the week- Usa

After the beating

Democrats reckon with a bruising defeat—and how to rebuild their party

Pages 6 and 18

Editor’s letter

When Donald Trump announced this week that he would choose Marco Rubio as his secretary of state, it seemed for a brief moment that Trump might be making some kind of peace with the Republican Party he had shattered, humiliated, and reassembled. Yes, the “Little Marco” sobriquet that Trump gave Rubio eight years ago would be shadowing the Florida senator all the way to the State Department. But by refashioning himself as a Trump team player Rubio had regained some semblance of power and even dignity. It looked like Trump had decided to take the win, and staff his administration with Capitol Hill players like Rubio and New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik. Rubio even gained an endorsement from the Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner, who seems to have understood that the country’s best bet in the Trump II era was that the Cabinet would be staffed by people like Rubio.

Then Rubio, and the rest of the country, got to find out the company that he’ll be keeping. First came plans for a defense sec-

retary, Pete Hegseth, elevated directly from Fox News and a border czar, Tom Homan, godfather of the unconscionable border policy of family separation. Then came the choice of Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic representative and presidential candidate known for her conciliatory words for Vladimir Putin and Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, for director of national intelligence. And then for attorney general, Trump has named Matt Gaetz, the congressman known for his efforts to blow up House leadership and a tawdry scandal of alleged sex trafficking. It is hard to find anything redeeming here. Maybe the only hopeful news of the week is that GOP senators overrode Trump’s request and chose John Thune (R-S.D.), an establishment Republican who opposed efforts to overturn the 2020 election, to lead their new majority. Let’s hope they keep that spine. If there was ever a time for the Senate to vigorously assert its constitutional power of “advice and consent” on presidential appointments, surely this is it.

LEISURE

27

& Drink An unconventional turkey roast; inventive twists on Texas tacos 28

A slow ascent on Everest’s ancient paths; looking for moose in Maine

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The great Bitcoin frenzy; the Trump stock rally; China’s export spike

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Jerome Powell stands his ground at the Fed; a very pricey steak dinner

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Musk’s White House role; prediction markets win big; Warren Buffett’s hoard

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Trump’s MAGA administration takes shape

What happened

President-elect Donald Trump began tapping hard-liners and loyalists to serve in his administration this week, issuing a flurry of Cabinet nominations and announcing that Elon Musk would assume a role helping to “dismantle” the federal bureaucracy. Trump rattled the Pentagon by naming Fox & Friends co-host Pete Hegseth, a former Army National Guard captain with no executive experience, to be defense secretary. Hegseth is an opponent of diversity and equity initiatives in the military; Trump has promised that under his presidency “the woke stuff will be gone.” For attorney general, he nominated Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, a pit bull Trump defender who is under congressional investigation for alleged sexual misconduct, illicit drug use, and misuse of campaign funds. For head of Homeland Security, Trump chose South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, a MAGA favorite who once gifted Trump a 4-foot replica of Mount Rushmore with his own likeness included, and in a recent memoir boasted of shooting dead her misbehaving dog. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, a moderate, was nominated for secretary of state.

Clockwise: Hegseth, Homan, Gaetz, Noem

Trump named former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard—who has echoed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s talking points on Ukraine—as national intelligence director; Florida Rep. Mike Waltz, a former Green Beret, to be national security adviser; New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, a staunch defender of Israel, as U.N. ambassador; and immigration hard-liner Tom Homan as his “border czar.” Trump demanded Senate Republicans embrace “recess appointments,” which would allow him to install his Cabinet picks without Senate confirmation. Senate leaders “must agree” to such appointments so his selections can be confirmed “IMMEDIATELY,” he wrote on Truth Social.

Trump announced that Musk and former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy will lead a new “Department of Government Efficiency.” The pair will “slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies,” he said. Trump met with President Biden in the White House, where the two had a jovial exchange and Biden promised a smooth transition. “I very much appreciate that, Joe,” said Trump, who in 2020 refused to meet with Biden after the Democrat won the presidency.

What the editorials said Trump’s demand that the Senate accommodate recess appointments must be soundly rejected, said National Review. The Framers allowed for temporary appointments when the Senate was at recess to ensure continuity of government, but to let Trump use that arcane rule to ram through his picks without confirmation would “undermine” a key check on the president’s power. Republicans “will have a clear majority” of at least 52 seats, said The Washington Post. Trump’s strong-arming suggests he wants to “elevate appointees whom even some Republicans cannot tolerate.”

What next?

With his appointment of Homan as border czar, Trump is advancing his promise to conduct “the largest deportation operation” in U.S. history, said The Wall Street Journal. How that will unfold depends on just what Trump envisions. In recent interviews, Homan said the priority will be migrants who pose “public-safety threats and national-security threats,” and rejected the idea of “mass sweeps.” That’s a positive sign Trump realizes “support will ebb if the public sees crying children as their parents are deported” or “long-settled families” torn apart.

What the columnists said Dream on, said Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times. As acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Trump’s first term, Homan executed Trump’s family separation policy. He’s promised a “historic deportation operation” in which no undocumented immigrant is “off the table.” Meanwhile, Trump has named as deputy chief of staff the anti-immigrant zealot Stephen Miller, who’s worked up plans to have the National Guard round up migrants “en masse” and warehouse them in military camps. This is what’s coming, and “no one should be shocked” when it happens.

Trump’s Hegseth pick “shocked Washington,” said Joe Gould in Politico. Even those “braced for surprises” were stunned at his nomination of a TV host with no Beltway or defense policy experience to lead the world’s most powerful military, and a department with a budget over $800 billion. “Who the f--- is this guy?” said one defense industry lobbyist. His selection “drew immediate backlash” from veteran groups—and amplified fears Trump plans “a swift and divisive overhaul at the Pentagon.”

Hegseth “is an unconventional pick,” said John Noonan in National Review. But he’s got a serious pedigree as an Iraq and Afghanistan veteran and as a graduate of Princeton and Harvard. There’s deep “rot” at the Pentagon and it needs a “jolt to its system” that just such an outsider can deliver. I’ve dealt with Hegseth, and he’s a horror show, said William Kristol in The Bulwark. “Beyond unqualified,” Hegseth is an “opportunistic” sycophant who’d let Trump run roughshod over the Pentagon. His nomination must be defeated.

Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) was elected Senate majority leader this week, said David Morgan and Bo Erickson in Reuters—a new era for the Senate GOP after nearly two decades under Sen. Mitch McConnell. “An even-tempered institutionalist,” Thune won a tight election despite a “public pressure campaign” from MAGA bigwigs including Elon Musk and Sean Hannity, who rallied behind Florida Sen. Rick Scott. Thune’s win is a sign that next year the Senate “could retain some degree of independence from Trump,” who refrained from endorsing a candidate. As Trump sets about revamping the federal government, there are signs he’s eyeing a Pentagon makeover, said Vivian Salama in The Wall Street Journal. His transition team is mulling an executive order to establish a “warrior board” that would review three- and four-star generals and recommend removal for those “lacking in requisite leadership qualities.” It looks, said Eric Carpenter, a military-law expert, “like an administration getting ready to purge anyone who will not be a yes-man.”

Trump is fulfilling what he sees as his mandate, said Stephen Collinson in CNN.com: building a “governing team in his own hard-line MAGA image.” His picks will “send shudders down liberals’ spines,” and that’s “part of the point.” With the common trait of “ultra-loyalty to Trump,” they’re on board with his plan to “shred the regulatory state and tell the rest of the world that from now on, it’s America First.” Whether the Senate will confirm picks such as Gaetz and Gabbard remains to be seen, but Trump voters who hoped for “shake-ups in Washington” are getting what they asked for—and what Harris voters feared.

...and How They Were Covered

Trump legal cases wither as he vows revenge

What happened

The four legal cases against Donald Trump crumbled this week, as prosecutors and judges began winding down proceedings involving the president-elect. Judge Juan Merchan delayed sentencing for Trump’s 34 felony convictions for falsifying business records in the New York hush money case—the only case that reached trial—and aides said he was considering tossing the case in light of the Supreme Court’s July ruling granting broad presidential immunity. The election interference case in Georgia, where Trump is accused of trying to rig the 2020 vote count, remained scheduled for hearings next month, but prosecutors had yet to decide whether to proceed against Trump’s co-defendants without him. Special counsel Jack Smith took a first step last week toward dismantling the remaining two federal cases—regarding Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election and his alleged retention of classified documents after leaving office—by asking a judge for a postponement.

Trump said last month that he would fire Smith “within two seconds” of taking office. Smith plans to step down before then, his associates said this week, once he has submitted the official report detailing his charging decisions. After the inauguration, though, Smith may face his own charges. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) has requested that he preserve all records, a precursor to congressional investigation. And Trump has said those who accused him, including Smith, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, and New York Attorney General Letitia James, should be arrested. “The hunters are about to become the hunted,” said former White House strategist Steve Bannon.

What the columnists said “This feels like thin gruel” for anyone who hoped juries might hold Trump accountable, said Elie Honig in New York magazine. Justice Department policy holds that sitting presidents can’t be prosecuted for federal crimes, so Trump is off the hook. At least we heard incriminating testimony in the hush money trial in May, and we can still hope that Attorney General Merrick Garland will publish Smith’s final report for “the history books, and as a warning to the American public.”

“Voters have spoken,” said Andrew C. McCarthy in National Review. The facts of the four cases have been in the press for months, and Americans are thoroughly familiar with them. Yet voters determined that Trump should be returned to the White House in spite of all that litigation—or maybe because of it. Many were surely repulsed by the Democrats’ nakedly partisan “lawfare campaign.” It’s appropriate that Smith is pulling back, and the other prosecutors and judges should follow suit. “Further prosecution of the incoming president is not in the national interest.”

But neither is retaliation against “civil servants,” said Ruth Marcus in The Washington Post. Trump plans to purge the Justice Department of anyone who worked on Smith’s team. Worse, he intends to sic his attorney general on Smith himself, despite there being “no evidence” the prosecutor violated any law. While this was all predictable, “it’s no less chilling.” And with Trump given carte blanche by the Supreme Court to commit crimes in office, “the real abuse of the system, I fear, will be what comes next.”

Ukraine readies for drastic change in U.S. alliance

What happened

War-battered Ukraine this week grappled with the ramifications of the U.S. election, as President-elect Donald Trump reportedly asked Vladimir Putin in a call not to escalate the conflict, even as 50,000 Russian and North Korean troops began their attempt to drive Ukrainians out of the Russian region of Kursk. The Kremlin denied a call occurred between Putin and Trump, who has claimed he could bring peace to Ukraine “within 24 hours.” Russia struck Ukraine with hundreds of drones, bombs, and missiles over the past week, targeting residential neighborhoods in Odesa and using camera-enhanced drones to “hunt” civilians leaving their homes in Kherson. Ukraine responded with 84 drones launched at Russian territory, including a 34-drone attack on Moscow that shut down airports and injured five.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who praised Trump’s “peace through strength” approach, congratulated him in a call that included Elon Musk, who has reportedly been in regular contact with Putin. Still, Donald Trump Jr. taunted Zelensky with an Instagram post that read “You’re 38 days from losing your allowance.” The Biden administration vowed to fast-track the remaining $6 billion in congressionally approved aid and let U.S. military contractors enter Ukraine to help maintain military equipment. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told NATO officials that “every dollar we have at our disposal will be pushed out the door between now and Jan. 20,” to help Ukraine fight or “negotiate a peace from a position of strength.”

What the columnists said

Trump had better realize soon that “Putin is not his friend,” said Fred Kaplan in Slate. Trump has derided Zelensky as “the greatest salesman in history” for securing $175 billion in U.S. aid, and “the entire MAGA wing of the Republican Party” backs Trump’s desire for a thaw with Russia. But Putin has made no sign that he plans to grant favors to the leader of a nation he still deems to be Russia’s mortal geopolitical enemy.

It’s Zelensky, actually, who “may welcome Trump’s victory,” said The Economist. With the Biden administration preoccupied with avoiding escalation, Ukrainian leaders increasingly think “a wild-card president” could hardly be worse. Trump wants a peace plan. The question is whether it will be one that forces Ukraine to cede land with no real restraints on Putin, or a deal that trades territory for Western military and financial support, plus possible NATO membership.

Security matters more than Ukraine’s prewar borders now, said Marc Champion in Bloomberg. Trump will “look less like a deal-making genius” if he chooses a settlement that forces Ukraine to disarm without international security guarantees. That all but invites a repeat invasion, and Russia could then marshal Ukrainian conscripts and vast Ukrainian deposits of natural gas and rare-earth minerals. Ukraine could survive without NATO membership. But Ukrainian “demilitarization,” a central goal for Putin, must not be “part of the package.”

Controversy of the Week

Democrats: Where does the party go from here?

As Democrats “sift through the wreckage of their shattered coalition,” one question should jump out at them, said Ruy Teixeira in The Liberal Patriot: “Who is the Democratic Party for, exactly?” It was no surprise last week that Donald Trump made further inroads with his base of white, working-class men. But the Republican also improved on his 2020 vote share with Latinos, Asians, urban voters, and young voters. Even women, predicted to turn out in droves to protect abortion rights, voted for Vice President Kamala Harris by a smaller margin than for Joe Biden in 2020. Most devastating to Democrats’ self-image, voters with household incomes below $50,000—and below $100,000—broke Trump’s way, making it official “that the GOP has become the party of America’s working class.” Some liberals are already blaming “dumb workers for not knowing their own interests.” But sneering won’t revive the fortunes of a party that desperately needs to rebuild its bond with “the common man and woman.” There is no quick fix, said Alex Gabriel in The Hill. But the first step, clearly, is to accept that the “progressive agenda, while vital in many ways, has become increasingly untethered from the concerns of the average voter.”

district, and Ruben Gallego, 44, who took an Arizona Senate seat, campaigned as “blue-collar populists”—ordinary people just as fed up as their neighbors with high prices and “corporate greed.” In the success of these young pragmatists, Democrats “have the beginnings” of a new winning formula.

Style is everything, said Maureen Dowd, also in the Times. Democrats in the Trump years became the party of “condescension and cancellation.” As the nation’s self-appointed language police, they shamed anyone not fluent in gender-fluid pronouns and “faculty-lounge terminology” like “BIPOC” and “Latinx.” They embraced unpopular, academic ideas like defunding the police and letting biological males play women’s sports. This intellectual and moral preening played well with white, affluent college graduates—the only cohort where Democrats made gains last week—but it “alienated half the country, or more.”

“Progressives aren’t the problem,” said Bob Hennelly in Salon. On issue after issue—health care, climate, gun control, housing— working-class voters prefer progressive policies to Republican ones. Those millions of votes were there for Harris’ taking, until she decided to campaign with former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney and run as a Glock-wielding, pro-business centrist. The Democrats who won where Harris lost “ran to the left on economic issues,” said David Leonhardt in The New York Times. Candidates like Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, 36, re-elected in a ruby-red Washington state

Good week for:

■ Costco has recalled some 80,000 pounds of Kirkland-brand butter because its printed label did not include the obvious warning “Contains Milk.” Because milk is a potential allergen, the Food and Drug Administration requires butter packaging to list milk as an ingredient, and to display a separate “Contains Milk” warning. The recall has been designated “Class II,” meaning consumers are at notional risk of “temporary or medically reversible adverse health consequences.”

■ A cruise company is offering a four-year “Skip Forward” package for Americans looking to escape the Donald Trump presidency. The cruise aboard the Villa Vie Odyssey costs $255,999 for an individual traveler and will include stops on all seven continents. Villa Vie says the offer isn’t “meant to stir political uproar, but to offer a real way for people who are disappointed with the election results to get away from reality.”

This is “2004 all over again,” said Nate Silver in his Substack newsletter. John Kerry’s defeat that year left Democrats distraught, but in 2008 Barack Obama “romped” to victory and it was Republicans wondering if and how they’d ever win again. Given Trump’s likely excesses over the next four years, that pattern could easily repeat—especially as Trump beat Harris by only 2 percentage points. Democrats have as much to learn from Trump’s victory as from their own defeat, said Ezra Klein in The New York Times. Even at 78, Trump’s comfort with new forms of media—from AI memes to niche podcasts—contrasted favorably with Harris’ cautious, traditional campaign of speeches and workshopped talking points. Yes, Democrats can draw comfort from previous resurrections in 2008 and 1992, but “what comes next needs to be new.”

Bunker diplomacy, after the o ice of South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol confirmed to CNN that Yoon is working on his golf game “for the first time in eight years” to prepare for the return of Donald Trump to the Oval O ice. Yoon’s decision to pick up his clubs again was apparently based on “the advice of those around him.”

Central planning, after reports that Russia may create a “ministry of sex” to boost the nation’s plunging birthrate. One policy under consideration is a suspension of internet access from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m., to encourage couples to seek more birthrate-raising forms of entertainment. Limitlessness, after Hertz apologized for a clerk who slapped a $10,000 surcharge on the bill of a customer who drove 25,000 miles on a monthlong “unlimited miles” rental deal. “We sincerely regret this customer’s experience,” said Hertz, confirming that unlimited means without limits.

Bad week for:

Public safety, after Argentina’s anti-bureaucracy czar called for the scrapping of a 1974 law that makes the national president the godparent of every family’s seventh child to prevent them turning into a werewolf. In an X post, Federico Sturzenegger said the medieval myth of the lobizón “has no place in a modern democracy.”

Tie-ins, after thousands of dolls for the new Wicked movie were pulled from stores because a URL on their packaging directed children to Wicked.com, a porn site. “Parents are advised that the misprinted, incorrect website is not appropriate for children,” said toymaker Mattel. Making a mark, after the New Orleans Saints’ newly hired interim head coach Darren Rizzi confessed to clogging the toilet during his first trip to the head coach’s private bathroom. “I’m like, ‘OK, this is not really a great start to the day,’” Rizzi told reporters.

In other news

Court blocks Louisiana’s Ten Commandments law

A federal judge this week temporarily blocked a Louisiana law mandating that public schools display the Ten Commandments in their classrooms. A coalition of parents—Jewish, Christian, Unitarian Universalist and nonreligious— had sued the state, arguing that the law interfered with their First Amendment right to raise their children with whatever religious values they want. U.S. District Judge John W. deGravelles agreed, ruling that the law—signed by Republican Gov. Jeff Landry in June and set to take effect on Jan. 1—is “unconstitutional on its face and in every application.” State officials defended the law, the first of its kind in the nation, arguing the documents were intended to educate children on the historical significance of the Ten Commandments, not to religiously indoctrinate them. Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said that she would “immediately appeal” the ruling.

