Everybody Wants Some!!

Jenner (center) on a bros’ night out

“Has anyone ever loved college as much as Richard Linklater?” asked Allison Willmore in BuzzFeed.com. The director’s first comedy in years feels like a spiritual sequel to Dazed and Confused, his great ode to circa 1976 high school, but the new movie makes life’s next chapter look “addictively” idyllic. The main characters are all players on a 1980 Texas college baseball team—a collection of “unapologetic bros.” But while most of them have little on their minds beyond getting wasted and getting laid, they turn out to be a surprisingly endearing bunch. The movie is “bursting with charismatic young actors,” said Michael Calore in Wired.com. Blake Jenner plays the new kid, a talented freshman pitcher who’s being shown the ropes by Glen Powell’s affable senior, and both performers are magnetic. There’s not much driving the plot beyond the perpetual competitiveness of these dozen lunks. Even so, as egos collide, “we can feel lifelong friendships forming.” Though some scenes meander, the movie “never drags,” and it even manages to touch on some of life’s deep mysteries, said Eric Kohn in IndieWire.com. “Simple and profound in equal doses,” Everybody Wants Some!! is “a poignant doodle” from one of America’s most consistently thoughtful filmmakers.

Bright Star

A “fresh breeze from the South” is blowing through Broadway, said Charles Isherwood in The New York Times. Bright Star, a “gentle-spirited” bluegrass musical written by Steve Martin and Edie Brickell, “moves with an easygoing grace where others prance and strut.” Set in North Carolina in the 1920s and 1940s, the tale focuses on Alice Murphy (Carmen Cusack), the worldly editor of an Asheville literary journal, and young Billy Cane (A.J. Shively), a World War II vet and aspiring writer Alice takes under her wing. Flashbacks to Alice’s troubled teen years, when a whirlwind romance led to an unwanted pregnancy, suggest that a big revelation will eventually link the two stories. Yes, the show leans toward melodrama. But Cusack makes a “gorgeous Broadway debut” and the show’s “simple but seductive melodies” make it all go down easily.

You could even call it spoon-feeding, said Jesse Green in NYMag.com. Brickell’s libretto “almost always does exactly the opposite of what a story-based musical requires.” Instead of advancing the plot and giving the characters emotional depth, the songs “repeat, in the most clichéd terms, what we already know from the dialogue.” The title number, which follows a scene in which Billy announces his plan to submit his stories to Alice’s journal, has a snappy tune, but the lyric offers only this Hallmark Card sentiment: “Bright star / Keep shining for me / And one day I’ll shine for you.” Most contrived of all is the show’s climax, when a hardly surprising connection between Alice and Billy is revealed, and the tone turns suddenly gothic. Some audience members actually burst out laughing.

“It is, you might say, a red state kind of show,” said Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune. But perhaps “good ol’ blue state Broadway,” so prone to jaundiced-eyed deconstructions of love and family, could use a dose of sincerity. Bright Star’s tale of redemption “got under my skin despite some resistance,” and Cusack—who’s recognizably the same woman no matter her character’s age—“is a revelation.” Despite its unevenness, Martin and Brickell’s musical “feels like a significant, distinctive, and artful entry into the Broadway repertory.”

“It can never be said that Don Cheadle hasn’t given everything he has” to this Miles Davis biopic, said Dominick Suzanne- Mayer in ConsequenceOfSound .net. Set in the late ’70s, Miles Ahead focuses on the jazz trumpeter’s darkest period, when he quit music for five years while nursing his grievances and a fierce cocaine habit. Cheadle, who co-wrote and directed the film, “does some of his best work to date,” creating a wrenching portrait of the drug-addled genius that openly acknowledges just how cruel Davis could be to people he loved. Unfortunately, a fictional central narrative “overwhelms the true story,” said Matt Patches in Esquire. Davis teams with a Rolling Stone journalist, played by Ewan McGregor, to stop Columbia Records from releasing a stolen session tape, and that buddy-comedy mission generates “an enjoyable, vapid ride” that’s also a distraction. Davis’ genius is apparent only in flashback scenes that “drift in on a wave of blue notes and cigarette smoke,” said David Edelstein in New York magazine. We see the young Davis bend bandmates like Gil Evans and Herbie Hancock to his will while giving them room to find their inner pulse. “It captures what you hear on many of Miles’ records—the sound of great artists alone together.”

Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck

Adam Cohen’s new book shines a stark light on “one of the most spectacular miscarriages of justice in U.S. history,” said Victoria Nourse in Nature. In 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the state of Virginia had the right to sterilize Carrie Buck, a poor young white inmate at the state asylum for the so-called feebleminded. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, in his 8-1 majority opinion, famously wrote off Buck’s rights with this line: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Most likely, Buck suffered no mental disabilities, yet that fact didn’t matter to the men deciding her fate. Cohen’s “lively, accessible, often heart-wrenching” account makes clear that they were in the grip of a monstrous idea, and that Carrie Buck was far from the last of their victims. “That’s the trouble with reformers. They are so sure, and so wrong,” said Amity Shlaes in The Wall Street Journal. Holmes and the men who brought the case had bought into the pseudoscience known as eugenics: They believed that criminality and mental disabilities were hereditary, and that society would benefit if people who carried those traits were prevented from reproducing. At least 60,000 other U.S. women were forcibly sterilized in the decades following Buck v. Bell, and Hitler used the Ameri - can example to bolster his case for mass sterilization—and then for genocide.

Carrie Buck’s story proves “deeply, almost physically, infuriating,” said Dana Goldstein in The New Republic. Though she remains a cipher, we learn that she completed five years of schooling before her foster parents forced her to quit, and that they sent her away after she became pregnant at 17 and accused a family member of rape. No heroes emerge—even Buck’s defense lawyer was collaborating with the men who viewed her case as a chance to legalize sterilization nationwide. But while the main players here are the villains, we do get a late glimpse of Buck as a nursing home resident, and she’s no “imbecile.” She enjoys music and crosswords, and lives to read the daily paper.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

As any 10-year-old could tell you, “pitting the biggest household names in superheroism against each other has never made much logical sense,” said A.A. Dowd in AVClub.com. Nonetheless, that’s the premise of the latest attempt to turn DC Comics’ superhero franchise into a box-office blockbuster. Sadly, director Zack Snyder “invests it with all the fun of a protracted custody battle.” Ben Affleck as a brooding Batman and Henry Cavill as a dour, emotionally remote Superman certainly have the looks for their parts, yet come off as “epic bores.” Whereas director Christopher Nolan raised the allegorical stakes for this genre with his Dark Knight series, Snyder mostly dumbs it down, said A.O. Scott in The New York Times. He throws in some ham-handed talk about Good and Evil, but this blatantly commercial film has little to offer but some CGI fight scenes and shots of the heroes shirtless. Still, the visual detail in every frame is sometimes breathtaking, said Andrew O’Hehir in Salon.com. Jesse Eisenberg’s bizarre, jittery Lex Luthor also provides a bit of fun “in a movie otherwise devoted to po-faced, comicsgeeks earnestness.”

Best books chosen by Helen Macdonald

British naturalist Helen Macdonald is the author of H Is for Hawk, an acclaimed international best-seller that is now available in paperback. Her 2001 poetry collection, Shaler’s Fish, was recently published in the U.S. by Atlantic Monthly Press

Silent Spring

by Rachel Carson (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $15). An indelibly powerful exposé of the terrible effects of pesticides, this 1962 book shaped the burgeoning environmental movement. Carson is a phenomenally important writer, and this book is more relevant than ever. We seem to have forgotten the lessons she taught

A Sand County Almanac

by Aldo Leopold (Ballantine, $8). Wise and lyrical meditations from the 1940s on environmental ethics, human and natural history, and the passage of time. Some measure of how fiercely good it is: A well-read, retired U.S. Army colonel once told me that he considered Leopold to be better than Shakespeare.

