Table of contents for January 16, 2026 in The Week Magazine

Why did Donald Trump direct the military to invade a sovereign country and drag its head of state away in a blindfold and handcuffs? Oil and hemispheric control may have been contributing factors, but Trump’s fundamental motivation in seizing control of Venezuela was quite simple: to show us all that he can! The commander in chief of the world’s mightiest military has demonstrated he can do whatever the hell he wants—and that anyone who defies his demands may wake up to explosions and automatic weapon fire. The politically independent generals who repeatedly restrained Trump in his first term are long gone, and his cosplaying “Secretary of War,” Pete Hegseth, enthusiastically shares his boss’s fixation with martial flexing. Maduro “f’d around and found out,” Hegseth chortled. “America can project our will…

■ Texas A&M University has ordered a philosophy professor to stop teaching Plato. The school recently banned academic courses that “advocate race or gender ideology.” After reviewing the syllabus for professor Martin Peterson’s “Contemporary Moral Problems” course, officials instructed him to remove two passages from Plato’s Symposium, written around 380 B.C., discussing the origins of human sexuality, and gave him 24 hours to confirm his willingness to “mitigate your course content.” ■ McDonald’s has been hit with a class-action lawsuit that claims the fast-food giant deceptively markets the McRib, which despite its name “does not contain any actual pork rib meat.” In a statement, McDonald’s insisted the “fan-favorite McRib sandwich is made with 100% pork” and vowed to challenge the plaintiffs’ “inaccurate” allegations that the patty includes ground-up, lower-grade “heart,…

Rosie O’Donnell just can’t help herself, said Geoff Edgers in The Washington Post. The comedian and talk show host has a compulsion to aid strangers in peril, a mothering urge that she traces back to age 10, when her own mother died. It was that urge that led O’Donnell to blast Donald Trump on The View in 2006 as a “snake oil salesman” for his showy, drawn-out deliberations over whether to uncrown a scandal-hit Miss USA. It was the start of a feud that raged through Trump’s first presidential term, an experience she had no desire to relive. So in early 2025, O’Donnell fled to Ireland with her family, fearing what life under a second Trump administration might look like for a lesbian with five adopted children. “People said, ‘Why…

Austin Sarat MS.now When House Republicans summoned former special prosecutor Jack Smith to defend his aborted prosecution of Donald Trump last month, said Austin Sarat, he “made them look foolish.” His testimony was such a disaster for Trump, in fact, that the House Judiciary Committee released the transcript on New Year’s Eve, hoping no one would pay attention. Nonetheless, Smith provided a compelling “refresher course” on the crimes Trump committed while trying “to hold on to power after losing the 2020 election, as well as the cavalier way he dealt with sensitive national security information after leaving the White House.” Smith methodically laid out the evidence that Trump broke numerous laws in his attempted coup and his theft of classified documents, and said he believed “we had proof beyond a…

Waleed Aly The Sydney Morning Herald How can we guard against leaderless terrorism like the Bondi Beach attack? asked Waleed Aly. The father-and-son murderers who gunned down 15 people at a Hanukkah celebration last month weren’t simply “two crazed people in isolation”—they were inspired by ISIS. The jihadist group may have suffered the “destruction of its purported caliphate” in 2019, but the massacre in Sydney shows that ISIS “still matters,” not as an organization but “as a brand” that can inspire any Islamist radical. This time, it was the Bondi attackers, including one born here in Australia. A year ago, it was a U.S. military veteran from Texas, who drove a truck through a crowd in New Orleans. The year before that, it was a 15-year-old Tunisian boy, who stabbed…

■ President Trump takes 325 milligrams of aspirin a day, according to his physician, Navy Capt. Sean Barbabella—four times the dose doctors recommend for cardiovascular disease prevention. “They’d rather have me take the smaller one,” Trump, 79, said of his doctors. “They say aspirin is good for thinning out the blood, and I don’t want thick blood.” The Wall Street Journal ■ The number of Indian students arriving in the U.S. to study at colleges and universities dropped 44% last year, to about 41,000, as the Trump administration cracked down on immigration. As of 2025, Indians were the largest contingent of foreign students at U.S. universities, accounting for nearly 1 in 3 international students. The New York Times ■ Russia seized control last year of an extra 1,864 square miles…

