The week USA september 17 2022

It raised the possibility that such sources could be identified and their lives put at risk “if the documents got into the wrong hands.” Just last year the CIA warned every one of its sta

THE BEST OF THE U.S AND INTERNATIONAL MEDIA

WWW.THEWEEK.COM ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT EVERYTHING THAT MATTERS

THE LAST WORD

A conservative’s lament for

Going on

offense

26 Art & Music

An epic sculpture,

50 years

in the making

28 Film &

Stage

A megachurch satire in

Honk for Jesus

6 Controversy of the week

After Dobbs, the GOP

has second thoughts on

abortion

7 The U.S at a glance

A fake Rothschild

penetrates Mar-a-Lago;

water crisis in Mississippi;

a U.S monkeypox death

8 The world at a glance

Gorbachev dies; floods

cover one-third of

Pakistan; Air France

pilots’ brawl

10 People

Harry Styles rinses off

his celebrity; how the

Williams sisters inspired

Coco Gauff

11 Briefing

Why nuclear power is

getting a new burst of

interest

12 Best U.S columns

America’s last ‘trusted

The student loan bailout;

CNN woos the Right; the

biology of long Covid

LEISURE

31 Food & Drink

A simple favorite of napa cabbage and noodles;

eating well at the airport

32 Consumer

Nissan brings back a classic sports car; keeping bedsheets white

BUSINESS

36 News at a glance

Fed sticks with tough inflation measures; Russia shuts off Nord Stream gas

37 Making money

The inner pain of the crying CEO; when IRAs get too big

38 Best columns

California sets the pace

on electric transition; AI:

utopia or dystopia?

A dried-up tributary of the Yangtze River in Chongqing, China (p.15)

Harry Styles

The contention that climate change isn’t real has gone poof! in

a wisp of smoke, like a piece of paper held under a magnifying

glass on a 100-degree day But there are still those who contend

that rapidly reducing the use of fossil fuels would be too painful

a price to pay, and that rather than succumb to “alarmism,”

humanity should learn to “adapt” to a hotter planet The

summer of 2022 has put the adaptation option under the

magnifying glass Unprecedented heat and drought have scorched

China for months, and dried up so many rivers— including the

mighty Yangtze—that authorities are instituting rolling blackouts

because of lost hydropower (See International columns, p.15.)

In Europe, 104-degree days and prolonged drought baked a

shocked Britain brown, revealed long- submerged relics in the

Tiber River and sunken German warships in the Danube, and

shut down popular river cruises on the Rhine In the American

Southwest, the worst megadrought in 1,200 years may lead to

major water usage cuts for seven sunblasted states dependent on

a waning Colorado River Is turning off the water an adaptation?

A hotter atmosphere traps a lot of moisture, so that when rain does arrive, it sometimes comes down with biblical ferocity In recent weeks, a spate of “1,000-year floods” have submerged Kentucky, Dallas, and other parts of the U.S., destroying thousands of homes In Pakistan, “a monsoon on steroids” has flooded close to a third of the country, killing more than 1,100 people and inflicting misery on 33 million All this comes after just 2 degrees Fahrenheit of warming so far Without a dramatic reduction in greenhouse gases, we may be heading for a rise of

3 degrees F in two decades, with more to come As the pandemic has shown, our species is prone to kicking the can down the road, to selfishly putting off the change and sacrifice needed to avoid collective future catastrophe But what if

the future shows up early?

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What happened

Donald Trump’s legal jeopardy deepened this

week when the Department of Justice said

in a court filing that he and his team “likely

concealed” top-secret government records

stored at Mar-a-Lago from federal

investiga-tors “Efforts were likely taken to obstruct

the government’s investigation” into Trump’s

possible mishandling of classified documents,

the filing said Federal agents removed more

than 100 such documents from Mar-a-Lago

after a Trump lawyer signed a document

in June asserting that a “diligent” internal

search had been conducted and all

sensi-tive materials had been handed over, the DOJ said Several secret

documents were hidden in his office at Mar-a-Lago That called into

“serious question” whether Trump’s team was acting in good faith,

said the 36-page filing—a response to Trump’s request to have an

independent “special master” appointed to review the seized

docu-ments The DOJ said Trump and his lawyers made no claim the

documents had been declassified during a year of efforts to reclaim

them, and included a photo of seized folders whose markings

indicated they contained intelligence from spy satellites and covert

human sources—putting them at the highest level of classification

With evidence mounting that the Justice Department may be

pursuing criminal obstruction charges against Trump, Sen Lindsey

Graham (R-S.C.) warned on Fox News “there literally will be riots

in the street” if Trump is prosecuted Trump, who has warned that

“terrible things are going to happen” if federal officials continue to

investigate him, reposted Graham’s comments on his social network

Truth Social along with QAnon mottoes and photos of Democrats

labeled “the enemy.” The nation, he wrote, is “going to places, in a

very bad way, it has never seen before!”

What the editorials said

“The spectacle of a former president facing criminal investigation”

is an alarming one, said The New York Times But if Attorney

General Merrick Garland believes he has enough evidence to prove

Trump guilty of serious wrongdoing, he must seek an indictment

Putting Trump on trial may “entrench support” for him, and lead

to “political escalation,” with Republicans seeking vengeance on

President Biden and other Democrats But ignoring the blatant

crimes of a former president who has tacked the heart of our system of govern-ment” would give “license to future presi-dents to do whatever they want.”

“at-Graham’s reckless talk of rioting sounds “like

a threat,” said The Washington Post By

rais-ing the specter of violence without ing it, he and other Trump toadies “play a game of intimidation,” putting Garland and federal investigators on notice they will “face the consequences” if they prosecute Trump Such “irresponsible rhetoric” sows the seeds for violence, just as it did before Jan 6 Fed-eral prosecutors “must not allow themselves to be bullied.”

condemn-What the columnists saidNew revelations about Trump’s secret-document theft have raised

“grave concern” among U.S intelligence agencies, said Julian

Barnes and Mark Mazzetti in The New York Times A redacted

federal affidavit released last week showed he held numerous ments marked “HCS,” which contain information obtained by human sources—CIA spies and informants It raised the possibility that such sources could be identified and their lives put at risk “if the documents got into the wrong hands.” Just last year the CIA warned every one of its stations around the world about “troubling numbers of informants being captured or killed.”

docu-The Justice Department has “serially destroyed the lies Trump has

told in his defense,” said Jonathan Chait in New York magazine He

had no right to take these “highly sensitive” government documents

to Mar-a-Lago, as he claimed, nor was he “cooperating fully.”

Instead, it’s now clear Trump and his lawyers lied repeatedly about what documents he held and where they were being kept

“No one should be intimidated” by threats of violence, said

Amanda Marcotte in Salon Trump’s ability to command loyalty

and incite his followers is built on their belief in his “apparently bottomless power” to “impose his will over reality” and escape all consequences for his actions A public court case that reveals Trump as a flailing, frightened crook will puncture that illusion and weaken the cult leader’s hold over his followers “They may even start looking for the exits.”

DOJ photo of documents in Trump’s office

The main stories

4 NEWS

DOJ bolsters its Trump obstruction case

Illustration by Fred Harper.

Note to readers

The Week will not

publish an issue for one week

Your next issue will arrive in two weeks Our next

edition will be dated Sept. 23, and should begin arriving on

Sept. 16 The Week

currently publishes

48 issues a year.

It wasn’t all bad Q A crowd cheered last week as a Belgian-British

teenager Mack Rutherford, 17, landed in Sofia, Bulgaria, becoming the youngest person to circumnavigate the globe solo Rutherford is no stranger to breaking records:

In 2020, he became the youngest licensed pilot at age 15

Traveling up to 186 mph, Rutherford battled monsoons, sandstorms, and extreme heat, passing through 52 coun-

tries on five continents

Flying a Shark Aero tralight modified to carry extra fuel, Rutherford got flying tips throughout his five-month journey from his sister, Zara, who at

ul-19 had set the previous record for the youngest pilot to circle the globe in

an ultralight craft.



Q Uber driver Fritz Sam was taking a

passen-ger to New York’s LaGuardia Airport when he

saw fire coming from a nearby brownstone

Sam asked his passenger, Jemimah James

Wei, if they could stop to help “Obviously!”

Wei said As residents streamed out, Sam

rushed inside, searching for anyone who

might be trapped He cajoled and guided

two petrified residents out to safety as

smoke billowed behind them Minutes later,

firefighters arrived and determined that

everyone was safe, so Sam and Wei headed

off again to the airport On the way, Sam

apologized for smelling like smoke “Firstly,

you smell fine,” Wei said “And secondly, you

just saved a life Maybe multiple.” Round-the-world mission

THE WEEK September 9/September 16, 2022

What happened

Ukrainian forces launched a high-stakes

counteroffensive to take back southern

terri-tory occupied by Russia this week and quickly

reclaimed four villages in the Kherson region

“The occupiers should know: We will oust

them to the border,” said Ukrainian President

Volodymyr Zelensky His administration

said Ukrainian forces had punctured Russia’s

front lines and almost completely severed its

supply lines across the Dnipro River, using

HIMARS launchers to disable most of the

bridges Those launchers were part of a large

package of weaponry the U.S sent to help Ukraine prepare for the

southern counteroffensive, including ammunition, drones,

howit-zers, and Javelin missile systems The Biden administration pledged

another $3 billion in military aid last week

Russia said the counteroffensive had already “failed miserably.”

But the deputy head of Kherson’s Russian occupation government

apparently fled—he filmed his victory message from a Russian city

more than 500 miles away Another Russian- appointed official in

Kherson was found dead in his home With some 80,000 Russian

soldiers killed or wounded, President Vladimir Putin ordered the

recruitment of 137,000 more soldiers, although he stopped short

of calling up a draft Russia now controls about a fifth of Ukraine,

including the nuclear power plant at Zaporizhzhia, which has seen

sporadic shelling Fearing that a direct hit could cause a nuclear

di-saster, Ukrainian officials gave residents of nearby towns potassium

iodide tablets to treat potential radiation sickness U.N nuclear

inspectors headed to Zaporizhzhia this week to assess the risks

What the columnists said

A great deal depends on this counter

offen-sive, said Julia Ioffe in Puck A victory

would be a “vital psychological salve for

a country shattered by war.” Kherson’s capital was the first major city to fall into Russian hands, and it now serves as Russia’s foothold on the Dnipro River, which bisects Ukraine Liberating that city is the goal But success is far from guaranteed, and failure would “help Putin to solidify control over Kherson” before officially annexing the region through a sham referendum Unlike Russia, Ukraine can’t “afford to lose.”