The U.S. at a Glance

Sacramento Blue wall: Numerous Democratic governors this week vowed to oppose the second Donald Trump administration.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom said his state was “ready to fight” and called for a special session of the state legislature to protect California’s progressive policies. He argued that the effects of a second Trump presidency on California “may be significant and immediate.” Trump responded by saying Newsom was “trying to KILL” his state. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul unveiled plans to meet regularly with Attorney General Letitia James to coordinate legal strategies on issues like reproductive rights, civil rights, and immigration. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker also announced the creation of Governors Safeguarding Democracy, a group that will focus on defending state institutions, without providing a specific plan. One factor in the organizing: The election has left a Democratic leadership void that the governors, and other ambitious Democrats, are hoping to fill.

Phoenix

Democratic win: Arizona elected its first Latino senator this week when Democrat Ruben Gallego defeated Republican Kari Lake.

An Iraq veteran and five-term House member, Gallego is the son of Mexican and Colombian immigrants. He was once known as a vocal progressive, but he remade himself into an even-keeled centrist for this campaign, promising to fight for veterans, immigration reform, and reproductive rights. Gallego’s victory over Lake, a Donald Trump ally and fervent promoter of claims that the 2020 election was stolen, marks the continuation of a streak of Democratic wins in Arizona Senate races, where Republicans had won every Senate contest for decades until Trump’s 2016 election. But Trump still defeated Vice President Kamala Harris in the state last week. Gallego will replace Kyrsten Sinema, an independent who left the Democratic Party in 2022. “Gracias, Arizona!” he wrote on social media when the results were confirmed.

Green Lake, Wis.

Lake mystery: A Wisconsin man who went missing in August is now thought to have faked his disappearance and run away to Europe, state officials announced this week. Ryan Borgwardt, a 45-year-old father of three, didn’t return from a kayaking trip in Green Lake, Wis., on Aug. 12. Search divers never recovered a body, but Borgwardt’s wallet, keys, kayak, and fishing rod were found, and a life jacket was floating on the lake. Investigators believe that Borgwardt faked his death after taking out a $375,000 life insurance policy. Green Lake County Sheriff Mark Podoll said that the day after Borgwardt vanished Canadian law enforcement ran a new passport that Borgwardt had gotten. He’d also cleared his browser history and tried to transfer money into a foreign bank account. Authorities discovered he’d been regularly emailing a woman in Uzbekistan. “We don’t know where he is,” said Podoll, “but he is not in our lake.”

Boston

Espionage Act: A federal judge this week sentenced Jack Teixeira, an airman who leaked highly classified military documents last year, to 15 years in prison. Teixeira, 22, was an information technology specialist in the Massachusetts Air National Guard when he shared defense secrets, including details about Ukrainian troop movements, on the social media platform Discord. He pleaded guilty earlier this year to six counts of willful retention and transmission of national defense information in violation of the Espionage Act. The leak raised questions about how a low-level airman gained the clearance needed to access such sensitive material. “You are young,” said Judge Indira Talwani, “but it is such a serious crime.” A CIA employee who worked overseas, Asif Rahman, was also indicted last week on charges of leaking classified documents revealing Israel’s plans to retaliate against Iran last month. He was arrested in Cambodia this week and brought to Guam.

West Milford, N.J.

Richmond, Va.

Racist provocations: Black people across the country, including young teens, received anonymous racist text messages in the days after the election telling them they’d been “selected to pick cotton at the nearest plantation” or “chosen to be a slave.” Some of the first reports came from Virginia, where the state attorney general’s office began investigating last week. Americans in at least 30 states, including Alabama, New York, and North Carolina, along with Washington, D.C., have received the messages since then. The FCC and FBI are investigating the texts, which were sent with TextNow, a provider that lets users create phone numbers for no charge. Masked men waving Nazi flags also shouted racist and antisemitic slurs outside of an American Legion Post in Howell, Mich., last week, during a performance of The Diary of Anne Frank. “To have that much hatred in them, it makes no sense to me,” said veteran Mark Epley.

Wildfires: New York and New Jersey experienced an unusual string of wildfires this week as the region’s drought continued. An 18-year-old New York parks employee died fighting a blaze that had spread 3,000 acres across Passaic County, N.J., and Orange County, N.Y. A 39-acre fire also roared in New Jersey’s Palisades, across the Hudson River from Manhattan, as hundreds of brush fires popped up across the state. New Jersey has had 306 wildfires since Oct. 20, compared with 28 in the same period last year. This October was the state’s driest on record. New York City has been under a drought watch since Nov. 2—its first in over 20 years. A fire even started in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. Residents from Delaware to Massachusetts were under red flag warnings to be careful lighting grills and cigarettes, and 48 states—all but Alaska and Kentucky—faced drought conditions. “We’ve been running our folks ragged,” said N.J. Forest Fire Service chief Bill Donnelly.

London

The World at a Glance

Berlin

Welby: Remorseful

Archbishop steps down: Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby resigned this week as head of the Church of England—and spiritual leader of 85 million Anglicans worldwide—after a report found he had covered up decades of sexual abuse by a volunteer at Christian summer camps. The report said the volunteer, British lawyer John Smyth, had caned more than 100 boys and young men until they bled and had sexually and psychologically abused them, telling them the “way to Christ was through suffering.” The attacks occurred in England, Zimbabwe, and South Africa from the 1970s until Smyth’s death in 2018, making him possibly “the most prolific serial abuser” in church history, the report said. Welby learned about the scandal in 2013 but didn’t make sure police were alerted. He apologized, saying he was stepping down to “take personal and institutional responsibility.”

Mexico City

Trump means tariffs and migrants: Donald Trump’s return to the White House is “nothing to worry about,” Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum assured Mexicans last week. But the markets took a different view. Right after the election, Mexico’s peso fell to a two-year low against the dollar. And foreign investment has been slumping for weeks, because Trump said during the campaign that he would slap a 25 percent tariff on goods from Mexico unless it does more to stop “the onslaught of criminals and drugs” crossing the border. Trump has also threatened to deport millions of undocumented migrants to Mexico. Sheinbaum is in for “quite a challenge,” said political analyst Carlos Pérez Ricart. “Four years of ‘State of Emergency’ await her.”

Amsterdam

Government collapses: Germany’s unwieldy governing coalition imploded last week when Chancellor Olaf Scholz fired Finance Minister Christian Lindner after a fight over the budget. Lindner’s pro-business Free Democrats withdrew from the coalition, leaving Scholz’s center-right Social Democrats and the leftist Greens without a majority. Scholz accused Lindner of “small-minded” partisan demands, like tax cuts for the rich, at a time when Europe is facing an economic challenge with the coming presidency of Donald Trump. Germany will have to foot a vastly greater share of European military spending if Trump follows through on his threats to cut U.S. support for Ukraine. A new election is expected in February.

Attack on Jews: Mobs of men, apparently responding to online calls for a “Jew hunt,” chased down and bludgeoned Israeli soccer fans in Amsterdam last week after a match between Israel’s Maccabi Tel Aviv and a local Jewish-identified team, Ajax. Some of the attackers shouted, “Free Palestine!” as they bashed fleeing Israelis with clubs and blasted them with fireworks. The attackers “had fire in their eyes,” said Maccabi fan Ofek Ziv, who was hit in the head with a rock as he left the stadium. Tensions had been high ahead of the game. Israeli fans had gathered the night before, chanting anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian slogans— including boasting that there were “no children left in Gaza”— and ripping down and burning a Palestinian flag. After Israelis vandalized a taxi, other taxi drivers, most of whom are of Turkish or Moroccan immigrant descent, organized online to lash out in response. Five Israeli fans were treated at hospitals and released. Dutch police arrested dozens of suspects. Amsterdam banned demonstrations for three days, but the unrest continued this week, with riot police breaking up a pro-Palestinian protest in Dam Square. A day later, dozens of people, some brandishing sticks and lighting firecrackers, set fire to a tram. Dutch authorities condemned what they called a clear escalation of the antisemitism that has been on the rise across Europe since the Israel-Hamas war started last year. Paris police this week deployed 4,000 officers and 1,600 stadium staff to bolster security at a France-Israel soccer match. “What happened over the past few days,” said Amsterdam Mayor Femke Halsema, “was a toxic cocktail of antisemitism, football hooliganism, and anger over the conflicts” in the Middle East.

Port-au-Prince, Haiti

Prime minister ousted: Haiti’s transitional ruling council this week fired Prime Minister Garry Conille after just six months in office, rattling an already rocky effort to retake the country from the gangs that control most of it. It chose businessman Alix Didier Fils-Aimé to replace him. The nine-member ruling council wants to pave the way for elections to be held in 2026—with help from a Kenya-led multinational police mission—but it has been plagued by infighting and corruption allegations. As Fils-Aimé was being sworn in, gang members shot at a Spirit Airlines flight that was landing in Port-au-Prince, slightly injuring a flight attendant and forcing the plane to divert to the Dominican Republic. Airlines responded by canceling all flights to and from Haiti.

The World at a Glance

Moscow

Jail time for criticizing war: A Moscow court sentenced a Ukrainian-born pediatrician to five and a half years in prison this week after she was accused of telling a 7-year-old patient that his father, a Russian soldier killed in Ukraine, deserved his fate. Nadezhda Buyanova, 68, denied saying anything negative about the father or the war, but the child’s mother told authorities the physician had said her late husband was a “legitimate target” and that Russia was the guilty party in the war. While there was no recording of the conversation, the court found the doctor guilty of disseminating false information. “This is absurd, just absurd,” Buyanova said. Russia has prosecuted more than 116,000 critics in the last six years, surpassing the rate of repression under Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev during the Soviet era.

Seoul

Offensive American: South Korean police detained an American YouTuber last week as they investigated him over a series of offensive videos that could fetch him 10 years in prison. Johnny Somali, 24, was charged with creating a disturbance after he filmed himself pouring a bowl of ramen onto the counter of a convenience store and clashing with a shocked employee. But the video that fueled public outrage—and caused police to detain him briefly for his own protection—showed him twerking at and lewdly kissing the Statue of Peace, a monument to Korean women forced into sexual slavery during the 1910-1945 Japanese occupation. Somali, whose real name is Ramsey Khalid Ismael, returned to the memorial after being released and publicly apologized, saying he “didn’t understand the significance of the statue.”

Zhengzhou, China

Jerusalem

Biden deadline passes: Israel made a last-minute show of increasing aid to Gaza this week ahead of a deadline set by the Biden administration, which threatened last month to restrict military support unless more food reached starving Palestinians. The aid flow into northern Gaza increased from 30 trucks daily in October to 150 this week. While that’s still far short of the 350 truckloads a day the U.S. had called for, the White House said it wouldn’t cut military support because Israel had taken “some steps.” Humanitarian groups said in a joint statement that Israel had not only failed to meet the U.S. demands but “concurrently took actions that dramatically worsened the situation,” and the U.N. said famine is imminent in northern Gaza. “People are very hungry,” said Louise Wateridge of the U.N. Palestinian refugee agency. “They are fighting over bags of flour.”

Joy ride banned: China this week squelched a viral trend that saw masses of young people biking at night nearly 40 miles to get soup dumplings. The event began in June, when four college friends in Zhengzhou decided to take free city bikes and cycle to Kaifeng to sample the local specialty, guantangbao. As the weeks went by, hundreds, then thousands of youths began joining in. Officials initially embraced the movement, calling it “a symbol of youthful energy” and instructing police to escort the cyclists. But after 100,000 people participated last week, causing a giant traffic jam, they cracked down. The Communist Party is suspicious of spontaneous gatherings, especially among youth, who face bleak job prospects. “People are so stressed these days,” said one 27-year-old participant, “so these events are a good thing.”

Zhuhai, China

Hit-and-run: A 62-year-old man rammed his SUV into a clutch of power walkers outside a stadium in Zhuhai this week, killing at least 35 and wounding dozens more in a city that was hosting a major military and civilian airshow. Elderly people and teenagers were among the victims in what appeared to be the deadliest act of random violence in China in decades. Police said the suspect was upset over a divorce settlement and stabbed himself so severely when they arrived that he lapsed into a coma. Internet censors scrubbed all video of the attack, which coincided with the opening of Airshow China. The Chinese military debuted its new stealth fighter jet there, the J-35A, which looks remarkably similar to the American F-35.

Tehran

Plot to kill Trump: Iran this week reacted with mockery to allegations by Manhattan federal prosecutors that operatives in Tehran plotted to assassinate Donald Trump before his election. According to court papers, alleged ringleader Farhad Shakeri, an Afghan former U.S. resident deported after being imprisoned for armed robbery, told the FBI he was assigned to target Iranian opponents in the U.S. Authorities have arrested two alleged hit men he is said to have hired to target Iranian-American journalist Masih Alinejad. But prosecutors said that a month before the election Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps also ordered Shakeri, now believed to be in Iran, to “focus on surveilling, and ultimately, assassinating” Trump in retaliation for a 2020 Baghdad drone strike that killed Iran’s Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said the case sounded like something scriptwriters would dream up for “a third-rate comedy.”

Evans’ religious exile

Luke Evans grew up both gay and a Jehovah’s Witness, said Simon Hattenstone in The Guardian (U.K.), and the result was pure torture. The Welsh actor—who has appeared in The Hobbit and played Gaston in the live action Beauty and the Beast—hated knocking on doors with his proselytizing parents, and hated being taunted as “Jovey” at school. Around age 8, he started to realize he was attracted to men, and his faith made him think he’d committed an unforgivable sin. “Every night in the congregation they read Scriptures saying terrible things about the way I was feeling,” says Evans, 45. “All that was in my head was, If I don’t sort this out, I’m going to lose my mum and dad. And I’m also going to die at Armageddon.” He hid his sexuality from his parents, but when he earned notice as an actor in his 20s, he gave an interview to a gay publication that was seen by church elders. He was booted from the church, but his parents didn’t shun him as he’d feared. Evans remains bitter toward the church but allows that all that door knocking “put me in good stead for when I became an actor and didn’t get a job. I didn’t give a damn. I’d be like, OK, moving on. There’s another 10 doors. I’ll just keep knocking on them.”

How Bruce Willis’ family copes with his decline

Emma Heming Willis first got an inkling something was amiss with her husband, Bruce Willis, when his speech began to falter a few years ago, said Katie Couric in Town & Country. Few fans would have suspected it, but the oft-loquacious actor had a stutter. It was severe in childhood but improved when he started acting. When his language started changing, it seemed “just part of the stutter, it was just Bruce,” explains Heming Willis, 46. Instead, it was the first sign that the Die Hard star, now 69, had frontotemporal dementia—a condition that causes a progressive decline in cognition, language, and mobility. The change was gradual. “FTD whispers, it doesn’t shout. It’s hard for me to say, ‘This is where Bruce ended, and this is where his disease started to take over.’” She’s had to be blunt with their two young daughters about the impact of the disease, which is ultimately terminal. “We had so many plans, so many beautiful things we wanted to do with our girls. You just rip that page out, and then how do you rewrite the story? I’m learning how to take some control back.” Heming Willis has become an advocate, pushing for FTD research and government support for caregivers. “It might not be the most beautiful story I could have thought of,” she says, “but there are cracks of light.”

In the news

■ Prince William said last week that the past year has been “the hardest” of his life, as the British royal spoke publicly for the first time about the cancer diagnoses of his wife, Catherine, Princess of Wales, and his father, King Charles III. “I’m so proud of my wife, I’m proud of my father, for handling the things that they have done,” the prince, 42, told reporters during a trip to South Africa. “But from a personal family point of view, it’s been brutal.” Buckingham Palace announced in February that Charles had cancer; six weeks later, it was revealed that Catherine—who has three children with William—was being treated for the disease after undergoing abdominal surgery. The king, 76, returned to public duties in

Springsteen’s

long journey home

Bruce Springsteen is the picture of confidence and charisma during his buoyant three-hour concerts, said Will Hodgkinson in The Times (U.K.). But those extroverted displays don’t come naturally. Growing up in Freehold, N.J., “I was very quiet,” says the 75-year-old rocker. “I was introverted, but songwriters do tend to be introverts. You’re living in your own head, living in your own worlds.” In the past he’s said his marathon shows were driven by “manic insecurity,” and while that’s eased with age, “I do have an enormous drive, every single night, to prove myself to myself. Or am I proving it to my long-dead father?” His dad, Doug Springsteen, struggled with mental illness and was “a man who said fewer than a thousand words to me” his whole life. Springsteen now lives just a few miles from his childhood home; his stints in Los Angeles and New York City didn’t work out. “I was not comfortable there. I don’t think you can find photographs of me falling out of nightclubs in either of them.” After having children, he returned to New Jersey. “The kids had aunts and uncles nearby, and it was a good payoff: normal life. You know, it’s funny. You grow up in a place that you weren’t so sure about. Then, whether for nostalgia or the feeling that you’re on solid ground, you find yourself returning.”

April and Catherine, 42, began making public appearances last month, after completing chemotherapy. “She’s been amazing this whole year,” said William.

■ Argentine police arrested three people last week in connection with the death of former One Direction member Liam Payne, who fell from the third-floor balcony of his hotel room in Buenos Aires in October. A toxicology report found that the British pop star, 31, had multiple illegal drugs in his system when he fell, and prosecutors said his death was not being treated as a suicide. “He did not know what he was doing,” said the prosecutor’s office. A hotel employee and an alleged drug dealer were charged with supplying narcotics to Payne; Argentine businessman Rogelio Nores, who presented himself to police as Payne’s manager, was arrested for breaching

his duty of care to the singer. Nores later insisted he was just Payne’s friend, not his manager.

■ Grammy-winning country star Zach Bryan allegedly offered his ex-girlfriend, podcaster Brianna “Chickenfry” LaPaglia, $12 million and a New York City apartment to keep quiet about their yearlong relationship. The pair split last month after LaPaglia, 25, discovered that Bryan, 28, had a very active profile on a dating app, sources told Us Weekly. Speaking on her podcast, BFFs, LaPaglia accused Bryan of emotional abuse, saying he would “build you up, beat you down.” She said he tried to control what she wore, often screamed at her, and once flew into a rage when she sang another country singer’s song. “I’m still scared right now because I’m scared of him,” she said. When Bryan allegedly offered her money to sign an NDA, LaPaglia said she turned him down. “I’m a lot stronger than a weak man.”

Briefing

The new threat from North Korea

Kim Jong Un is now directly aiding Russia’s war in Ukraine. What does he want in return?

How is North Korea helping Russia?

The Hermit Kingdom’s supreme leader, Kim Jong Un, last month deployed 10,000 of his country’s most elite troops to Russia’s Far East to train in Russian uniforms, with Russian weapons, alongside Russian soldiers. By last week, some of them were already seeing combat in Kursk, a Russian border region that Ukraine invaded in August in an effort to regain momentum in Europe’s biggest conflict since World War II. The manpower assistance is a direct result of the security pact Kim signed with Russian President Vladimir Putin in June, during Putin’s first visit to North Korea in 24 years, which provides for mutual defense in the event of an external attack. The North Korean troops will help shore up the Russian military, which has suffered an estimated 650,000 casualties in the two years since it invaded Ukraine. It’s a huge escalation from Pyongyang’s earlier support for Moscow’s war effort, which included providing millions of artillery rounds as well as anti-tank rockets and ballistic missiles.