■ 68% of Americans believe 2026 will be an economically difficult year. 59% think consumer prices will rise at a high rate, and 62% believe unemployment will increase. Gallup ■ 80% of Americans believe political institutions have been captured by the rich and powerful, with 74% saying that leaders who come from ordinary backgrounds are better equipped to represent them. Still, 58% say complex societal problems can be effectively addressed only by well-run government institutions. The Economist/YouGov…

■ Swipe right to see my résumé Struggling job seekers are turning to dating apps to find a match with an employer, said Georgia Hall and Jeff Green in Bloomberg. According to the career platform ResumeBuilder.com, 1 in 3 users on a dating app last year said “they had sought matches” to land a job, not a date, and two-thirds “targeted potential paramours who worked at a desirable employer.” Career-focused singles say traditional job portals are so flooded with résumés they stand little chance to get noticed, while dating apps offer a potential “path to a live hiring manager.” One Hinge user, Kait O’Neill, has networked so much that she feels badly “about matching with men solely based on their profession.” She eventually changed her dating-app profile to read that…

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have spotted what may be the strangest exoplanet ever discovered, reports Space.com. PSR J2322-2650b is a Jupiter-size world some 2,000 light-years from Earth that is locked in a tight, eight-hour orbit around a pulsar. Planets circling pulsars—ultra-dense, rapidly spinning neutron stars—are rare but not unprecedented. What makes this one exceptional is its distorted, lemon-like shape, produced by the nearby pulsar’s intense gravitational pull. And its atmosphere is downright bizarre, dominated by helium and carbon and featuring soot clouds that rain diamonds. At the extreme temperatures on this planet—1,200 degrees Fahrenheit on the nightside and more than 3,700 degrees on the dayside—carbon should bond with oxygen or nitrogen. That it doesn’t in this case has left scientists puzzled. “It’s extremely different from what we…

Matthew Pearl is the best-selling author of the historical thrillers The Dante Club, The Poe Shadow, and The Last Dickens. Below, he recommends six books that were influences on The Award, his darkly satirical new novel about an unscrupulous fiction writer. Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith (1950). Highsmith is in a league of her own. Her first novel is a study in building stakes through an approach I call “cringe suspense,” in which the reader is pleading with characters not to do what they’re doing. This creates friction not just between characters but between the novel and reader, keeping pages turning. The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith (1955). Once a year, I devour “the Ripliad,” the five novels in Highsmith’s series about Tom Ripley. While planning my…

Directed by Gus Van Sant (R) An angry Indiana man takes a lender hostage. Gus Van Sant’s first feature in seven years has “the breezily watchable feel” of a movie you might catch on Sunday-afternoon cable TV, said Marshall Shaffer in The Playlist. “A well-oiled machine,” Dead Man’s Wire dramatizes a real-life 1977 incident in which an Indianapolis mortgage broker was held hostage by a man named Tony Kiritsis who believed the company had sabotaged his attempt to finally make a few bucks. Portrayed here as “both bumbling and brilliant,” Kiritsis won his bid to air his grievances on national TV, all while keeping a shotgun wired to his captive’s neck in a way that ensured instant death if anyone intervened. A “crackling” lead performance by Bill Skarsgard carries this…

Elon Musk’s artificial-intelligence company, xAI, announced this week it raised $20 billion in its latest funding round, said Carmen Arroyo and Edward Ludlow in Bloomberg. The total surpasses the company’s $15 billion target, which was expected to bring the startup’s valuation to $230 billion. xAI “is eager for capital” and “still needs billions more, given that the company has been burning through $1 billion per month” building data centers. The news comes as xAI’s chatbot, Grok, faces scrutiny for “allowing users to post images of people,” including children, “undressed without their consent.” Wages: Millions of workers get a raise in 2026 The new year brought a wave of minimum-wage hikes across the country, said Jared Mitovich in The Wall Street Journal. Nineteen states “raised their minimum wage” starting last week,…