Ukrainians have a decent chance of retaking Kherson, said

Sébas-tien Roblin in NBCNews.com They’ve been preparing for months

Russia has heavily fortified the city, though, and breaking through will require large-scale coordination of infantry, tanks, artillery, and airpower That’s a combination Ukraine’s army has little experi-ence with, so it may take them “several short hops rather than a sustained drive.” They’ll need continued military aid

For now, “the moment of peril has shifted from Ukraine to Russia,”

said David French in The Dispatch Ukraine has retaken “territory

the size of Denmark” and has a clear opportunity to notch its most important battlefield victory in months Yet even if this offensive succeeds, don’t expect “a true Ukrainian breakthrough.” The war

of attrition is likely to slog on Just as there is “no clear path to Russian domination,” there is also “no clear path for a complete Ukrainian victory.”

Battering away at Russia’s front line

Ukraine begins southern counteroffensive

What happened

Americans who have received two primary vaccine doses could

begin getting new booster shots soon past Labor Day, after the

Food and Drug Administration this week authorized the first

Covid vaccines reformulated for Omicron Pfizer and Moderna

have both created versions of a bivalent vaccine containing

genetic material from the original Covid strain and two Omicron

subvariants, BA.4 and the dominant BA.5 Pfizer’s booster has

been approved for everyone over 12, while Moderna’s is cleared

for adults The federal government has already ordered 171

mil-lion doses of what is expected to be the last free Covid booster

Last month, the government ceased sending free Covid tests to

households, due to lack of funding

While the Omicron boosters have only been tested on mice, fears

that the virus could mutate again before human trials are

com-plete have prompted the pharmaceutical companies to pursue

authorization now Dr Ashish Jha, the White House’s Covid

response coordinator, expressed confidence that the new boosters

would improve on the original vaccines “in terms of their ability

to prevent infection, transmission, and serious illness and death.”

So far, two-thirds of the U.S population have had two vaccine

doses, but only about one-third have received a booster shot,

and just 31 percent of children ages 5 to 11 have gotten an initial

vaccination Covid stubbornly remains a factor in American life:

Every day, there are more than 90,000 reported new cases in the

U.S., and nearly 500 deaths

What the columnists saidThe boosters “promise to be a life raft in dangerous seas,” said

The Washington Post in an editorial It’s a trade-off: Use vaccines

only tested on mice but available while the dominant variant

is still BA.5, or risk ending up with a booster “well behind the curve if the virus mutates.” While scientists pursue the goal of a pan- coronavirus vaccine that will endure through future variants,

“a booster that is currently relevant, with less clinical trial data, seems reasonable.” Mice studies have worked for the flu vaccine,

so “this is a gamble that the past is prologue.”

It’s not clear the gamble promises much of a payoff, said Faye

Flam in Bloomberg “There’s almost no public data on the

effi-cacy of the boosters.” Still, it’s “unlikely to pose any new health threats,” and if it reminds vaccinated people to get boosted,

“maybe that’s an upside.” But most of the people hospitalized and dying are unvaccinated, and this booster does nothing for Americans who never got the original shots “They are, inexplica-bly, not eligible for it.”

Unfortunately, none of this matters if Americans keep “greeting

the coronavirus with little more than a shrug,” said Katherine

Wu in The Atlantic Boosters only work if people get them Mask

mandates are gone, as is emergency funding As fall approaches,

“calls for staying up-to-date on vaccines are one of the last

nationwide measures left—which puts a lot of pressure on shot-

induced immunity to combat the virus, all on its own.”

FDA approves first Omicron boosters

Controversy of the week

6 NEWS

Three months after the Republican Party’s

Supreme Court appointees overturned Roe

v Wade, there is some serious “buyer’s

remorse creeping in,” said Aaron Blake in The

Washington Post The most direct expression

of regret came last week from Republican

South Carolina state Rep Neal Collins in

remarks that went viral A 19-year-old

con-stituent, he said, was told by doctors she has a

nonviable fetus that will die in the womb, but

they sent her home because South Carolina’s

new “heartbeat” abortion ban would make

standard medical care illegal A prolonged miscarriage without

medical assistance, the woman’s doctor told Collins, creates “a

greater than 50 percent chance that she’s going to lose her uterus”

to infection and a 10 percent chance she will die “That weighs

on me,” said Collins, choking up “I voted for that bill.” The

political implications of such horror stories are weighing on other

Republicans in battleground states, so they are discreetly scrubbing

references to abortion from their campaign websites Going into

the midterms, Republicans clearly have an “abortion problem,”

said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial “The long-predicted

GOP ‘wave’ election” appears to be “crashing on an offshore reef.”

In fact, a Democratic wave is building that could keep the House in

the party’s hands, said Ed Kilgore in New York magazine Liberal

and independent voters have been enraged and energized by the

sudden demise of Roe and the ensuing stampede of red-state

legis-lators to pass “draconian” abortion bans from conception onward,

with no or very limited exceptions for rape and incest and the life

of the mother An abortion referendum in conservative Kansas led

to a 2-to-1 pro-choice landslide, and last week Democrat Pat Ryan

pulled off a surprising victory in a special House election in upstate

New York by making abortion a central issue Throughout the country, women and young people are registering to vote in a mid-term election “they might otherwise skip.” Voters usually use the midterms to punish partisan overreach by the party that holds

the White House But the Dobbs decision

has changed the usual dynamics and matized the conservative Republican hold on the Supreme Court,” so it’s the GOP’s power that many voters want to rein in

“dra-Republicans need to dust themselves off and “adapt to the

post-Roe political world,” said Rich Lowry in the New York Post They

no longer have the luxury of staking out “maximalist” pro-life positions that fire up the conservative base Rather than “run and hide from the issue,” the GOP should unify around an abortion ban after 15 weeks—the point at which most Americans sup-port restrictions Some pro-lifers may recoil at that suggestion of

compromise, said Ramesh Ponnuru in National Review But if

Republicans shift the debate to banning the later abortions that Democrats insist should be legal, they can get “the median voter” back on their side

Good luck with that, said Heather Digby Parton in Salon For

50 years the GOP galvanized its “fanatical anti-choice base”

by promising to use the power of the state to force all pregnant women to give birth Now that many red states are doing just that, Republicans have discovered that “their medieval approach to reproductive rights” is an electoral “kiss of death” in swing states Abortion bans will hurt Republicans not only in November but

“over and over again as one state after another grapples with the mess they made for themselves.”

Only in America



Q A Nebraska man was

arrested for staging an

active-shooter drill at an

Omaha charity office without

informing terrified employees

that it wasn’t real John

Chan-nels, 27, was paid by Catholic

Charities to barge into their

offices firing an assault rifle

loaded with blanks, as fake

blood–spattered actors fell

“dead.” Catholic Charities

said Channels “mishandled”

the drill’s “implementation.”



Q Lakewood, N.J., has cut

down all the shade trees in its

town square to make it less

attractive to the homeless

Mayor Ray Coles says the

tree removal was a response

to complaints of homeless

people harassing passersby

and defecating in the street

Homeless advocate Steven

Brigham says the real issue is

Lakewood’s lack of shelters,

and called it “extremely

ex-treme to cut down the trees.”

Taylor Lautner, after the actor shared the happy news that he is

marrying his girlfriend, Taylor Dome, who will take his last name

Etiquette experts surveyed by Slate agreed that the couple should

be known as “the Taylors Lautner.”

Boldly going, with the news that the ashes of Nichelle Nichols,

who played Lieutenant Uhura in the original Star Trek TV series,

will be blasted into space later this year on a private spacecraft that

will also carry the ashes of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry

and James Doohan, who played chief engineer “Scotty.”

Midlife crises, after quarterback Tom Brady finally explained his

mysterious 11-day absence from the Tampa Bay Buccaneers “I’m

45 years old,” he said “There’s a lot of s - going on.”

Stable geniuses, after former President Donald Trump

responded to his growing legal danger by demanding that the country declare him the “rightful winner” of the 2020 election or

“hold a new Election, NOW!”

Roaming, after Avis slapped an $8,000 surcharge on a Canadian

woman, claiming she drove a rental car 22,369 miles in three days—nearly the circumference of Earth Avis later apologized

Britons, who in coming years may need to become “less

squea-mish” about drinking water extracted from sewage, according to Sir James Bevan, head of Britain’s Environment Agency Purified sewage water, Bevan said, is “perfectly safe and healthy,” even if it’s “not something many people fancy.”

Good week for:

Bad week for:

Will the GOP pay for near-total bans?

In other newsU.S life expectancy plunges again

The average American’s life expectancy fell from nearly

79 years in 2019 to 76.1 years

in 2021, the sharpest year decline in a century, the National Center for Health Statistics reported this week The decline was most acute among Native Americans and Alaska Natives, whose life expectancy fell 6.5 years since the start of the pandemic, to

two-65 The second-worst drop occurred among white Ameri- cans, with more than half of the increase driven by Covid Unintentional injuries, includ- ing overdoses, accounted for

12 percent of the drop among whites Although many other high-income countries saw life expectancy drop in 2020, most held steady or began

to recover last year, thanks

in large part to higher Covid vaccination rates

The U.S at a glance NEWS 7

Palm Beach, Fla

Getting close to Trump: The FBI is tigating an immigrant from Ukraine who allegedly bypassed security at former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club by pretending to be a descendant of the Rothschild banking dynasty The inves-tigation was launched this week after

inves-the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported last

week on Inna Yashchyshyn, 33, who the paper reported went by the name Anna de Rothschild during several trips last year to Trump’s club, using a fake Florida ID and claiming to own a Miami Beach mansion Yashchyshyn took part

in a May 2021 golf outing at Lago, posing for a thumbs-up photo with Trump and Sen Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) In reality an immigrant from Ukraine, Yashchyshyn was working for a Canadian charity, United Hearts

Mar-a-of Mercy, founded by Florida-based Russian businessman Valery Tarasenko

Yashchyshyn has denied posing as a Rothschild, and any other wrongdoing

Cassville, Mo

In loco parentis: A Missouri school trict serving 1,900 students drew national attention last week when it reinstated paddling The school district, which had eliminated corporal punishment in 2001, will bring back spanking in school, but only with parents’ permission “Parents have said, ‘Why can’t you paddle my student?’” said Superintendent Merlyn Johnson “We’ve had people actually thank us for it,” he said Corporal punishment remains legal in 19 states, despite objections from groups such as the American Psychological Association, which says paddling can cause trauma and does not improve behavior More than 100 Cassville students protested the reinstatement of paddling, saying it’s demeaning and painful “Corporal pun-ishment is honestly an archaic and com-pletely pointless and irresponsible way to punish children and high schoolers,” said Kalia Miller, 17

dis-Bend, Ore

Heroic sacrifice: A Safeway

supermar-ket employee was killed this week as

he confronted a heavily armed gunman

who fired more than

100 rounds

in a matter

of utes The gunman, 20-year-old Ethan Blair Miller, walked into the store

min-and killed a customer, Glenn Bennett, 84,

at the entrance Instead of fleeing, the

employee, Donald Surrett, a 66-year-old

Army veteran, hid in the produce section

and attacked the gunman with a produce

knife Miller killed Surrett, then turned

his gun on himself Miller’s AR-15–style

rifle and a sawed-off shotgun in his car

appear to have been purchased legally,

and he had no prior criminal history

Described by former classmates

as a loner prone to fighting,

Miller graduated high school

in 2020 and had worked at

the Bend Safeway Online, he

appeared to rant about

self-hatred and isolation, saying he

wanted to shoot up his alma

mater but couldn’t wait to

because “the Rage has become

uncontrollable.”