Kim: Drawing up his battle plans

What is North Korea getting out of this?

The cash-strapped dictatorship is receiving food and oil from Russia, which helps alleviate its dependence on China, as well as upgrades to its satellite and rocket technology. But that’s not all. By deploying to Russia’s front line, North Korea’s military—which hasn’t fought in a large-scale war since it invaded South Korea in 1950—is gaining invaluable battlefield experience. Its soldiers are getting a close look at Western defenses and learning how to use drones and electronic warfare. And now Putin owes Kim. “Sending weapons is one thing, but sending your own men is another level,” said Rachel Lee, a North Korea expert at the Stimson Center. If things heat up on the Korean Peninsula, Kim has “reason to count on Russia.” South Korea fears that could mean Russian weapons or even troops being deployed against it in the event of war.

Does Seoul expect open conflict?

The signs are worrying. Reversing the long-standing policy of his father and grandfather, who both sought reunification of the two Koreas, Kim Jong Un in January declared the South his “principal enemy.” This year, he has demolished the reunification monument erected by his father, Kim Jong Il; dismantled reconciliation agencies; and ramped up a Cold War–style psychological campaign, sending thousands of helium balloons across the border to drop bags of trash and propaganda leaflets on the South. In October, North Korea dynamited the unused rail and road links between the two countries that had been built, aspirationally, some two decades ago. North Korea said it was responding to South Korean provocation, claiming Seoul had flown drones over Pyongyang.

But it may have also been trying to get the attention of the U.S.: In recent weeks, North Korea has tested a new intercontinental ballistic missile as well as a flurry of short-range missiles.

What does Kim want from the U.S.?

Possibly economic aid. North Korea is desperately poor, with nearly half its population malnourished. Successive U.S. administrations tried to keep it from going nuclear by offering aid and sanctions relief and then, after that failed, tried to persuade it to denuclearize using the same carrots. Each time, North Korea would accept whatever it could get and then renege on its promises. In 2018, it looked as if that cycle might be broken when then-President Donald Trump took the unprecedented step of meeting with Kim and even traveling to the North (see box), but ultimately nothing came of the brief thaw in relations. The Kim dynasty has always seen the U.S., South Korea’s defender, as an existential threat—and nuclear weapons as its only protection against a U.S. attempt at regime change. In the last few years, Kim has expanded his stockpile to some 50 nuclear warheads and enough material to build 40 more, raising concerns in both the U.S. and South Korea.

Does the U.S. expect him to attack South Korea?

Trump and Kim: A love a air?

President Trump has had a love-hate relationship with Kim. In his first year in office, Trump threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea after Kim—whom he nicknamed “little rocket man”—conducted a showy series of nuclear tests. Less than a year later, though, Trump had warmed to Kim, and the two exchanged over two dozen personal letters. “We fell in love,” Trump said of his pen pal. He met with Kim three times to discuss North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, even becoming the first sitting U.S. president to set foot on North Korean soil, and he halted the regular U.S. military exercises with the South. But Kim insisted that he would only reduce his nukes after the U.S. lifted economic sanctions, and the détente fell apart. While Trump appears optimistic that he can restore goodwill in his second term, saying that Kim “misses me,” North Korea’s alliance with Russia has hardened its commitment to defying the West. “We will only deal with the state entity called the U.S.,” said North Korean ambassador to the U.N. Kim Song, “not the mere administration.”

Not immediately. While Kim is certainly “laying the groundwork” for an invasion, “North Korea is not ready to attack,” said Andrew Yeo of the Brookings Institution. There have been no signs of military preparations such as troop mobilization, and the regime would hardly send some of its best-trained troops to Russia if it were plotting war at home. Threatening the U.S. and then backing down after getting some economic relief is its modus operandi. Still, with Trump returning to the presidency, Kim’s actions are unpredictable. A provocation on the border could tumble the two Koreas into conflict inadvertently—and the U.S. is committed by treaty to South Korea’s defense. There are also tempting American targets right in the neighborhood: Camp Humphreys, the Army’s largest overseas base with 28,500 troops plus 12,000 contractors and military family members, lies a mere 60 miles from the demilitarized zone.

Should the U.S. be worried?

Just days before the U.S. election, North Korea successfully launched a test of an intercontinental ballistic missile that flew for 86 minutes, the longest it had yet achieved. That shows the country is closer than ever to a nuclear weapon that can hit the U.S. mainland. “I don’t think it’s particularly controversial to say that the defense of the homeland against nuclear attack should be a primary consideration in the formation of U.S. policy,” said Ankit Panda, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “We need to be vigilant.”

The alternate reality of new media

Amanda Marcotte Salon.com

Best Columns: The U.S.

The mainstream media is rapidly losing its influence over American politics, said Amanda Marcotte. That’s one of the central lessons of the 2024 election. When given an explicit choice, most Americans actually prefer Democratic policies on health care, abortion, wages, family leave, taxation, and the economy. Polls from earlier this year, in fact, found that people “who consume news from journalistic outlets—newspapers, network news programs, and news websites—overwhelmingly planned to vote for the Democratic candidate.” But roughly half the country now consumes “an all-propaganda media diet” from Fox News, TikTok, Instagram, X, right-wing podcasts, and what their MAGAfied friends and family tell them. These sources immerse their audiences in a separate reality of misinformation, resentment, and conspiracy theories in which vaccines are dangerous, scientists are evil, America is a hellhole overrun by criminals and vicious migrants, Ukraine isn’t worth saving, and the economy is in the toilet. Progressives are often accused of looking down on working-class voters, but it’s Donald Trump and his allies who see the “poorly educated,” as Trump calls them, as gullible yahoos “who are stupid enough to believe their lies.” When voters are bathed in false information, they often make bad choices.

Why polls missed Trump voters—again

Tom Lubbock and James Johnson The Wall Street Journal

“While most of the polling industry was wrong, we got it right,” said Tom Lubbock and James Johnson. Our firm, J.L. Partners, was one of only two of the top 10 major pollsters that predicted a Donald Trump victory. We projected Trump would beat Kamala Harris by 3 percentage points nationally—the margin is actually 1.4 percent—by using a mixedmethod polling approach that better captured Trump’s unique coalition of blue-collar, politically disengaged, and nonwhite voters. Traditional polling methods rely on random-digit phone polling and online polling, but these are biased toward college-educated Democrats, who are more likely to be politically engaged, work from home, and have free time to chat with pollsters. Our mix of text message surveys and in-app polls that “survey voters as they shop or play games on their phone,” were better fit to capture the opinions of people who are largely disengaged from politics. In focus groups and in-depth interviews, we built trust with voters who first denied, and then admitted, they were voting for Trump. Clearly, the polling industry “needs to reinvent itself,” and stop relying on methods of reaching people from the year 2000.

A Trump SCOTUS until 2045?

Jane Mayer The New Yorker

Viewpoint

Donald Trump now has an opening to create a far-right Supreme Court that may last for decades, said Jane Mayer. Kamala Harris’ campaign committed a “major political blunder” in neglecting to emphasize that a Trump victory would push the Supreme Court even further to the right. Emboldened by Trump’s victory, the 6-3 conservative supermajority may now smash through old guardrails and approve enforcing the Comstock Act of 1873 to ban sending abortion medication by mail to every state. It might even enshrine “fetal personhood” in law—thus banning abortion in all 50 states. The conservative Federalist Society recognizes that a second Trump term will enable him to cement the court’s far-right ideology for another generation, and is openly expressing hope that the oldest two conservative justices, 76-year-old Clarence Thomas and 74-year-old Samuel Alito, can be “nudged into retirement.” The plan is to replace them with far-right Christian conservatives in their 40s. They would join three justices in their 50s Trump appointed in his first term, meaning that “five Trump-appointed justices could easily serve until 2045.” These ideologues would likely further curtail reproductive and personal freedoms. Overturning Roe v. Wade “might just have been the beginning.”

“We are entering a period of white water. Trump is a sower of chaos, not fascism. Over the next few years, a plague of disorder will descend upon America, and maybe the world, shaking everything loose. If you hate polarization, just wait until we experience global disorder. But in chaos there’s opportunity for a new society and a new response to the Trumpian political, economic, and psychological assault. These are the times that try people’s souls, and we’ll see what we are made of.”

David Brooks in The New York Times

It must be true... I read it in the tabloids

■ Forty-three rhesus monkeys ran loose in Yemassee, S.C., after escaping from a research facility through a door a new employee left open. Police asked area residents to keep their windows and doors closed, but said the monkeys posed no danger. “They are harmless and a little skittish,” said Yemassee Police Chief Gregory Alexander. After five days, more than half were captured, and many of the remaining monkeys were gathered by the facility’s border fence, where workers were using food to try to lure them back.

■ An Italian entrepreneur is marketing cans containing air from Lake Como. The 400 ml cannisters of “100 percent authentic air” from the popular tourist region go for around $11 a can in local shops. They offer “the peace and elegance of this heavenly corner, sealed in a tin,” said the website for Lake Como Air. Company founder Davide Abagnale said he’s not merely selling cans of air, but “a tangible memory that you carry in your heart.”

■ People lined up at a temple in India to drink water dripping from an elephant sculpture, believing it was divinely generated holy water. Instead, it was condensation from the temple’s air-conditioning. After crowds of devotees lined up to drink sacred water they believed to come from Lord Krishna, officials at the Vrindavan temple issued a clarification to get them to stop. “We respect the faith people have in God, but it’s essential to inform them,” said a temple official.

Best Columns: Europe

IRELAND

What to do with too much wealth

Emer Walsh Irish Examiner

UNITED KINGDOM

Making a mockery of diversity

Nesrine Malik The Guardian

Ireland “has more money than it knows what to do with,” said Emer Walsh. While most of Europe is drowning in debt, our government has piled up a $27 billion surplus this year, thanks to all those tech companies we lured with sweetheart tax rates. One chunk of the revenue influx is the $15 billion haul in back taxes from Apple, which, ironically, we “fought so hard against receiving” out of fear of upsetting our cash cow. But a lot of it is the “major boosts in income tax” from the strong job market, which generated $36 billion this year with even more on the way in 2025. The problem is, our legacy of penny-pinching means we “cannot spend it.” We’re not used to being a high-income country.

Black Britons should have cause to celebrate the first Black party leader—but we don’t, said Nesrine Malik. In picking Kemi Badenoch to lead them, the Conservative Party likely expected everyone to observe the “ritual of withholding criticism” that is standard when an ethnic minority takes a position of power. Badenoch is not just the first Black leader; she takes over from Rishi Sunak, the first South Asian party leader and first prime minister of color. I would love to be able to “put politics aside” and hail this handoff as a sign of “diminishing barriers.” But that’s impossible when Badenoch’s “record is so appalling.” This is a person who has

In the 1980s, when unemployment topped 16 percent, we were spending 15 percent more than we took in. Things picked up in the mid-’90s with the Celtic Tiger era, but the “cheap borrowing and excessive spending” led to utter collapse in the 2008 financial crisis. Determined not to let that happen again, we saddled ourselves with “strict commitments not to use windfall corporation tax receipts to fund permanent or recurring expenditure.” Now our lean years are haunting us, because they’ve left us stuck spending a fraction of what our counterparts across Europe do on housing, health care, and roads. “While Ireland is a very rich country, it fails to behave like one.”

said there’s “no such thing” as the Black community and that Black people who find their employer racist must just be in the wrong job. When deciding which immigrants should be allowed to enter the U.K., she has said “not all cultures are equally valid.” People of color like her can advance in the Tory party, yes, but only when they are willing to “undermine the concerns of other ethnic minorities.” Badenoch, a pugnacious culture warrior, has a right to her retrograde opinions. But others have the right “to feel excluded by them, and not be scolded for refusing to cheer an appointment that is at best meaningless, and at worst perturbing.”

How they see us: Europe braces for Trump’s second term

Donald Trump’s return to the White House is “a disaster for Europe,” said Paul Taylor in The Guardian (U.K.), and Europeans are panicking. Just look at how their newspapers reacted: France’s Le Monde called it “the end of the American world,” while Germany’s Die Zeit ran a headline of one word: “F---”. They know that Trump’s “unpredictability and transactional approach to global affairs” comes at a “moment of great fragility” in the European Union. Both France and Germany are “weakened by political crises”—France has a minority government, while Germany’s government just fell apart—and most EU economies are still struggling with inflation. Hungary, governed by the Kremlin-friendly Viktor Orban, is currently in charge of the rotating EU presidency, and Trump’s election will embolden him and the other populist leaders to form an “illiberal internationale.” Security, though, is the biggest concern. NATO depends on the might of the U.S. military, but Trump sneers at alliances. As French President Emmanuel Macron put it during an emergency gathering of European leaders just after the election: “The world is made of herbivores and carnivores. If we decide to remain herbivores, the carnivores will win.”

American retrenchment “is simply indecent.” Europe treated Joe Biden’s interregnum as if it were a reprieve, and now crisis is upon us. And the stakes are higher this time around, said Le Monde (France) in an editorial. Europeans have “war raging on their continent, initiated by a Russian power that flouts international obligations and is increasingly aggressive.” If Trump follows through on his threats to cut off Ukraine and “negotiates a peace with Vladimir Putin that favors the invader,” more countries will be in jeopardy. No wonder that this week saw Keir Starmer visit France for Armistice Day—the first time a British prime minister has done so since Churchill. It’s time to pull together.

We’ve heard this from Macron before, said Étienne Gernelle in Le Point (France). When Trump during his first term threatened to leave NATO, European leaders realized they could no longer outsource the continent’s defense—indeed, Macron pledged in 2017 to lead the EU to “rediscover the salt of sovereignty” on defense. But the promised common European defense industry has yet to materialize. Seven years later, this unpreparedness for

In some ways, Trump might bring the “forced shock treatment” Europe needs, said Dalibor Balsinek in Echo24 (Czech Republic). The hefty tariffs he plans will be “another big blow” to European economies already weakened from the EU push to become carbon neutral by 2050. That means the EU will be compelled to get leaner, and fight climate change without sacrificing growth. Yet it’s hard to spin this as anything other than bad news, said El Pais (Spain) in an editorial. It’s devastating for the world, not just the U.S., that a majority of American voters endorsed racism, misogyny, and overt authoritarianism. For decades, “the West has acted as if liberal democracy were irreversible,” as if institutions would always get stronger and rights would perpetually expand. “The United States, the country that invented the democracy that the rest of the world copied, now tells us that may not be the case.”

Best Columns: International

Australia: Yanking kids off social media

Is the government going to do our parenting for us? asked Kate Halfpenny in The Sydney Morning Herald. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese last week unveiled a proposal to make the country the first in the world to ban children under 16 from using any social media, even with parental consent. “Social media is doing harm to our kids, and I’m calling time on it,” Albanese said. If Parliament passes the legislation, platforms like X, Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook will have a year to work out how to bar underage users. The goal, I admit, is “fantastic: to free kids from their glamorous online prison” where they think the “most creative adventure they can have is making a TikTok dance.” Nearly all Australian teens use social media even though many say it makes them feel lonely and 1 in 5 are targeted by online bullies. A ban would get these “zombie kids” to stop staring at their “cursed phones” and talk to one another in person. Yet there’s something grating about the government saying to parents, “You stuffed that up, so we’ll take it from here.”

almost anything goes,” governments simply must step in to protect kids from the “toxic influence” of apps. But a “blanket ban” is too draconian, said Lisa M. Given in The Conversation. Why not require parental controls instead? Moms and dads know “their child’s state of development and readiness to use social media” better than anyone. And some kids really need these communication tools—those “grappling with issues such as their sexuality,” for example, who might find support online that isn’t available in their hometown. Australia shouldn’t punish young people for tech companies’ failure to make their platforms safe.

Somebody had to intervene, said the Herald Sun in an editorial. The intrusion of social media “into young lives—at all hours and in any place via smartphones—amounts to the biggest unregulated experiment ever conducted on children.” Teens spend up to 30 percent of their waking hours staring at screens, and 40 percent have mental health issues linked to social media. Kids’ brains are being rewired to need constant dopamine hits in the form of likes. With tech companies taking the “Wild West approach of

INDONESIA

How to whip your cabinet into shape

Yerica Lai and Radhiyya Indra The Jakarta

CANADA

Killing our own people on purpose

Andrew Phillips Toronto Star

How would this work, exactly? asked The Age. “Indeed, can it work?” Britain tried to bar people under 18 from accessing pornography, only to give up because of concerns over the intrusiveness of the tech required to confirm user age. That example should serve as a “healthy dose of reality” for Albanese’s government. Age verification will be impossible to enforce, especially as most kids are savvy enough to use a VPN that makes it look like they’re logging in from another country. Still, the mere threat of a ban could force tech companies “to take greater responsibility for the enormous social harm they have caused,” said The New Zealand Herald. Days after news of Australia’s plan first emerged, Instagram announced new options letting parents “set daily time limits” and see who their kid is talking to. That’s a start. “Unfortunately, the time for action was about 30 years ago.”

President Prabowo Subianto has dusted off his combat boots, said Yerica Lai and Radhiyya Indra.

Accused of human rights abuses in the 1990s— when he was a general under his father-in-law, the dictator Suharto—Prabowo now says he supports a “polite democracy” with little dissent. Toward that end, the newly sworn-in president piled all 100 of his cabinet ministers and deputies onto a C-130 cargo plane and flew them to the military academy for a four-day “military-style boot camp.” The officials had to go through “morning exercises and command drills in matching camouflage outfits,” and they even “slept in tents.” All this discipline

Canada is hurtling down the “slippery slope that opponents of assisted death warned of years ago,” said Andrew Phillips. Legalized for the terminally ill in 2016, medical assistance in dying (MAID) expanded in 2021 to those with incurable but nonfatal conditions, under a provision called Track 2.

A new report by the Ontario chief coroner’s office has found that some patients are now “being euthanized” merely because they suffer “from untreated mental illnesses and addictions.” The Track 2 numbers “aren’t huge”—they made up just 2.6 percent of the province’s 4,644 assisted deaths last year. But these also aren’t the pain-wracked, elderly patients we imagine when we think of assisted suicide. They

was meant to ensure that the agencies can work together toward Prabowo’s goal: self-sufficiency for Indonesia in food and energy within four years. Every arm of the government is to devote itself to helping the Agriculture Ministry grow enough food for all 278 million Indonesians. And all agencies are to help in the energy transition, which will include converting palm and cassava crops into biofuels. In the rest of the world, this boot camp might seem like a bizarre initiation ritual. But Indonesia has so many agencies to keep in line that Prabowo had to get creative. The president’s priorities have now been “drilled into his ministers”—literally.

are ordinary people, often the poor, “suffering from inadequate housing, a lack of social supports, and simple loneliness.” They “could live for decades,” if only they were given something to live for. One man in his 40s, who presented with a history of depression and substance abuse as well as inflammatory bowel disease, wasn’t even offered addiction treatment before being approved for suicide. The rightto-die movement was supposed to be about choosing dignity. Yet “what real choice does a person have” if they’re poor and mentally ill and offered no support? Society has an obligation to help such people “live decently,” not nudge them toward an early death merely because it’s cheaper.