■ Investors remain bullish in 2026 Wall Street expects the market to keep rallying in 2026, said The Economist. “A recent survey by Bloomberg shows that the average investment strategist expects America’s S&P 500 share index to climb by 9% over the coming year.” That’s a decent return, but not spectacular; the index rose 16.5% in 2025. Even the most bearish forecaster “thought that the index would rise by 1%,” and the “most bullish by 18%.” Another way to gauge expectations is to look at the data on available “put” options for the S&P if it falls 30%. “The prices of such contracts” suggest “the probability that traders assign to a stock market crash.” But you won’t find many who are panicking. The crash probability, based on available options data,…

Matteo Wong The Atlantic Elon Musk’s social media platform is turning into a “pornography machine,” said Matteo Wong. Users of X have recently been replying to photos “of real people—celebrities and noncelebrities, including some who appear to be young children”—and asking the platform’s AI chatbot, Grok, to “put her in a bikini,” “take her dress off,” or “spread her legs.” Again and again, the bot complied: Copyleaks, an image authenticator, estimated that “Grok generated one nonconsensual sexual image every minute in a roughly 24-hour stretch.” X has removed a number of these images, but many are still visible, and there appears to be little urgency in its efforts to combat the issue. Musk himself has largely laughed it off. It seems sexual harassment is a feature of Grok, not a…

What happened Confusion reigned in Venezuela this week after the U.S. toppled President Nicolás Maduro in a lightning military operation, with President Trump saying the U.S. would now “run” the country while the remaining leaders of the autocratic regime insisted they were in charge. Trump gave no details of how the nation of 28 million would be governed, following an early-morning raid that seized Maduro and brought him and his wife, Cilia Flores, to New York City to stand trial on narco-terrorism charges. But, Trump asserted, “We’re going to run it, fix it.” Elections, he said, would be held “at the right time.” Trump demanded “total access” to Venezuela’s vast oil reserves (see Talking Points, p.16) and announced the interim government would give the U.S. up to 50 million barrels…

What happened The death toll mounted in Iran this week, as the regime used live fire to try to put down the most widespread protests in years despite President Trump’s threat to intervene if demonstrators were killed. At least three dozen Iranians have been killed in the protests, which began last month among shopkeepers in Tehran angry over the deep devaluation of the currency and have since spread across the country. The rial has lost half its value in the past year, and the price of cooking oil tripled in just the past week. Crowds chanted “Death to the dictator!” and “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, my life for Iran,” a reference to the Islamic Republic’s support for Hamas and Hezbollah. Security forces responded with tear gas and live ammunition, even…

Product placement, after Nike sold out of a gray $260 sweat suit within hours of President Trump sharing a photo online of a handcuffed and blindfolded Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro wearing the fleece-lined athletic gear during his transport to the U.S. Productivity, after President Trump unleashed a salvo of 89 social media posts between 12:45 a.m. and 1:40 a.m. on a Sunday night. Averaging one post every 37 seconds, Trump’s fusillade touched on such topics as Somali day-care fraud, the “stolen” 2020 election, and Barack Obama’s ineligibility to be president of the United States. Prophecy, after a group of Peruvian shamans, giving their annual New Year’s predictions, said 2026 would see Trump overthrow Venezuela’s Maduro, which he did just three days later. Ominously for Trump, the shamans also predicted the…

Chevy Chase has few fans in the entertainment business, said Nicole Sperling in The New York Times. The famously abrasive 82-year-old comedian and actor is so unpopular that he was excluded from Saturday Night Live’s 50th-anniversary special last year, despite being the show’s first Weekend Update anchor in 1975. Director John Carpenter said his experience working with Chase on a 1992 movie made him want to quit Hollywood. And in 2014, Chase was written off his last major job, the NBC comedy Community, after clashing repeatedly with the showrunner and using the N-word on set while fuming in regard to his character’s bigotry. Why does he consistently rub people the wrong way? “Maybe they thought I was full of myself,” he says, but he also suspects people don’t “really like…

Kim Wehle The Bulwark The Supreme Court has finally handed President Trump a defeat—but with a dangerous loophole, said Kim Wehle. Trump announced last week an end to National Guard deployments in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland, Ore., after the high court ruled that he lacks the authority “to co-opt National Guard troops and thrust them in American cities basically just because he feels like it.” The 6-3 decision constituted “a rare rebuke” of the president, but don’t mistake it for a signal that “a subset of the court’s right-wing justices has had a change of heart about the mad king.” Conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a concurring opinion noting that while the Posse Comitatus Act forbids the use of the military on U.S. soil, another law, the Insurrection Act,…