Jackson, Miss

Water crisis: The capital city’s main water treat-ment plant failed this week, leav-ing more than 150,000 residents without access

to safe drinking water After decades of water issues and calls for upgrades dating back to the 1940s, Jackson has spent the past month

on a boil-water advisory after health officials found cloudy water that could cause digestive problems, the result of broken pumps at the treatment plant After flooding further disrupted treat-ment, low water pressure left many residents unable to shower, flush toilets,

or cook The four-fifths Black city has suffered from tax revenue shortages after decades of white flight to the

suburbs, and the water crisis sparked finger-pointing between Jackson’s Democratic officials and the state’s GOP leaders

In recent years, Republicans blocked funding for Jackson’s water and sewer improvements, but the Environmental Protection Agency also recently blamed Jackson officials for not recruiting to fill the treatment plant’s acute staffing shortages

Harris County, Texas

First U.S fatality: With monkeypox

cases now reported in all 50 states, Texas

announced this week the country’s first suspected mon-keypox-related death Health officials said the adult victim was “severely immunocompro-mised” and are still determining whether

monkeypox was the direct cause of

death During this year’s global outbreak,

there have been just 15 fatalities reported

out of 47,000 documented cases outside

of West and Central Africa, where the

virus is endemic Most deaths involved

people with underlying conditions that

weakened their immunity There have

now been more than 18,000 U.S cases,

including 31 in children Monkeypox

spreads mainly through extended

skin-to-skin contact, and the vast majority of

U.S cases have spread among men who

have sex with men But the virus can also

be passed along by contaminated bedding

and towels

Atlanta

Subpoena upheld: Georgia

Republican Gov Brian Kemp must testify before

a special grand jury investigating efforts to overturn the 2020 election results by former President Trump and his allies,

a judge ruled this week, though in an apparent concession to Kemp, he won’t have to testify before the November election Kemp, who is running against Democrat Stacey Abrams in a rematch

of their 2018 contest, enraged Trump in December 2020 by refusing to convene the state legislature to appoint pro-Trump electors from Georgia, a state Joe Biden won Trump endorsed a loyalist

in a primary challenge against Kemp, former Sen David Perdue, who lost by more than 50 points Kemp, who must court Trump voters to win re-election, fought the subpoena for weeks, arguing that sitting governors are protected from lawsuits But the judge ruled that Kemp’s immunity does not extend to the grand jury investigation

THE WEEK September 9/September 16, 2022

Mass shooting averted

Seeking safe water

Monkeypox virus

Gov Kemp

Sea level rise inevitable: Massive ice losses in Greenland will cause

global sea levels to rise nearly a foot by 2100 even if humans stop emitting greenhouse gases today, a new study said this week

The study, published in Nature Climate

Change, said 3.3 percent of the Greenland

ice cap—some 110 trillion tons of ice—is certain to melt due to human-driven cli-mate change and can’t be saved “Every study has bigger numbers than the last,”

said study co-author William Colgan “It’s always faster than forecast.” The ice loss will cause dramatic increases in flooding in coastal cities

Abuja, Nigeria

No foreign models: Nigeria this

week became the first country to ban foreign models and voice-overs from its advertisements The country’s advertising regulator said the total ban on non-Nigerian models and voice-over artists was meant to provide jobs for young Nigerians It will be a huge change for local media, as to date, TV and print ads have been dominated by white, particu-larly British, faces and voices The ban is a response to a “new sense of pride” among young people eager to be represented in the media, said Steve Babaeko, president of the Association of Advertising Agencies of Nigeria “I think the law is just catching

up with national sentiment,” he told The Times (U.K.) Nigeria is

projected to be the world’s fastest-growing generator of ment and media revenue in the next five years

entertain-Tanaru Reserve, Brazil

‘Man of the Hole’ dies: An fied Indigenous man thought to be the last living member of his tribe has died, Brazil’s Indigenous agency said last week The man had resisted attempts to contact him for decades, even as the rest of his tribe was killed

unidenti-by ranchers and other tribes, and the government designated a special nature reserve just for him He was known as “Man of the Hole” because he had been seen digging

deep holes to use as traps and hiding spaces Authorities said he

likely knew he was dying, as his body was found surrounded by

carefully placed feathers in a hut he had built It’s the first recorded

disappearance of an entire uncontacted tribe in Brazil

Lima, Peru

President’s inner circle accused: The sister-in-law

of Peruvian President Pedro Castillo was sent to

jail this week in a corruption probe that’s

reach-ing ever closer to the embattled leftist leader

Yenifer Paredes, whom Castillo has referred to as

his “daughter,” received 30 months of pre-trial

detention for alleged influence peddling in the

Castillos’ home region of Cajamarca Prosecutors

have opened six criminal investigations against

Castillo and his inner circle, and have even requested that his wife

be barred from international travel for three years But they cannot

charge or detain Castillo, who has denied all wrongdoing, while

he remains president Since rising from unknown teacher to far-left

president last year, Castillo has presided over a widely unpopular

and ineffective administration He’s already survived two

impeach-ment attempts and replaced dozens of cabinet members

Paris

Cockpit fight: Two Air France pilots brawled in the

cock-pit during a Geneva-Paris flight in June, French media

reported this week The pilot and co-pilot began arguing shortly

after takeoff, and one of them hit the other By the time cabin

crew separated them, they had grabbed each other by the collar

The flight landed safely, though, with one crew member

remain-ing in the cockpit to monitor the pilots France’s air investigation

agency recently issued a report on safety violations in the airline,

including an incident in December 2020, during a flight from

Brazzaville, Republic of Congo, to Paris, in which pilots failed

to land even though an engine was leaking fuel and could have

caught fire Air France said it will conduct a safety review

Riga, Latvia

Soviet obelisk removed: In the latest manifestation of growing anti-Russian sentiment in the Baltics, Latvia has torn down a 260-foot Soviet monu-ment The concrete obelisk was origi-nally erected in 1985 as a memorial

to Soviet soldiers who died fighting Nazi Germany As two diggers toppled

it last week, a large crowd applauded “This monument was a

steady reminder of our occupation and the associated fate of many

people: deportation, repression, and so on,” said Latvian President

Egils Levits, referring to Latvia’s five decades as a Soviet Socialist

Republic A quarter of Latvian citizens are ethnic Russians, and

many had gathered at the obelisk every year on May 9 to celebrate

the Soviet victory in World War II

Sydney

True-crime case solved: Former Australian rugby player Chris Dawson was found guilty this week of having killed his wife, Lynette, in 1982, ending a 40-year cold case that was the subject

of a popular true-crime podcast Dawson was convicted after

a three-month trial, which heard new evidence, including some

from the 2018 podcast The Teacher’s Pet Dawson was

work-ing as a gym teacher at a Sydney high school when he began a sexual rela-tionship with the family’s 16-year-old babysitter, JC Shortly after Lynette went missing, JC moved into the fam-ily home Dawson, now 74, denied killing his wife and maintained that she had walked out on him and their two young children

THE WEEK September 9/September 16, 2022

Moscow

Gorbachev dies: Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet

leader whose reforms led to the dissolution of the

USSR, died in Moscow this week at age 91 Soon

after becoming Soviet leader in 1985, Gorbachev

began espousing glasnost, or openness, and

per-estroika, or restructuring of the economy and

political system He struck a major nuclear arms

reduction deal with the U.S., lifted the repressive

restrictions on Soviet media, and allowed his country’s first

multi-party elections While Gorbachev never intended to bring about

the Soviet Union’s collapse, his reforms shook the foundations of

an already faltering state, leading to its disintegration—and the

birth of many newly independent countries—in 1991 Most world

leaders eulogized Gorbachev as a visionary, but Russian President

Vladimir Putin, who has called the Soviet Union’s demise a

catas-trophe, said only that he sent condolences to the family

Mekelle, Ethiopia

War restarts: Ethiopian ment forces and Tigray rebels broke their cease-fire in the nearly two-year Tigray war last week

govern-Airstrikes around the Tigrayan capital, Mekelle, hit numerous

targets, and the rebels said a kindergarten was damaged, killing

at least four people “This vicious regime has outdone itself with

today’s deliberate targeting of a children’s building,” Tigrayan

authorities said The Ethiopian government said only military

targets were hit and accused the rebels of staging civilian deaths

War first broke out in November 2020, when Prime Minister

Abiy Ahmed sent troops to oust the Tigray People’s Liberation

Front from the northern Tigray region, and the conflict has

caused a hunger crisis there The two sides agreed to the cease-fire

in March, allowing aid to finally reach millions

Peshawar, Pakistan

Country underwater: Massive flooding inundated fully a third

of Pakistan this week, affecting

33 million people in a natural disaster of stupefying scale The rushing waters have flattened entire villages, and city streets have become roaring rivers that crash into multistory buildings and crumble them to rubble At least 1 million homes have been destroyed The flooding is a result of the unprecedented and unrelenting monsoon rains that have been pounding the country since mid-June, forcing millions of people to evacu-ate and killing more than 1,100 Near Peshawar in the north,

a partially built hydroelectric dam was washed away, while satellite images showed that part of southern Sindh province was turned into a 62-mile-wide lake after the Indus River overflowed Nearly half of Sindh’s cotton crop has been lost, and more flooding is expected because the rivers to the north continue to swell

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif pleaded for help from the inter na tional community, saying the floods had caused some

$10 billion in damage and that Pakistan was bearing the brunt

of global climate change that it did not cause “This flood situation is probably the worst in the history of Pakistan,” he said “We are suffering from it, but it is not our fault at all.” Pakistan, home to 220 million people, produces less than 1 per-cent of the world’s carbon emissions

Baghdad

Al-Sadr quits: At least 24 people were killed in Baghdad during ferocious street battles this week after Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr abruptly quit poli-tics Al-Sadr’s nationalist bloc won last October’s elections but could not muster a governing coalition, and his bloc has been feuding with Iran-backed Shiite factions

Earlier this month, he had his followers occupy parliament to protest one faction’s attempt to form a government Once al-Sadr tweeted his decision, fierce fighting broke out, and his supporters stormed the Green Zone, occupying the presidential palace and swimming in its pool, until al-Sadr begged them to stand down

“I apologize to the Iraqi people,” he said “I was hoping for a peaceful demonstration, not with mortars and weapons.”

