The Week - USA (2021-02-19)

ARTS

21 Books

Charles Blow calls for

a black return to the

South

22 Author of the week

Russell Shorto probes his

family’s criminal history

23 Music

Should a country

superstar be

exiled for using

a racial slur?

24 Film &

Home

Media

Three video

games inspired

by the arcade

age

NEWS

4 Main stories

Former President

Trump’s impeachment

trial; worries over Covid

variants; Democrats push

ahead with stimulus plan

6 Controversy of the week

Should it be easier or

harder to vote?

7 The U.S. at a glance

A push to recall California

Gov. Gavin Newsom; Lou

Dobbs canceled by Fox

8 The world at a glance

Canada designates the

Proud Boys as terrorists;

Tanzania rejects vaccines

10 People

Lisa Guerrero’s football

ordeal; the Cassandra of

the “attention economy”

11 Briefi ng

Did last summer’s Black

Lives Matter protests

result in meaningful

police reform?

12 Best U.S. columns

A pandemic catastrophe

for working moms; a

governor’s lies about

Covid deaths

14 Best European

columns

New Brexit troubles for

Northern Ireland

16 Talking points

The fi ght over reopening

schools; President

Biden’s fi rst foreign

policy moves; the GOP’s

internal rift

LEISURE

26 Food & Drink

Two recipes for chaat,

India’s superior snack; the

boom in French whisky

27 Coping

Why newly vaccinated

Americans still need to

keep their Covid guard up

BUSINESS

30 News at a glance

Tesla’s $1.5 billion Bitcoin

buy; the cost of a $

national minimum wage

32 Making money

Feeling the GameStop

hangover; new proposal to

cancel student debt

34 Best columns

Big challenges for Big Oil;

the dangers of talking

down the dollar

House impeachment managers head to the Senate. (p.4)

Lisa Guerrero
(p.10)
AP

(^2
)

Ancient Crete. Seventeenth-century Bohemia. Revolutionary Cuba.

The planet Gethen. Those are just some of the places that books

have allowed me to visit over the past year, even as the pandemic

has largely kept me locked down at home. When the first wave

of the coronavirus crashed into the U.S. last spring—and the re-

ality of a world with no school for the kids and no nights out for

the parents kicked in—I decided that I needed a reminder of how

much worse things could be. So I picked up a suitably lengthy his-

tory of the Thirty Years’ War and, transported to the many miser-

ies of Europe in the 1600s, felt distinctly grateful I didn’t have to

deal with a plague and pillaging, pike-wielding armies of Swedes

and Spaniards. My other book-induced getaways have been con-

siderably more pleasant, including trips to alien worlds with Ursula

K. Le Guin and a swashbuckling spin through 1890s Havana with

Elmore Leonard. Next up, I might let Chang-rae Lee take me on a

wild ride through 21st-century China. (See The Book List, p. 22.)

Elizabeth Bernstein notes in The Wall Street Journal that there

are real psychological benefits to this kind of page-turning es-

capism. When you’re truly submerged in a book, the brain’s

default-mode network—a web of brain structures that are acti-

vated when we’re not doing anything, and which can reverber-

ate with worry and anxiety—is thought to calm down. But read-

ing is much more than a stress-reducing sedative. At a time when

so many of us are struggling with the mundanity of Covid-era

life, deprived of restaurants and vacations and get-togethers with

family and friends, books can provide us with some desperately

needed novelty, surprise, and excitement. That is surely why

2020 was a bumper year for the publishing industry, with sales

of print books up 8.2 percent over 2019 and e-books up 17 per-

cent. “There is no frigate like a book,” poet Emily Dickinson

once wrote, “To take us lands away.” I’ll see

you out there on deck.

Editor’s letter

Contents^3

Theunis Bates

Managing editor

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