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The price
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 Contents 5

Editor’s letter
Like so many other parents across America, I’m dreading the ar-
rival of the new school year. What should have been a moment of
celebration for my family—our 4- and 7-year-old will finally be
attending the same school, freeing my wife and me from a frantic
multi-venue drop-off and pick-up routine—has instead become a
source of constant worry. We’re lucky to live in an area that cur-
rently has a low Covid-19 infection rate, which means my kids
are scheduled to be learning in the classroom at least two days a
week. After three months of all-remote schooling, during which
our children earned top grades in moaning and Netflix, we should
be looking forward to those two days as if they were a Caribbean
vacation. But there are too many unknowns for us to take any joy
in this return to in-person education. How will the kids cope with
having to wear a face mask for hours at a time? Will they able to
learn effectively when their teacher is also wearing a mask, block-
ing them from seeing her facial expressions? Will social-distancing
rules mean that a teacher won’t be able to hug my son when he
inevitably bursts into tears on his first day of kindergarten?
Then there are the very real health fears. While the early evi-
dence suggests that the risk of young children getting seriously
sick with Covid-19 is relatively low, they may be able to transmit
the disease to adults. How much danger are we putting teachers
in by asking them to stand in front of a class of kids who’ll prob-
ably be pulling down and playing with their face masks every 5
minutes? And what’s the likelihood that a child might bring home
the disease and unwittingly transmit it to mom, dad, grandpa, or
grandma? If the U.S. had implemented a national testing, tracing,
and quarantining coronavirus policy, like South Korea, Germany,
and other countries, we likely wouldn’t have to weigh the odds
and gamble with our health and our children’s education. But we
didn’t. And so suffer the little children. And Theunis Bates
the parents. And the teachers. Managing editor

NEWS
6 Main stories
Covid-19 infections and
deaths accelerate across
U.S.; Congress debates a
new pandemic aid bill
8 Controversy of the week
Will Republicans be hit
by a blue tsunami in
November?
9 The U.S. at a glance
A deadly attack by a
men’s rights activist;
Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s
cancer recurrence
10 The world at a glance
The European Union
agrees on a massive
bailout; Russian hackers
try to steal vaccine data
12 People
Cameron Diaz’s new
winemaking career; Killer
Mike’s political ambitions
13 Briefing
Could genetic engineering
safely rid the world of
mosquito-borne diseases?
14 Best U.S. columns
Dismantling John Lewis’
civil rights legacy; the
Editor-in-chief: William Falk
Managing editors: Theunis Bates,
Mark Gimein
Assistant managing editor: Jay Wilkins
Deputy editor/International: Susan Caskie
Deputy editor/Arts: Chris Mitchell
Senior editors: Chris Erikson, Danny Funt,
Michael Jaccarino, Dale Obbie,
Zach Schonbrun, Hallie Stiller
Art director: Dan Josephs
Photo editor: Mark Rykoff
Copy editor: Jane A. Halsey
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
Moms on the frontline of the protest in Portland, Ore. (p.19) Midwest sales director: John Goldrick
West Coast executive director: Tony Imperato
Director, direct response: Alexandra Riera
ARTS LEISURE Head of brand marketing: Ian Huxley
Director of digital operations &
advertising: Andy Price
23 Books 28 Food & Drink Sales & marketing coordinator: Lauren
How things go viral, Fish tacos, Baja style; the Addicks
from disease to fake news best low-carb beers; how to Chief executive: Kerin O’Connor
get more from food scraps Chief operating & financial officer:
24 Author of the week Kevin E. Morgan
David Mitchell’s rock- 29 Life at home Director of financial reporting:
star dreams Why this is the perfect time Arielle Starkman
to buy a new car; essential Consumer marketing director:
Leslie Guarnieri
25 Art & Music gear for aspiring podcasters HR manager: Joy Hart
Could the Operations manager: Cassandra Mondonedo
pandemic spell BUSINESS
the end of
Chairman: Jack Griffin
Dennis Group CEO: James Tye
modernist 32 News at a glance
architecture? A high-stakes hearing for U.K. founding editor: Jolyon Connell

racism of White Fragility Big Tech; Jack Ma readies Company founder: Felix Dennis
26 Film & a massive IPO in China
16 Best European
columns Home 33 Making money
An anti-mask movement Media Small businesses suffer in
rises in the U.K. What Netflix the pandemic; mortgage Visit us at TheWeek.com.
viewers are rates drop below 3 percent For customer service go to www
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Ore.; revenge of the Never Cameron Diaz the Magic Kingdom at www.GiveTheWeek.com.
Trump Republicans (p.12) under siege
THE WEEK July 31, 2020
6 NEWS The main stories...
Hospitalizations, deaths soaring
What happened restaurants, gyms, and other indoor
The U.S. coronavirus daily death spaces where people congregate,
toll broke 1,100 this week for the and enforcing social distancing.
first time since May, as case numbers And for heaven’s sake, wear a mask,
rose in 40 states and numerous states said the Chicago Tribune. Strong
set records for hospitalizations and evidence shows that masks block
deaths. States across the South and infections and could help bring the
Southwest were overwhelmed by epidemic under control—and save
surging infections, feeding case totals the economy. It’s astounding that
that over the past week have regu- so many deluded people “still resist
larly topped 60,000 a day and send- this basic precaution.”
ing the tally of confirmed U.S. cases
near the 4 million mark, with more Trump is losing the public with his
than 145,000 deaths. Several states “rosy talk,” said the Washington
faced shortages of intensive care beds; Examiner. Bluster and spin go a
in Florida, at least 50 hospitals were long way in real estate and real-
maxed out, while the health officer in A memorial for Covid-19 victim Fernando Aguirre in Texas ity TV, but they don’t work in a
Mississippi—where 31 state legisla- pandemic—which is why his “poll
tors are infected—said the system risked being “thoroughly over- numbers have cratered.” With the U.S. facing devastation as life
whelmed.” California surpassed New York as the state with the in Italy and Spain goes back to normal, Trump faces more than a
most cases, and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said the city was communications problem. “It’s a results problem.”
“on the brink” of another lockdown order. A growing number of
school districts were opting to begin the school year with partial or What the columnists said
full remote learning. The rampant spread in nearly half the country What we’ve seen is “perhaps one of the greatest failures of presi-
came as once hard-hit countries in Asia and Europe reported low dential leadership in generations,” said Michael Shear in The New
case numbers and reopened businesses and schools. “Things are York Times. Faced with America’s biggest crisis in decades, the
the worst they’ve ever been in the U.S., and they are spiraling White House “embraced overly rosy projections” in order to pro-
out of control,” said Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of claim victory over the virus and prematurely reopen the economy.
Tropical Medicine at Baylor University. They were cheered on by White House coronavirus response coor-
dinator Dr. Deborah Birx, “a constant source of upbeat news” who
As dozens of states struggled to contain the virus, they faced lab assured administration officials in mid-April that the virus’ spread
backlogs and supply shortages that are creating waits of a week or had peaked. The administration was driven by one unwavering
more for test results, making the tests largely useless in identifying goal: shifting responsibility to the states “in an attempt to escape
and containing infections. Meanwhile, the Trump administration blame for the crisis.”
sought to block billions of dollars in state grants for testing and
contract tracing in the upcoming relief bill. We’ve “squandered” our chance to beat back the virus, said
Michael Hiltzik in the Los Angeles Times. Nations across the globe
President Trump returned to televised have proved that “the virus can be
briefings for the first time since April, crushed, given a consistent government
in an attempt to reverse plummet- What next? response and mobilized and willing
ing approval ratings. He was somber, “There are three scenarios of what happens public.” But in a country that once led
advising Americans to wear masks and next, ” said Leana Wen in WashingtonPost.com. the world, an ineffective, patchwork
acknowledging the situation will likely One is to continue on the same path, where response has left us with overburdened
“get worse before it gets better.” He said mask use is optional and inconsistent, busi- hospitals, doubts that schools can
his administration is now—six months nesses carry on, and we hit 200,000 deaths safely be reopened, and “a citizenry
into the pandemic—“in the process of by the fall. Option two: a “full shutdown, ” in that feels it has already sacrificed too
developing a strategy” to combat what which every American “stays at home for four much for no visible gain.”
he acknowledged is “a vicious and to six weeks” and we “starve the virus and stop
dangerous illness.” But he complained transmission,” as Australia and South Korea did. “Hunker down,” America, said Jim
that TV coverage was blowing the The last option is “whack-a-mole,” with localities Geraghty in NationalReview.com.
problem out of proportion and repeated issuing “some version of stay-at-home orders “This fight is far from over.” In a best-
his claim that “the virus will disappear. until they hit specific goals,” such as a sustained case scenario, we’ll have a vaccine by
It will disappear.” drop in infections. Additional lockdowns “are early 2021. Even then we’ll have to
going to be necessary,” said Noah Smith in contend “with the lingering economic,
What the editorials said Bloomberg.com. But with what we’ve learned so geopolitical, social, educational, and
“The United States is plunging ever far, we could make them “much less restrictive psychological consequences of the
deeper into a public health catastro- and just as effective as the old ones.” Bars and virus.” We’ll also face another problem:
phe,” said The Washington Post. In theaters would be out, but beaches, retail stores, figuring out how to prevent another
the wake of Trump’s “epic leadership and even hair salons can stay open with proper pandemic. The conditions that allowed
failure,” governors should “hit the reset protective measures. Even in hard-hit areas, that this virus to jump from a bat to a
button and try once more to get this will allow “a semblance of normal life.” human in China are “almost entirely
Getty

right.” That means shutting down bars, unchanged.”

Illustration by Fred Harper.
THE WEEK July 31, 2020 Cover photos from AP, Reuters, Getty
 ... and how they were covered NEWS 7

Economy teeters as Congress fights over relief bill

What happened The U.S. is suffering from a lack of jobs,
A bitterly divided Congress began lengthy “not a lack of willing workers,” said The
negotiations over the next coronavirus New York Times. While a $600 weekly
relief package this week, as the explo- unemployment check might sound
sion in Covid-19 cases showed signs of generous, “it’s not as good as a job.”
wiping out the country’s fragile eco- More than 5 million workers have lost
nomic recovery. Congress has only three their health insurance in the coronavirus
weeks to pass the bill before its summer recession, and the federal payments don’t
recess, and no deal is expected before the make up for that. And boosted unem-
enhanced $600-a-week unemployment ployment benefits have societal benefits,
payments approved in March expire on because they allow laid-off workers to
July 31. Some 25 million Americans cur- cover rent payments and shop at local
rently claim that benefit; if it disappears, McConnell: Planning a $1 trillion package stores, helping prop up the economy.
their weekly income might fall by half or
more. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is pushing What the columnists said
for a $1 trillion bill that would include a new round of payments Back in March, it made sense to pass a recovery bill stuffed with
for individual Americans and liability protections for businesses and incentives to keep workers home and “flatten the curve,” said Brad
other organizations hit with coronavirus-related lawsuits. It may also Polumbo in WashingtonExaminer.com. But the federal government
include a payroll tax cut—a demand of President Trump’s that many is set to run a nearly $4 trillion deficit this year and we can’t afford
Senate Republicans oppose—and reduced unemployment benefits. to bankroll unemployment indefinitely. Reducing the jobless bonus
Some GOP senators balked at the prospective bill’s price tag. “We to $200 a week or capping overall benefits at 80 percent of previ-
can’t keep shoveling cash at this problem,” said Sen. Ted Cruz, who ous income would help get us back on the road to fiscal sanity.
urged Republicans to focus on reopening the economy.
The economy won’t start growing again until we contain the virus,
Democrats have proposed a $3 trillion package that would extend said Annie Lowrey in TheAtlantic.com. “States with unmitigated
unemployment benefits through January 2021, offer aid to states outbreaks have been forced to go back into lockdown, or to
and cities, and include stimulus checks. Senate Minority Leader pause their reopening, killing weakened businesses and roiling the
Chuck Schumer called McConnell’s plan “inadequate” and said labor market.” In June alone, the number of companies filing for
Republicans are “paralyzed by internal divisions.” The latest data Chapter 11 bankruptcy surged by 43 percent over the same month
suggest the economy is in a dire condition. While the unemploy- last year. The U.S. prioritized reopening the economy over public
ment rate dropped from a high of 15 percent in April to 11 percent health, “and we got the worst of both worlds.”
in June, job postings have declined over the past two weeks in all
50 states. New applications for unemployment benefits remain at Despite all this misery, McConnell is showing no “particular
historically high levels, at about 1.3 million claims a week. urgency about passing a bill,” said Paul Waldman in Washington
Post.com. He has yet to talk terms with Democratic leaders in
What the editorials said Congress and seems content for the next stimulus to be “com-
Republicans should permanently kill the “federal jobless-insurance pletely inadequate to the crisis we face.” Perhaps McConnell has
bonus,” said The Wall Street Journal. As a result of the $600 realized that nothing he can do will save the economy or Trump’s
weekly unemployment supplement—which comes on top of state dismal showing in the polls. So why not leave an economic mess
unemployment benefits of about $373 a week—“tens of millions of for Joe Biden to inherit? Just as they did when Barack Obama was
Americans earn more now by staying at home than if they return president, Republicans can then “blame Democrats for their own
to work.” That explains why employers “can’t find enough work- mistakes.” That sounds horrifically amoral, but for McConnell, it
ers” even with historic unemployment. might be a “best-case scenario.”

It wasn’t all bad
QConservationists were thrilled this
month to see a photo of the world’s
rarest gorilla subspecies—with
babies. Critically endangered and
wary of humans, Cross River gorillas
in the mountains of Nigeria and
Cameroon were believed to number
only around 300. Their future was
uncertain, but camera traps this year
captured images of a group of goril-
las with several babies of various
ages on their backs and walking at
their sides. It’s a sign “that our con-
servation efforts are yielding fruits,”
said Otu Gabriel Ocha of the nearby
Getty, AP
QAt age 100, Capt. Tom Moore just earned another title: Sir.
Moore raised some $40 million for Britain’s National Health
Service this year by walking laps around his garden, using
his walker after recovering from a broken hip. The country
hailed him as a national hero, and last week Queen Eliza-
beth II, in one of her first
public engagements since
the coronavirus lockdown,
used a royal sword to
bestow knighthood upon
the World War II veteran.
“I could never have imag-
ined this would happen
to me,” said Moore. The
centenarian remained
standing for the ceremony,
saying, “If I kneel down, I’ll
QAfter Theresa Mellas finished
volunteering on the front lines at a
Bronx hospital in May, she wanted
a new challenge. On an impulse, the
physician’s assistant bought a one-
way ticket to Oregon, got a bike off of
Craigslist, and biked back across the
United States. Mellas pedaled 100-
plus miles a day and slept in strang-
ers’ cornfields during her 40-day trip.
“They offered me food, they offered
me showers…. I met so many incred-
ible people,” she said. By the time
Mellas ended her ride on the shore of
Staten Island, she had realized this:
“There’s a lot of negativity right now,
but when you look hard enough—

village of Kanyang I. He’s still standing never get up again.” there’s so much good.”

THE WEEK July 31, 2020

8 NEWS Controversy of the week
Election 2020: Is Trump headed for a landslide defeat?
If “a blue wave” won the House for Dukakis led George H.W. Bush by 17 points,
Democrats in the 2018 midterms, said Ed while Hillary Clinton led Trump by 7 points
Kilgore in NYMag.com, then the general in August 2016. But this cycle could be dif-
election in November is shaping up to be a ferent, and more stable. On “the dominant
“Democratic tsunami.” With only 100 days issue in American life,” the coronavirus pan-
to go, this week’s ABC News/Washington demic, the simple fact is that voters have “an
Post poll showed Joe Biden with a stunning overwhelmingly negative view of how the
15-point lead over President Trump among president has handled it.” And the pandemic
registered voters. This came after last week’s isn’t going away by November.
15-point Quinnipiac lead and an NBC News/
Wall Street Journal poll that put Biden up Trump can fix that, said Steve Hilton in
by 11. The picture in battleground states is FoxNews.com. This week’s resumption of
no less grim for Trump. Biden holds solid ‘People don’t love me, maybe.’ daily coronavirus briefings is a good first
single-digit leads in all seven of the states likely to choose the next step—though they might be more effective with Vice President
president, including crucial Florida. He’s even running neck and Mike Pence as “the face of the federal response.” That would free
neck with Trump in Texas, and is leading in Georgia, a state no up Trump to focus on growth and jobs, using the policies that
Democrat has carried since 1992. Numbers like these don’t just delivered the greatest economy in U.S. history to “deliver it again.”
make Trump “a major underdog,” said Chris Cillizza in CNN. Yes, the polls show Trump losing to Biden, said Ledyard King and
com. They suggest he could lose “big enough to drag down all Michael Collins in USA Today. “They said the same thing four
Republicans on the ballot in November,” giving Democrats the years ago against Hillary Clinton.” As pollsters always remind us,
Senate and an expanded House majority, and “creating a hole that their surveys are “snapshots—not predictors.”
it could take years for the GOP to dig out of.”
Trump himself seems to believe he’s losing, said Maeve Reston
Trump still has his base of white evangelicals and men without in CNN.com. In a recent Fox News town hall meeting, Trump
college degrees, said Jennifer Rubin in WashingtonPost.com, but grumbled of Biden, “He’s going to be your next president, because
the rest of his 2016 coalition has seen enough. The white women people don’t love me, maybe.” Bewildered and defensive, Trump
who chose Trump over Hillary Clinton by 47-45 now prefer Biden hasn’t offered “any semblance of a second-term agenda,” or any
by 55-38. Seniors, whom Trump won by 9 points in 2016, now imminent “course correction.” The “snapshot” analogy for polls
favor Biden by a startling 14 points in the Quinnipiac poll, perhaps is usually used to suggest a candidate can improve his standing,
because of his disastrous pandemic nonresponse. Though Trump said Jonah Goldberg in TheDispatch.com. But polls “can also get
won the suburbs by 4 percent in 2016, he’s currently losing them worse.” With Trump doing nothing to win back disaffected vot-
by 25 percent. “Big polling leads tend to erode,” said Nate Cohn ers, the current polls may be like “snapshots of the Titanic leaving
in The New York Times. In late July 1988, Democrat Michael port” on its fateful journey to the bottom of the sea.