Arctic Dreams

by Barry Lopez (Vintage, $17). A wondrous investigation into the Arctic and its place in our imagination, as well as an exploration of landscape, culture, science, hunting, morality, and value. There is a moment in this book when Lopez feels compelled to bow to arctic ground-nesting birds with deep humility and reverence for their tenacity. It always reduces me to tears.

Journals

by R.F. Langley (Shearsman, $18). A selection of journal entries by the English poet R.F. Langley, dealing centrally with what Ruskin called the “prime necessity” of seeing. Langley’s subjects range from moths to etymology, from the philosophy of observation to reading Shakespeare. It is astoundingly brilliant.

The Peregrine

by J.A. Baker (NYRB Classics, $16). A darkly poetic and episodic work about a man obsessively watching wild peregrine falcons in the British countryside. Written at a time when the extinction of the peregrine and nuclear apocalypse both seemed imminent, this is a book about the poetry of death and loss as much as it is about hawks.

The Sibley Guide to Birds

by David Allen Sibley (Knopf, $40). I adore books on how to identify everything from flies to lichens, flowers to whales. This superbly written and illustrated guide to American avifauna, like all field guides, tells us much about birds, but also about us: how we encounter the natural world, our urge to know and collect, our need to carve nature at the joints.

Health scare of the week Americans’ unhealthy habits

To remain healthy, doctors say, you have to eat well, exercise regularly, avoid smoking, and keep body fat in check. But new research shows that only 2.7 percent of Americans are actually adhering to all four healthy habits. Researchers came to that surprisingly glum conclusion after examining national survey data on more than 5,000 people, compiled by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prev ention. Only 47 percent got 150 minutes a week of moderate to vigorous exercise, only 38 percent had healthy diets, and only 10 percent had proper body-fat levels. Only 16 percent met three of the four criteria. “This is sort of mind boggling, to have so few people maintaining what we would consider a healthy lifestyle,” study author Ellen Smit of Oregon State University tells ScienceDaily.com. “There’s clearly a lot of room for improvement.”

A promising dengue vaccine

The medical community is one step closer to a vaccine that protects against dengue, a mosquito-borne illness, closely related to the Zika virus, that kills some 25,000 people a year worldwide. In a clinical trial, researchers tested an experimental vaccine called TV003 that was developed at the National Institutes of Health. They infected 41 volunteers with a weakened version of dengue and gave the vaccine to 21 of them. All members of the unvaccinated group showed mild signs of dengue, notably a characteristic rash, but the vaccine proved 100 percent effective—none of the 21 people who received TV003 became sick. The results are so promising that large-scale tests of the vaccine have already begun in Brazil. “We are confident that it is going to work,” researcher Anna Durbin, an infectious-disease specialist at Johns Hopkins University, tells NBCNews.com. If the dengue vaccine proves safe and effective, she adds, it could provide a valuable shortcut for researchers working to develop a vaccine that protects against Zika, which has been linked to serious birth defects and neurological complications.

Continuing to break up native families

Canada is repeating our old pattern of injustice against indigenous women, said Carol Finlay. In the last century, indigenous children were ripped from their tribes and warehoused in residential schools, causing damage that reverberated down the generations. “Violence, substance abuse, and crime” are now endemic in the children and grandchildren of the people placed in those institutions. And how have authorities responded to that crisis? By incarcerating native women, far from their communities and at shocking rates. Across Canada, more than two-thirds of female federal inmates are indigenous; in Edmonton, the rate is more than 90 percent. This is again devastating indigenous families, because when a woman goes to prison, “she is often the sole support to the family, and her children go into foster care.” The loss of her kids sends her into a spiral of hopelessness and depression. “Cut off from their families and culture, and locked up in a ‘white man’s justice system,’” these women become mentally and physically ill. When they get out of prison, they are broken, and they have no job training, so they can’t earn money to get their children back. If we don’t break this cycle, “we become complicit in the ongoing tragedy of the residential schools.”

