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MAIN STORIES INTERNATIONAL OBITUARIES
EPSTEIN’S Hong Kong’s Giving voice
FINAL battle for to the black
ESCAPE civil liberties experience
p.4 p.5 p.35 Toni Morrison

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 Contents 3

Editor’s letter
The United Nations made a polite request to the Western world
last week: Could you please stop scarfing so much meat? If we
could all just cut back a bit on the burgers and lamb chops, a
U.N. panel of climate experts explained, millions of square miles
of grazing land could be reforested. Those trees would then suck
carbon from the atmosphere, effectively reducing CO2 emissions
by up to 9 billion tons a year. As an added bonus, by shrinking
herds of cows and sheep we’d also shrink the amount of planet-
warming methane these ungulates belch into the atmosphere. To
counter climate change, says Timothy Searchinger of the World
Resources Institute, big meat consumers such as the U.S. “need to
eat less.” To which I can only say: Good luck with that.
This country has had a long love affair with meat. Early Euro-
pean settlers salivated at the sheer abundance of game that was
waiting to be eaten: deer, ducks, wild turkeys, hares, and the ap-
parently delicious (and now almost certainly extinct) Eskimo cur-
lew. As the U.S. expanded westward, vast ranches allowed cattle
to be farmed on a scale unimaginable in the Old World. Rich and
poor alike came to expect beef at every meal by the late 19th cen-
tury. Infants, says food journalist Nina Teicholz, would gnaw beef
even before their first teeth came in. While visiting the U.S., an
astounded Charles Dickens wrote that an American “breakfast
would have been no breakfast” without a T-bone steak “swim-
ming in hot butter.” That hunger for meat is still going strong
today: A typical American eats the equivalent of about 50 chick-
ens or half a cow every year. If health warnings from scientists
about red and white meat—both of which raise the risk of heart
disease—won’t stop us from eating this tasty stuff, it’s doubtful
we’ll give up steaks to prevent the planet from overheating. Per-
haps our only hope lies with the researchers who are now work-
ing to make lab-grown meat a palatable possi- Theunis Bates
bility. So, who’s up for a petri-dish Whopper? Managing editor

NEWS
4 Main stories
Jeffrey Epstein’s apparent
suicide; Hong Kong
protesters face off against
Beijing; a means test for
immigrants
6 Controversy of the week
Are Democrats bullying
private citizens by
naming and shaming
Trump donors?
7 The U.S. at a glance
Stopping right-wing
terrorism; Trump loses
The Mooch; a grisly
prison break fails
8 The world at a glance
Argentine markets crash
as Left makes a comeback;
the Kremlin covers up a
Editor-in-chief: William Falk
Managing editors: Theunis Bates,
Mark Gimein
Deputy editor/International: Susan Caskie
Deputy editor/Arts: Chris Mitchell
Senior editors: Alex Dalenberg,
Danny Funt, Michael Jaccarino, Dale Obbie,
Zach Schonbrun, Hallie Stiller
Art director: Dan Josephs
Photo editor: Loren Talbot
Copy editors: Jane A. Halsey, Jay Wilkins
Researchers: Joyce Chu, Alisa Partlan
Contributing editors: Ryan Devlin,
Bruno Maddox
Chief sales and marketing officer:
Adam Dub
SVP, marketing: Lisa Boyars
Executive account director: Sara Schiano
Senior account director: Dana Matesich
Midwest director: Lauren Ross
China escalates crackdown as protests shut Hong Kong airport. (p.5) Southeast director: Jana Robinson
West Coast executive director: Tony Imperato
ARTS LEISURE
Marketing director: Kelly Dyer
Integrated marketing manager:
Lindsay LaMoore
22 Books 27 Food & Drink Research and insights manager: Joan Cheung

nuclear accident
10 People
Candace Bushnell looks
P.T. Barnum, America’s Fish tacos worthy of a Programmatic revenue and ad operations
director: Isaiah Ward
showman and con man special holiday meal Digital planner: Maria Sarno
23 Author of the Week 28 Travel Chief executive officer: Sara O’Connor

back on Sex and the City;
Nicolas Cage’s dino skull
11 Briefing
America’s fast-graying
population
12 Best U.S. columns
Banning “hyperlethal”
bullets; how electable is
Javier Marías’ fight A dragon leads a parade of Chief operating & financial officer:
Kevin E. Morgan
against fascism surprises in Singapore Director of financial reporting:
Arielle Starkman
24 Art & Podcasts 29 Consumer Consumer marketing director:
The disturbing beauty Stylish essentials to outfit a Leslie Guarnieri
HR manager: Joy Hart
of Hyman college dorm room Operations manager: Cassandra Mondonedo
Bloom’s
Chairman: Jack Griffin
cadavers BUSINESS Dennis Group CEO: James Tye
25 Film 32 News at a glance U.K. founding editor: Jolyon Connell

gaffe-prone Joe Biden?
14 Best European
columns
Is Germany paying its
fair share for defense?
16 Talking points
Trump’s incendiary
immigration rhetoric;
AP, Getty
A British- Trump postpones tariffs; Company founder: Felix Dennis
Pakistani CBS and Viacom finally
discovers get hitched
Springsteen
33 Making money Visit us at TheWeek.com.
Which colleges are really For customer service go to www
worth the cost? .TheWeek.com/service or phone us
at 1-877-245-8151.
34 Best columns Renew a subscription at www
Candace An impressively vast loss .RenewTheWeek.com or give a gift

ICE workplace raids; Bushnell for Uber; how Android at www.GiveTheWeek.com.

canceling The Hunt (p.10) made the modern world
THE WEEK August 23, 2019
4 NEWS The main stories...
Epstein’s final escape from justice
What happened who have repeatedly failed Epstein’s vic-
Attorney General William Barr vowed this tims are “long overdue” for a reckoning.
week to “get to the bottom” of serial sex
offender Jeffrey Epstein’s apparent suicide Trump is playing a “dangerous game”
inside a federal jail cell, as members of by peddling conspiracy theories, said
Congress demanded answers as to how the Miami Herald. Not only is the
the wealthy financier was left alone after president—who socialized with Ep-
a previous attempt to kill himself. The FBI stein in the 1990s and early 2000s and
opened an investigation into what Barr publicly called him “a terrific guy”—
called “serious irregularities” at the Bureau undercutting his own Justice Depart-
of Prisons–run Metropolitan Correctional ment’s investigation into Epstein’s death,
Center in Manhattan. Early reports sug- he’s also “exploiting the unending pain”
gest the two guards overseeing Epstein of Epstein’s victims to deliver another
slept on their shifts, then falsified logs. nonsensical partisan “rant to his base.”
Epstein had been placed on suicide watch Epstein’s body being loaded onto a van
July 23, when abrasions were found on his What the columnists said
neck, then was taken off six days later at the request of his lawyers. Epstein’s death leaves prosecutors “with one prime target,” said
Guards were still supposed to check on him every 30 minutes and Marc Fisher in The Washington Post. The Paris-born, Oxford-
house him with a roommate. But his roommate was transferred educated Ghislaine Maxwell, 57, met Epstein less than a year after
Friday night and not replaced. Hours later, Epstein was found her father, a British publishing tycoon and member of Parliament,
dead, after apparently using a bedsheet tied to a top bunk to hang died $4 billion in debt. His victims say she became “the prime
himself. Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) said Epstein’s “dark secrets” were organizer” of his thrice-daily “massages” from underage girls
“allowed to die with him,” and that “heads must roll.” recruited on the pretext they were auditioning for modeling jobs.
In court documents released just before Epstein’s death, one of
In the wake of Epstein’s death, President Trump provoked outrage Epstein’s victims, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, said Maxwell had re-
when he retweeted a conservative comedian’s allegation that cruited her and ordered her to have sex with Epstein and numerous
former President Bill Clinton somehow engineered the hanging be- famous friends, including Britain’s Prince Andrew.
cause Epstein “had information” on him. A Clinton spokesperson
said the former president “knows nothing” about Epstein’s crimes “It shouldn’t be possible for a hideous monster” like Epstein “to
and had not spoken to him in “well over a decade.” Meanwhile, game the American system of justice,” said Rich Lowry in National
there were news reports that Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell— Review.com, but that’s exactly what he did. Again and again, the
a British socialite described as his “procurer”—had boasted of wealthy predator enjoyed “advantages and breaks unimaginable
possessing dirt on “an astonishing number” of rich and famous to anyone who didn’t jet around with influential friends.” His
people, and even videotaped visitors to his infamous Caribbean high-priced legal team got him a slap on the wrist for a 2002 guilty
island near St. Thomas. The FBI raided that island this week in plea—and even just got him removed from suicide watch.
search of evidence. About 80 women and girls, some as young as
14, have accused Epstein of raping or sexually abusing them. What a rare opportunity missed, said David Graham in The
Atlantic.com. Since the 2008 financial crisis, Americans have been
What the editorials said left feeling there are “two sets of rules: one for ordinary Americans
While Epstein cheated justice with his death, “the investigations and another for the rich and well connected.” Epstein’s recent ar-
into his crimes, and those of others connected to him, must contin- rest “looked like a chance to finally hold rotten elites to account,”
ue,” said The New York Times. Nothing short of a full accounting with this pampered child rapist likely to spend the rest of his life
is required to restore faith in a system that too often tilts “toward in a jail cell. Instead, “his death represents one final escape from
the powerful at the expense of the vulnerable.” The public officials accountability.”

It wasn’t all bad
QTwo days before her fifth birthday,
Maebh Nesbitt hiked to the top of
the 4,239-foot Big Slide Mountain in
upstate New York and became the
youngest person to summit all 46
QDanny Trejo is used to playing the bad guy, giving villain-
ous turns in movies including From Dusk Till Dawn and Con
Air. But the 75-year-old actor got
a shot at being the hero last week
when he witnessed a collision at a
Los Angeles intersection. One car
flipped over, trapping a baby with
QFBI agent Troy Sowers said
he expected nothing more than
“doughnuts and coffee” at his re-
tirement party. So he was stunned
when a special guest showed up:
the baby, now a man, he’d saved
22 years before. Sowers was a
Jefferson Siegel/The New York Times/Redux, Newscom

high peaks in the Adirondacks. Her
mom and dad, Siobhan and Lee,
are both members of the 46ers’
club, and when Maebh was 3, she
said she also wanted a sticker from
the club. Siobhan told her daughter
she’d have to “climb every peak
and earn it.” And Maebh did just
that, scaling the peaks on her own,
with her parents at her side. “I’m so
proud of her,” said Siobhan.
special needs and his grandma
inside. Trejo crawled into the SUV
and pulled the baby to safety with
a bystander’s help. As firefight-
ers freed the driver, Trejo kept her
grandson calm by pretending to be
a superhero. The actor said he was
happy to have been able to help.
“Everything good that’s happened
to me,” he said, is “a direct result
Trejo: Heroic turn of helping someone else.”
rookie with the Seattle field office
when a newborn was snatched
from a Washington hospital in
1997. The kidnapper was soon
arrested, and Sowers convinced
her to lead him to the baby, who
she’d left next to a dumpster. That
baby, Stewart Rembert, is now a
Marine corporal. “Thank you for
giving me the opportunity to have
a life,” Rembert told Sowers.

Illustration by Fred Harper.

THE WEEK August 23, 2019 Cover photos from AP, Getty (2)
 ... and how they were covered NEWS 5

China blames U.S. for Hong Kong protests

What happened What the columnists said
Fears were mounting this week that China The odds of a Tiananmen Square–style crack-
would launch a military crackdown in semi- down “are rising by the day,” said Richard
autonomous Hong Kong, after pro-democracy McGregor in The New York Times. Beijing’s
protesters temporarily shuttered the city’s displays of “fury and firepower” are meant to
airport and Beijing began massing paramilitary intimidate the protesters into retreating, but
forces nearby on the mainland. Thousands of a vicious cycle has now taken hold. Images
protesters—some waving U.S. flags and singing of police battering peaceful protesters with
“Do You Hear the People Sing?” from Les batons and tear gas have made some protest-
Misérables—swarmed the airport for several ers embrace violence, in turn provoking
days, causing hundreds of flights to be canceled. Demonstrators take over the airport.
more iron-fisted policing. China’s strongman
It was the boldest act of defiance yet by the two- president, Xi Jinping, won’t tolerate these
month-old protest movement, which was sparked by legislation that embarrassing scenes for much longer. Soon, he will “resort to force.”
would have allowed Hong Kongers to be extradited to the mainland
but has grown to include demands for greater democracy. The airport “Rhetorically, it’s not even clear what side the U.S. is on,” said John
occupation descended into chaos after the crowd beat up two men Daniel Davidson in TheFederalist.com. Trump has been content to
from mainland China—one a reporter with a state-run newspaper— offer platitudes such as “I hope it works out for everybody, includ-
and riot police rushed in. The next day, protesters held up a sign that ing China.” And Democratic presidential candidates, too busy
read “We apologize for our behavior, but we are just too scared.” “eating corn dogs and pandering at the Iowa State Fair,” have been
largely silent. The protesters waving American flags passionately
Chinese authorities described the demonstrators’ actions as “close believe in American freedoms. “The question is, Do we?”
to terrorism,” and satellite images showed some 500 armored
personnel carriers parked at a stadium in the southern city of Shen- Trump’s response has been “almost comical in its emptiness,” said
zhen, which borders Hong Kong. President Trump tweeted that Jonathan Last in TheBulwark.com. But “what is he supposed to
U.S. intelligence agencies had confirmed that Beijing was moving do?” If he supports the protesters too loudly, Trump will add fuel
troops toward Hong Kong and that “Everyone should be safe and to Beijing’s claims that the demonstrations are all a foreign plot.
calm!” Chinese state-run media said the protests were being guided If he applies no pressure, he will only embolden the Communist
by the “black hand” of the U.S. and that the CIA was trying to regime. Too much pressure, and he could make Beijing desperate.
stage a “color revolution” like those that erupted in former Soviet “And desperate regimes are violent regimes.” America, sadly, can
republics in the early 2000s. do little to protect the brave souls on the streets of Hong Kong.

White House sets new hurdles for legal immigrants

What happened
The Trump administration moved aggressively this week to cut
legal immigration with a new rule making it harder for immi-
grants already here lawfully to become permanent residents if they
use public benefits. Starting Oct. 15, green card applicants could
be rejected if they’ve turned to public benefits for more than 12
months of any 36-month period. That includes any of a wide ar-
ray of programs, including most forms of Medicaid, food stamps,
and public housing assistance. Immigrants could also be denied if
officials determine they’re likely to use such benefits in the future.
White House aide Stephen Miller was a driving force behind the
new rule, with the anti-immigration hard-liner reportedly telling
officials to prioritize it above everything else. The policy could
reduce the number of people who receive green cards and visas
by half, with the government estimating that the status of roughly
382,000 immigrants could be immediately affected. Defending the
rule, acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services
Ken Cuccinelli said the Emma Lazarus poem inscribed at the base
of the Statue of Liberty was meant for “Europeans” and suggested
that it should carry a disclaimer. “Give me your tired and your
poor,” Cuccinelli said, “who can stand on their own two feet.”
What the columnists said
The idea that President Trump only opposes illegal immigration
“turns out to be—big surprise—a lie,” said Eugene Robinson in
The Washington Post. The new rule forces legal immigrants to
Getty
make an “impossible choice” between accepting benefits they
might desperately need or gaining permanent residence. It also
privileges immigrants from Europe while making it harder to
come from the poorer, browner nations Trump denigrates as
“s---hole countries.” This is just another part of “Trump’s cru-
sade to Make America White Again.”
“This isn’t about race,” said Jonathan Tobin in the New York
Post. It only makes sense to screen out immigrants who can’t
support themselves. In fact, the idea is “an old one.” The new
rule is based on the Immigration Act of 1882, which says the
government can deny residency to anyone likely to become a
“public charge.” The Trump administration has simply expand-
ed and clarified the definition of who counts as a “public charge”
to make it reflect our modern world.
“The idea that if someone has ever used a public benefit then
they won’t ever become a contributing member of society is ab-
surd,” said Paul Waldman in The Washington Post. Almost 1 in
6 Americans used food stamps during the Great Recession. “The
immigrants who arrived at Ellis Island a century ago did not,
for the most part, come here on private yachts or in first-class
berths,” said Joel Mathis in TheWeek.com. But they and their
descendants strengthened the nation. Today’s immigrants are no
different. Their children are just as likely as any other U.S. adults
to be homeowners, and more likely to be college graduates.
Somewhere, Emma Lazarus is weeping.

THE WEEK August 23, 2019

6 NEWS Controversy of the week
Shaming Trump donors: Fair game or out of bounds?
Since when did it become acceptable “to target people for their donations is absolutely “fair
private citizens for their political opinions?” game.” Trump’s donors deserve to be named
said Karol Markowicz in the New York Post. and shamed, said Zak Cheney-Rice in NYMag
Liberals have worked themselves into such .com. They’re giving their money to “ensure a
moral outrage over President Trump, they think two-term presidency for a virulent bigot.”
anyone who donates money to his 2020 cam-
paign is “complicit in this great evil and there- The Left’s “shaming of Trump supporters
fore fair game.” Last week, droves of outraged won’t work,” said Kathleen Parker in The
blue staters canceled (or claimed they canceled) Washington Post. Trump’s fans don’t “think
their memberships to Equinox and SoulCycle, he’s a racist, and don’t think they are, either.”
the high-priced, New Age–y fitness centers, But they do believe that liberals are out to get
Anti-Equinox protesters in Los Angeles them, using charges of “racism” and “white
because Stephen Ross, billionaire owner of both
gyms’ parent company, hosted a fundraiser for President Trump in supremacy” to drive them out of polite society. These shaming
the Hamptons. Just days earlier, Democratic Rep. Joaquin Castro— campaigns will only rally Trump’s supporters to his side. The
presidential candidate Julián Castro’s twin brother and campaign true believers may feel that way, said Michael McGough in the
manager—tweeted out the names of 44 San Antonio residents Los Angeles Times. But those who supported Trump for cynical
who had donated the maximum $2,800 to Trump’s re-election reasons—such as their gratitude for his tax cut for corporations—
campaign, and accused them of “fueling a campaign of hate that may find the charge that they are actively funding Trump’s xeno-
labels Hispanic immigrants as ‘invaders.’” In the current polarized phobia, hatred, and racism a “hard argument to refute.”
atmosphere, this “retaliatory intimidation” is dangerous, said Guy
Benson in TownHall.com. Castro’s clear goal was for “anti-Trump These two cases aren’t the same, said the New York Daily News
partisans to find and punish these people” for their political beliefs. in an editorial. It makes perfect “strategic sense” for socially con-
The same hypocritical liberals who blamed the El Paso massacre on scious gymgoers to let Stephen Ross know that lending big-dollar
Trump’s “incitement” are now circulating “hit lists” of Republican support to “an unstable, dangerous, and divisive president may
donors, including the home addresses of retired people. have consequences for the bottom line.” But the public shaming
of individuals who gave Trump less than $3,000? That’s “a path
What Castro did “was not doxxing,” said Suzanne Nossel in The toward endless civic warfare.” With his constant Twitter troll-
New York Times. That Twitter-era term means the unauthorized ing of his opponents, Trump “bears some responsibility for this,”
sharing of your political opponents’ private information: unlisted said Jonathan Tobin in NationalReview.com. But in insisting that
phone numbers, home addresses, names of children’s schools, etc. anyone who supports him is “unworthy of even minimal respect,”
A person’s history of political contributions, by contrast, is publicly liberals are turning their backs on “the basic rules of American
available information in our democracy, and rightly so. As long democracy.” As both sides gear up for 2020, the nastiness to come
as it never crosses the line into harassment or menace, calling out will likely “make Castro’s tweet seem like a church picnic.”

