich red fruit is “cut by crushed-stone flavors” and “lifted by savory spice.” 2018 Sobon Estate Rocky Top ($18). This “plushly textured” wine from Amador County “starts with wild berry and underbrush aromas” and follows them with “ripe blackberry and black plum flavors.” 2019 Gnarly Head Old Vine ($13). A great value, this Lodi zin nicely counters very ripe fruit with strong oak-instilled hints…

Wine: California zinfandel

Pandemic parenting: How to help a depressed teenager

“Dear struggling parents: It’s not just you,” said Susanna Schrobsdorff in Time.com. The past year “has made everything that’s already difficult about adolescence that much harder,” and as the pandemic drags on, many Gen Z teenagers and young adults “are now grappling with serious depression, becoming self-destructive, or losing motivation for school.” In a survey published by the American Psychological Association several months into the pandemic, no other generation reported higher levels of anxiety than those in the ages 13 to 23 cohort. Among those 18 to 23, more than 7 in 10 described themselves as miserable or unhappy, and also said they sometimes felt so tired that they sat around and did nothing. A parent doesn’t have to solve such a problem alone. The Child Mind Institute (childmind.org), a…

Pandemic parenting: How to help a depressed teenager

Distancing season: Making the most of it

A heightened need for foster parents “The pandemic has created new challenges in the foster-care system,” said David Dodge in The New York Times. Fortunately, if you think you’d like to help any of the children in the system, “getting started is easier than you might think.” Generally, “the best thing you can do is pick up the phone and call your local agency”(childwelfare.gov has a directory). If taking a child into your home is too much, you could instead provide transportation for siblings to visit one another, or serve a child as a mentor. To be a foster parent, you must undergo 10 to 30 hours of education and training, followed by a 3- to 6-month home study by the governing agency. “Once you get trained and gain some experience,”…

Distancing season: Making the most of it

Homes off the mainland

Chocolate Hole, St. John Set on the smallest of the U.S. Virgin Islands, Villa de Vida has unobstructed views of Hart Bay and St. Thomas. The home’s three bedroom suites are in separate buildings connected to the great room by covered walkways, and the living areas open to an expansive ipe-wood deck with a swimming pool overlooking hills and sea. The landscaped hillside property is surrounded by lush tropical forest. $2,495,000. Abigail Schnell O’Connell, Island Living Collective/Luxury Portfolio International, (340) 998-1934 Kilauea, Hawaii This four-bedroom Bali-style home stands on 7 acres of riverfront land on Kauai. The partially solar-powered home is built with exotic hardwoods and features oversize rooms, exposed beams, carved-wood doors, and a kitchen with wood built-ins and an onyx-slab island. The property includes koi ponds, streams, lawns, fruit…

Homes off the mainland

Boeing: More trouble for an aerospace giant

Boeing is again dealing with the aftermath of an aerial disaster, said Andrew Tangel in The Wall Street Journal. This week, the Federal Aviation Administration ordered that 128 of Boeing’s wide-body 777s be removed from the skies so that their “engines can undergo immediate inspections” following an explosion near Denver on Feb. 20. The engine fire immediately brought to mind the problems with Boeing’s 737 Max, which caused two deadly crashes with 346 deaths. The 737 Max was allowed to “continue flying with passengers after the first fatal accident.” By contrast, regulators in the U.S. and Japan moved quickly to stop flights of 777s with the Pratt & Whitney engines that failed over Colorado. This was nothing like the Max crisis, said Brooke Sutherland in Bloomberg.com. The jet involved was 26…

Boeing: More trouble for an aerospace giant

PPP: A loan window for the smallest businesses

Criticized for favoring “the most well-established and well-connected” businesses, the Paycheck Protection Program this week temporarily limited access to its loans to businesses with 20 employees or fewer, said Stacy Cowley and Jim Tankersley in The New York Times. Since its start last spring, the program has extended nearly $700 billion in forgivable loans to small businesses. But sole proprietorships and independent contractors “have had a particularly hard time” getting PPP loans. In addition to the 14-day freeze for larger businesses, the Small Business Administration has instituted a more generous loan calculation for one-person firms, based on gross income rather than annual profit. Economy: Fed promises to keep buying bonds Despite “healthy signs of a return to normal,” the Federal Reserve will keep supporting the economy with major bond purchases, said Brian…