Talking Points

Election 2024: How Trump won

“In its nearly 250-year history, America has never before chosen a president” with so many black marks against his name, said James Rainey and Noah Bierman in the Los Angeles Times. Donald Trump is a convicted felon who was judged liable for sexual abuse. He incited a violent uprising in an attempt to overthrow his 2020 election loss. On the campaign trail, he echoed Hitler with his exhortations that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of America and calls for retribution against “the enemy within.” Yet Trump achieved a stunning victory over Vice President Kamala Harris last week, becoming the first Republican to win the popular vote (50 percent to 48 percent) in two decades and expanding his 2020 numbers in nearly every demographic—Hispanics, young voters, both urban and rural voters, and both men and women. He did it by delivering a populist message with uncompromising “ferocity” and by harnessing the anger of Americans “uneasy about the high cost of living, unsettled about a southern border they view as insecure, and disturbed over an evolving culture they feel has strayed too far from traditional values.” Above all, his win came down to voters’ “economic outlook,” said Noah Rothman in National Review. While Democrats insisted all was rosy and that inflation had been tamed, ordinary Americans spoke of wrestling with the surging cost of housing (rents are up 20 percent since 2020), groceries (up to 40 percent higher), and borrowing (credit card interest rates are at record highs). In 2020, Biden won voters with a sour economic view by 63 points. “Harris lost them by 40.”

issues of our time” said Rachel Bachman in The Wall Street Journal: “transgender rights.” He and his backers spent at least $123 million on TV ads targeting Harris and Democrats’ support for letting transgender women compete in women’s sports. The ads—with the tagline “Kamala’s for They/Them. President Trump is for you”—not only resonated with blue-collar laborers but also with high-income parents worried about their daughters playing against transgender girls in school and college sports. Yet Harris “ignored the issue” even as some worried Democrats urged a response.

This was a howl of rage against “elites,” said David Brooks in The New York Times. Over the past four decades “those of us in the educated class” have built a post-industrial economy that elevated college-educated knowledge workers and rendered everyone else “invisible.” As “vocational training withered” and free-trade policies sent industrial jobs overseas, working-class voters—especially men—felt angry and betrayed. Democrats fancy themselves warriors against inequality, but they have become so focused on “racial inequality, gender inequality, and LGBTQ inequality” that they couldn’t see “the great chasm” of economic inequality staring them in the face. “I guess it’s hard to focus on class inequality when you went to a college with a multibillion-dollar endowment.” Trump spoke to the nation’s raging “class animosity”—56 percent of voters without degrees picked him, up 6 percentage points from 2020— and made marginalized Americans feel seen and understood.

Trump also scored by leveraging “one of the hot-button cultural

■ Women are stockpiling abortion drugs out of fear that access to reproductive care could be restricted under a Donald Trump presidency. Aid Access, a major supplier of abortion pills, received 10,000 requests for medication in the 24 hours after the election was called for Trump—17 times more than a typical day. Just the Pill, an abortion drug nonprofit, said nearly 20 percent of the orders it received in the three days after the election were from

women who are not pregnant. The Washington Post

■ The net worth of the world’s 10 richest people rose $63.5 billion the day after the election, the biggest daily increase since Bloomberg began its wealth index in 2012. Tesla CEO Elon Musk alone saw his wealth increase by $26.5 billion. The gains came from a surge in U.S. stocks built on anticipation that Trump will cut taxes and regulations. Bloomberg

“This is all Biden’s fault,” said Josh Barro in The New York Times While warning that “democracy was on the ballot,” the president “prioritized his own ego and profile” when he insisted on running again despite dismal approval numbers. Biden, 81, persisted even as he and aides worked to hide his growing cognitive decline. Following his meltdown in the June presidential debate, he spent weeks contending all was fine—and by the time he finally stepped aside in July, it was too late for anyone other than the uninspiring Harris to take his place. An earlier exit might have produced a primary that could have yielded a stronger nominee, like Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro or Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. A lack of enthusiasm for Harris was apparent on Election Day, said John West and Kara Dapena in The Wall Street Journal. “Across every core Democratic bloc”—Black voters, college graduates, union members—and in every liberal stronghold, Democrats failed to show up for Harris in the numbers they did for Biden in 2020. “Democrats sat out the election,” said Monmouth University pollster Patrick Murray.

All these things contributed to Trump’s win, but one factor trumped all others, said Will Bunch in The Philadelphia Inquirer: “the most badly informed electorate in modern American history.” A May survey found Biden leading overwhelmingly “among the shrinking number of Americans who still read a newspaper,” while Trump held his biggest margins among those who follow no news at all, many of whom bathe in the toxic stew of misinformation that circulates on social media. Having ridden into office on angry voters’ grievances, Trump now “faces a new challenge,” said John F. Harris in Politico. Much of his political mojo is derived from “victimhood,” and “the perception that he is valiantly fighting back against entrenched forces.” Now he has “unambiguously bested” those forces, how will he deliver for the broad coalition of voters who’ve bought his promises of change? “We are in for a new chapter of Trump’s career, and a new chapter in the American presidency.”

■ Canadian officials saw “a spike” in queries from U.S. citizens about how they might legally reside in Canada following Trump’s win, said the country’s immigration

department. The agency also saw a bump in web traffic originating from the U.S. Politico

■ Greenhouse gas emissions from private jets increased nearly 50 percent worldwide from 2019 to 2023, according to a new study. Nearly half of the trips made by private jets in that period were shorter than 500 kilometers (about 310 miles); some 900,000 flights were under 50 km. The Guardian

Talking Points

Climate: The return of the denier-in-chief

With Donald Trump returning to the White House, “the stakes for the planet could hardly be higher,” said Benjamin Storrow and Corbin Hiar in Politico

The president­elect is a climate­change denier who’s pledged “to unleash fossil fuel development, slash pollution regulations, and dismantle President Biden’s climate agenda.” He plans to appoint an “energy czar” to cut regulations across agencies, pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement (again), scale back investment in renewable energy and electric vehicles, allow more drilling and mining on public lands, and “frack, frack, frack, and drill, baby, drill” as he declared at a rally. Project 2025 calls for overturning Biden’s landmark climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, which provides hundreds of billions for “greening the economy.” Trump appointed former Rep. Lee Zeldin (R­N.Y.) to lead the Environmental Protection Agency this week, saying Zeldin would “ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions.” In what will probably be the hottest year in human history, Trump’s win “casts immediate doubt over the future of U.S. climate measures.”

is the hottest year on record.

ing policies on everything from toxic chemicals to California’s effort to phase out gas­powered vehicles. They’re aiming to finalize a study that justifies pausing approvals of new liquefied gas exports—which Trump pledged to end on Day 1—and already finalized plans to restrict drilling in the Arctic. Trump’s election has “set off a scramble” across the government “to lock in” climate initiatives by January

Wit & Wisdom

“Never underestimate a man who overestimates himself.”

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, quoted in The Washington Post

“Freedom is a fragile thing, and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction.”

Ronald Reagan, quoted in The Dispatch

That’s why the Biden administration is racing to “Trump­proof” its climate legacy, said Maxine Joselow in The Washington Post. Officials are issu­

The rest of the world, meanwhile, is deeply alarmed, said Sara Schonhardt in Politico. If Trump does pull the world’s biggest economy out of the Paris climate agreement, it could encourage “opponents of stringent climate action in China, India, or Europe to do less,” spelling disaster for efforts to limit global emissions. Trump could also hand China “a golden opportunity” to become the leading supplier of green technology, said Zoë Schlanger in The Atlantic. “The global turn” toward solar, wind, and electric vehicles now seems “inevitable.” China is already far ahead on producing these products, and will be able to make billions while expanding its “green soft power” in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. By re­electing “a climate denier with a thirst for oil drilling,” the U.S. will “mostly hurt itself.”

Sexism: Did it cost Harris the election?

“Misogyny has won in America,” said Theresa Bennett in the Akron, Ohio, Beacon Journal Donald Trump will return to the White House propelled largely by the votes of men, including 59 percent of white men, 56 percent of young male voters, and 47 percent of Latino men—far more than he received from these groups in 2020. Given the option of voting for an accomplished former prosecutor and U.S. senator in Kamala Harris, American voters instead chose a self­described p­­­y grabber who’s been found liable for sexual assault, indicating “they would rather have a criminal who sexually abuses women run the country than a woman herself.” Economic insecurity certainly played a role, said Jill Filipovic in Slate, but for men, Trump’s re­election was really “reasserting dominance.” Trump and his cabal of “bros”— including Elon Musk, podcaster Joe Rogan, and Vice President–elect JD Vance—made it clear to American men they would be “returned to their rightful positions of authority, in the White House and in houses across America.”

If Trump ran on misogyny, asked Ingrid Jacques in USA Today, why did 53 percent of white women vote for him? Among women without college degrees, Trump’s margin was 63­35, according to

exit polls. Democrats assumed women would vote for Harris because of abortion, but that issue was overshadowed by the high cost of living and immigration. Nearly 40 percent of women said the economy and jobs were most important to them, more than double the amount who said the same of abortion. Harris lost because she was an “uninspiring and insubstantial” candidate, not because she’s a woman. Trump won because he “spoke directly to voters’ top concerns.”

“Let’s not be fooled,” said David Gardner in The Daily Beast. While many people voted for Trump over the economy and immigration, his victory was also fueled by sexism. That’s why his campaign “waxed nostalgic” about a 1950s­style patriarchy in which tradwives stay home with the kids, why his running mate, JD Vance, railed against “childless cat ladies” devoted to their careers, and why Trump vowed to “protect” women—“whether the women like it or not.” Sexism was by no means the whole story of this election, said Sally Jenkins in The Washington Post. But as Harris tried and failed to break the ultimate glass ceiling, Trump and his allies sneeringly called her “dumb,” “trash,” and a “ho.” In America, “misogyny is alive and rampant.”

“I’ve done the calculation, and your chances of winning the lottery are identical whether you play or not.”

Fran Lebowitz, quoted in the King Weekly Sentinel (Canada)

“The cause of America is in great measure the cause of all mankind.”

Thomas Paine, quoted in The Herald (Scotland)

“Two cheers for democracy, one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism. Two cheers are quite enough: There is no occasion to give three.”

E.M. Forster, quoted in Dawn (Pakistan)

“When I became a man, I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”

C.S. Lewis, quoted in Bored Panda

“What a pity, when Christopher Columbus discovered America, that he ever mentioned it.”

British writer Margot Asquith, quoted in The Knowledge

Poll Watch

■ 91% of Republican voters said the 2024 election was fair and accurate— up from just 26% in 2020, when 61% of Republicans said Donald Trump lost because of illegal voting or election rigging and 14% were not sure. 63% of Democrats said the 2024 election was fair and accurate, down from 88% in 2020.

Reuters/Ipsos

Technology

Salt Typhoon: China’s backdoor espionage

It’s terrifying to think about what China can do following its most brazen cyberattack ever, said Josh Rogin in The Washington Post. Last month, it was revealed that Chinese state-sponsored hackers had infiltrated “the private wiretapping and surveillance system that American telecom companies built” for U.S. law enforcement. Through such access, they “were able to collect audio and text messages” to spy on Donald Trump and JD Vance, along with people in the Kamala Harris campaign and Congress. But the hacking operation, known as “Salt Typhoon,” goes beyond election interference. It’s not known how long the Chinese had access to the system; some officials think it could go back to last year. The most troubling part, though, is that the government “does not know how to get them out.” It means that “millions of mobile-phone users of major U.S. carriers could be vulnerable to Chinese government surveillance.”

after 9/11 made it even easier to listen in on cellphone calls. But creating a backdoor for somebody (such as law enforcement) “is a backdoor for everybody,” said J.D. Tuccille in Reason. The debate about information security has raged since “people like Edward Snowden were pointing out that law enforcement can’t be trusted with access” to the whole communications system. “Now we know they aren’t competent custodians.”

Technologists had been sounding the alarm about the telecom “backdoor” for years, said Zack Whittaker in TechCrunch. It was established 30 years ago in the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, “at a time when cellphones were a rarity.” The law requires that any “communications provider,” such as a phone company or internet provider, must give the government “all necessary assistance to access a customer’s information when presented with a lawful order.” The Patriot Act

Innovation of the week

Japanese researchers have built the world’s first wood-paneled satellite, said Swaminathan Natarajan in BBC .com. “Built from a type of magnolia tree,” the LignoSat, “after the Latin word for wood,” is “heading for the International Space Station on a SpaceX mission” before it will be released into orbit. The satellite is not completely made of wood; it has “electronic components” and sensors onboard as well. But the researchers who developed it at Kyoto University hope that it will prove “the suitability of timber” as a future replacement for “some metals in space exploration,” including parts of spacecraft. Wood is “more durable in space,” where there’s no oxygen or water and—while we are very far from this—trees planted in greenhouses on the moon or Mars could eventually be a source of renewable materials for future vehicles.

Countering the China threat “is proving a Sisyphean task,” said Max Colchester and Daniel Michaels in The Wall Street Journal. Within the last couple of months, the FBI has said Chinese hackers accessed “260,000 internet-connected devices, including cameras and routers,” in the U.S. and other countries, and even Chinese-made cargo cranes at U.S. seaports contained embedded technology “that could allow Beijing to secretly control them.” China’s hacking operations will only grow more inventive thanks to the country’s “talent pipeline for government cybersecurity agencies,” said Micah McCartney and Didi Kirsten Tatlow in Newsweek. Hacking competitions in China attract as many as 35,000 participants—and many are sponsored by the People’s Liberation Army and China’s intelligence services. China sees these contests as a strategic imperative, useful for identifying real-world vulnerabilities that are “funneled to China’s security agencies,” and building up cyberwar capabilities that the U.S. can’t match.

Bytes: What’s new in tech

■ An unsettling Google for faces

Your face is much more easily tracked online than you might think, said Shira Ovide in The Washington Post. One free website called PimEyes is “a searchable Rolodex of faces.” Give it a photo and it will scan the internet for similar images “that have appeared on publicly available websites, blogs, online photo albums, and more.” When I searched myself, PimEyes “dug up my roughly 15-year-old employee ID photo from a Japanese-language blog post.” It also retrieved images that looked like they had been snapped from my laptop cam. I believe the images were screenshots of myself during a large web video call that had been Zoom-bombed in 2020. You can request removal from PimEyes’ database— but only after sending them a photo of yourself and a redacted copy of a passport or ID.

■ Police find iPhones harder to unlock Apple phones are mysteriously rebooting after being seized by cops, said Jamie Richards in TechRadar. “Law enforcement officers in the U.S. have noticed and warned of an issue whereby iPhones reboot themselves,” making it “much harder to unlock without the original user’s input.” Some police officers think the devices might somehow be signaling to one another to trigger a reboot, since the sudden restarts have

occurred in phones that were in airplane mode, according to one law enforcement memo. It’s possible that the issue might “stem from a new security feature” in the new iOS 18 that automatically reboots phones that have been “disconnected from cellular service” or left inactive for at least a day, a feature intended to deter thieves attempting to access stolen phones.

■ Tech companies rush for CHIPS cash Chipmakers are scrambling to secure federal funding before Donald Trump takes office, said Mackenzie Hawkins in Bloomberg. Of the $39 billion in grants secured by Congress by the passing of the 2022 CHIPS Act, “only one binding agreement” has been announced so far—for Minnesota-based manufacturer Polar Semiconductors. Now other chipmakers are “racing to complete agreements” for awards “to avoid renegotiating terms with a new administration.” Despite having years to secure the funding, Intel, Samsung, and Micron “are still working through substantive details of their contracts.” Micron has resisted joining the National Semiconductor Technology Center, a CHIPS Act research and development initiative, a condition of the awards. Also slowing down the grant process is “a labor provision” that sets pay standards for federally supported projects.

Health & Science

The worrying cause of a methane spike

Scientists may have solved the years-long mystery of why levels of methane in the atmosphere are rising. After years of stability, concentrations of the greenhouse gas surged by 5 or 6 parts per billion every year from 2007; in 2020, the growth rate nearly doubled. That’s a big concern: While methane breaks down in the atmosphere much faster than carbon dioxide, it also traps about 28 times more heat per molecule. The record emissions were initially thought to stem from increased use of natural gas, which is largely methane, and leaks from drilling or from pipelines, reports The Washington Post. But a new study suggests the biggest source of the surge is microbes:

That might give you a sweet tooth for life.

Why young kids should eat less sugar

Cutting sugar during pregnancy and early childhood may protect children from serious health issues later in life, reports The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). Researchers examined the health records of people born in the U.K. during the country’s post-World War II rationing, when adults were limited to about 40 grams of sugar a day, and those born soon after, when people’s sugar consumption roughly doubled. They found that those who were conceived and reached 2 years old during rationing had a 35 percent lower risk of type 2 diabetes in middle age and a 20 percent reduced risk of high blood pressure. The low sugar diet also appeared to delay the onset of those diseases, by around four and two years, respectively, compared with the post-rationing group. The researchers aren’t sure why sugar in early life might have this effect. One theory is that early exposure creates a lifelong taste for it: The British government’s official diet and nutrition survey found that the rationing cohort ate less sugar later in life. Co-author Tadeja Gracner, from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, acknowledges that it’s “far from easy” to reduce added sugar from children’s diets. “Added sugar is everywhere, even in baby and toddler foods, and children are bombarded with TV ads for sugary snacks.”

specifically, methane-producing, single-cell organisms found in wetlands, agricultural fields, and cows’ stomachs. The researchers analyzed samples of methane from around the world to measure its carbon signature— microbe methane tends to be “lighter,” with fewer C13 carbon atoms, whereas fossil fuel methane is “heavier.” They found that as levels of methane have risen, the gas has gotten lighter. It’s a clear sign, they say, that microbial emissions are driving the increase. That raises the prospect of a worrying feedback loop: that wetlands respond to warmer global temperatures by producing more methane, which further increases the temperature, and so on. “You can turn a wrench in an oil and gas field to

An inebriated animal kingdom

Humans aren’t the only creatures that enjoy a tipple, reports The Guardian (U.K.). A review of studies has found that alcohol occurs naturally in almost every ecosystem on the planet, meaning most animals that consume fruits, sap, and nectar also regularly get a hit of the heady stuff. Chimpanzees in southeastern Guinea have been spotted tucking into the alcoholic sap of raffia palms; spider monkeys in Panama enjoy the ethanol-heavy yellow mombin fruit. But while tales of seemingly drunken animals abound, such as the Swedish moose that got its head stuck in a tree after feasting on fermenting apples, it’s unclear how much consumption leads to inebriation. Some species appear to use alcohol in very humanlike ways: Male fruit flies, for instance, hit the booze after being rejected as a mate. Others have developed high tolerance levels. Researchers found no evidence of intoxication in pen-tailed tree shrews, despite what they describe as “prodigious ethanol consumption.” But they concede it is “unclear how an inebriated tree shrew would behave.”