Good week for:

Only in America
QFormer NBC hockey analyst
Jeremy Roenick, 50, who was
fired after joking on a podcast
he’d like to “go to bed” with
a female colleague, is suing
the network for anti-straight
discrimination. Roenick’s suit
claims that when he told his
boss that skating commenta-
tor Johnny Weir also engaged
in suggestive on-air banter, he
was told that Weir “is gay and
can say whatever.” Roenick
argues he was fired for his
heterosexual orientation.
QStudents at Marymount
Manhattan College want a
professor fired because she
fell asleep during a Zoom
anti-racism meeting. A petition
with 2,000 signatures states
theater professor Patricia
Simon “should not be an
educator any longer” after
she nodded off. Simon claims
she was merely “resting my
Zoom-weary eyes,” with her
Law and order, with the arrest of a Michigan woman who
Confederate flag
barred from U.S. bases
offered $5,000, plus travel expenses, on RentAHitman.com for the
murder of her ex-husband. The owner of the fake website says it Defense Secretary Mark Esper
issued new guidance that
has helped prevent 130 murders since its founding in 2005.
effectively bans the Confeder-
Bisexual men, who actually do exist, according to a new British ate battle flag from Defense
study. Once-skeptical researcher Gerulf Rieger said the penile- Department property. While
response data of 400 men exposed to gay and straight pornogra- making no mention of the flag
phy was “clear proof” of bisexual arousal. itself, whose display President
Selective empathy, after President Trump sent well-wishes to Trump has supported as a
the accused sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, awaiting trial in jail symbol of Southern pride,
the new policy limits flags to
on charges she procured underage girls for the late Jeffrey Epstein.
a short list that includes the
“I’ve met her numerous times over the years,” noted Trump, who U.S. flag, those of the military
used to socialize with Epstein. “I wish her well.” services, and some others
Bad week for: such as the POW/MIA flag.
The Marine Corps banned the
Mistaken identity, after Republican Sens. Marco Rubio and Confederate flag in April. The
Dan Sullivan both marked the death of civil rights icon Rep. John
military has become deeply
Lewis by posting photographs of themselves with a different black embroiled in the debate over
congressman: Rep. Elijah Cummings, who died in October. symbols of the Confederacy.
Gov. Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma, who became the first state This week, President Trump
governor to test positive for coronavirus. Stitt, who said he was threatened to veto a $740 bil-
“shocked” by his diagnosis, often goes maskless and has tweeted a lion military-spending bill
photo of his family dining maskless in a crowded restaurant. passed by the House over a
provision that would rename
Q, after Twitter disabled 7,000 accounts dedicated to spreading the bases that honor Confeder-
QAnon conspiracy theory, which nonsensically holds that JFK Jr. ate officials, such as North
faked his own death and is working with President Trump to round Carolina’s Fort Bragg.
Reuters

head tilted back.

up a ring of child sex traffickers, including Hillary Clinton.
THE WEEK July 31, 2020
 The U.S. at a glance ...
Washington, D.C.
RBG’s cancer: Supreme
Court Justice Ruth
Bader Ginsburg
revealed last week
that she has
been undergoing
biweekly chemo-
Still at work
therapy treatments
since mid-May, after doctors detected
tumors on her liver two months earlier. In
a statement, the 87-year-old justice said
she has no plans to stop working. “My
most recent scan on July 7 indicated sig-
nificant reduction of the liver lesions and
no new disease,” she said, adding that
she is “encouraged by the success” of her
treatment. Ginsburg has overcome both
colon and pancreatic cancers, and while
she didn’t stipulate from which organ the
liver tumors originated, the drug she is
taking (gemcitabine) is commonly associ-
ated with the more serious pancre-
atic cancer. Senate Majority Leader
Mitch McConnell has vowed to
fill her seat should she retire or
pass away before the election.
The court said Ginsburg was
“home and doing well” after
a hospitalization last week at
Johns Hopkins Hospital for
gallstones and an infection.
Houston
Document
bonfire: Smoke
billowed from
a Chinese consul-
ate this week,
after the Trump
administration
ordered China
Ordered closed
to shutter the
facility within 72 hours and employ-
ees burned documents in metal drums
arrayed about the building’s courtyard.
The State Department said the move was
made in response to China’s “massive
illegal spying and influence operations”;
Assistant Secretary David R. Stilwell
called the Houston facility “the epicenter”
of a campaign by the Chinese army to
infiltrate American research institutions.
Also this week, U.S. authorities charged
two alleged Chinese hackers with trying
to steal coronavirus vaccine data, and
charged a visiting Stanford University
researcher with hiding connections to the
Chinese military. In its charges against the
AP, Reuters, AP (2)
hackers, the U.S. said that spies who had
earlier tried to get information on human
rights activists had turned their attention
to stealing biomedical research.
Pittsburgh
Blue Jays can’t fly here: Major League
Baseball’s Toronto Blue Jays were left
scrambling to secure a home field for the
shortened 2020 season after Pennsylvania
this week rejected the team’s appeal
to share a stadium with the Pittsburgh
Pirates. A few days earlier, Canadian offi-
cials had rejected the team’s request to play
games in Canada. The Blue Jays got per-
mission to return home from spring train-
ing, but were denied a broader exemption
from travel rules. Marco Mendicino,
Canada’s immigration minister, cited the
danger of repeated cross-border travel
and of the Blue Jays playing “in loca-
tions where the risk of virus transmission
remains high.” With the Pittsburgh agree-
ment falling through, the team is turning
to other contingency plans. If no Major
League stadium can be found, the Blue
Jays could play in Buffalo’s Sahlen Field,
home to the team’s Triple A affiliate.
Washington, D.C.
Exposed: Multiple Washington Redskins
executives were fired or quit and the
team promised “a thorough indepen-
dent review” after The Washington Post
published a report last week detailing a
culture of sexual harassment and verbal
abuse. Fifteen ex-employees who served
in a range of roles told the paper of a
horrific environment in which sexual
propositions were commonplace, or even
daily, occurrences. “It was the most miser-
able experience of my life,” said Emily
Applegate, 31, a onetime Redskins mar-
keting coordinator whose boss, former
Chief Operating Officer Mitch Gershman,
routinely called her stupid and demanded
she wear tight dresses “so men would
have something to look at.” Much the
same was “happening to every single one
of my female co-workers under the age of
40,” said another woman. Owner Daniel
Snyder was not implicated, but women
say he encouraged such behavior by abus-
ing his managers, even ordering one to
perform cartwheels for his entertainment.
NEWS 9
New York
Racist boss: President Trump’s former
personal lawyer Michael Cohen said this
week that his old boss made “virulently
racist remarks” about the late Nelson
Mandela and former President Barack
Obama, whom Trump saw as not “wor-
thy of respect by virtue of their race.”
The planned book, Disloyal: The True
Story of Michael Cohen, also levels
charges of anti-Semitism. Cohen is suing
to be released immediately from federal
custody, saying he was returned to prison
as retaliation for writing
a memoir about his time
working for Trump. In
early July he balked at
signing a gag order that
would have prevented
him from publishing
his memoir or making
media appearances.
Federal authorities deny
Cohen the charges, claiming
that Cohen was impris-
oned again for refusing to wear
an ankle monitor. He’s since
been placed in solitary confine-
ment in Otisville federal prison in
upstate New York.
North Brunswick, N.J.
Justice attacked: A self-described “anti-
feminist” lawyer and former Trump
campaign volunteer is believed to be
the gunman in an attack on a federal
judge’s home that killed her 20-year-old
son and badly wounded her husband,
cops said. The judge herself, Esther
Salas, 51, escaped the encounter with
Roy Den Hollander with no physical
harm, although cops believe she was the
“intended target.” Hollander was found
dead in Rockland, N.Y., from a suspected
self-inflicted gunshot wound, and a law-
enforcement source said he had been diag-
nosed with terminal cancer. Hollander, 72,
allegedly bluffed his way into the home by
dressing as a FedEx driver. He left behind
a 2,028-page manifesto, uploaded to the
Internet. Over the years Hollander has
flooded the courts with lawsuits alleging
women have unfair advantages. One,
claiming they should be subject to the
draft, reached
Salas’ court
in 2019. She
allowed it to
proceed, but
he accused her
in his screed of
foot-dragging
and careerism. Esther Salas’ house
THE WEEK July 31, 2020
10 NEWS The world at a glance ...
London
Russian interference: Successive U.K.
governments ignored a sophisticated
Russian campaign to interfere in Britain’s
democracy, according to a parliamentary
intelligence committee report released this
week. The 50-page document says the rul-
ing Conservative Party turned a blind eye
Protesting Brexit
to attacks on Russian exiles and let Russian
oligarchs launder illicit money by buying up London properties.
These oligarchs, the report explains, were then given “connections
at the highest levels, with access to U.K. companies and political
figures.” British leaders also deliberately “glossed over” allegations
of a Kremlin-sponsored influence campaign during the 2016 Brexit
referendum. “The outrage isn’t if there is interference,” said Kevan
Jones, a lawmaker with the opposition Labour Party. “The outrage
is no one wanted to know if there was interference.”
Sofia, Bulgaria
President vs. PM: Tens of thousands of
Bulgarians have been in the streets for
two weeks, demanding the resignation
of Prime Minister Boyko Borissov, who Borissov: Corrupt?
they say is corrupt and authoritarian. The
protests began in early July after it was revealed that state agents
had seized part of a public beach for the private use of oligarch
and politician Ahmed Dogan—a protégé of Borissov’s. President
Rumen Radev, a fierce critic of Borissov, called on the government
to resign. Soon after, security officers raided the president’s office
and detained his anti-corruption secretary and his defense adviser
for questioning, which only added to the anger on the streets.
Radev has been openly supporting the protesters, calling on them
to “throw the mafia out of the government.”

Brussels
Huge bailout: After nearly five days of bitter wrangling,
European Union leaders this week agreed on an $860 billion
coronavirus recovery package. “We pulled ourselves together in
the end,” said German Chancellor Angela Merkel. With French
President Emmanuel Macron, she argued that Italy, Spain, and other
pandemic-battered countries should receive aid in the form of non-
repayable grants. Leaders of the “frugal four”—the Netherlands,
Denmark, Austria, and Sweden—pushed for loans with favorable
conditions. In the end, the EU leaders agreed that just over half the
bailout will be grants and the rest loans. The EU will borrow the
money on financial markets jointly and pay it back jointly, but it will
be distributed where it is needed. That means the EU is effectively
now a transfer union, where rich countries subsidize poorer ones.

Guadalajara, Mexico
Show of force: Mexico’s Jalisco New Generation
Cartel flaunted its vast firepower last week in a
social media video that stunned Mexicans. For
2 minutes and 20 seconds, a camera pans along a
20-strong convoy of armored vehicles, many fitted
with heavy machine guns. The recording features
at least 75 cartel fighters wearing military-style
uniforms and wielding automatic weapons and Cartel gunmen on parade
grenade launchers. The release seemed timed to
taunt President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who had just met
in Guadalajara with the governor of Jalisco state. López Obrador
said he would not repeat the mistakes of his predecessors and wage
war on the cartels. “Violence cannot be confronted with violence,”
he said. He said his government would prevail over the gangs by
alleviating poverty and providing services.

Caracas
Blaming refugees: Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro says
his country’s skyrocketing Covid-19 caseload is the fault of
Venezuelans who fled the country’s economic collapse and are now
coming back across the border from Colombia. “Those who cross
illegally, you are killing your families,” Maduro said. Returning
migrants—some 60,000 in the past few weeks—are being kept
in crowded quarantine centers with
no masks or social distancing; critics
say the virus is spreading fast at the
Brasília
Is he the dictator’s son? The body
of former Paraguayan dictator
Alfredo Stroessner will be exhumed and a
DNA test conducted to settle a claim by
a Paraguayan who says he is the strong-
Soon to be exhumed
man’s son. Enrique Alfredo Fleitas says
his mother, Michele Fleitas, had a decades-long relationship with
Stroessner and that as his son, Fleitas should inherit some $20 mil-
lion. Stroessner had three children with his wife but was known to
Reuters (2), Getty, Shutterstock

Refugees in Colombia
THE WEEK July 31, 2020
detention camps. More than 5 million
Venezuelans have left the country in
recent years, with most settling in other
Latin American nations. But many
exiles have been left jobless by the pan-
demic and are now returning home.
have other lovers. Under his rule from 1954 to 1989, more than
450 Paraguayans were disappeared or killed, and last year, human
remains were discovered at his summer home. He is buried in
Brasília, where he lived in exile from 1989 until his death in 2006.
His only living legitimate child, Graciela Concepción Stroessner
Mora, granted permission for the exhumation.
 The world at a glance ...
Moscow
Stealing vaccine data: Russian state hackers have been trying to
steal research on coronavirus vaccines being developed by Western
pharmaceutical companies and universities, the U.S., U.K., and
Canadian governments said last week. The group Cozy Bear,
associated with Russian intelligence and
implicated in the 2016 hacking of Democratic
Party servers, has been trying to break into
vaccine databases using malware and phish-
ing emails. U.S. intelligence said the attempts
don’t appear to be aimed at sabotaging the
research, but rather at stealing data to aid the
Russian vaccine effort. Separately, the U.S.
Justice Department this week indicted two
state-sponsored Chinese hackers for allegedly
trying to steal coronavirus vaccine research
Wanted by Russia from U.S. biotech companies.
Endorse, or else deleted his endorsement.
Cairo
Neighborhood intervention: Egypt’s parliament has unani-
mously approved a military intervention in neighboring Libya
to support the forces of warlord Khalifa Haftar. That could put
Egyptian troops in direct confrontation with Turkish troops,
who have been supporting Haftar’s chief foe: the United Nations–
recognized Libyan government in Tripoli. A 14-month offensive by
Haftar’s forces to seize Tripoli collapsed last month, and Turkish-
backed Libyan troops pushed Haftar back to his stronghold around
the strategic oil port of Sirte.
Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-
Sissi said last week that an attempt
to take Sirte would be a “red line”
that would trigger Egyptian inter-
vention. Egypt and Turkey are both
U.S. allies, and President Trump
has urged el-Sissi not to escalate the
Reuters (2)
situation. Libya has been embroiled
in civil war since 2014. Headed to Libya?
NEWS 11
Khabarovsk, Russia
Huge protests: Tens of thousands of people
marched daily through the Russian city
of Khabarovsk this week shouting “Putin,
resign!” and “Freedom!” to protest the arrest
of the region’s popular governor on charges
related to multiple murders 15 years ago. Sergei
Furgal—one of the few governors who is not a
member of President Vladimir Putin’s United
Furgal: Arrested
Russia party—was arrested by federal agents and
flown to Moscow for trial instead of being tried in his region. He is
accused of ordering murders when he worked in the metals trade,
charges he denies. Further enraging the protesters, Putin named as
Furgal’s replacement a Duma deputy with no executive experience
and no ties to the far eastern province. Furgal, a member of the
nationalist Liberal Democrats, was elected governor in 2018, an
unexpected victory seen as a challenge to Putin’s policies.
Lutsk, Ukraine
Animal rights terror: A gunman held 13 bus passengers hostage
in Ukraine for 12 hours this week and released them only after
President Volodymyr Zelensky agreed to publicly
endorse an animal rights documentary. Maksym
Kryvosh, 44, demanded to speak to the presi-
dent, who was in a meeting with Swiss President
Simonetta Sommaruga and had to keep leaving to
be briefed on the crisis. After a 10-minute phone
call with the hostage taker, Zelensky posted a video
on Facebook in which he said, “Everyone should
watch the 2005 film Earthlings”—a documentary
narrated by Joaquin Phoenix about animal abuse
in industrial farming. The gunman released the
hostages soon after and was arrested, and Zelensky
Urumqi, China
Forced labor: China is forcing Uighurs to make face masks and
other personal protective equipment for export to the U.S. and
elsewhere. The number of factories making such products in the
northwestern region of Xinjiang has ballooned from four to 51
since the start of the pandemic, The New York Times reported this
week, and some of those factories use Uighur forced labor. China
has been rounding up minority Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang for
more than a year and sending them to re-education camps to learn
Mandarin and renounce Islam—a campaign international observers
say amounts to cultural genocide. The Trump administration this
week added 11 more Chinese companies to a list of those already
under sanctions for using Uighur forced labor. The sanctioned busi-
nesses include current and former suppliers to international brands
such as Apple, Google, Ralph Lauren, and Tommy Hilfiger.
Tehran
Executions stayed: After an unprecedented online protest, Iran’s
supreme court this week agreed to suspend the impending execu-
tions of three men arrested during mass anti-government protests
last November. Amirhossein Moradi, Mohammad Rajabi, and
Saeed Tamjidi—who are all in their 20s—were accused on little evi-
dence of leading the nationwide demonstrations that erupted after
the government hiked fuel prices. Protesters torched hundreds of
banks and Islamic centers across the country, calling for the over-
throw of the regime, and security forces killed up to 1,500 people.
The death sentences were meant to be a warning to the burgeon-
ing reform movement. But last week many prominent Iranians,
including bloggers, athletes, actors, and politicians, began flooding
the internet with millions of Twitter and Instagram posts with the
Persian hashtag #Don’tExecute. The men may now get a new trial.
THE WEEK July 31, 2020
12 NEWS People
Killer Mike’s political ambitions
Killer Mike is not your typical celebrity dabbling
in politics, said Donovan Ramsey in GQ. Born
Michael Render, Killer Mike (for “microphone
killer”) is one half of the rap duo Run the Jewels.
His speech in his hometown of Atlanta after
George Floyd’s death struck a powerful balance
between rage and restraint. “I woke up wanting
to see the world burn down,” Mike said that
day, addressing protesters. “It is your duty not to burn your own
house down for anger with an enemy. It is your duty to fortify
your own house. Now is the time to plot, plan, strategize, organize,
and mobilize.” Mike, 45, grew up surrounded by black profes-
sionals and activists with strong, independent political views. “My
grandfather could be best described as a libertarian,” he says. “He
believed in small government. Fishing licenses were an abomina-
tion to him.” A childhood shaped by drug dealing and police vio-
lence shaped Mike’s unusual politics: He supports gun rights and
capitalism but backed Sanders, a democratic socialist. He dreams
of running for office himself and would push Atlanta to support
black-owned banks and businesses and the city’s historically black
colleges. If that sounds far-fetched, so is being a rapper taken seri-
ously as a political leader. His life is like “a goddamn BET movie,”
he says. “So I got to believe everything is possible.”

Stone’s contempt for Hollywood

Oliver Stone’s iconic run of films has been overshadowed by his
reputation as a political provocateur, said David Marchese in The
New York Times Magazine. Stone won directing Academy Awards
for Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, and wrote seminal
1980s flicks Scarface and Wall Street. Those films earned him a
reputation as a generational talent. But over time, his focus as
a filmmaker turned to politicians like George W. Bush, Richard
Nixon, Fidel Castro, and Vladimir Putin, and he became viewed
as a far-left conspiracy theorist. Stone, 73, says he’s given up on
making mainstream movies. “The problem is Hollywood,” he says.
“Everything has become too fragile, too sensitive. You can’t make a
film without a sensitivity counselor. It’s like an Alice in Wonderland
tea party.” Stone makes no apologies for the contrarian political
narratives of films like JFK, which portrayed the assassination as
the product of a grand plot involving the CIA, or for his largely
flattering documentary about Putin. “I’ve negotiated my way,
sometimes with great controversy, through life,” he says. “I enjoy
give-and-take. I will continue not to run away from who I am. I’m
going to own who I am.”
How Diaz became a winemaker
Cameron Diaz has a new profession, said Tim Chan in Rolling
Stone. Diaz, 47, hasn’t appeared in a major movie role since 2014’s
Annie, and in 2018 she nonchalantly announced her “retirement”
from acting—shortly before she and her husband, Benji Madden,
had a daughter. But for the past two years she’s been studying
oenology and making deals with French and Spanish vineyards in
order to produce her own label, Avaline. Thanks to her movie-star
wealth and travels, Diaz says, she has enjoyed some of the world’s
finest wines—“big, beautiful, very expensive, highly sought-after
vintages.” Her brand is geared toward casual nights on the porch:
Avaline’s rosé and dry white blend are marketed as “clean” and
organic, and go for about $20 each. Diaz insists she’s serious about
winemaking. “I’ve never slapped my name on anything,” she says.
“I’ve always done the work. I don’t think anyone could blame me
for wanting to spend time in beautiful organic and biodynamic
vineyards touring centuries-old wine caves [and] learning from
passionate winemakers.” Granted, being Cameron Diaz did help
open doors. “I did make movies for 20-plus years,” she says, “so I
guess it’s finally paying off.”

QKanye West’s family and
friends expressed concern
about his mental health
this week after he made a
tearful, rambling speech
at his first presidential
campaign rally. West
tweeted that his wife,
Kim Kardashian, was
trying to get “a doctor to lock me up.”
In the speech in South Carolina, West—
wearing a bulletproof vest—denounced
abortion and said God told him and
Kardashian, then his girlfriend, not to abort
A source told People.com that Kardashian
was shocked and furious about his abor-
tion comments, and “has been trying to get
Kanye help for weeks.” West has said he’s
bipolar, but calls it a “superpower.” He says
God told him to run for president. He failed
to submit the required signatures to get on
the ballot in South Carolina, and so far is on
the ballot of one state, Oklahoma.
QPresident Trump’s longtime adviser
Roger Stone appeared to mock a black
radio host as “this negro” during a live
telephone interview this week. Trump com-
muted Stone’s 40-month sentence earlier
this month after Stone was convicted of
obstructing the Russia probe, and as the
muttering, “I don’t really feel like argu-
ing with this negro.” When O’Kelly asked
Stone to repeat himself, Stone sighed and
went silent for almost 40 seconds, then
said, “I did not...you’re out of your mind.”
Afterward, Stone denied saying “negro”
but said it’s “far from a slur.” O’Kelly said,
“Negro is N-word light.”
QViacomCBS fired TV host Nick Cannon
last week after he called black people the
true Hebrews on his podcast and said
white Jews have a “deficiency” that has
forced them “to be savages.” Cannon, 39,
whose job hosting the Fox hit The Masked
Singer was unaffected, said Viacom want-
ed to “force me to kiss the master’s feet
Getty, Newscom (2)

their first child in 2013. “She had the pills Los Angeles–based host, Morris O’Kelly, in public.” He later apologized, saying, “I
in her hand,” said West, 43, crying as he grilled Stone about whether Trump’s act feel ashamed of the uninformed and naïve
screamed, “I almost killed my daughter!” was a political favor, Stone could be heard place that these words came from.”

THE WEEK July 31, 2020

 Briefing NEWS 13

Genetically modified mosquitoes

Scientists plan to release altered mosquitoes designed to sabotage the species’ ability to reproduce. Is this safe?