“To some, Jan. 6 felt like an ending, the final, violent death spasms of the cult of Trump. Instead, it proved to be the dawn of Trump’s total liberation. He had stress-tested his own theory of his base: that they would swallow insane, ludicrous election lies simply because he asked them to, would march themselves into felonies because they thought he wanted them to. Ever since, Trump has lived his life in accordance with the lessons he learned that day. There was no act of selfishness or vindictiveness too grotesque for him to survive, provided he kept his people adequately juiced in the belief that their enemies were worse. We’ve never left the Jan. 6 era.” Andrew Egger in The Bulwark…

Paola Holguín El Colombiano President Gustavo Petro has given Colombians a Christmas present they may soon want to send back, said Paola Holguín. At the end of the year, just as the nation was debating the “unconstitutionality and inappropriateness” of his declaration of an economic emergency to justify raising taxes, Petro also raised the minimum wage, by 23%. The increase brings the monthly wage to a ridiculous $470—much higher than Brazil’s monthly minimum of $295—conveniently ahead of elections scheduled in May. The president said the windfall would “democratize wealth so that working people, who make up the majority of the Colombian population, can live better.” That “may seem like good news to the naive among us,” but in fact it will have “serious consequences for millions of Colombians.” Petro’s irresponsible…

Thomas Legrand Libération Brigitte Bardot was an emblem of a “bygone France,” said Thomas Legrand. The film star, who died last week at age 91, personified the “Thirty Glorious Years,” that era from the end of World War II through the mid-1970s when a “radiant, vibrant, and powerful” France showed the traumatized world how to emerge resplendent from the horrors of war. Back then, France represented the future. With its rapid economic growth, it was “the driving force of a Europe that was not yet united.” Everyone then saw us as they saw Bardot, “through Hollywood’s eyes—charming, chic, artistic, refined, free-spirited, and full of life.” With her “insolent beauty” she shed old taboos, helping to create a culture where “one could laugh at anything, flirt, drive fast, smoke in the…

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani almost makes “socialism sound appealing,” said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial—“if you missed the last century.” The 34-year-old democratic socialist was inaugurated last week, with Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont administering his oath of office. A mayor’s inaugural address “isn’t typically of national interest,” but Mamdani has “real charisma and political talent” and represents the mostly young Democratic left, who’ve lost faith in capitalism. His speech “laid out the large scope of his socialist ambition and how little it is rooted in reality.” His most alarming proclamation: “We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” That last word evokes “the greatest killers of the 20th century,” including Stalin and Mao, who elevated the collective over individual rights.…

Archaeologists have uncovered evidence that early humans made and controlled fire as long as 400,000 years ago, fully 350,000 years earlier than previously thought. The discovery comes from a site at Barnham, in eastern England, where researchers found the remains of a hearth made from baked earth. The site also contained heat-shattered flint tools and fragments of iron pyrite, a mineral used to strike sparks. Together, the finds suggest that early humans, most likely Neanderthals, had not only learned how to keep alive natural blazes but could also light their own fires from scratch. At early human settlement sites discovered in Africa and the Middle East that show burn traces, it’s unclear whether the fires were set deliberately. At Barnham, though, chemical analysis of the soil reveals repeated, high-temperature burning…

Good news for those who overindulged over the holidays: Eating full-fat cheese could keep your mind sharp. Researchers in Sweden followed 27,000 adults over 25 years and found that those who regularly ate high-fat cheese and cream at the start of the study period were less likely to develop dementia than those who didn’t. Intake of 50 grams of cheese a day, or roughly two slices of cheddar, correlated with a 13% lower overall risk of dementia and a larger reduction in vascular dementia. A similar association was found for small daily amounts of full-fat cream. But there was no apparent protective effect from low-fat cheese, milk, butter, or yogurt. Lead author Emily Sonestedt, from Lund University, tells The Times (U.K.) the findings suggest that “not all dairy is equal”…