Meet a truly teensy ‘toadlet’

A species of frog that’s just 6.95 millimeters (0.3 inches) long, small enough to fit on a fingertip, has been discovered in the forests of Brazil. Brachycephalus dacnis is the secondsmallest vertebrate on Earth, behind only another Brachycephalus species. Known as a “flea toadlet” for its ability to leap around 30 times its body length, the ant-size amphibian doesn’t go through a tadpole stage; its eggs hatch directly into tiny frogs, reports The New York Times. Due to their size, Brachycephalus frogs look nearly identical to the untrained eye, but distinct mating calls help females identify males of their own species. That was what initially alerted study author Luís Felipe Toledo, from the University of Campinas in Brazil, to the new species: He could hear two

Emissions from wetlands are rising.

quench methane emissions,” says Stanford University professor Rob Jackson, who was not involved in the study and is part of a global methane-tracking project. “There’s no wrench for the Congo or the Amazon.”

How ERs are failing children

More than 80 percent of U.S. emergency rooms are unprepared for pediatric cases, despite children making up 20 percent of ER visits. As a result, kids are dying needlessly. That’s the conclusion of a new analysis that found that if all ERs met a high level of “pediatric readiness”—including having child-size equipment and establishing youth-specific protocols—more than a quarter of child deaths following ER visits could be prevented, saving thousands of lives a year. It would cost as little as $207 million a year for every ER in the country to reach that level of readiness. That figure is relatively low because most ERs already stock more than 90 percent of the equipment needed for pediatric care, reports The New York Times—the staffs just haven’t been trained to use it on children. “If these changes can be mandated in the whole emergency system,” says Phyllis Rabinowitz, who set up a foundation advocating pediatric readiness after the death of her newborn daughter, “my charity can go out of business. That would be the best-case scenario.”

distinct calls from a pair of seemingly identical frogs. This is now the seventh flea-toad species discovered, and further specimen collections could potentially see the dacnis take the crown of smallest vertebrate. The researchers say there may be many more such species that remain undiscovered— in large part because they are very, very tiny.

Review of Reviews: Books

Book of the week

Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn

by

Christopher Cox (Simon & Schuster, $35)

“He was a racist. Of course he was. He was disdainful of women. We knew that,” said David M. Shribman in The Boston Globe. But while Woodrow Wilson has been called out for his galling flaws before, Christopher Cox’s important new biography “leaves the reputation of America’s only president with a Ph.D. in tatters.” In Cox’s admirably measured portrayal, the eloquent wartime leader who championed the League of Nations and spoke of making the world safe for democracy comes across as “a reflexive enemy of Blacks,”“a serial belittler of women,” and above all, “a cynical traitor to liberalism.” Far from deserving to be celebrated as one of progressivism’s heroes, the Wilson that emerges in Cox’s portrayal doesn’t even qualify as a member of the movement. “A lifelong lout,” he aggressively resisted women’s suffrage and the rights of non-white Americans. Even that doctorate degree of his was a scam.

The heart of Cox’s book is the “rarely told” story of Wilson’s quiet but vigorous campaign against women’s voting rights, said Sara Bhatia in Washington Monthly Wilson had been raised in Georgia and South Carolina, and like many Southerners, he opposed universal suffrage for reasons that were “deeply entangled with white supremacy.” His words and actions suggest that he abhorred the thought of doubling the power of Black voters, and when obstructing the suffrage movement didn’t work, he took to harassing and imprisoning suffrage demonstrators. While Wilson’s racism is no longer a secret, Cox, a former Republican congressman and SEC chair,

Novel of the week

Lazarus Man

by Richard Price (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $29)

Richard Price’s first novel in nearly a decade is “the strangest of urban thrillers: a thoughtful, even peaceful story about stumbling into new life,” said Ron Charles in The Washington Post Set in 2008, Lazarus Man follows four characters in the aftermath of an explosion of a five­story building in East Harlem that leaves at least six dead. In a book packed with memorable imagery, “nothing is more evocative than the implications entombed in the title,” a reference to the dissolute 42­year­old who is pulled from the rubble 36 hours after the collapse and imagines himself reborn. Price, the author of Clockers and Lush Life, “can size up people with a phrase,” said Leigh Haber in the Los Angeles Times. “A chorus of voices enlivens every page in a kind of urban opera,” as you might expect from a writer whose credits include HBO’s The Wire. Born and raised in the Bronx, Price is also “an astute chronicler of his city and its contradictions, Uptown versus Downtown, the tug­of­war between haves and havenots,” said Hamilton Cain in The Boston Globe As Lazarus Man unfolds, “Price’s love for his fellow citizens, in all their flaws, enthralls us.”

Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures by Katherine Rundell (Doubleday, $26)

Katherine Rundell’s latest offering is “a book packed with marvels,” said Malcolm Forbes in The Minnesota StarTribune. The prolific British author and literary scholar has compiled 23 lively portraits of creatures that are classified as endangered, and “every chapter contains sparkling nuggets that range from eye-opening to jaw-dropping.” Polar bears detect scents up to 18 miles away. Pangolins store their long tongues in a pouch near their hips. Along the way, “Rundell explains how we came to associate crows with cleverness, wolves with rapaciousness, and bats with dark deeds,” and she proves as erudite as she is enthusiastic, weaving snippets of Shakespeare, Byron, and Chinese myth in among an array of zoological fun facts.

“For anyone whose capacity for wonder could use a jump-start, Rundell’s essays are essential reading,” said Maureen Corrigan in NPR.com. Her “deeply felt, lyri-

“provides an array of shocking examples that might be new to armchair historians.” Not only did Wilson host a White House screening of The Birth of a Nation, his writings in support of the Ku Klux Klan were featured on title cards at the start of the incendiary 1915 film. Worse, he instituted Jim Crow segregation policies in all federal offices.

Scholars have often characterized Wilson’s disdain for women and Black Americans as departures from his progressive ideology, said Barton Swaim in The Wall Street Journal. “Was there a contradiction, though?” As Cox acknowledges, Wilson established child labor laws, a progressive national income tax, and the Federal Reserve System. Still, “the core of progressivism is the belief that most people lack the wisdom to govern themselves and require a class of educated elites to organize society.” Because Cox focuses so narrowly on Wilson’s misogyny, racism, and rights violations, his book isn’t a traditional “whole-of-life” account, said Quin Hillyer in the Washington Examiner. Fortunately, it doesn’t lack for heroes. At times, in fact, it’s “less a biography of Wilson than a tribute to the women and men who persevered to expand civic agency.”

cal, often witty” evocations of these living marvels never fail to surprise. For example, her chapter on the coconut crab begins: “It was, perhaps, a hermit crab that ate Amelia Earhart.” She then tells us about a collection of bones found on a Western Pacific island that is also home to a colony of land crabs that can live more than a century. In that time, they can grow to 40 inches across or, as she puts it, “too large to fit in a bathtub, exactly the right size for a nightmare.”

A running theme of the book is how the human and animal worlds are interconnected, and she “makes readers see, really see, some of the miraculous creatures we share this fragile world with.”

Unfortunately, “things get a bit woolly” every time Rundell touches on what action humans might take to protect the species she so describes, said Matthew Reisz in The Guardian. She does at least give us reasons to be angry, such as how much killing is carried out to satisfy our silly superstitions about the magical powers of tiger claws and rhino horns. Despite the “thin and impractical” advice it offers, Vanishing Treasures “could hardly be bettered as an exuberant celebration of everything from bats, crows, and hedgehogs to narwhals and wombats.” Every portrait brims with vivid details, and “Rundell is incapable of writing a dull sentence.” Getty

The Book List

Best books…chosen by Ed Park

Ed Park’s novel Same Bed Different Dreams, now out in paperback, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of the 2024 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction. Below, the author, editor, and critic names six of his favorite books of 2024.

Stubs by John Jaewon Kim. A simple conceit yields the coolest memoir of the year. Kim found an envelope containing ticket stubs to 32 indie-rock shows (plus a Warhol exhibit and a Joan Rivers set) that he’d attended between 2001 and 2010. Each stub sparks a memory, producing a portrait of the artist as a young law student, avid concertgoer, crush-haver, life liver.

The Last One at the Wedding by Jason Rekulak. In this deeply satisfying thriller, a veteran UPS truck driver should be happy as he travels to a tech baron’s idyllic New England compound to marry off his estranged daughter into money. But why is her fiancé so skittish, and where in the name of V.C. Andrews is her future motherin-law?

Blurry by Dash Shaw. Shaw, the author-illustrator of Bodyworld and Bottomless Belly Button, reinvents himself with each graphic novel. Blurry lacks a central character, instead letting the narrative flow from person to person, couple to couple, like a passed baton made up of grace and light.

Negative Space by Gillian Linden. This pitchperfect novel charts a week in the life of a frazzled part-time private school English teacher at the height of the pandemic in New York City. Worries about her own children and her grasp on Kafka occupy her whirring mind when she sees—or does she?—a troubling teacher-student interaction.

Self-Portraits by Osamu Dazai. “One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji,” the standout story in this curated collection of Dazai’s autobiographical shorts, begins with a corrective bit of art criticism regarding depictions of the titular promontory. The story then wanders a while—like the best of John Cheever’s fictions.

1095 Short Sentences by Donato Loia. The best of these numbered entries have an offhand wisdom (“210. Your success or failure as a professor depends enormously on the tone of your voice”). And they might change your life in small ways if you let them: “4. The first coffee of the day should be consumed as slowly as possible.” I’ll drink to that!

Also of interest...in perseverance

Consider Bill Zehme’s “short but florid” new biography of Johnny Carson “a memorial of the monoculture,” said Alexandra Jacobs in The New York Times. During the three decades that he ruled late-night network TV, “Carson’s work was to keep the show going, not to dwell on unpleasant topics, and Zehme follows suit.” This book brushes aside the star’s sometimes violent alcoholism, devoting itself instead to “a brisk ring-a-ding” of a career sum-up. And it’s loaded with Dad jokes.

One Gets to

$28)

Émilie du Châtelet (1706-49) “never would have taken herself to be dangerous,” said Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker. A French marquise celebrated for her 1740 treatise, Foundations of Physics, she’d have preferred to be remembered as wise. In this new biography, Andrew Janiak worries too much that she’s best known today as Voltaire’s lover. Still, his book “makes the largely persuasive case that du Châtelet was one of the most important women in European history.”

Brian C. Black (Godine, $29)

“No One Gets to Fall Apart is a searing account of what it’s like to love someone who is grappling with a severe mental illness,” said Christy Gualteri in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Sarah LaBrie’s mother was slipping into full-blown schizophrenia in Houston while LaBrie was stepping into adulthood and a writing career. Owing to her worries and fears, LaBrie was also falling apart, and she spends the back half of this “alluring” memoir “desperately trying to piece herself together.”

When Dwight Eisenhower first drove across America, he did it the hard way, said Mark Yost in The Wall Street Journal. In 1919, the future president was one of the Army officers in charge of getting an 81-vehicle convoy from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco on the sorry road between. Ike’s Road Trip focuses on the obstacles the group overcame, including places where progress was made with only 50 to 100 men pulling each vehicle. It’s all “as engaging as any tale of westward expansion.”

Author of the week

Bethany Joy Lenz

Just because Bethany Joy Lenz’s first book is a critically praised best-seller doesn’t mean that she’s loving all the attention, said Savannah Walsh in Vanity Fair. “I would love to be able to be really excited about this, but it’s strange,” says the 43-year-old actress. “I’m still working past a lot of the shame, so it is a mixed bag.” In Lenz’s Dinner for Vampires, the former One Tree Hill star is dinner and the vampires are the leaders of a small Idahobased Christian cult that largely controlled her life during her hit drama series’ 10-year run. Lenz married the leader’s son and had a child with him at 30. She also reports losing $2 million to the group and spending another $360,000 to wrest away full custody of her daughter. Once she was asked to write a memoir, she threw herself into it despite her shame, knocking out 90,000 words in roughly 10 weeks. “I was a machine,” she says.

Lenz is still a Christian, but she’s far warier today about labels that have the potential to divide people, said Olivia Truffaut-Wong in Cosmopolitan. “In culture right now, there’s so much polarization,” she says. “So many people are very reliant on their beliefs as the spine of their identity. And what I’m seeing is a pattern of relegating anyone who is different from you or believes different things than you into a subcategory. I see it in workplaces, even in friend groups, and it’s concerning to me.”

That worry helped inspire Lenz to push past any insecurities she felt about sharing the mistakes she’d made. “I hope that when people read this book,” she says, “one of the things they’ll be able to take away from it is how insidious groupthink is and what happens when you’re not thinking for yourself.”

Review of Reviews: Art & Stage

Exhibit of the week

Tamara de Lempicka

The de Young Museum, San Francisco, through Feb. 9

“Before Madonna strapped on her funnelbreasted bustier and called it feminism, there was the painter Tamara de Lempicka,” said Walker Mimms in The New York Times. Shortly after World War I, the Polish emigrée settled in France and developed a distinctly cool, hard-edged style of art deco portraiture that now seems “synonymous with the fierceness and decadence of Paris in the 1920s.” But while Lempicka was dedicated to a vision of femininity that anticipated the future, the first major retrospective of her work to appear in America reveals that she always had an eye trained on art history’s past. “Lempicka was no trailblazer, it turns out. Like other deco nostalgists, she was a good old-fashioned classicist,” drawing inspiration from previous centuries’ masters. The 100 paintings and drawings in the de Young’s current show are “by turns swaggering, Sapphic, and sensational,” but you sense that imagery might not have been so daring if Lempicka—a lover of cocaine, Wagner, and both men and women—hadn’t looked back to the Renaissance for inspiration.

“American museums have largely ignored Lempicka’s work,” said Judith H. Dobrzynski in The Wall Street Journal. The explanation partly lies in her blazing art deco aesthetic, a style whose popularity peaked in the 1920s and ’30s but faded, deemed decorative, as abstraction and other nonfigurative styles took hold. The curator of the de Young show, Furio Rinaldi, also

A Wonderful World

Studio 54, New York City ★★★★

“You can see why A Wonderful World’s structure might sound compelling in a pitch meeting,” said Jackson McHenry in NYMag.com. It’s a Broadway jukebox musical that showcases the music of Louis Armstrong and tells the jazz legend’s life story in four chapters—each associated with a different city, decade, and wife. In practice, however, “that four-part structure makes the action both rush and stall.” And while James Monroe Iglehart’s mimicry of Satchmo is “really quite impressive,” he’s forced by the crowded storytelling to hit a series of emotional highs and lows in quick succession. Often, “it feels like Iglehart gets weighed down by the sheer heft of the responsibility he feels not to sugarcoat his man,” said Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune. “You always feel like the show is racing against time.”

“Though every single tune sounds sublime,” said Johnny Oleksinski in the New York Post, “the applause dims as the performance goes on.” Surprisingly, “the show’s best numbers belong to the actresses who play the wives, each one fabulous.” But the show-stealing work of Dionne Figgins, Jennie Harney-Fleming, Kim Exum, and Dar-

lesia Cearcy reduce Iglehart’s Armstrong to second trumpet, and too many of his numbers, great as they are, feel as if they should have been left out. “If drama were merely a tribute concert, there would be nothing to complain of,” said Jesse Green in The New York Times. “But with such a major figure we want something deeper,” something that reveals how Armstrong’s interior life clashed or meshed with his stage persona. “Sincere and loaded with talent, A Wonderful World made me wish that Broadway were just another stage in a show’s development,” because “Armstrong deserves more than the standard jukebox bullet-point biography he gets here.”

blames gender bias and general discomfort with celebrating a promiscuous bisexual woman whose greatest works included racy ensembles of female nudes. Whatever the reasons Lempicka’s star had faded by the time she moved to the U.S. in 1940, “there’s no denying her talent.” Consider Young Girl in Green, from about 1931, which depicts a woman who, in her revealing dress and long, spilling curls, “epitomizes the free-spirited belief in modernity that characterized the interwar years in Paris.”

“Lempicka’s work was never quite the same after she left Paris,” said Sarah Hotchkiss in KQED. If you must, “blame her depression and a turn toward religious imagery.” Either way, “the final rooms of the de Young’s exhibition come as a shock,” because the colors are off, the subject matter is “all over the place,” and “none of it sticks.” Such a decline may help explain why Lempicka faded, and also why a recent Broadway show about her life couldn’t muster a compelling storyline. But you may be happiest if you enter the show knowing little of Lempicka and “getting your socks knocked off.” Her early paintings “pack high drama into tight compositions,” her portraits of Paris’ aristocrats pair glamour with faith in technological progress, and her women project “a sense of unattainable cool.”

The Other Americans Arena Stage, Washington, D.C.

John Leguizamo’s first ensemble drama is nothing if not a big swing, said Naveen Kumar in The Washington Post. But while the writer and actor best known for his solo shows infuses

patriarch

The Other Americans with “the candor and moral clarity that has made him a singular voice in American theater,” he gives the secondary characters in the family drama so little depth that he could have made this a one-man production as well. Playing a Colombian immigrant and laundromat owner named Nelson Castro, Leguizamo is “a domineering presence,” said Gregory Ford in DC Theater Arts. But Trey SantiagoHudson adds “an edge-of-your seat performance” as the troubled son Nelson hopes will become his lieutenant and heir. When the story’s painful passages arrived on the night I saw the play, “there were moments of stunned silence so deep you practically felt it on your skin.”

Small Things Like These

Directed by Tim Mielants (PG-13)

One witness dares question his church’s conduct.

Review of Reviews: Film

Cillian Murphy must be unaware that the next film an actor makes after winning an Oscar is usually terrible, said Odie Henderson in The Boston Globe. “In fact, I’ll go so far as to say his performance here is better than the one for which he was honored by the Academy.” In this adaptation of an acclaimed 2021 Claire Keegan novel, the Oppenheimer star plays a coal man in 1985 Ireland who becomes deeply troubled by the sins of his church, and the story largely plays out on the performer’s face. The result is “a master class in quiet acting, one that’s hard to shake once the credits roll.” Small Things Like These could serve as “a history lesson in why Irish people are the way they are,” said Emma Kiely in Collider. For generations, Ireland’s Catholic Church ran homes for “fallen women,” known as the Magdalene Laun-

dries, where unwed pregnant women were held against their will, forced to work, and compelled to give up their babies. By focusing not on the laundries’ inner workings but on one husband and father who resists the temptation to simply look the other way, the film shows how society allowed the abuse to endure and “how the power of the Catholic Church silenced an entire nation.”