Who’s doing this? Mosquito Control commission

The federal Environmental Protection still need to sign off, and may face
Agency has approved a plan by a lawsuits. More than 31,000 people
British biotech company called Oxitec filed objections with the EPA—and
to release about 1 billion genetically only 56 expressed support—with
modified (GM) mosquitoes in the some accusing the agency of relying
Florida Keys and, next year, Texas. The solely on data supplied by Oxitec to
mosquitoes (code-named OX5034) will issue permits. “What could possibly
only be male—the gender that does go wrong?” asked Hanson. “We
not bite humans—and will carry a new don’t know, because they unlawfully
gene that will be passed on to their refused to seriously analyze environ-
female offspring and cause them to mental risks.”
die while they’re still larvae. Repeated
releases of such “Trojan horse” A genetically modified Aedes aegypti mosquito What could go wrong?
mosquitoes should kill, in theory, 90 Some geneticists, including
percent of the local population of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, Dr. Ricarda Steinbrecher of EcoNexus, a public-interest research
which is capable of transmitting the Zika and West Nile viruses, organization, have raised alarms that Oxitec’s altered mosqui-
as well as dengue and yellow fever. Oxitec claims it’s safe and toes haven’t been adequately studied. The researcher said “the
notes that the species is invasive to south Florida, anyway. But the underlying mechanism(s) leading to cell death” in the larvae aren’t
plan has drawn protest from residents and some in the scientific “fully understood” and thus can’t yield “precise and predictable
community. “People here in Florida do not consent to the geneti- results.” An independent group of researchers also claimed that
cally engineered mosquitoes or to being human experiments,” said some of the larvae produced from an earlier Oxitec field study in
Barry Wray of the Florida Keys Environmental Coalition. Henry Brazil survived to sexual maturity and were able to reproduce—
Greely, a Stanford law professor and bioethicist, said the Oxitec introducing the mosquitoes’ modified DNA into the local popu-
plan reflects the almost limitless possibilities—and dangers—of lation. (So far, there is no evidence that the resulting hybrid is
genetic technology. “We can remake the biosphere to be what we more robust or dangerous to humans.) Critics also warn that the
want, from woolly mammoths to nonbiting mosquitoes,” he said. potential removal of even an invasive species from the food chain
“How should we feel about that? Do we want to live in nature, or and ecosystem could have profound unintentional consequences;
in Disneyland?” many kinds of birds and bats, for example, eat mosquitoes. “I’m
not sure I care if mosquitoes suffer, if they can suffer,” Greely said.
How does this technology work? “But mammals or birds, I do care.”
Scientists first genetically modified an animal—a mouse—in 1974.
But the process remained cumbersome and slow until the develop- What’s the upside?
ment of the CRISPR technique and other “gene-editing” technol- Some see world-changing possibilities. Florida witnessed its
ogy this decade. Now scientists can first mosquito-to-human transmis-
target exactly which genes they want Oxitec’s modified moths sion of the Zika virus (which causes
to modify using RNA, break the DNA South Florida and Texas aren’t the only places serious birth defects) in 2016, and
apart at the gene’s location using an that Oxitec is testing its genetically modified West Nile is a perennial problem. As
enzyme, and then insert a new gene. Last insects. Earlier this year, Cornell University sci- these diseases spread northward in
year, University of Georgia researchers entists announced the results of a project they a warming world, the elimination of
created the first genetically modified rep- had conducted with the company involving its a species that transmits them could
tile, a brown anole, and an Indiana com- genetically modified diamondback moths, or prevent many illnesses and save lives.
pany, AquaBounty, expects to begin har- Plutella xylostella. The pest reportedly wreaks Meanwhile, a team of scientists led
vesting tons of salmon genetically modi- between $4 billion and $5 billion a year of dam- by the renowned botanist Joanne
fied to grow faster at an indoor facility age to crops like broccoli, canola, cauliflower, Chory is using CRISPR to create
later this year. Critics say this is all and cabbage. Scientists and farmers are eager plants capable of storing extra carbon
moving too fast, without adequate study to find ways of limiting the damage as well as dioxide. Theoretically, if applied on
of risks and unintended consequences. reducing the $19 billion worth of chemical pesti- a large scale, such plants could suck
Jaydee Hanson, policy director for the cides sprayed on crops each year. The modified more greenhouse gases from the atmo-
International Center for Technology male moths come with a self-limiting gene that sphere and arrest the forces of climate
Assessment and Center for Food Safety, causes their female progeny to die. The Cornell change. “I feel like I have the weight
calls Oxitec’s project a “Jurassic Park team declared the test a success, saying that of the world on my shoulders,” Chory
the modified moths should “effectively suppress has said. In Australia, researchers are
experiment, except without the island.”
populations of pest P. xylostella in the field.” The
devising a genetically modified coral
company is also at work developing a modified,
Where do the plans stand? self-limiting version of the fall armyworm, which
capable of withstanding rising sea
In May, the EPA greenlighted Oxitec’s is responsible for terrible crop losses across sub- temperatures. “The worst thing that
plans for both Florida and Texas, issu- Saharan Africa and parts of Asia. An Oxitec sci- we could do is ignore genetic engineer-
ing the company an experimental use entist who co-authored the Cornell report hailed ing because it’s frightening for some
permit. Florida state authorities fol- the “immense potential” of protecting plants people,” said coral geneticist Line Bay,
lowed suit with their own approval. without resorting to potentially toxic pesticides. “and then get 10 or 15 years down the
Oxitec

Texas authorities and the Florida Keys road and realize it’s the only option.”
THE WEEK July 31, 2020
14 NEWS Best columns: The U.S.
John Lewis had his head cracked open in Selma, Ala., while protesting
Lewis’ legacy for voting rights in the 1960s, said Sean Collins, but “his legacy is now It must be true...
is in in danger.” The late congressman and civil rights activist, who died last
week (see Obituaries), said the right of every American to vote is “the
I read it in the tabloids
jeopardy most powerful, nonviolent tool we have in a democracy.” But in a 5-4
decision in 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated key sections of
QA British pub has come up
with a novel way of enforcing
Sean Collins the 1965 Voting Rights Act that Lewis and other protesters shed blood social distancing: an electric
Vox.com to get passed. “Things have changed in the South,” Chief Justice John fence between bartenders
Roberts wrote in the majority opinion. Have they? After the ruling, and patrons. Owner Johnny
Texas, Georgia, and Virginia quickly rolled out voter ID laws that made McFadden said he installed
it harder for the poor, blacks, and Hispanics to vote. North Carolina’s the fence in front of the bar
voter ID law, a federal court later ruled, was designed to disenfranchise at the Star Inn to ensure that
black voters “with almost surgical precision.” Southern states closed patrons don’t get too close.
“Before the fence, people
nearly 1,700 polling places, mostly in minority neighborhoods, and
were not following social
purged millions of people from voter registration rolls. As Lewis said distancing and were doing as
last year, “There are forces in this country that want to keep American they pleased,” he said—but
citizens from having a rightful say in the future of our nation.” now, they “take heed to the
guidance.” The fence, added
McFadden, is for “every-
The unbearable The most popular current book on racism, White Fragility, “is actually
a racist tract,” said John McWhorter. The book, by white “diversity
body’s benefit” and isn’t
usually live—but, he warned,
lightness of consultant” Robin DiAngelo, has become required reading for corporate
human resource officers and well-meaning white people embarking on
“It can be turned on.”

White Fragility aheld

project of self-criticism. As a black college professor who has not been
back by racism, I found the book “deeply condescending.” DiAngelo
QA municipal road
crew in Brazil
John McWhorter are convinced
“diminishes black people in the name of dignifying us,” portraying us
they have
TheAtlantic.com as victims with exquisitely sensitive feelings. She correctly observes that discovered
all people have some degree of racial bias, but insists that whites are so a manifesta-
steeped in white supremacy they can’t perceive just how racist they are. tion of Jesus
When white people are confronted with their racism, DiAngelo says, Christ inside
they often complain or even burst into self-indulgent tears. White people, a willow tree.
she says, should not bother to “ask black people about their experiences Odimar Souza,
and feelings, because it isn’t their responsibility to educate you.” Instead, who was overseeing the
white people should relentlessly do the “hard, personal work” of examin- pruning operation, said in
ing how deeply racist they are. This earnest self-flagellation may make a social media post that the
“educated white readers feel better about themselves,” but it’s a poor miracle was obvious once
substitute for “vigorous, constructive activism in the real world.” one of his colleagues sawed
through the trunk and looked
inside. “That was when this
Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s announcement that she is being treated for a perfection appeared,” Souza
Filling recurrence of cancer raises a major question, said Ed Kilgore. What will wrote, in reference to a stain
in the wood shaped like a
a high court happen if the 87-year-old justice is forced to leave the Supreme Court
before January? President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch man in a loose-flowing gown.
Others weren’t so sure the
vacancy McConnell would surely “insist on filling any vacancy.” McConnell
has already stated he will ignore the precedent he set when he refused image was, in fact, the Chris-
to allow hearings on President Obama’s nominee to fill Antonin Scalia’s tian savior. “People, that’s
Ed Kilgore
Voldemort!” one commenter
NYMag.com seat, Merrick Garland, for 10 months in 2016. Trump, meanwhile, would
wrote. “Get back to work,
love a confirmation fight before Election Day “to rouse the Republican thank you, you’re welcome!”
base.” The GOP’s elimination of the filibuster for Supreme Court nomi-
nees means Democrats couldn’t stop confirmation of a new, Federalist QA Bronx man calmly
Society–approved justice, but “it would be holy war for both sides.” And walked away after a fight left
a meat cleaver stuck in his
what if the vacancy occurred after Joe Biden was elected president, but
head, and chit-chatted with
in the lame-duck session between November and January? Conservatives witnesses while he awaited
“would howl at Trump and McConnell to ram through a confirmation.” medical attention. Roberto
But if Democrats hold a Senate majority in January, they will react by Perez was stabbed during
expanding and packing the court with liberal justices. For the sake of our a squabble with another
already divided country, Justice Ginsburg needs to hold on. man, but acted afterward
as if the knife weren’t there,
even declining to get into
Viewpoint “I appeal to all of you to get into this great revolution that is sweeping this an ambulance to receive
nation. Get in and stay in the streets of every city, every village and hamlet treatment. “He looked like he
of this nation until true freedom comes, until the revolution of 1776 is complete. To those who have didn’t even feel it,” said one
said, ‘Be patient and wait,’ we have long said that we cannot be patient. We do not want our free- witness. Another added, “I’m
dom gradually. We are tired. We are tired of being beaten by policemen. We are tired of seeing our traumatized from seeing that.
Odimar Souza

people locked up in jail over and over again. We want our freedom and we want it now.” It looks like a scene out of a
The late John Lewis in 1963, quoted in TheAtlantic.com freaking movie.”

THE WEEK July 31, 2020

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16 NEWS Best columns: Europe
Ireland has been jolted out of its fantasy of an
IRELAND “Apple tax windfall,” said Jason O’Mahony. The
European Commission ruled in 2016 that Apple,
Dashing which has its European Union headquarters in
Cork, owed an extra $15 billion in taxes because
the dream it had been paying tax on all its European profits
at the ridiculously low Irish rate of 1 percent. The
of a jackpot Irish government contested that decision and won
a court battle last week, which means Apple will
Jason O’Mahony
remain in Ireland but also that we won’t get a
Irish Independent
huge pot of money. For four years, that $15 bil-
lion payout has been “the bag of magic beans
at the heart of Irish politics,” and now we are
denied the sweet agony of determining how to
spend it. We might have had a “windfall conven-
tion,” where interest groups could have made
their pitch, the farmers vying against the homeless
shelters. This being Ireland, we’d soon see a “Give
the West Its Due!” campaign and a “Donegal
Forgotten Once Again” committee. And as we’re
still in the pandemic, someone would insist, “with
holier-than-thou smug satisfaction,” that we
give it all to the nurses. Ah, well. It’s unlikely we
could have kept it, anyway: Brussels would have
swooped in “like a distant cousin who heard the
phrase ‘lotto win.’”

SWITZERLAND The pillorying of rapper Loredana has exposed
the double standards in European hip-hop, said
Gangsta rap Tim Wirth. The Swiss rapper of Albanian descent
is accused of swindling a couple in their 50s out
is only of some $750,000, and many hip-hop fans are
calling for a boycott of her music. If the allega-
for men tions are true, then we probably should reject her
songs like “Milliondollar $mile,” in which she
Tim Wirth
raps “I’ll take all your cash away.” But if you’re
Tages-Anzeiger going to cancel Loredana, “you can’t celebrate
other criminal rappers for their supposed au-
thenticity.” Plenty of male rappers have criminal
records. They “sell drugs, harass women, and
incite brawls”—but when they do it, that behav-
ior is “seen as gangsta, and wins them approval
and fame.” Just look at Xatar, a German rapper
who once broke a Playboy bunny’s nose at Hugh
Hefner’s mansion and did prison time for steal-
ing some $2 million in gold from a transport
truck. The gold is still missing. His songs glorify
violence, and he is an actual convict, yet nobody
boycotts him. And what about German rapper
Veysel, who actually killed a guy in a fistfight?
“Again and again, the misconduct of male artists
is downplayed and rationalized.” So don’t excuse
Loredana. But don’t excuse the men either.

United Kingdom: A growing backlash against masks

The new government order that who calls masks a “monstrous im-
makes it compulsory to wear face position.” We have a history of this
masks in shops in England is going sort of intransigence. When small-
to be “devastating for human rela- pox vaccination was made compul-
tions,” said Camilla Long in The sory in the 19th century, dissenters
Sunday Times. Maybe months ago, such as George Bernard Shaw
mask wearing might have stopped howled about infractions of liberty.
the spread of Covid-19. But with the Eventually, the anti-science crowd
disease now largely under control in won: The mandate was repealed a
Britain, after some 300,000 infec- few decades later, and to this day,
tions and more than 45,000 deaths, the U.K. doesn’t require childhood
putting on a flimsy bit of cloth is “a vaccinations. Still, I expect mask
pointless, semi-religious activity for wearing will soon “become more
the vacant and pusillanimous middle prevalent in England, more accept-
classes.” We can’t breathe freely, but able, less ‘embarrassing.’”
An anti-face mask protester in London
we can touch anything we want in the
supermarket with our grubby hands? The rule—already in place People have been slow to get the message because our lead-
in Scotland—makes no sense, another exercise in dreary con- ers don’t model the behavior, said Uzma Mir in The Herald.
formity, like clapping every night for health-care workers. I was Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak, for example, was “all
getting a pedicure the other day, and when word came that city winning smiles and shiny hair but, notably, no mask” when he
inspectors were on the way, the shopkeeper sent workers racing recently launched a new meal-voucher program in a restaurant.
around frantically, scrambling for masks. “How have we got to And Health Secretary Matt Hancock has only confused things
the stage of such fear and panic that pedicurists are practically with his insistence that masks are compulsory in shops but not
throwing themselves under their counters in terror?” in other enclosed spaces, such as pubs and offices. The govern-
ment isn’t listening to its own experts, said Sean O’Grady in
“The science behind the benefits of mask wearing is pretty solid,” Independent.co.uk. Science advisers say we should reopen slowly
said Richard Coker in The Guardian. Even a cloth covering and carefully after suffering the worst Covid-19 outbreak in
will substantially reduce the number of droplets and aerosols Europe. But Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who “gets bored eas-
that you can cough, sneeze, or breathe out, making it less likely ily,” has insisted on opening everything up, the pubs, the offices,
you’ll pass on “a nasty virus that you may not know you have.” the soccer stadiums. Johnson “wants to get back to something
Yet hundreds of anti-mask protesters gathered in London this like normality by Christmas, virtually ending all restrictions just
week to oppose the new rule, spurred on by lawmakers such as as the cold weather sets in.” If the virus roars back in a second
Desmond Swayne—a member of the ruling Conservative Party— wave, it won’t be the mask skeptics’ fault—it will be his.
Getty

THE WEEK July 31, 2020

 Best columns: International NEWS 17

Iran: An isolated nation turns to China

Israel appears to be waging a “clandes- around the sanctions, but never came
tine campaign” of sabotage in Iran to through, and relying on Europe in the
slow the Islamic Republic’s nuclear future would be like “building a house
program, said Amos Harel in Haaretz on the sands.” Russia, another potential
(Israel). A string of mysterious blasts partner, is not ideal because it is our
and fires have occurred at military and neighbor, and is therefore “more likely
civilian sites across Iran in recent weeks. than China to put political pressure on
Only one of these incidents has been at- us in addition to economic pressure.”
tributed by foreign media to Israel: the The far-off Chinese are our best bet.
July 2 explosion at a facility in Natanz
that produced advanced centrifuges ca- “Iran’s regime has seized this prospect
pable of enriching uranium to weapons- like a drowning rat clinging to a float-
grade level. That explosion likely set ing log,” said Baria Alamuddin in Arab
The Natanz centrifuge facility: Blown up by Israel?
back Iran’s nuclear weapons program by News (Saudi Arabia). The mullahs
up to a year. Other unexplained blasts and blazes have damaged think it will solve all their economic problems—with inflation and
Iranian power stations, factories, missile-production sites, and a unemployment rocketing, ordinary Iranians are starting to protest
shipyard in the port of Bushehr. Some of these may have been in the streets—“but Beijing is not a charity.” Experts doubt that
the result of accidents; others were likely Israeli operations. Iran, China will actually spend $400 billion bolstering Iran’s infrastruc-
though, has a plan to restore its capabilities. It is finalizing details ture. More likely is that China will “gain control over substantial
of a pact with China under which Tehran would sell oil to Beijing port facilities,” making Iran the crown jewel of its Belt and Road
at reduced rates for 25 years and get some $400 billion in infra- Initiative to link the world through roads, railways, and harbors
structure investment in return. The Chinese “would also hold under Chinese administration.
joint exercises with the Iranian military, develop weapons, and
share intelligence with Tehran.” That’s a risk Israel can’t take, said The Jerusalem Post (Israel)
in an editorial. A closer military relationship between Tehran
Tehran is making this deal with Beijing out of “economic neces- and Beijing would mean Iranian access to Chinese intelligence,
sity,” said Saeed Laylaz in Jamaran.news (Iran). Our country has research, and arms, all of which “can be turned on Israel.” More-
been cut off from Western financial institutions and many interna- over, the “massive Chinese cash influx for Iranian banks” and
tional markets since 2018, when the Trump administration pulled projects “frees up the regime to spend more on its proxies and ter-
out of the Iran nuclear deal and reinstated punishing sanctions. rorist groups.” There will be consequences if Beijing takes “steps
The European Union talked a great deal about trying to work that can further fuel Iran’s obsession with destroying this country.”

A notorious con man has scammed thousands
BANGLADESH of Bangladeshis with fake Covid-19 tests, said
Mohammad Jamil Khan. Mohammad Shahed,
A career 43, pocketed some $350,000 by running testing
clinics that didn’t process most of the swabs but
fraudster simply gave patients certificates declaring that they
were negative. When the scheme was discovered,
exploits Covid he evaded authorities for nine days before finally
being caught last week trying to cross a river into
Mohammad Jamil Khan
neighboring India while wearing a burqa. But the
The Daily Star
real question is, Why was this swindler ever al-
lowed to open a clinic? Shahed is chairman of the
Regent Group, a conglomerate with short-lived
businesses in everything from construction to tex-
tiles to shipping that seems to operate primarily
by fraud. For pretty much “any business deal,” he
paid with bad checks, and when those he stiffed
complained, “he used to threaten them with severe
consequences” invoking the names of top officials.
He had his friends’ phone numbers listed under
the names of politicians and police chiefs, and
when vendors came to him for payment, he would
pretend that a powerful person was on the line
promising to back him, showing the phone as fake
proof. Arrested in 2016, he was released within a
week under murky circumstances. Could endan-
gering Bangladeshis’ health during a pandemic be
the charge that finally sticks?

