Innholdsfortegnelse for January 30, 2026 i The Week Magazine

On occasion, the world’s biggest gathering of global elites can produce more than hot air. The World Economic Forum, held annually at the Swiss ski resort of Davos, was where Nelson Mandela shook hands with then–South African president F.W. de Klerk in 1992—marking the beginning of the end of apartheid. Eight years later, Davos served as the springboard for Gavi, a vaccine alliance that has inoculated over 1 billion children, and in 2005 the forum produced a landmark report on gender equality. It was the site of climate activist Greta Thunberg’s famous “Our house is on fire” speech in 2019, and promoted a vision for “stakeholder capitalism” in 2020. Say what you want about its optics, but Davos can be a useful weather vane for revealing which way the global…

■ Rep. Kristin Noble (R-N.H.), chair of a House education committee, is calling for schools to be “segregated” by political affiliation. “Republicans have been self-segregating out of the leftist indoctrination centers for decades,” Noble said. She added that Democrats will likely be delighted to have “their own schools, with libraries full of porn, biological males in girls’ sports and bathrooms, and as much DEI curriculum as their hearts desire.” ■ A Michigan appeals court ruled that a hospital worker can sue his employer after he was attacked by a goose on its grounds. Eric Leiendecker suffered a broken hip when the bird knocked him down, and later learned that the goose had been terrorizing visitors for days. The court ruled that while the hospital is not liable for the bird’s…

Honolulu Guns in public: The Supreme Court this week appeared ready to knock down a Hawaii law requiring gun owners to obtain permission to carry firearms onto private property that’s open to the public, threatening similar regulations in California, New York, New Jersey, and Maryland. Justice Samuel Alito said such barriers in spaces like malls and restaurants relegate the Second Amendment to “second-class status.” The Trump administration backed gun owners challenging the law, arguing it “effectively nullifies” gun licenses. A 2022 ruling instructs courts to consider whether gun laws align with U.S. “history and tradition.” This case pits gun rights against traditional property rights. Justice Sonia Sotomayor said there is no “constitutional right to enter private property with a gun” without an owner’s consent. An invitation to enter a store,…

Googoosh watched Iran’s 1979 revolution unfold live on TV in New York, said Hilary Rose in The Times (U.K.). The Iranian pop icon, born Faegheh Atashin, was at a low. She had gone from singing for Iran’s shah and performing alongside the likes of Ray Charles and Tina Turner at music festivals to living in a filthy hotel, broke and addicted to drugs. “I was dying in New York,” says Googoosh, 75. “I decided if I’m going to die, I’ll die in my own country.” She returned to Tehran and within months was locked up in the notorious Evin prison, accused by the new Islamist regime of being a corrupting Western influence. “I thought they would kill me. I saw how many other women were executed.” Instead, she was released…

President Trump has revived the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine to justify his aggressive foreign policy. What is the Monroe Doctrine? It’s a foreign policy vision that was first articulated by President James Monroe in 1823. Monroe declared that the Western Hemisphere was off-limits to European colonization, and that political meddling in the Americas by Old World powers would be considered a threat to U.S. “peace and safety.” This policy—which in the 1850s became known as the Monroe Doctrine—landed after a decade-long stretch in which Venezuela, Mexico, Guatemala, and a dozen other former Spanish colonies in the Americas had won independence and opened their once-closed ports to American and British trade. With rumors circulating that Spain might try to reconquer its New World possessions, and with Russia claiming control of the Pacific…

Michelle Goldberg The New York Times Right-wing media have identified a terrifying new threat to the nation, said Michelle Goldberg: “affluent white liberal women.” In the wake of Renee Good’s shocking shooting death by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, MAGA influencers are demonizing the progressive, middle-class women like her who’ve come out in droves in that city and others to protest the Trump administration’s ruthless immigration roundups. With “misogynistic rage,” Fox News and other right-wing media are warning that “organized gangs of wine moms” are using “antifa tactics” against ICE, calling them “harpies” and the “anti-ICE insurgency.” MAGA isn’t wrong to see these “furious women as an obstacle to their dreams of mass deportation.” That’s because Good’s death and ICE’s other brutal assaults on white moms have been “a public…