Emily Watson, playing the Mother Superior determined to hide the crimes of her convent, raises the dramatic stakes with “a deadeyed performance of cool bureaucratic tyranny,” said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. Ultimately, it mattered little to me that no climactic confrontation arrives. “I was so rapt, so caught up in this film, that I wasn’t aware that it was going to be the ending until the screen faded to black.”

Heretic

Directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods (R)

Missionaries walk into a foe’s deadly trap.

“If Heretic proves nothing else, it’s that creepy, evil Hugh Grant is the best Hugh Grant,” said David Fear in Rolling Stone. The former rom-com king, at 64, is now trying his hand at horror, and this smallscale production from the co-writers of A Quiet Place “makes extremely good use of those twinkly eyes, that sunny smile, the wry spin he puts on a punch line.” Grant plays a cardigan-wearing Colorado homeowner who welcomes two young female Mormon missionaries into his house only to trap them, testing their faith with provocative questions before eventually revealing very dark intentions. After starting out strong, however, Heretic stalls, then “devolves into pure balderdash by the last act.” The di-

Grant’s self-styled moral adjudicator

alogue and performances make it worth watching, said Katie Walsh in the Los Angeles Times. As played by Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East, the missionaries are “observant and canny,” ready with rebuttals when Grant’s creepy pedant attacks organized religion and—“well, there’s gratification in that.” Meanwhile, “Grant is clearly having a lot of fun,” said Manohla Dargis in The New York Times “It’s enjoyable watching him go hard here with cold, predatory eyes and a smile that turns from uneasily friendly to straight-up fiendish.” Even as the horror film around him takes a turn into dull familiarity, “the pleasure he exudes as an irredeemable fiend is plenty seductive.”

Bird

Directed by Andrea Arnold (R)

A plucky tween transcends long odds

Andrea Arnold’s latest film “insists on finding beauty in places a less empathetic gaze might overlook,” said Farah Cheded in Paste. Its 12-year-old protagonist, Bailey, is coming of age in a Gravesend, U.K., squat that she shares with an older brother and their childlike unemployed father, played by a tattooed Barry Keoghan. Three of Bailey’s younger siblings live across town with her mother and a terrifying new boyfriend. But as the stoic tween’s challenges escalate, a stranger named Bird enters her life, and Arnold’s gritty drama “takes flight into magical realism.” As played by German actor Franz Rogowski, Bird has “a fey, otherworldly quality,” said Leslie Felperin in The Hollywood Reporter. And as he

Keoghan and Adams: Ready to fly

and Bailey develop a friendship, Arnold “starts dropping little hints that some supernatural or fantastical force is at work here.” For the director of American Honey, that’s a major departure, setting up a closing scene that will “send an audience out feeling giddy and a smidge weepy in the best sort of way.” For all its metaphorical avian imagery, however, “Bird is more rewarding at ground level, as a study of a fractured family on the margins that is neither condescending nor exploitative,” said Zachary Barnes in The Wall Street Journal. Keoghan and Rogowski are both striking, while newcomer Nykiya Adams embues Bailey with “a natural blend of pluck, perseverance, and cautiously subdued curiosity.”

Streaming tips

New documentaries

Night Is Not Eternal

Chinese-American director

Nanfu Wang saw parallels between her own story and that of Cuban activist Rosa Maria Paya. Wang’s intimate portrait of Paya as she fights for democratic change in her homeland is an effective primer on how to combat autocratic regimes. Max

Bread & Roses

When the Taliban seized power in Kabul in 2021, 20 million Afghan women were stripped of basic rights. The three brave women in this sober, at-times brutal documentary fight back. Risking their lives, they take to the streets to protest, cameras in hand. Apple TV+

I Am Ready, Warden

Expect to see this documentary short about a Texas death-row inmate on the list of Oscar nominees. It follows the last acts of convicted murderer John Henry Ramirez, who seeks redemption from his victim’s son 20 years after committing the crime.

Paramount+

Never Look Away

Video journalist Margaret Moth was a singular war documentarian who regularly put her life on the line, even returning to the battlefield after being shot in the face by a sniper in Sarajevo. First-time director Lucy Lawless examines Moth’s unconventional life and what drew her to combat zones.

$4 on demand

Lead and Copper

The 2014 water crisis in Flint, Mich., is revisited in extraordinary detail in this horrorinducing documentary. It argues that the Flint debacle isn’t an aberration, but one of many environmental crimes unfolding in poor and minority communities throughout the nation. Available to rent Nov. 19 Tito, Margot & Me

The niece of Panamanian diplomat Tito Arias and renowned ballerina Margot Fonteyn tells the story of the couple’s long love affair, which survived a coup effort and an attempt on Arias’ life. IndiePix Unlimited

Television

The Week’s guide to what’s worth watching

Interior Chinatown

In this eclectic, action-packed series based on Charles Yu’s National Book Award–winning novel, Jimmy O. Yang stars as a thwarted actor who appears in a police procedural in a background role as a Chinese restaurant waiter. His drab existence is upended when he witnesses a crime and begins an investigation that uncovers secrets about Chinatown’s underbelly and his family’s history. Tuesday, Nov. 19, Hulu

Buy Now: The Shopping Conspiracy

If every day feels like your own private Prime Day, there might be a reason for that. In this eye-opening documentary, former Amazon and Apple insiders spill the tea on the devious tricks their former employers use to keep us buying. Aided by effective graphics, the movie lays out the personal and environmental costs of our consumption loop. Wednesday, Nov. 20, Netflix

Surveilled

Always feel like somebody’s watching you? There’s a reason for that, too. This investigative documentary led by Ronan Farrow takes a deep dive into the booming business of commercial spyware, a multibillion-dollar industry that’s quietly erasing personal privacy and threatening the health of democracies. Farrow travels the globe to expose the ways espionage technology is being used to suppress dissent and terrorize citizens. Wednesday, Nov. 20, HBO and Max

A Man on the Inside

Good news for fans of The Good Place: Creator Michael Schur and star Ted Danson have reunited. In this very funny new series, Danson plays a widower who’s looking for a fresh start when he answers a want ad and ends up as a private investigator tasked with infiltrating a retirement community to find a stolen heirloom. Mary Elizabeth Ellis, Stephanie Beatriz, and Sally Struthers co-star. Thursday, Nov. 21, Netflix

Cruel Intentions

The 1999 cult-classic teen drama has been given

John David Washington at the keyboard

Yang, with Ronny Chieng, in ‘Interior Chinatown’

a series adaptation. The action is set at fictional Manchester College, an elite D.C. school where stepsiblings Caroline and Lucien sit atop the social hierarchy. To maintain their status, the two plot for Lucien to seduce a student who happens to be the daughter of America’s vice president. Savannah Lee Smith, Sarah Catherine Hook, and Zac Burgess co-star. Thursday, Nov. 21, Prime

Other highlights

2024 CMA Awards

Luke Bryan, Peyton Manning, and Lainey Wilson co-host the Country Music Association’s annual awards ceremony, which figures to be a big night for top nominees Morgan Wallen, Chris Stapleton, and Cody Johnson. Wednesday, Nov. 20, at 8 p.m., ABC

Blitz

Saoirse Ronan and the excellent young Elliott Heffernan co-star in the new Steve McQueen movie about a London boy who attempts to find his way back to his mother during Germany’s World War II bombing campaign. Friday, Nov. 22, Apple TV+

Spellbound

Nicole Kidman, Javier Bardem, and West Side Story’s Rachel Zegler lend their voices to this animated feature about a princess who must spring into action when her parents are transformed into monsters. Friday, Nov. 22, Netflix

Show of the week

The Piano Lesson

Denzel Washington has a deep affinity for the plays of August Wilson. Having won an Oscar for his adaptation of Fences, he’s brought in the family for his new take on Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize winner from 1987. Son Malcolm directs, and son John David Washington co-stars as Boy Willie, who wants to sell the family piano, an heirloom that was intricately carved by an enslaved ancestor. Standing in his way is his sister, Berniece, made unforgettable here by Danielle Deadwyler’s remarkable performance. Deadwyler gets the strong support you’d expect from her main costar and Samuel L. Jackson. Friday, Nov. 22, Netflix

LEISURE Food & Drink

Salt-crusted turkey: The end of dry breast meat

Salt-roasting is a technique that’s often employed to keep lean fish moist, said John Somerall in Food & Wine. Not surprisingly, “it works the same magic with turkey.” A mixture of salt and egg whites forms a nearly airtight crust, locking in moisture and flavor. “Whereas traditional methods for roasting turkey tend to yield dry white meat, salt-roasting delivers an incredibly juicy breast that’s perfectly seasoned to the bone.”

Recipe of the week

Salt-crusted turkey

1 (5- to 6-lb) fresh or thawed frozen bone-in, skin-on turkey breast

2 tsp olive oil, divided

3 lbs coarse kosher salt (about 10 cups)

6 large egg whites

1 large shallot, halved lengthwise

6 sprigs each parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme

Freshly cracked black pepper

Gravy of your choice

Preheat oven to 400. Place turkey, breast side down, on a work surface. Using poultry shears or a sharp knife and beginning at tail end, cut along each side of backbone. Remove backbone from turkey; reserve for stock or discard. Turn turkey breast side up. Using the heels of your hands, press firmly against breastbone until it cracks and turkey breast flattens slightly. Trim any excess

fat and skin around neck, and trim any exposed ribs sticking out from sides of breast. Starting at neck end, loosen skin from breast by inserting fingers and gently pushing between skin and meat. Rub 1 tsp oil under skin; smooth skin over breast, and rub remaining 1 tsp oil over skin.

In a large bowl, stir together salt and egg whites. Add ¼ cup water and continue stirring, adding 1 tbsp at a time until texture resembles lightly wet sand. (If you pack mixture into a ball in your hands, it should

Road trip: Texas’ best ‘New Tejano’ tacos

Tacos are going through some changes in Texas, and “I’m calling the movement New Tejano,” said José R. Ralat in Texas Monthly. As the magazine’s taco editor, I sample hundreds of taco joints throughout the state every year. While Tex-Mex still dominates the scene, “more than ever,” Mexican immigrants and first-generation Mexican-Americans are using local ingredients in tacos that pay homage to unexpected flavors, such as kimchi or Big Red soda, that their blended cultures have taught them to love. Below, three of the best.

Elemi Horizon City “Elemi is New Tejano’s beating heart.” Located outside El Paso, the epicenter of the movement, “Emiliano and Kristal Marentes’ restaurant is about getting back to the couple’s Mexican roots with local ingredients,” such as black trumpet mushrooms. “The best taco of the bunch” is a conejito pibil that substitutes rabbit for pork and slathers it in achiote and bitter orange. 13500 Eastlake Blvd.

Dinnertime at Taqueria El Tiger

Taqueria El Tiger El Paso From a charming blue bus parked in the shadow of the bridge to Ciudad Juárez, seasoned chef Jorge Ortiz and his team “sling modern twists on border food.” Beef shaved from a vertical rotisserie

pack the tacos trompo de asada, but the standout is the tripa y tembloroso, a taco that brings together tripe, pork rinds, and salsa morita–marinated kimchi. 10167 Socorro Road Nixta Taqueria Austin

The decor at Nixta is very Mexican, including a mural of Mesoamerican goddess Tonantzin. But the menu is “vegetable-forward” and all New Tejano. Credit co-owner Edgar Rico’s San Luis Potosí roots for inspiring the enchilada potosina taco: Guajillo chile paste is mixed into the masa used to make the tortillas, which are stu ed with duck-fat refried beans, potato, chorizo, and chilerubbed queso. 2512 E. 12th St.

hold its shape but break apart if tossed back into the bowl.)

Place 2 cups salt mixture in a mound in a 12-inch cast-iron skillet, leaving a 2-inch border around edge of the skillet. Place shallot halves, cut sides up, on salt mixture; top with 2 sprigs each parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme. Place turkey, skin side up, on salt and herbs. Cover turkey with remaining salt mixture, pressing to adhere and making sure cavity around neck is filled and sides are covered. Insert a probe thermometer in thickest part of turkey breast; press to seal cracks or fill holes in crust, forming a tight seal around thermometer. Gently press salt mixture into turkey, smoothing surface to repair any cracks or holes.

Roast in preheated oven until thermometer registers 150, 1 hour and 20 minutes to 1 hour and 35 minutes. Remove from oven; let rest 10 to 15 minutes. (Turkey will reach an internal temperature of 165.)

Using the back of a large spoon or knife, crack salt crust on turkey. Remove crust in pieces; using a pastry brush, gently brush away excess salt. Remove and discard skin. Carve turkey and place on a serving platter. Garnish with remaining herb sprigs and, if desired, black pepper. Serve with gravy.

Wine: Zero-alcohol sparklers

“When the time comes to raise something festive and fizzy, alcohol-free options abound,” said Emily Saladino in Imbibe. The quality of non-alcoholic sparkling wines has “improved dramatically” during recent years, and these bottles could transform skeptics into converts.

French Bloom Le Rosé ($44). Sporting “the most wine-centric nose of the bottles we tasted,” this organic sparkler combines notes of tart lemon rind and grape juice followed by “a long finish with lots of bright acidity.”

Studio Null Prickly Red ($32). A blend of Spanish tempranillo and syrah, this wine’s red fruit and grippy tannins are “reminiscent of a dry lambrusco.” When slightly chilled, “it pairs beautifully with holiday dishes like roast turkey.”

Proxies Gold Crush ($25). Sommeliers at Michelin-starred restaurants love Proxies’ wine alternatives.

“A great aperitif,” Gold Crush “has fresh-squeezed lemon and lime juice flavors balanced by a hint of black tea leaves.”

Travel

This week’s dream: The paths less traveled in Nepal

Detouring from the “Everest Highway” favored by hardcore climbers is a deeply rewarding way to experience Nepal, said Sarika Bansal in Afar. Instead of making Everest Base Camp a first step in a challenging journey, the group I joined for a 12-day trek “would zig and zag through ancient paths once followed by monks and traders, sleep in lodges in Nepali villages, and enjoy viewpoints few visitors experience.” The itinerary, planned by Mountain Lodges of Nepal, would include 35 miles of hiking for an 8,000-foot elevation gain, broken up by three helicopter rides. And it all began in the small town of Lukla, home to an airport and busy streets with no cars but plenty of yaks for hauling luggage.

Hiking from Lukla (9,318 feet) to the town of Namche Bazaar (11,286 feet), we stopped at Pema Choling, a 17th-century Buddhist monastery and happened to catch an annual puja ceremony. “How lucky we were to witness monks in maroon robes

Hotel of the week

The Regent’s sun-filled lobby

Regent Santa Monica Beach Santa Monica, Calif.

Santa Monica’s iconic beachfront has just added “a beacon of classic luxury,” said Chadner Navarro in Robb Report. While the surge of high-end local hotel openings has reached “a fever pitch,” the new 167-key Regent is “the most glamorous in the game.” The aesthetic fits the setting: “lots of light, lots of references to nature and water, and lots of space.” Suites include a 2,800-square-foot duplex with stunning views of the Pacific, and all guests can enjoy the services of a beach butler, celebrity chef Michael Mina’s Egyptian-inspired indoor-outdoor restaurant, and the West Coast’s first spa from the French beauty brand Guerlain. regenthotels.com, doubles from $1,291

play horns of various lengths, hit gongs, and sing in low, throaty voices.” During our subsequent ascent, “every time I thought the path would flatten, I turned a corner and had to crane my neck upward.” After crossing the Dudh Koshi river on a vertiginous suspension bridge, our guide, Pasang Temba Sherpa, urged us to peer through the firs. “The world’s highest peak, Mount Everest, stood snowcapped at 29,032 feet.

Getting the flavor of...

The Everglades’ tree islands

“Deep within the seemingly endless saw-grass marshes of the Florida Everglades, I found myself standing on an unexpected speck of dry land,” said Jennifer Reed in The New York Times. Our guide, a member of the Miccosukee tribe, had carried us by airboat to one of the small “tree islands”—formed from sediment trapped in willow roots—where her ancestors lived for roughly a century after taking shelter in the vast marshland during the Seminole Wars of the 1800s. The 600 remaining Miccosukee now live on the mainland, but they use the tree islands for ceremonies and for growing pumpkin and corn. Ours was dotted with palm-thatched structures, called chickees, and we learned how each island sustained families of 10 to 15 people, via foraging, farming, and hunting. You can learn more at the Miccosukee Indian Village, a cultural center 40 miles west of Miami on U.S. 41. But you really should book a short airboat tour. “I had never seen the Glades this way: not as an intimidating wilderness to be tamed, but as the Miccosukee do, as a home.”

Moose-spotting in Maine

Though they can grow up to 7 feet tall and weigh 1,700 pounds, “moose aren’t as easy to spot as you might think,” said Ken Wells in The Wall Street Journal. I recently climbed into a van for a four-hour moose-watching tour near northwest Maine’s Moosehead Lake. Two hours in, all of us are still “looking hard

I felt the awe that inspired centuries of mountaineers.”

We overnighted at Thame (12,467 feet) before hopping a helicopter to another lodge. “As we began to rise, ravines opened beneath us, filled with rushing waterfalls and bright alpine flowers.”

A day later, another helicopter took us to Everest Base Camp (17,598 feet), where the surreal ice and peaks overwhelmed me. Shuffling a half mile along glacial paths, we reached the menacing Khumbu Icefall. But soon my head started to spin and by morning, I decided to join other stricken trekkers on a helicopter back to Lukla, which was disappointing. Embracing advice provided by Pasang Temba, however, “I tried to let go of my ego and think positively about the universe”—particularly all the wonders I’d recently experienced.

Mountain Lodges of Nepal (mountainlodgesofnepal.com) offers a 13-day trek for $3,075 a person.

at thickets, gazing beyond brush piles, staring at bogs.” But we’re seeing no moose. Our guide, Chris Keene of Northeast Whitewater, eventually invites us to pile out into a clearing and, putting a hand to his nose, makes a moose call, “a high-pitched, otherworldly sound” that echoes around us. Still, “not a creature was stirring,” and we all thank Keene for his efforts before parting ways. The next morning, after a couple shows us photos of two moose they encountered farther north, we make our way to Lazy Tom Stream—a prime spotting ground. “It is a place of sprawling splendor,” and we ask two photographers there whether they’ve seen any moose. “Not today,” one says. “But on a tour yesterday we saw seven.”