NIGERIA Yet again, the people of the Niger Delta are being
robbed of the wealth that flows from their oil-rich
Aid agency region, said Azu Ishiekwene. Twenty years ago,
after protests and sabotage campaigns against oil
only helps pipelines by residents whose farms and rivers were
being polluted by the oil industry, the Nigerian
itself government created the Niger Delta Develop-
ment Commission. It was supposed to funnel
Azu Ishiekwene
some of the oil money back into the region for
PremiumTimesNg.com environmental cleanup and job creation. But the
agency was just “another bureaucracy on top of
the existing pile of corrupt bureaucracies,” and
Reuters
worst misconduct by far was revealed in a Senate
investigation just last week, which found that the
NDDC spent half of its $8 million in Covid-19
relief funds on bonuses to its own staff of up to
$25,000 each. This “bazaar among the commis-
sion’s 1,272 staff members” comes at a time when
the Delta is exploding with infection. The gall of
the staffers is even greater when you consider that
the NDDC is supposed to be under a comprehen-
sive audit. Given Nigeria’s hopeless corruption,
the audit, “if it ever gets properly underway,” may
later have to “be the subject of another forensic

all it has given us is infighting and scandal. The audit, and another.”
THE WEEK July 31, 2020
18 NEWS
Noted
Q In an interview with
Chris Wallace of Fox News,
President Trump refused
to say he would accept the
results of the November
election if he lost. “No, I
have to see,” Trump said.
“No, I’m not going to just
say yes. I didn’t last time
either.” Trump claimed that
Democrats will use mail-in
voting to “rig the election”
and conceded that he is
“not a good loser.”
FoxNews.com
Q More than 6 million
people enrolled in the
Supplemental Nutrition
Assistance Program, com-
monly referred to as food
stamps, in the first three
months of the pandemic,
from February to May. It
was the fastest-ever expan-
sion of the program.
The New York Times
Q The official
portraits of
former
presidents
George W.
Bush and Bill
Clinton have
been moved
from a place
of prominence in the White
House’s grand foyer to a
room mainly used for stor-
age. The move came after
President Trump staged a
meeting in the grand foyer,
with the presidential por-
traits behind him. He has
made it clear he has no
respect for either president
or for President Obama,
whose official portrait has
not been unveiled.
CNN.com
Q A 3-mile stretch of new
border wall in Texas built
by a private group is in
danger of collapsing into
the Rio Grande because of
erosion. President Trump
now says this portion of
wall was “only done to
make me look bad,” but
he lobbied for the builder,
Fisher Sand & Gravel, to
get a $1.7 billion federal
wall-building contract.
The Washington Post
THE WEEK July 31, 2020
Talking points
Biden: A strategic move to the left
Joe Biden’s newly unveiled
economic plan is a better
take on “America First,” said
Fareed Zakaria in Washington
Post.com. The Democratic
nominee is shrewdly mov-
ing onto President Trump’s
“economic nationalism” turf,
proposing an extra $300 bil-
lion in federal spending over
four years on U.S.-based tech-
nological research and devel- Is ‘Joe from Scranton’ still a moderate?
opment, plus $400 billion in
government purchasing of U.S.-made goods and
services. That would restore the jobs lost this year socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders. The huge tax hike
and create 5 million new ones, Biden says. Most
importantly, his “made in America” plan is not a Biden is still “working-class Joe from Scranton.”
continuation of Trump’s trade wars, which have
cost an estimated 300,000 U.S. jobs. Last week,
Biden also outlined a $2 trillion climate plan,
said Jordan Weissmann in Slate.com, proposing
to “scrub carbon from the electricity sector by
2035.” It’s “the Green New Deal, minus a bit of
crazy”: a progressive vision that could actually
become law.
Actually, Biden’s climate speech was not a seri-
ous policy proposal, said Holman Jenkins in The
Wall Street Journal. It was just a “triangulation
of hot buttons” like “electric cars” and a humon- FDR,” and he’s right. As a matter of tempera-
gous dollar figure to excite liberals. But “greens”
shouldn’t celebrate; Biden still wants to keep “oil, a “cautious moderate.”
Journalism: Purging the unwoke
“The intellectually intolerant mob claimed two
high-profile victims” last week, said Henry Olsen
in WashingtonPost.com. Bari Weiss, an opinion
editor and sometime columnist at The New York
Times, roiled the media world when she posted
a searing resignation letter blasting a culture of
woke conformity at the paper, calling it a left-
ist “performance space” where “intellectual
curiosity—let alone risk-taking—is now a liabil-
ity.” The 36-year-old Weiss said she’d faced bully-
ing and accusations of “Nazism” from colleagues
for her provocative center-left views, including her
pro-Israel stance and her criticisms of cancel cul-
ture. The same day, contrarian columnist Andrew
Sullivan announced he was being purged from
New York magazine, saying his failure to “bend
the knee to critical theory’s version of reality” on
gender, race, and identity politics had made his
younger colleagues feel “unsafe.” Like Weiss, Sul-
livan is no far-right extremist: the gay pundit was
a pioneering advocate for marriage equality and
loathes President Trump. Their exiles are the latest
examples “of the deadly virus spreading through
our public life: McCarthyism of the woke.”
“This mounting pile of dead canaries within
the liberal coal mine” should inspire some soul
gas, and coal in business”
and hand out “green pork”
to the nuclear and frack-
ing industries. Note that he
made no mention of “made
in America” solar panels, said
Miranda Devine in the New
York Post. The only way to
meet Biden’s goal of install-
ing 500 million panels in five
years “is to buy them from
China.” Biden’s economic
manifesto, meanwhile, is the
handiwork of the task force Biden set up with
needed to pay for it “betrays any pretense” that
Biden is hardly a “puppet of the radical left,” said
Paul Waldman in WashingtonPost.com. But while
the average voter was preoccupied with the pan-
demic and the economic crisis, the Democrat did
adopt some very progressive policy ideas as part
of a “careful strategy.” He has resisted radical-
sounding “symbolic positions,” such as calling for
Medicare for All and to “defund the police.” But
Sanders says Biden’s policy platform on health
care, climate change, and the economy would
make him “the most progressive president since
ment and style, however, Biden is still running as
searching, said Noah Rothman in Commentary
Magazine.com. It was only a few years ago that
progressives were mocking the fact-free “bubble”
trapping conservatives in groupthink. Now the
Left has forged its own “intellectual cul-de-sac.”
Let’s not turn Weiss into a victim of a mob, said
Alex Shephard in NewRepublic.com. She’s made
a career of “taking thin, anecdotal evidence and
framing it in grandiose culture-war terms” while
insisting that critics of her factually questionable
work are “out to silence her.” Besides, the Times
is “hardly an organ of the woke left”—the opin-
ion page she quit gives free rein to conservatives
David Brooks, Ross Douthat, and Bret Stephens.
That misses the point, said Kevin Williamson in the
New York Post. Conservatives at the Times are like
zoo animals—tolerable curiosities “as long as they
stay in their cages.” In an era of “politics as tribal
warfare,” Weiss was viewed as “a heretic” who
dared to think independently. The Right no longer
tolerates independent thought, either, said Mona
Charen in TheBulwark.com. Search conservative
publications for persistent Trump critics; they’ve
either quit or been purged. Sadly, “liberalism—
by which I mean a commitment to open inquiry—
AP (2)
is fast disappearing from American life.”
 Talking points NEWS 19

Portland: Trump sends in federal forces Wit &

“Something terrible, some-
thing dangerous—and, yes,
get involved in actual law
enforcement. Trump is also
Wisdom
something unconstitutional— warning he may send federal “The greatest enemy of
is happening,” said Ruth Mar- forces to quell crime and knowledge is not
cus in The Washington Post. violent protests in Detroit, ignorance, it is the illusion
of knowledge.”
President Trump has declared Philadelphia, Baltimore, New Historian Daniel J. Boorstin,
open war on American cit- York City, and Oakland. “All quoted in GoodReads.com
ies with Democratic mayors. run by liberal Democrats,”
Armed bands of federal Trump said. “We’re not “If you want to be a
millionaire, start with a
Homeland Security agents in going to let this happen in
billion dollars and
green military uniforms have our country.” This “made- launch a new airline.”
descended on Portland, Ore., Federal agents and a protester in Portland for-TV fascism” is proof of
Richard Branson, quoted in
in unmarked vans, “sweeping up” random black- Trump’s desperation, said Will Bunch in Inquirer Bloomberg.com
clad protesters without cause. These agents—who .com. Sagging badly in the polls, he’s using the “Longing on a large scale
have no name tags or identifying badges—are only re-election strategy left to him: fear and divi- is what makes history.”
detaining some people in cells without charges or sion. But this “dictatorial strongman shtick” is not Don DeLillo, quoted in
explanation, shattered a protester’s skull with a going to win over many voters. The Washington Post
rubber bullet, and fired pepper spray and flash- “To err is human—but it
bangs at a group of moms who’d formed a human The use of federal agents may be “heavy-handed,” feels divine.”
wall to protect protesters. Gov. Kate Brown calls said Noah Rothman in CommentaryMagazine Mae West, quoted in Forbes.com
the assault “a blatant abuse of power” and has .com, but it’s not unjustified. Protesters have taken
“The usefulness of an
filed a civil rights lawsuit on behalf of protesters. over downtown Portland every night for weeks,
opinion is itself a matter
Acting DHS head Chad Wolf claims that more vandalizing government buildings and police of opinion: as disputable,
than 50 nights of protests outside the federal vehicles. Local cops say last weekend’s protests as open to discussion, and
courthouse, which have included graffiti spraying swelled into “a riot.” True enough, but Trump requiring discussion as
and some vandalism, justify the intrusion of armed should limit the mission in Portland and other much, as the opinion itself.”
federal agents into a city and state that vehemently cities to protecting federal buildings, said William John Stuart Mill,
object to their presence. McGurn in The Wall Street Journal. Otherwise, quoted in ABC.net.au
he’ll give progressive mayors the perfect scapegoat “Meetings are indispens-
Next, the feds are headed for Chicago, said for the chaos they’ve let envelop their cities for able when you don’t want
Matt Stieb in NYMag.com. There, more than weeks. These mayors “don’t deserve to be so eas- to do anything.”
150 agents won’t go after protesters, but will ily let off the hook.” Economist John Kenneth
Galbraith, quoted
in iNews.co.uk

Lincoln Project: Why its attack ads sting
Can a group of Never Trump Republicans oust
the president from office? asked Jane Coaston in
Vox.com. The Lincoln Project, founded by eight
former Republican operatives, has been creat-
ing brutally effective attack ads against President
Trump that are drawing lots of online and TV
attention—and getting under his skin. With its
insider understanding of Republican values, the
Lincoln Project is crafting ads designed to per-
suade other Republicans and centrist independents
to abandon Trump, highlighting his failures, lies,
and insecurities with dark, foreboding images and
language. One, called “Mourning in America”—
which ran on Fox News—contrasted scenes of
post-Covid devastation with the hopeful “bits
of Americana” from Ronald Reagan’s 1984 ad.
Another mocks Trump’s halting walk down a
ramp at West Point, with the hashtag “#TrumpIs
NotWell.” At his Tulsa rally, Trump ranted about
the ramp video for nearly 15 minutes.
No doubt about it: “Republicans are better at this
than Democrats,” said Joanna Weiss in Politico
.com. Like other Republican attack ads, Lincoln
Project ads—paid for by $20 million in grassroots
fundraising—“pack an emotional punch” and
Getty
“Traveling is like flirting
with life. It’s like saying, ‘I
ad entitled “100,000 Dead,” which starts with a would stay here and love
shot of seven white body bags and Trump saying you, but I have to go; this
the nation’s Covid-19 caseload will soon be “close is my station.’”
Novelist Lisa St. Aubin de
to zero.” Another image of rows of body bags fol- Terán, quoted in
lows, with “the faint sound of wind whistling, as if Lapham’s Quarterly
through a graveyard.” This is what it will take to
beat Trump, said David Zurawik in The Baltimore
Sun. The Michelle Obama slogan “When they go
low, we go high” sounds nice, but it won’t get the Poll watch
job done. With “screen-searing intensity,” Lincoln Q56% of American voters
Project ads use Trump’s own words and actions to say that the country is rac-
paint a devastating picture of his incompetence. ist, though with a partisan
split between Republicans
These so-called conservatives claim to “represent (30%) and Democrats
true Republican values,” said Henry Olsen in The (82%). 71% agree that race
Washington Post. But if they succeed in their goal relations are bad, a 16%
increase since February.
of unseating both Trump and Republican sena-
NBC News/
tors, liberal Democrats will be in total control The Wall Street Journal
of Washington. “There’s a name for people who
want to do that: Democrats.” Even before Trump, Q53% of voters do not
rank-and-file conservatives had grown tired of the want a full reopening of
milquetoast orthodoxy offered by Mitt Romney K-12 schools, while 38%
are in favor. 50% are op-
and the Bush family; here and in other countries,
posed to a full reopening
conservatism has become distinctly nationalist and
of colleges for in-person
populist. The Lincoln Project may help elect Dem- instruction.
ocrats, but it will fail “if its objective is to remake Politico/Morning Consult

“provoke anxiety, anger, and fear.” Consider the the post-Trump Republican Party in its image.”
THE WEEK July 31, 2020
20 NEWS Technology

Chaos: Twitter takeover raises fears of online mayhem

A brazen Twitter attack that targeted 130 ac- accounts after losing their phones or forgetting
counts, including those of Joe Biden, Bill Gates, their passwords.” Security experts warned that
Barack Obama, and Elon Musk, has “shaken “a well-timed attack during the 2020 election
confidence in Twitter” and other tech plat- could be especially calamitous.” This attack,
forms, said Nathaniel Popper and Kate Conger too, could have been much worse, said Brian
in The New York Times. The kind of hack that Barrett in Wired.com. “Nothing about the
first appeared to be the province of state-level hackers’ confirmed actions so far suggests they
actors was “done by a group of young people— were interested in anything other than a pay-
one of whom says he lives at home with his day.” But Twitter’s admin tool makes it “rela-
mother.” The attackers took over prominent tively easy to take over a handle” and even
accounts and asked their millions of followers view direct messages, creating almost infinite
for donations to a Bitcoin wallet. Central to the opportunities for mischief.
exploit was a mysterious hacker who went by
“Kirk” and who “was able to quickly change One hack to rule them all? “Sometimes,” said Richard Waters in the
the most fundamental security settings on any Financial Times, “a security breach is so star-
user name.” His partners got cold feet as Kirk escalated to the tling in its reach and audacity that it becomes a stark reminder
highest-profile attacks. Kirk’s sudden disappearance surprised of the precarious nature of our collective dependence on security
not only the public but even the partners, who marveled that systems.” The 2014 Sony hack was one, the Snowden leaks of
with all that power Kirk had managed to walk off with only U.S. intelligence files in 2013 another, the email hack on the
about $180,000 worth of Bitcoin. Democratic National Committee a third. Add “the Great Twitter
Hack of 2020” to the list. This one may be even more “emblem-
This is not the first time Twitter’s internal systems have been atic of our times.” Twitter is “built on unverified information.”
breached, said Robert McMillan and Dustin Volz in The Wall Yet the world’s dependence on it has only grown in recent years,
Street Journal. President Trump’s account was deactivated for thanks largely to President Trump, the Tweeter-in-Chief, who
11 minutes in 2017 by a customer-support employee on his last uses Twitter to announce new policies, while the media assidu-
day. But lawmakers raised alarms about this recent attack, which ously reports on those tweets. A “more canny and manipula-
appeared to have focused on the company’s “internal account- tive hacker” could have wreaked far more havoc, given “the
reset systems, which are used to help users regain access to their precarity of our online existence.”

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

Researchers
in Singapore
created a
speaker sys-
tem that lets
you cut out
street noise
without shut-
ting your
window,
said David Waldstein in The New
York Times. The “Anti-Noise Control
Window” works like “noise-
canceling headphones for your
apartment.” A microphone outside
the window detects repeating
sound waves from the offending
source and sends the information
to a computer. The computer then
sends a signal to 24 small speakers
placed in the window to produce
corresponding “anti” waves that can
“cancel out the incoming waves.”
The system isn’t perfect yet: It’s only
optimal for silencing regular sounds,
like that of traffic. It’s less successful
with “sporadic noises, like firecrack-
ers or car horns” or that loud neigh-
bor’s voice across the street. The
conspicuous speakers also pose “a
bit of an aesthetic hindrance.”
Verizon’s not-quite-5G
“Verizon has agreed to stop running ads that
falsely imply the carrier’s 5G mobile service is
available throughout the United States,” said
Jon Brodkin in ArsTechnica.com. In one of
the ads, Verizon engineers are seen in “cities
throughout the U.S., with several running real-
time speed tests on their phones.” Another ad
claims “people from midtown Manhattan to
downtown Denver can experience” Verizon’s
5G service. But the carrier’s current 5G capa-
bility is nowhere close to that. It is “primarily
restricted to outdoor locations,” because its
use of millimeter-wave signals can’t easily pen-
etrate walls, and it is “only available in small
areas, instead of throughout entire cities.”
Silicon Valley’s tall hedges
A popular Silicon Valley blogger pulled the
plug on his site to deter a New York Times re-
porter from naming him, said Gideon Lewis-
Kraus in The New Yorker. The blog, Slate
Star Codex, was “perhaps the premier public-
facing venue of the ‘rationalist’ community,” a
“loosely affiliated” group of mathematicians,
programmers, and computer scientists whose
“common interests tend to include artificial
intelligence and transhumanism.” Writing
SSC’s author attracted a cultlike following
for his “delightfully weird,” counterintuitive
arguments and knack for helping “explain
Silicon Valley to itself.” But on June 22, Alex-
ander abruptly deleted SSC and its archives.
He claimed a Times technology reporter, Cade
Metz, “was planning to write a story” that
would effectively “dox” him by revealing
Alexander’s real name. “If there’s no blog,
there’s no story,” Alexander wrote.
EU court: Don’t send data to U.S.
The EU’s top court ruled that “transfers of per-
sonal data to the U.S. from Europe must stop
immediately,” said James Vincent in TheVerge
.com. The judgment last week invalidated
Privacy Shield, a four-year-old accord that was
of “particular importance to tech and social
media companies like Facebook,” which stores
personal data from European citizens on serv-
ers in the United States. After years of litiga-
tion led by privacy campaigner Max Schrems,
the EU’s Court of Justice unexpectedly de-
clared that the Privacy Shield rule “cannot be
trusted” to protect EU citizens from U.S. sur-
veillance. Tech companies may still apply an-
other protocol, Standard Contractual Clauses,
to safeguard data transfers, although that, too,
AP (4)

under the pseudonym “Scott Alexander,” “may be open to future legal challenges.”
THE WEEK July 31, 2020

Covid immunity may not last
People who have recovered from Covid-
19 may not have lasting immunity to the
disease, new research suggests—a find-
ing that implies the virus might reinfect
people year after year, much like the com-
mon cold. Scientists from King’s College
London examined the immune responses
of more than 90 patients and health-
care workers at hospitals in the British
capital. While 60 percent of those infected
quickly developed a “potent” level of
antibodies—proteins the body makes to
battle infection—only 17 percent had high
levels of antibodies three months later. If
confirmed, the study “puts another nail
A volunteer gets a shot of the experimental drug.
A ‘promising’ vaccine
Early results on a Covid-19 vaccine devel-
oped by U.S. biotech firm Moderna have
raised hopes that the experimental drug
could be used to prevent coronavirus
infections. The vaccine, backed by the
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases, triggered immune responses in all
45 volunteers who received it in a phase 1
clinical trial. This does not prove the drug
can protect against the virus, reports the
Los Angeles Times—its efficacy will be
determined in a phase 3 trial, which will
involve 30,000 people and is expected to
start July 27. (For phase 2, the vaccine is
being tested on a few hundred volunteers.)
But the researchers nevertheless describe the
immune responses as “promising.” The pri-
mary goal of a phase 1 trial is to determine
whether a drug is safe. While the vaccine
produced mild side effects in about half the
volunteers—including fatigue, chills, head-
aches, and muscle pain—the researchers
said none suffered “serious adverse events.”
Moderna has said that if the vaccine proves
safe and effective in the upcoming clinical
trials, the company is on track to deliver
500 million doses a year, and possibly up to
1 billion, starting in early 2021.
Getty, AP, Getty
Young smokers’ viral risk
One in three young adults is at risk of devel-
oping severe Covid-19—and the risk is
Health & Science
in the coffin of the dangerous concept of
herd immunity,” Jonathan Heeney, a virol-
ogist at Cambridge University, tells The
Guardian (U.K.) “I cannot underscore how
important it is that the public understands
that getting infected by this virus is not a
good thing.” The research has implications
for the development and effectiveness of
vaccines. It is possible that people want-
ing to maintain immunity might need a
“booster’’ coronavirus shot every year,
or even twice a year. The King’s College
study isn’t conclusive—there are still no
confirmed cases of Covid-19 reinfection
anywhere in the world. And even if rein-
particularly high among those who smoke.
That’s the conclusion of a new study by
researchers at the University of Califor-
nia, San Francisco, reports CNN.com. The
researchers examined data on more than
8,000 people ages 18 to 25, to assess their
medical vulnerability to the disease based
on risk factors set out by the Centers for
Disease Control, such as asthma, diabe-
tes, or liver problems. Overall, they found
32 percent of the young adults were medi-
cally vulnerable. But when cigarette smokers
and e-cigarette users were taken out of the
analyses, the percentage of those classified
as medically vulnerable fell to 16 percent.
“Recent evidence indicates that smoking is
associated with a higher likelihood of Covid-
19 progression, including increased illness
severity, ICU admission, or death,” says lead
author Sally Adams. The finding appears to
contradict earlier research from France that
suggested nicotine may offer some protec-
tion against Covid-19.
Record methane emissions
Global methane emissions have rocketed
to their highest level ever, a new study has
Recalibrating dog years
Most dog owners calculate their
Recalibrating dog years
furry pal’s “human age” by
multiplying its actual age by 7.
But new research suggests this
method is, essentially, bunk. By
examining methylation marks—
chemical marks on DNA that
change with age—researchers
concluded that the accurate
calculation for “doggy years”
is far more complicated. They
determined that dogs age at a
much faster rate than humans
Fido’s 31st birthday? age will have to get to grips
when they’re very young, but
that their relative rate of aging slows
down over time. Specifically, they say,
NEWS 21
An illustration of antibodies fighting the virus
fection is possible, the second infection
might be less severe, because “memory
immune” B and T cells would likely kick in
and fight the virus.
found. Researchers at the Global Carbon
Project calculated that levels of the potent
greenhouse gas rose 9 percent from 2000 to
2017, the last year for which data is avail-
able. That’s equivalent to adding 350 million
cars to the roads or doubling the total emis-
sions of Germany or France. The researchers
concluded that human activity was respon-
sible for about half the increase in methane
emissions since 2000, with the biggest
culprits being agriculture—cattle and sheep
belch out huge amounts of methane—coal
mining, and leaks from oil and gas wells.
The other emissions occurred naturally.
Methane is a major contributor to climate
change: It is 28 times more effective than
carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmo-
sphere over 100 years. Project leader Rob
Jackson, from Stanford University, says the
finding should be a wake-up call on meth-
ane emissions, which could be curbed by
overhauling agriculture and plugging leaks
in oil and gas infrastructure. “There’s a hint
that we might be able to reach peak carbon
dioxide emissions very soon,” he tells The
New York Times. “But we don’t appear to
be even close to peak methane.”
a 1-year-old dog is the equivalent of a
31-year-old human, a 5-year-old is like a
57-year-old, and a 10-year-old
like a 68-year-old. “This makes
sense when you think about
it,” senior co-author Trey
Ideker, from the University
of California, San Diego, tells
USA Today. “A 9-month-old
dog can have puppies, so we
already knew that the 1:7 ratio
wasn’t an accurate measure
of age.” Those wanting to cal-
culate their pooch’s “human”
with the natural logarithm (ln)
function on their calculator and do this
equation: 16 ln(dog age) + 31.
THE WEEK July 31, 2020
22 NEWS Pick of the week’s cartoons