Ibrahim Melhem Al Quds The U.S. says Phase 2 of the Gaza ceasefire deal has begun. But implementing it will be an “almost impossible task,” said Ibrahim Melhem. Phase 2 of the U.S.-brokered deal tasks a committee of Palestinian technocrats with the massive challenge of “managing Gaza.” These 15 people will have to sidestep “landmines of pretexts” that Israel has concocted to evade its Phase 1 obligations, which include withdrawing its military to the agreed line, “removing the rubble, beginning reconstruction, and opening the Rafah border crossing in both directions.” Without these measures, starving Palestinian families cannot get enough food and medicine to survive. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu excuses his stalling by saying there can be no progress until Hamas surrenders its weapons—which is a Phase 2 obligation—or until…

The Trump administration is doubling down on “Nazi dog whistling,” said Farrah Tomazin in The Daily Beast. As masked agents assault, drag away, and even shoot immigrants and protesters in Minneapolis and other Democratic-run cities, the administration is churning out social media posts, recruitment ads, and slogans that appear “straight out of Adolf Hitler’s playbook.” The Department of Labor last week put out a series of posts bearing captions such as “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage” and “America is for Americans”—a clear echo of the infamous Nazi slogans “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer” and “Deutschland den Deutschen.” The Department of Homeland Security’s social media pages are filled with ICE recruitment posts of young white men and the slogan “We’ll have our home again.” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem…

Conventional wisdom—backed by countless teen comedies—holds that sexual desire is strongest in youth. A large new study suggests that may be true for women but not for men, reports The Times (U.K.). Drawing on data from more than 67,000 adults ages 20 to 84 in the Estonian Biobank, researchers found that men’s self-reported libido rose through early adulthood and peaked in their early 40s, before declining slowly and steadily thereafter. For women, desire was highest in their 20s and early 30s. Then it began to decline earlier than that of men, and with a sharper drop-off around age 50. The researchers note that although men’s testosterone levels typically begin falling when they’re in their early 30s, their libido appears to remain high for another decade—challenging the notion that sexual desire…

With her “riotously assured” debut novel, “Madeline Cash has announced herself as a writer with a distinctive voice,” said Rhoda Feng in The Boston Globe. The 29-year-old author, who’s also the co-founder of a buzzy literary journal, shows in Lost Lambs that she has “a Rabelaisian appetite for absurd detail.” At the center of the novel is a cracked American family, the Flynns. Mom and Dad are clumsily experimenting with an open relationship while their three daughters, 17, 15, and 11, are busy with worrying romantic entanglements or chasing conspiracy theories that might just be true. At times, Cash’s rapid-fire comic flourishes “can feel like a substitute for thoughtful plotting and considerate character development,” said Niela Orr in NYMag.com. When she addresses the fissures in the Flynn marriage, she’s “prone…

Barbieland by Tarpley Hitt (Atria, $30) In the movie, the original Barbie doll answered girls’ need for a role model, said Amanda Hess in The New York Times. But the doll’s true story is “much messier, and more interesting—especially as told in Tarpley Hitt’s rollicking tale of how Mattel spied, copied, and stole its way to market dominance.” It’s widely known that Barbie was a knockoff of a German doll, and that Mattel plays hardball, but Hitt has “an eye for the absurd detail” and “a special skill for enlivening the archive.” Blank Space by W. David Marx (Viking, $32) “Well-read critics are forever writing nostalgic complaints about the unique dumbness of the culture of their own time,” said Martin Gelin in Foreign Policy. W. David Marx has now joined…

Zach Bryan’s music hasn’t changed much since his 2019 breakthrough, and “it is hard to tell whether this means he is stuck or just sticking to what he does best,” said Kelefa Sanneh in The New Yorker. The ornery Oklahoma singer-songwriter didn’t need more than his “halfway hoarse” voice and simple country-folk strumming to become one of America’s biggest stars, and the willfully shaggy 25 tracks on his new album “evoke the blurry conviviality of a bar band at the moment between last call and lights on.” Days after releasing the record, he issued a version that’s just Bryan and his guitar, helping push With Heaven on Top to No. 1 on Billboard’s album chart and “demonstrating how little adornment his best songs need.” But while his urge to share…