The rising cost of easy travel

Wherever you venture these days, “the hottest travel amenity is getting your time back,” said Allison Pohle in The Wall Street Journal. Roughly half of all theme parks, zoos, and similar attractions now offer skip-the-line access for a fee, improving life for monied travelers but not others. At Disney World, Disney hotel guests now can pay up to $449 on top of admission for a Lightning Lane Premier Pass that erases waits at theme park attractions. Similar shortcuts are everywhere. For airline passengers, $80 buys five-year enrollment in TSA PreCheck, which cuts security line waits, and it’s $120 for Global Entry, which speeds passport checks. This winter, skiers will have a new way to skip rental lines by paying $50 for Vail Resorts’ My Epic Gear, a service that delivers rented gear slopeside to all members.

Best Properties on the Market

This week: Homes in Columbus, Ohio

Olde Towne East This updated 1893 townhouse is on a tree-lined corner lot near shopping, arts venues, and tennis courts. The fourbedroom home features original details including bull’s-eye door casings, hardwood floors, carved central staircase, and ornate marble fireplace surrounds; a gourmet kitchen with exposed-brick walls, large island, and pantry; and smart-home technology for music, security, lights, and thermostats. Outside are a front garden, covered side porch, and large landscaped backyard. $649,900. Michael Jones, Coldwell Banker Realty, (614) 434-6631

German Village Two blocks from Schiller Park, this 1915 redbrick with Victorian elements is also next door to a beloved café famed for its burgers. The three-bedroom house has high ceilings, pocket doors, period hardware, custom cabinetry, exposed brick, balcony, redone marble and quartz–clad kitchen with eat-in island and drinks bar, and mudroom with built-in desk. The lot has a landscaped front, side yards, and two-car garage with EV charger. $1,150,000. Leah Bastin, Cutler Real Estate/Luxury Portfolio International, (614) 542-7371

Downtown The 2005 Sixty Spring condominium is surrounded by downtown amenities and 10 minutes’ drive from Battelle Riverfront Park. This huge three-bedroom penthouse has an open layout, architectural curves and angles, stone floors, art tiling, art nouveau–style cutout door, double-sided gas fireplace, floor-to-ceiling windows with city views, chef’s kitchen with cooktop island, and stairway access to a private garden. The building includes a common roof deck and courtyard garden. $2,371,300. Shawn Redman, Street Sotheby’s International Realty, (614) 946-5983

Best Properties on the Market

Woodland Park The residential street of this modern farmhouse is near dining, a library, a YMCA, and the Franklin Park Conservatory and Botanical Gardens. The 2022 fourbedroom has a vaulted great room with clerestory windows, wall of sliders, and floating wood-and-steel stairs; open kitchen with island and garage-door window; primary suite with walk-in closet; rec room; and wine cellar. The property includes a porch, patio, yard, deck, and roomy three-car garage. $724,900. Misty Linn, Core Realty Collection, (614) 286-5171

Victorian Village This 1900 American Foursquare across from 32.56-acre Goodale Park is also close to dining, shops, and nightlife. The four-bedroom house features a spacious front porch; parallel sitting rooms with pocket doors, fireplaces, and crown molding; updated chef’s kitchen with herringbone-tile floors and drinks refrigerator; primary suite with steam shower; office with park views; and upstairs entertainment space. French doors open to a terrace overlooking landscaped plantings and a kidney-shaped saltwater pool. $1,800,000. Michaela Grandey, Rolls Realty, (614) 783-5486

Brewery District The apartments in the historic Schlee Malt House are walking distance to Brewery District and German Village restaurants and stores. This two-bedroom loft features new hardwood floors, exposed brick, arched windows, original beams, a fireplace, and a refreshed kitchen with granite counters and subway tiles. Amenities include a parking spot and access to a common patio; a park with trails and rock climbing is a short drive. $475,000. Jennifer Williams, Cutler Real Estate New Albany/Luxury Portfolio International, (614) 271-0407

The bottom line

■ Climate-related extreme weather events cost the global economy more than $2 trillion over the past decade, roughly equaling the damage caused by the 2008 global financial crisis. In the past two full years alone, global economic damages reached $451 billion.

Axios

■ The Biden administration set out plans to triple U.S. nuclear power capacity to 300 gigawatts by 2050 through the construction of new reactors and upgrades to existing facilities. Nuclear accounted for about 100 GW of installed electricity generation capacity in 2023, or about half as much as coal.

Bloomberg

■ OpenAI paid around $15 million to purchase the Chat.com domain from HubSpot co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah. This is believed to be one of the most expensive domain purchases ever, albeit a far cry from the $872 million that Gannett paid in 2014 for Cars .com (as part of a broader purchase).

Axios

■ Thirty-four percent of Millennials say they’d turn down a higher-paying job if it meant less flexibility to spend time with their pet. And 35 percent of Americans say their pets motivate them to work harder for more pay.

The Hustle

■ Timothy Mellon, a reclusive heir to the fortune of Gilded Age tycoon Andrew Mellon, donated $165 million to Republican political action committees that supported Donald Trump, more than other billionaires like Elon Musk. The Mellon family remains one of the country’s richest, with a combined net worth of $14 billion.

Fortune

The News at a Glance

Bitcoin: Trump win drives crypto dreams

“From New York to Singapore,” traders are “pulling all-nighters and forgoing gym breaks” to ride the biggest crypto rally since 2021, said Suvashree Ghosh and Sidhartha Shukla in Bloomberg The price of bitcoin hit a record on election night and continued this week on a “march toward $100,000.” Many forecasters thought the collapse of crypto exchange FTX in 2022 marked the end of bitcoin fever. But the digital currency has “more than doubled so far this year” The latest rally was unleashed by Donald Trump’s victory, giving bitcoin proponents an “ally” in the White House. “Trump campaigned as an industry champion, promising to fire Gary Gensler, the Securities and Exchange Commissioner, who over-

saw a post-FTX crackdown.” Crypto lobbyists spent more than $100 million backing sympathetic candidates, including Trump, said The Economist He, in turn, pledged that “a changing of the guard will make regulation kinder to crypto.” “The rules will be written by people who love your industry, not hate your industry,” Trump said at a crypto conference in July. It’s true that Gensler was “unconvinced of cryptocurrencies’ merits.” He took numerous firms to court. Canning him removes the industry’s “perfect villain.” But Trump wasn’t always a believer, calling bitcoin a “scam” as recently as 2021. The crypto believers shouldn’t expect consistency from Trump 2.0.

Markets: Stock surge for Trump-friendly companies

“Trump trades” fueled a post-election market surge, said Derek Saul in Forbes. “U.S. stocks are up nearly across the board,” but traders have poured into areas that could benefit most from the incoming Trump administration. Bank stocks are up due to “an expected uptick in mergers and acquisition activity.” Tesla’s stock gained nearly 40 percent in five days. “The only S&P 500 company to top Tesla is Taser stun gun parent Axon Enterprise.” And doing even better than that are the “shares of private prison companies CoreCivic and Geo Group, which are Immigration and Customs Enforcement contractors.”

Prices: Inflation rises slightly in line with forecasts

Inflation ticked up slightly in October, ending a streak of steady declines, said Jeff Cox in CNBC.com. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this week that the annual rate was 2.6 percent last month, up from 2.4 percent in September. It’s the first time the number has risen since March. However, “the readings were in line with Wall Street expectations” and are not likely to make the Federal Reserve change course on rate cuts. “Shelter prices continued to be a major contributor” to inflation, with housing costs up 4.9 percent on an annual basis.

Environment: Dutch court overturns carbon decision

Shell won an appeal of a 2021 landmark decision that said it was partially responsible for climate change, said Jenny Strasburg and Christian Moess Laursen in The Wall Street Journal. “The 2021 decision by The Hague district court ordered Shell”—then based in the Netherlands, now in the U.K.—“to reduce its carbon emissions by 45 percent by 2030.” The Hague Court of Appeal this week said that Shell is still “obliged to reduce emissions,” but it would not set a specific standard. Elsewhere, the chief executive of U.S. oil giant Exxon urged Presidentelect Donald Trump not to drop out from the Paris climate agreement, saying businesses need “consistent political and legal guidance.”

Trade: China exports hit records despite tariff threats

China’s trade surplus could hit a record this year as it picks up the pace before Donald Trump takes office, said Bloomberg. The net amount of goods the country exported, minus the amount it brought in, “soared to $785 billion in the first 10 months, an increase of almost 16 percent from 2023.” The surge in outflow of cheap goods leaves it on “a collision course” with the Trump White House. “The surplus with the U.S. rose 4.4 percent this year” and 9.6 percent with the EU, which has already raised some tariff barriers.

The dying business of copying homework Chegg is no longer students’ top choice for cheating, said Miles Kruppa in The Wall Street Journal Before students could use artificial intelligence to plagiarize their homework, there was Chegg, an online education platform that charged subscribers “up to $19.95 a month for pre-written answers to textbook questions and ondemand help from experts.” The shift to virtual learning during the pandemic sent subscriptions and its stock price to record highs. But that all came crashing down in late 2022, when the launch of ChatGPT offered students a simpler alternative to “chegging” their assignments. Some Chegg executives initially thought “the company wasn’t at risk because of the chatbot’s propensity to make up incorrect answers.” The current model, GPT-4, however, “scored higher on internal evaluations than answers from Chegg’s human experts.” With its stock down 99 percent from its peak, “erasing $14.5 billion of market value,” Chegg has begun incorporating AI and “plans to target more serious students.”

Making Money

The Fed: Not giving ground to Trump

Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell has joined the resistance, said Nick Timiraos in The Wall Street Journal. “When asked last week whether he would resign” if asked by President-elect Donald Trump, the Fed chairman “offered a one-word reply: ‘No.’” Asked a follow-up about whether the president “had the authority to dismiss him,” he added tersely: “Not permitted under the law.” With just those few words, the central bank chief set up a potential battle with Trump, who wants a say in monetary policy decisions and who sparred frequently with Powell during his first term. Powell has prepared for this scenario. Soon after he was named Fed chair by Trump in 2018, Powell began prepping “a legal challenge against the president” to “preserve the ability of future Fed chairs to serve without the threat of being removed over a policy dispute.”

Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling in The New Republic. A central bank mandated to gird the economy against inflation and job losses has “long been under attack” by groups who darkly dismiss the Fed as a tool of big banks. But talk of its outright elimination is now “at the forefront of far-right thought.” Following through would “place the United States on a short list alongside Andorra, the Isle of Man, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and a small handful of other nations” without a central bank.

Poor Powell, said John Authers in Bloomberg. He and the rest of the Fed have brought the economy safely “down the mountain of high interest rates,” only to find that what’s waiting at the bottom is “a large and angry orange-skinned yeti.” Trump won’t return to the White House for another 10 weeks, but already “the battle lines are being drawn.” A disastrous idea to “#EndTheFed” is even circulating on the social media platform X thanks to Elon Musk and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), said

What the experts say

■ The first night of the Trump market

The market’s exuberance over the election of Donald Trump started early, said Gordon Gottsegen in MarketWatch. Overnight trading on the online brokerage Robinhood on election night “was 11 times higher than its usual overnight notional volume.” Robinhood executes trades outside of the normal Wall Street window using an alternative trading system called Blue Ocean Technologies. Blue Ocean saw record volume of 3.27 billion shares on the night of the election, around 100 times the usual trading. Other brokerages reported similar overnight surges. The momentum carried into the following day, when the Dow Jones industrial average saw “its biggest postelection gain since 1896.”

■ For investors, it pays to skip the steak

A free dinner cost a man a chunk of his retirement savings, said Laila Maidan in Business Insider. George Wilson “regularly received postcards in the mail, offering to teach him about finance and how to make money in retirement.” Such “free lunch seminars” are a common tactic by brokerage firms “to sell high-commission products.” One time, Wilson took the bait, and at the dinner at Ruth’s Chris steakhouse—“It was a very good restaurant.

An upheaval that drastic is unlikely, said Amara Omeokwe in Bloomberg Businessweek, but any meddling with the Fed’s independence would do long-term economic damage. “Politicians like lower interest rates” to juice the economy while they’re in office. But investors and consumers need a central bank that’s willing to “take necessary but sometimes unpopular steps,” like raising interest rates. If he chooses, Trump can wait until 2026 and replace Powell then, said Jeanna Smialek in The New York Times. The name to watch is Michelle Bowman, “arguably the most conservative member of the Fed board.” In September, she conspicuously voted, alone, against lowering interest rates, aligning with Trump’s preference to keep a lid on economic growth until the election. That fueled speculation that Bowman was already “putting herself in a place to be considered” if Trump is looking for a friendlier Fed chair.

And so, of course, it caught my attention,” Wilson says—he was persuaded to invest $180,000 in alternative products offering a 9 percent monthly interest rate based on expected death benefits from life insurance policies on the secondary market. Not enough people were dying, and the firm selling the products collapsed. Wilson fought for years to regain his $158,000 loss in arbitration; though he recently won, he is unlikely to collect.

■ Small car dings bring outsize costs

Minor auto repairs have gotten much costlier, said Joe Pinsker in The Wall Street Journal. “The average repair cost for an insurance claim was $4,721 in the second quarter of 2024, about $800 more than three years earlier.” But it’s the dings and dents that are nickel-and-diming the average driver. Consider the side-view mirror. Replacing one in 2014 might have cost $200 to $400. But “the same mirror on a 2024 car could have a camera and sensors for lane-changing assistance, plus a heating element to keep warm,” raising the cost to upward of $1,500. Insurers say that more than a quarter of today’s repairs require recalibrating sensors, up from 5 percent in 2020. Recalibrations add an average cost of $500.

Charity of the week

One in six children in the U.S. live at or below the poverty line. Each holiday season, the Marine Toys for Tots Foundation (toysfortots.org), which was founded in 1991 by the Marine Corps, gifts toys to millions of those economically disadvantaged children who otherwise might go without. Starting in October, active and veteran Marine Corps members in more than 800 communities across all 50 states organize donation drives to collect brand-new toys. When Christmas nears, those coordinators work with local organizations, churches, and social welfare agencies to distribute the gifts to in-need kids. The foundation encourages local business leaders to host their own toy drive events, and it accepts donations online to fund its work. During the rest of the year, Toys for Tots collects and distributes books to children and schools.

Each charity we feature has earned a four-star overall rating from Charity Navigator, which rates not-for-profit organizations on the strength of their finances, their governance practices, and the transparency of their operations. Four stars is the group’s highest rating.

Best Columns: Business

Payback: The United States of Elon Musk

The gilded alliance between Donald Trump and Elon Musk “seems to grow stronger by the day,” said Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen in Axios. Since the election, the world’s richest man has been “camped out” at Mar-a-Lago, where Trump is lapping up his “torrent of ideas” for filling the Cabinet and remaking the government. It wasn’t long ago that Musk had seemed circumspect about Trump. But he “poured more than $119 million into a Super PAC backing Trump” this summer that Republicans say “made a real difference.” Musk is cashing in on that risky bet. Trump this week said that Musk, together with the combative biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, would head a “Department of Government Efficiency,” tasked with finding “trillions in possible budget cuts.” That can give Musk enormous influence over the agencies that oversee his empire, which “could reap a windfall from deregulatory moves.”

subsidies and SpaceX contracts Musk “has only begun to tap the pecuniary potential of the government.” Trump rewards loyalists, and “none of his cronies will have chits to compare to Musk’s.”

A White House role would let Musk “regulate the regulators,” said Eric Lipton in The New York Times. “His companies have been targeted in at least 20 recent investigations or reviews, including over the safety of his Tesla cars and the environmental damage caused by his rockets.” Now agencies will have to “consider how taking action against one of Musk’s companies might affect” their own survival. Federal conflict-of-interest rules are barely a hurdle for ordinary contractors; they will do nothing to limit Musk’s power. “Like other billionaire exponents of libertarianism, Musk has turned the government into a spectacular profit center,” said Franklin Foer in The Atlantic. But with Tesla

Why is Buffett sitting on his cash hoard?

Musk thinks he can cut $2 trillion out of the federal budget, said Tim Higgins in The Wall Street Journal. He has a history of “taking a shock-and-awe approach” to austerity. When he purchased Twitter in 2022, he eliminated “about 80 percent of its workforce,” keeping a skeleton crew. In his companies, Musk seems to like to use the threat of cuts and firings as a “motivating tool.” But that’s not what voters signed up for, said Brett Arends in MarketWatch. There are only two ways to save $2 trillion. Either Trump and Musk envision chopping “85 percent of all spending on highways, disaster relief, federal bank-deposit insurance” and the like—while saying “goodbye” to national parks, and NASA. Or, “despite all of Trump’s protests to the contrary,” they are “planning on cutting Social Security and Medicare.”

The Trump-Musk “bromance is not going to last,” said David Nasaw in The New York Times. “There’s room for only one star, one genius in the Trump White House.” Trump is not going to share center stage. And “this is not a man for whom loyalty is a strong suit.” At least Musk and his companies “will probably be left alone” under Trump rule, as long as he stays on his good side. But I expect he will soon “join the long list of genius businessmen donors who were casually discarded after they had served their purpose.”

Is Warren Buffett telling us something? asked Spencer Jakab. The legendary investor’s stockpile of cash and equivalents at Berkshire Hathaway has now grown to more than $325 billion. It’s enough money on hand for Berkshire to outright purchase a company as big as Disney, Goldman Sachs, Pfizer, or AT&T if Buffett was so inclined. But Buffett doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to put all that money to work. Berkshire has been steadily selling down two of its largest shareholdings, Apple and Bank of America, for the past several months, and its cash pile has been growing for years. The “always optimistic and patient Buffett has turned cau-

Prediction markets were the other big winner of the election, said Amanda Hoover. Watching the polls, you would’ve seen that Kamala Harris and Donald Trump were running neck and neck for weeks. But on election-betting platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi, gamblers “had been favoring Trump” by a wide margin. Perhaps there’s such thing as wisdom of the markets after all. Polymarket saw more than $3.6 billion in wagers on the presidential race, while Kalshi—the first big site that lets Americans legally bet on politics—accepted $476 million. The betting markets “are not a silver bullet” for forecasters. Gamblers skew heavily male, “and

tious” before at times when he felt the market was too frothy. Using his own preferred measure of valuations, the “Buffett Indicator,” a ratio of the value all listed stocks to the size of the U.S. economy, the current ratio of 200 percent is “more stretched than at the peak of the tech bubble.” Buffett and his late business partner Charlie Munger “didn’t outperform the stock market 140-fold by being market timers.” The last time Berkshire built up cash as substantially as this was “in the years leading up to the global financial crisis.” Might the Oracle of Omaha be “keeping dry powder ahead of the next crisis? Yes, but he isn’t saying.”

more than 70 percent are under 40.” But unrepresentative as gamblers may be, they have one advantage over pollsters: They have a very strong incentive to get every bit of information that will make them more accurate. A French trader who wagered $30 million on Polymarket reportedly commissioned his own polls; “he is thought to have made $85 million when Trump won.” The platforms have expanded beyond politics to bets on “whether Elon Musk will post on X a certain number of times in a week and whether Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce will get engaged.” One easy-to-make projection: Prediction markets are on the way up.