Good week for: New White House

Only in America
QA former North Carolina
sheriff’s deputy is suing the
police department, claiming
he was fired for following the
“Billy Graham Rule.” Under
the Graham Rule, now also
associated with Vice Presi-
dent Mike Pence, men decline
to be alone with women
other than their wife. Manuel
Torres, 51, said his “sincere
religious belief” motivated
his refusal to ride with female
trainees in a patrol car, so he
should not have been fired.
QWhite visitors to former
slave plantations are object-
ing in travel-site reviews to
the tours’ heavy emphasis on
slavery. One reviewer who
toured the McLeod Plantation
in South Carolina complains
of being “subjected to a
lecture aimed to instill guilt.”
Another writes that “we
didn’t come to hear a lecture
on how the white people
treated slaves.”
Modern families, after two gay male penguins at the Berlin pick for intel chief
Zoo adopted an abandoned egg and will hatch a chick in early President Trump tapped re-
September. Skipper and Ping, who are inseparable, are “taking tired Adm. Joseph Maguire, a
turns to keep the egg warm,” said a zoo spokesman. onetime Navy SEAL, to serve
Cat people, after scientists announced the development of a vac- as acting Director of National
cine for the cat allergies that afflict up to 10 percent of the U.S. Intelligence last week. Trump’s
population. The vaccine eliminates a protein that triggers allergic first choice, Rep. John Ratcliffe
reactions and is delivered by injection to the cat, not its owner. (R-Texas), withdrew from con-
sideration after critics charged
Eco-constipation, after Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro that the fierce partisan had
defended Amazon deforestation by saying that if people want to exaggerated his counterter-
help the environment, they should “poop every other day” instead rorism experience. Maguire,
of daily. “That would be better for the whole world,” he added. director of the National Coun-
terterrorism Center since June
Bad week for: 2018, was widely deemed to
be a more politically neutral
Range, after a 65-year-old Chinese man was hospitalized with pick. The vacancy came after
a collapsed lung following a marathon karaoke session in which intelligence chief Dan Coats
he hit some very high notes. “I was very excited in the heat of the resigned following months
of clashes with Trump over
moment,” said the man, identified in news reports only as Wang.
the threat of Russian election
Screen time, with a new study showing that the percentage
interference and North Korea’s
of British teenagers needing glasses soared from 20 percent to
nuclear ambitions. Coats’
35 percent between 2012 and 2018. The teens spend an average of deputy, career intelligence
26 hours a week staring at a smartphone or other screen. officer Sue Gordon, had been
Bill de Blasio, mayor of New York and Democratic presidential floated as a replacement, but
candidate, who received a mere 23 corn kernels out of 20,000 cast was also forced out by the
White House.
in the Iowa State Fair’s quirky poll of its attendees. “The goal is to
Getty

keep building,” the unfazed candidate told the New York Post.
THE WEEK August 23, 2019
 The U.S. at a glance ...
Las Vegas
Bombing stopped:
An avowed white
supremacist was
charged this week with
plotting to firebomb a
synagogue or gay bar
in downtown Las
Vegas. Prosecutors
say Conor Climo,
Terror charge
23, used racist, anti-
Semitic, and homophobic slurs on an
encrypted online message board with
white supremacist “lone wolves” who’d
pledged to commit acts of terror and vio-
lence. FBI agents searched the home of
Climo, who worked as a security guard,
finding bomb-making materials, an
AR-15 assault-style weapon, and a bolt-
action rifle. Climo’s arrest came after he
discussed plans to build a “self-contained
Molotov” cocktail with an undercover
agent and an FBI informant, saying, “I’m
more interested in action than
online s---.” In 2016, Climo drew
headlines when he patrolled his
neighborhood in battle gear
while carrying an assault rifle,
a knife, and four ammunition
magazines. He’d broken no
laws in the open-carry state.
Henning, Tenn.
Caught: A five-day manhunt
for escaped prisoner Curtis Ray
Watson ended this week after Watson
emerged from a soybean field and sur-
rendered to authori-
ties. He was nabbed
10 miles from the
West Tennessee State
Penitentiary. Watson
broke out on his
44th birthday, then is
alleged to have sexu-
ally assaulted and
strangled to death
prison administrator
Debra Kaye Johnson,
Violent escape 64, in her home.
Watson, serving a
15-year sentence for aggravated kidnap-
ping and child abuse, had “trusty” status
that gave him access to prison equipment
for his work assignment mowing lawns.
After he escaped on a tractor, authori-
ties fielded 430 tips before a security
system alerted Harvey and Ann Taylor to
surveillance footage of Watson rummag-
ing through their outdoor refrigerator.
Covered in mosquito and tick bites, a
AP, Getty, AP, Getty
captured Watson looked “relieved to be
over with his run,” Tennessee Bureau
of Investigation Director David Rausch
said. “He knew he wasn’t getting away.”
Boardman, Ohio
Pre-emptive raid: Prosecutors charged
Justin Olsen this week with threaten-
ing to assault a federal officer after the
18-year-old praised mass shootings and
endorsed attacks on Planned Parenthood.
After months of monitoring Olsen,
who amassed an online following post-
ing as “ArmyOfChrist,” the FBI says it
rushed to arrest him after recent shoot-
ings. Agents searched his father’s home,
where Olsen lives, finding 300 rounds
of ammunition on a stairway and
thousands more in a “gun vault” in his
father’s room, along with about 15 rifles
and shotguns and 10 semi-automatic pis-
tols. “Don’t comply with gun laws, stock
up on stuff they could ban,” Olsen alleg-
edly wrote on online message boards. He
praised the Oklahoma City bombing and
said the lesson of the deadly 1993 siege
in Waco, Texas, was “shoot every federal
agent on sight.” Olsen says his posts
were “hyperbolic” and “only a joke.”
Washington, D.C.
Background checks: Congressional
Democrats raced to advance several gun
control measures this week, prioritizing
universal background checks for gun
sales—a move President Trump endorses.
The proposal, which already passed the
House, would close a loophole by requir-
ing private gun sellers, not just licensed
dealers, to screen buyers for criminal
records, mental illness, and other factors
that would bar them from gun owner-
ship. Trump says Senate Majority Leader
Mitch McConnell “wants to do back-
ground checks,” adding, “I think a lot of
Republicans do.” Yet McConnell has been
noncommittal on gun reform measures
and did not agree to hold a vote on the
House bill when the Senate returns from
a six-week recess. Democrats have also
proposed “red flag” laws, restricting high-
capacity magazines, and banning assault
weapons—the last of which has support
from nearly 200 House Democrats, but
faces strong Republican opposition.
NEWS 7
New York City
The Mooch defects:
President Trump lost a
loyal defender this week,
after former White House
Communications Director
Anthony Scaramucci
withdrew support for
Trump’s re-election bid,
saying the president has
gone “off the rails.” Fired in
2017 for a profanity-filled
interview after 11 days at the
White House, Scaramucci
remained a reliable Trump
advocate on TV. Yet the New
York–based investor said
Trump’s graceless visits Scaramucci
with shooting survivors
in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio—
along with his taunt that four women
of color in Congress should “go back”
where they came from—went too far.
“Honest people in the room know that
he is crazy,” he said, suggest-
ing the GOP consider another
nominee. Scaramucci, Trump
replied on Twitter, “is only
upset that I didn’t want him back
in the Administration (where he
desperately wanted to be).” “You are
losing your fastball—very weak troll,”
Scaramucci countered. “Time to call
in a good relief pitcher.”
Washington, D.C.
Conservation cutbacks:
The Trump administra-
tion this week issued
new rules that weaken
the Endangered Species
Act, clearing the way for
drilling and development in
habitats of protected species.
For the first time, regulators
will be allowed to make
economic assessments
when deciding whether Protected species
species warrant protec-
tion, a victory for industries that say the
landmark 1973 law is too onerous. The
changes make it easier to remove spe-
cies from the endangered list and reduce
protections for threatened species, while
making it harder to protect wildlife from
threats posed by climate change: Federal
officials have used climate models to
anticipate habitat losses for polar bears
as far as 2090, but the new rules limit
impact predictions to the “foreseeable
future.” Several states promised lawsuits.
The changes focus on the law’s “ultimate
goal—recovery of our rarest species,”
Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, a for-
mer oil and gas lobbyist, said.
THE WEEK August 23, 2019
 8 NEWS The world at a glance ...
Baerum, Norway
Mosque attack foiled: An alleged white supremacist
wearing a helmet and body armor opened fire in a
near-empty mosque outside Oslo last week, only
to be tackled to the ground by a worshipper
who happened to be a retired Pakistani air force
officer. “He started to fire toward the two other
Manshaus: In court
men,” said the ex-officer, Mohammad Rafiq, 65.
“He put his finger inside my eye, up to here, full finger inside my
eye.” Rafiq and two other worshippers subdued the suspect, Philip
Manshaus, 21; Manshaus appeared in court two days later with
two black eyes. The shooter is believed to have killed his 17-year-
old stepsister before attacking the mosque. Manshaus wrote on
social media that he had been “chosen” by the Christchurch killer,
who massacred 51 people at two New Zealand mosques, and he
praised the recent El Paso shootings, in which 22 were killed.
Warsaw
Nazi collaborators honored: Top Polish offi-
cials this week honored a partisan group that
collaborated with the Nazis and battled the
advancing Soviets toward the end of World
War II. Most Polish partisans fought fiercely
against the Nazis for the duration of the
Paying tribute
war, and usually it is those units that receive
state honors. President Andrzej Duda’s presence at the Warsaw
ceremony—marking the 75th anniversary of the founding of the
group, the Holy Cross Mountains Brigade—is part of the ruling
nationalist Law and Justice party’s pitch to far-right voters ahead
of October’s elections. Poland’s chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich,
rejected an invite to the event, saying such “ceremonies insult the
memory of all Polish citizens killed in the fight against Germany.”

Gillam, Manitoba
Teen killers dead: Canadian police said this week that two
teenage fugitives suspected of going on a killing spree in
remote British Columbia have been found dead. Bryer Schmegelsky,
18, and Kam McLeod, 19, appeared to have committed suicide,
and likely shot themselves after their third slaying in mid-July.
McLeod and Schmegelsky grew up together on Vancouver Island,
where they worked together at a Walmart. Schmegelsky col-
lected Nazi paraphernalia and “was raised by YouTube and video
games,” said his father, Alan. “He could have had a better upbring-
ing.” The pair is suspected of killing 24-year-old Chynna Deese, of
Charlotte, S.C., and her Australian boyfriend, Lucas Fowler, 23.
They are also believed to have murdered Leonard Dyck, a 64-year-
old University of British Columbia lecturer.

Rome
Salvini’s power play: Seeking to cement his national-
ist League party’s hold on power, Italian Deputy
Prime Minister Matteo Salvini last week broke his
coalition agreement with the left-leaning populist
Five Star Movement and called for a no-confidence
vote in the government. Salvini, whose League is
polling at about 39 percent, is betting that early Salvini: Ambition
elections will put him in a position to form a more ideologically
pure coalition with the far-right Brothers of Italy and center-right
Forza Italia parties. So far, the Italian Senate has blocked the
no-confidence motion, giving all the other parties time to try to
cobble together an alternative government that would leave the
League out. Meanwhile, Salvini, who is also interior minister, is
blocking two rescue ships operated by French and Spanish chari-
ties from bringing more than 500 migrants to Italian ports.
Buenos Aires
La Guajira, Colombia Markets vs. Kirchner: Argentina’s
Goodbye, bananas: Colombia has declared a national emergency stock market and currency plum-
after Panama disease TR4, a fungus that has destroyed banana meted this week after election
plantations across Asia and Africa, was found in plantations on its primaries suggested that former
Caribbean coast. “Once you see it, it is too late,” Dutch phytopa- President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner could return to power,
thology professor Gert Kema told National Geographic, “and it this time as vice president to her little-known running mate
has likely already spread outside that zone without recognition.” Alberto Fernández (no relation). Their leftist ticket took 47 percent
Commercial banana plantations typically grow one hardy clonal of the vote, while conservative President Mauricio Macri took 32
variety, the Cavendish, which can survive percent. The primaries function mostly as an opinion poll for the
long-distance transport. But the banana’s October presidential vote, because the parties have already chosen
lack of genetic diversity makes it vulner- candidates. Argentina’s S&P Merval Index dropped 48 percent in
able to disease. Widespread banana blight a single day—the second-largest drop of any major stock index
Reuters, AP (2), Newscom

would be devastating to Latin American
economies, which export the yellow fruit,
as well as to the region’s own food sup-
plies, because Panama disease TR4 can
Endangered fruit also kill local varieties, including plantains.
THE WEEK August 23, 2019
since 1950—and the peso sank 15 percent against the dollar.
Macri says he is trying to wrest the country out of a decade of
mismanagement by Kirchner and her predecessor, her late hus-
band, Néstor Kirchner. But inflation is at 50 percent, and Macri’s
austerity measures are deeply unpopular.
 The world at a glance ...
Stockholm
A$AP Rocky goes free: A Swedish court this week found
American rapper A$AP Rocky and two associates guilty of
assault but sentenced them to no prison time and a total fine of
$1,300, ending a case that saw President Trump and a gaggle of
U.S. celebrities claim that Sweden was treating the hip-hop star
unfairly. Rocky, 30, and his friends were arrested while on tour
in Stockholm after getting into a street brawl with a 19-year-old
man, Mustafa Jafari, who had been harassing them. Jafari suf-
fered head and arm injuries, as well as broken ribs. The court
acknowledged the harassment but said the Americans “were not
in a situation where they were entitled to use violence in self-
defense.” Rocky, who spent nearly a month in jail before the
trial, returned to the U.S. on Aug. 2 after the court ruled that he
and his associates could travel while awaiting a verdict.
Harare, Zimbabwe
Country in collapse: Living con-
ditions for millions of Zimbabwe-
Mnangagwa: No change
ans have dramatically worsened under
President Emmerson Mnangagwa, who wrested power from
the nation’s longtime dictator Robert Mugabe in a 2017 coup.
Mnangagwa took office promising democratic and economic
reform, but instead has followed the repressive and regressive
policies of his predecessor. Hundreds of Zimbabweans have
been charged with treason for such noncriminal actions as join-
ing a union. Blackouts are frequent and long, drivers wait for
hours in line for gas, and half of the capital, Harare, has running
AP (2), screenshot, Newscom
water only once a week. High inflation has caused the prices of
staples such as sugar and cooking oil to jump 200 percent, and a
monthly pension that last year was worth $80 is now worth only
$10. One elderly woman told the BBC she would like to give her
suffering husband, 85, “a banana, an orange, or a cool drink. But
we can’t afford it. A banana costs 40 cents.”
NEWS 9
Nyonoksa, Russia
Another Chernobyl? Russia
gave a hero’s funeral this
week to five nuclear engi-
neers who died in a mysteri-
ous explosion at a missile
test site—a blast that caused
radiation to spike in the
region. Russia’s Federal
At the engineers’ funeral
Nuclear Center said the
workers were killed while developing a small nuclear power
source. U.S. nuclear experts believe the blast occurred dur-
ing the testing of a nuclear-powered cruise missile known as
Burevestnik, a weapon that Russian President Vladimir Putin
said last year would have an “unlimited range,” able to deliver
an atomic weapon anywhere in the world. Experts said the
U.S. abandoned development of nuclear-powered missiles
decades ago because they were too risky.
Contradictory information trickled out of Moscow, leading
to suspicions that the Kremlin was engaged in a Chernobyl-
like cover-up. The Defense Ministry initially said that a liquid-
fueled missile engine had blown up on a platform in the White
Sea and that two people had died. After radiation levels went
up in the nearby town of Severodvinsk, officials revealed that
the explosion had involved nuclear materials. The damaged
reactor might now be sitting on the seabed. Alexei Likhachev,
director of the state-controlled Rosatom nuclear corporation,
said that completing the work on the “new weapons” would
be “the best tribute” to the dead engineers.
Pyongyang
Trump sides with Kim: President Trump joined North Korean
dictator Kim Jong Un in criticizing the annual U.S.–South Korean
military exercises, which got underway this week, tweeting that
such drills are “ridiculous and expensive.” Trump wrote that he
had received a “beautiful letter” from Kim, in which the tyrant
made a “small apology” for conducting multiple short-range
ballistic missile tests in the past month. Kim said the tests
would stop, Trump wrote, “when the exercises end.”
The president added that the North had kept its
promise not to test long-range missiles or nukes,
but U.S.-led U.N. Security Council resolutions
prohibit Pyongyang from testing any ballistic
technology. “This is not denuclearizing,” said
Melissa Hanham of the U.S.-based Open
Nuclear Network. “This is not even close.” Another missile test
Gitega, Burundi
Child star dies of malaria: The malaria epidemic ravaging Burundi
has claimed the life of a 6-year-old YouTube star known in the
country for his comedy sketches. Darcy Irakoze was an elementary
school student who performed online and in
theaters, sometimes with well-known adult
comedians. The World Health Organization
says nearly 6 million cases of malaria have
been recorded in Burundi this year—equivalent
to more than half the country’s population and
a 50 percent increase over 2018. More than
1,800 people have died of the disease, putting
Burundi’s malaria epidemic on course to rival
the Ebola outbreak in Congo. With a national
election scheduled for next year, the Burundian
government is disputing WHO’s figures and
Darcy has not declared a national emergency.
THE WEEK August 23, 2019
10 NEWS People
Cage’s cultivated weirdness
Nobody plays unhinged wackos like Nicolas
Cage, said David Marchese in The New York
Times Magazine. In more than 100 movies,
Cage, 55, usually plays bizarre characters with
off-the-charts intensity. “Nouveau shamanic
acting,” he calls it. “I wanted to have the mys-
tery of the old stars, always preserved in an
enigmatic aura.” His personal life has been no
less unusual: buying castles, preparing a pyramid tomb in New
Orleans for his corpse, collecting exotic pets, nearly going bank-
rupt. Don’t blame the exotic pets, he says. “What is an octopus,
$80?” he says. “The dinosaur skull was unfortunate, because I
did spend $276,000. I bought it at a legitimate auction and found
out it was abducted from Mongolia illegally,” so he returned it.
“I never got my money back. That stank.” He also had to give up
his two king cobras, because they kept lunging at him, although
he kept his cat, with whom he’s shared some profound moments.
“A friend of mine gave me this bag of [psychedelic] mushrooms,
and my cat would go in my refrigerator and grab it, almost like
he knew what it was,” Cage says. “He loved it. Then I started
going, ‘I guess I’ll do it.’ It was a peaceful and beautiful experi-
ence.” Nowadays, he clarifies, “I am completely antidrug.”

Creating his own cure

When doctors couldn’t diagnose Doug Lindsay’s mysterious ail-
ment, he took matters into his own hands, said Ryan Prior in
CNN.com. Lindsay had collapsed on the first day of his senior
year at Rockhurst University in Kansas City, Mo., in 1999, and
spent the next 11 years bedridden. Every time he stood, his heart
raced wildly and he became dizzy—the same mysterious ailment
that plagued his mother. In bed, Lindsay pored over old text-
books and zeroed in on the adrenal glands. Seeking a medical ally,
he bought a row of airplane tickets in 2002 so he could lie down
on a flight to a scientific convention in South Carolina. There,
an Alabama medical professor told Lindsay that he was onto
something. By 2006, they’d found the problem: Lindsay’s adre-
nal glands pumped out way too much adrenaline. A diagnosis,
however, isn’t a cure. “If there isn’t a surgery,” Lindsay decided,
“I’m going to make one.” He developed a 363-page proposal,
and finally found a surgeon who’d perform it. Three months later,
Lindsay walked a mile to church. Six years later, he completed his
degree in biology, and now, at 41, he works as a medical consul-
tant. His health isn’t perfect, “but I can travel and give speeches
and go for walks,” he says, “and I can try to change the world.”
Bushnell’s sexual hindsight
Candace Bushnell has second thoughts on Sex and the City, said
Laura Pullman in The Times (U.K.). Not the HBO series itself, a
“game-changing cultural phenomenon” based on Bushnell’s 1997
novel of the same name, but rather the lifestyle it championed.
The book and show, which were inspired by her sex advice news-
paper column, broke down stigmas about single women having
carefree flings. She’s now 60, single, and childless. “I don’t want
to be shot down,” Bushnell says, “but I do see that people with
children have an anchor in a way that people who have no kids
don’t.” After getting divorced in 2012, she spent five years in rural
Connecticut writing, riding horses, and dating little. “I felt a bur-
den,” she admits, “maybe of disappointment or shame.” When
a woman is single in her 50s, she says, people act as though
“you didn’t do something right.” She still wants to look sexy, get-
ting regular Botox (“though it stops working so well as you get
older”) and fillers (“though you try not to get too much”). She’s
also back dating in Manhattan, but doesn’t regret her years of cel-
ibacy. “Did I miss some pure good sex? Of course,” she says. But
“finding the person to have the sex with—I couldn’t deal with it.”

Q Miley Cyrus and Liam Hemsworth split
last week after just seven months of mar-
riage. The Disney star turned singer, 26, and
Australian actor, 29, wed last December
after dating on and off for 10 years. They
put out a joint statement saying the
separation was mutual, but Hems-
worth was spotted looking sullen
in Australia, telling paparazzi,
“You don’t understand what
it’s like.” Cyrus, meanwhile,
vacationed with The Hills star
Kaitlynn Carter in Lake Como,
Italy, where the two were
photographed making out on
earlier this year she identifies as queer, and were trying to put on her wig.
that gender is “almost irrelevant” in her re-
Q CNN anchor Chris Cuomo went ballistic
lationships. She posted a cryptic message this week after a Trump fan called him
about her separation, writing, “Don’t fight “Fredo,” referring to the cowardly and
evolution, because you will never win.” stupid brother in The Godfather. Cuomo,
Q Faye Dunaway was fired from a Broadway- whose older brother, Andrew, is governor
bound play last month for both her abusive of New York, said, “Don’t f---ing insult me
behavior and her inability to remember like that,” insisting that “Fredo” is “like the
her lines, TMZ.com reported. In Boston to N-word” for Italian-Americans. “I’ll f---ing
perform Tea at Five, a one-woman play throw you down these stairs like a f---ing
about an aging Katharine Hepburn, Duna- punk,” Cuomo, 49, tells his antagonist in a
way, 78, was fed lines through an earpiece hotel bar on Shelter Island, N.Y., as seen in
but still managed to flub them, once ex- a video posted to a conservative website.
claiming midshow, “Where am I? Line?” CNN defended its prime-time host, say-
Yet Dunaway, who won the “Best Actress” ing he was the victim of an “orchestrated
Oscar in 1977 for Network, was even setup.” Conservatives, however, mocked
worse offstage. She was habitually late for Cuomo’s tough-guy tirade. President Trump
Getty, AP (2)

a boat. Carter, 30, also recently rehearsal, according to TMZ, berating col- tweeted: “I thought Chris was Fredo also.
broke off a marriage. Cyrus said leagues, and slapping crew members who The truth hurts.”