A full-immersion portrait of the Shakers’ founder The “singular, astonishing, otherworldly” new biographical musical about the founder of the Shakers “may not be to everyone’s taste,” said Alissa Wilkinson in The New York Times. But who cares? “When an artist takes a swing this colossal and stays true to their vision in every way, the resulting work deserves respect, and is always worth seeing.” With a “spectacular” Amanda Seyfried as her star, director Mona Fastvold has found a way to pull viewers inside the life of Ann Lee as the 18th-century mystic experienced it, particularly when engaged in the ecstatic form of group song and dance that was central to the sect’s form of worship. “Rationalists in the audience might be tempted to ask, ‘Well, what is the testament of…

Peter Hujar’s Day Ben Whishaw is terrific as the photographer Peter Hujar in this enthralling recent film that depicts Hujar sitting with his writer friend Linda Rosenkrantz for a long interview about a single day in his life in 1970s New York City. Rebecca Hall co-stars. $6 on demand Blue Moon Ethan Hawke makes a quirky and compelling Lorenz Hart in this recent Richard Linklater film that spends a night with the great lyricist as he waits in a popular Broadway haunt for the arrival of his ex-partner after the debut of a hit created without him. $15 on demand Monk in Pieces Meredith Monk’s boundary-pushing vocal compositions, which she began performing in the 1960s, are still avant-garde. Long misunderstood, Monk thrived anyway, and she’s celebrated here by Philip Glass,…

Do the Winter Olympics have you dreaming of attending the 2028 Summer Games in L.A.? “The time to start plotting your itinerary isn’t next year, it’s now,” said Meredith Heil Bock in Afar. Registration for early ticket draws recently opened at la28.org, offering enrollees alerts when time windows open for purchasing tickets. Finding seats for popular events like the Opening Ceremony will be challenging, but you’ll have plenty of chances to catch other events, with tickets starting at $28. Among the expected highlights of the L.A. games are new flag football and squash competitions, as well as the first cricket and lacrosse events since the early 1900s. “For a turnkey experience,” look to onlocationexp.com, the official source for packages that combine tickets, lodging, and transportation.…

Thin air, after business analysts projected that the popularity of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs could save the top four U.S. airlines—American, Delta, Southwest, and United—as much as $580 million annually, because lighter passengers require less fuel to get airborne. Togetherness, after Philip Nitschke, inventor of the Sarco assisted-suicide capsule, announced plans for the “Double Dutch Sarco,” a two-seat capsule that would let couples end their lives together. The Double Dutch will feature two separate activation buttons, both of which must be pressed before the capsule floods with deadly nitrogen. Contingencies, after a former policy expert at the Bank of England advised the central bank to plan for an announcement confirming the existence of alien life. Such a disclosure, said Helen McCaw, could trigger “extreme” market volatility “due to catastrophizing or euphoria.”…

London Tories defect: A wave of high-ranking Conservative lawmakers have defected to Britain’s anti-immigration Reform UK party, escalating the battle for control of the British right. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch last week ousted Robert Jenrick, justice spokesperson in her shadow cabinet, after suspecting he planned to jump ship. Two other prominent Tories also left last week. Jenrick said the Conservative Party, which governed from 2010 until suffering its worst-ever electoral defeat two years ago, had “betrayed its voters” on immigration and the economy and remained “in denial.” In total, more than 20 leading Tories—three of them sitting members of Parliament—have now defected. Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer said Reform leader Nigel Farage was building a party of “failed politicians” who had already “let the country down.” Adamuz, Spain Deadly train…

Jodie Foster fell in love with France at age 8, said Elaine Sciolino in The New York Times. That’s when her Francophile mother—“She read books on Napoleon, drove a Peugeot, bought a French armoire,” says the actress—first took her to Paris. Foster binged on buttered ham baguettes and snapped photos of bridges over the Seine. Back in Los Angeles, her mother enrolled Foster in a French lycée. “I did science, math, history, everything in French,” she says. “Every kid in my class was French except me.” When Taxi Driver made its debut at Cannes in 1976, a 13-year-old Foster wowed local journalists with her fluent French. Now 63, the actress is giving her first solo lead performance in French in her new film, A Private Life. To prepare, she spent…

Paul Waldman Public Notice President Trump has been promising since 2017 “a spectacular” new health-care plan to replace the Affordable Care Act, said Paul Waldman. Now that enhanced Obamacare subsidies have expired, sending premiums soaring for millions of Americans, the White House finally announced Trump’s “Great Healthcare Plan” last week. But it’s neither great nor a real plan. Instead, it’s “a bunch of vague statements of principle,” based on the long-standing Republican fallacy that the simple solution to all health-care problems is the free market. Trump proposes redirecting government subsidies for insurance into a direct payment to consumers, allowing them to use that money to shop for insurance and doctors. But “getting your gall bladder removed is not like buying a car.” When you have a heart attack, you don’t…