The bottom line

The price tag for the energy crisis in Texas: $50.6 billion, the cost of electricity sold from early Monday, when the blackouts began, to Friday morning, according to Bloomberg estimates. That compares with $4.2 billion for the prior week. Bloomberg.com Bitcoin “mining” uses more electricity annually than it takes to power Argentina, according to a study from Cambridge University. The heavy computer calculations required for verifying cryptocurrency transactions consume about 121.36 terawatt-hours (TWh) per year. BBC.com Tesla’s shares fell 8.5 percent in the first trading day after Elon Musk called Bitcoin overpriced. The electric-car company recently invested $1.5 billion in Bitcoin. Even with this recent decline, Tesla’s shares are up 1,300 percent since October 2019. CNN.com Walmart announced a pay bump for 425,000 employees to at least $13 an hour. About half of Walmart’s U.S. workers,…

The bottom line

Education: Americans lose confidence in college

New college graduates are entering the “worst job market in decades,” said Jeffrey Selingo and Matt Sigelman in The Wall Street Journal. “Hiring for entry-level college-graduate positions has fallen 45 percent,” likely hastening doubts about the value of college that have been building for years. According to Gallup, “the number of Americans who consider higher education ‘very important’ has fallen nearly 20 points since 2013.” Americans simply don’t see the return on their investment, and colleges themselves aren’t helping. The same survey found that 78 percent of new grads never even bothered with their college’s career office. It’s the job of schools to help students identify more fruitful career pathways. For example, “a psychology major who acquires data-analysis skills through research or internships can unlock more than 100,000 additional entry-level…

Education: Americans lose confidence in college

What the experts say

Special car warranty offer? Skip it Extended car warranties are too often “a bad deal,” said David Lazarus in the Los Angeles Times. “As I frequently tell consumers, if insurance helps you sleep at night, it’s probably worth it.” But generally speaking, service contracts don’t deliver enough bang for their buck. “A 2013 survey by Consumer Reports found that 55 percent of people who purchased extended car warranties never used the coverage.” Even those who did saved about $837 on covered repairs, far less than the $1,500 median cost of the coverage. You should steer clear of “coverage pitched by marketing letters or robocalls.” Many car dealers “sell details of extended warranties to data brokers, which in turn sell them to others,” giving salesmen that information about your car. Robinhood’s turn in…

Charity of the week

Since 1984, the Performing Animal Welfare Society (pawsweb.org) has been rescuing, protecting, and rehabilitating exotic performing animals that have been abused and neglected. PAWS operates two wildlife refuges, a 2,300-acre sanctuary in San Andreas, Calif., for elephants, lions, bears, primates, and tigers, and a 100-acre refuge in Herald, Calif., for emus and oryxes. These sanctuaries are carefully created to mimic the animals’ natural habitats. There are specially constructed areas for older, arthritic, or injured animals. At PAWS, these exotic animals receive care from dozens of trained staff and veterinarians and are not bred, sold, or exploited in any way. In 2004, dozens of tigers who lived on a landfill were rescued from a breeding facility and brought to the refuge’s safety. Each charity we feature has earned a four-star overall rating…

Charity of the week

Travel: Few hints of spring for a battered industry

Prospects for a swift travel rebound are dimming, said Mike Cherney and Eric Sylvers in The Wall Street Journal. After the worst year for tourism on record, the arrival of Covid-19 vaccines was expected to be “the great panacea” in 2021. “But at current vaccination rates, less than 20 percent of the world’s population is expected to be inoculated this year,” according to recent estimates. The spread of coronavirus variants from places like South Africa, Brazil, and the United Kingdom means governments will remain cautious before easing travel restrictions, and many travelers appear hesitant to begin booking trips again. Air tickets issued for international travel in the coming six months actually fell in February. Overall, they remain down 85 percent from this time in 2019. One travel data company projects…

Travel: Few hints of spring for a battered industry

A surprising, inspiring hatchet job

Justin Peters Slate.com If you had to choose “a corporate pandemic casualty that the world wouldn’t particularly miss,” Stumpy’s might well be it, said Justin Peters. Stumpy’s is a fast-growing chain of hatchet houses—BYOB joints where customers can “huck hatchets at wooden targets while drinking beers indoors.” Stumpy’s doesn’t have anything to offer for curbside pickup or delivery, and ax throwing doesn’t “pivot well to digital.” But while bars, restaurants, movie theaters, and performance venues have been reeling, many “smaller-scale fun palaces” have defied the odds. Hatchet houses emerged before the pandemic along with other “low-budget entertainment facilities for grown-ups, like escape rooms and happy-hour painting studios,” filling a need for adults who have been “underserved by the broader entertainment market.” When it opened in 2016 as the “first and only indoor…