THE WEEK July 31, 2020 For more political cartoons, visit: www.theweek.com/cartoons.
 ARTS
Review of reviews: Books
Book of the week
The Rules of Contagion:
Why Things Spread—And Why
They Stop
by Adam Kucharski (Basic, $30)
If you’re struggling to make sense of the
global pandemic, “The Rules of Contagion
is the book you might want to reach for,”
said Laura Spinney in TheGuardian.com.
Not that author Adam Kucharski mentions
Covid-19, because the virus was just emerg-
ing as he was finishing the book. But his
insights will help you think more like an
expert. Though the British biostatistician
stresses that no two pandemics are identical,
he explains clearly how every epidemic fol-
lows a set of mathematical rules that were
developed across the past century. The hero
of the book is the British physician who
proved epidemic modeling could be predic-
tive. And Kucharski uses that launching
point to show how the formula can be or
is being applied to markets or marketing,
crime, or even fake news.
Dr. Ronald Ross won a Nobel Prize in 1902
Novel of the week
Pew
by Catherine Lacey
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26)
Catherine Lacey’s “beautifully written”
new novel has a fable-like air, said Lionel
Shriver in the Financial Times. A young
stranger is found sleeping in a church
and soon drives a whole small Southern
town to distraction because no one can
determine what race or gender the new-
comer is, and he or she mostly doesn’t
speak. In a lesser novel, that might frus-
trate readers too, but “I can’t overempha-
size how sweetly, swiftly, and entertain-
ingly this book proceeds, or how exqui-
sitely the prose is crafted on every page.”
The stranger, given the name Pew, is our
narrator, and Pew’s “Kafkaesque sense of
anxiety” is a real strength, said Dwight
Garner in The New York Times. But the
story also often feels pretentious, and
the townspeople shallow. In its inven-
tion of a character who so thoroughly
resists categorization, though, Lacey’s
fable “illustrates just how deeply em-
bedded the impulse toward othering
runs in this country,” said Connor Good-
win in The Seattle Times. “Pew’s ex-
Shutterstock
treme passivity is a kind of protest—and
an effective one, too.”
Spanish flu patients at a tent hospital in 1918 succeeds—“up to a point,” said Mark
for discovering that malaria is transmitted
by mosquitoes, said Rien Fertel in AVClub
.com. But to Kucharski, Ross’ grandest
achievement was developing the “theory of
happenings,” which proposed that math can There’s no such brake on an overheated
predict how contagions grow. The theory
became more useful in the 1970s, when
a German mathematician pinpointed the
importance of a disease’s reproduction num- started trying to stem the flow of misinfor-
ber, or R—meaning the average number of
infections each carrier passes on. Wielding
that tool, researchers “have since used the
theory of happenings to calculate the repro- the spread of harmful ones. “Unfortunately,
duction numbers of obesity, suicide, smok-
Action Park: Fast Times, Wild
Rides, and the Untold Story
of America’s Most Dangerous
Amusement Park by Andy Mulvihill
and Jake Rossen (Penguin, $17)
Action Park of New
Jersey “offered more
than just the illusion
of danger,” said Jesse
Walker in Reason.
Launched in 1978 by a
ski resort owner seek-
ing off-season revenue,
the notorious amuse-
ment park eventually
drew a million visitors
a year who weren’t
put off by the broken bones, lost teeth, and
various other injuries that ran about one
per hour. They “preferred risks to rules,”
as mastermind Gene Mulvihill predicted,
and he obliged thrill seekers by building
poolside cliffs to jump from and a cart run
down a winding mountain chute that
invited crashes in the woods at screaming
speeds. Mulvihill’s son Andy worked there
for 10 summers, said Kirsten Fleming in
the New York Post. With a sharp co-author,
he’s written a memoir that doubles as “an
ode to a seat belts–optional era.”
23
ing, mass shootings, opioid addiction, and
even yawning.” Because Kucharski spends
the second half of The Rules of Contagion
examining how ideas spread, particularly
online, “it’s impossible to read the book
without reflecting on the Black Lives Matter
protests that have flared up since the killing
of George Floyd.” New ideas emerged, and
in household after household, our conversa-
tions about race changed almost overnight.
In its bid to draw parallels between actual
and metaphorical contagions, the book
Honigsbaum in The New York Times.
Kucharski was working at an investment
bank in 2008 and saw how the financial
crisis spread like an epidemic. But diseases
often die out because immunity spreads.
market, nor on the “idiotic” conspiracy the-
ories that circulate online. Kucharski is right
to applaud social media platforms that have
mation, and you can understand why he’s
hopeful that tech leaders will find ways to
speed the spread of beneficial ideas and slow
that is easier said than done.”
“It’s a gloriously funny read,” said Tim
Robey in The Daily Telegraph (U.K.).
Andy was a teenage lifeguard at the
crowded Wave Pool, where the artificially
generated swells required about 10 rescues
a day, often of drunken swimmers. He was
also the first person to ride the Cannonball
Loop—soon after its namesake vertical
loop decapitated a crash-test dummy. But
his dad kept pushing. And with the help of
a clever lawyer who regularly negotiated
settlement payouts, Mulvihill was able to
keep the park operating until it was discov-
ered that he had created a fake insurance
company to pretend that the park had
liability coverage.
Six guests died in separate incidents across
the years, and Action Park the book “isn’t
exactly flippant about the tragedies,” said
Rachel Rosenblit in The Washington Post.
Andy Mulvihill presents his father as
having been pained by the fatalities but
too caught up in his vision of being “the
Walt Disney of New Jersey” to consider
changing course. He comes across as a
dreamer, not a con man, and his son’s book
“captures the frenetic energy of a place
very much a function of its time: parental
supervision and safety precautions—low;
teen hormones, illusion of infallibility and
recklessness—high.”
THE WEEK July 31, 2020
24 ARTS
Author of the week
David Mitchell
“It’s hard to imagine David
Mitchell in the role of the
bumptious rock god,” said
Alex Clark in TheGuardian
.com. At 51, the acclaimed
author of Cloud Atlas and
seven other novels is “the
image of self-effacing gentle-
ness,” not
at all like
the young
Dionysian
rebels who
populate his
new, 592-page
novel about
a fictional
1960s British psychedelic rock
band. Not that he wouldn’t
sometimes like to trade places.
“I think most writers have a
deep-seated envy of most
musicians,” he says, argu-
ing that musicians have the
advantage of taking a stage
and directly and immediately
connecting with an audience.
“I can see how glorious it
must feel,” he says. “And how-
ever brilliant a scene I write,
however perfect a paragraph
I compose, I will never, ever,
ever, get a taste of that drug.”
Still, he’s closer now than he
was when he started writing
Utopia Avenue, said Dan
Stewart in Time. To add
authenticity to his descriptions
of rehearsals and songwriting,
he learned to play both piano
and guitar. He also watched
hours of old interviews and
concert footage and read sev-
eral dozen music memoirs.
He admits the research could
help only so much. “Prose
isn’t that good at describing
music,” he says. “After three
or four sentences it becomes
as intolerable as listening to
someone else’s dreams.” His
solution was to occasionally
work in very short descriptive
passages, “just to give a ghost
of the sound for the reader.”
If he’s lucky, maybe readers
will like it, and even applaud
politely someday when he
reads it aloud at an author
appearance. Still, he says, “it’s
not 15,000 people just scream-
ing ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah’ at you
at the top of their voice.”
THE WEEK July 31, 2020
The Book List
Best books…chosen by Sarah Weinman
Sarah Weinman is the author of 2018’s The Real Lolita, a journalist, and the editor
of three crime anthologies. The latest of those anthologies, Unspeakable Acts,
collects 13 true-crime stories from contemporary masters of the form.
Classic Crimes by William Roughead (1951).
The true-crime genre as we understand it could
not exist without the writings of Roughead
(1870–1952), a Scottish lawyer with an avid
interest in criminal trials. His writeups of trials he
attended and cases he researched, collected in this
single volume, are infused with delight and brio,
as well as bursts of outrage at obvious wrongs.
Crime and Science by Jürgen Thorwald (1967).
Thorwald’s incisively written tour through cases
obscure and famous highlights 20th-century
forensic science techniques such as blood typing
and elemental analysis of gunshot residue. He
showcased these pioneering techniques at a time
when the revolution of DNA evidence was still
two decades away.
The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet
Malcolm (1990). With each rereading, I find
something new in Malcolm’s account of the com-
plex battle between author Joe McGinniss and his
subject, convicted killer Jeffrey MacDonald. The
principals and the case matter less to Malcolm
than the failures of the journalist-subject relation-
ship, which she conveys with near perfection.
Also of interest...in funny women
Becoming Duchess Goldblatt
by Anonymous (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $24)
Reinventing oneself as a gray-haired
noble is one way to bounce back
from divorce, said Karen Heller in
The Washington Post. That’s appar-
ently why the writer of this “splendid”
memoir started posting on Twitter as
Duchess Goldblatt, a self-described 81-year-old
literary icon whose dry aperçus have gained a wide
following. Here, the duchess’ surreal wit mixes
with the winning candor of the writer saved by
the project. “Becoming is many things, all of them
splendid. It is a gift for our anxious summer.”
Take a Hint, Dani Brown
by Talia Hibbert (Avon, $16)
Talia Hibbert’s latest romantic comedy
is “a burst of sunshine,” said Maureen
Lee Lenker in Entertainment Weekly.
In the British author’s follow-up to Get
a Life, Chloe Brown, Chloe’s sister is
thrown together with a security guard
when he rescues her and the video goes viral. Dani
and Zafir decide to fake a relationship to raise
money for worthy causes. And though it’s obvi-
ous where this is all headed, Take a Hint “blends
insightful cultural commentary with a love story
that’s exuberant, hilarious, and restorative.”
Under the Bridge by Rebecca Godfrey (2005).
Fourteen-year-old Reena Virk’s murder by sev-
eral classmates was a flash point in my—and
Godfrey’s—home country of Canada in the late
1990s. Godfrey renders the victim and the perpe-
trators in stunning, three-dimensional detail, com-
bining immersive journalism with a novelist’s eye.
Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied
Torso by Kali Nicole Gross (2016). True-crime
narratives by African-American authors are
disappointingly scarce—something that must
change soon. Gross, a Rutgers University history
professor, masterfully reconstructs both a ghastly
late-19th-century murder and the life of a woman
tried for the crime. Gross also illuminates how
the American criminal justice system continues to
fail the black community.
Furious Hours by Casey Cep (2019). What a
marvel of a book—one that’s as much about
a series of murders that rocked small-town
Alabama in the late 1970s as it is a thoughtful,
empathetic portrait of Harper Lee, psychologi-
cally overwhelmed by the prospect of writing
another book after To Kill a Mockingbird.
Nothing Is Wrong and Here Is Why
by Alexandra Petri (Norton, $26)
This collection of recent Alexandra
Petri columns and essays makes “a
queasy kind of time machine,” said
Emma Sarappo in the Washington
City Paper. The effective default MO
of the Washington Post humorist is a
false cheeriness, but it’s still troubling to confront
many Trump administration outrages most of us
have forgotten. Though not every column clicks,
“there are more hits than misses,” culminating in
“How to Sleep at Night When Families Are Being
Separated at the Border,” a lacerating classic.
The Madwoman and the Roomba
by Sandra Tsing Loh (Norton, $26)
It’s odd remembering the things that
bothered us just six months ago, said
Shana Nys Dambrot in LA Weekly.
In her new memoir, comedian and
NPR host Sandra Tsing Loh provides
a one-year snapshot of middle age
for a working L.A. mother and shows again
Paul Stuart, Ty Bergman
that “her frank, self-deprecating wit is built on a
foundation of acute observation of the ridiculous
hypocrisies that give everyday life its texture.”
But bad vacations? Lazy teenagers? Fad diets?
You’ll wish life were so simple again.
 Review of reviews: Art & Music
Architecture: Why Covid might end modernism’s long reign
When you look at any city, mall, or
office building these days, “it’s pain-
fully clear that our world has been
constructed for a reality that no lon-
ger exists,” said Kristen Brown in
Bloomberg.com. With the Covid-19
outbreak still raging, social distancing
has become an anxious way of life, and
entering even bright, spacious public
structures can provoke dread. Many
buildings where people interact now
feature tweaks such as plexiglass shields
and circles on the floor to mark 6-foot
separations. Later may come touchless
elevators and self-cleaning bathrooms.
But that’s just a start. If distancing
remains necessary, “the pandemic is likely
to kick off a new era of architecture.”
It wouldn’t be the first time that infectious
disease has transformed cities, homes, and
workplaces, said Vanessa Chang in Slate
.com. Paris looks the way it does because
after a devastating late-19th-century chol-
era epidemic, the audacious French prefect
Georges-Eugène Haussmann razed medieval to this pandemic. Today, “barriers are our
neighborhoods to make way for broad,
geometric avenues and spacious parks.
And modernism as it emerged in the 1920s
was a response to tuberculosis, producing
==The Chicks
Gaslighter
++++
They’ve dropped the
word “Dixie” from
their name, but this
Texas trio isn’t trying to
start any new political
debates with its first
album in 14 years, said
Mikael Wood in the
Los Angeles Times. “Gaslighter turns out
to be the Chicks’ most intensely personal
effort yet,” its songs largely inspired by lead
singer Natalie Maines’ recent divorce. On
both the title track and “Sleep at Night,”
Maines “lays out an ex’s deception in brutal
detail,” and the weary “Set Me Free” pleads
with the guy to just sign the paperwork.
The writing is “sharp and vivid” through-
out and the sound “sleek but homey, with
banjo and fiddle mixing with keyboards and
programmed percussion behind the Chicks’
crisp vocal harmonies.” Despite the breakup
theme, Gaslighter also isn’t afraid to have
fun, said Maura Johnston in Entertainment
Weekly. The propulsive “Texas Man” warily
eyes a return to dating, while “Tights on
My Boat” delivers a jaw-dropping kiss-off.
Blending “21st-century pop savvy” with
Bloomberg
country music’s storytelling strength,
Gaslighter is “all fire and nerve.”
A last ‘machine’?: Bloomberg’s London headquarters
whitewashed unadorned spaces “cleansed— buildings be more like living organisms—
physically and symbolically—from disease.” adaptable rather than disposable, and
That aesthetic, the aesthetic of Le Corbusier, contributing to sustaining lives outside their
Mies van der Rohe, and the hospital, has
never really died, said Kyle Chayka in
NewYorker.com. A century after its arrival,
the blank, empty box remains “shorthand
for good taste” and yet clearly ill-suited
friends,” and “the airy, pristine emptiness of a remedial lesson about how we are all con-
modernism” is simply hazardous.
Worse, in this time of crisis, “the build-
The Pretenders
Hate for Sale
++++
Chrissie Hynde is
“a force of nature,”
said Hal Horowitz in
AmericanSongwriter
.com. At 68, the lead
vocalist and primary
songwriter of the
Pretenders “remains
as commanding as ever,” whether she’s
belting out brash punk (“Hate for Sale”)
or singing sultry R&B (“You Can’t Hurt
a Fool”). Picking up where she left off
on 2016’s Dan Auerbach–assisted Alone,
“Hynde is back in full-throttle, rock-star
form.” And though these 10 tracks contain
“plenty of throwbacks to earlier Pretenders
material,” even the less original songs
possess “the crackling energy” of the
band’s finest music. The Ohio-bred queen
of British new wave has always embod-
ied “a unique blend of assuredness and
vulnerability,” said Mark Beaumont in
The Independent (U.K.). Just compare the
raucous title track to “Crying in Public”—a
closing tearjerker set to piano and chamber
strings. In between, not every melody is
memorable, “but when Hynde reels out
the rockabilly on ‘Junkie Walk’ and ‘Didn’t
Want to Be This Lonely,’ everything clicks.”
ARTS 25
ings that many of us live and work in
offer little sense of comfort, safety, and
sustenance,” said Philip Kennicott in
The Washington Post. Covid-19 has at
least awakened architects to these defi-
ciencies, and “the exciting thing today
is that this sense of humility is now
joined to a resurgent sense of ambi-
tion.” Le Corbusier said that a home
should be “a machine for living in”;
today, that ideal is finally being pushed
aside because more architects can see
how such buildings answer finite sets of
needs but show no regard for their own
impact on society and the planet. A bet-
ter metaphor, previously championed
only by a fashionable fringe, asks that
own walls. The movement may sound more
abstract than real, but in recent months, a
new consensus has emerged in the field that
architecture should be about securing equal
access to the necessities of life, including
uninfected air. “A virus is giving our planet
nected, and architecture may be the science
that consolidates this terrible but liberating
new wisdom.”
Apollo Brown & Ché Noir
As God Intended
++++
“There must be some-
thing in the water in
Buffalo right now,”
said Andrew Sacher
in BrooklynVegan
.com. The Rust Belt
city in western New
York keeps producing
one talented rapper after another, begin-
ning with Griselda—a trio endorsed by
Nas and Raekwon—and now Ché Noir.
The 26-year-old “has been a promising
artist for a while,” but now that Ché has
teamed up with the great Detroit producer
Apollo Brown, “she makes that leap from
‘promising’ to one of the most command-
ing new voices in modern ’90s-style rap.”
Her gritty lyrics often contain “a wild vio-
lent streak, which she delivers in a smooth
and unhurried monotone,” said Phillip
Mlynar in Pitchfork.com. Of course, lots
of rappers document their hardscrabble
upbringings, but on As God Intended,
“Ché aims higher,” linking the scenes she
sketches to broader sociopolitical ills such
as mass incarceration and urban blight.
“A savvy and earnest lyricist, she’s also
unafraid to add vulnerable autobiographi-
cal flashbacks to her writing.”
THE WEEK July 31, 2020
26 ARTS Review of reviews: Film & Home Media
Netflix’s Top 10: What home viewers really watch
nary trying to rescuing a drug lord’s
kidnapped son—and scored 99 million
streams in its first four weeks. 2. Bird
Box (2018) Sandra Bullock did her best
to sell a supernatural thriller that’s
essentially “a monster movie without
a monster.” 3. Spenser Confidential
(2020) A troublesome Boston ex-cop—
Mark Wahlberg, naturally—returns
to the streets in this winking recent
smash-’em-up. 4. 6 Underground
(2019) Ryan Reynolds led this Michael
Bay action production, which “belongs
Extraction: Hemsworth with Rudhraksh Jaiswal to the school of ‘if you keep things
moving fast enough, no one will ques-
Maybe Netflix won’t be cinema’s savior tion the logic.’” 5. Murder Mystery (2019) A
after all, said Owen Gleiberman in Variety. comedic whodunit in which Adam Sandler
The world’s leading streaming service pro- let Jennifer Aniston do all the acting. 6. The
motes itself as the new home of prestige,
Old Guard (2020) Charlize Theron fronts a
director-driven efforts such as Roma, The
“perfectly OK” action thriller of her own.
Irishman, and Marriage Story. But last week
Netflix revealed for the first time the most 7. The Irishman (2019) Martin Scorsese’s
popular of its original movies, and the list is Best Picture nominee, and this list’s “one
packed with entries that “would have played film of supreme artistry.” 8. Triple Frontier
like C-list formula entertainments had they (2019) Another “overblown, undercooked”
been shown in movie theaters.” Below, thriller, Ben Affleck edition. 9. The Wrong
Netflix’s all-time top 10 so far—and what Missy (2020) A routine rom-com—albeit
Variety’s critics have had to say about them: with comedian Lauren Lapkus enliven-
ing every scene. 10. The Platform (2020)
1. Extraction (2020) “A dumbed-down bit of Quarantining misanthropes apparently
blow-uppy distraction,” this mid-lockdown lapped up Spanish director Galder Gaztelu-
release cast Chris Hemsworth as a merce- Urrutia’s “brutalist” dystopian nightmare.
New movies on demand
The Painted Bird
“Humanity’s moral depravity has never
looked so stunning,” said Johnny Oleksinski
in the New York Post. A young Eastern
European refugee faces a gauntlet of hor-
rors in this “mesmerizing” black-and-white
adaptation of Jerzy Kosinski’s 1965 novel.
Director Václav Marhoul is “no empty pro-
vocateur,” though, and he’s delivered “a
superbly told story.” ($7) Not rated
Amulet
Actor Romola Garai (Atonement) has
become “a filmmaker to watch,” said
Kate Erbland in IndieWire.com. Her “chill-
ing, smart” feature-length debut ushers
a PTSD-afflicted immigrant soldier into a
London townhouse that harbors secrets.
After a “slow-burning” opening act, unset-
tling moments escalate into “some nutso
body horror” in a story that’s really “about
trauma in all its forms.” ($12) R
The Rental
“If a filmmaker can winch the bindings
tight enough, sometimes the rest doesn’t
matter,” said Chris Barsanti in PopMatters
.com. Dave Franco, in his own directorial
debut, does more than the expected with a
horror premise about two couples renting a
remote getaway where their every move is
being watched. Alison Brie and Dan Stevens
help make it “a chilling piece of work.” ($7) R