“Donald Trump aspires to be the sort of man Xi Jinping is, the sort of man Vladimir Putin is, the sort of man Li Peng was when he ruthlessly suppressed the Tiananmen Square demonstrations—a vicious act of repression that Trump has spoken of admiringly. The acts of unjustifiable violence and extralegal threats carried out by his agents are, manifestly, to Trump’s taste. He is an Iranian ayatollah at heart—fundamentally totalitarian. And he seems to desire violence. Why wouldn’t he? He has the guns and the gun thugs. Where there are genuine acts of violence being perpetrated against federal agents, those carrying out such acts are giving the Trump administration what it desires: a pretext for escalation.” Kevin D. Williamson in The Dispatch…

Reinhard Veser Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Germany) Authoritarians sure know how to stick together, said Reinhard Veser. Hungary, led by nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban, has just granted asylum to Zbigniew Ziobro, who served as Poland’s justice minister in the former government of the right-wing Law and Justice. Ziobro has been accused of more than two dozen crimes, including the embezzlement of funds meant for crime victims and the “illegal purchase of spyware” used against political opponents. Now he is crying political persecution and claiming he needs Hungary’s protection from biased judges. Yet it is simply “grotesque for Ziobro to turn around and complain about judges in Poland lacking independence.” He was the very one who “spearheaded the transformation of the Polish judiciary into a political instrument of the ruling class”…

Iris Gorfinkel Toronto Star “What happens in the U.S. doesn’t stay in the U.S.,” said Iris Gorfinkel. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “spent his career arguing that children get too many vaccines,” and as U.S. health secretary he has set about dismantling his country’s vaccine schedule. Under his watch, the United States will no longer inoculate every child against flu, Covid, hepatitis, rotavirus, or meningococcal disease, which can kill in a flash. Even RSV, the leading cause of hospitalization in infants, is off the list. Because travelers can easily carry all these vaccine-preventable diseases with them across borders—and the U.S.-Canada border sees 400,000 crossings a day—Canada is bracing for “dangerous comebacks of common viruses.” And that’s not the only thing we’re catching. The disinformation fueling the Trump administration’s anti-vax fever “is…

“The Supreme Court has the chance to save women’s sports,” said The Washington Post in an editorial. The justices heard arguments last week in two cases challenging Idaho and West Virginia laws blocking transgender women and girls from participating in female sports. Twenty-five other states have similar laws. Lawyers for two trans girls argued the bans violated their constitutional rights under the Equal Protection Clause and the Civil Rights Act—a position the court’s conservative majority seemed prepared to reject. And for good reason: Girls and boys compete separately in sports because of distinct biological differences. Males have bigger bones, stronger muscles, and more aerobic capacity than females, and many studies indicate “those advantages persist after hormone treatments.” The huge growth of girls’ sports programs was one of feminism’s greatest victories,…

We all have family secrets, but “few have darker ones than Christine Kuehn,” said David A. Taylor in the Washington Independent Review of Books. In her best-selling memoir, the first-time author shares a story long withheld from her: Her German grandparents were Nazi spies who channeled enough information used in the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor that her grandfather was the only person convicted for the attack. “Surely this must be historical fiction,” you’ll think, said Julia M. Klein in The Forward. But several years before Pearl Harbor, Otto and Friedel Kuehn were rising figures in Nazi party when their daughter, 19-year-old Ruth, began an affair with Joseph Goebbels and the Nazi propagandist learned that Ruth’s biological father was Jewish. Soon, the entire family was shipped to Hawaii, with three…

For Julian Barnes, thinking about death is nothing new, said Elaine Szewczyk in Publishers Weekly. It’s been a hobby for the celebrated British novelist for decades. “One of my French gurus is the philosopher Montaigne, and he said we should think about death on a daily basis,” Barnes says. At 80, the author of Flaubert’s Parrot isn’t done living. He remarried in August, 17 years after the death of his beloved first wife and five years after he was diagnosed with a treatable though incurable blood cancer. He also isn’t done writing, even though he has declared that his new novel, Departure(s), will be his last. Barnes says he had long assumed he’d write novels until his last breath, only to conclude that Departure(s) would make a better finale than…