For some married middle-aged white men, Ben Markovits’ new novel about a cross-country road trip might hit too close to home, said Ron Charles in The Washington Post. “But anyone willing to consider the thicket of fears, affections, and recriminations that grow through the cracks of a long relationship will find in these pages an almost unbearable sadness.” Tom Layward, at 55, still mildly resents his wife for a years-earlier affair, and when he drops their younger child off at college, he simply keeps driving west. As he does, the story “accrues an irresistible momentum of sympathy.” Unfortunately, Tom evinces “no evidence of personal growth,” said Cory Oldweiler in The Boston Globe. Instead, he remains one of the many privileged white men who feel themselves wronged. “Introspection is simply not…

Motherland by Julia Ioffe (Ecco, $35) Journalist Julia Ioffe was deeply disappointed when she briefly returned to her native Russia in 2009, said Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times. Though female doctors in her family stretched back three generations, the Soviet commitment to women’s equality had dramatically eroded. Ioffe decided to find out why, and “the result is an enthralling narrative,” a feminist history of post-revolutionary Russia that’s eye-opening before it reaches an “unsparingly bleak” portrait of the present. Swoon by Bea Martinez-Gatell (Biteback, $26) At least since a young Frank Sinatra shot to stardom, “the female teenager has been a force with which to reckon,” said Sibbie O’Sullivan in The Washington Post. This “highly readable” history of female fandom reaches back further, making case studies of Lord Byron,…

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, through April 5 “On this side of the Atlantic, her name usually elicits a puzzled ‘Who?’” said Karen Wilkin in The Wall Street Journal. But Helene Schjerfbeck (1862–1946) is revered in Finland as the nation’s greatest painter, and the new survey of her work at the Met should awaken America to the fact that she’s “a modern painter to be reckoned with.” Schjerfbeck took up art at age 4 after a fall that necessitated a long recuperation and earned admission to an art academy at the “astonishing” age of 11. By her teens, she was gaining national recognition, and some of the earliest works in this show of 56 paintings “make you come to a full stop.” But it was the decades after…

Directed by Jim Jarmusch (R) A portrait of family by way of three awkward gatherings “Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother finds the director in a minor key, which is sometimes his best key,” said Bilge Ebiri in NYMag.com. Like such Jarmusch “masterpieces” as 1984’s Stranger Than Paradise and 2016’s Paterson, this Venice film festival award winner mines the mundane for humor and emotional effect. Even so, “it’s much more stripped down and oblique,” a quiet triptych in which each of the parts is a snapshot of a “disarmingly spare” family get-together. The movie is “funniest at the start,” said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast, as Adam Driver, Mayim Bialik, and Tom Waits co-star in a chapter about two adult siblings who during a rare visit with their semi-reclusive…

Though stout is delicious year-round, “the beer’s toasty flavors make for an especially comforting winter pour,” said Penelope Bass in Imbibe. As sales of Guinness in the U.S. continue rising, many brewers are seeking to catch the wave by dialing back the alcohol content and container sizes of their own stouts. Below, three worth sampling. Left Hand Nitro Milk Stout ($14 per six-pack). The smooth texture of this “extra-creamy” Colorado offering “complements the beer’s flavors of coffee, chocolate, and brown sugar.” Bell’s Kalamazoo Stout ($12.50 per six-pack). Another stout that comes in at a modest 6% ABV, this Michigan beer “features notes of roasted coffee and dark chocolate, and some complementary complexity from brewer’s licorice.” Lawson’s Finest Nitro Stout ($15 per four-pack). A hit in Lawson’s Vermont taproom for years,…

Amtrak’s Mardi Gras Service A recent journey made possible by Amtrak’s new Mardi Gras Service “reinforced for me rail travel’s timeless charms,” said Sarah Stodola in The New York Times. Since August, a train runs twice daily between New Orleans and Mobile, Ala., making it possible for the first time since 2005’s Hurricane Katrina to “explore this stretch of coast, and explore it well, without a car.” I passed a few days visiting the string of “pleasantly walkable” coastal towns that dot the 150-mile run. After leaving New Orleans at sunset one evening, I first overnighted in Gulfport, Miss., where I chatted with a bartender at the Siren Social Club over fried eggplant before finding most of the nighttime action near arty Fishbone Alley. In Biloxi, the Frank Gehry–designed Ohr-O’Keefe…