One of al-Sadr’s militants

Injured in an airstrike

Displaced from Sohbatpur

Dawson: Jailed after 40 years Gorbachev

10 NEWS

Gauff’s debt to the Williams sisters

Coco Gauff erupted onto the tennis scene in story book fashion, said Alyssa Roenigk in

ESPN.com Three years ago, the teenage prodigy

from outside Atlanta faced one of her idols, Venus Williams, at Wimbledon—and won After her surprise defeat of Venus, Gauff shook hands with her idol and said, “I wouldn’t be playing tennis without your influence.” Gauff, now

18, has never been shy about giving credit to her inspirations If

she hadn’t seen two fellow Black women torching the pro tennis

circuit, she might never have asked for a racquet But once she did,

her parents devised a 10-year plan to make her a pro, modeled

explicitly after the extremely regimented training approach made

famous by the Williams sisters’ father, Richard “Serena, Venus,

Serena, Venus,” Gauff says “That’s all I watched growing up.”

She hung their posters in her room, modeled her swing after theirs,

and at age 9, Gauff even portrayed a young Serena in a Delta Air

Lines commercial Now, with Serena about to retire from

competi-tive tennis, Gauff is coming into her own “For a long time, I was

stepping onto the court trying to be the next Serena,” she says

“But that’s not why I play tennis That’s what people wanted to

hear.” These days, Gauff says, she plays “for myself.”

Kidron takes on Silicon Valley

Beeban Kidron remembers the moment she decided to leave

her 30-year career as a filmmaker, said Charles Hymas in The

Telegraph (U.K.) In 2012, the British director had begun to

observe a profound change in children’s behavior “I’d walk into a

room full of kids and they were silently tapping on their phones,”

she says “I was fascinated.” She began shooting a documentary,

spending hundreds of hours shadowing teenagers as they engaged

with the online world, whether that meant chatting on social

media or looking at porn The kids, says Kidron, 61, didn’t

real-ize companies were trying to addict them “What cuts a hole in

my heart is the number of kids stuck in ‘the loop’ who say they

tried to get off,” she says “I spent time with one child who put

her phone in the bin and then found herself in the rain scraping

through the bin to get it in the middle of the night.” The

experi-ence led Kidron, a member of the British House of Lords, to push

for online protections for minors Her reforms are being

imple-mented globally, and California just passed a law requiring social

media companies to protect child users from addictive features

“If we’d just stop talking about content and start talking about

product safety,” Kidron says, “we’d be in a much better place.”

Harry Styles has learned how to handle the intrusive attention that

comes with pop stardom, said Brittany Spanos in Rolling Stone

He’s dealt with obsessive fans for 12 years, first as a member of the boy band One Direction, and then in a solo career that has really taken off Immediately after performing in front of stadiums full of hysterical fans—still mostly girls—Styles, 28, always insists

on taking a shower “It’s really unnatural to stand in front of that many people and have that experience,” he says “Washing it off, you’re just a naked person, in your most vulnerable, human form Just like a naked baby.” The singer is also a movie star and fashion icon, though his gender-bending clothing choices have drawn accusations of “queerbaiting”—using queer aesthetics to seem edgy without actually coming out “Sometimes people say,

‘You’ve only publicly been with women.’ I don’t think I’ve publicly been with anyone,” Styles says “If someone takes a picture of you with someone, it doesn’t mean you’re choosing to have a public relationship.” He is troubled that some of his female fans have been brutal online toward his girlfriend, actress and director Olivia Wilde, 38, and he’s responded by closing off his private life even more “I’ve never talked about my life away from work publicly and found that it’s benefited me positively,” he says

Q A federal jury last week awarded

$15 mil-lion to Vanessa Bryant after finding that

Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies and

firefighters violated her family’s civil

rights by taking and sharing photos

of mangled bodies at the site of the

2020 helicopter crash that killed her

husband, NBA legend Kobe Bryant;

their 13-year-old daughter, Gianna;

and seven others The jury also

awarded $15 million to Chris Chester,

whose wife, Sarah, and daughter,

Payton, were among the deceased

In testimony, deputies and firefighters

admitted to showing photos of body

parts at a bar, a cocktail party, and an

awards gala The plaintiffs had sought

an additional $75 million for emotional tress, but the jury did not award that Bryant said she would donate the money to her family’s nonprofit sports foundation

dis-

QShivon Zilis, an executive at Elon Musk’s

brain-chip company Neuralink, claims that the twins she had with Musk last fall were conceived through in vitro fertilization, not through an affair Zilis has told fellow employees at Neuralink that she was never sexually or romantically involved with Musk, Reuters reported last week That claim has allowed Musk, 51, and Zilis, 36,

to continue working together, despite pany policy prohibiting personal relation- ships between a boss and underling Musk, who speaks frequently about the dangers

com-of declining birth rates, is father to nine children with three women



Q Two Floridians pleaded guilty last week to

stealing and selling the diary of President Biden’s daughter Ashley shortly before

the 2020 election Aimee Harris, 40, and Robert Kurlander, 58, admitted they took the diary and other personal items from a home where Ashley Biden, 41, had lived for months They then sold the diary to the right-wing activist group Project Veritas for $20,000 each The contents of the diary, which include Ashley Biden’s intimate thoughts about family and recovering from addiction, were eventually published by

a different website Harris and Kurlander are now cooperating with authorities in an ongoing investigation of Project Veritas, which said in a statement that its purchase

of the stolen diary was “news gathering” protected by the First Amendment

Is there a nuclear energy revival?

In most of the world, not quite yet—but

there is certainly renewed interest The

combination of climate change and a

global energy crunch caused by Russia’s

invasion of Ukraine is making nuclear

power look much more attractive Once

hailed as a cleaner, more bountiful

alternative to fossil fuels, nuclear power

saw its prospects dim after the accident

at Three Mile Island in the U.S., the

Chernobyl catastrophe in Ukraine, and

the meltdowns at Japan’s Fukushima

plant in 2011 Now governments are

giving it a new look, hoping to ease

a transition away from fossil fuels

California Gov Gavin Newsom wants

to spend $1.4 billion to keep the state’s

Diablo Canyon nuclear plant running

Meanwhile, the Ukraine war has

high-lighted how much the world relies on

fossil fuels from repressive states Germany had planned to shut

down its last three nuclear reactors at the end of this year; it’s now

considering putting that off Even Japan, which vowed to banish

nuclear energy forever after the Fukushima meltdown, is mulling

new reactors “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has vastly transformed

the world’s energy landscape,” said Prime Minister Fumio Kishida

Is nuclear power truly clean?

It’s complicated Nuclear reactors produce no direct carbon

dioxide emissions, making them appealing as a potential bridge

between fossil fuels and renewable energy But manufacturing

the concrete and metal used to build nuclear plants is

energy-intensive Environmentalists worry that the potential benefits are

too small to invest heavily in nuclear energy instead of jumping

straight to safer, cleaner renewables Large nuclear power plants

can use up to 1 billion gallons of water per day, slightly more

than fossil fuel–fired plants There’s also the persistent issue of

waste storage: Most experts prefer disposing of radioactive waste

deep within the earth, and Finland has

even built about 100 disposal tunnels

to create a giant tomb where nuclear

waste will be laid to rest some 1,400 feet

below the surface “Any energy policy

has pros and cons,” said Eric Dawson,

a grassroots campaigner at Nuclear

New York “The pros outweigh the cons

on nuclear energy.”

Are nuclear plants cost-effective?

If cost-effective means cheaper than

alternatives, the answer has generally

been no In the U.S., nuclear costs

ballooned in the 1970s after courts

mandated additional safety and

envi-ronmental measures Cost is one of the

reasons that nuclear plant construction

in the U.S came to a virtual standstill

The last plant to start up in the U.S

was Tennessee’s Watts Barr; its second

reactor was finished in 2016, and its

first way back in 1996 The price of two new reactors at Georgia’s Plant Vogtle—set to start operation in 2023—climbed to more than $30 billion, double their original price tag France has remained committed to nuclear power, which generates some 70 per-cent of French electricity But there, too, costs have spiraled; the cost of the Flamanville 3 reactor, supposed to start

up next year, has risen to more than

$14 billion However, some companies have started building small modular reactors (see box) that are cheaper and eliminate moving parts like pumps and valves that cause meltdowns

Aren’t wind and solar enough?

Solar costs have decreased by a tling 90 percent over the past 10 years, while the lifetime costs of new wind farms have dropped by 71 percent in that time frame Stanford engineering professor Mark Jacobson believes the U.S can power itself using only wind, solar, and hydropower by 2050 In April, wind and solar power combined to produce more electricity than nuclear power for the first time ever, according to the U.S Energy Information Administration But building the vast solar arrays needed to power the grid requires an expansive amount of land-mass that, in many areas, is simply not available President Biden has set a lofty goal of a zero-carbon electricity grid by 2035, and the newly passed Inflation Reduction Act is stuffed with incentives for renewables—but also significant tax credits for new and exist-ing nuclear plants that allow them to “compete on a more even basis,” said nuclear expert Brett Rampal “This is definitely a win for nuclear energy.”

star-Do people trust nuclear power?