“It’s hard to sing along to a Dry Cleaning song,” said Stuart Berman in Pitchfork. And that’s not just because vocalist Florence Shaw “isn’t really one for singing.” The frontwoman of the Grammy-winning, London-based post-punk outfit typically maintains “the calm elocution of a wellness podcast host” as she channels various characters in a “blasé-faire” voice. On “Cruise Ship Designer,” she gives voice to a smug pawn of the wealthy, on “Evil Evil Idiot,” she’s a hypochondriac foodie, and on “My Soul/Half Pint,” she’s a neat freak who loves to organize but hates to clean. “Spoken-word post-punk works best when the band surrounding the vocalist has an acute feel for melody,” said Mark Richardson in The Wall Street Journal. Guitarist Tom Dowse, bassist Lewis Maynard, and drummer Nick Buxton are fully…

A zombie virus brings out the best and worst in the human survivors. “Squeamish, beware,” said Johnny Oleksinski in the New York Post. The latest 28 Years Later movie, the second in a trilogy, “doubles the savagery” of its June 2025 predecessor, adding a “twisted” and “more freakishly funny” chapter to a zombie franchise that debuted with 2002’s 28 Days Later. The story picks up where the last ended, as 12-year-old Spike is forcibly conscripted into joining a small band of murderous adolescents in blond wigs. But “two tales are told here,” the second focusing on a lone doctor, played by a “magnificent” Ralph Fiennes, who has a monument to the dead in human bones and is seeking a cure for the zombie virus. Fiennes “elevates the movie whenever he’s…

Netflix has offered to acquire major parts of Warner Bros. Discovery for $83 billion in cash, said Lauren Hirsch in The New York Times. The streamer’s sweetened offer this week adds pressure on Paramount, which has sued Warner in a hostile pursuit to persuade shareholders to accept its $108 billion bid for the entire company, including cable networks CNN and TNT. Netflix, which has offered to buy only Warner’s studio and streaming business, also reported a 29% increase in profit in the fourth quarter, and a global subscriber base of 325 million. Meta: Not out of the antitrust woods yet “The Federal Trade Commission is appealing the loss in its case against Meta challenging the acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram as an illegal monopoly,” said Ashley Gold in Axios. A…

■ Auto loans keep getting longer Car buyers are increasingly opting for longer loan terms in an effort to keep costs low, said Charles Singh in USA Today. More than 20% of new-car purchases in the last quarter of 2025 were 84-month financing deals, according to Edmunds, while the average vehicle loan in the U.S. stretched closer to 72 months. Some lenders are offering “car loans of up to 96 months” to entice buyers, who seek out extended terms to keep monthly costs down. But “larger loans also rack up larger interest prices.” The average new car auto loan rate is 6.51%, meaning that the buyer of a 2026 Toyota RAV4 who gets an 84-month loan for $25,520 would end up paying an additional $11,629 “in total interest costs by…

Bill Saporito The New York Times The American auto industry failed to “anticipate how the business climate would change” under President Trump, said Bill Saporito. The president, who “equates green with woke and views climate change as heresy,” has worked overtime to cancel consumer tax incentives and billions in funds for battery production and electric charging stations. “About 25% of new cars sold globally are EVs,” and the number is rising. Yet “the vindictive, oil-loving Trump” has forced America’s automakers to reverse course. It’s like having “a president who decreed that all music had to be sold on vinyl rather than digital.” Adding to this, his tariffs have scrambled supply chains that depend on materials flowing freely across North America. How has all this impacted business? Well, Ford suspended production…

What the “framework of a future deal” will look like is not yet clear, said Emily Davies in The Washington Post. But the deal is “likely to fall far short of the full sovereign possession” of Greenland that Trump had previously insisted on. Denmark’s top diplomat said the U.S. “would not ‘own’ the island,” and, as NATO secretary general, Rutte “is not empowered to negotiate the transfer of territory” from one member to another. Trump’s “backpedaling” on Greenland has brought some “relief” to European leaders, said Eli Stokols and Diana Nerozzi in Politico. But “there is also an awareness that he could reverse himself,” said one European official, adding, “Trump’s promises and statements are unreliable, but his scorn for Europe is consistent.” So while the immediate crisis may have passed,…