Oracle wants to work with China’s cops

Mara Hvistendahl TheIntercept.com The software giant Oracle puts profit over national security and human rights through secretive work with China, said Mara Hvistendahl. Since it began building databases for the CIA in the 1970s, Oracle has “fostered a reputation for being closely aligned with the U.S. government.” Larry Ellison, Oracle’s co-founder and chairman, “criticized Google’s 2018 plans for a censored Chinese search engine” as un-American. But between 2010 and 2020, Oracle was also pitching its software to the Chinese government for “key surveillance initiatives,” including in Xinjiang, site of the genocide against the Uighur Muslim population. Chinese-language presentations hosted on Oracle’s own website offer examples of how provincial police departments can deploy the company’s analytic software for predictive policing, helping scan the “mounds of data” collected by China’s pervasive surveillance network. Oracle…

The Sicilian sculptor who put a bull on Wall Street

Wall Street’s monument to bullishness began as a lark. After the Black Monday stock market crash of 1987, Sicilian-born sculptor Arturo Di Modica spent two years and $325,000 of his own money crafting a 3.5-ton bronze beast intended to lift traders’ spirits. In the dead of night on Dec. 15, 1989, Di Modica used a truck, a crane, and 40 friends to sneak Charging Bull outside the New York Stock Exchange. To their surprise, a huge Christmas tree had been erected where Di Modica planned to place his animal. “Drop the bull under the tree,” he shouted. “It’s my gift.” The rogue sculpture was eventually granted permanent legal residence in Lower Manhattan, becoming a tourist draw and a totem of American capitalism. Di Modica was miffed. It was meant as…

The Sicilian sculptor who put a bull on Wall Street

The nun who became an anti-torture campaigner

Dianna Ortiz lived two lives, one before her abduction, and one after. In the late 1980s, the American nun was teaching indigenous children in the highlands of Guatemala, amid a brutal civil war that pitted leftist rebels against the U.S.-backed military. For years, the Catholic missionary ignored menacing letters warning her to leave the country. Then on Nov. 2, 1989, she was kidnapped by Guatemalan security forces, gang-raped, burned with cigarettes, forced to stab to death a fellow captive, and dangled by her wrists over a pit filled with rats and decomposing bodies. The ordeal ended, Ortiz said, when an American man arrived and ordered her torturers to stop, saying her disappearance had sparked media attention. When he drove her away, she escaped from his car. Back in America, Ortiz…

The nun who became an anti-torture campaigner

The godfather of salsa who got the world dancing to a Latin beat

In 1963, the Dominican-born bandleader Johnny Pacheco jumped into business with the attorney handling his divorce: Jerry Masucci, an Italian-American ex-cop with a love for Cuban dance music. The pair founded Fania Records, with Pacheco as the label’s chief producer and talent scout, and started selling LPs from the trunks of their cars in Spanish Harlem. By the 1970s, Fania was being hailed as the Latin Motown, home to superstars such as Celia Cruz, Héctor Lavoe, and Rubén Blades and the breeding ground of salsa, a distinctly New York blend of Cuban mambo, Puerto Rican bomba, Dominican merengue, and American jazz and funk. The lyrics of the songs—many written by Pacheco—often tackled weighty subjects such as racism and cultural pride, but the music never lost its propulsive rhythm. “Our only…

Half a million Americans are gone

As the U.S. reaches a terrible Covid-19 milestone, said Julie Bosman in The New York Times, Americans cope with the emptiness left by so much death. A nation numbed by misery and loss is confronting a number that still has the power to shock: 500,000. Roughly one year since the first known death by the coronavirus in the United States, we have hit an unfathomable toll—the loss of a half-million people. No other country has counted so many deaths in the pandemic. More Americans have perished from Covid-19 than on the battlefields of World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War combined. The milestone comes at a hopeful moment: New virus cases are down sharply, deaths are slowing, and vaccines are steadily being administered. But there is concern about emerging variants…

Half a million Americans are gone

This week’s question: A company in Israel has created an edible rib-eye steak, complete with authentic fatty marbling, using a 3D printer that lays down layer after layer of lab-grown animal cells. If a restaurateur were to open a chain of steakhouses that served up only 3D-printed meat, what should the eateries be called? Last week’s contest: A Louisiana woman who used Gorilla Glue to keep her hair in place—and soon found she couldn’t remove the stuff—blamed the company, complaining that the glue’s labeling only warns against getting the product “in eyes, on skin, or on clothing.” If a movie studio were to make a drama about her ordeal, what should the film be titled? THE WINNER: “As Glued As It Gets” Bob Colman, Palm Desert, Calif. SECOND PLACE: “Dry Hard With a…

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