The office is getting so casual that some companies are prohibiting footwear, said Lora Kelley in The New York Times. At a growing number of firms, employees are told “to leave their Vans and Uggs at the door” in keeping with a “no-shoes policy.” Some companies are really setting the mood with soft rugs, while others “offer free slippers.” At Spur, an AI-driven quality-assurance firm in New York City, workers and guests are asked to slip into a pair of branded sandals. The policy, said Spur co-founder Sneha Sivakumar, makes the workplace “feel like a second home.” That tracks for Stanford’s Nicholas Bloom, who studies work culture. He says people have been bringing their work-from-home habits into the office since the pandemic, an expansion of what he calls “the pajama…

Founded in 2008, the nonprofit South Asian American Digital Archive (saada.org) maintains a digital collection of photographs, letters, interviews, newspaper clippings, and more to serve as a leading source for South Asian American history. Thousands of these records are available on its website, and members of the public can sort through them by topic—including “campus organizations,” “early women students,” “political engagement,” and “trailblazers.” Its mission is centered on the belief that immigrants from India, Pakistan, Nepal, and other South Asian countries have formed an integral and unsung part of American history that visitors to its award-winning archive will discover. The nonprofit also hosts art exhibits, talks, and workshops; offers a fellowship program; and organizes innovative community projects and popular walking tours in Harlem and Philadelphia. Each charity we feature has…

Ana Swanson The New York Times “As concerns about affordability grow,” President Trump keeps adding tariff carve-outs to buffer the damage from his own trade policy, said Ana Swanson. The White House “raised the taxes that the U.S. charges on imports last year to levels not seen in a century.” That’s on paper. The “actual tariff rate” paid by businesses at the end of September averaged 14.1%, according to a new working paper from economists at Harvard University and the University of Chicago, or “about half the tariff rate that the administration had officially announced.” There are multiple reasons for that. Roughly 90% of goods coming from Canada and Mexico, for instance, aren’t getting taxed because of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement “which Trump signed in his first term.” Tariff evasion,…

Maduro and Flores were arraigned in a Manhattan courtroom this week, kicking off the U.S. government’s “most consequential prosecution in decades of a foreign head of state,” said Michael R. Sisak in the Associated Press. A 25-page indictment charges them and other regime figures with working with cartels to ship thousands of tons of cocaine into the U.S., and ordering the beatings, kidnappings, and murders of those who hindered them or owed drug money. In leg shackles and “jail-issued garb,” they pleaded not guilty. Meanwhile, in Venezuela, a “new wave of repression” is being unleashed, said María Luisa Paúl in The Washington Post. The regime “moved quickly to suppress any public expression of support” for Maduro’s ouster, with pro-government paramilitary groups setting up checkpoints where residents were questioned and had…

Trump administration freezes billions in blue-state aid In the wake of a major welfare fraud scandal in Minnesota, the Department of Health and Human Services this week said it is cutting off $10 billion in aid to five Democratic states, citing suspicions of widespread misuse without providing evidence. Minnesota, New York, California, Illinois, and Colorado will be excluded from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, which offers cash support to households with children, and will lose almost $2.4 billion meant for child care for working parents and $870 million in grants that largely aided at-risk children. HHS said it had “concerns” that federal aid was being funneled to undocumented immigrants but did not elaborate. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul vowed to take legal action over the freeze, saying, “Our…

Pamela Anderson sometimes wishes she was Pamela Hyytiainen, said Clare McInerney in Vogue Scandinavia. That was the surname of her Finnish grandfather before he immigrated to Canada and became an Anderson. “He was the closest person to me in my life,” she says. Her grandfather taught her Finnish as a child, and she carried a Finnish dictionary around to impress him with new words. But he died when she was about 11, and the language “kind of left with him.” The actress remains close to her roots, though. She bought her grandparents’ Vancouver Island property 30 years ago and still lives in her childhood home, “which is triggering and crazy,” she laughs. Anderson, 58, lovingly tends a garden she christened Arkady, brimming with both flowers and vegetables. Most of her…

■ Will Smith is being sued for sexual harassment and wrongful termination by a violinist who accuses the rapper and actor of “grooming” him. In a lawsuit filed last week, Brian King Joseph, 35, said that while working on a Smith album in early 2025, the “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It” star told him they had a “special connection.” Joseph joined Smith, 57, for a March concert in Las Vegas, and went to his hotel room one evening to find someone had “unlawfully” entered and left behind wipes, HIV medication, and a note that read, “Brian, I’ll be back no later 5:30, just us [drawn heart], Stone F.” Fearing the intruder would return, Joseph said he reported the break-in to hotel security and Smith’s team. In response, the complaint alleges, a…