Video games: Touring Japan in Ghost of Tsushima The Line

Gamers have always wanted
an open-world samurai simula-
tor, said Mitchell Saltzman in
IGN.com. “Consider that itch
sufficiently scratched with
Ghost of Tsushima.” In this
“stunningly gorgeous” new
PS4 exclusive set in feudal
Japan, you play as Jin Sakai,
one of the few samurai to
survive a devastating Mongol
attack. (The Mongol Empire
actually did invade the island of
Tsushima in 1274.) Jin travels
the war-torn countryside, gather-
ing a ragtag resistance group.
His cinematic, Kurosawa-inspired quest
to liberate the island one village at a time
takes the player across rippling grasslands, map “start to feel like cookie-cutter bits
through autumnal forests, and deep into
Mongol strongholds. There, during tense
standoffs set to thunderous taiko drums,
the split-second swordplay proves “fast,
chaotic, tactical, and true to the fantasy of
being a lone, hyperskilled, but outnum-
bered samurai.”
Jin: An honorable warrior turns vigilante.
too familiar. “It’s not bad—it’s just rote.”
And after a while, the countless places of
interest scattered across the sprawling
of consumable content.” Similarly, many
of the plot threads show “a disappointing
lack of imagination,” said Keza MacDonald
in TheGuardian.com. “Ghost of Tsushima
sticks so closely to the tropes of samurai
fiction that it sometimes forgets to have a
personality of its own.” Step off the beaten
path, though, and you’ll find opportunities
PublicTheater.org
++++
Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen “have
made a career of transforming real con-
versation on urgent issues into theater,”
said Peter Marks in The Washington
Post. The playwrights’ latest project,
available to stream on the Public The-
ater’s YouTube channel through Aug. 4,
is an hour-long compilation of testimony
from medical workers who bore the
brunt of New York City’s early battle
with Covid-19. Though their words are
delivered by seven actors, including the
very effective Lorraine Toussaint and
Alison Pill, “you get what feels like a
total immersion in the frustration, anger,
and exhaustion of confronting a disease
in wave after frantic wave.” It’s “no small
problem” that they are all speaking of
past, not present, dramas, said Jesse
Green in The New York Times. Some
performers also overact, and Blank, who
directs, “has not enforced subtlety.”
Eventually, though, the play “latches
on to a larger theme” and it resonates.
Many of these humble heroes are people
Netflix, Sucker Punch Productions

When forced to resort to guerrilla warfare, to compose haiku, bathe in hot springs, of color, some of them immigrants or
the proud Jin struggles with the shame follow foxes to hidden shrines, or play children of immigrants, and it dawns on
of killing from the shadows, said Carolyn shakuhachi flute. “This is the most beauti- them that the public health system isn’t
Petit in Polygon.com. But as folktales ful version of Japan ever conjured in code, truly looking out for their interests. As
about a vengeful spirit sweep the island, he and when slashing Mongol spearmen to one male nurse here says, “Wait—are
slowly assumes the identity of the Ghost. bits gets tedious, you can always just drink we expendable?”
Unfortunately, the stealth-based action is in the view.”
THE WEEK July 31, 2020

Streaming tips
The best of sketch comedy
for a summer binge...
Mr. Show
Before Bob Odenkirk became
Saul Goodman and before
David Cross did Arrested
Development, they paired to
create and star in the hands-
down funniest sketch comedy
series of the ’90s. Some skits
that top various best-of lists:
“Super Pan,” “Blowing Up
the Moon,” “Megaphone
Crooners,” “The Audition.”
HBO Max
Key & Peele
A show that originally looked
like an attempt by Comedy
Central to quickly fill a void
created by Dave Chappelle’s
departure turned into a
phenomenon in its own
right. Keegan-Michael Key
and Jordan Peele borrowed
the best elements of
Chappelle’s Show and
Mr. Show to create a series
that voiced truths about sys-
temic racism while making
you laugh like you’d never
laughed before. Hulu
I Think You Should Leave
Tim Robinson worked
as a writer for Saturday
Night Live and on Comedy
Central’s Detroiters before
finding his groove with an
absurdist sketch show that
tramples on social mores.
In his first six 15-minute
episodes, which aired a year
ago and produced endless
memes, he moved the bar
on taking a joke way too far.
Netflix
Saturday Night Live
All 44 seasons of the late-
night institution are available
on NBC’s new streaming
service (great news for fans
of John Belushi and Eddie
Murphy). And to stream old
highlights and more recent
seasons, you don’t even have
to pay the premium service’s
$5 monthly fee. Peacock
MADtv
At its height, this sketch se-
ries loosely inspired by MAD
magazine gave SNL a run
for its money. Across 15 sea-
sons, the show also launched
a few careers (see Key &
Peele) and produced several
AP, Disney+
memorable skits. HBO Max
• All listings are Eastern Time.
Television ARTS 27
The Week’s guide to what’s worth watching
Frontline: United States of Conspiracy
From Pizzagate to the “plandemic,” conspiracy
theories are thriving. This special report focuses
on how three men—Alex Jones, Roger Stone,
and Donald Trump—formed an alliance in late
2015 that spread dangerous fantasies, including
those that Jones has peddled on radio and on the
website Infowars. As a deadly pandemic gains
fuel from widespread conspiracy thinking among
the public, Frontline’s political team assesses how
grim the trend could become. Tuesday, July 28, at
10 p.m., PBS; check local listings
Frayed
When her husband dies during a ridiculously
outré act of infidelity, a pampered mother of
two in 1980s London discovers that the family Return to flight: Williamson and Antetokounmpo
is also broke and her native Australia is the only
place to turn. Aussie comedian Sarah Kendall Muppets Now
wrote and stars in this six-part dark comedy, Kermit, Miss Piggy, and many other beloved
which starts slowly but shows promise. After Jim Henson creations try their luck with a new
series that looks a lot like an improvised ver-
all, Kendall’s Simone was lying, too—about her
sion of The Muppet Show. Celebrity guests are
name, her home city, and her status. She and the
kids have a lot of adjusting to do. Available for again part of the package, with RuPaul, Dead to
Me’s Linda Cardellini, and Seth Rogen among
streaming Thursday, July 30, HBO Max
the humans who’ll be trying to rekindle the old
In My Skin vaudeville-style magic. Available for streaming
Mom is in a psych ward and Dad is an alcoholic Friday, July 31, Disney+
in this sharply written British coming-of-age
Other highlights
dramedy series, which stars BAFTA winner
Rebecka Martinsson
Gabrielle Creevy and debuts several weeks after
The Nordic noir series returns with the titu-
its original U.S. launch was scratched. Available
lar public prosecutor tackling four new cases.
for streaming Thursday, July 30, Hulu
Available for streaming Monday, July 27,
2019–20 NBA Season Return AcornTV
Pro basketball plans to tip off its patchwork
The Speed Cubers
regular-season stretch run with a nationally
The world of competitive Rubik’s Cube is the
televised doubleheader. Game 1 potentially
backdrop for an endearing true story of friend-
pits Zion Williamson and the New Orleans
ship and rivalry between the world’s two fastest
Pelicans against Giannis Antetokounmpo and the
solvers. Available for streaming Wednesday,
Milwaukee Bucks, while the star-packed Lakers
July 29, Netflix
and Clippers meet in primetime for Los Angeles
bragging rights. All 22 competing teams will play The Go-Go’s
in the bubble of Florida’s ESPN Wide World of The ’80s wouldn’t have had quite the same
Sports Complex, and each will get eight games to beat without the Go-Go’s. This documentary
shake off the rust and determine seeding for play- celebrates the all-girl group that emerged from
offs scheduled to begin on Aug. 17. Thursday, the L.A. punk scene to briefly attain pop mega-
July 30, at 6:30 p.m. and 9 p.m., TNT stardom. Friday, July 31, at 9 p.m., Showtime
Show of the week
Black Is King
Beyoncé the filmmaker already has two major
works on her CV: the video edition of her album
Lemonade and last year’s concert film Home-
coming. Now she’s giving the “visual album”
treatment to one of the least noticed of her recent
projects: her 2019 album inspired by Disney’s
live-action remake of The Lion King. Some critics
loved how Beyoncé collaborated with African
artists to stretch her sonic reach. The new film
pairs that music with twined stories of a young
king’s journey of self-discovery and the struggles
of black families across centuries. Available for
Beyoncé in a still from the new film streaming Friday, July 31, Disney+
THE WEEK July 31, 2020
28
Fish tacos: Baja made easy, once you know the white sauce
For good reason, batter-fried fish tacos
are “possibly the most well-known street
food of northern Baja,” says David
Castro Hussong in The Baja California
Cookbook (Ten Speed Press). Vendors
in Ensenada often use shark, because it’s
cheap and available, but “you can make
a comparably delicious—albeit much
more expensive version—using a meaty
white fish such as halibut.” Cod and
grouper are options, too, and shrimp is a
completely authentic alternative.
A great Baja fish taco is served on a
from-scratch tortilla and topped with
red salsa, pico de gallo, and shredded
cabbage. To me, though, it’s the white
sauce that “makes a fish taco a fish taco.”
and the simple version here “tastes like
home.” To complete the Ensenada street-
food effect, fry the fish pieces once, then
give each one 30 seconds more in the hot
oil just before you fold it into the tortilla.
Recipe of the week
Beer-battered fish tacos
For the white sauce:
½ cup mayonnaise
½ cup Mexican crema (or ¼ cup each
cultured buttermilk and heavy cream)
Juice of 1 lime
½ tsp black pepper
½ tsp kosher salt
Craft beer: Lo-cal keepers
Calorie-counting beer drinkers don’t
have to settle for “one-note blandness”
anymore, said Josh Noel in the Chicago
Tribune. We recently taste-tested 18
low-cal, low-carb craft beers that weren’t
even sold in Chicago a year ago, and
the best offer “light, bright refreshment.”
Sure “none will supplant the joy of a
300-calorie IPA,” but they’re not meant to.
Good Behavior This light IPA from
Colorado’s Odell Brewing lives up to
its crushable billing, but its “lush, fruity
hops character” makes it “drink like a
fully realized beer.”
Hop 99 Light IPA A “bright,
lemony character” followed
by “a welcome dry finish”
make this IPA from Louisi-
ana’s Abita Brewing “a home
run” on a warm summer day.
Ballast Point Lager San Diego
delivers with a backyard
beverage that’s “reminiscent
of the major light beers, but
also an improvement: lightly
fruity, lightly grassy.”
THE WEEK July 31, 2020
LEISURE
Food & Drink
Put mayonnaise, crema, lime juice,
and pepper in a bowl and whisk.
Add salt to taste. Sauce should be
thin enough to easily spoon, but thick
enough not to run.
Combine flour, cornstarch, and
baking powder in a large bowl.
Add mustard and oregano and mix
well. Add beer to bowl and stir to
combine. Push batter through a fine
mesh strainer into a serving-size
bowl. Discard solids.
Pour into a wok or Dutch oven
Pro tip: Try a squeeze bottle for the sauces. enough frying oil to fully cover fish
pieces. Heat oil to 365.
For the fish:
2½ cups all-purpose flour, plus more for
drying the fish Line a plate with paper towels. Dry fish
2
⁄3 cup cornstarch pieces with paper towels, then lightly
1 tsp baking powder flour them, just enough to wick away any
1 tbsp yellow mustard remaining moisture. One by one, dredge
¼ cup chopped fresh Mexican oregano them in the batter to fully coat. Working
One 12-oz bottle beer (preferably a in batches, submerge pieces in oil and
Mexican pilsner) fry until golden brown, 4 to 8 minutes.
2 to 4 cups frying oil (lard is traditional, Remove from oil and lay on paper towel–
but any frying oil will do) lined plate. Heat tortillas on a grill or in a
1 lb shark or meaty white fish such as pan. Place a piece of fish in each tortilla.
halibut, cut into 10 pieces, or 1 lb large (If serving shrimp, use two or three per
shrimp tortilla.) Add cabbage, white sauce, and
10 corn tortillas other toppings. Serve with lime wedges.
½ head green cabbage, shredded Makes 10 tacos.
Smart cooking: How to get more from your food scraps
Stop throwing away your stems, peels, and
bean water, said Rachael Jackson in The Wash-
ington Post. Such castoffs “can be the secret in-
gredients to adding flair, texture, and substance
to your meals while also stretching your budget
and reducing food waste.” In short, “there’s
food hiding in your food,” enough to even save
you a trip or two to the grocery store.
The leafy stuff: Fresh greens from beets, car-
rots, and radishes can be tossed right into a
salad, and if they’ve started wilting, use them
instead in a stir-fry or sauté. Tough leaves can
be processed into a pesto.
Stems: Stems from cilantro and other herbs can be diced for salads or collected in the
freezer for future pestos. The big stems from kale or chard can be pickled, or blanched
and then added to other dishes.
Packing liquids: Aquafaba, the liquid in a can of chickpeas, is “pretty magical,” acting
Oriana Koren, Tom McCorkle/Washington Post
as an egg substitute for baking. Other bean liquids can thicken soups or sauces, while
oil from sardines or sun-dried tomatoes goes nicely over salads. Pickle juice is great in
salad dressings and cocktails, and athletes swear by its rehydrating properties.
Fruit peels and rinds: “All it takes is water, sugar, and a stove to convert citrus peels to
marmalade.” In fact, store every stray mango pit, pineapple core, and strawberry top
in a gallon bag in the freezer. Once you’ve boiled and simmered your fruit-scrap collec-
tion, you’ll be halfway to more jam.
Watermelon seeds: You know to save the rinds for pickling. But the seeds can be a snack,
too. Just soak them in salty water and give them 20 minutes in a 320-degree oven.
 Life at home LEISURE 29

Car buying: The perks of pandemic shopping

Believe it or not, “this might be the perfect
time to buy a new car,” said Benjamin
Preston in Consumer Reports. When
dealerships closed in March and auto
sales plummeted, automakers started of-
fering major incentives, including deferred
first payments, zero percent financing,
and cash-back offers worth thousands.
Meanwhile, many dealers transitioned into
contactless “buy-at-home” operations and
are now allowing buyers to arrange ev-
erything—including test drives and home
deliveries—online or by phone. Though
surging demand and inadequate inven-
tories have, at least for now, helped drive
up prices on used cars sold by dealers,
bargains on new cars remain plentiful.
Dealers have also become far more willing
to negotiate and quote prices online, and
“that transparency is revolutionizing the
game,” said Lawrence Ulrich in Autoblog
.com. “From their own comfy chair, shop-
pers can play dealers off one another and
see who’ll offer the sweetest deal.” Just do
your homework: Know the car you want
and what it’s selling for. And remember These days, the cars often come to you.
that a big discount isn’t the same as a
great deal. The discount indicates that the road will likely be low, too. For that reason,
automaker or dealer already knows that “high-demand models that sell for little
consumers won’t pay the sticker price, or no discount can end up being smarter
which means the resale value down the long-term buys.”

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bearer among USB Isolation Shield If you wish to stream It’s unwise to try to edit record interviews on
mics ensures that your “Echoes can ruin a multiple people speak- and mix audio record- the go, take along a
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Source: TheWirecutter.com Source: Popular Science Source: Wired.com Source: Slate.com Source: Engadget.com

Tip of the week... Solutions... Best online...