About one third of U.S adults favor the production of more nuclear power, while around 26 percent are against it, according

to a Pew Research Survey conducted

in January Since then, Russia’s sion of Ukraine has sent global energy prices skyrocketing and made coun-tries around the world—including nuclear-averse Germany, which relies heavily on Russian gas—reconsider their stances on nuclear power People looking for a firm picture of nuclear power’s safety may not get one: A new book by U.S Nuclear Regulatory Commission historian Thomas

inva-Wellock argues that it’s never been possible to reliably estimate the safety

of nuclear power plants, and ties have instead relied on “expert guesswork or calculations that often produced absurd results.” And just one accident—conceivably even a catas-trophe at Ukraine’s currently besieged Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant—could change everything

Germany could postpone closing its last nuclear plants.

A comeback for nuclear power

THE WEEK September 9/September 16, 2022

Are small modular reactors viable?

Last month, regulators quietly gave final certification to Oregon-based NuScale Power

to begin constructing small modular reactors,

or SMRs Unlike traditional reactors, they can be built in factories and shipped away for deployment, where they are stacked with other reactors like beer cans NuScale is licensing its reactor design to Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems, which plans to build

a 12- reactor plant that could spur an “advanced nuclear” revolution SMRs are also a big part

of the nuclear plans of Russia and China, which plans to build at least 150 modular plants in the next 15 years “SMRs as a class have a potential to change the economics,” said Robert Rosner, a physicist at the University of Chicago

But critics argue SMRs don’t produce enough electricity to justify the cost per unit—and the Utah project has already been forced to down- size because of cost overruns.

Long shunned, nuclear plants are getting a second look Are they safe, clean, and efficient enough to start building again?

Best columns: The U.S

a chip in his left hand that opens his house doors “I thought, how cool would it

be if I could leave my house with no car key and no house key?” he said.



Q Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan made a splash in

2019 when he duct-taped a banana to a wall as part of a Miami gallery exhibit—and sold three versions of the work for $390,000 Now he’s being sued by a California artist, Joe Morford, who says Cattelan stole his idea “I did this in 2000,” he wrote

“Plagiarism much?” He included a photo of his own work, which used a plastic banana instead of Cattelan’s real one A federal judge ruled that Morford’s suit may proceed, even if duct- taping

a banana to a wall “may not espouse the highest degree

“I wanted to make poop something funny, not dirty,” said Akihiko Nobata, who sold poop-themed T-shirts online before opening the Unco Shop, named after the Japanese word for poop

His store has a guest book

in which visitors draw poops and giggle “It transcends language and culture,”

Nobata says, “and creates universal laughter.”

It must be true

I read it in the tabloids

Anthony Fauci may be America’s last “trusted doctor,” said Tim Requarth After four decades of “spearheading America’s responses to infectious-disease threats from AIDS to monkeypox,” Fauci, 81, an-nounced last week he was stepping down at the end of the year—to a sharply polarized reaction When the Covid pandemic began in March

2020, Fauci tried and failed to stay above the fray as the U.S response became a political lightning rod Fauci became such a hated figure on the right that he needs a full-time security detail Most of the right-wing attacks on him are based on “unhinged” conspiracy theories, such as that he sponsored and then covered up the creation of SARS-CoV-2

in a Wuhan lab Still, it’s undeniable that at times in this fast- moving pandemic, “Fauci has been wrong.” Initially, he told people not to wear masks because he wanted scarce N-95s to be saved for health-care workers; later, he was too optimistic that vaccines would provide last-ing immunity from infection His biggest mistake, perhaps, was project-ing too much certainty If there’s one lesson public health officials can take from Fauci’s “diminished standing,” it’s that they should not be afraid to say, “We really aren’t sure.”

A conservative activist who crusaded “with startling success” to

overturn Roe was just rewarded with a $1.6 billion political bution, said The Wash ing ton Post Thanks to a tip, we learned that

contri-electronics mogul Barre Seid last year made a massive “dark money”

contribution—100 percent of the shares in his company, Tripp Lite—to

a group called Marble Freedom Trust That group is headed by Leonard Leo, a longtime leader of the Federalist Society and primary architect of the movement to reshape the judiciary with conservative judges who’d

overturn Roe Seid’s advocacy donation—the largest in history—was made possible by the 2010 Supreme Court decision Citizens United,

which allowed for unlimited political spending by outside groups Under campaign laws, nonprofit groups such as Leo’s—which are as political

as they come—can register as “social welfare organizations” and not disclose their donors Leo defended the donation by saying it is “high time for the conservative movement to be among the ranks of George Soros” and other liberal donors But when a handful of billionaires can

so heavily shape our politics, “neither side should be proud.”

Our criminal justice system is set up to guarantee that innocent people will be shot in their own homes, said David French Last week, for-mer police detective Kelly Goodlett pleaded guilty in federal court to conspiracy, confessing that she falsified the no-knock search warrant application that led to 26-year-old Breonna Taylor’s killing by police in March 2020 Two other officers face federal charges over the falsified warrant, while a third faces charges of violating Taylor’s civil rights by firing wildly into her Louisville apartment In situations like these, “we ask ourselves: How much blame should we allocate to ‘the system,’ and how much to individuals?” Taylor’s case illustrates why the system is largely at fault No-knock warrants are far too easy to get, thanks to

a 1995 Supreme Court ruling that said police can barge into private homes whenever they fear violence or the destruction of evidence

“Qualified immunity,” meanwhile, makes it nearly impossible for zens to hold officers accountable for their actions through civil lawsuits

citi-Cops sometimes lie, and when panicked, they sometimes start shooting

“Until we further reform the systems that helped set events in motion that dreadful night, more innocent people will die Systems can kill.”

messier story More Californians than Texans voted for Donald Trump And even Richmond isn’t

Richmond anymore—now that the city removed all the Confederate monuments from Monument

Avenue, it’s just a bunch of Joe Biden voters driving past a statue of the tennis star Arthur Ashe We

are stuck with each other We are stuck With each other Perpetually.”

Sarah Vowell in The New York Times

Viewpoint

Best columns: Europe

14 NEWS

ITALY A Russian spy who posed as a socialite for years in Naples wormed her way into the NATO officers’

social scene, said Floriana Bulfon “Maria Adela Kuhfeldt Rivera” spoke six languages and claimed

to be a German-Peruvian jewelry designer From

2013 to 2018, she threw glittering parties and gave freely to a Lions Club chapter frequented by NATO officers, eventually becoming the club sec-retary One American officer, Col Sheila Bryant, said the woman’s bizarre story of having been raised in the USSR because her German mother abandoned her there didn’t ring true—and it wasn’t An investigation by this newspaper, with

Bellingcat and others, reveals that Rivera was actually Olga Kolobova, the daughter of a retired Russian military intelligence officer We’re not sure what information the spy gleaned, “or whether she was able to plant spyware” on NATO friends’ phones What’s clear is that “no other Russian agent ever managed to penetrate so deeply” into NATO and U.S Navy circles Might she have had something to do with the French colonel serving in the Naples headquarters who is now suspected of having sold top-secret files to Russian intelligence?

He was arrested in 2020 By then, “Maria Adela had already disappeared.”

Germans are fighting a new battle in the culture war over a children’s movie, said Claudius Seidl

The Young Chief Winnetou tells the backstory of

the Apache chief Winnetou, a character created in the 1870s by German author Karl May Genera-tions of Germans grew up reading the books and watching the 1960s movies about the friendship between Winnetou and Old Shatterhand, his Ger-man companion, as the two forged peace between Native Americans and settlers in the Wild West

Those movies, with their clumsy stereotypes, are German classics, but they are also racist You’d think that after they were so deliciously lampooned

in the 2001 parody The Shoe of Manitou, nobody

would make another Yet this new film is a back “Stupid, provincial, ignorant, and arrogant,”

throw-it shows Native characters in redface, speaking in pidgin German Those from Winnetou’s tribe are dressed in ahistorical, stereotypical buck fringe, “as Germans used to dress up as Indians for Carnival.” The backlash was swift, and when a publishing company came out with new Winnetou books to coincide with the film’s release, it was forced to quickly retract them That’s as it should be Karl May’s Winnetou “was a story of the time when it was created,” and nobody can erase May’s contri-butions to German culture But there’s simply no excuse for racist depictions today

The scale of Britain’s energy crisis just

became “suddenly and shockingly real,”

said The Guardian in an editorial

Fami-lies were already struggling to pay their

bills, thanks to high prices resulting from

Russia’s war in Ukraine Now energy

regulator Ofgem has announced an

80 percent rise in the annual energy price

cap for suppliers—a cap that is pegged to

market rates and must go up when global

gas prices do—on top of its earlier huge

rise in April That means British energy

bills could nearly triple over last year’s

as the country enters the winter months,

forcing families to make hard choices

between buying food or keeping the heat on The rates could rise

further in January and April, perhaps by the same amount once

again Hundreds of thousands of citizens face having their

elec-tricity and gas turned off, while millions “will be plunged into

intolerable debt” to prevent that horror “No decent society can

allow it to happen.” Yet the ruling Conservative Party, distracted

by its leadership election to replace lame-duck Prime Minister

Boris Johnson, has responded with indifference

The new cap hikes will leave the lowest-paid workers saddled

with energy bills “higher than their monthly pay,” said Jacob

Jaffa in The Sun, which could “force thousands of Brits into

debt.” Average energy bills are set to increase from $2,293

to $4,128 per year When the cost of food and rent is taken

into account, even middle-income Brits with salaries around

$26,300 will be hard-pressed to meet their bills Families and

businesses will be crushed without “further state support,” said

the Financial Times in an editorial

The small and medium-sized nesses responsible for 60 percent of U.K jobs cannot simply “absorb soar-ing bills and pass on price increases to consumers.” In the short term, there’s

busi-no other solution but direct payments

to the poorest and those on fixed incomes, and direct support to busi-nesses through grants and rebates

Yet our likely next prime minister says she doesn’t believe in giving people di-

rect aid, said Donnachadh McCarthy

in The Independent Foreign Secretary

Liz Truss, who is leading former chancellor Rishi Sunak by

22 percentage points in polls in the race to succeed Johnson, said she would solve the energy price crisis in the “Conservative way” by “lowering the tax burden, not giving out handouts.”

Truss, who used to be commercial manager for the oil giant Shell, has proposed “a massive ramping up” of North Sea oil projects, a resumption of fracking on the British mainland, and

“a frenzied building of eye-wateringly expensive new nuclear power plants.” Yet “if Britain’s economy is not to sink like the

Titanic,” she will have to help consumers now, not just provide

energy later It’s unfortunate that Truss will “almost certainly” have to implement “an enormous bailout for the public and for

industry,” said The Daily Telegraph in an editorial But at least

she will return the country to a culture of personal responsibility after that—indeed, that’s why Conservatives prefer her “The age

in which large parts of the population looked to the government

to fix all of their problems has to come to an end.”