THE WEEK August 23, 2019

 Briefing NEWS 11

The graying of America

The number of Americans 65 and older is projected to nearly double by 2060.
Why does this matter? by buying an RV and touring a seasonal
America is in the midst of a profound demo- rotation of places to work. You might see
graphic transformation that will render its them logging hours as a NASCAR usher in
population significantly older in the years to Florida, a security guard at a Texas oil field,
come. In 2014, the percentage of Americans or taking tickets for whale-watching tours
ages 65 and older was 15 percent—already in Maine.
an all-time high. By 2030, that will rise
to 21 percent, and by 2060, a remarkable Will this affect the economy?
24 percent of Americans will be in their As the percentage of Americans with
golden years. By 2035, the number of those full-time jobs drops, so, too, will GDP.
65 and older will surpass Americans under Researchers from Harvard’s Medical School
age 18 for the first time in the country’s his- and the RAND Corp. recently compared
tory. This graying is already well underway. the growth rates of states that are aging at
In 1970, the median American age was 28.1 different paces. Their findings were startling.
years. Forty-six years later, in 2016, the For every 10 percent jump in the portion of
median age was 37.9. As the median age a population over 60, economic growth fell
continues to advance, it could have transfor- 5.5 percent. Nationally, the group estimated,
mational consequences for large swaths of the aging of America’s workforce has already
American life, including the workforce, the lopped 1.2 percent off GDP this decade;
economy, the solvency of the social safety this may explain why the average rate of
net—even the way sidewalks are engineered. growth has been a meager 2.3 percent since
2009. Another vexing question is how well
‘Workamper’ Michael Shoemaker with his RV
What’s driving this transformation? America’s consumer-driven economy will
A confluence of factors. Americans are not only living longer—one hold up when so many of us are living frugally on fixed incomes.
born in 1900 could expect only 47.3 years—but fewer of them are
being born. In 2018, the crop of newborns was the lowest since How about health care?
1986—about 3.78 million, continuing a downward trend that American spending on health care is expected to rise from about
some are now labeling “the baby bust.” The dramatic birth-rate $4 trillion a year to $6 trillion, or 19.4 percent of GDP, by 2027.
decline is occurring at the same time that America’s second-largest By 2025, U.S. health-care providers believe they will face a col-
generation—the 77 million–strong Baby Boomers, born between lective shortage of about 500,000 home health aides, 100,000
1946 and 1964—are moving into old age. Boomers are now turn- nursing assistants, and 29,000 nurse practitioners. Some are also
ing 65 at a rate of between 8,000 to 10,000 a day; by 2030, all bracing for a shortage of up to 122,000 doctors by 2032. This
of them will be older than 65. In the face of these statistics, the problem was complicated by Congress capping Medicare reim-
U.S. Census Bureau has sounded the alarm, calling 2030 a “demo- bursement to teaching hospitals for each resident in 1997, when
graphic turning point” for the country. there was talk of a doctor glut.

Why else is 2030 significant? What other problems are ahead?

It’s the year when America’s so-called
dependency ratio—or the percentage
of nonworking citizens who rely on
those who are employed—will exceed
70 percent. This will have profound
consequences for Social Security and
Medicare, the former of which is
now projected to exhaust its $2.9 tril-
lion reserve by 2035. (At that point,
unless Congress increases taxes or
cuts benefits, only payroll taxes from
a shrinking workforce would finance
the program, and benefits would likely
be reduced by 20 percent.) Employers
have mostly eliminated pensions, and
Boomers have an average of only
Jenn Ackerman/The New York Times/Redux
Not just an American problem
The U.S. is not the only country with a rapidly
aging population. Between 2015 and 2030, the
number of people 60 years or older worldwide is
expected to grow 56 percent, from around 900 mil-
lion to nearly 1.5 billion. In China, alone, those
over 65 are projected to spike from 8 percent of
the population to 24 percent in just 30 years. Other
countries have already begun adjusting in ways
that the U.S. can copy or learn from. In France,
people can now pay to have postal workers check
in on elderly kin in rural areas. In Yokohama, Japan,
officials incentivize citizens to stay fit by donat-
ing about $1,900 to the United Nations’ World
Food Programme whenever participating pedes-
Cities will need to adjust their infra-
structure for older people: Crosswalk
timers will have to be reset to give
them more time to get across the
street, and far more curb cutouts
for walkers and wheelchairs will
need to be installed. The number of
homebound, isolated seniors will
dramatically rise, contributing to
an existing loneliness epidemic. The
isolation, ironically, will be worse
in the sidewalk-less, car-oriented
suburbs America created to make
Baby Boomer childhoods so utopian.
What happens to tens of millions of
suburban residents when they’re 85

152,000 in retirement savings—far
too little for a 20-year retirement;
45 percent of Boomers currently have
no retirement savings. A Gallup poll
found that 74 percent of Americans
plan to work past 65, with some
Boomers becoming “workampers”
who combine work and retirement
trians average more than 100,000 steps a month.
Japanese companies such as Sony and SoftBank
are marketing a line of robot puppies and baby
seals as a balm for elderly loneliness. “Just looking
at it makes people smile,” said one Japanese nurs-
ing-home manager of a robot seal. At the Shintomi
nursing home in Tokyo, sing-alongs are now led by
a 4-foot-tall android named Pepper.
and unable to drive or walk to stores,
community centers, or doctors? “In
the ’60s, a majority of people weren’t
living past 70, or 75,” says Hilde
Waerstad, research associate with the
MIT Age Lab. “We’re entering into
this new era that we just have not
seen before.”
THE WEEK August 23, 2019
12 NEWS Best columns: The U.S.
Should the federal government mount “a war on terrorism” against
Don’t repeat white nationalists? asked Max Abrahms. After the El Paso massacre and It must be true...
the war other acts of domestic terrorism by white nationalists, some on the Left
are calling for a “massive, post-9/11–like counterterrorism response”—
I read it in the tabloids
on terrorism this time, against far-right Americans. The impulse is understandable.
The U.S. has poured resources into fighting Islamist terrorism while
Q A French bulldog survived
a six-story jump off a Man-
Max Abrahms largely ignoring extremists at home, even though white supremacist ter- hattan midrise that ended
TheAtlantic.com rorism has “historically made up the lion’s share of attacks.” But “in when he crashed through
this climate, we run the risk of bouncing from a longtime underreaction the sunroof of a parked
to a sudden overreaction.” In the emotional aftermath of 9/11, the U.S. car. The near-death dive of
invaded a country with no connection to the attack, tortured and impris- Winston the bulldog ended
oned suspects without trial, and approved a massive secret surveillance with a “giant smash” that
program tracking nearly every phone call in the U.S. and abroad. In the had people on the sidewalk
ducking and shrieking, said
process, we arguably created more terrorists and gave rise to ISIS. White
an eyewitness. Seconds
nationalism is a real threat, but it would be a mistake to have the FBI later, the witness said, “a
surveilling and rounding up Americans who have discussed “offensive— panicked woman comes
even reprehensible—political visions” on the internet. Without expressed flying down the stairs of an
intent to commit acts of violence, ignorance and bigotry are not crimes. apartment building, climbs
onto the hood of the car and
pulls the dog out through
“Coverage of political gaffes is often overwrought,” said Aaron Blake.
Is Biden really Any politician is bound to say dumb things now and then, given how
the sunroof.” The dog’s own-
er said Winston was running
the most often they speak publicly. But Democrats who view former Vice Presi-
dent Joe Biden as their strongest challenger to President Trump have
away from her on the roof
and went over the edge.
electable? to be concerned after Biden’s cringeworthy performance while cam-
paigning in Iowa last week. In one speech, the 76-year-old Biden raised
“It’s an absolute miracle he’s
alive,” the owner said.
Aaron Blake eyebrows when he said that “poor kids are just as bright and just as Q A Pennsylvania man has
WashingtonPost.com talented as white kids.” For the second time in recent weeks, he referred won approval from his doc-
to former British Prime Minister Theresa May as “Margaret Thatcher,” tor to use an alligator
and at one point urged Democrats to “choose truth over facts.” Per- as an emotional
haps most worrisome was his claim that survivors of the 2018 Parkland support animal.
school shooting “came up to see me when I was vice president.” Biden Joie Henney, 65,
was not vice president in 2018. Now, Biden “has shown an unmatched said Wally is
ability to connected with audiences,” but his spate of stumbles “is “just like a
a bad sign.” In the pressure of a general election campaign against dog” and
Trump, could the undisciplined Biden say something so damaging it “wants to
could torpedo his chances? If the gaffes continue, Democrats may have be loved and petted.” Since
to question their assumptions about “Biden’s superior electability.” Wally helps lift his depres-
sion, Henney said, his
doctor figured, “Why not?”
Former Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan once proposed a huge tax on the Now the two go shopping
Making sure most damaging kinds of ammunition, explaining: “Guns don’t kill peo- together and pay visits to lo-
cal nursing homes to cheer
victims ple, bullets do.” Recent mass shootings have proved that the late senator
“was onto something,” said Francis Wilkinson. In his “sick” manifesto, up residents. Wally is 5 feet
long and could triple in size,
don’t survive the El Paso shooter lovingly explains his choices of an AK-47–style semi-
automatic weapon and the “8m3 bullet,” which has a cult following but, Henney said, “I don’t
know what I would have
Francis Wilkinson because it expands and fragments when it hits human flesh—causing
done without him.”
Bloomberg.com catastrophic wounds. In publications such as the NRA’s official journal,
Shooting Illustrated, “bullet talk is as revealing a window on Ameri- Q A British hospital patient
can gun culture as gun talk.” In one ammo review, the writer gives his was mistakenly circumcised
“thumbs up” to Hornady-brand bullets’ ability to penetrate thick cloth- instead of receiving bladder
surgery. Terry Brazier was
ing and expand inside the body, causing “deep wound cavities.” When
too busy chatting with a
this kind of ammo is paired with semi-automatic rifles, which fire bullets nurse at Leicester Royal
at triple the velocity of most handguns, the effects are “especially grue- Infirmary while under local
some and lethal.” Surgeons who’ve treated victims of assault-rifle mass anesthesia to notice he was
shootings say organs are so badly shredded that there is “nothing left to getting the wrong proce-
repair.” Why are we selling “hyperlethal” guns and bullets designed and dure. “They didn’t know
marketed to make sure shooting victims can’t possibly survive? what to say when they’d
Heather Khalifa/The Philadelphia Inquirer/AP

done it,” Brazier said. “It

was a real surprise.” The
Viewpoint “The very existence of the Hong Kong demonstrations is an assault on the
hospital blamed the incident
conventional wisdom that Western-style liberalism is exhausted and uncom-
on muddled notes, and
pelling. It’s proof that people cannot be pacified by consumer goods and intimidated by a panoptical
surveillance state. It’s a confirmation that the people are the ultimate arbiters of who governs them Brazier has been awarded
and how, not the other way around. That is the essence of the American promise, and it’s in both almost $24,500 in com-
this president’s interest and America’s to say as much.” pensation by the country’s
Noah Rothman in CommentaryMagazine.com National Health Service.

THE WEEK August 23, 2019

“ Everything was always very tidy.
Then my family noticed how
disorganized I had become.”
—Theresa, living with Alzheimer’s

When something feels different,

it could be Alzheimer’s.
Now is the time to talk.
Visit

alz.org/ourstories
to learn more
14 NEWS Best columns: Europe
Being designated a UNESCO World Heritage
ITALY Site should be a boon for any locality, said Paolo
Martini, but in fact “it’s a curse.” After the Dolo-
Prosecco mites in the Italian Alps got the nod in 2009, they
“experienced an impressive sequence of natural
is ruining disasters” and an explosion in “destructive tour-
ist speculation.” Now it’s the turn of the Veneto
the countryside region in northeastern Italy. After intense lob-
bying by vintners, UNESCO recently added the
Paolo Martini
Conegliano and Valdobbiadene hills—home to the
Il Fatto Quotidiano
sparkling wine prosecco—to the heritage list in
recognition of its unique checkerboard landscape
of terraced vineyards. This designation will only
encourage the rapacious wine industry. Grape
cultivation has already expanded massively in
Veneto, from some 70,000 acres in 2010 to nearly
100,000 in 2018, yet the region keeps greenlight-
ing ever more vineyards. These farms are some
of the most polluting in the country, using more
than twice the average amount of pesticides and
degrading and eroding the soil. And is the wine
any good? Michil Costa, the famed hotelier with
a Michelin star to his name, says he won’t drink
prosecco, noting that when “466 million bottles
are produced in an area filled with industrial
monoculture,” the resulting beverage lacks char-
acter. Forgive me if I don’t raise a glass to cele-
brate UNESCO’s honor.

UNITED KINGDOM Brexit could well break up the United Kingdom,
said Iain Martin. In the 2016 national referendum,
We can’t Scotland—unlike England and Wales—voted
overwhelmingly to remain in the European Union.
let Scotland Now a new poll has shown that a majority of Scots
support declaring independence so that their coun-
slip away try can rejoin the EU when the U.K. eventually
leaves the bloc. Scotland’s nationalist first minister,
Iain Martin
Nicola Sturgeon, is already insisting on a new ref-
The Times erendum on independence, and the Labour Party
says it would not block such a vote. That is why it
is up to Britain’s ruling Conservative Party to save
the three-centuries-old union. We should remind
the Scots that ours is “one of the most successful
and close-knit partnerships going.” We share a
currency, and Scotland exports some $60 billion
worth of goods to the rest of the U.K., and only
about $18 billion to the EU. But it’s about more
than trade. “For all the rivalry, we are family.”
Prime Minister Boris Johnson should promise the
Scots constitutional reform, so that a post-Brexit
U.K. would be a newly constituted entity, “some-
thing closer to a federal collection of states, pooling
defense and foreign affairs.” If the union is to be
saved, it will have to be updated. “But to do it, the
Conservatives will have to be bold.”

How they see us: A threat to pull troops from Germany

“Germany is risking its most important mand center for the European and Afri-
alliance,” said Philip Volkmann-Schluck can theaters, and Grafenwöhr boasts a
in Bild (Germany). That was the message vast training ground. All these facilities
the U.S. ambassador in Berlin, Richard are worth billions of dollars and could
Grenell, delivered last week, warning that not be easily replicated in Poland. Nor
America will remove its troops from the would it be legal under a NATO-Russia
country and relocate them to Poland un- treaty to station so many U.S. troops in
less Germany honors its NATO defense- a former Warsaw Pact nation.
spending obligations. Alliance members
are supposed to spend at least 2 percent The U.S. president doesn’t care about
of their gross domestic product on de- upholding treaties, said Konrad Schul-
fense, but we spend less than 1.4 percent ler in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zei-
on the military. “The German govern- tung (Germany), but that doesn’t mean
ment is even planning to lower the rate Grenell meets with U.S. service members in Germany. he’ll follow through with his threat.
after 2021.” Grenell fumed at how “of- He is a professional bluffer. Remem-
fensive” it is to “assume that the U.S. taxpayer must continue to ber two years ago, when he threatened North Korea with “fire
pay to have 50,000-plus Americans in Germany but the Germans and fury” if it didn’t dismantle its nuclear programs? Pyongyang
get to spend their surplus on domestic programs.” The ambas- keeps testing missiles, but Trump makes excuses for this behavior
sador was echoing what U.S. President Donald Trump has long and praises dictator Kim Jong Un. Same with Iran: Trump sent
insisted: Germans aren’t paying their fair share. aircraft carriers to the Persian Gulf to protect ships, yet when
Iran sabotaged and confiscated tankers, he did nothing. Trump
To hear the Trump administration tell it, the U.S. troops here are “will not do what he threatens.”
“an undeserved gift to the Germans,” said Stefan Braun in the
Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany). Nothing could be further from Trump and Grenell’s “style may be harsh,” said Marc Felix Serrao
the truth. During the Cold War, America’s bases in Germany in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Switzerland), but they’re telling
served as a bulwark against the Soviets, defending Europe and the truth. “Europe’s largest economy” really isn’t doing its bit to
the U.S. And Germany is now “the linchpin of global U.S. opera- help to defend Europe. Underspending has crippled the German
tions,” said Christoph von Marschall in Der Tagesspiegel (Ger- military: Warplanes have been grounded for lack of spare parts;
many). The U.S. base at Ramstein serves warplanes and drones troops are going without bulletproof vests and winter clothes; and
that fly missions in the Middle East and Africa, while the Land- fewer than 50 percent of tanks are battle ready. Berlin should step
stuhl military hospital has treated thousands of American troops up defense spending—not because of Trump’s threats but because
wounded in Afghanistan and Iraq. Stuttgart hosts the U.S. com- it’s in Germany’s national interest.
Getty

THE WEEK August 23, 2019

 Best columns: International NEWS 15

India: Exerting direct rule over Muslim Kashmir

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi but only after “Kashmir signed an
has taken a “decisive and bold” step in accession treaty.” Now Pakistan con-
Jammu and Kashmir, said R.K. Arora trols about a third of the region, and
and Vinay Kaura in the Economic India the rest. The two countries have
Times (India). Modi’s government since fought three wars over Kash-
sent tens of thousands of troops to the mir, and Indian security forces have
restive Himalayan state and preemp- committed numerous “grave human
tively detained hundreds of Kashmiri rights abuses” against pro-separatist
leaders before announcing last week Kashmiris, including mass rape and
that it was revoking Article 370 of extrajudicial executions. Hindus have
the Indian constitution. That article also been victims, said Deepti Misri
granted Jammu and Kashmir, India’s and Mona Bhan in AlJazeera.com
only Muslim-majority state, significant (Qatar). Islamist militants began a
political autonomy and barred non- Kashmiri Muslims protest the lockdown. bloody rampage in 1989 that drove
Kashmiris from taking land or jobs some 500,000 Kashmiri Hindus from
there. Jammu and Kashmir—home to about 12 million people, the state. Those exiles are now cheering a possible return home.
some 70 percent of whom are Muslim, and 30 percent Hindu—will But non-Kashmiri Hindu nationalists are also celebrating, hopeful
now be downgraded to a union territory, effectively ruled directly that Modi will launch a settler project designed “to transform In-
by New Delhi. And its mountainous region of Ladakh—which dia’s only Muslim-majority state into a Hindu-majority one.”
has a population of 300,000, almost equally divided between Mus-
lims and Buddhists—will be carved out and turned into a union This is a betrayal of democracy, said Navnita Chadha Behera in
territory. The new arrangement “makes strategic sense.” It fulfills The Hindu (India). Kashmiri Muslims have had their self-rule
a campaign promise of Modi’s Hindu nationalist party, and it will stripped from them “on legally shaky ground.” Jammu and Kash-
enable India to finally quash the Pakistan-backed Islamist separat- mir is now an “open-air prison,” with a curfew and no phone or
ist insurgency that has been simmering in Kashmir for decades. internet access. The mosques were closed even on Eid al-Adha,
one of the holiest days in Islam. After the curfew is lifted, Kash-
The Kashmir problem has its roots in the British colonial era, said miris will be subject to the whims of New Delhi, with “no space
Salil Tripathi in India’s LiveMint.com. When Britain divided the for dissent.” Prepare for “another intifada,” said Muhammad
subcontinent in 1947 into Hindu-majority India and Muslim- Amir Rana in Dawn (Pakistan). Kashmiris will resist, perhaps
majority Pakistan, Pakistani militants tried to intimidate the inde- violently, and because Pakistan is “morally and politically bound
pendent kingdom of Kashmir into joining their nation. Kashmir’s to support the Kashmiris,” we will be drawn in. “Pakistan-India
maharaja asked India for military assistance, and India agreed, tensions could at any time turn into conventional warfare.”

New Zealanders have an unhealthy obsession with
NEW ZEALAND greasy meat pies, said Matt Rilkoff. The national
dish of minced meat and gravy, encased in a round,
Can’t stop flaky pastry that fits in your hand, is scarfed at
breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Every day, thousands
scarfing down of commuters “perform the gymnastics of using
one hand to eat a paper-bagged pie while steer-
those pies ing their car with the other.” Loving these pies is
“part of being a Kiwi.” But it’s a love that is kill-
Matt Rilkoff
ing us. The meat pie is “one of the most efficient
Stuff.co.nz
calorie-delivery vehicles that humankind has ever
invented.” A third of New Zealanders are “grossly
overweight.” Of course, we can’t blame the pies
alone. We also gobble fried fish and chips and wash
it down with our favorite soda, the fizzy lemon
L&P. On special occasions, we’ll do a lamb roast
with trimmings, which sounds relatively harmless
until you consider that we serve it all “slathered in
fat-based gravy.” We know we should be snack-
ing on carrots and kiwifruits instead, but they
just don’t fire our taste buds the way meat does.
So we’ll have to be forced to improve our diets—
potentially through a tax on sugary and fatty foods.
“The days of cheap pies are numbered.”