Adam Serwer The Atlantic Government censorship has arrived in the U.S., said Adam Serwer, and it’s being carried out by “yesterday’s free-speech champions.” The most vivid example of this hypocrisy is Bari Weiss, who was “recently installed at the head of CBS News by Paramount’s new owner, the pro-Trump billionaire David Ellison.” Weiss rose to prominence as a writer who challenged the cancel culture of the “illiberal left.” But in her new role, she’s gatekeeping “on behalf of right-wing interests”—and Trump himself. She recently spiked a 60 Minutes report on CECOT, the brutal El Salvador prison where the Trump administration has sent hundreds of migrants to be tortured. It was a story the Trump administration and Ellison did not want to air, so Weiss claimed the story needed more balance.…

With his attack on Venezuela, Donald Trump “is not acting like a classic imperialist,” said Isidro H. Cisneros in La Cronica de Hoy (Mexico), but rather like “a pirate.” Even as he claimed that the military raid to kidnap President Nicolás Maduro last week was intended to combat drug trafficking, he couldn’t help but admit that his “true aim” was to grab Venezuela’s vast oil reserves and exert “U.S. hegemony” over North and South America. Under Trump, the U.S. will no longer be the upholder of international law or even of property rights. Instead, he has launched the world into an era in which a country can “militarily occupy neighboring nations” solely to “extract plunder.” In destroying the rules-based international order built by the U.S. after World War II, Trump…

Peter Orry JydskeVestkysten Donald Trump hasn’t given up on his quest to wrest Greenland from Denmark, said Peter Orry. The U.S. president refuses to rule out an invasion, and he’s doubling down on his insistence that America’s national interests require it to possess the huge, mineral-rich Arctic island. Now Trump has appointed “one of his most vocal supporters,” Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, as special envoy, and Landry promptly said he would work to make Greenland part of the U.S. The rhetoric is so crazy that it makes you want to “take up arms, at least rhetorical ones.” Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and Greenland Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen have been firm, insisting that Greenland’s fate can be decided only by Greenlanders. They are right to show Trump a “shoulder colder…

If your ancestors fought in the Revolutionary War, are you more American than someone whose grandparents landed at Ellis Island in 1920? asked Jonah Goldberg in The Dispatch. A growing contingent of “Very Online right-wingers” thinks so, claiming that “Heritage Americans” who can trace their family tree back to the nation’s earliest days deserve special status. This blood-and-soil nationalism—in which Jews, Asian Americans, and others are second-class citizens—has been popularized by white supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes. But a softer version is being peddled by top Republicans, including Vice President JD Vance, who in a speech this summer claimed “America is not just an idea. We’re a particular place with a particular people.” Not all Republicans agree, said Nicholas Mitchell in MS.now. Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy infuriated MAGA last month…

“And now we welcome the new year. Full of things that have never been.” Rainer Maria Rilke, quoted in Good Housekeeping “Love is that short period of time when someone else holds the same opinion of us as we do of ourselves.” Polish writer Magdalena Samozwaniec, quoted in The Atlantic “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” Frederick Douglass, quoted in The Orange County Register “We’re living in the age of Occam’s chainsaw, when the preferred answer is the one that makes the loudest noise and generates the most debris.” A.O. Scott, quoted in The New York Times “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” Madeleine Albright, quoted in the Vermont Daily Chronicle “The world…

“There is perhaps no more traditionally masculine literary genre than the seafaring tale,” said Jennifer Wright in The New York Times. “So it is exciting to read Tilar J. Mazzeo’s The Sea Captain’s Wife,” an account of how, in 1856, a Massachusetts woman named Mary Ann Patten became the first female captain of a merchant clipper ship while 19 and pregnant. When her husband, the ship’s captain, was stricken with tubercular meningitis as the 216-foot triple master neared the world’s most dangerous ocean passage, Patten called upon the knowledge she’d accumulated over the previous two years to win the crew’s support. The mutinous first mate had already been shackled below deck when Patten seized command of Neptune’s Car, and Mazzeo recounts the subsequent action “with a no-nonsense crispness that feels…