Obituaries

The NASCAR great who was hit by tragedy

Speeding around a track brought Bobby Allison both brilliant accomplishments and personal tragedy. The Hall of Famer won 85 races—ranking fourth highest of all time in NASCAR—including three Daytona 500s, but a devastating injury ended his career. During the Miller High Life 500 in 1988, a low tire caused his car to slide toward the wall, and another driver T-boned him right in the driver’s side door. Initially pronounced dead, Allison was resuscitated. After over three months in the hospital, he finally returned home in a wheelchair, eventually relearning how to walk and talk. Four years later, his younger son died in a crash practicing for a race, while the following year, his older son, who was also a NASCAR driver, died in a helicopter crash on the way to a race. “Racing has been good to me in a lot of ways,” Allison once said. “It’s been very unfortunate in other ways.”

Hueytown, Ala., to build a garage in 1959, and he raced in his first NASCAR Cup two years later. Their group became known as the “Alabama Gang,” part of “a rugged and colorful generation of drivers who helped stock car racing come of age,” said The Washington Post. At the 1979 Daytona 500, in front of millions of Americans watching on TV, he and Donnie got into a fistfight with driver Cale Yarborough. The brawl marked “a turning point in NASCAR’s national exposure,” said The New York Times. Allison’s Hueytown headquarters became a tourist attraction, and his stardom endured for decades. In his final Daytona win, in 1988, he beat his own son.

Born in Miami, Allison fell in love with stock car racing when his grandfather took him to the Opa-locka Speedway at age 10. He raced in high school against his parents’ wishes, often using a fake name, and then got work as a NASCAR mechanic. He and his brother Donnie moved to

His near-fatal crash just months later left him with severe neurological damage. After years of therapy, Allison “attempted a comeback,” said ESPN.com. But the joy was gone after his sons died, and he retired, having piled up accolades including NASCAR’s Award of Excellence and induction into multiple halls of fame. “The only thing I don’t like about the way my career ended is I didn’t want to do it on somebody else’s terms,” he said in 1997. “I don’t feel deprived of anything right now, but I still would like to drive.”

The dancer who saved a legendary company

Judith Jamison was a pivotal figure in American dance. Soon after joining the pioneering Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in 1965, she became one of the leading Black dancers in America, and then in the world. Her statuesque 5-foot-10-inch form, clad in white leotard and long skirt and punching toward the sky, is the indelible image of Cry (1971), the solo devoted to Black womanhood that shot her to international stardom. Alvin Ailey wrote Pas de Duke (1976), a playful, jazzy take on ballet’s pas de deux set to the music of Duke Ellington, specifically for her to perform with Mikhail Baryshnikov. And when Ailey died in 1989, she took over his troupe, turning the troubled company into a powerhouse of global touring. “I love moving people,” Jamison said in 1985. “The power, the idea of being able to move other people, to whatever level, to take them out of their stance into another circumstance, has always been fascinating to me.”

would give Black children classical training. When she was studying at the Philadelphia Dance Academy, she was noticed by choreographer Agnes de Mille, who cast her in a 1964 work for the American Ballet Theatre. The following year, she joined Alvin Ailey’s company and became his muse. She quickly “distinguished herself” as the umbrella woman in Ailey’s signature work Revelations, said The New York Times. But Cry was her breakthrough, a demanding, 16-minute solo in which she portrayed mother, servant, and queen, dancing “through pain into ecstatic freedom.”

The JanSport designer who took backpacks from hiking to schools American school hallways are seas of bobbing backpacks thanks to Murray McCory. Before 1967, students carried books in a satchel. That year McCory, then a University of Washington student, won a national design competition with a nylon backpack mounted on a lightweight aluminum frame. He and future wife Jan Lewis had used her mother’s sewing machine to create it, and together they brought the “Jan Sport” to market for hikers. They also developed a “bookstore model”—a frameless version with a large front pocket and reinforced bottom—to sell at their university in 1970. It caught on immediately. “When we first saw a bus with the ad,” Lewis recalled, “Murray and I looked at each other and he said, ‘This is going to be big!’”

He was born Murray Pletz in a Seattle suburb, and grew up “hiking, camping, and tinkering with industrial equipment in his father’s auto shop,” said The Washington Post. He found a kindred spirit in Lewis, and the two soon developed “a catalog’s worth” of hiking equipment, including sleeping bags, tents, and snowshoes. But the company “became better known for its school backpacks than its alpine gear.” While other companies copied the design, JanSport dominated the market, and in 2015 it was selling 8 million backpacks a year.

The daughter of a Philadelphia engineer and a drama teacher had always delighted in movement, said The Washington Post. “To keep me from being gawky,” she said, her mother took the tall little girl to one of the few ballet schools that

A brief pivot to Broadway had mixed results, said The Philadelphia Inquirer, with positive reviews for Sophisticated Ladies (1980) but not much after that. Jamison took on a new career after Ailey succumbed to AIDS, helming his troupe as artistic director. She saved it from financial ruin by making sure “to keep front and center” his masterpiece Revelations, turning it into the mostseen modern dance work of all time and wowing 23 million audience members in 71 countries. “I didn’t do this by myself,” she said in 2010. “I have 30 dancers who understand the original idea of the company, which was to celebrate AfricanAmerican cultural expression and experience.”

By then the couple had long since sold the company, said The New York Times Their marriage ended in 1979 and McCory changed his surname—he’d always hated Pletz—soon after. In the early 1990s, he “returned to his love of the outdoors by moving to a sparsely populated patch of eastern Washington” to work on a rewilding project. “The wilderness is a sacred gift,” he wrote in 1978, that “will allow your free spirit to soar.”

The Last Word

The fast and the furious

In a Texas classroom, drivers talk about why they got stopped by the cops, said Ruby Cramer in The Washington Post—and try to understand the roiling anger that made them step on the gas.

SAN ANTONIO—They arrive from the highways of San Antonio, where it is 91 degrees outside, and there is construction on the roads, and cellphones are ringing, talk radio is blaring, people are tailgating, no one will let anyone into their lane, horns start honking, middle fingers go up, car doors fly open, and another day of road rage is underway in an increasingly angry country.

Now, in a small classroom on the edge of the city, Dean DeSoto, 70, looks over a roster for his class on aggressive driving.

“Good morning,” he says, as 19 people walk into the room looking the way they usually do at the start of class. Tired, annoyed, blank. Most of them don’t want to be here, and DeSoto knows this. They are here because they have been ticketed, fined, and sent here by a judge to learn how to manage their anger and anxiety on the road. They take their seats, and he begins to read aloud from a list of their citations, most of which look like speeding violations.

other thing DeSoto has come to believe is that more than just reckless behavior, the cases are a measure of the country’s stress, trauma, and polarization, and that made them part of a larger, longer story.

“So let’s start,” he says.

“90 in a 65…94 in a 65…102 in a 65…105 in a 65…112 in a 60.”

DeSoto, who runs a traffic-safety nonprofit that partners with San Antonio’s city and county courts, has been teaching his aggressive-driving class for 26 years, and in that time, he has come to believe several things. One is that what goes on in the country will play out on its roadways. Another is that anger on the roads is getting worse. Across the country, the number of people injured or killed in road rage incidents involving a gun has doubled since 2018, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit research group. There is no uniform definition of aggressive driving across law enforcement agencies and no national database to track it, but DeSoto has been keeping his own tally, including cases in Texas involving guns, knives, ice picks, 2-by-4s, tire tools, PVC pipe, plumbing pipe, bats, hammers, shovels, hatchets, ball bearings, marbles, frozen water bottles, bricks, stones and, in at least one instance, a spear.

On the road, the incidents can begin and end in as little as 30 seconds. But an-

AYOUNG WOMAN goes first. She says she was speeding to pick up a sick aunt. A man next to her says he was speeding to pick up his daughter from school. A man a few seats away goes next. “I was coming back from work,” he says, and DeSoto, a certified intervention facilitator, gestures for him to keep talking, trying to draw him out. These are not the people with spears, pipes, and knives, but this is a course about the different forms anger can take. “You’re driving a vehicle that is 3 to 7,000 pounds,” DeSoto will tell them. “You can hurt somebody.”

Next person. A young woman. Speeding because—“OK, you’re gonna hate me, but...” she begins to say.

“No,” DeSoto says.

“I’m sorry, but I like to go fast.”

“You go, girl,” another man says.

“OK, so, how fast were you going?” DeSoto asks.

“I was going 103 in a 70.”

“Ooh,” one person says, and another starts clapping.

“In a construction zone, too,” she says.

A few seats to her right, the next person to speak, a 41-year-old man whose

first name is Almir, sits up in his chair and, instead of talking about speeding, says to the rest of the class, “People are just overwhelmed.”

He begins to list the reasons: inflation, job insecurity, constant TV, constant news.

“It’s, ‘Hey, look at this.’ ‘Look at this.’ ‘Look at that.’ ‘Should we look at this?’ ‘Should I look at that?’ People are just losing it,” he says. He had read stories about gunfights between strangers in Texas, where, as of 2021, state law allows most adults to carry a handgun in public without a permit. He had seen people scream at the nurses and administrators at the hospital where he worked.

“And it’s hot,” a girl next to him says.

“Everything. Humans are just too overwhelmed with, just, everything,” Almir says. “And in particular, in my case, I just wanted to avoid the guy….”

The larger, longer story: If Almir had wanted to explain it fully to the rest of the class, he would have told them that what happened the day he was pulled over wasn’t just about an angry and anxious world. It was part of a story that began decades ago, when he was growing up in the mid1990s during the war in Sarajevo. His childhood memories were of grenades, emptied out buildings and a neighbor who was abusive, leaving him with trauma he couldn’t talk about for years. Then there was bullying at school, skipped classes, and nights he ran away from home, sleeping in abandoned houses. When his family resettled in the United States, he began to see that any situation could provoke him into a reaction. It wasn’t until he was in his 30s and met his wife, a licensed professional counselor, that he started to realize why. She encouraged him to see a therapist. In the beginning, he talked until he overwhelmed himself with crying. “If you cry, you cry,” his wife told him. “Let it out. It’s an emotion.”

None of which he says in class. What he does say is, “I also got a short fuse.” He turns to the girl who likes to drive fast and says: “I understand what she’s saying. She’s gonna slow down as she grows older. When I was younger, you need something. You’re understanding this world.”

AFTER A FEW days, 10 students return to DeSoto’s classroom, here again because a judge considered their citation serious enough for a second, more intensive session of the aggressive-driving course. They sit in the circle of chairs, and this time halfway through the class a 26-year-old man walks into the room and takes a seat in the corner.

“This is Colten Bonk,” DeSoto says, and he tells the class Bonk is here to talk about his own life with anger. “Kind of a long story,” Bonk says.

Bonk was also speeding. In his case, it was through downtown Fredericksburg, Texas. A police officer had pulled him over, but instead of keeping the car in park, he put it in drive and stepped on the gas. He saw the cop car behind him, then more than one cop car. “I’ve seen the footage. It’s not good,” he says. He kept driving until he flipped his Dodge Ram 2500, was ejected from the driver’s seat, put his face through the windshield, hit his head on the concrete, and broke 23 bones, including his ribs, sternum, and scapula. He was airlifted to a hospital. When he woke up, he didn’t know who he was or recognize his parents.

What he would eventually remember was how he’d gotten there. He was an alcoholic, and his anger had begun when he was 19 years old and a scholarship student at St. Louis University. One night, a fight with his girlfriend became physical. “I had a couple of black eyes, and I threw her on the ground. It took me years to even talk about that, but that’s what I did,” he says. The next day, he was arrested by campus police officers, accused of domestic violence and, later, charged by the state. He left Missouri, lost his scholarship and “blamed everyone around me,” he says. “The anger progressed and progressed, man.” By 22, he got a DWI, went to rehab, got out, moved into a sober living house, relapsed, got a second DWI, moved back into sober living—and then came the night he was stopped in Fredericksburg and decided to take off. “The last time I drank, when I was in Fredericksburg, I can’t tell you exactly what was going through my mind,” he says.

“The police officer had you,” DeSoto says now. “The car was in park. What did he tell you?”

“‘Don’t put it in drive.’”

“That hair-trigger kicked in…. What triggered that?”

“I mean, probably a few things,” Bonk says.

“Fire away.”

“One was just fear and trauma,” he says. “I got to the point where I started being angry even when I wasn’t drunk. Somebody would look at me wrong in the room and I’m like, ‘The f--- is this guy’s

The Last Word

problem, dude?’”

Now Bonk looks out across the classroom. “I mean, we all get angry, right?” he says. “You blame other people. You blame other things. You blame other people on the road for how they’re driving or whatever it is. But you play a part in everything, dude, trust me.”

“ALL RIGHT,” DESOTO says when the class is nearly finished, “What have you picked up? Or did it go in one ear and out the other?”

They go around the room as they’d done in the beginning.

“I’m just more conscious of my state of mind,” a man says.

“Maybe I shouldn’t be speeding around,” another says.

“OK,” DeSoto says, turning his attention to the woman who a few minutes before had been telling Bonk how she ended up going 92 mph on the interstate. “Hailey?”

She was 20 years old. She had been living on her own since she was 18, she explained one day outside of the classroom. She had been working at a restaurant and earned just enough money for rent, groceries, and a white Camry, which she was driving the night she was pulled over with a load of freshly done laundry in the back seat. At the time, she was trying to cut down on marijuana, which she said she’d been using since she was a teenager, and

that was part of one more story in this class. From the ages of 5 to 12, she said, she was abused by someone close to her family, and in the years afterward: therapy, mental health hospitalizations, and a disciplinary program in school called In-School Suspension, or ISS, where she remembered sitting in a room and writing the same phrase over and over in a workbook—“I’m in ISS because...I’m in ISS because....” And now this new program with a workbook, where she had been doing her best to answer the questions:

Why were you speeding? “Trying to show off/pass in front of a sports car.”

What did you say to the police officer? “That I saw him and started slowing down. It was a long day, and I just wanted to get home after doing laundry. That I’m broke and didn’t have money for the tow/car insurance.”

What did the police officer say to you? “That I was going way too fast in a 65 and that it was reckless driving and that they would have to tow my car because I didn’t have insurance.”

In her apartment in the weeks leading up to her citation, she found herself on social media more and more. One night it was scrolling past images of war in Gaza, feeling a “dark hole of hopelessness” at what she saw. Another night, it was videos of influencers sitting on the beach, traveling to places she had never been, “in a competition of who’s doing better, who has this, who has that, who’s making more money, who’s right, who’s wrong...” until the night her life had brought her to DeSoto’s class, where he is now saying her name.

“Sorry,” she says to him, looking up. “What was the question?”

“What have you processed?”

“Um,” she says to DeSoto.

She talks about watching her speed and keeping distance from other drivers. “Just overall trying to be more responsible,” she says. “Very good,” DeSoto says, and Hailey returns to the workbook.

How do you define anger?

“Anger is a cover emotion...”

What emotions trigger anger?

“Fear, sadness, emptiness.”

After a few minutes, people begin to pack up their things. DeSoto wishes them luck and hands them each a certificate that will allow them to expunge the citations from their records. They take out their car keys and their phones, and one by one, they begin to leave the classroom, headed back to highways full of anger and anxiety, until only one person is left seated. Hailey, still writing.

This story was first published in The Washington Post. Used with permission.

The Puzzle Page

No. 769: Listen to This by Matt Ga ney

Merlots and Malbecs, say

2005 war movie starring Jake Gyllenhaal

___ noche (Spanish for “tonight”) 60 For the third year, Grammys will be awarded in 2025 for music composed for this form of entertainment

65 High school or college freshman, usually

66 Sign of things to come

67 Sing the praises of 68 Makes a misstep

69 Payment to a landlady 70 Poet Thomas

1 Give a zero-star review to 2 Driving force 3 Theater division 4 Working, like detectives

5 Daly of Judging Amy

6 Large computer key

7 Cheer from the stands 8 Object 9 ___ Era (66 million years ago to the present) 10 NFL game venue

11 With The: The soundtrack for this 2023 movie, a remake of a 1985 film, was nominated for two Grammys

12 Overhead

13 Prefix with data or analysis

18 Pest control pitched by Muhammad Ali

22 Trip around the track

23 Sunny and warm

24 San Antonio attraction

25 100-year-old ex–U.S. president who became the oldest Grammy nominee ever for Best Audio Book, Narration, and Storytelling Recording

27 YOLO or FOMO, e.g.

30 Sphere, poetically

32 Russo in Tin Cup

34 Turned green, maybe 36 Attempted to tempt

37 Has more points than 40 Strive

41 Prefix for environmental causes

44 Many Dickens characters

47 “So soon?”

49 Put into practice

50 Sport whose periods are called chukkers

51 Tag or beam preceder

53 Taker of 15 percent, often

55 Petit ___ (ballet move)

56 Change purse item

58 “My word!”

61 Cub Scouts group

62 Gretchen in Rounders

63 Noted historical period

64 Any of 100 in D.C.

The Week Contest

This week’s question: British police are hunting for a gang of crooks who stole 24 tons of artisanal cheddar—worth about $390,000—from a high-end London cheese shop. If Hollywood were to make a crime caper about this fine-cheese robbery, what title should it give the movie?

Last week’s contest: Boston Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla said his team feels “zero pressure” to repeat last year’s championship season because “we’re all going to be dead soon, and it doesn’t matter anymore.” If Mazzulla were to write a leadership book about his less-than-motivational style, what should it be titled?

THE WINNER: Dare to Be Indifferent

Bruce Carlson, Alexandria, Va.

SECOND PLACE: Morose-Colored Glasses

Dave Grossman, Petaluma, Calif.

THIRD PLACE: Layup, Lay Down. Who Cares?

Mike McDannel, Lincoln, Neb.

For runners-up and complete contest rules, please go to theweek.com/contest.

How to enter: Submissions should be emailed to contest@ theweek.com. Please include your name, address, and daytime telephone number for verification; this week, type “Cheese heist” in the subject line. Entries are due by noon, Eastern Time, Nov. 19. Winners will appear on the Puzzle Page next issue and at theweek.com/puzzles on Friday, Nov. 22. In the case of identical or similar entries, the first one received gets credit.

t The winner gets a one-year subscription to The Week.

Difficulty: hard Sudoku

Fill in all the boxes so that each row, column, and outlined square includes all the numbers from 1 through 9.