RUSSIA We can’t blame only climate change for the
wildfires raging across Siberia, said Alexey Po-
Why fires lovnikov. Since the beginning of this year, fires
have consumed some 32 million acres—an area
in Siberia larger than Greece—including forests within the
Arctic Circle. Those blazes have only intensified in
are so huge the summer months. The federal government has
blamed illegal loggers for setting fires to cover up
Alexey Polovnikov
their misdeeds, but that doesn’t explain why the
Nakanune.ru blazes were allowed to grow to such a massive
size. The answer, says Russian historian Darya
Mitina, lies in President Vladimir Putin’s “de-
bureaucratization” reforms, under which firefight-
ing was removed from the responsibility of the
AP
federal Ministry of Emergencies and transferred to
the regions. The problem is that regions such as
Irkutsk, where many of the worst fires are raging,
don’t have the money or the infrastructure to fight
fires. They lack not only aircraft to drop water but
also trained firefighters on the ground. The situa-
tion has become “so catastrophic that even foreign
countries are drawing attention to it.” The smoke
wafted over to Alaska a few weeks ago, prompting
U.S. President Donald Trump to offer Putin fire-
fighting assistance in a terrible “blow to Russia’s
international image.” Putin has now called out the
army, but returning firefighting to the federal gov-
ernment is the only long-term solution.

THE WEEK August 23, 2019

16 NEWS Talking points
Trump: The impact of his immigration rhetoric
“A really exceptional work of obscenity, like ings for years, and his victims included six
a really exceptional work of beauty, exceeds black people and his own sister. They “did
the ability of its viewers to fathom what not fit any political or ethnic profile.” The
they just saw,” said Graeme Wood in The El Paso shooter’s mostly Hispanic victims,
Atlantic.com. And the photo of a grinning however, “were the objects of his expressly
President Trump flashing a thumbs-up while stated political rage.” The Right’s attempt
standing next to a baby orphaned in the to equate the Dayton and El Paso murder-
El Paso mass shooting is truly, exceptionally ers “is a transparently self-serving effort to
obscene. Two-month-old Paul Anchondo, absolve the president of moral responsibil-
whose parents both died shielding him from ity.” Like the shooter, Trump uses the word
a white nativist hunting Mexicans with a “invasion” to describe immigration, invok-
military-style rifle, was actually brought ing the word in more than 2,000 campaign
back to the hospital Trump was visit- ads. When Trump asked, “How do you
ing because five wounded adult survivors stop these people?” at a rally in Florida
refused to meet with our anti-immigrant Thumbs up: The Trumps pose with the baby. earlier this year, someone in the crowd
president. So, the White House conscripted shouted “Shoot them!” The mob cheered
a powerless infant as a prop in a photo op. Words fail. “Ghoul- and Trump grinned. We’re told to take Trump seriously, but not
ish and surreal might serve,” said Dahlia Lithwick in Slate.com. literally. The El Paso shooter, it seems, “didn’t get that memo.”
The child’s parents are dead because a white nationalist “spout-
ing Trumpist talking points about ‘foreign invaders’” took that Some of Trump’s immigration rhetoric is “crude and inflamma-
racist rhetoric seriously. If Trump were a normal man, let alone tory,” said Rich Lowry in the New York Post, and he shouldn’t
a normal president, he would have been somber when meeting use the word “invasion.” But he’s never said anything to “justify
that orphaned child, and moved to compassion and critical self- indiscriminately shooting people.” The president’s actual immigra-
reflection. But not our reality-TV president. All he cares about is tion position is that we should protect the southern border with
getting attention and credit, so he turned that fraught encounter a wall while reforming asylum rules. That’s in “a different moral
into another opportunity to preen and mug for the camera. “It universe” from the shooter’s belief in murdering immigrants. But
took a tiny baby to reveal how small Donald Trump really is.” the Left wants to use the overlap between the shooter’s words and
Trump’s to invalidate his entire immigration agenda.
Enough with the “phony outrage,” said David Catron in Spectator
.org. The baby’s uncle Tito—who is in the photo with his arm “We will likely never know how much the El Paso shooter was
around the president—is a self-described Trump supporter who influenced by rhetoric like Trump’s,” said Amelia Thomson-
brought the baby to the hospital voluntarily. Liberals went “ber- DeVeaux in FiveThirtyEight.com. But we do know that Latinos
serk” because the photo undercuts their narrative that Trump is “a “have become more insecure and fearful about their place in
Mexican-hating racist” who caused the El Paso massacre with his the country.” A recent Pew survey found that more than half of
tough talk against illegal immigration. “If Trump is responsible for Hispanics say their lives have become more difficult since Trump
El Paso, then Democrats are responsible for Dayton,” said Marc was elected. As an immigrant from Brazil, said Fernanda Santos
Thiessen in The Washington Post. The Dayton shooter labeled in The New York Times, “I felt safe in America”—until recently.
himself a “leftist,” voiced support for Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and That has changed under Trump, even though I am a natural-
echoed Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s rhetoric about how immi- ized citizen. Shortly after the election, a man screamed at me to
grant detention centers are “concentration camps.” Of course, it “Speak English!” while I was on the phone outside a coffee shop.
would be ridiculous to blame these Democrats “for the actions of I started carrying my passport card in my wallet just in case. But
a madman.” The same is true of Trump. I know that a piece of paper can’t truly protect me, or my mixed-
race daughter, because we have brown skin, which now makes us
That comparison is “idiotic,” said Bret Stephens in The New York “invaders.” For the first time since I arrived here 21 years ago, I
Times. The Dayton shooter had been obsessed with mass shoot- don’t feel like a proud American immigrant. I feel “like a target.”

QSince a white supremacist killed nine
people at an African-American church in
Charleston, S.C., on June 17, 2015, mass
shootings (when four or more people
are killed) have occurred every 47 days
Noted
a $6 million lakefront mansion last year.
LaPierre and his wife said they needed the
10,000-square-foot, French-style estate in
a gated community near Dallas for secu-
rity reasons, after the backlash over the
winning her record-tying sixth U.S. cham-
pionship. Only two men have pulled off
the move in competition.
NBCNews.com
Official White House photo/Andrea Hanks, Getty

on average. Before the 1999 Columbine
High School shootings, the pace was
roughly once every six months.
The Washington Post
QWayne LaPierre, the chief execu-
tive of the National Rifle Associa-
tion, tried unsuccessfully to get the
nonprofit organization to buy him
Parkland, Fla., school shootings.
The Wall Street Journal
QGymnast Simone Biles,
22, became the first
woman to successfully
complete a triple-twisting
double somersault in
competition en route to
QThe homeownership rate among
African-Americans was 40.6 percent
in June, which is 33 points lower than
the white homeownership rate. Black
homeownership is at its lowest rate since
1960, largely because people lost so many
homes to the predatory lending policies
that led to the 2008 financial collapse.
Bloomberg.com

THE WEEK August 23, 2019

 Talking points NEWS 17

ICE raids: Why not charge the employer? Wit &

ICE’s cruelhearted immi-
gration sweep last week in
asylum and come with chil-
dren.” While they wait in the Wisdom
rural Mississippi is a “win U.S. as courts process a back- “If you can only be tall
for corporate exploitation,” log of about 1 million cases, because somebody is on
said Adrian Carrasquillo in “Democrats will breathe their knees, then you have
NewRepublic.com. About 600 fire on anyone who tries to a serious problem.”
Toni Morrison, quoted in
Immigration and Customs deport them.” In Missis- MotherJones.com
Enforcement agents raided six sippi, ICE already released
chicken-processing plants and 271 workers from custody “To the old, the old do not
arrested 680 suspected unau- pending hearings, prioritizing look old.”
Novelist Howard Jacobson,
thorized workers—one of the “those who had children.” quoted in the Financial Times
largest operations in ICE his- Federal officers with arrested workers Rather than vilifying agents
tory. Agents bound the workers’ hands and took for enforcing the law, said John Daniel Davidson “Books serve to show a
them away on buses, “leaving children sobbing in TheFederalist.com, why not address the root of man that those original
and wives tearfully saying goodbye to husbands the problem? We should “expand the number of thoughts of his aren’t very
new, after all.”
through chain-link fences.” Some kids returned work visas” to address massive labor shortages in President Abraham Lincoln,
from school to find that their dad and mom were low-skill fields. If farms and meat producers used quoted in INews.co.uk
both in federal custody. Magdalena Gomez Gre- only American workers, “we would all pay much
gorio, 11, pleaded for her father’s release. “Gov- more for meat, fruit, and vegetables.” “Moderation is a fatal
thing. Nothing succeeds
ernment, please show some heart,” she said. “He’s like excess.”
not a criminal.” But once again, “the cruelty is the The raid on the chicken plant underlines President Oscar Wilde, quoted in The
point.” Not charged was her father’s employer, Trump’s “profound hypocrisy” on immigration, New York Review of Books
poultry giant Koch Foods, which actively recruits said Raul Reyes in CNN.com. His own company
“A narcissist is
undocumented immigrants and pays them pitiful “has a history of using illegal labor” at its golf someone better looking
wages to cut, debone, and package chicken under courses and construction sites. Nationwide, just a than you are.”
miserable, sometimes dangerous conditions. handful of employers of illegal immigrants were Gore Vidal,
successfully prosecuted in the past year. Arresting quoted in Forbes.com
Liberals love to “hyperventilate about ‘the chil- migrants is nothing but a distraction, said Paul “To wear your heart on
dren,’” said Eddie Scarry in WashingtonExaminer. Waldman in WashingtonPost.com. The number of your sleeve isn’t a very
com. But by refusing to reform the asylum system people coming to or crossing the border is soar- good plan; you should
and blocking immigration enforcement, Demo- ing, and the “big, beautiful wall” hasn’t material- wear it inside, where it
crats created this mess. Migrants know they can ized. By any measure, Trump’s immigration policy functions best.”
“waltz” across the border “so long as they claim is “a complete and utter failure.” Former British Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher, quoted in
the Montreal Gazette

The Hunt: An incendiary film is shelved “Waldo should have

“For once, a major Hollywood film studio was
about to release a movie sympathetic to Trump
voters,” said Kyle Smith in NationalReview.com.
Then, “our film-critic-in-chief got it canceled.”
Universal Pictures’ The Hunt—originally sched-
uled to be released Sept. 27—is a withering satire
depicting a pack of “private jet–loving Davos
globalists” who kidnap and hunt a group of
red-state “deplorables.” The targets are chosen
because they express anti-choice positions or are
deemed racists. “War is war,” says one coastal
elite as she shoves “a stiletto heel through the eye
of a denim-clad hillbilly.” But President Trump
and the Fox News pundits who “egged each
other into a frenzy about the film” lack any sense
of irony, and failed to understand that the “posh
urban TED Talk–goers” are the bad guys; their
haughty cruelty makes audiences sympathize with
the hunted red staters. “The Right ought to make
it clear that we are not only not offended by the
premise of The Hunt, we’re delighted.”
It wasn’t just the Right that put The Hunt on
the shelf, said Kim Masters and Tatiana Siegel in
The Hollywood Reporter. In a “fraught politi-
Reuters
to find himself like the
shootings, Universal got queasy about the R-rated rest of us do.”
Comedian Hannah Gadsby,
film’s explicit violence, and some ads for the film quoted in The New York Times
were pulled. The studio even reshot some scenes.
When and whether the film will be released is
now unknown. No one, liberal or conservative,
should be happy about that, said Caspar Salmon Poll watch
in The Guardian. Universal officials canceled a Q43% of Republicans now
satirical film the president denounced as “racist.” think the nation’s problems
This is an “overt act of censorship.” Universal could be addressed more
should be “standing up for artists’ liberty of effectively if presidents
expression.” “didn’t have to worry so
much about Congress or
the courts”—up from 14%
This was “a perfect storm of disastrous tim-
who thought so in 2016.
ing,” not censorship, said Owen Gleiberman in
Overall, 66% of Americans
Variety.com. Releasing The Hunt in the wake of say it is too risky to expand
the El Paso and Dayton shootings would have presidential power in order
been “sheer folly.” In this supercharged climate, to deal with the country’s
a movie about “Americans ritually shooting problems.
other Americans” over politics would not feel Pew Research Center
like “megaplex escapism.” But I suspect that the
movie will not stay on the shelf forever. Universal Q57% of Americans ap-
prove of letting Central
spent a lot of money to make it and will wait
American refugees into the
for a better moment to put it in theaters. Indeed,
country, up from 51% in
a movie that was originally titled Red State vs. December.
Blue State might seem more “ideally timed for the

Gallup
cal climate” made even worse by several mass presidential civil war of 2020.”
THE WEEK August 23, 2019
18 NEWS Pick of the week’s cartoons

THE WEEK August 23, 2019 For more political cartoons, visit: www.theweek.com/cartoons.
Pick of the week’s cartoons NEWS 19

THE WEEK August 23, 2019

20 NEWS Technology

Platforms: Who should be liable for online hate?

After yet another mass shooting, the
founder of 8chan, the internet’s “go-to re-
source for violent extremists” says the site
needs to be shut down, said Kevin Roose
in The New York Times. Fredrick Brennan
started the fringe site in 2013 “as a free
speech alternative to 4chan, a better-known
online message board.” But Brennan, who
left 8chan last year, said it has devolved
into a recruiting platform for violent white
nationalists—including the one who mur-
dered 22 people in a Walmart in El Paso, 8chan founder Fredrick Brennan
Texas, last weekend after posting a mani-
festo and urging his 8chan “brothers” to share it. And share
they did. The site has become a “megaphone” for mass shoot-
ers, populated not only by racists and anti-Semites but also sup-
porters of the dark conspiracy QAnon and “incels”—men who
are “involuntarily celibate” and hate women as a result.
It’s not just about 8chan, said Jonathan Taplin, also in the
Times—Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, and other big players all
provide homes for online hate. And thanks to Section 230 of the racist, hate-filled propaganda.” Indeed, the human brain “wasn’t
Communications Decency Act, they’re “totally protected from
being sued” for it. This safe harbor provision, passed in 1996,
shields internet platforms from liability for the content posted
on their networks. It’s time to change that. These companies can
remove toxic content, just as they found ways to “filter pornog-
raphy and jihadist videos off their networks using artificial intel-
ligence.” But only revising Section 230 will
give them incentive to do it.
The government shouldn’t decide who tech
companies must censor, said Scott Shack-
ford in Reason.com. I had no issue when
Cloudflare, the web domain provider,
booted 8chan off its platform in response to
the El Paso shooting. Cloudflare is “refus-
ing to associate itself with a site that hosts
messages it finds offensive.” That’s the
business’s decision, and it has every right to
cut off extremist sites. When politicians get
involved, though, censorship usually limits only “speech that has
the potential to jeopardize their own power or influence.”
Still, Big Tech must accept some responsibility, said Noam
Cohen in Wired. It rewards users for inhabiting virtual worlds
and discourages them from leaving. That’s how minds get
warped. “People in such isolated circumstances can become vul-
nerable to all manner of deception and manipulation, including
designed to endure the volume of relentless inner-directedness
that is driven by these new screens,” said Daniel Henninger in
The Wall Street Journal. The modern “life lived online” is the
epidemic. It’s too late to put the screen genies back in the bottle,
but “maybe the app masters who elevated self-obsession on
Instagram and 8chan could turn toward apps rooted in reality.”

Innovation of the week Bytes: What’s new in tech

Researchers at the University of
California, Berkeley have designed
a drone that can shrink itself like
Ant-Man to fit through tight spaces,
said Andrew Liszewski in Gizmodo
.com. The trick is that the quad-
copter’s four wings are attached to
the main body with hinged joints
and a spring that pulls the arms
down automatically when the craft
is turned off. So when approaching
a small opening, it automatically
cuts its power, causing the arms to
retract and enabling it to squeeze
through. “The drone’s momen-
tum carries it through to the other
side, at which point the rotors can
Parents peer into the NICU
New tools “give worried parents frequent
updates on what’s happening to their children
during surgeries or hospital stays,” said Julie
Jargon in The Wall Street Journal. One app,
EASE, which stands for Electronic Access to
Surgical Events, “buzzes every 30 minutes to
remind nurses to send a text, video, or photo
update to waiting relatives.” It encrypts mes-
sages between health-care providers and fami-
lies to comply with privacy laws, and the mes-
sages disappear after 60 seconds and can’t be
saved. Another company, Natus Medical, “of-
fers a streaming video service called NICVIEW
so that parents can watch their baby in a
neonatal ICU.” However, one concern is that
these tools might overtax nurses. And while
the EASE app is free for families, it charges
hospitals $20,000 to $500,000 annually.
The world champ of office apps
A teenager in Alabama can now claim he is
the world’s best—at using PowerPoint, said
Molly Olmstead in Slate.com. Seth Maddox,
New York City. He said it started when he
fulfilled a certification requirement for using
various Microsoft Office products as a class
project. “I received an email probably six,
seven days later saying that I was the Ala-
bama champion,” Maddox said. To practice
before the championship, he would “just kind
of start clicking buttons to try to find stuff I
never found before.” PowerPoint can be frus-
trating, he said, but “the skills are just know-
ing what’s possible.”
A three-channel deal from Disney
Disney’s combined Hulu, ESPN+, and Disney+
streaming package will match the $12.99
monthly price of Netflix’s most popular plan,
said Julia Alexander in TheVerge.com. The
bundled Hulu service is the cheapest, ad-
supported tier. Still, the three channels add up
to an aggressively priced effort by Disney “to
provide a ton of content in three distinct areas:
general entertainment, family, and sports.”
Scheduled to launch Nov. 12, the service will
likely be available as an add-on to Apple TV
Newscom, screenshot (2)

spin up again.” One downside:
It requires “plenty of space on
the other side to power back up,
recover, and steady itself before
continuing its explorations.”
THE WEEK August 23, 2019
a recent high school grad from Geraldine,
Ala., (population: 900) beat 850,000 other
competitors from 119 countries over the
course of state and national rounds, culminat-
ing in a world championship competition in
and Amazon Prime Video, though Disney
hasn’t finalized distribution deals. Disney CEO
Bob Iger called the planned streaming service
“the most important product Disney has intro-
duced” in his 14-year tenure.