How to stay cool without AC
QBlock sunlight. Much heat enters a home
via sunlight, so use blackout curtains or
shades to keep it at bay. (Hot colors—such
as red, orange, and yellow—deflect the
most warmth.) If a darkened room bothers
you, try solar screens or window tints.
QVentilate. “The best way to cool off a room
is to pull heat up and out.” So don’t let heat
get trapped in the attic, and if your home
has two floors, place some fans in the upper
story’s windows, facing outward. Place them
as high as possible—in the upper sash if you
can—and think strategically about the whole
house. You may want to create a cross breeze
by pulling cool air in from fans on one side
and pushing it out with fans on the other.
QDehumidify. Where air isn’t moving—
including when windows are closed to
AP, Little Free Library
Start your own sidewalk library Four great virtual summer camps
A sidewalk library QCamp Kinda offers weekly adventures for
can really unite a kids through eighth grade, each activity built
neighborhood, said around an interesting theme such as insect
Susan Straight in science, moviemaking, the art of graphic
OprahMag.com. novels, or the world’s craziest sports.
When schools QCamp Wonderopolis covers all five STEM
closed this spring, subjects with a variety of courses and activi-
“I realized I had ties related to science, music, engineering, or
something valu- health and fitness. Kids in grades 2 to 8 might
able: hundreds draft an architectural blueprint, or learn about
of books.” Many the tech used by music producers.
people around QVarsity Tutors, an online tutoring service,
the country have bought or built Little Free also offers free and paid summer camp
Libraries—those little birdhouse-like lend- courses for kids of all ages—everything
ing boxes set on posts. I started my lending from drawing anime to forensic science.
library with a stack of children’s books on my QMaker Camp puts kids and families to work
porch, then expanded to shelves and plant crafting all kinds of things using household
holders that I hang on my white slat fence. materials: light-up origami, PVC marshmal-

keep the hot sun out—dehumidifiers can Neighbors aren’t just borrowing; they’re add- low shooters, circuits made with office sup-
dramatically improve comfort. And you can ing to the collection. And when I’m slow to plies. The company also offers weekly work-
run one for a fraction of the cost of AC. pack the books each night, the readers keep shops on rocket making and magic tricks.
Source: PopSci.com coming well past dark. Source: Lifehacker.com

THE WEEK July 31, 2020

30 Best properties on the market
This week: Homes in the Northern Rockies

1 W Mackay, Idaho The East Fork of the Big Lost

River runs half a mile through Castle Rock Ranch,
80 deeded acres bounded by the Salmon-Challis
National Forest, with views of the White Knob and
Pioneer Mountains. The four-bedroom furnished
house features exposed-log walls and beams, pine
floors, a river-rock fireplace, and a wide porch over-
looking the water. Outside are miles of hiking and
6 riding trails, trout fishing, and hunting. $1,950,000.
1 3
2 4 5 Trent Jones, Hall and Hall, (208) 622-4133

2 X Big Sky, Mont. This five-bedroom lodge perches on Antler

Ridge, minutes from Big Sky’s ski resort and an hour from Yellow-
stone. The house is trimmed with reclaimed logs, hardwood floors,
and wood detailing, and has a chef’s kitchen and a two-story
great room with fireplace. The outdoor deck has a fireplace and
a spa. $2,450,000. Catherine Gorman, (406) 580-2318, and Will
Brunner, (406) 209-1225, Big Sky Sotheby’s International Realty

3 X Darby, Mont.
The 99 acres of this
wooded property in-
clude a four-bedroom
home and frontage
on the West Fork of
the Bitterroot River.
The house features
log beams, floor-
to-ceiling windows,
stone fireplaces, a
double-height great
room, a master suite with soaking
tub and walk-in closets, a gym, and a
screened porch with fireplace and spa.
On the grounds are lawns, patios,
a stocked pond, a six-car garage, a
greenhouse, and a stone-walled dug-
out with a wine cellar. $2,950,000.
Dawn Maddux, Engel & Völkers
Western Frontier, (406) 550-4131

THE WEEK July 31, 2020

 Best properties on the market 31

4 X Irwin, Idaho Eagle’s

View Retreat stands
on a rise overlooking
the Palisades Reservoir,
40 miles from Jackson
Hole. The three-bedroom
custom-built house
features a two-story great
room with a stone fire-
place, a billiard room, and
several decks, one with a
fire pit and another with
a hot tub. The 1.6-acre lot
is landscaped with mature
aspen and maple trees and
irrigated gardens, and in-
cludes an oversize two-car
garage. $795,000. Matt
MacMillan, Live Water
Properties, (307) 413-3582

6 S Somers, Mont. This four-

5 S Jackson, Wyo. Minutes from town, this three-
bedroom home is also next to the Game Creek Trailhead,
with access to hiking, biking, and cross-country skiing.
The cedar-clad house has stonework accents, a zinc roof,
radiant heat, steel and fir built-ins, a gourmet kitchen,
and a master suite with walk-in closets, private deck,
and en-suite bathroom with steam shower. The 11-acre
landscaped property features an accessory shop, a private
trail, and a yoga deck with mountain views. $4,500,000.
Gregory Prugh, Prugh Real Estate, (307) 413-2468
bedroom home stands on the
shore of Flathead Lake, with
views of the Mission Mountains.
The custom-built house has an
open floor plan uniting a living
room with fireplace, dining room
with wine cooler, and chef’s
kitchen with central island; there are also a media room and
an enclosed breezeway to guest quarters. The backyard of the
landscaped, wooded lot leads to a private boat dock. $1,595,000.
Cherie Hansen, Sotheby’s International Realty, (406) 253-4546
THE WEEK July 31, 2020
32
The bottom line
QForty-eight percent of U.S.
adults working remotely dur-
ing the pandemic say they
have been just as produc-
tive as usual. The youngest
workers, ages 18 to 24, were
the most likely (42 percent)
to say they’d like to return to
working in the office full-time.
Axios.com
QMore than three dozen
North American shale explor-
ers, fracking service compa-
nies, and pipeline operators
have sought bankruptcy
protection. Production is
down by 2 million barrels a
day from a peak of almost
13 million early this year.
Bloomberg.com
BUSINESS
The news at a glance
Big Tech: CEOs get ready for the hot seat
Lawmakers are struggling to
make the most of a coming
antitrust hearing featuring the
CEOs of four tech giants, said
Cristiano Lima in Politico.com.
Next week, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos,
Google’s Sundar Pichai, Apple’s
Tim Cook, and Facebook’s
Mark Zuckerberg—“whose
companies are worth a combined
Facing antitrust panel
$5 trillion”—will appear together,
likely virtually, before the House’s antitrust com-
mittee. But the complexity of their businesses will
make this a greater challenge than some prior
high-powered hearings, such as “the famed 1994
grilling of seven tobacco-industry chiefs.” Antitrust And Amazon needs to clarify whether it has been
advocates fear that a joint appearance will let the
executives get away with superficial answers.
Congress needs to focus on busi-
ness models, said Alex Webb
in Bloomberg Businessweek.
Leave the hate speech and mis-
information topics for another
day. Legislators should start by
asking Facebook why “I must
give permission to let it track
my other internet-browsing
activity.” Google should explain
why it doesn’t allow brands
to see competing bids for ad space, leading to
“higher ad costs passed on to consumers.” Apple
must be asked to justify taking a 30 percent cut
of revenue from any signups through iOS apps.
pirating data from third-party sellers to benefit its
own-branded, often cheaper products.

Advertising: Ebay slims down by selling classifieds A Las Vegas classic

QWalmart will give $428 mil-
lion in bonuses to workers
next month for working
through the pandemic, part
of $1.1 billion in hazard pay it
has given out. The com-
pany said it will be closed for
Thanksgiving this year, for
the first time in 30 years.
USA Today
QJeff Bezos added a record
$13 billion to his fortune after
Amazon’s shares surged
7.9 percent in one day last
week. Bezos has added
$74 billion to his net worth
in 2020 alone, making him
personally worth more than
McDonald’s or Nike.
Bloomberg.com
QArete Financial, a lender ac-
cused by regulators of cheat-
ing student loan borrowers
out of $43 million, received a
government-backed Payroll
Protection Program loan.
Other recipients include a
San Francisco company
whose CEO was indicted for
bribery; televangelist Jim
Bakker, who served eight
years for fraud and recently
was sued for selling quack
Covid-19 cures; and a Cali-
fornia man who fraudulently
obtained $9 million and used
hundreds of thousands of
Ebay said this week it is selling its classified-ads business for $9.2 billion
drops off the menu
to Norway’s Adevinta, said Eoin McSweeney in CNN.com. “One of The feast is ending at
the oldest businesses on the internet,” the unit dates back to 1995, hav- the famous Bacchanal
Buffet at Caesars Palace,
ing started life as the online version of “a popular Danish all-classified said Tim Carman in
newspaper.” Ebay bought it in 2008 to form eBay Classifieds Group,
The Washington Post.
which remains a significant profit center for the company. Activist With the government’s
investors, however, have pushed for a “meaner, leaner” eBay, which has recommendation that
also spun off Skype, PayPal, and, most recently, StubHub. restaurants and hotels
“discontinue any
Media: Disney cuts Facebook ads operations” that require
Disney has quietly joined the Facebook advertisers’ boycott, said
shared utensils, buf-
Suzanne Vranica in The Wall Street Journal. The entertainment giant fets are approaching
was “Facebook’s top U.S. adviser for the first six months of 2020,” extinction. One casualty:
with an estimated $210 million spent to promote Disney+. But it the famous Las Vegas
slashed spending in July, joining “hundreds of other companies that temple, which once
have paused their spending” after civil rights groups called for a boycott “served 3,000 people a
over Facebook’s policies on hate speech and misinformation. Ads for day across nine stations
ABC and Disney-owned cable networks have “all but vanished from the featuring hundreds of
site,” with no plan to return “unless the platform polices itself better.” menu items”—including
crab legs, avocado
Netflix: Names co-CEO as growth slows toast, bone marrow,
Netflix promoted Ted Sarandos to be the company’s co-CEO last week, and cheeseburger slider.
said Edmund Lee in The New York Times. The unusual distinction was That daily cornucopia
a long time coming for Sarandos, the influential content executive who will now be reduced to
“has often been the face of Netflix at public events.” He joins Reed “tableside delivery” of
Hastings, who will remain chairman and told investors he has no plans “miniature composed
to retire. Netflix also announced it had added 10 million subscribers dishes.” Other buffet
worldwide, for a total of 192.9 million. But its stock fell sharply on pro- owners are switching to
“cafeteria-style” service,
jections that growth would slow.
with employees plating
China: Ant Financial plans mega-IPO the food. The Golden
Ant Group, Chinese internet tycoon Jack Ma’s “crown jewel,” is list- Corral chain has pivoted
ing its initial public offering close to home, said Lulu Yilun Chen in to curbside pickup.
These are “smart sur-
Bloomberg.com. As the parent company of Alipay, Ant has grown from
being “the payments gateway for the world’s biggest e-commerce plat- vival tactics.” But, sadly,
none of them is a buffet:
form,” Alibaba, into its own sprawling “online mall for everything from
“one of the last places
loans and travel services to food delivery.” However, unlike Alibaba, where adults can feel
which raised a then-record $25 billion in its New York listing debut in like a kid again, over-
Reuters, AP

that to gamble in Las Vegas. 2014, Ant announced this week it will pursue a dual listing in Hong whelmed and delighted
The Wall Street Journal Kong and Shanghai, with “a valuation north of $200 billion.” by all the options.”

THE WEEK July 31, 2020

 Making money BUSINESS 33

Small business: Knocked down by a second wave

“What will be left of my vibrant ated an exit from his lease and shut
downtown when we emerge from down for good. Some of the busi-
the coronavirus crisis?” asked James nesses going under now survived
Kwak in The Washington Post. In “world wars, the Great Depression
Amherst, Mass., where I live, Pleasant and the 2008 financial crisis, and
Street was home to 40-plus bars and floods,” said Amy Haimerl, also
restaurants, three bubble-tea shops, a in The New York Times. Harrell’s,
century-old stationery store, and myr- a family-owned department store,
iad other businesses. Most are now in anchored Burgaw, N.C.’s downtown
severe trouble. The pandemic is accel- for 117 years before announcing
erating a trend that has been building last month that it would close. “I
for decades of large businesses taking did not want to be the one who
share from small ones, making Main brought it to an end,” says owner
Streets across the country “grow Vernon Harrell, who’d worked
blander and more corporate.” As I Texas’ second lockdown has shut some businesses for good. there since he was 13.
walked down Pleasant Street recently,
no business owner I spoke to “was ready to admit defeat.” But Before the crisis, small business was already fragile, said Annie
each day it seems more certain that “their customers will be Lowrey in The Atlantic. “More than half of them had less than
claimed by a handful of winners with the cash and technological two weeks’ worth of cash on hand,” making any major down-
infrastructure to survive.” turn deadly. It’s not just stores closing now, but also the next
generation of startups. “The pandemic will mean the triumph of
Many businesses are already closing for good, said Emily Flitter franchise chains over mom-and-pop shops, of C-suite executives
in The New York Times. For some, the second wave of shut- over entrepreneurs working in their basements.” The prospect
downs was a death sentence. “We did everything we were sup- of small businesses getting wiped out en masse is worrying even
posed to do,” says the owner of a karaoke club in Wichita Falls, big investors, said Annie Massa in Bloomberg.com. Larry Fink,
Texas. But after the second order to close, he “just said, ‘I can’t the CEO of BlackRock, the world’s biggest money manager, says
keep doing this.’” Other businesses see the writing on the wall. that major corporations are doing fine as markets rise, while
A sports-memorabilia seller in Omaha says that as soon as he small and midsize companies face a steep climb up. If the U.S. is
saw the prospect of Division I sports getting canceled, he negoti- to really recover, he says, we can’t create a “bipolar economy.”

What the experts say Charity of the week

Mortgage rates fall below 3 percent
The average interest rate on a 30-year mort-
gage dipped below 3 percent for the first time
ever, said Orla McCaffrey in The Wall Street
Journal. According to mortgage giant Freddie
Mac, average 30-year fixed rates have fallen
nearly three-quarters of a percentage point
since the start of the year, settling at a record-
low 2.98 percent last week. It’s a hard-to-
believe milestone for anyone who remembers
buying a home in the early 1980s, when rates
“peaked above 18 percent.” But banks have
been more cautious about extending loans, be-
cause of the economic uncertainty, and a lack
of inventory has contributed to an increase in
home prices, “potentially muting any savings
from low rates.” Nonetheless, more buyers
seem to be “venturing into the market,” with
mortgage applications rising 17 percent in June
compared with a year earlier.
An IPO windfall disappears
Dylan Cole/The New York Times/Redux
grant the stock to employees. In Uber’s case,
it delivered its shares on the day of its initial
public offering, “meaning employees would
be taxed” at Uber’s price of $45 per share,
which they were restricted from realizing. At
the end of the six-month lockup period, shares
had dropped to $27. Peter Moody, a software
engineer, said he joined Uber with “a lower
salary but the promise of stock.” His tax bill,
however, “wiped out the promised reward.”
New rules for health savings accounts
HSAs and FSAs have become a better deal,
thanks to new rules passed in the wake of the
pandemic, said Lisa Gerstner in Kiplinger.
High-deductible plans paired with a health
savings account can now exempt telemedicine
from the deductible—a change in the “no first
dollar” coverage rule that limited who could
benefit from the tax-advantaged savings plans.
The economic stimulus package enables you
Founded in 1980,
Just Detention
International (just
detention.org)
works to stop
sexual abuse in
prisons and is the
only organiza-
tion exclusively
dedicated to fight-
ing rape behind
bars. Thanks
largely to JDI’s efforts, Congress passed
the Prison Rape Elimination Act in 2003,
the first federal law to require rape data
to be collected in prisons and grants to
be allocated to combat the problem. This
paved the way for PREA’s national sexual
abuse prison standards, set in 2012, allow-
ing detention centers to partner with
nonprofits to offer education and services
to victims and survivors. JDI also works
inside prisons, connecting inmates to
resources, teaching staff how to prevent
and respond to sexual abuse, and training
counselors to help rape victims heal.

to use money from HSAs or FSAs (flexible

Some former employees are blaming Uber for
outsize tax bills, said David Ingram in NBC
News.com. “Employees or early investors
who hold stock in companies that are going
public are typically required to wait to sell
their shares until a certain amount of time has
passed.” But companies get to decide when to
spending accounts) to pay for more expenses,
including over-the-counter drugs. The IRS is
also “allowing certain midyear changes to
FSAs that are typically permitted only dur-
ing open enrollment.” The offers vary by
employer, but you may be able to adjust the
amount you put into your plan.
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 July 31, 2020
34 Best columns: Business

Pharma: Profit and risk in race for a vaccine

More than 100 separate labs are compet- been tested on just a few human subjects,
ing to develop the first Covid-19 vaccine, said Christopher Rowland and Carolyn
said Stephanie Baker in Bloomberg Busi- Johnson in The Washington Post. CEO
nessweek, and a partnership between the Stéphane Bancel and other executives
University of Oxford and the pharma giant have “picked up the pace” of their stock
AstraZeneca is leading the race. A team selling as the share price rises, and chair-
of researchers at Oxford’s Jenner Institute man Noubar Afeyan’s venture capital
reported positive results this week from firm sold $68 million of Moderna stock.
an early-stage human trial with more than The selling has continued even as Securi-
1,000 participants, and the stock market ties and Exchange Commission head Jay
leaped at the news. The Oxford lab’s vac- Clayton cautioned Moderna to “avoid
cine is adenovirus-based; such vaccines even the appearance of impropriety.”
Several potential vaccines are in human trials.
have a small but critical “advantage over
other candidates: They need only to be kept chilled rather than Also raising questions is a $1.6 billion federal contract awarded to
frozen.” That could make worldwide distribution easier for Astra- Novavax, a company that has “never brought a vaccine to mar-
Zeneca, which struck a manufacturing deal with Oxford—as- ket,” said Katie Thomas and Megan Twohey in The New York
sisted by Bill Gates—“in about 10 days through a flurry of Zoom Times. The Trump administration wanted to “invest in a variety
calls.” After that deal was announced, “big money followed.” of vaccine technologies,” and Novavax’s approach holds out the
The biggest patron: The United States’ pandemic drug authority, possibility of faster vaccine production than some others. But crit-
BARDA, which handed AstraZeneca more than $1.2 billion; a ics see a second-tier player that has repeatedly “boosted its stock
test of 30,000 people in the U.S. is scheduled to start next month. by promising vaccines for new outbreaks, yet never delivering.”

The U.S. biotech upstart Moderna has also shown promising
preliminary results, said Peter Loftus and Gregory Zuckerman in
The Wall Street Journal, but “skepticism has dogged it since its
creation in 2010.” As its name suggests, the Cambridge, Mass.,
biotech firm uses a novel process involving the creation of syn-
thetic RNA. But while it has “more than 20 experimental drugs
and vaccines” in development, “none are close to being commer-
cially available.” Since Moderna’s Covid vaccine entered human
trials, its stock has risen more than 230 percent. That has let
some Moderna executives profit, even though their vaccine has
“Trump did promise America First,” said The Economist, and his
administration has “turned on the federal money hose” to achieve
it. The U.S. has already cut deals for priority access to Covid
treatments, causing alarm in countries that worry the U.S. will ex-
pect the same preference after “stumping up a lot of cash” in the
vaccine race. Another concern is that the FDA will “cut corners”
to ready a vaccine ready before the election. The agency says that
won’t happen, but it’s already been blasted for giving emergency
approval as a Covid treatment to hydroxychloroquine “to avoid
embarrassing the president,” who endorsed the drug.

Wall Street traders are getting rich off the Fed’s
Wall Street’s largesse, said Antony Currie. Last quarter, Morgan
easiest payday Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan each tucked
away more money to cover compensation than they
in years did in the same period last year. Goldman’s “pay and
compensation” bill grew 35 percent, while JPMor-
Antony Currie gan’s outlay for its investment bank rose 41 percent
BreakingViews.com and Morgan Stanley’s compensation costs jumped
65 percent. “Based purely on the banks’ perfor-
mance, that’s justified.” Buoyed by a blowout quar-
ter for bond trading, the three banks earned record
revenues, “and banker pay is supposed to be tied
to how much business they bring in.” But the trad-
ers didn’t earn these stellar returns “thanks purely
to their own skill and hard work.” The Federal
Reserve’s interest-rate actions and asset-purchasing
programs in response to the economic crisis set the
stage for a quarter of “gangbuster trading.” Banks
returning to “huge paydays while millions of Ameri-
cans are struggling” run the risk of triggering Wash-
ington’s institutional memory about their failings a
decade ago. When Goldman had a quarter like this
in 2009, it wisely set aside $500 million for charita-
ble contributions. Wall Street banks would be smart
to emulate this if they don’t want to find themselves
facing a new Occupy Wall Street movement.