Best columns: International NEWS 15

KENYA

SINGAPORE

Kenya’s President-elect William Ruto likes to cast himself as a “hustler,” said Eromo Egbejule and Immaculate Akello That populist flair helped him beat Kenya’s political dynasties and its tribalism

in the recent vote Ruto, the vice president, bested rival Raila Odinga, who was backed by Presi-dent Uhuru Kenyatta, by framing the election as

“a class war between the haves and have-nots.”

While Odinga and Kenyatta are the sons of yan independence heroes, the triumphant Ruto presents himself as a rags-to-riches figure who

Ken-“hawked chicken and peanuts on the streets” fore becoming one of Kenya’s wealthiest business-

be-men Of course, that’s not the whole story: Ruto got his start in politics in 1992, as a protégé of dictator Daniel Arap Moi, a fellow ethnic Kalen-jin, and the International Criminal Court charged him and Kenyatta with war crimes after the vio-lent 2007 election (The charges were dropped after Kenya refused to cooperate.) Yet because

of his poor roots, Ruto still connected with the working class That helped him transcend ethnicity and win the support of the Kikuyus, the country’s largest voting bloc, who did not have one of their own in the race For the first time, Kenyans voted

“with their bellies, not with their blood ties.”

“Should men cry in public?” asked Nicholas Fang

Singaporeans have been asking that question ever since a man was caught on camera “with tears streaming down his face” as he sang the national anthem at this year’s National Day Parade The viral image brought the man, high school teacher Azuan Tan, instant fame It’s no surprise the video caused a stir: Under Singapore’s conserva-tive norms, the sight of a man shedding tears runs counter to traditional stereotypes of “men being strong and silent.” Yet when I saw Tan’s face, “I knew exactly how he was feeling.” Because of the pandemic, Singapore had pared back its previous

two National Day celebrations, and we all had

“pent-up patriotism seeking an outlet.” And then this long- delayed parade took as its theme the hardships we had been through as a nation, in particular the sacrifices of “our front-line workers and medical professionals!” By the time the strains

of “Majulah Singapura” (“Onward Singapore”) broke out, “I know for a fact that Mr Tan was not the only one in the audience who cried.” While he says he’s embarrassed by the attention—he’s been interviewed for countless news sites—he can be proud A man who shows his genuine love

of country “should be a role model.”

How a

self-made ‘hustler’

got to the top

Eromo Egbejule and

China is currently suffering “the most

extreme heat event ever recorded in world

history,” said Jamie Seidel in News.com

.au (Australia) Pitiless heat and endless

drought have “blasted China’s

popula-tion, factories, and fields” for more than

70 days, killing crops and drying up

lakes and rivers In the parched

south-west, temperatures reached 113 degrees

and remained above 95 at night Several

people have died of heatstroke,

includ-ing health workers who must swelter in

airtight hazmat suits as they enforce the

zero- Covid policy The Yangtze River, a

major source of hydropower, is suffering its worst drought in 61

years, forcing rolling power cuts Offices and shopping centers

have been ordered to turn off lights and set air- conditioning

temperatures higher, while factory shutdowns from southwestern

Sichuan province to the eastern megacity of Shanghai have hit

car manufacturers, “major Intel and Apple assembly plants,”

and battery and solar panel producers In the months to come,

“global shortages and soaring prices are almost certain.”

In the southwestern metropolis of Chongqing, volunteers from

around the country banded together to fight back “ravaging

wildfires” in the surrounding mountains, said Li Xin in Sixth

Tone (China) In one viral video, hundreds of motorcyclists

drove uphill carrying fire extinguishers and water into

moun-tains “engulfed by a fiery orange blaze.” State media celebrated

the heroism of fire and rescue workers, while social media users

described them as a “Firefighting Great Wall.” Yet their bravery

is not enough, said Caixin (China) in an editorial China is still

“a long way” from implementing tive disaster-warning systems and pre-venting floods City governments have struggled to meet strict national emis-sions targets while sustaining economic growth Climate change was considered neutral ground in U.S.- China relations, but China pulled out of climate talks to protest House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s August visit to Taiwan Beijing must relent, because “in this climate crisis, every one on Earth is affected.”

effec-The extreme weather is threatening

China’s status as the “world’s factory,” said Ji Siqi and Wendy

Wu in the South China Morning Post (Hong Kong) Power and

water cuts have combined with strict anti- Covid measures to slow production and ensure that costs will rise Some areas in the Yangtze River basin have started to see raindrops, but not enough to “fully rectify the shortfall” of water that halted pro-duction and destroyed much of the region’s autumn grain har-vest Cities across China boosted their use of coal as reservoirs dried up, while authorities released Himalayan water reserves

to combat the shortfalls, but those short-term solutions will

only have a “limited effect,” said Zhao Ziwen, also in the South China Morning Post After a coal shortage caused widespread

power cuts in China in 2021 that plunged neighborhoods into darkness for entire days, leaving some apartment towers with no cellphones, no elevators, and no water, Chinese leader Xi Jinping promised no more large-scale power cuts That promise may be hard to keep As the planet warms and China continues to lead the world in emissions, “the worst may not be over.”

Suffering panda given ice at Guangzhou zoo

THE WEEK September 9/September 16, 2022

President Biden’s student loan bailout is

“ter-rible policy” driven by cynical political

pan-dering, said Brian Riedl in The Dispatch The

estimated $300 billion giveaway announced

last week forces millions of taxpayers who

either didn’t attend college, or who struggled

and sacrificed to pay off student loans, to bail

out Democrats’ core constituency: “upwardly

mobile college graduates.” Biden’s executive

order forgives up to $10,000 in federal student

debt for borrowers making less than $125,000

annually, or $250,000 per couple—“nearly

quadruple the median family income.” Low-income recipients

of Pell Grants can get up to $20,000 canceled About 40 million

Americans will benefit, but many of them are hardly the

lower-income people Democrats claim to represent “Nearly half of all

student loan debt is held by individuals with graduate degrees,”

including doctors and lawyers and MBAs, “who borrowed as an

investment in high future incomes.” Imagine all the “genuinely

poor people” whose lives would be “transformed” if their credit

card or medical debt or missed mortgage payments were forgiven,

said Kevin Williamson in National Review Biden reportedly

worried that millions of Americans would hate bailing out the

educated elite, but even though his unilateral “emergency” order

may be ultimately found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court,

he caved to “the great infantile cry” of the Democratic base

As usual, the conservative argument against debt relief is “cultural

resentment,” said Jamelle Bouie in The New York Times GOP

Rep Jim Jordan asked why “a machinist in Ohio” should have to

pay the debts of “a jobless philosophy major in Los Angeles.” But

“the biggest beneficiaries of Biden’s policy” are struggling

middle-class workers Most of these debtors earn between $51,000 and

$82,000 a year, and they are disproportionately young and Black

Besides, Jordan’s argument “could be raised against almost every

government program in existence,” said Paul Waldman in The

Washington Post Taxpayer money “goes to all kinds of things

that don’t benefit you directly,” including trillions in bailouts the

U.S handed over in recent decades to bankers, insurers, auto

com-panies, and farmers Taxes from “truck drivers and waitresses”

also went toward forgiving Paycheck Protection Program (PPP)

loans during the pandemic, including $183,000 for Rep Marjorie

Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and $482,000 for Rep Matt Gaetz (R-Fla)

Where were conservatives’ shrieks about fairness then?

That comparison makes no sense, said Jeff

Jacoby in The Boston Globe PPP loans

“were designed to be forgiven” so long as

companies facing a “cataclysmic economic shutdown” kept paying their employees PPP was “an expensive flop,” but at least it was

a response to a real crisis The student loan bailout, on the other hand, erases the deficit reductions that Democrats just passed and

is “all but certain to make inflation worse.” You’d think there must be a strong economic reason for incentivizing Americans to get

expensive degrees, said Alyssia Finley in The Wall Street Journal

There’s not “The median earnings for a recent Columbia grad with an anthropology degree ($85,967 annual sticker price) was only $29,201.” Another analysis found that 41 percent of recent college grads “work at jobs that don’t require degrees.”

“Actually,” said economist Joseph Stiglitz in The Atlantic,

“can-celing student debt will cut inflation.” The estimated $300 lion price tag represents the estimated value of lost payments in all future years The actual amount of reduced debt payments will probably be much lower, since many people drowning in student loans would never have been able to pay off their debts anyway Inflation hawks “compound this error by assuming that the indebted students will take their forgiven debt and go on a spending spree.” That’s nonsensical As part of the cancellation program, Biden plans to end the pandemic-era freeze on loan pay-ments in January, bringing in an estimated $30 billion annually So

bil-the net effect “will be to reduce inflation.” Meanwhile, relieving

young people of crippling debt and interest payments will have positive economic effects, enabling them to get married, start fami-lies, move, and launch adult lives

If Biden’s bailout withstands legal challenges, “what do Democrats

do for an encore?” asked Megan McArdle in The Washington Post Future graduates also saddled with debt “will badger Demo-

cratic politicians to help them out too.” The fundamental problem has not been addressed: the absurdly high cost of tuition, which has climbed to nearly $80,000 per year for many elite private col-leges When Congress raised caps on subsidized federal loans to students, “as much as 60 cents of every extra dollar lent got eaten

up by tuition increases.” It’s a vicious cycle, and the Democrats’ fix “will likely make the problem worse.”

Outside the White House last week



Q Nearly 18 months after the Covid relief

plan allocated $386 million toward

retrain-ing veterans for civilian jobs, it has helped

employ fewer than 400 Nearly 90

voca-tional schools have had their approvals

for the program rescinded, after failing to

enroll students or deliver the training and

other services promised.

The Washington Post



Q The first expenditure the IRS will

make with the additional $80 billion

it was allocated by Congress last

month is to hire people to answer

taxpayers’ phone inquiries during next year’s tax-filing season Because of budget cuts and manpower shortages, only about

1 in 10 people calling the IRS have been getting through to someone

T he Wall Street Journal



Q The U.S has seen five

“1,000-year rain events”

since the end of July, in Dallas, eastern Kentucky,

St Louis, southern linois, and Death Valley, Calif Such events are defined as episodes

Il-of flooding with only a 0.1 percent ability of happening in any given year.

prob-NBCNews.com



Q Agriculture consumes 80 percent of the water used in the seven states that depend

on the Colorado River Other water usage

in the region—including all the flushing toilets, showers, dishwashers, washing machines, drinking water, and the water- ing of parks and golf courses in the Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Las Vegas metro- politan areas—accounts for 10 percent

The Washington Post

Noted

“I needed a password eight characters long, so

I picked ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.’”