Greenland’s fast-melting ice sheet
The heat wave that sent temperatures to
record highs in northern Europe in July is
now turning much of Greenland’s ice sheet
to slush, in yet another troubling sign of
climate change. An astonishing 12.5 billion
tons of the island’s surface ice melted into
the Atlantic Ocean on Aug. 1, according
to satellite and other data, the highest
single-day loss since records began in
1950. The summer heat surge has caused
temperatures in Greenland to increase by
up to 30 degrees Fahrenheit above aver-
age. At the island’s Summit Station, which
is located 10,551 feet above sea level and
rarely experiences temperatures above
Hanging out with friends is good for the brain.
Socializing to stave off dementia
If you want to reduce your risk of devel-
oping dementia in later life, stay socially
active during your 50s and 60s. That’s the
conclusion of a new study by researchers at
University College London, who examined
data from more than 10,000 people tracked
from 1985 to 2013. The participants under-
went regular cognitive testing and answered
questionnaires about their social activity.
Researchers found that people who at age
60 saw friends almost daily were 12 percent
less likely to develop dementia later on in
life than those who saw friends only every
few months. Seeing relatives regularly did
not appear to have the same beneficial
effect. Using the brain for memory and lan-
guage during social interactions could help
build new connections between brain cells,
creating so-called cognitive reserve. “While
it may not stop their brains from changing,
cognitive reserve could help people cope
better with the effects of age and delay any
symptoms of dementia,” senior author Gill
Livingston tells ScienceDaily.com.
Postponing menopause
British scientists say they have developed a
surgical procedure that can delay menopause and water for up to three
for up to 20 years, a potentially life-chang- decades, in temperatures
AP, Getty, Newscom
ing breakthrough for millions of women.
Menopause can trigger symptoms including degrees Fahrenheit
anxiety, hot flashes, a reduced sex drive, and and as high as
in extreme cases, heart disease and bone-
Health & Science
freezing, the mercury briefly exceeded
that mark. In July—the hottest month ever
observed worldwide—Greenland’s ice
sheet lost some 197 billion tons of ice. The
melt in July was about 36 percent more
than scientists expect in the entirety of an
average year and enough to raise sea lev-
els globally by 0.02 inches. Even small sea-
level rises can heighten the risk of coastal
flooding and extreme storms across the
world. “These are records we don’t want
to see broken,” Ruth Mottram, a polar
scientist at the Danish Meteorological
Institute, tells NationalGeographic.com.
This summer’s melt is on course to match
weakening osteoporosis. The procedure—
offered only to women under 40—starts
with a 30-minute operation in which tissue
is removed from the patient’s ovaries. The
sample is then frozen at minus 238 degrees
Fahrenheit. When the patient begins meno-
pause, the tissue is thawed and grafted back
into the body—triggering the release of
hormones that put menopause on hold. Ten
women in the U.K. have undergone the ini-
tial procedure; one had the regraft immedi-
ately because she was having a hysterectomy
and wanted to avoid premature menopause.
“Being able to delay menopause has been
life-changing,” Dixie-Louise Dexter, 33, tells
The Times (U.K.). How long the procedure
holds off menopause depends on a patient’s
age when the tissue is extracted: Tissue from
a 25-year-old could postpone menopause by
20 years, while a sample from a 40-year-old
might delay its onset by five years. A similar
procedure has been used to preserve fertility
in girls and women who are receiving treat-
ment for cancer.
Tardigrades on the moon
There could now be life on the moon,
thanks to a botched mission launched from
here on Earth. When the unmanned Israeli
spacecraft Beresheet crash-landed on the
moon in April, it likely spilled its unusual
cargo: a few thousand tiny tardigrades, the
toughest animals on Earth. Only a milli-
meter or so long, these microscopic “water
bears” become almost indestructible when
they enter a state known as cryptobiosis,
in which they expel all moisture from their
bodies and mummify themselves in a pro-
tective coat of sugar. Dormant tardi-
grades can survive without food
as low as minus 328
284 degrees
NEWS 21
Rivers of melt water flow across the ice.
or surpass the most extreme season
recorded, in 2012, when 97 percent of
Greenland’s surface ice experienced some
sort of melt. Such events typically occur
about every 250 years.
Fahrenheit, even in the vacuum of space.
Beresheet was carrying thousands of dehy-
drated tardigrades that had been taped
between DVD-sized etched nickel discs that
contained a “library” of human civilization.
The creator of that library, Nova Spivack of
the nonprofit Arch Mission, tells Wired.com
that the discs were probably safely ejected.
“Our payload,” he says, “may be the only
surviving thing from that mission.” There’s
no danger of the tardigrades colonizing the
moon; to reproduce, they’d need to return
to Earth and rehydrate.
Health scare of the week
Osteoarthritis and NSAIDs
People who take nonsteroidal anti-
inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) to relieve the
pain of osteoarthritis may be increasing their
risk for cardiovascular disease. Researchers
have long known of the association between
osteoarthritis and heart problems. To exam-
ine this link, scientists compared the health
records of 7,743 osteoarthritis patients with
23,229 people who rarely or never took
ibuprofen, naproxen, and other NSAIDs.
Compared with the control group, the osteo-
arthritis patients had a 42 percent higher
risk for congestive heart failure, a 17 percent
elevated risk for coronary heart disease,
and a 14 percent increased risk for stroke.
Once they had controlled for other factors—
including socioeconomic status and body
mass index—the researchers calculated that
41 percent of the patients’ elevated risk for
heart problems was due to NSAID use. That
could be because NSAIDs can raise blood
pressure by causing the body
to retain more sodium and
water. Lead author Aslam Anis,
from the University of British
Columbia, tells The New York
Times that osteoarthritis patients
should discuss NSAID use with their
physician. “Sometimes,” he says, “the
treatment is worse than the disease.”
THE WEEK August 23, 2019
22
Review of reviews: Books
Book of the week
Barnum: An American Life
by Robert Wilson
(Simon & Schuster, $28)
P.T. Barnum finally has the biography he
deserves, said Rachel Shteir in The Wall
Street Journal. The “staggeringly energetic”
19th-century impresario was “a bundle of
contradictions,” so “it should not be sur-
prising” that many contemporary portraits
of him tend toward caricature. In the 2017
movie musical The Greatest Showman,
the co-founder of America’s most famous
circus was a champion of the marginalized,
pulling them out of the closet and into the
spotlight. Other chroniclers go to an oppo-
site extreme, painting Barnum as a racist,
an animal abuser, and a con artist—a per-
sonification of America at its worst. Robert
Wilson’s portrait gives us instead an imper-
fect man who evolves for the better. “This
P.T. Barnum may have been a small-hearted
small-timer, but he grew into a humanist.”
“Over time, the author starts to feel like
Barnum’s wingman,” said Jessica Bruder in
Novel of the week
The Lager Queen of Minnesota
by J. Ryan Stradal
(Pamela Dorman, $26)
J. Ryan Stradal’s “delightfully intoxicat-
ing” new novel isn’t just for beer snobs,
said Don Oldenburg in USA Today. His
tale of two farm-bred Minnesota sisters
who become rival brewers late in life
“weaves together a bittersweet but
heartwarming story of family, tragedy,
perseverance, and forgiveness.” Dutiful
Edith married young and has worked
for decades in a nursing home while
baking delectable pies on the side;
ambitious Helen married a brewing
scion and revived his family’s empire.
The sisters have been long estranged
by the time we meet them, but Edith is
about to be pulled into craft brewing by
the plucky granddaughter she’s raised
since adolescence. The obvious contriv-
ances that carry the plot can easily be
forgiven “because the novel is so rich
and satisfying,” said Wendy Smith in
The Washington Post. Each of the three
central characters is “pleasingly three-
dimensional,” and the hard feelings be-
tween Edith and Helen never cloud over
the author’s fundamental optimism. Like
a cold pint, his book proves “a perfect
pick-me-up on a hot summer day.”
THE WEEK August 23, 2019
ARTS
Barnum in his prime: The godfather of humbug
The New York Times. From the start, he
casts the Connecticut-born huckster as a
product of his times and an ever-resourceful
self-made man. Raised by pranksters,
Barnum proudly trafficked in winking hum-
buggery all his life, starting with a stunt that
even Wilson doesn’t forgive: He bought or
rented a blind, elderly slave and presented
her as the 161-year-old former nursemaid
of George Washington. When she died on
tour in 1836, he sold tickets to her autopsy.
If it’s true that Barnum later became a bet-
ter man, said Elizabeth Kolbert in The New
The Yellow House
by Sarah M. Broom
(Grove, $26)
“This is a major
book that I suspect
will come to be con-
sidered among the
essential memoirs of
this vexing decade,”
said Dwight Garner
in The New York
Times. It is a story
about the author’s
childhood home,
a yellow shotgun
house in New
Orleans East that saw 12 siblings come
of age before it was destroyed in 2005 by
Hurricane Katrina. But the book “has a
lot more on its mind” than one devastat-
ing storm. The house and its blighted
surroundings offer useful entry into the
larger story of New Orleans’ dysfunction
and generations-long neglect of its black
citizens. Sarah Broom’s elegy for the yellow
house pays tribute to her large, resilient
family and “throws the image of an excep-
tional American city into dark relief.”
The house, long ago, represented a chance
at stability, said Suzanne Van Atten in the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Broom’s
Yorker, “‘better’ is a relative term.” Yes, he
renounced slavery in the 1850s and, after
the Civil War, advocated black suffrage. But
during that same decade, his freak show
presented a black man with microcephaly
as the missing link between humans and
apes. “To ask readers to look past Barnum’s
faults would seem to miss the point.”
There is, in the end, no getting around one
of his signature quips, said James Parker
in The Atlantic. “The American people,”
he said, “like to be humbugged.” However
generous he became in later life, however
much he became a fighter for the weak
against the strong, Barnum made his name
and fortune on the kind of bold fraudulence
that will remind almost any reader of the
current occupant of our White House. But
there’s a difference that Barnum would
point out if he could, because if he were
to see what Barnum-ism has become in
our nation’s political theater, “he would
be offended by its humorlessness, and the
crudeness and greediness of its demands
upon our credulity.” His form of humbug-
gery at least promised a laugh. “You’re not
going to be left with nothing.”
mother, Ivory Mae, was 19 years old and
pregnant when she bought it in 1961 with
insurance money after her first husband’s
death. She went on to marry a NASA
maintenance worker who also played jazz
trombone, and together they expanded
and decorated it, using the materials they
could afford. Six months after Sarah was
born in 1979, her father died, and the
home’s unfinished interior slid into disre-
pair. Sarah’s mother, who insisted that her
children present a spit-shined image to the
outside world, made it clear that even close
friends should never step inside the house.
Sarah grew up feeling both love for and
shame about the place, and “she coped by
fleeing as far as she could”—first to col-
lege in Texas, then to New York City and
points beyond.
Katrina scattered the family, and Sarah’s
account touches that mini-diaspora’s
distant points too, said The Economist.
When she returns to New Orleans, she
sees “disaster tour” buses cruising the
devastated, dead-quiet neighborhood that
Courtesy of the Library of Congress
once was her whole life. Her memoir raises
profound questions: “Who has the rights
to the story of a place? Are those rights
earned, bought, or fought and died for?”
The house that was the source of so much
quiet shame no longer stands. “In her
book, Broom proudly opens its doors.”
 The Book List
Best books…chosen by Christopher Bonanos
Christopher Bonanos is the National Book Critics Circle Award–winning author
of Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous, now in paperback. Below, New York
magazine’s longtime city editor recommends six great New York City biographies.
Winchell by Neal Gabler (1994). The most
powerful and popular newspaper columnist of
the 20th century—of all time, really—was a self-
aggrandizing creep, and his late-in-life comeup-
pance was dramatic and humiliating. Gabler’s
irreplicable research (because Walter Winchell’s
archive has since been broken up and sold)
makes this definitive.
De Kooning by Mark Stevens and Annalyn
Swan (2004). An evocative biography of Willem
de Kooning that broadens out to become a visit
to the New York art world when it was still
small and weird. The authors pair superior art
criticism with great storytelling.
In Our Time by Susan Brownmiller (1999). A
history of the feminist movement of the 1970s by
the reporter turned activist who was at its center,
this is a great memoir whose valuable lesson is
that social movements are nonlinear and messy,
with internal factions and squabbles and rifts, as
people argue their way to enlightenment.
The Power Broker by Robert Caro (1974). It
feels a little duh to include Caro’s Robert Moses
biography—but really, it is as unskippable and
Also of interest...in servants and underlings
Say Say Say
by Lila Savage (Knopf, $24)
“The protagonists of acclaimed
women’s fiction these days tend to be
glamorous, self-centered, and cynical,”
said Josephine Livingstone in The New
Republic. Not so the heroine of Lila
Savage’s remarkable debut, a 29-year-
old home health aide whose difficult day-to-day
work “has illuminated corners of her soul that,” for
most young people, “usually stay dark.” Ella cares
for a brain-damaged woman who seems to dislike
her, and we expect the work will be enervating.
That Savage casts it differently feels “quite radical.”
The Turn of the Key
by Ruth Ware (Scout, $28)
Think of Ruth Ware’s “superb” new
thriller as a 21st-century Turn of the
Screw, said Margaret Cannon in The
Getty, Klaus Holsting and Louisiana Literature
ARTS 23
Author of the week
Javier Marías
Javier Marías never could
hold his tongue, said Giles
unforgettable as everyone says. Nobody digs Harvey in The New York
through a paper trail as doggedly as Caro does; Times Magazine. The 67-year-
nobody has ever done a better job explaining the old Spanish novelist, who
ways in which a single person formed the modern enjoys, across Europe, “a kind
metropolis, or the ways in which power both of cultural prestige that makes
emboldens and entrenches. even America’s most success-
ful literary
Just Kids by Patti Smith (2010). Punk legend writers look
Patti Smith was also Robert Mapplethorpe’s like obscure
muse, and he was hers. The two were lovers hobbyists,”
who eventually, after his coming-out, remained began speak-
the closest of friend-collaborators until his 1989 ing out in his
death. I can’t imagine a more vivid and romantic 20s against
description of what it was like to be young and apologists
artsy and hungry and fearless in the broken- for Spain’s
down New York of the ’70s. 36-year fling with fascism.
In 1999, when Nobel laure-
The Man in the Glass House by Mark
ate Camilo José Cela tried
Lamster (2018). Here’s all 98 years of the life
to brush off queries about
of that wily rich-kid-aesthete-fascist-turned-
his fascist past, Marías drew
corporate-smooth-talker Philip Johnson, who fire for pressing the case.
never met an architectural trend he didn’t glom But today, as a new genera-
onto. What a career! At one point in the 1980s, tion pushes for an overdue
he proposed a Manhattan skyscraper entered via reckoning with the misdeeds
a drawbridge over a moat full of alligators. It of dictator Francisco Franco
was designed, you will perhaps not be surprised and his enablers, Marías can’t
to learn, for Donald Trump. simply applaud the effort. He
has dismissed as “a fairy tale”
the idea that Spain has “the
people” to thank for establish-
ing democracy after Franco’s
Reasons to be Cheerful 1975 death. “In reality,” he
by Nina Stibbe (Little, Brown, $26) wrote in his weekly news-
paper column, “the people,
Novelist Nina Stibbe is “a pitch- with some exceptions, were
perfect observer: clever, confiding, devoted to the dictatorship
sublimely weird,” said Leah Green- and cheered it on.”
blatt in Entertainment Weekly. In the
third of a series of comic novels that In Marías’ latest novel, Berta
began with Man at the Helm, Stibbe’s Isla, about the wife of a spy,
heroine Lizzie Vogel has turned 18 and secured a the title character at one point
measure of independence by talking her way into unloads on “the people,”
a job as an unqualified dental assistant. Her boss calling them as stupid and
is a racist, and her crush prefers bird-watching to untouchable as the despots of
the past. “They have the pre-
sex, but “there’s unexpected resonance, too, in
rogative to be as fickle as they
the story’s final, bittersweet pages.”
please,” she says, “and they
The Last Book Party don’t have to answer for how
they vote.” Like many Marías
by Karen Dukess (Holt, $27) novels, this one wrestles with
“I thought I had this one figured how past horrors are best
out after the first chapter, but I was addressed, giving final word
wrong,” said Elisabeth Egan in The to a character who argues
against fetishizing them.

Globe and Mail (Canada). From the
first page, “we already know that it
doesn’t end well,” because we are
reading a letter from a young nanny insisting
that she didn’t kill a girl in her charge. She soon
describes events at a country house in Scotland
bristling with surveillance technology, and the
tale that unfolds proves “irresistible from first
page to last line.”
New York Times. Karen Dukess’
debut novel is set in 1987 Cape Cod,
where Eve Rosen, a young research
assistant, has joined a fading literary lion and
his wife at a vacation home that’s a magnet for
artists and writers. “After some initial wobbly
pacing, Dukess delivers a spare, bittersweet page-
turner” that culminates in a revealing end-of-
summer party.
“Some things are so evil that
it’s enough that they simply
happened; they don’t need to
be given a second existence
by being retold,” Marías says.
“That’s what I think on some
days, anyway. Other days I
think the contrary.”
THE WEEK August 23, 2019
24 ARTS Review of reviews: Art & Podcasts
Exhibit of the week
Hyman Bloom:
Matters of Life and Death
Museum of Fine Art, Boston,
through Feb. 23
It can be hard to look at some of
Hyman Bloom’s best paintings, said
Murray Whyte in The Boston Globe.
Because the Boston-based Latvian
immigrant often painted cadavers
that had been flayed open by medi-
cal examiners, “the mind recoils at
what the eye drinks in, radiant color
swiped in exultant strokes.” Bloom’s
cadaver paintings have always been
controversial: In 1954, protesters in
Buffalo had them removed from a The Hull (1952): Finding eternity in an exposed rib cage
midcareer retrospective of his work.
But viewer discomfort alone doesn’t explain Bloom’s cadaver paintings belong in a
why Bloom (1913–2009) faded into obscu- long tradition, but their origin was highly
rity long before his death. Though Jackson personal, said Sebastian Smee in The
Pollock and Willem de Kooning once
praised him as “the first abstract expres-
sionist,” the shy, limelight-shunning Bloom identify the body at a morgue. The experi-
rejected that label and set himself outside
the main wave and story of the era by
continuing to produce figurative work. The
MFA’s current show proves he should be
counted among our 20th-century masters.
“That it provokes, stirs, and disturbs only
makes it more compelling.”
New and noteworthy podcasts
The Clearing
(Gimlet/Pineapple Street)
“Playing armchair
sleuth has become
something of a sport,”
said EJ Dickson in
RollingStone.com. But
few amateur investiga-
tors are attempting to
implicate their parents.
In a true-crime podcast “trying its damned-
est” to avoid the genre’s excesses, journal-
ist Josh Dean partners with April Balascio,
who at 40 came to suspect that her father,
Edward Edwards, had murdered at least
two people. Balascio knew him to be a
small-time criminal before she gave a tip
to police that resulted in his confession
and conviction for a 1980 double murder
and three other killings. Balascio’s hunt for
other potential murders is complicated by
the efforts of true-crime zealots to link the
since-deceased Edwards to other murders,
including the Zodiac serial killings. The fas-
cinating result is a look at true-crime inves-
tigation “from the inside out,” said Sarah
Larson in NewYorker.com. Edwards, who
left behind a cache of recordings of his
personal musings, “craved attention and
recognition throughout his long criminal
life.” Now he’s got it.
Washington Post. In 1941, a close friend
of his killed herself, and he was asked to
ence “profoundly altered both his inner
and the trajectory of his art.” He believed
he’d glimpsed, in the way color and life
seem to be restored to bodies under dis-
section, evidence that death was not the
end but a metamorphosis. Two years later
he began visiting morgues and render-
Spectacular Failures
(American Public Media)
“Failure needn’t always
spell disaster,” said
Fiona Sturges in the
Financial Times. But
NPR host Lauren Ober
isn’t probing small
stumbles here; she’s
after “the eye-watering
cock-ups that have spelled doom for pow-
erful corporations”—many of them house-
hold names. Whether the brand in question
is Kodak, Toys R Us, or Schlitz beer, “these
are delicious tales of greed, mismanage-
ment, and recrimination, and I can’t get
enough of them.” And the episode about
the 1986 takeover of U-Haul might remind
you of King Lear. Even a company in a
recession-proof industry can self-detonate,
said Wil Williams in AVClub.com. Ober, “a
fantastic and funny host,” takes obvious
pleasure in recounting, across one episode,
how a Canadian conglomerate began gob-
bling up independent funeral homes across
the U.S. before it was outfoxed by a mom-
and-pop operation in Ocean Springs, Miss.
“It’s a story of classic capitalist greed, of
hubris and comeuppance, and a bunch of
caskets, that, no, Ober would really not like
to give a test-drive, thank you.”
ing what he saw there in electrify-
ing jewel tones and thick impasto
strokes. Michelangelo, Leonardo, and
Rembrandt had all studied cadavers to
master human anatomy, but Bloom’s
interest went further. “What really
preoccupied him was the profound
intertwining, the ultimate indivisibility,
of life and death.” Given his Jewish
background, it’s natural to see the
paintings and drawings he produced
across the next dozen or more years
as a response to the Holocaust. In any
case, they comprise “one of the most
extraordinary and disturbingly beauti-
ful bodies of work in American art.”
“At times, one could say Bloom’s sym-
bolism becomes too much, but that
seems to me a quibble rather than a fault,”
said John Yau in Hyperallergic.com. Bloom
was essentially a genre painter who pro-
duced still lifes, portraits, and landscapes
that frequently come across as explorations
of the continuum between life and death,
life matter and light. “I have no doubt of his
greatness, no matter how unsettling his
work may be. There should be a place in
this world where disquieting visions are
more fully honored,” and “the fact that
Bloom has been rediscovered after years of
neglect is a step in the right direction.”
This Land
(Crooked Media)
A murder is only
the entry point to
the compelling story
explored in this new
podcast, said Toby
Ball in NYMag.com.
Twenty years ago,
an Oklahoma man
killed his wife’s ex-boyfriend on the side
of a road. But because both men were
members of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation
and the killing arguably occurred on
reservation land, the defendant’s law-
yers have argued that Oklahoma has no
jurisdiction to convict and execute him.
The case, now before the U.S. Supreme
Court, could result in half the state’s land
being designated as reservation territory,
and “if this sounds dry, rest assured, it’s
not.” The second episode’s sudden shift
into the history of the Muscogee “can be
somewhat disorienting,” said Lars Odland
in PodcastReview.org. Host Rebecca Nagle
expands her inquiry still further—into the
full history of how the U.S. government
has taken land and more from Native
Americans. But that story—the story of an
entire people—is “much more interesting”
than a tale of one murder.
THE WEEK August 23, 2019
 Review of reviews: Film ARTS 25
Blinded by Remember the name Viveik
Kalra, because “this film will
and pursue his career dreams.
What follows “will make you
the Light make him a star,” said Johnny feel better than any other film
Directed by Oleksinski in the New York that comes out this year.” Its
Gurinder Chadha Post. The young actor displays coming-of-age story is fairly
(PG-13)
“off-the-charts likability” in standard, said Leah Greenblatt
the new crowd-pleaser from in Entertainment Weekly. But
++++ the director of Bend It Like Kalra’s charisma sells it, “even
A child of immigrants Beckham. Kalra plays Javed, when the script steers into sheer
discovers Springsteen. a British-Pakistani teen in a Kalra: New Jersey in his heart wish-fulfillment silliness.” Even
depressed town outside London. non–Springsteen fans will find it
The year is 1987, jobs are scarce, and racism is “a joyous tribute to the way pop songs can detonate
rampant. One rough night, when Javed learns that in our lives,” said Steve Pond in TheWrap.com.
his father has been laid off, he pops in a cassette lent “You might shake your head at characters breaking
by a friend: Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. into full-throated versions of ‘Thunder Road’ and
Suddenly, “Springsteen becomes his Shakespeare,” ‘Born to Run,’ but if you don’t surrender to this
inspiring him to work up the courage to kiss a girl grand lunacy, you don’t have a heart.”