Allen Levi keeps adding surprising new chapters to his life story, said Sophia Nguyen in The Washington Post. A Georgia lawyer who quit the profession in his 40s, he toured the world as a singer-songwriter well into his 50s before he decided to slow down, and he served briefly as a probate judge in his home county before beginning to write his first novel, one of the surprise breakout hits of 2025. Levi’s Theo of Golden tells of a traveler who arrives in the fictional small Southern city of Golden, is dazzled by the pencil portraits lining a coffee shop’s walls and decides to purchase and make gifts of them to all 92 of the depicted subjects. Levi, now 69, began writing the tale during the Covid pandemic and never…

Directed by Park Chan-wook (R) A victim of downsizing turns murderous. Park Chan-wook’s “mordantly hilarious” new comedy “skewers capitalism with much of the same wit, sadness, and slapstick buffoonery that made Parasite so resonant,” said David Ehrlich in IndieWire. Squid Game villain Lee Byung-hun stars as a laid-off paper company veteran who’s so desperate to preserve his family’s upper-middle-class existence that he schemes to murder the other contenders for his potential bounce-back job. “Plotted with ornate precision but unfolding with the panic of a desperate man,” the latest Korean-language feature from the director of Oldboy and The Handmaiden is “a slaphappy movie with a surprisingly powerful sting.” Because Lee’s character is such an incompetent killer, No Other Choice “plays like a vicious episode of Looney Tunes,” said Brian Tallerico in RogerEbert.com.…

This Is Spinal Tap Reiner’s 1984 directorial debut inaugurated America’s lasting love affair with mockumentaries, as he used handheld cameras and talking-head interviews to chronicle the calamitous American tour of a fictional British heavy metal band. Crank it up to 11. HBO Max Stand by Me Two years later, Reiner was back with an adaptation of a Stephen King short story that put aside satire to tell a moving tale about four 12-year-old boys whose friendship is tested and strengthened when they make an overnight trek down a railroad line for a chance to see a dead body. Netflix The Princess Bride Some directors work at creating a definitive style. Reiner could go anywhere, and in 1987 he returned to satire, this time to unspool a storybook adventure about a…

Costco’s side business in travel booking isn’t well known, but “sleeping on their deals could cost you,” said Dawn Gilbertson in The Wall Street Journal. On its Costco Travel website, the warehouse retailer offers members great deals on vacation packages, and there’s no better place for deals on rental cars. Measured by total travel bookings, “Costco is no Expedia or Booking.com,” but the value of its annual bookings runs in the billions. And while it’s selective about its offers, its lineup of destinations keeps growing. Deals on rental cars remain the service’s calling card, but members shouldn’t stop there. During 2024’s Thanksgiving holiday, I booked a six-night hotel and rental-car package in Maui for $2,031. The package excluded airfare but included breakfasts for two, resort fees, and a daily $50…

A proposed ballot measure that could tax California’s richest residents has the state’s billionaire class thinking of “cutting or reducing their ties to the state,” said Ryan Mac in The New York Times. Backed by a prominent health-care union, the measure calls for a one-time tax of 5% on all individuals with a net worth of at least $1 billion. They could choose to pay it all at once or spread the payments over five years. The union and other advocates of the tax argue that it would generate “up to $100 billion from about 200 billionaires,” with the revenue going to state health care, education, and food assistance programs imperiled by federal budget cuts. But the possibility of a new tax—potentially on unrealized “paper” fortunes driven by Silicon Valley’s…

Diane Crump didn’t think she’d be the first female jockey to race at a major U.S. track. A lawsuit had finally allowed women to get jockey’s licenses in 1968, when many still considered women too weak to handle a thoroughbred galloping 40 miles an hour, and two other women got theirs first. But injuries and threats of boycotts kept those two from competing, and in 1969 Crump ran her breakthrough race. Security guards had to escort the 20-year-old to the stalls as spectators booed and yelled that she should go back to the kitchen. Just a year later, Crump became the first woman to ride in the Kentucky Derby. When asked if she was nervous about competing against elite jockeys, she showed her trademark confidence. “I never worry when I…