ICE’s operation in Minneapolis is looking “more and more like a siege on a city than an effort to enforce the law there,” said Zeeshan Aleem in MS.now. Eleven days after an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good on a residential street, masked immigration officers broke down the door of St. Paul resident ChongLy Thao—a 56-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen with no criminal record—and dragged him out at gunpoint in handcuffs and boxer shorts in subfreezing conditions. He was released an hour later. Shawn and Destiny Jackson, both 26 and both American, were driving home from a child’s basketball game when ICE blasted their car with tear gas and stun grenades, forcing them to perform CPR on their 6-month-old baby. Local police chiefs are reporting that their own off-duty officers—the…

Democrats investigated over video message to troops Five Democratic lawmakers revealed last week that they are being investigated by the Justice Department for participating in a 90-second video in which they reminded military personnel of their duty to refuse illegal orders. Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), who served in Iraq with the CIA, said she learned of the investigation after being contacted by federal prosecutors. “It’s legal intimidation and physical intimidation meant to get you to shut up,” Slotkin said of the probe. Reps. Maggie Goodlander (D-N.H.), Jason Crow (D-Colo.), Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.), and Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pa.) have also been contacted by prosecutors. Trump and other administration officials have called the video “seditious.” Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), a retired Navy captain, sued Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last week over his attempt…

Emmylou Harris is one of Americana’s great collaborators, said Fiona Sturges in The Guardian (U.K.). Over the past five decades, she’s duetted with everyone from Johnny Cash to Bob Dylan and Alison Krauss. She made her breakthrough in the 1970s in a musical partnership with country-rock pioneer Gram Parsons. They were an odd pairing. Parsons, who died of an accidental overdose at 26, was infamous for his prodigious cocaine intake; she was a single mother who knitted on the tour bus. “I had that wonderful yarn that they made the fishermen’s sweaters from,” says Harris, 78. “I would just sit there amid all the craziness and knit away.” She had more in common with country icons Linda Ronstadt and Dolly Parton, with whom she recorded the 1987 album Trio. “There…

■ Former U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema is being sued for $75,000 for allegedly seducing a member of her Senate security detail and breaking up his “good and loving” 14-year marriage. The bodyguard’s ex-wife, Heather Ammel, claims in her lawsuit that the Arizona lawmaker’s affair with Matthew Ammel, 39, began around 2023. The pair attended Green Day and Taylor Swift concerts together, and Sinema allegedly told Matthew—a veteran with PTSD—he should bring MDMA on a work trip so “she could guide him through a psychedelic experience.” A Democrat turned independent, Sinema, 49, left Congress in 2025 and became a lobbyist for psychedelics and cryptocurrencies. She is being sued under North Carolina’s so-called home-wrecker law, which lets people seek damages from their ex-spouses’ lovers. ■ Kiefer Sutherland was arrested in Los Angeles…

Jonathan Chait The Atlantic The FBI’s raid on a Washington Post journalist’s house “stomps on a once-inviolable right,” said Jonathan Chait. American courts have long recognized that the press has a First Amendment right to gather and expose nonpublic information. But that didn’t stop federal agents from searching the home of Post reporter Hannah Natanson last week, seizing her laptops and mobile phones “allegedly as part of a leak investigation.” The unprecedented raid is an alarming escalation of Donald Trump’s war on independent journalism. Trump has repeatedly described reporting or commentary he doesn’t like as “illegal,” and “has made it plain that owners of large media firms should expect much friendlier regulatory treatment if they bring to heel the journalists they employ.” That policy has turned Paramount’s CBS News into…

Anoosh Chakelian The New Statesman Londoners are living in an era of “chaos creep,” said Anoosh Chakelian. Sure, the murder rate has fallen, and some districts have been gentrified. In one borough that used to be rife with muggings at knifepoint, “you’re now more likely to be sold matcha.” Yet while stabbings are down, crimes like car theft and shoplifting are up. Even on posh streets full of “babyccino-sipping toddlers” and “Lululemon-clad running clubs,” anyone standing on the sidewalk is liable to have “their phone nicked by a balaclavaed kid whizzing past on a moped.” And don’t expect the police to help. Because of budget cuts by earlier Conservative governments, they now solve an inexcusably low 7.3% of crimes. Shoplifters openly sell their plunder from “car boots, corner shops, or…