Good Boys The latest raunchy comedy from

producing buddies Seth Rogen
find this material offensive,
when the bigger trouble is that
Directed by and Evan Goldberg “seems it just isn’t very good.” Despite
Gene Stupnitsky convinced that it’s riotous,” said all the sex-toy jokes, “Good
(R) Dennis Harvey in Variety. Think Boys also has its fair share of
Superbad, but lewder, and with ‘awww’ moments,” said Eric
++++ 11-year-olds instead of teenagers Kohn in IndieWire.com. And
Three suburban tweens engaging in “crude but obvi- because the movie believably
mildly misbehave. ous” high jinks. Jacob Tremblay, inhabits the naïve worldview of
Brady Noon, and Keith L. Neo-rascals Tremblay, Williams, and Noon its sixth-grade heroes, it often
Williams co-star as foulmouthed proves “adorable and twisted at
friends who’ve just begun middle school. When the same time.” Besides, “the casting is great,” said
Tremblay’s Max is invited to a kissing party that his Kristy Puchko in TheGuardian.com. As hilarious
crush will attend, he panics because he doesn’t know as Noon’s macho bluster is, Williams “shines the
how to kiss. Soon the boys are consulting online brightest” as the trio’s most earnestly well-behaved
porn for insight and practicing on what they assume member. “He even turns a scene of confessing his
to be a parent’s CPR doll. “Some will no doubt crimes to his parents into a laugh riot.”

One Child Know this before watching

One Child Nation: “It’s a tough
strategically restrained outrage.”
Wang leads the investigation,
Nation movie; at times, it feels almost and one midwife she speaks to
Directed by Nanfu Wang unbearable,” said Manohla even admits to killing babies
and Jialing Zhang Dargis in The New York Times. after delivery, said Justin Chang
(R)
Filmmaker Nanfu Wang, who in the Los Angeles Times. Most
moved from China to the U.S. disturbing, though, is that the
++++ in her 20s, had just become midwife is the only interviewee
A look back pregnant for the first time when who expresses any regret, any
at a brutal policy she decided to team with Jialing Wang with her son: Revisiting a nightmare recognition of complicity. At 89
Zhang on a documentary about minutes, One Child Nation is
the Chinese policy from 1979 to 2015 that limited hardly comprehensive, but “its directness and inti-
each family in the country to a single child. The macy lend an indelibility that encyclopedic framing
measure led to hundreds of millions of infant aban- could never approximate,” said Inkoo Kang in Slate
donments and abortions, especially of female babies, .com. “The one-child policy haunts Wang, and she
and One Child Nation unpacks the horror “with wants it to haunt the viewer too.”
Nick Wall, Ed Araquel/Universal Studios, Amazon Studios

New on DVD and Blu-ray

Amazing Grace
(Universal, $15)
Aretha Franklin’s best-selling album finally
has a concert film to match, said Rolling
Stone. In 1972, backed by a choir at a Los
Angeles Baptist church, Aretha delivered a
gospel performance that blew the roof off
the place. “It’s an unforgettable experience
watching her up there, shaking the rafters.”
The Souvenir
(Lionsgate, $20)
In Joanna Hogg’s recent drama, Honor
Swinton Byrne stars as a 1980s London film
student who grows into a confident artist
while her affair with a genteel addict is falling
apart. The movie “demands to be seen,” said
The Boston Globe. “Hogg is a major film-
maker pointing herself in new directions.”
Avengers: Endgame
(Marvel, $25)
Concluding a superhero saga 11 years in
the making, 2019’s highest-grossing movie
“pays off in all the right ways,” said The
Atlantic. And though the action “has the
usual bland competence of Marvel movies,”
Endgame succeeds when it slows down
and “basks in the charisma of its ensemble.”

THE WEEK August 23, 2019

26 ARTS
Movies on TV
Monday, Aug. 19
Dirty Dancing
You probably won’t have
the time of your life, but
Patrick Swayze and Jennifer
Grey’s classic summer
fling remains an entertain-
ing watch. (1987) 8 p.m.,
Movieplex
Tuesday, Aug. 20
Anna and the Apocalypse
The zombie genre gets
an unlikely jolt in a musi-
cal comedy about teens
battling the undead at
Christmastime. (2018)
6:25 p.m., Epix
Wednesday, Aug. 21
Sullivan’s Travels
In Preston Sturges’ peerless
satire, Joel McCrea plays a
comedy director who hits
the road disguised as a
hobo in an ill-advised bid to
create a socially meaningful
drama. (1942) 8 p.m., TCM
Thursday, Aug. 22
Prisoners
Hugh Jackman, Viola Davis,
and Jake Gyllenhaal co-
star in a boundary-pushing
thriller about a father who
goes rogue after his young
daughter and a friend
disappear. (2013) 8 p.m.,
Cinemax
Friday, Aug. 23
Thelma & Louise
Susan Sarandon and
Geena Davis ride off into
Hollywood history while
playing friends who turn
outlaws after fending off a
sexual assault. (1991)
4 p.m., Ovation
Saturday, Aug. 24
Empire of the Sun
Christian Bale plays an
English boy caught up in
the brutal 1937 Japanese
takeover of Shanghai in an
opulent Steven Spielberg
war epic. (1987) 8 p.m.,
Cinemax
Sunday, Aug. 25
The Graduate
Dustin Hoffman tests how
far youthful solipsism
can take a person in Mike
Nichols’ evergreen comedy
drama co-starring Anne
Bancroft and Katharine
Ross. (1967) 8 p.m., TCM
THE WEEK August 23, 2019
Television
The Week’s guide to what’s worth watching
Pose
AIDS can’t stop the party for Blanca and the rest
of the trans women of color in Ryan Murphy’s
often exuberant series about New York City’s
underground ball culture circa 1990. In the
finale of a second season in which the epidemic’s
toll mounted, ACT UP activism flared, and the
subculture won brief mainstream exposure with
Madonna’s “Vogue,” Mj Rodriguez’s Blanca
Evangelista works to return to ballroom competi-
tion while Billy Porter’s Pray Tell confronts past
traumas. Tuesday, Aug. 20, at 10 p.m., FX
This Way Up
Seeking a new Fleabag? This new series from
Catastrophe’s Sharon Horgan delivers similarly
antic, incisive humor featuring a whip-smart
female lead. Irish comedian Aisling Bea stars as
a wisecracking English-as-a-foreign-language
teacher who’s trying to get her London life
restarted after a nervous breakdown and a stint
in a rehab facility. Horgan co-stars as the pro-
tagonist’s sister, and Game of Thrones’ Tobias
Menzies plays a love interest. Available for
streaming Wednesday, Aug. 21, Hulu
Jawline
The path to fame has never been clearer for
teens. This documentary profiles 16-year-old
Austyn Tester, a Tennessee kid with Bieber-esque
good looks and a talent for baring his soul in
live social media broadcasts. Adored by thou-
sands of faceless peers, Tester dreams of escaping
rural poverty, but reconciling the real and online
worlds proves a complex challenge at a crucial
stage of personal development. Available for
streaming Friday, Aug. 23, Hulu
Hitsville: The Making of Motown
No one can fully measure the cultural impact of
the music of Motown, but this new documentary
does the label’s story justice. It’s the first film that’s and Ruth Wilson. Sunday, Aug. 25, at 9 p.m.,
won the participation of Motown founder Berry
Gordy, who hangs out with Smokey Robinson
in the place where it all started, a little house on
Detroit’s West Grand Boulevard. The pair’s remi-
niscences knit together a grand revue of archival
performance footage and incomparable hits from
Can’t auto glass bring us together?
Dunst’s Central Florida: Selling what they’re buying
the Supremes, the Temptations, Stevie Wonder,
Gladys Knight, Marvin Gaye, the Jackson 5, and
more. Saturday, Aug. 24, at 9 p.m., Showtime
On Becoming a God in Central Florida
Kirsten Dunst brings a passion project to life in a
dark dramedy series about a water-park employee
and new mother whose family is nearly brought
to ruin after her husband sinks their savings in an
Amway-like company running a pyramid scheme.
But Dunst’s Krystal Stubbs decides to strike back,
then seizes on her own chance to convert hustle
and bluster into impossible personal wealth.
Sunday, Aug. 25, at 10 p.m., Showtime
Other highlights
Power
A showdown looms as the final season begins
for 50 Cent’s series about a drug lord trying to
go clean. Sunday, Aug. 25, at 8 p.m., Starz
The Affair
In a final season that leaps forward in time, Anna
Paquin joins the cast as the adult daughter of
Noah and Ruth, now back in Montauk, N.Y.,
where all the trouble started. With Dominic West
Showtime
Good Eats: The Return
Food-science geek Alton Brown breaks down
the appeal of shakshuka, steak tartare, and other
recipes in a reprise of his popular series. Sunday,
Aug. 25, at 10 p.m., Food Network
Show of the week
American Factory
Forget tariffs and trade wars. When a Chinese
billionaire decided in 2014 to revive a shuttered
General Motors plant outside Dayton, Ohio, he
threw a stark light on the gap between U.S. and
Chinese economic cultures. Skilled Chinese and
American laborers were soon working alongside
one another, but optimism faded quickly when
reduced wages and strict rules fueled talk among
the locals of unionization. Filmmakers Steven
Bognar and Julia Reichert captured the folly from
Showtime, Netflix
all angles, creating a jarring examination of the
long-term viability of the American dream. Avail-
able for streaming Wednesday, Aug. 21, Netflix
• All listings are Eastern Time.

Your new fish taco: Brined ahi tuna, served warm from the pan
Visitors to Mexico City are often surprised
by the size of the city’s wholesale fish mar-
ket, the second-largest in the world, says
Danny Mena in Made in Mexico (Rizzoli).
But my hometown “has a phenomenal
seafood culture for a landlocked city,” a
culture that brings together all the country’s
regional cuisines and absorbs elements of
others from around the globe.
The dish below is meant to be served
with tortillas—homemade, if you’re will-
ing, from fresh masa or masa harina. But
I could say the same about nearly any
Mexican recipe I’d share, because “almost
all Mexican food is intended to be eaten as
a taco,” with the tortilla serving as a sort of
edible spoon. The recipe below comes from
a popular restaurant, Puntarena, that com-
bines high-end ceviches and fish tacos with
Japanese-, Spanish-, and Italian-inspired
dishes. The word “carnitas” refers to pork
that has been slow-cooked in lard, so carni-
tas de atún is “not carnitas at all”—except
that the brined ahi tuna “looks a little
like pork carnitas and has the same soul-
satisfying effect in a taco.”
This is one of the recipes I turn to for a
holiday or special-event meal. And yes,
you can serve it on a plate and eat it with
a fork, but without the tortilla, “you’d be
losing part of the soul of Mexican cuisine.”
LEISURE 27
Food & Drink
1 tbsp olive oil
Juice of 2 limes (about ¼ cup)
1 tbsp soy sauce
¼ cup vegetable oil
½ tsp kosher salt or to taste
Corn tortillas, hot, for serving
To make the brine, purée the salt, sugar,
bay leaf, clove, allspice, and 1 cup of water
in a blender until smooth. Add 3 cups of
water and purée until the salt and sugar
dissolve. Pour the brine over the tuna in
a glass bowl, cover, and refrigerate for
4 hours.
Meanwhile, in a medium bowl, mix the
onion, tomatillos, chile, cilantro, mint, olive
oil, lime juice, and soy sauce, and refriger-
Tuna that wants to be carnitas ate for 4 hours.
Recipe of the week When ready to cook, remove the tuna from
Carnitas de atún the brine and pat dry. Heat the vegetable
½ cup kosher salt oil in a large nonstick pan over medium-
2 tbsp sugar high heat. Add the tuna and cook until
1 bay leaf the fish is browned well on both sides and
1 whole clove cooked through, with no red left in the cen-
1 whole allspice berry ter, 6 to 10 minutes total, depending on the
2 lbs ahi tuna thickness of the tuna.
½ medium red onion, finely chopped
3 medium tomatillos, diced Working quickly so the fish stays hot, chop
1 serrano chile, finely chopped the tuna roughly and combine it with the
2 sprigs fresh cilantro, finely chopped vegetable mixture. Salt to taste and serve
3 mint leaves, finely chopped with hot corn tortillas. Serves 6.

Revisiting Portland: Less buzz, same great taste Liqueurs: Three essentials
“You can’t blame Portland chefs for looking back,” A versatile home bar only begins with
said Michael Russell in the Portland Oregonian. several bottles of hard liquor, said Jim
Fifteen years ago, they were setting trends that Vorel in PasteMagazine.com. Below
changed how the whole country ate, and the are three liqueurs you should con-
nation’s food media watched their every move. sider. With these on hand, “you’ll be
“But now that every city in America has a scratch- able to not only make plenty of classic
everything restaurant with pickles on the shelves cocktails but also create entirely new
and a high-end tasting menu in the back,” Portland combinations.”
seems to be doing less innovating than refining Amaro Averna With so many ama-
what it’s already done well. Below, three examples. ros to try, Averna is “a great place to
Ned Ludd “With its rustic-glam décor, wood-fired start.” It’s “on the richer end of the
Jason French, chef-owner of Ned Ludd
menu, and ‘American Craft Kitchen’ tagline,” this amaro spectrum,” but has a com-
decade-old joint might be dismissed as the epitome of Portlandia-esque preciousness. plex fruit and spice profile with “a
“The only problem? The food is as strong as it’s been in recent memory, from the gentle herbal bitterness.”
vibrant pickles at the start to the smoke-kissed chocolate-chip cookie skillet at dessert.” Luxardo Maraschino Liqueur Not
3925 N.E. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., (503) 288-6900 a sweet fruit syrup, this cocktail
Jacqueline Three years after taking over a space formerly occupied by St. Jack, this staple is “more a reflection of the
bright, homey Clinton spot has become Portland’s most interesting seafood restaurant entire cherry,” with herbal flavors
and one of its best date-night destinations. Regulars are drawn in by happy hour’s $1 and crushed cherry pits adding a
oysters, while later arrivals are rewarded with such thoughtful dishes as whole fried bitter-almond note.
Aaron Adler, Stuart Mullenberg

sea bass in a cashew salsa mocha. 2039 S.E. Clinton St., (503) 327-8637 St-Germain Elderflower liqueur can
Beast The fixed-price restaurant that used to be the first stop after the airport for out- spruce up so many cocktails that
of-town high rollers recently added a Tuesday-night special for the rest of us: a $65 it’s sometimes called “bartender’s
tip-included dinner often prepared by star chef Naomi Pomeroy herself, who makes, as ketchup.” It can go in “everything
it turns out, a “remarkably good” chicken cordon bleu. And the communal tables and from a G&T to a scotch and soda.”
use of thrift-store china haven’t changed. 5425 N.E. 30th Ave., (503) 841-6968

THE WEEK August 23, 2019

28 LEISURE
This week’s dream: Sensory overload in dazzling Singapore
“You have to expect the unexpected in
Singapore,” said Doug Hansen in The
San Diego Union-Tribune. A face-to-
face encounter with a toothy, 30-foot-
long, red-and-yellow cloth dragon
taught me that on the day my wife and
I decided to explore the city’s famed
Orchard Road, a leafy boulevard lined
with upscale shops and hotels. The
dragon and the drum-driven parade
it was leading turned out to be only
one of countless pleasant surprises
that greeted us during our five days
in the vibrant island city-state. Of the
six weeks we spent touring Southeast
Asia, those days proved the highlight.
“In fact, Singapore has become my favorite
major, modern city in the world.”
I should mention two drawbacks. First,
Singapore is a hot, humid, equatorial city:
The average daytime high temperature
hovers near 88 degrees. Second, it’s one of
the most expensive cities in the world. But
its wealth has created something special.
Travel
The Supertree Grove, at the Gardens by the Bay
Visiting the National Museum, we were
impressed by Singapore’s rapid rise in the
first several decades after it was founded in
1819 as a trading post for the British East
India Company. A global, multicultural
powerhouse by the end of that century,
the city—comparable in size to New York
City’s five boroughs—is today a leader
in education, finance, technology, and
entertainment, as well as one of the
world’s safest, cleanest, and healthiest
countries. And English is the official
language.
We changed hotels twice to explore
different areas of the city, anchoring
ourselves at one point within short
walks of several major museums, the
famed Raffles Hotel, and a spectacu-
lar bayside park. Both the 203-acre
Singapore Botanic Gardens and the
Gardens by the Bay are must-sees, the
latter being the home of the world’s
tallest enclosed waterfall. But as beau-
tiful and green as our surroundings
were by day, “after nightfall the city trans-
formed itself into a nocturnal kaleidoscope
of color, especially down by the bay.” At
the Supertree Grove, in the Gardens by
the Bay, a light and sound show bathes a
stand of 100-foot-tall, man-made trees with
music and changing colors.
At the Capitol Kempinski Hotel Singapore
(kempinski.com), doubles start at $270.

Hotel of the week Getting the flavor of...

Welcome, Millennials.
Raffles Hotel
Singapore
Singapore’s most storied
hotel looks grander than
ever, said Alyson Krueger in
The New York Times. The
1887 landmark recently was
renovated to appeal to a
younger generation without
compromising established
luxury standards: The lobby
has been stripped of gaudy
furnishings to show off the
architecture, while a once
nondescript grill has been
transformed into a pink-and-
purple bistro run by a three-
Michelin-starred French chef.
Though you can still order a
Singapore Sling at the Long
Cruising the Great Lakes A classic Delaware amusement park
“The ports of Cleveland and Detroit do not nor- Many of America’s small-town amusement parks
mally enter into a conversation about cruises,” have shut down—but not Funland, said Chris
said Jim Winnerman in The Orange County Lindsley in The Washington Post. The 1-acre
Register. They do now, though, because tourist- boardwalk attraction in Rehoboth Beach, Del.,
ship traffic is booming in the Great Lakes for the has barely changed since I worked there during
first time since the 1950s. I recently enjoyed an summers in the early 1980s. In fact, it’s almost
11-day adventure on a small Victory Cruise Lines the same Funland that it’s been since 1962, when
ship as it skipped among all five Great Lakes. Al Fasnacht and his family bought it. Fasnacht,
We began in Toronto, “a destination unto itself,” now 90, still operates the 40-cent kiddie rides six
then crisscrossed the U.S.-Canada border to take or seven nights a week, and “there is no place he
in Niagara Falls, Detroit’s Henry Ford Museum, would rather be.” Five of Funland’s 20 rides date
Michigan’s Mackinac Island, and the Ojibwe to the 1940s, and those rides, always gleaming,
First Nation’s reservation on Manitoulin Island, “hold special meaning for families who have had
Ontario. Cleveland was a highlight: “Everyone three and four generations ride them.” Rides like
on board was amazed at the vitality of this flour- the SuperFlip 360 offer modern thrills, but I pre-
ishing metropolis.” During our time on ship, we fer the beachside park’s signature draw: a dark,
enjoyed five-course meals and nightly concerts by twisty ride through a haunted mansion. “The
a trio while passing parades of islands where the ride still strikes a good balance of scary and fun,
homes on one side flew Canadian flags and the just as I remembered it doing the first time I rode
homes on the other flew the old Stars and Stripes. it 40 years ago.”
Last-minute travel deals
Spanish specialties Rosé in SoCal Richmond done right
Dine on Spain’s legendary Cool off by the rooftop pool The breathtaking grand stair-
tapas and tour famous plazas with free rosé at The Rowan, case and marble columns of the
and medieval mansions in the a top Palm Springs hotel. The Jefferson Hotel await. Through
country’s capital with Indus two free cans of rosé a day are Sept. 15, Grand Premier guest
Doug Hansen, Ralf Tooten

Bar, where the cocktail was
invented, the young crowd is
gravitating to the bookshelf-
lined Writers Bar.
raffles.com; doubles from $650
Travel’s “Magic of Madrid” tour.
Save $400 on the seven-day
tour, which now starts at $799
per person. Book by Aug. 23.
indus.travel
part of a package that includes
late checkout and a 20 per-
cent rate discount. Through
Sept. 20, rooms start at $147.
rowanpalmsprings.com
rooms at the historic Virginia
hotel cost half as much as
usual, starting at $225 a night.
Valet parking included.
jeffersonhotel.com

THE WEEK August 23, 2019

 Consumer LEISURE 29

The 2020 Nissan Versa: What the critics say

Car and Driver
Say goodbye to the Nissan Versa that was
long the cheapest new car in America. The
2020 Versa that will arrive in showrooms
next month starts at $2,270 more than
the last, but it “finally measures up to less
popular but more sophisticated rivals such
as the Hyundai Accent.” Though still an
entry-level sedan, the Versa “has trans-
formed from unquestionably homely to
universally handsome” while improving
its road manners and adding a few class-
exclusive safety features. The ubiquitous
subcompact you might previously have
accepted as a rental “starts being one you
might want.”
Motor Trend
Despite a modest boost in engine output,
the 2020 still feels underpowered. “Step on
the gas, and you’ll hear the transmission
complain as it whines to get the job done.”
But the steering is responsive, the ride is
decent once you reach cruising speed, and
you will get 40 mpg on the highway, pro-
vided you don’t choose the manual trans-
mission over the standard CVT. The Versa Small but capable, from $14,730
remains relatively spacious, too, despite a
reported 6-inch reduction in rear legroom. much more from a car like this.” Though
the weak engine prevents it from being a
Autoblog.com runaway pick, the Versa is now “a serious
Attractive, competent, content-laden, and contender for the top spot in the subcom-
competitively priced—“it’s hard to ask pact sedan market.”