The coronavirus is laying siege to the seemingly
Even Disney impregnable Magic Kingdom, said Erich Schwartzel
now looks and Joe Flint. The Disney brand was “widely
thought to be built to survive any economic calam-
vulnerable ity.” But the coronavirus is forcing it to address
some big vulnerabilities. New CEO Bob Chapek,
Erich Schwartzel and who succeeded longtime chief Bob Iger in February,
Joe Flint has to figure out how the “franchise machine”—
The Wall Street Journal turning a movie into toys, theme-park rides, TV
shows, and so on—can survive in an environment
in which Disney is “hoping people show up” to its
parks in the first place. Executives are now “scram-
bling to address what is looking to be a prolonged
crisis.” Iger himself has stepped back into the pic-
ture, wielding his business clout to negotiate some
“high-profile deals” that have so far kept Disney
in the game. Iger arranged for the NBA to resume
games in a “bubble” on the Disney World campus,
hoping to “jumpstart ESPN,” whose ratings have
plummeted. He also orchestrated the release of a
filmed performance of the hit Broadway musical
Hamilton in July, more than a year ahead of sched-
ule. Launched on Disney+, the streaming service
that has become a lifeline for the media company in
recent months, Hamilton was a huge hit. Disney is
going to need more like it.
AP

THE WEEK July 31, 2020

 Obituaries
The civil rights icon who became the ‘conscience of Congress’
John John Lewis spent his life fighting for
Lewis racial justice, as one of the giants of
1940–2020 the civil rights movement and then as
a 17-term U.S. representative known
as the “conscience of Congress.” A protégé of Martin
Luther King Jr., Lewis spent the 1960s on the front
lines of the battle to end segregation, combining a
commitment to nonviolence with a bulldog tenacity
that carried him through dozens of arrests and jail-
ings and many brutal beatings from police and white
mobs. Lewis led lunch counter sit-ins, was among the
13 original Freedom Riders who challenged the seg-
regation of interstate buses, and helped organize the
1963 March on Washington. On March 7, 1965, Lewis led one of
the era’s most pivotal actions, a march for voting rights in Selma,
Ala. Billy club–wielding state troopers met the peaceful marchers
with sheer brutality, wounding dozens and cracking the 25-year-
old Lewis’ skull. Televised footage of the assaults spurred outrage
and rallied support for the landmark Voting Rights Act, which was
signed into law five months later. The marchers “literally, in my
estimation, wrote the Voting Rights Act,” said Lewis, “with our
blood and with our feet on the streets of Selma.”
The son of sharecroppers and the third of 10 children, Lewis grew
up picking cotton and peanuts near Troy, Ala., said The New York
Times. The house had no plumbing or electricity; “in the outhouse,
they used the pages of an old Sears catalog as toilet paper.” His
family nicknamed him “Preacher,” and “becoming one seemed
to be his destiny.” Responsible for the farm’s chickens, he fancied
them as his congregation, giving them Bible readings, baptisms,
and funerals. Bristling at the South’s entrenched segregation—and
the local library’s refusal to grant him a card—“he drew inspira-
tion” from the radio addresses of the young Martin Luther King,
imagining, he later said, that King “was speaking directly to me,”
saying, “You can make a difference.”
Lewis moved to Nashville in 1958 to attend the American Baptist
Theological Seminary, where “aspiring black preachers willing
The minister and activist who preached nonviolence
C.T. When the Rev. C.T. Vivian took a punch
Vivian in Selma, Ala., he delivered a powerful
1924–2020 blow against racial injustice in the Jim
Crow South. A Baptist minister and a
field general in the civil rights movement, Vivian was
dispatched to Selma in 1965 by Martin Luther King Jr.
to register African-American voters. Standing on the
steps of the county courthouse with some 100 voters,
Vivian was ordered to leave by the city’s segregation-
ist sheriff, Jim Clark. “You can keep your club in your
hand,” Vivian said, jabbing a finger toward Clark, “but
you cannot beat down justice.” With TV cameras rolling, Clark
sucker punched Vivian and sent him tumbling down the steps. A
bloodied Vivian got back up and continued his sermon before being
arrested. His mistreatment helped draw thousands of protesters
to Alabama, and their efforts pushed Congress to pass the Voting
Rights Act later that year. “In no way,” Vivian said in 2011, “would
we allow nonviolence to be destroyed by violence.”
Getty, USA Today/Imagn
Born in Boonville, Mo., Cordy Tindell Vivian was raised by a
mother “who encouraged his pursuit of higher education,” said
The Washington Post. He attended what’s now Western Illinois
University but dropped out in protest after being barred from a
35
to take campus jobs could attend free,” said The
Washington Post. He “found the pull of social activ-
ism irresistible,” and was soon engaging in sit-ins and
voter registration drives—and enduring beatings and
his first arrest. The latter, he later wrote, felt like a
step “through the door into total, unquestioning com-
mitment.” In 1960, Lewis helped found the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which organized
demonstrations across the South. He moved to Atlanta
in 1963 to become the group’s chairman, earning
“$10 a week plus rent for a dingy apartment.”
As the civil rights movement gave way to the more
militant Black Power movement, Lewis saw his pacifist ideals fall
out of favor, said the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Ousted from
the SNCC in 1966 “along with the notion of nonviolence,” he was
replaced by the firebrand Stokely Carmichael. Lewis headed the
Voter Education Project for much of the 1970s, and in 1977 was
named director of a federal volunteerism agency by then–President
Jimmy Carter. “Lewis’ political career began in 1981, when he was
elected to the Atlanta City Council,” said the Los Angeles Times.
Five years later, he was elected to Congress, representing a district
that includes much of Atlanta.
“Age did not blunt his dedication to nonviolent direct action,”
said The Times (U.K.). As a congressman, Lewis was arrested at
protests against apartheid in South Africa and genocide in Darfur.
He worked to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which prohibits
employment discrimination, and to create the National Museum of
African American History; he fought for gun control and the rights
of gays and lesbians. In 2011, Lewis was awarded the Presidential
Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama. Despite being diagnosed
with pancreatic cancer last December, in June he joined a protest
near the White House following the killing of George Floyd by
Minneapolis police—and was deeply moved by the resulting upris-
ing. “People now understand what the struggle was all about,” he
said. “It’s another step down a very, very long road toward free-
dom, justice for all humankind.”
student club for English majors. After moving to
Peoria, Ill., “he joined his first protest,” said The New
York Times, helping to desegregate a lunch counter in
1947. Attending seminary in Nashville, Vivian studied
nonviolence alongside another future King aide, John
Lewis. They were among the first Freedom Riders
who, in 1961, rode by bus into the Deep South to
desegregate interstate transport. After the 1963 March
on Washington, King invited Vivian to join his staff;
he became national director of some 85 affiliate chap-
ters of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,
directing protests and coordinating voter registration drives.
Vivian was repeatedly jailed and beaten for his activism, said
TheUndefeated.com. While leading a 1964 protest at a segregated
beach in St. Augustine, Fla., he “was nearly drowned by a white
mob” who whipped black sunbathers with chains. “Vivian contin-
ued to serve in the SCLC after King’s assassination in 1968, becom-
ing its interim president in 2012,” said the Associated Press. A
lifelong campaigner for equality and justice, he never wavered from
King’s teachings. “We learned how to solve social problems without
violence,” Vivian said in 2012. “We cannot allow the nation or the
world to ever forget that.”
THE WEEK July 31, 2020
36 The last word
A crisis foretold—and ignored
The United States spent years preparing for a pandemic, said Joel Achenbach in The Washington Post. When one
came, the Trump administration ignored the advice of health officials and failed catastrophically in its response.

I
SABELLE PAPADIMITRIOU, The federal government
64, a respiratory therapist punted the coronavirus
in Dallas, had been treat- response to the states,
ing a surge of patients as the counties, and cities, said
Texas economy reopened. Cameron, who was senior
She developed coronavirus director for global health
symptoms June 27 and tested security and biodefense on
positive two days later. The the White House National
disease was swift and brutal. Security Council under
She died the morning of the President Barack Obama. “I
Fourth of July. just never expected that we
The holiday had always been would have such a lack of
her daughter’s favorite. Fiana federal leadership, and it’s
Tulip loved the family cook- been deliberate,” she said.
outs, the fireworks, the feel- “In a national emergency
ing of America united. Now that is a pandemic, spread-
she wonders whether she’ll ing between states, federal
ever be able to celebrate it leadership is essential. And if
again. In mourning, she’s there was any doubt about
furious. Tulip, 40, had seen that, we ran that experi-
As other countries recover, the U.S. South and West have become virus hot spots.
her country fail to control the ment from March and April
virus. She had seen Texas ease restrictions until now. It failed.”
new infections were few and far between.
even as case counts and hospitalizations

S
OMEHOW, THIS HIGHLY mobile virus
soared. She had seen fellow citizens refuse to Many countries did that. They have man- keeps sneaking up on communities,
wear a mask or engage in social distancing. aged to avoid the kind of dramatic viral seeding itself extensively before people
resurgence that is happening in the U.S. detect the breadth and intensity of the
“I feel like her death was a hundred percent Spain, Italy, Germany, and France—all
preventable. I’m angry at the Trump admin- devastated by the virus months ago—drove attack. That happened catastrophically in
istration. I’m angry with the state of our New York City early in the pandemic. The
coronavirus cases and deaths to relatively new outbreaks have been largely in the
politics. I’m angry at the people who even low levels. And in Asia, the picture is radi-
now refuse to wear masks,” she said. South and West.
cally different. In Taiwan, baseball fans sit
Six months after the coronavirus appeared in the stands and watch their teams play. This month, Roy Ramos, a reporter for
in America, the nation has failed spectacu- Japan has had fewer than 1,000 deaths WPLG-TV in Miami, noticed he had a
larly to contain it. Many countries have rig- from Covid-19. South Korea has had fewer cough. He and his wife, the station’s eve-
orously driven infection rates nearly to zero. than 300. Vietnam has recorded no deaths ning news anchor, Nicole Perez, went to get
In the United States, coronavirus transmis- from the virus. tested for the coronavirus. Positive—both
sion is out of control. The national response of them. Soon, another anchor and the sta-
is fragmented, shot through with political The United States’ mishandling of the pan- tion’s chief meteorologist had tested posi-
rancor and culture-war divisiveness. Testing demic has defied most experts’ predictions. tive, too. As of July 14, 10 station employ-
shortcomings that revealed themselves in In October, not long before the novel coro- ees had tested positive, including some who
March have become acute in July, with navirus began sickening people in China, had not been in the office or in contact with
week-long waits for results leaving the a comprehensive review ranked the pan- their co-workers. The virus was everywhere
country blind to real-time virus spread and demic preparedness of 195 countries. The in South Florida, which is now reeling from
rendering contact tracing nearly irrelevant. project—called the Global Health Security the pathogen’s assault.
Index and led by the Johns Hopkins Center “This is not a political message, but a
How the world’s richest country got into for Health Security and the Nuclear Threat personal one,” Perez’s co-anchor, Calvin
this dismal situation is a complicated tale Initiative—assigned scores to countries as
that exposes the flaws and fissures in a Hughes, told viewers. “Please, please wear
a way to warn them of the rising threat of a mask.”
nation long proud of its ability to meet infectious-disease outbreaks. With a score
cataclysmic challenges. If there was a mis- of 83.5 out of 100, the U.S. ranked No. 1. In the minds of many Americans, the
take to be made in this pandemic, the U.S. coronavirus crisis that was so alarming
has made it. The single biggest miscalcula- But the death rate from Covid-19 in the in March and April lost its fearsomeness
tion was rushing to reopen the economy U.S. looks like that of countries with vastly in May and June, when people tried to
while the virus was still spreading at high lower wealth, health-care resources, and resume something approximating a normal
rates through much of the country, experts technological infrastructure. How did the life. The shutdowns had been miserable,
say. The only way to reopen safely, epidemi- nation get caught so flat-footed? By not but they’d been effective. The success of
ologists said as far back as early April, was really trying, said Beth Cameron, who the shutdowns meant that many Americans
to “crush the curve”—to drive down the helped lead the project for the Nuclear did not personally know anyone sickened
rate of viral transmission to the point where Threat Initiative. by the virus. In places with low transmis-
AP

THE WEEK July 31, 2020


sion rates, the crisis seemed far away.
“We just let our guard down,” Ohio Gov.
Mike DeWine, a Republican, said in an
interview Friday. “Some people when they
heard, ‘Hey, Ohio’s open,’ what they men-
tally processed is, ‘It’s safe. We can go out
and do whatever we want to. It’s back to
normal.’”
“Florida a month ago is where Ohio is
today,’’ the governor said. “If we don’t want
to be Florida, we’ve got to change what
we’re doing. Everybody’s got to mask up.”
Kristin Urquiza, 39, said she tried warning
her father, Mark—a lifelong Republican—
against going out and risking infection.
In their home state of Arizona, as leaders
including Republican Gov. Doug Ducey
sprinted to reopen in May and June,
Urquiza could tell she was losing the argu-
ment. “When the president, the governor,
and people on cable news are all saying one
thing, how do you compete with that?” she
said. “He would push back. ‘I hear what
you’re saying, but why would the governor
say it’s safe to go out if it’s not true?’”
Her father died of the virus June 30. In the
obituary she wrote, she lashed out at gov-
ernment leaders. “He was a huge supporter
of Trump and Arizona Gov. Ducey. He
believed what they said. And they betrayed
him,” she said in an interview.
E
VEN BEFORE THE pandemic hit, local
public health agencies had been
devastated by years of staffing and
budget cuts. They had lost almost a quarter
of their overall workforce since 2008—a
cut of almost 60,000 workers, according
to national associations of health offi-
cials. The agencies’ main source of federal
funding—the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention’s emergency preparedness
budget—had been cut 30 percent since 2003.
The public health challenges are keenly felt
in Malheur County, a vast swath of mostly
federal rangeland in rural eastern Oregon.
About a quarter of its 30,000 residents live
in poverty. Teen pregnancy rates are double
the statewide rate. There’s one school nurse
for 10,000 square miles. Drug use is high.
The first coronavirus case hit March 30,
and for more than a month, the county
averaged one to two cases a week. There
was resistance to a statewide shutdown
in the conservative area, but most people
were willing to observe temporary restric-
tions, said Sarah Poe, director of the county
health department. But after a month or so,
residents began to complain of government
overreach. Many felt they had to resume
working to survive, she said. “People’s
response has been to just take care of them-
Getty
selves, take care of your own business, your
The last word
own family,” Poe said. “That’s not how this
virus works.”
Now, the coronavirus is a full-blown crisis
in Malheur County. Cases began soaring
three weeks ago, to 15 or 16 a day. As
of Friday, the county had 477 cases. The
cumulative positive rate since the first
case is nearly 16 percent—quadruple the
state’s rate.
Last week, facing an accelerating caseload,
Malheur County commissioners passed a
resolution that goes further than the state’s
mask order. It recommends gatherings of
no more than 10 people indoors or 25
outdoors, and mask-wearing in groups
Deaths in Texas are rising.
indoors and out. But resistance in the
county remains high. Poe said she regularly
gets hate mail and phone calls accusing her
of peddling a hoax. “We’re up against just
a ton of misinformation,” she said. “What
are we fighting here? We are fighting a virus
and our goal is to save lives. Let’s not be
distracted into fighting other people.”
The United States, experts say, is approach-
ing a tipping point at which its public
health systems could become so over-
whelmed that they begin to collapse.
Already, coronavirus test results take so
long to come back that they are almost
useless for anything except as a historical
record. The delays have a cascading effect.
Contact tracing is rendered ineffectual.
Containing the virus by isolation becomes
impossible. And as hospitals fill, the virus’
fatality rate could inch upward because
of overtaxed ICU nurses and doctors
struggling to care for so many.
But the most dangerous cascading
effect could be despair—a loss of hope,
along with the resolve to fight the virus,
warned Michael Osterholm, director of
the University of Minnesota’s Center for
Infectious Disease Research and Policy.
“When that happens, you lose the ability to
act rationally. You lose the commitment to
fight. You lose all chance of beating back
the virus,” he said.
Adam Fleming Petty, a writer in Grand
Rapids, Mich., said he feels that demoral-
37
ization acutely—as well as “so much rage”
at Trump and other political leaders whose
measures did not quell the virus enough to
allow many schools to open. “One thing
I told myself was, ‘OK, as long as school
starts back up in the fall, I can do this. I can
make it through the summer if I have that
goal waiting for me.’ Now that goal isn’t
there anymore,” said Petty.
This crisis has been sucked inexorably into
the vortex of political polarization. Trump
repeatedly downplayed the viral threat.
“You have 15 people, and the 15 within
a couple of days is going to be down to
close to zero,” he said in late February.
On Twitter, he cheered on citizen protests
of shutdowns that had been ordered by
Democratic governors. He did not wear a
mask in public until July 11.
Many Americans now believe the pandemic
has been exaggerated, or even fabricated,
by scientists and the mainstream news
media. The rejection of scientific expertise
has flowered into a conspiracy theory hold-
ing that the experts are lying as part of a
political agenda.
“The most outrageous lies are the ones
about Covid-19. Everyone is lying. The
CDC, Media, Democrats, our Doctors,
not all but most, that we are told to trust,”
former Wheel of Fortune game show host
Chuck Woolery tweeted July 12. Trump
retweeted that. Days later, Woolery revealed
that his son was sick with the virus, and he
has since taken down his Twitter account.
A
S SHE PREPARED for a three-day drive
across the country—from New York
to Texas—to bury her mother, Tulip
said she has been thinking a lot about what
it means to be American.
She was raised like many Texans, unabash-
edly proud of her roots and her patriotism.
“I grew up a Dallas Cowboys fan. All
about the Stars and Stripes. You know that
song ‘Proud to Be an American’? We would
literally sing that as kids in elementary
school and mean every word.”
Now, she said, she feels betrayed by both
her country and home state. For the past
two weeks, she and her husband have been
calling funeral homes in Brownsville, unable
to get through because the town has been
overwhelmed by the virus. “I desperately
want to believe we as a country can change,
that we can recover from where we are
now,” she said. “I want to believe that
America can get back to who we were, a
proud country, one where people can thrive
and not suffer.”
A version of this article originally appeared in
The Washington Post. Used with permission.
THE WEEK July 31, 2020
38 The Puzzle Page
Crossword No. 561: You’d Better Be Dam Sure by Matt Gaffney The Week Contest
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
This week’s question: A British pub has come up with a
novel way of enforcing social distancing: an electric fence
14 15 16
between bartenders and patrons. The fence isn’t usually
live, said the owner of the Star Inn, but “it can be turned
17 18 19
on.” If you were to rename this pub to reflect its electrify-
ing distancing technology, what would you call it?
20 21 22 23
Last week’s contest: NASA has issued a public call to the
24 25 26 27 nation’s “community of makers, garage tinkerers, and
citizen scientists” to help develop a zero-gravity toilet
28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 that can handle “simultaneous urination and defecation.”
What catchy—and family-friendly—name should NASA
37 38 39 40
give the resulting safe-for-space toilet?
THE WINNER: Zero Gravatory
41 42 43 44 Tim Mistele, Coral Gables, Fla.
SECOND PLACE: Emission Controller
45 46 47 48 Bill Doughty, Honolulu
49 50 51 52 THIRD PLACE: The Millennium Foulcan
Jeff Gaines, Fort Collins, Colo.
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theweek.com/contest.
56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65
How to enter: Submissions should be emailed to contest
@theweek.com. Please include your name, address, and
66 67 68 69
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70 71 72 by noon, Eastern Time, Tuesday, July 28. Winners will
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entries, the first one received gets credit.
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 Un
o
Discovered! Unopened Bag of 13 pen
8 Y ed
ea fo
138-Year-Old Morgan Silver Dollars rs! r

Coin experts amazed by

“Incredible Opportunity”
3 Historic Morgan Silver Dollars
3 Minted in New Orleans
3 Struck and bagged in 1882
The Morgan Silver Dollar is the most 3 Unopened for 138 years
popular and iconic vintage U.S. coin. They 3 26.73 grams of 90% fine silver
were the Silver Dollars of the Wild West,
3 Hefty 38.1 mm diameter
going on countless untold adventures in
dusty saddlebags across the nation. Finding 3Certified Brilliant Uncirculated
a secret hoard of Morgans doesn’t happen by NGC
often—and when it does, it’s a big deal. 3Certified “Great Southern
Treasury Hoard” pedigree
How big? Here’s numismatist, author 3 Limit five coins per household
and consultant to the Smithsonian®
Jeff Garrett:
Actual size is 38.1 mm
“It’s very rare to find large third-party grading service Numismatic
quantities of Morgan Silver Guaranty Corporation (NGC), and they agreed to honor
Dollars, especially in bags that the southern gentleman by giving the coins the pedigree of the “Great
have been sealed... to find several Southern Treasury Hoard.”
thousand Morgan Silver Dollars
that are from the U.S. Treasury These gorgeous 1882-O Morgans are as bright and new as the day
Hoards, still unopened, is really they were struck and bagged 138 years ago. Coins are graded on a
an incredible opportunity.” 70-point scale, with those graded at least Mint State-60 (MS60) often
referred to as “Brilliant Uncirculated” or BU. Of all 1882-O Morgans
-Jeff Garrett
struck, LESS THAN 1% have earned a Mint State grade. This makes
But where did this unique hoard come from? Read on... these unopened bags of 1882-O Morgans extremely rare, certified as
being in BU condition—nearly unheard of for coins 138 years old.
Morgans from the New Orleans Mint
In 1859, Nevada’s Comstock Lode was discovered, and soon its rich Don’t Miss This Rare Opportunity—Order Now!
silver ore made its way across the nation, including to the fabled Regular 1882-O Morgans sell elsewhere for as much as $133, and
New Orleans Mint, the only U.S. Mint branch to have served under that’s without the original brilliant shine these “fresh” 138-year-
the U.S. government, the State of Louisiana and the Confederacy. old coins have, without their special NGC hoard designation,
In 1882, some of that silver was struck into Morgan Silver Dollars, and without their ability to tell their full, complete story from the
each featuring the iconic “O” mint mark of the New Orleans Mint. Comstock Lode all the way to your collection.
Employees then placed the freshly struck coins into canvas bags... Given the limited quantity of coins available from this historic hoard,
The U.S. Treasury Hoard we must set a strict limit of five coins per household. Call quickly to
Fast-forward nearly 80 years. In the 1960s, the U.S. government secure yours today as supplies are sure to sell out quickly!
opened its vaults and revealed a massive store of Morgan Silver 1882-O Morgan Silver Dollar NGC Certified BU from the
Dollars—including full, unopened bags of “fresh” 1882-O Morgan Great Southern Treasury Hoard — $99 ea.
Silver Dollars. A number of bags were secured
by a child of the Great Depression—a southern FREE SHIPPING on 2 or More!
gentleman whose upbringing showed him the Limited time only. Product total over $149 before taxes (if any).
value of hard assets like silver. He stashed the Standard domestic shipping only. Not valid on previous purchases.
unopened bags of “fresh” Morgans away, and
there they stayed... Call today toll-free for fastest service

The Great Southern Treasury Hoard 1-888-324-9125

That is, until another 50 years later, when the Offer Code MSH233-01
man’s family finally decided to sell the coins— Please mention this code when you call
still in their unopened bags—which we secured,
bag and all! We submitted the coins to respected

GovMint.com • 14101 Southcross Dr. W., Suite 175, Dept. MSH233-01, Burnsville, MN 55337

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