Innholdsfortegnelse for 9/10/2021 i Newsweek

2001 “Once a hated, hunted Utah sect, the Mormons are now a global church worth an estimated $25 billion and claiming 11 million members,” Newsweek wrote a year before Salt Lake City, the home base of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, hosted the Winter Olympic Games in 2002. Mormons have worked to alter their often misconstrued stereotype, “With an infusion of converts from Latin America, Asia and Africa since the 1950s, it is no longer a white-bread church.” To date, their community has risen to over 16 million worldwide, with 54,000 missionaries. 1970 “With the possible exception of speeding cars, marijuana smoking is probably the most widely committed crime in the U.S. today,” Newsweek reported. Now, after much controversy and continued debate, recreational cannabis is legal in…

MANDATES CAN MAKE SENSE by Benjamin Wittes I WILL NOT KNOWINGLY ENGAGE with unvaccinated people in person. I’m happy to do it remotely. I’m not interested in being punitive or stigmatizing, but I’m also not interested in becoming a vector for transmission. And so if somebody tells me that they are not vaccinated, I’m really not interested in being in their presence. I will, of course, make exceptions to that for people who have legitimate medical reasons to not be vaccinated, or for children for whom the vaccine is not approved on an emergency basis. My own personal vaccine mandate is that I don’t choose to socialize in-person with people who are themselves choosing to be vectors for the virus’ transmission. I think that there may be good prudential reasons…

When President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, he inherited former President Donald Trump’s plan for the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. The two men agree on little. Yet, Biden honored the agreement. In fact, Biden has supported reducing troops on the ground for years, advising President Barack Obama to limit involvement there back in 2009, even as Obama’s generals were recommending an increased American presence, as discussed in this excerpt from award-winning, former BBC journalist David Loyn’s new book, The Long War: The Inside Story of America and Afghanistan since 9/11 (St. Martin’s Press, September 21). In the wake of the U.S.’ unilateral withdrawal from Afghanistan and the country’s swift fall to the Taliban, Loyn and his work offer an insight into Biden’s policy in the region and into…

“REBELLING” AT WORK ISN’T usually thought of in positive terms, Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino admits. “Usually if we close our eyes and think about the rebels in our business,” she says, “we think about the jerks, the showoffs…people who are troublemakers, people who break rules just for the sake of breaking rules, or the contrarians.” No sane company would actively seek that out. And yet Gino, the author of Rebel Talent, believes that cultivating your own rebellious edge might be crucial to helping your company—and your career. She recently joined me on my weekly Newsweek interview show Better (Thursdays 12 pm ET/9 am PT) to discuss what it really means to be a rebellious leader, and why we need rebels now more than ever. As she says, “Being…

At what point did the U.S. military mission in Afghanistan become unwinnable? Was it always, or was there a point that sealed its fate? In the first week of December 2001, two decisions of the Bush administration set the course for what would become America’s longest war. On December 3, U.S. special forces began an assault on the Tora Bora caves where Osama bin Laden was holed up. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wanted Afghans to do the ground fighting and paid unreliable local militias, backed by U.S. air power, and a handful of special operators. Thiswasdespite1,000 Marines on the ground near Kandahar, and 3,500 more not far away on board a ship. Bin Laden escaped. Not only was this a failure to pursue the main target of the war,…

TAKING ON A ROLE MADE FAMOUS BY ANOTHER ACTOR IS ALREADY INTIMIDATING, but one Tom Hanks made famous? That’s a whole other deal. But Ashley Zukerman, who plays Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon in the new Peacock series The Lost Symbol (September 16), took it in stride. “I loved the films, and Tom Hanks is one of the greatest actors of our time. This should have been more daunting than it was, it just felt like I could launch into this from myself.” In this version, which author Dan Brown executive produced, we see young Langdon, years before we originally met him in The Da Vinci Code. “We get to explore what made him the person everyone knows. So we lean on the love everyone already has for the material, but…