The best of…dorm-room decor

Costa Farms LapGear TaoTronics LED

Peace Lily Vornado VFAN Designer Lap Desk Desk Lamp With
A peace lily is nearly Mini Classic If you need a lap desk, Poppin Wireless Charging
impossible to kill. This The brand to turn to this model is “the total Laundry Hamper Everybody needs a
3-foot-tall specimen for the best fans still package in terms of “For any small space, desk lamp, and this one
requires little more than produces an all-metal style, comfort, stabil- this hamper is the per- has a built-in pad for
direct sunlight and a desktop model that ity, and build quality.” fect fit.” It can collapse wireless charging of
weekly watering. And delivers vintage style Thoughtful touches for easy storage, and iPhones and Samsung
unlike the blooms of along with efficient, include a handle for the canvas liner dou- phones. It also features
other lilies, the flowers quiet air circulation. It’s toting it across campus bles as a laundry bag. a pivoting, tiltable head,
aren’t overwhelmingly available in three colors and a slot for holding Also available in dark five lighting modes,
fragrant. Also available and comes with a five- phones. The cushion gray, rosy pink, heather and seven brightness
in a smaller size. year warranty. pattern varies. brown, and navy blue. settings.
$42, amazon.com $50, vornado.com $35, lapdesk.com $70, containerstore.com $36, walmart.com
Source: NYMag.com Source: TheInventory.com Source: TheWirecutter.com Source: Forbes.com Source: Engadget.com

Tip of the week…
How to pet a cat
Q Appreciate the cat mindset. Cats were do-
mesticated long after dogs, so they do have
more of a wild streak. They have to learn
to enjoy human interaction when young—
ideally between two and seven weeks old—
or they’ll always be fairly standoffish.
Q Give them control. Leave it to the cat to
approach you. If the cat doesn’t know you,
kneel and hold out your hand as you would
with a dog. Nuzzling and purring means you
have permission to pet.
Q Know where to stroke. Most friendly cats
like being touched at the base of their ears,
under their chins, and on their cheeks (but
not on the whiskers). Cats often don’t like to
be touched on their stomachs, backs, paws,
or the base of their tails.
Q Recognize danger signs. A sudden turn of
the head, flattened ears, and a twitching tail
all are trying to tell you, “You should really
stop...like, now.”
Source: Southern Living
And for those who have
everything...
“For ice cream lovers, it is the summer of
our discontent.” The food industry has
taken it upon itself to push dairy-free ice
cream alternatives as the healthy eater’s
choice, and our supermarket freezers
are being filled with options containing
cauliflower, sweet potatoes, even zucchini
and peas. Some of them are vegan-friendly
“frozen desserts”: Oatly is made from oat
milk; Cado uses avocados; Farm to Spoon
uses a pureed blend of cauliflower and navy
beans. Peekaboo Mint Chocolate Chunk,
by contrast, really is ice cream, complete
with 10 percent dairy
fat and cane sugar.
But every Peekaboo
flavor promises hidden
veggies in every bite—
in this case, spinach.
$10 a pint, peekaboo
icecream.com
Source: The Wall Street Journal
Best apps…
For hunters and anglers
Q onX Hunt, perhaps the most popular app
for hunters, provides detailed topographi-
cal GPS maps that let users track their steps
and mark waypoints. Subscriptions starting
at $30 a year add precise property lines and
unlimited offline use.
Q HuntStand is a free alternative that like-
wise allows hunters to create shareable
maps of hunting grounds with pins marking
deer stands, trails, and food plots.
Q Fishbrain lets anglers network, show off
their catches, and exchange tips, such as
which lures work best where. “You might
even meet your next fishing partner.”
Q Navionics is “Google Maps for the water.”
For $15 a year, boaters and anglers can ac-
cess nautical charts, sonar charts, detailed
map overlays, and more.
Q Fish Rules gives anglers detailed regula-
tions based on location and time of year,
including daily limits and minimum sizes.
Source: Field & Stream

THE WEEK August 23, 2019

30 Best properties on the market
This week: Historic Mediterranean-style homes

1 W Scarsdale, N.Y. Built in 1925, this four-bedroom

Italian-influenced home lies within walking distance
of trains to New York City. The light-filled interior
features hardwood floors, a formal dining room,
an eat-in kitchen, and a living room with a wooden
cathedral ceiling and arched glass doors that lead to
a private courtyard. A grand staircase flows upstairs
to a cupola and the master suite. $1,499,000. Angela
Retelny, Compass, (914) 450-5106

6 2

4 5

2 X Hamden, Conn. This three-bedroom house sits close to

a 427-acre park, Yale University, and two colleges. Built in
1929, the stucco home has a living room with a beamed ca-
thedral ceiling, French doors, and the original clay-tile floors.
Additional details include arched doorways, a sunroom with
stone columns, a grand staircase with wrought-iron rail-
ing, and a master bedroom with barreled ceiling. $699,000.
Wojtek Borowski, Pearce Real Estate Co., (203) 606-9898

3 W Miami This four-bedroom Mediter-

ranean home in Upper Morningside was
built in 1930. The Spanish-influenced
house has a tile roof, a tower entry,
arched doorways, a chef’s kitchen with
tile walls, and a master suite with dress-
ing room. French doors lead out to a
patio with a pool and water feature,
and there’s a one-bedroom guesthouse.
$1,670,000. Nancy Batchelor, BHHS
EWM Realty, (305) 903-2850

THE WEEK August 23, 2019

 Best properties on the market 31

4 X Los Angeles Set above Sunset Boulevard, this 1927, four-

bedroom Mediterranean home offers views of the city. The interior
features terra-cotta floors, a wrought-iron staircase, a living room
with ornate molding and fireplace, a master suite with balcony, and
a dining room that opens out to a fountain. Additional outdoor
amenities include a dining terrace, pool, and gardens with ma-
ture olive trees and landscape lighting. $3,995,000. Daniel Lam,
The Agency, (424) 231-2406

5 W Atlanta Built in 1924, this

three-bedroom house in Buck-
head underwent a full renova-
tion in 2009. Inside, there’s
a grand foyer with diamond-
stained floors, ornate molding,
a living room with an attached
sunroom, and a kitchen with
calacatta marble and a large
pantry. The lush, 1.1-acre property has a one-bedroom original
guesthouse, as well as a second guesthouse with two rooms and
a full bath. $2,395,000. James Simons, Harry Norman Real-
tors, (404) 317-1185

Steal of the week

6 X Chicago This four-bedroom home in the South Side neighbor-
hood of Beverly was built in 1925. The blond-brick house has arched
windows, hardwood floors, a chef’s kitchen with Viking appliances,
and a full basement with
a second kitchen and
full bath. The property
includes a brick patio,
manicured lawn, and
two-car garage with tiled
roof. $540,000. Ana
Kelly, BHHS/Koening
Rubloff Realty Group,
(773) 615-9552

THE WEEK August 23, 2019

32
The bottom line
QTwenty-five families now
control almost $1.4 trillion in
wealth. The world’s wealthi-
est family, the Waltons of
Walmart, have grown their
fortune by $39 billion to
$191 billion since June
2018—an increase of $4 mil-
lion every hour.
Bloomberg.com
QVerizon is selling the social
network Tumblr to Word-
press for $3 million. That’s
a discount of more than
99 percent from the $1.1 bil-
lion that Yahoo, now owned
by Verizon, paid for Tumblr
in 2013.
Axios.com
QNew York City’s Uber
and Lyft drivers have one
overwhelming ride of
choice: Toyota Camry. The
model makes up 38 percent
of the 72,000 nonpremium
app-dispatched vehicles in
the city.
The Wall Street Journal
QSaudi Aramco, the
kingdom-owned oil group,
earned $46.9 billion in
profits in the first half of this
year. That’s down 12 percent
from the year before, but al-
most eight times what Ama-
zon made. The company is
preparing for an IPO said to
be valued at $2 trillion.
TheGuardian.com
QSpaceX launched the cre-
mated remains of 152 people
on its Falcon Heavy rocket
into space. A company called
Celestis facilitated these
“funeral flights,” charging
over $5,000 for 1 gram of
“participant” ashes.
Axios.com
QBoeing sold zero new
737 Max jets for the fourth
straight month. The jet-
maker, however, still has
a backlog of 4,600 orders
left to fill.
CNBC.com
THE WEEK August 23, 2019
BUSINESS
The news at a glance
Trade: A retreat on new China tariffs
President Trump abruptly sus- The president “finally acknowl-
pended plans to impose new tar- edges his tariffs could hit con-
iffs on Chinese imports, to avoid sumers,” said Heather Long
hurting the holiday shopping sea- in The Washington Post. His
son, said Josh Zumbrun in The statements Tuesday were “a
Wall Street Journal. The U.S. has noticeable change from his
already imposed tariffs of 25 per- insistence that the Chinese are
cent on about $250 billion worth paying the full cost.” The truth
of Chinese imports. Angered by is, up till now, “many U.S. com-
the slow progress of negotiations, panies opted to absorb a lot of
Trump had threatened a 10 per- the added costs” of tariffs that
Trump offers Christmas reprieve.
cent levy on consumer goods like had mainly affected component
smartphones, laptops, toys, and video games start- parts. But a tariff on “finished goods like shoes
ing Sept. 1. But the president retreated Tuesday, and iPhones” that businesses had already commit-
saying he would offer a reprieve “for Christmas ted to importing would likely be felt by consum-
season.” If all the tariffs planned for September ers. Suspending the September tariffs eases the
and December are put into effect, they will cover immediate burden, but “does little to mitigate the
“nearly everything the U.S. imports from China.” uncertainty surrounding Trump’s trade policy.”
Bonds: Markets tumble on recession signal Is that a résumé—
or a Tinder profile?
The U.S. bond market flashed a reliable recession warning this week
Young job applicants’
after the yield curve briefly inverted, said William Watts and Sunny Oh
CVs are coming in
in MarketWatch.com. The return on a 10-year Treasury note dipped adorned with colored
below that of a 2-year note for the first time since 2007, sending stocks photos and head-
plunging. The same phenomenon has “preceded each of the past seven shots and wrapped in
recessions.” Typically, rates are higher for longer-term bonds. But an “Instagram-friendly
inversion may occur when “investor worries about future economic palettes of mint green
growth are stoking demand for safe, long-term Treasurys, pushing and pastel pink,” said
down long-term rates.” Chip Cutter in The
Wall Street Journal.
Media: Shari Redstone reunites CBS-Viacom Some “are even add-
CBS and Viacom “agreed to merge on Tuesday in a deal that will ing bitmojis, those
reunite a roster of once mighty media businesses,” said Edmund Lee in personalized avatars
The New York Times. “Viacom’s Paramount film studio and MTV and used in text messages
and on social media,”
Nickelodeon cable networks will be added to the broadcast giant CBS
and the book publisher Simon & Schuster.” The two companies had to digital versions of
their résumés. The CEO
been a single entity, owned by Sumner Redstone, until 2006. Redstone’s
daughter Shari, who will be chairwoman of the combined company, of a fitness startup said
a few résumés she has
had fought to merge them, against fierce opposition from CBS chief received lately “looked
Leslie Moonves, who was pushed out after sexual assault allegations.
more like a Tinder
Platforms: Trump seeks to regulate social media profile.” The trend
goes against efforts
The White House drafted an executive order last week that calls on gov-
by employers to strip
ernment agencies to address Silicon Valley’s perceived anti-conservative down CVs to the most
bias, said Brian Fung in CNN.com. The order would put the Federal essential elements—in
Communications Commission “in charge of shaping how Facebook, some cases, blinding
Twitter, and other large tech companies curate what appears on their out even names and
websites.” It would also narrow the protections tech companies have for addresses—to reduce
content that users post on their platforms. The draft comes a few weeks bias in hiring. A few
after President Trump met with right-wing social media activists. managers like the per-
sonalization. One CEO
Video games: Microsoft teams with ‘Ninja’
recalls a digital résumé
Microsoft signed an exclusive deal with the world’s leading celebrity that “included an ava-
video gamer to challenge Amazon in the game streaming business, tar of the applicant
said Sarah Needleman in The Wall Street Journal. Streaming— sweating,” to show
she could “hustle like
“watching others play games online”—is an increasingly big part of
the $150 billion–a-year video game industry. Last year, viewers spent no one else.” The CEO
appreciated the effort.
8.42 billion hours watching live-streamers on Twitch, which Amazon
AP, Reuters
bought in 2014. Tyler Blevins, known as Ninja, “had 14 million Twitch But the applicant didn’t
get the job.
followers” before leaving Twitch for Microsoft’s Mixer earlier this month.
 Making money BUSINESS 33

College: Still worth it if you choose wisely

Getting a college degree still pays off for most qualify for need-based aid, the in-state tu-
students, said Josh Mitchell in The Wall Street ition averages $4,905. At Yale University,
Journal, but it is no longer a sure route to half of students receive need-based financial
higher salaries and greater wealth. The num- aid that cuts the $71,000 tuition down by
bers still favor higher education: In recent an average of 75 percent. For the college
years, “Americans with a bachelor’s degree that “pays off the most,” we look to Stan-
earned an average of $77,239, nearly $32,000 ford, said Abigail Hess in CNBC.com. Aid
more than the average of workers with only a there is available to families with incomes
high-school diploma.” However, students who as high as $250,000 a year; for students
borrowed now leave college with more than from families making less than $75,000
$30,000 in debt. And even with higher sala- per year the annual cost—including room
ries, significant numbers of college graduates and board—averages $4,061. Meanwhile,
are struggling to build the wealth of previous the starting salary for Stanford grads is
Stanford: New grads earn $109,800.
generations. For black and Hispanic students, $109,800. Some of the biggest salary ad-
“there is little to no wealth advantage” from going to college at vantages at top schools come at midcareer points, 10 years out
all, “splitting graduates more widely into haves and have-nots.” of school. A number of colleges, including Georgia Tech, boast
Meanwhile, the tight labor market has employers relaxing educa- midcareer salaries that average over $130,000.
tion requirements, said Conor Sen in Bloomberg.com, so millions
of people are getting paid more “without having to spend years Those arguing that college isn’t properly preparing young gradu-
and tens of thousands of dollars on a degree that employers only ates for work miss the point of a liberal-arts degree, said Erik
‘require’ when they have leverage over workers.” Gross in WashingtonExaminer.com. It teaches skills “such
as critical thinking, written and verbal communication, inter-
There are still colleges that offer plenty of bang for your buck, cultural fluency, interpersonal skills,” and more. Liberal arts
said Kaitlin Pitsker in Kiplinger’s Personal Finance. We ranked graduates might find themselves “better equipped for the rapidly
schools that “meet our definition of value: a high-quality educa- changing job market,” in which Millennials change occupations
tion at an affordable price.” To really judge value, you often need every few years. What’s more, humanities and social sciences
to look past the sticker price. The University of North Carolina, are generally cheaper to teach than STEM classes. Investing in
Chapel Hill tops our list of public universities for the 18th straight liberal arts programs “can save money for colleges, while cutting
time. It boasts an 84 percent graduation rate; for students who costs and discounting tuition” for students.

What the experts say Charity of the week

The downsides of early retirement
Retiring at age 34 has been an enjoyable
experience, but there are a few things I’d do
differently, said Sam Dogen in CNBC.com.
I quit my job with $3 million, generating
roughly $80,000 in investment income per
year. But one downside is that retiring early
made me “excessively risk-averse,” and I’ve
paid the price. If I’d waited, I might have had
the “financial confidence to buy more real
estate in 2012, right before prices began to
take off.” My wife and I also waited to have
a child. “In retrospect, I would have preferred
to be a first-time parent in my early 30s,” and
I missed out on my firm’s incredibly gener-
ous parental leave benefits—we had to pay
$1,700 a month in health-care premiums on
our own.
Eleven kids with an odd superpower
“The fate of the world’s largest exchange-
traded fund rests on the health of a group
of 20-somethings,” said Rachel Evans in
Bloomberg.com. SPY, the first ETF in the U.S.,
was organized as a trust when it was estab-
lished in 1993—an unusual structure that al-
lowed its creators to set up “units” that traded
much like shares in a company. However, an
arcane rule required the trust fund to have a
AP
specified termination date. The founders chose
to peg it to the life spans of 11 “ordinary kids”
born between May 1990 and January 1993.
As a result, “SPY as we know it will cease
to be on Jan. 22, 2118, or 20 years ‘after the
death of the last survivor of the 11 persons’—
whichever occurs first.” At least eight of the
11 kids had ties to the American Stock Ex-
change, which structured the ETF, but none
were aware of their role in investing history.
On ‘vacation,’ still at work
“Too often, employees are made to feel like
there’s no good time for them to get away,”
said Alison Green in Slate.com. This is ridicu-
lous. “When paid vacation time is part of
your benefits, letting some of it go unused is
like taking money out of your paycheck and
handing it back to your employer.” Still, some
offices even expect people to “remain avail-
able” to work while they’re away. “Many
states don’t require companies to pay out
remaining vacation time when an employee
leaves—making the time off that they earned
truly use-it-or-lose-it.” Employers need to
treat vacation time like any other compensa-
tion they owe employees. And employees
“need to be better about insisting on taking
the time off”—and I mean truly off.
In partnership with the National Park
Service, the Wolf Trap Foundation for the
Performing Arts (wolftrap.org) organizes
dozens of performances in Virginia’s Wolf
Trap National Park. Known for its Wolf
Trap Opera program, Wolf Trap has long
provided emerging professional singers
with one of the country’s most visible
outlets. Wolf Trap Opera selects its artists
from among the best classical vocalists in
the country through a national series of
auditions. It chooses operas—including
many that are rarely performed—to
showcase the singers’ talents. Wolf Trap
also provides a summer home for the
National Symphony Orchestra, providing
space for performances as well as collab-
orations with pop artists. Wolf Trap also
runs arts education programs nationally,
from preschool- to high school–level
classes, with master teachers.
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.

THE WEEK August 23, 2019

34 Best columns: Business

Transit: A giant loss raises questions about Uber

Three months after its public debut, businesses with the promise of future
Uber posted a $5.2 billion loss that’s growth.” That makes Uber “among
“impressively vast” even for a com- the biggest weights around the neck of
pany whose business model is based the SoftBank Vision Fund.” SoftBank
on outspending the competition, said is even looking at investing in some of
The Economist. Much of this quar- Uber’s competitors, said Jesse Pound
ter’s loss—$3.9 billion—is a one-time in CNBC.com. But Uber CEO Dara
cost from stock-based compensation Khosrowshahi believes Uber and Soft-
linked to Uber’s IPO. Still, “from its Bank are very much still on the same
inception Uber has now lost a cumula- side. When Son “puts money into com-
tive $14 billion.” All that money is panies, it’s because he believes in them
being spent on “efforts at becoming and he thinks they’re going to be cate-
the ‘Amazon of transportation,’” but gory leaders,” says Khosrowshahi. “We
this is far more money than Amazon Uber shares sank to a new low after a weak quarter. are their single largest investment.”
ever lost. Meanwhile, Uber’s revenue
growth has slowed to its lowest rate ever “as competition for Uber has claimed that its biggest rival is car ownership, said
passengers holds down fares.” This is a company that “relies Patrick Sisson in Curbed.com. “For roughly the last decade,
on rapid growth to keep investors happy.” Now those investors Uber and Lyft and other technologies have been the focus of
have to decide “whether it’s worth backing a firm splurging vast wild claims of growth and guarantees that they would revolu-
sums.” Uber still has $13.7 billion on hand, said Tom McKay in tionize how we get around, reduce traffic, and cut emissions.”
Gizmodo.com, so it still has “about two years before it exhausts Now many of those claims look suspect. Uber’s and Lyft’s own
its current funding.” But clearly the company can’t keep burn- studies show that drivers cruising around the streets increase
ing money at its current rate. It’s laid off 400 people from its congestion. Uber was heavily subsidized by venture capital, cut-
marketing staff and put a hiring freeze on new engineers—not ting the cost of rides and turning them into “affordable luxu-
“a good sign for the future of an organization.” ries.” Its mounting losses, though, have exposed the problems
with the model. “Not only is it difficult trying to disrupt the way
When Masayoshi Son, the CEO of tech investment giant Americans travel, it’s also very, very expensive.” Uber and its
SoftBank, “wrestled his way into Uber a little more than a year competitors face high costs to recruit drivers, while “passengers
before the IPO,” it was seen as a triumph, said Tim Culpan in are very price-sensitive when booking rides.” All this invites a
Bloomberg.com. Now, however, the stock is down more than question that’s even bigger than Uber: Has the tech solution that
20 percent since Uber’s May 10 IPO, and the public markets so many investors bet on distracted us from better and cheaper
have shown themselves less willing to “invest in big unprofitable ways of fixing our transportation infrastructure?