Comedian Nick Helm, quoted

in Time Out Edinburgh

“Tea to the English is really a picnic indoors.”

Alice Walker, quoted

William Gibson, quoted

in Nasdaq.com

“When plunder becomes

a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes

it and a moral code that glorifies it.”

Economist Frédéric Bastiat, quoted in Fee.org

“I have spent a great deal

of my life discovering that my ambitions and fantasies—which I once thought of as totally unique—turn out to

35% say it isn’t likely 62% believe divisions will

increase in coming years,

and 60% think political

violence will increase

Just 9% expect political

violence to decline.

Economist/YouGov

THE WEEK September 9/September 16, 2022

“It’s not just in your head,” said Zeynep Tufekci

in The New York Times For an estimated 12 to

20 percent of people who get Covid, some

symp-toms can linger for more than three months—

a syndrome known as long Covid For a smaller

percentage, long Covid can be debilitating, with

such symptoms as fatigue, exercise intolerance,

brain fog, digestive problems, nerve tingling,

chest pain, a rapid heart rate, and depression

Much like other post-viral illnesses, such as

chronic fatigue syndrome, long Covid is not well

understood and thus is frequently dismissed as a

conversion disorder—“the historic catchall for,

‘It’s in your head, dear.’” But a new study reveals

that 16 million people in the U.S are suffering

from long Covid and up to 4 million remain out

of work, worsening the country’s labor shortage

With no proven treatment available, we need to

establish a dedicated national institute for long

Covid Then “we could honestly tell so many

looking for answers that help is on the way.”

But the first step must be “demystifying the

biol-ogy of long Covid,” said Eric Topol in the Los

Angeles Times The vast majority of people who

get long Covid are just 30 to 50 years old and

previously healthy For these unlucky souls, Covid triggers “an immune response that has gone hay-wire,” with antibodies attacking the body The result is inflammation and hormonal disruptions;

it is also possible there is a hidden reservoir of virus Dozens of small trials are underway to test drugs or supplements that may alleviate symp-toms, but “what can we do about long Covid”

while suffering people await treatments? “First off, drop the skepticism and denial.”

The Biden administration has at least done

that, said The Washington Post editorial board

Last month, the government released a plan for tackling the long-term effects of Covid, and it

“makes the point that long Covid is real, but the impact is not yet fully grasped.” With more than 80,000 new cases of the syndrome reported daily

in the U.S., the condition could further deplete the workforce and strain the health-care sys-

tem Meanwhile, said Ryan Prior and Kimberly

Knackstedt in Stat News, most Americans have

dropped all precautions and are blindly ignoring the risks of getting Covid infections But “the pandemic rages on, etching itself further into the lives of millions of long haulers.”

CNN’s “Project Centrism”

has begun, said Erik Wemple

in The Washington Post

Step one was the firing of its

longtime media critic, Brian

Stelter, the host of Reliable

Sources for nine years Ever

since the election of Donald

Trump, Stelter had focused

on withering coverage of

Fox News and its unholy

propaganda alliance with the

former liar-in-chief “It’s not partisan to stand up

to demagogues,” Stelter said in his final show

But following the April merger between CNN’s

owner WarnerMedia and Discovery, new CNN

CEO Chris Licht and Warner Brothers billionaire

investor John Malone made it clear they hope to

lure back viewers alienated by the network’s

criti-cal coverage of Trump Since Trump left office,

ratings of all the cable networks have been in

decline, said Clare Malone in The New Yorker

So CNN executives have decided to refocus on

“unbiased” coverage of breaking news The

polarizing Stelter, they decided, endangered “their

ability to appeal to a wider audience.”

Stelter’s bias tainted his reporting, said Ruben

Navarrette Jr in the Greensboro, N.C., News &

Record When a scandal involved Fox News, “he

covered it breathlessly.” But he was late to the

story when left-of-center CNN host Chris Cuomo

got involved in his brother Gov Andrew Cuomo’s sexual harassment scandal

Stelter’s liberal views led him to make a hero of anti-Trump lawyer and fraudster Michael Avenatti and to claim “we may never really know” what happened to hate-crime hoaxer Jussie Smollett No wonder view-ers’ trust waned Polling suggests Americans “believe all the major news

networks but Fox lean liberal,” said Jennifer

Graham in the Salt Lake City Deseret News

CNN is “smartly trying to reclaim the center,”

though only time and ratings will tell whether

“Americans really want news delivered neutrally.”

“I have bad news” for CNN’s new leadership,

said Jonathan Last in The Bulwark No matter

what the network does, critics on the right and

at Fox will continue to label CNN as lessly biased That was true even when CNN, after Trump’s election, went on a spree of “both sides” political coverage and “ affirmative-action conservative hires,” such as former Trump advis-ers Corey Lewandowski and Jason Miller, who spouted pure propaganda Trump and Fox have trained conservatives to dismiss any legitimate news that threatens their beliefs “There is noth-ing you can do to appease bad-faith critics.”

Stelter: Too polarizing?

Pick of the week’s cartoons

18 NEWS

Pick of the week’s cartoons NEWS 19

THE WEEK September 9/September 16, 2022

“Elon Musk is now the least of Twitter’s

problems,” said Daniel Howley in Yahoo

Finance The social media company is

“a security train wreck,” according to its

former security chief, Peiter Zatko In an

explosive whistleblower complaint filed to

numerous Washington regulatory agencies

last week, Zatko claims “half of Twitter’s

employees had access to sensitive user

data,” but the company “wasn’t even

fol-lowing the most basic level of

cybersecu-rity preparedness.” Many workers rarely

updated their mobile devices, while the

company’s servers ran on vulnerable and

out-of-date software The report may put Twitter in jeopardy

with the Federal Trade Commission, which already hammered

the company over lax security in 2011 Zatko also says Twitter

executives hardly cared to know “how many bots are actually on

the platform,” giving new credibility to Musk’s justifications for

backing out of his $44 billion agreement to take Twitter private

Twitter is poorly managed, said Katie Canales in Business

Insider, and has been for a while Co-founder Jack Dorsey’s

“reputation as a visionary” was long ago “tainted by reports

painting him as absent, uncommunicative, and indecisive.”

Dorsey hired Zatko in 2020, after a teen hacker hijacked the

verified Twitter accounts of some of Twitter’s highest-profile

users—including Barack Obama, Kim Kardashian, and (yes)

Elon Musk But Zatko indicates that Dorsey himself didn’t do much to im-prove the situation, saying the then-CEO was “disengaged” and would go missing

“for weeks.” The big question is what this means for Twitter’s lawsuit against Musk, which goes to trial in October, said

Barbara Ortutay and Tom Krisher in the Associated Press It appears to “boost

Musk’s claims on the spam bots issue,”

although Musk will still need to prove the bot count is much worse than he knew when he signed the deal But Dan Ives, a well-respected analyst at Wedbush, says Twitter should no longer expect “an easy win.” Musk should feel “like a kid waking up on Christmas morning,” Ives said

Don’t be fooled into believing that Zatko has made Musk’s

claims a slam dunk, said Matt Levine in Bloomberg Musk

doesn’t just say that Twitter has too many bots He says that Twitter has defrauded advertisers (and Musk himself) by lying about it But Zatko actually admits that Twitter “does a good job of excluding” those bots from the count it gives advertisers, just not of getting rid of them entirely “That’s not fraud”—

though maybe Musk can “spin some legal arguments” from Zatko’s account If he succeeds, things may end up looking pretty good for Zatko, because “saving the richest person in the world $44 billion is a good career move.”

Surveillance in the college dorm

A federal judge said a university’s use of monitoring software that scanned a student’s bedroom before he took a remote test violated the Fourth Amendment right to privacy, said

Amanda Holpuch and April Rubin in The

New York Times Cleveland State, like many

schools that offered online classes during the pandemic, employed software that “collects feeds from a computer’s camera and micro-phone” to prevent cheating on exams Aaron Ogletree initially protested the policy when

it was introduced in his class, and the school relented But a month later, “two hours be-fore a test, the university’s testing service told Ogletree in an email that a proctor would be checking his work area.” Ogletree complied, then sued the school

Twitter reinstates Berenson

Covid vaccine skeptic Alex Berenson won

a rare reinstatement back on Twitter, said

Kaitlin Tiffany in The Atlantic Former New

York Times journalist Berenson’s account had

340,000 followers when it was permanently suspended last year for “repeated violations of our Covid-19 misinformation rules.” Berenson sued demanding reinstatement Most of the time, such cases have gotten dismissed Indeed,

a judge rejected Berenson’s First Amendment argument Instead, his success “seems to have hinged on promises made to him by a high-level Twitter employee,” prompting Twitter

to settle Berenson also showed evidence of Twitter’s employees discussing his posts with the Biden administration, which, one Twitter executive said in a Slack message, demanded

to know “why Berenson hasn’t been kicked off from the platform.”

An embarrassing security breach

“The world’s most popular password ager says it was hacked,” said Margi Murphy

man-in Bloomberg LastPass, a password manager

used by more than 33 million people, said last week that “a hacker stole its source code and other proprietary information about break-ing into its system.” The company doesn’t believe any passwords were taken as part of the breach Allan Liska, an analyst at cyber-security company Recorded Future, agreed that the stolen source code wasn’t likely

to yield access to password vaults But the attack was nonetheless unnerving for a com-pany that has long promoted the safety and security of its service, which automatically

“generates and stores hard-to-crack words on behalf of its users.”

pass-Bytes: What’s new in tech

Germany debuted the world’s first

exclusively hydrogen-powered

trains, said Julia Buckley in CNN

.com A fleet of five trains began

service last week along a regional

route in Lower Saxony Another

nine will be introduced later to

replace the 15 diesel trains on the

line The trains, manufactured by

the French company Alstom, “are

emission-free and low-noise, with

only steam and condensed water

issuing from the exhaust.” Each

train has a range of more than

600 miles, “meaning they can

run for an entire day on a single

tank of hydrogen.” Just in case, a

hydrogen filling station has been

established on the route The use

of renewable energy to power the

trains is expected to save more than

422,000 gallons of diesel fuel a year

Innovation of the week

Technology

20 NEWS

Twitter: A series of reversals and accusations

Health & Science

22 NEWS

Dogs’ tearful greetings

If you ever feel your eyes welling up when

your dog gives you a big greeting after a

long day away, the feeling may be mutual,

reports CNN.com Researchers in Japan

have found that pups produce more tears

when reunited with their owner than with

another person If confirmed, the

find-ings could be evidence that emotion can

cause nonhuman animals to weep For

the study, researchers placed a paper strip

inside the eyelids of 18 pooches before they

were reunited with their owners after five

to seven hours of separation They found

that the dogs’ tear volume increased by

10 percent compared with normal Further

research confirmed that the tear levels

increased only when seeing the owner, not

a stranger The researchers also found that

oxytocin, commonly known as the “love”

hormone, seems to play a part in doggie

tears, because when they brushed dogs’ eyes

with a solution containing the hormone,

the tear levels rose significantly compared

with a control solution Still, there’s a

catch: Another part of the study found that

humans in general look more favorably

upon dogs with wet eyes, suggesting that

domesticated dogs may have evolved eye

watering to elicit gentle treatment When

dogs exhibit “watery, shiny eyes,” says

coauthor Takefumi Kikusui, from Azabu

University, it “facilitates human caregiving.”