“It’s hard to be shocked by anything the Trump administration does,” said Joan Walsh in The Nation. But I was stunned this week when Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told Fox News there was no need for the Justice Department to investigate Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who shot dead Renee Good on a Minneapolis street. Millions of Americans had already watched cellphone video of the incident, he said, and understood Ross was “forced to defend himself” to avoid being run over by Good’s SUV. But polls show most Americans have drawn the opposite conclusion: that Ross was at fault, and his life was never in danger. A frame-by-frame analysis of all available cellphone footage by The New York Times shows Ross had pulled his legs and body away from…

“The U.N. was created not to take mankind to heaven, but to save humanity from hell.” Dag Hammarskjöld, quoted in China Daily “Life isn’t a matter of milestones, but of moments.” Rose Kennedy, quoted in the Manila Bulletin “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.” Alberto Brandolini, quoted in The Argument “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” Robert Ingersoll, quoted in Vanguard (Nigeria) “You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.” Ronald Reagan,…

■ Palantir’s Big Brother app aids ICE Palantir is building a “nearly all-encompassing” surveillance tool for ICE to find its immigration targets, said Joseph Cox in 404 Media. Called the “Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement (ELITE),” it produces a digital map of potential deportation targets, and ICE officers “can then select people one by one” or “draw a shape on the map” to round up larger groups. Selecting a person pulls up a “dossier” of biographical information, including names and addresses compiled by other government sources, such as Health and Human Services. Laura Rivera, an attorney who focuses on immigrant rights, said the surveillance tool is the means by which “ICE is going into communities and identifying people for arrest in real time.” ■ Private firms could join…

In a major milestone, 7 in 10 U.S. cancer patients now survive at least five years after diagnosis, up from just half in the 1970s. The figure, from the American Cancer Society’s new annual report, is based on diagnoses made between 2015 and 2021. Since 1991, an estimated 4.8 million cancer deaths have been averted, largely due to falling smoking rates and major advances in care. Many cancers that were once rapidly fatal are now managed as chronic conditions. Among the biggest breakthroughs is immunotherapy, which has helped to nearly double the five-year survival rate for multiple myeloma. Targeted therapies, designed to go after specific genetic or molecular flaws in cancer cells, have also extended patients’ survival, all while causing fewer side effects than chemo or radiation. Although breast and…

Novelist and writing teacher Jenna Blum is the author of the 2004 best seller Those Who Save Us. Her new thriller, Murder Your Darlings, is about a female novelist who falls into an affair with a famous male peer hounded by a possibly homicidal stalker. Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh (1964). I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was 4 (my dad was a CBS newswriter), and when I read Harriet, I thought: Aha! Somebody sees me. Harriet M. Welsch was my companion, in the way fictional characters were and continue to be some of my closest friends. Fear of Flying by Erica Jong (1973). As a tween, I stole this novel with its provocative nude-woman cover off my mom’s shelf because sex. But in my 20s it…

On her third album, Madison Beer can be heard at times “singing with the casual sultriness of someone who eats boys for breakfast,” said Lydia Wei in Paste. It’s a welcome dose of lightness from a talented vocalist who was touted by Justin Bieber as a future star when she was just 13. She crashed before she ever really made it, but at 26, she’s “perhaps finally ready to cut loose” because on Locket, she’s “stepping away from sleepy slo-fi pop,” stringing together “pop confection after pop confection.” The “sonically diverse” 11-song set includes a couple of “dark-siren synth-pop bangers,” a “booty-call yearner reimagined as a ’60s crooner jam,” and a “twinkly” R&B bedroom ballad that has Beer wittily imagining an ex dead—with angel wings. The record “represents a creative…

Pregnancy tests the resolve of four Belgian teenagers. “Understated, graceful, and moving,” this Belgian drama from the celebrated Dardenne brothers is, to me, “the first great film of 2026,” said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast. Winner of Best Screenplay at Cannes, Young Mothers ushers viewers into a shelter for single young mothers to portray four of its teenage residents. Each faces challenging circumstances, and the Dardennes’ naturalistic touch and deep empathy for people on the margins are once again “on full display” in a movie that’s “of a piece with their prior masterworks,” including Rosetta, The Kid With a Bike, and Two Days, One Night. Because the Dardennes have four protagonists here instead of one, said Justin Chang in The New Yorker, “they lean more on exposition, which doesn’t…