Apple may have sparked the smartphone revolution,
Android, not but “Android was the essential ingredient that made
Apple, made the devices ubiquitous,” said Shira Ovide. Panicked
after the iPhone debuted in 2007, Google made its
our world open-source mobile operating system available for
free to telecoms and phone makers, in exchange for
Shira Ovide the right to “latch its lucrative online advertising
Bloomberg.com machine to most any phone running Android.” This
gave every phone maker the power to “churn out any
iPhone-like product and, if it wanted, customize it
before branding it as its own.” Software companies
“no longer had to create a zillion versions tweaked
for a vast sea of mostly crummy proprietary operat-
ing systems.” Consumers benefited, too. If Steve Jobs
had fulfilled his pledge to “destroy Android” in 2010,
it’s possible that the smartphone would have stayed
“confined mostly to the relatively affluent parts of the
globe, as the PC was before it.” Instead, Samsung,
which joined with Android in 2009, began making
phones “at every conceivable price tier.” Since 2010,
Android has powered more than 8 in 10 new devices
worldwide. Technologists today are looking beyond
the smartphone, and “the biggest platforms for cloud
computing, driverless cars, and voice-activated digital
assistants are proprietary systems,” not open-source.
Sadly, we may never see anything like Android again.

Tech companies are tripping over themselves to
Big Tech cozy up to the U.S. government, said Kevin Roose.
wraps itself Exhibit A is Peter Thiel, the Trump-backing venture
capitalist. “Seeing him lecture anyone on patriotism
in the flag is rich.” This is a man who once supported a move-
ment to “flee the United States and build a floating
America so much that they have gone to elaborate
lengths to avoid paying taxes to its Treasury, are
also promoting themselves as national champions.”
And Google just sent its CEO, Sundar Pichai, to the
White House to “reassure the president that Google
does not discriminate against conservatives.” This
Xinhua News Agency/eyevine/Redux

Kevin Roose city in international waters.” Then there’s Facebook
The New York Times CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has been decrying
China’s growing tech prowess. He conveniently
forgets to mention that “he has spent much of the
past decade trying desperately to curry favor with
the Chinese” in an effort to gain access to their mar-
kets. “Amazon and Apple, two tech giants that love
THE WEEK August 23, 2019
“patriotic posturing” is questionable, but it may be
smart. Lawmakers understand the importance of
technologies like 5G and artificial intelligence to this
country’s national security. However, they should
also be “appropriately wary of Silicon Valley’s charm
campaign.” It’s dangerous to conflate what’s good
for Big Tech with what’s good for the nation.
 Obituaries
The Nobel laureate who chronicled the black experience
Toni Morrison gave
Toni
Morrison voice to millions of peo-
1931–2019 ple who had long been
relegated to the margins
of American literature and life. With
poetic and often painful language, the
Nobel Prize–winning author placed
African-Americans—particularly
women—at the heart of her 11 novels.
Many of Morrison’s characters were
tortured but proud figures who were,
she said, “unavailable to pity.” They
included Sethe, the runaway slave in
Beloved (1987) who commits infan-
ticide rather than see her daughter
raised in bondage; Pecola Breedlove,
a black girl who struggles with feel-
ings of racial inferiority and longs for
eyes like Shirley Temple in The Bluest
Eye (1970); and Macon “Milkman”
Dead III, who spends decades search-
ing for his roots and identity in Song
of Solomon (1977). Slavery and its
brutal legacy coursed through her
work. “Anybody white could take
your whole self for anything that came to mind,” Morrison wrote
in Beloved, which was set in the 19th century but read as a meta-
phor for the 20th. “Not just work, kill or maim you, but dirty
you. Dirty you so bad you couldn’t like yourself anymore.” What
drove Morrison to write about the African-American experience,
she said in 2003, “was the silence—so many stories untold and
unexamined. There was a wide vacuum in the literature.”
She was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, to a ship-
builder father and homemaker mother, said The New York Times.
“Young Chloe grew up in a house suffused with narrative and
superstition.” She listened to ghost stories and folktales told by
her parents—both of whom were descended from slaves—and
watched as her grandmother “ritually consulted a book on dream
interpretation.” At school Chloe developed a love of literature,
especially the novels of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Jane Austen,
and went on to study English and classics at the historically black
Howard University in Washington, D.C. Classmates struggled to
pronounce “Chloe,” so she started going by Toni, from the bap-
tismal name Anthony—patron saint of the poor and the lost—she
had taken on converting to Catholicism at age 12.
Soon after earning a master’s degree from Cornell University she
joined the Howard faculty, “where her students included the
civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael,” said The Washington
Post. In 1958, she wed Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect.
“Their marriage was an unhappy one,” with Harold believing
a wife should be subservient to her husband. “I was a complete
nuisance to mine,” she said. Morrison started writing fiction to
escape, said The Times (U.K.). “I wrote like someone with a dirty
habit,” she explained. “Secretly, compulsively, slyly.” One early
short story was inspired by a childhood friend who, Morrison
said, confessed to losing faith in God because “she had prayed for,
and not been given, blue eyes.” After getting divorced in 1964,
Morrison moved with her two young sons to New York City, tak-
ing a job as a senior editor at Random House. Over the next two
decades, Morrison would cultivate what she called “a canon of
Getty
black work,” editing books by Angela Davis, Toni Cade Bambara,
35
Gayl Jones, and Muhammad Ali,
and African authors including Wole
Soyinka and Chinua Achebe.
In her late 30s, Morrison began
working on her own novels, writ-
ing “whenever she could find time,”
said Time. She wrote at daybreak
when her boys were still asleep, and
would scribble out paragraphs on her
steering wheel while stuck in traffic.
Her debut, The Bluest Eye, was set
in 1941 and inspired by the “Black
Is Beautiful” movement that took
off in the 1960s. “There was a time
when black wasn’t beautiful,” she
said. “And you hurt.” Her next novel,
Sula (1973), focused on two child-
hood best friends whose lives radically
diverge. Like many of Morrison’s
books, Sula captured the importance
of black sisterhood. It was “so critical
among black women because there
wasn’t anybody else,” she explained.
“We saved one another’s lives for
generations.” Nationwide acclaim came with Song of Solomon. It
was picked as a main selection by the Book of the Month Club,
the first novel by a black author to receive the honor since Richard
Wright’s Native Son in 1940.
But it was Morrison’s “fifth novel, Beloved, that proved to be
her most celebrated work,” said The Hollywood Reporter. In a
chilling feat of literary invention, Morrison gives words to the
slain infant, who lives as a ghost with her mother—a symbol of
the bloody history that continues to haunt African-Americans. “I
am not dead,” says the child, known as Beloved. “I sit the sun
closes my eyes when I open them I see the face I lost Sethe’s is the
face that left me.” The novel was an instant sensation, spending
25 weeks on the best-seller list. When Beloved failed to win a
National Book Award in 1988, 48 black writers—including Maya
Angelou, Ernest J. Gaines, and Alice Walker—wrote an open letter
protesting the oversight. Later that year, Beloved won the Pulitzer
Prize for fiction, the first of many major awards for Morrison.
She received the Nobel Prize in literature in 1993, “the first black
woman to be so honored,” and in 2012 was presented with the
Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the
U.S., by President Barack Obama.
The accolades didn’t cause Morrison to slow down. She won
acclaim for the improvisational style of Jazz (1992), which was
“set in 1920s Harlem and echoed to the strains of black jazz
music,” said The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). More novels followed,
as well as three children’s books, collections of essays, and the
libretto for Margaret Garner, an opera about the real-life slave
who had inspired Beloved. Her final novel, God Help the Child,
which explores childhood trauma visited upon a dark-skinned
woman and how it shapes her adulthood, was published in 2015.
“Word-work is sublime,” Morrison said in her Nobel lecture in
1993, “because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our
difference, our human difference—the way in which we are like
no other life. We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do
language. That may be the measure of our lives.”
THE WEEK August 23, 2019
36 The last word
The Amazon nomads
Roving merchants scour the country searching for odd and quirky items they can sell through Amazon,
said journalist Josh Dzieza in TheVerge.com. It’s a life of constant searching, open sky, and nothing left to lose.

C
HRIS ANDERSON MOVES
through the Target
clearance racks with
cool efficiency, surveying the
towers of Star Wars Lego sets
and Incredibles action figures,
sensing, as if by intuition, what
would be profitable to sell on
Amazon. Discontinued nail
polish can be astonishingly
lucrative, but not these colors.
A dinosaur riding some sort of
motorcycle? No way. But these
Jurassic Park Jeeps look prom-
ising, and an Amazon app on
his phone confirms that each
could net a $6 profit after fees
and shipping. He piles all 20
into his cart.
It’s not a bad haul for a half
hour’s work, but it’s not great
either. He consoles himself that
he hit upon a trove of deeply discounted
Kohl’s bras the day before as he left East
Brunswick, N.J., on his way here to Edison.
Home is still 300 miles away, in Tyrone,
Pa., and there are plenty of stores between
here and there.
Anderson is an Amazon nomad, part of a
small group of merchants who travel the
backroads of America searching clearance
aisles and dying chains for goods to sell on with cited more personal reasons for their
Amazon. Some live out of RVs and vans,
moving from town to town, only stopping
long enough to pick the stores clean and
ship their wares to Amazon’s fulfillment
centers.
The majority of goods sold on Amazon are
not sold by Amazon itself, but by more than it was actually Kris Kristofferson’s song—
2 million merchants who use the company’s
platform as their storefront and infrastruc-
ture. Some of these sellers make their own
products, while others practice arbitrage,
buying and reselling wares from other retail- get rid of, the freer you are.”
ers. Amazon has made this easy to do, first
by launching Fulfillment by Amazon, which
allows sellers to send their goods to com-
pany warehouses and have Amazon handle
storage and delivery, and then with an app
that lets sellers scan goods to instantly check
nography from Radiohead
and Misfits. Coupled with
the white windowless cargo
van he drives, the whole
ensemble gives him the
appearance of a cheerful
roadie, one of the many jobs
he’s briefly held.
Anderson adopted the
nomadic life partly out of
necessity. A restless person
by his own admission,
he dropped out of col-
lege three years in, getting
all the debt without the
degree. He started making
jewelry—wedding bands
and titanium plugs, like the
Space Invaders ones he’s
now wearing—but it wasn’t
Anderson: ‘So many people are owned by their possessions.’ enough to live on. He
worked retail. He worked
business and Amazon is just an extension of in a call center. Then, looking for ways to
my arm,” says Sean-Patrick Iles, a nomad sell his jewelry, he came across Amazon. It
who spent weeks driving cross-country dur- was a terrible platform for selling crafts. He
ing Toys R Us’ final days. It was a feeding couldn’t make things fast enough to meet
frenzy Anderson and others also hit the Amazon’s requirements, but retail arbitrage
road for. “I find the products, and then they looked interesting.
mail them to people.”
He moved to Tyrone, and the nearest Wal-
Though nomadism offers competitive mart was 20 miles away, so any shopping
advantages, most of the merchants I spoke trips would have to be road trips anyway.
He figured he might as well keep driving—
profession. to Wisconsin, to Florida, to Nevada. Today,
“Freedom,” Jason Wyatt quickly answers he runs a warehouse, packing products for
when I ask him why he decided to quit his other Amazon sellers, and spends half his
job as an aviation electronics technician, time on the road chasing product.
sell his house in Georgia, and buy an RV. When you spend weeks on end traveling the
“Janis Joplin once said—though I believe strip malls and big-box stores of America,
you start to appreciate small differences in
‘Freedom’s just another word for nothing what can seem like archipelagoes of same-
left to lose.’ And I found that that’s actually ness: the way the Targets get cleaner as
the truth. Your possessions, you don’t really you approach corporate headquarters in
own them. They own you. The more you Minneapolis; the novelty of an unusually
small Walmart in Indiana; the McDonald’s
This is a not uncommon refrain from the in Pomeroy, Ohio, that served pizza, the
nomads, who often have a complicated remainder of an abandoned experiment in
relationship with consumerism. Too much the ’80s. How was the McPizza? “Bad!”
stuff can be a burden on the road, so Anderson says exuberantly. “But that’s not
they can find themselves living like ascet- the point.”
ics amid the clearance aisles, servicing, in

whether they’d be profitable to sell on the
site. A few sellers, like Anderson, have fig-
ured out that the best way to find lucrative
products is to be mobile, scouring remote
stores and chasing hot-selling items from
Anderson’s words, “literally the best prod-
uct distribution system ever devised by the
human race.”
At 32, Anderson is burly, with a youthful
face and shoulder-length dark hair tucked
F
INISHED WITH TARGET, Anderson stacks
the Jeeps in the back of his van and
gives the cart a shove, sending it rat-
tling into its corral. Sometimes, he confides,
when he finishes shopping late at night, he’ll
bump his cart with his van to knock it into
Ross Mantle

coast to coast.
behind his ears. His black shorts and T-shirt its pen as he leaves, a parting flourish in the
“It’s almost like I’m the front end of the reveal tattoos of aliens, cats, skulls, and ico- empty lot.
THE WEEK August 23, 2019

Often, sellers will invent destinations to
give their travels a direction. Anderson likes
to follow bands. He recently followed the
Mountain Goats across four states and is
planning to do the same this summer when
Tool goes on tour. National parks are a
popular destination, which can create a
distinctly American-feeling juxtaposition of
natural splendor and commerce, big stores
and open sky. Iles reminisces about waking
up in his van to see the sun rising over the
Grand Canyon after a weeks-long tour of
closing Toys R Us stores. Anderson takes
detours for roadside attractions like the
largest basket in Ohio, and he always stops
for caves.
But sometimes the Amazon app, acting as
a Geiger counter of consumer demand, will
light up on something strange, and it’s time
to chase a product. Anderson recently hit
half a dozen Walmarts buying Game of
Thrones Oreos. You learn to develop an eye
for things that could set off the scanner.
“Ooh, weird cleaning products—I love
’em,” Anderson says as he leaves a TJ
Maxx aisle full of plastic avocado-half con-
tainers and Jim Beam–branded steak knives.
There are objects that are intentionally
scarce and marketed as such, like the Oreos,
and then there are everyday things that sim-
ply vanish in the churn of seasonal redesigns
and obsolescence. The attachments people
develop for these unremarkable commodi-
ties can be intense, at least as measured by
their prices on Amazon. For Anderson, the
holy grail is the Bounce Dryer Bar, a $5
plastic oblong you affix to the dryer rather
than adding a dryer sheet to each load.
Now discontinued, a two-pack sells on
Amazon for $300. Anderson once hunted
a particular brand of discontinued dental
floss across the Big Lots of America, buying
six-packs for 99 cents and selling them on
Amazon for more than $100 apiece.
He has no idea why someone would pay so
much for such things, but the scanner tells
him people do. His best guesses are melan-
choly ones. Discontinued cat food is a big
seller, which he didn’t understand until his
mom’s cat grew old and senile and refused
to eat any of the new flavors.
He once saw a post from a parent whose
son was autistic and drank from the same
plastic cup every day for 20 years. The cup
eventually disintegrated, and he didn’t want
to drink from any other vessel.
“I’ve always wondered if it’s something
like that,” Anderson says. “But it can’t be
that common. Plus, I don’t see how you get
that attached to it. I can see a cup, but I
don’t get a dryer bar.” In any case, demand
exists. Someone bought a $300 dryer bar
last month.
AP
The last word
L
IFE ON THE road isn’t easy. Sellers
“don’t realize how isolating it can be at
times,” says Iles, who travels between
New York and Florida in a Ford conversion
van. It also takes a tremendous amount of
work to be financially viable. While there is
a robust economy of influencers promising
Closeouts can turn into a feeding frenzy.
riches through retail arbitrage, the actual
margins are unforgiving, and the practice
has been declining for years.
Iles, who was studying to be a music
teacher before he decided it wasn’t a
viable career, pays himself about $40,000
a year and works long and strange hours,
sometimes overturning shopping carts in
Walmart parking lots at 3 a.m. to serve
as makeshift countertops as he packages
goods to send to Amazon. Anderson says he
makes “about $100,000” a year, of which
arbitrage represents roughly half.
The nomads must also endure the over-
whelming feeling of being confronted
with so much stuff. I started to experience
this as the afternoon wore on. By 4 p.m.,
Anderson and I had been to Target, Ulta,
TJ Maxx, Walmart, Kohl’s, and had moved
on to GameStop. We had seen quivers of
yoga mats, pro-wrestling action figures,
vast Nerf arsenals, and copper-plated pans.
There were plush Star Wars droids, plas-
tic dinosaurs, Sour Patch cereal, Churro
Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal (weird
cereal can be lucrative, Anderson says),
Elmos, Teddy Ruxpins, glittering purple
bath bombs, body mist that a rival seller
had registered as weighing 500 pounds so
the scanner app registered it as unprof-
37
itable, skull-covered American Sniper–
branded car seat covers with gun holsters,
plastic succulents, TVs, drones, and a toy
that was labeled simply “egg.”
“What kind of weird parent gets their kid
an egg?” Anderson asks.
There’s nothing quite like a clearance sec-
tion for feeling the intensity and fleetingness
of consumer desire: all these plastic leftovers
of huge public appetites, which were shaped
for a time by enormous companies and
have since moved on to robot monkey fin-
ger puppets or whatever. The scale is over-
whelming. Anderson recalls an auction for
a pallet of robotic hamsters called ZhuZhu
Pets, which were briefly hot in 2009, with a
Disney Channel cartoon and video games.
The pallet was No. 20,000. “That means
somebody imported 20,000 pallets at least.
That is an insane number.” Doing the math,
he comes up with almost 800 tractor trailers
full of robot hamsters.
I was surprised at first by how often the
nomads distanced themselves from material
culture, speaking of their customers and fel-
low shoppers from an almost anthropologi-
cal remove. But it makes sense when you
realize that they make most of their money
by immersing themselves in the pre-holiday
buying frenzy. Anderson has Thanksgiving
with his mom a day early so he can venture
out to the stores, a tradition that dates back
to his time working retail. He always brings
a buddy; it’s too harrowing to face alone.
He’s seen hungry-eyed adults fighting over
TVs and parents crying out in desperation
that, without a particular toy, their kid’s
Christmas will be ruined.
“Too many people are unhappy, and I don’t
think they know why they’re unhappy, so
they’re like, ‘I’m going to buy a new toy,
and that’ll make me happy,’ and it does
not,” he says. “So many people are owned
by their possessions.”
Anderson is still eager to travel, he says, as
we sit outside at a Starbucks along a busy
road, cars whooshing home in the evening
rush hour. He’s had depression for a lot of
his life, and when he’s traveling is when he’s
happiest. Yesterday, he drove through the
Pine Barrens, which was beautiful. Tonight,
he might drive down to Philadelphia and
see his dad, or up through Jersey to get din-
ner with a fellow nomad.
“It’s kind of nice to just be carefree, you
know? I’m gonna see.” Then it’s probably
off to Harrisburg, Pa., where he recently hit
a rich vein of discontinued Pop-Tarts.
This story originally appeared in TheVerge
.com on July 10 and has been edited by
The Week. Used with permission.
THE WEEK August 23, 2019
38 The Puzzle Page
Crossword No. 516: Gran Colombia by Matt Gaffney The Week Contest
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
This week’s question: Procter & Gamble has blamed
extravagantly bearded Millennials and the growing social
14 15 16
acceptance of stubble for an $8 billion write-down of
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17 18 19
fewer, please come up with an advertising slogan that
Gillette might use to encourage hirsute dudes to shave
20 21 22 off their facial hair.
Last week’s contest: The average legroom for fliers
23 24 25 26 27
in economy class has fallen by 5 inches since 2006, to
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28 29 30 31 32
17 inches. Please come up with an honest slogan that
an airline could use to promote its increasingly cramped
33 34 35
cabins and ever-shrinking seats.
36 37 38 39 40 41 THE WINNER: Fly the way too friendly skies
Don Phillips, Point Arena, Calif.
42 43 44 45 SECOND PLACE: Come fly with knee!
David Crommie, San Francisco
46 47 48 49 50 51 THIRD PLACE: We make the world small for you!
Tom Roeber, San Diego
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Difficulty:
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