Weed and acid use are up

Young adults in America are higher than ever on weed and hallucinogens, new fed-eral data shows In the National Institutes

of Health’s annual survey of drug use,

43 percent of respondents ages 19 to 30 said they had used marijuana 20 or more times in the past year, up from 29 percent

in 2011, while 11 percent said they were daily users, up from 6 percent These are the highest levels since the survey began,

in 1988 Eight percent reported they used psychedelics, such as magic mushrooms or LSD, up from just 3 percent in 2011 The survey also showed that vaping and binge drinking continued to climb in 2021 after

a brief pause the previous year, as did the consumption of alcoholic drinks mixed with THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana Experts say the legalization of marijuana in many states likely plays a role

in the increase, but so does the growing perception that substances such as ketamine and ecstasy may have therapeutic benefits

in fighting depression and PTSD “It’s about availability,” says Kevin Gray, from the Medical University of South Carolina,

“but also about peer acceptability.”

Hair loss cure that works

Dermatologists say they have found a treatment for hair loss that actually works,

reports The New York Times—and it costs

only pennies a day The secret is minoxidil, the active ingredient in the hair-growth salve Rogaine Rather than having patients apply the drug directly to the scalp, as the over-the- counter product indicates, doctors have been prescribing minoxidil in very low-dose pills—and many say this stimu-lates hair growth in both women and men, provided the original hair loss isn’t too severe Rodney Sinclair at the University of Melbourne in Australia, for example, says

he has helped more than 10,000 patients

in this way He’s among many gists across the world and in the U.S who are prescribing it “off- label”—a common practice in the industry for other drugs as well The treatment isn’t likely to be sub-mitted for approval to the FDA, because minoxidil, developed in the 1950s, is a cheap, generic drug “There is no incentive

dermatolo-to spend tens of millions of dollars dermatolo-to test

it in a clinical trial,” says Brett King from the Yale School of Medicine “That study truly is never, ever going to be done.”

So very happy to see you

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has produced a new showstopper: stun- ning images of Jupiter in never-seen- before detail The largest planet in our solar system, the gas giant, made mostly

of hydrogen and helium,

is more than twice as big as all the others combined—if Earth were the size of a grape, Jupiter would be as big as a basketball The composite images, which have been artificially colored to translate the

infrared light captured by the telescope into the visible spectrum, show the gas giant’s rainbow auroras, its faint space dust rings, and two of its 50-plus moons, Amalthea and Adrastea The planet’s famous Great Red Spot—a storm big- ger than Earth that has been raging for

several centuries— appears white because it is reflect- ing sunlight “We’ve never seen Jupiter like this,” proj- ect leader Imke de Pater, from the University of Cali- for nia at Berkeley, tells

The Wash ing ton Post “We

hadn’t really expected it to

be this good, to be honest.”

A detailed look at Jupiter

The king of planets

Scientists have discovered a way to

destroy some of the “forever chemicals”—

a group of compounds used in a vast

array of everyday household items

Known as PFAS, or per- and

polyfluoro-alkyl substances, the synthetic chemicals

help make products oil repellent and

resistant to temperature change These

compounds are found all around us, in

carpets, couches, nonstick cookware,

stain- resistant clothing, fast-food

wrap-pers, and other products, and they can be

detected in the blood of some 98 percent

of Amer i cans They have been linked to a

raft of serious health conditions, including

cancer, birth defects, liver disease, and kidney problems The EPA has recently slashed the amount allowed in drinking water from 70 parts per trillion to just 0.02 ppt or less Yet because they don’t degrade naturally, existing PFAS will continue circulating unless they are some- how destroyed In the new study, reports

USNews.com, researchers broke down

PFAS molecules into harmless nents by combining them with two cheap chemicals—lye and dimethyl sulfoxide—

compo-at a relatively low temperature, just above water’s boiling point The technique is far from commercial use and works only for

PFAS chemicals containing carbon ide Nevertheless, says researcher William Dichtel, from Northwestern University, the

diox-“fundamental knowledge of how these materials degrade” is a hugely important step in reducing the threat

Getting rid of ‘forever chemicals’

PFAS in water: One way they get inside us.

ARTS 23

Review of reviews: Books

“We humans are besotted by intelligence,

especially our own,” said David Barash in

The Wall Street Journal But could it be

that human smarts are more a liability than

a gift? Justin Gregg is an expert on animal

communication, and in his “extraordinary”

book, he begins an inquiry into that

ques-tion by suggesting that Friedrich Nietzsche,

the gloomy 19th- century German

philoso-pher, probably would have lived a happier

life if he’d been a narwhal—one of Gregg’s

favorite creatures Nietzsche both pitied

and envied animals because he perceived

that they lacked the ability to contemplate

their own existence, relieving them of much

mental anguish From that playful starting

point, Gregg’s engaging study turns “far

more serious,” arguing that the evolution of

human intelligence, in his words, “just may

Creedence Clearwater Revival, in its heyday, was “popular almost beyond belief,” said

David Cantwell in

The New Yorker

The four-man band from working-class

El Cerrito, Calif., scored 14 Top 10 songs from 1969 to

1971 and outsold the

Beatles in the year Abbey Road was released

Yet while the music of John Fogerty and company has remained part of the fabric of American pop, “somehow, the sheer scope

of what they accomplished has always seemed underappreciated.” John Lingan’s new book credits that in part to their being rock misfits “Because they performed notably sober and straight—and especially because they favored two- to three- minute-long pop gems rather than improvised jams—they were perceived as squares even

in their own scene.” But listeners of the time connected to a fatalism in Fogerty’s lyrics, and to the music’s “melody and groove.”

Book of the week

be the stupidest thing that ever happened.”

Gregg builds his “hilarious, sometimes

unsettling,” case step by step, said Rachel

Nuwer in Undark Humans, he contends,

stand apart from other creatures because

of our capacity to ask “Why?” Our grasp

of cause and effect has enabled remarkable breakthroughs, from the development of agriculture to space travel But other crea-tures establish social codes without compre-hending precise causes or effects, whereas humans can be become so fixated on proper

human conduct that they resort to war and genocide “But the most damning chapter

of the book—and my favorite— concerns

a special brand of cognitive dissonance”: our species’ talent for expanding its power without thinking through the consequences Contemplating climate collapse and nuclear annihilation, Gregg writes, “Our many intellectual accomplishments are currently

on track to produce our own extinction, which is exactly how evolution gets rid of adaptations that suck.”

Gregg, “in his very human desire to tize the stakes,” can be “prone to overstate-

drama-ment,” said Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times Though no narwhal would ever

build a gas chamber, humans exhibit certain admirable traits, including a willingness to fight for just treatment of the weak In the end, the human way of living “isn’t inher-ently good or evil”; it just is And “despite Gregg’s comic distortions,” I suspect he might argue the same Still, he’s right that

we should be less smug, said Lars Chittka

in BBC.com His book is “a poignant

reminder that if we don’t raise our game fast, we might once again cede Earth to the rule of insects.”

If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal:

What Animal Intelligence

Reveals About Human

Stupidity

by Justin Gregg

(Little, Brown, $29)

A Song for Everyone:

The Story of Creedence Clearwater Revival

by John Lingan (Hachette, $32)

“Lingan isn’t the first to take on the band’s saga of dogged ascendancy and acrimoni-ous disintegration,”said Brett Marie in

Pop Matters CCR fans already know that

Fogerty and two other members were barely teenagers when they formed the band’s core, and that they’d been together a decade when they scored a 1967 hit with their cover of “Suzie Q.” Fogerty then knocked out a string of enduring hits, including

“Bad Moon Rising” and “Fortunate Son,” before his controlling manner drove his older brother out in 1971 and caused the band to fold a year later Lingan’s storytell-ing skill “rescues his work from being a mere retread,” though Cleverly, he also frequently cuts away from the band to show how CCR’s music spoke to its era

“If there’s a villain in this story,” said David

Yaffe in Air Mail, it’s not Fogerty but the

record-label boss who gained the trust of the young band members, then “robbed them blind.” Acrimony between Fogerty and his ex-friends also persisted for years When CCR was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1993, Fogerty refused

to perform with them Still, a song like CCR’s “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?” is forever Though it originally evoked the war

in Vietnam, “it could be about the sorrows

of today and beyond.”

Human intelligence: A troublesome gift

THE WEEK September 9/September 16, 2022

If you’ve never read Abdulrazak Gurnah

before, “consider this a late invitation

that you should not ignore,” said Ron

Charles in The Washington Post When

the Tanzanian-born British novelist won

last year’s Nobel Prize in literature,

pub-lishers began scrambling to make his

books available here Afterlives, a 2020

novel that has only now gotten its U.S

release, proves revelatory

Interweav-ing the stories of three East African men

whom we meet in the early 20th century

when Germany rules their land, it’s “ at

once a globe- spanning epic of European

colonialism and an intimate look at life

in one of the many overlooked corners

of the Earth.” Gurnah “sees in all

direc-tions at once,” said Bethanne Patrick in

the Los Angeles Times One of his

pro-tagonists fights for Germany in a colonial

army Another is sexually abused by an

officer As we follow the trio’s life paths

across decades, Germany’s crimes hit the

reader hard Still, Gurnah “constructs his

magnificent novel so carefully that when

his last lines bring us back to love, we’re

ready to pay attention.”