“The best rye whiskey should be the spicy-sweet backbone of your bar cart, holding together classic cocktails like a Manhattan or a Sazerac,” said Sam Stone in Bon Appétit. Our editors put 12 widely available young ryes to a blind taste test, favoring those that delivered “an herbal pepperiness” smoothly integrated with a touch of warm spice and a bit of sweetness. Below are our top three, unranked: Sazerac Rye ($32). Sazerac is “softer, sweeter, and rounder than some of its peers,” making it a favorite of bourbon lovers and a great choice for a Manhattan. Michter’s Rye ($48). Michter’s opens its seduction with vanilla, then brings “a universe of other flavors,” from “caramel” to “baked goods” to “a fresh cut grass pepperiness.” Rittenhouse Rye ($29). This bold but well-structured…

Palm Beach’s ‘secret’ island getaway “There’s no bad time to spend a day on Peanut Island,” said Heema Patel in Travel + Leisure. Known locally as “the Nut,” the 79-acre car-free getaway that sits in the intracoastal waterway just northwest of Palm Beach is “one of South Florida’s best-kept secrets.” Accessible by the Peanut Island Shuttle Boat or private watercraft, the island offers the laid-back vibe, clear-blue waters, and ring of beachline you’d expect in the Caribbean. The only services are restrooms, showers, and barbecue grills, and with no hotels or restaurants, “the island manages to feel untouched.” A bunker for President Kennedy was built here during the Cold War, but since a 2005 renovation of the island’s parkland, it has welcomed kayakers, snorkelers, and other day-trippers to its man-made…

Beyond Meat is going way beyond meat, said Clint Rainey in Fast Company. The plant-based-meat pioneer announced last week it is pivoting to sports drinks. Its new beverage line, called Immerse, comes in three flavors—lemon-lime, orange-tangerine, and peach-mango—and is stuffed with protein, electrolytes, and something called “tapioca fiber,” which is derived from the cassava plant. The new “functional beverage” is part of a total relaunch for Beyond Meat, now simply named Beyond, which has shifted to a “complete-protein brand” after watching its stock fall 99% from its 2019 peak, when its market capitalization topped $10 billion. Beyond and its fans blame Big Beef for “smearing alt-meats as unhealthy, ultra-processed, and too fake.” But Beyond chief executive Ethan Brown hasn’t given in. He has begun to highlight “plants’ distinct nutritional advantages,…

The family-run nonprofit ACEing Autism (aceingautism.org) has organized tennis programs for thousands of autistic children across the country for nearly two decades. Founded by Richard Spurling, a former collegiate tennis player, and his wife, Dr. Shafali Jeste, a behavioral child neurologist, the group hosts weekly tennis clinics for kids with autism at some 200 facilities nationwide. Its affordable clinics are meant to help kids meet new friends and improve hand-eye coordination, focus, and social and communication skills. Paired with one or two volunteers each, kids participate in adaptive warm-ups, learn how to volley and hit a backhand, and engage in other personalized motor-skill exercises. Last summer, ACEing Autism led a clinic for nearly 100 children and adults with special needs in Flushing Meadows, the site of the U.S. Open. Each…

Andy Kessler The Wall Street Journal There’s an important place in the world for nonconformists, said Andy Kessler. Every company leader should at the very least take one out to lunch. Think if IBM had done that with those “weird, longish-haired geeks” Bill Gates and Paul Allen. IBM disdained the “dippy hippies and yippies.” It missed out. Perhaps the most compelling example is Elon Musk, who has “made a career, and billions of dollars, out of being a nonconformist.” He made electric cars when everyone thought he was nuts. “But Musk’s success was because he was crazy and did things that were nonconforming before they weren’t.” His rogue ideas are now mainstream. In business, we are often told to “think outside the box.” What box? Where are the lines? That’s…

Erich von Däniken was the father of the “ancient aliens” theory. In his book Chariots of the Gods (1968), he contended that aliens visited Earth thousands of years ago, mated with humans, and gifted them the tools needed to build wonders like Egypt’s Great Pyramids. A rust-resistant rod in an Indian temple was made of celestial alloy, he claimed, while the geoglyphs of Peru were spaceship landing strips. Archaeologists dismissed his theories as crackpottery, but readers ate up von Däniken’s folksy prose and sweeping pseudoscience. NBC produced a documentary, and von Däniken went on to write more than 40 books, selling over 70 million copies. Chariots’ success turned the author into a true believer. “When I wrote it I was not at all convinced,” he said, but by the second…