Healthy heart, sharp mind

Americans are constantly advised to lead “heart healthy” lives, and for good reason: Heart disease remains the leading cause of death in the U.S. But cardiovascular health is also a boon to the brain, new research reveals. The study examined the habits and lifestyles of more than 1,000 people who were an average age of 72. Specifically, they assessed how many of the American Heart Association’s goals the participants achieved—keeping physically active; main tain ing a healthy weight and eating regimen; not smoking; and keeping blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar levels under control. The participants also completed cognitive tests when the study began and again six years later. As it turned out, people who more closely adhered to a heart-healthy lifestyle showed fewer signs of age-related mental decline, reports TechTimes.com. University of Miami neurologist Hannah Gardener, who led the study, suggests more research is needed to pinpoint the age ranges during which cardiovascular-friendly behaviors “may influence cognitive performance and mitigate decline.”

Pakistan: Christians targeted by the Taliban

At the funeral for a victim of the Lahore suicide bombing

“The heart of Lahore and its children were attacked this week,” said Luavut Zahid in Dawn. On Easter Sunday, a suicide bomber detonated a vest loaded with explosives and ball bearings at a playground in Gulshan-i-Iqbal park, which was crowded with Christian families celebrating the holiday and mingling with their Muslim neighbors. Children and parents were ripped apart as they lined up for a merry-go-round and picnicked on the grass. A Taliban splinter group claimed responsibility for the atrocity—the deadliest since the murder of nearly 150 people at a Peshawar army school in 2014—saying it had targeted Pakistani Christians. But most of the 70 people who died in the attack were Muslims, and at least 29 were children. Authorities responded by cracking down on suspected jihadists, arresting more than 200 people across Punjab province. The city of Lahore itself “chose compassion.” Thousands of people streamed to hospitals to donate blood and bring food and flowers to the wounded. Muslims and Christians mourned together.

This tragedy is the result of “our criminal neglect of our duty” as Muslims to protect Pakistani Christians, said Mosharraf Zaidi in The News International. Our 3 million Christians are an intrinsic part of our country. Wealthy Muslims send their kids to Christian private schools; Muslim doctors turn to Christian nurses for assistance. Yet this is the third terrorist attack in three years specifically targeting Christians. Last year, also in Lahore, two churches were bombed, killing 15 people. In 2013, suicide bombers attacked a church in Peshawar, killing 127. Why weren’t Punjabi authorities patrolling the Easter celebration?

“It is not surprising that Punjab was targeted,” said The Nation in an editorial. Extremism has been growing across the region. Just last week, Islamic groups banded together to oppose Punjab’s new law creating women’s shelters and a hotline for battered women; they called the measure “un-Islamic.” The same day as the Lahore bombing, Islamabad was besieged by 10,000 supporters of Mumtaz Qadri, the assassin who in 2011 shot dead Punjab’s moderate governor, Salman Taseer. The governor’s sin was to speak out against the execution of a Punjabi Christian woman for blasphemy. Qadri was executed last month, and his supporters now want him declared a martyr and all clerics serving sentences for terrorism released. Such demands are beyond ridiculous. “The nation does not have the patience anymore amid death and fear to sympathize with those who defend murderers.”

We need to stop our youth being brainwashed in extremist madrasas, said The Daily Times. Millions of children “are exposed to unfiltered hateful demagoguery that warps their attitudes toward non-Muslims in a harmful way.” That they should be incited against Christians is horrifying, as Christians have “a special status” in Islam as People of the Book. These Islamic schools must be dismantled and reformed, or else Pakistan will continue to witness the “glorification of religiously motivated violence.”

Australia’s coral-bleaching crisis

spokesman Richard Leck. When coral is stressed by changes in temperature and acidity, it expels the symbiotic algae living in its tissue that provide it with essential nutrients. This causes brilliantly colored reefs to turn bone white. A resilient reef can recover or adapt if conditions return to normal or stabilize, but if temperatures rise too quickly or algae loss is prolonged, coral eventually dies. Ocean temperatures in northern Australia have averaged 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit above normal since January, but it’s more than a localized crisis—climate change and a strong El Niño have been heating seas all around the world, posing a threat to coral reefs almost everywhere. Marine ecologist Nick Graham of Lancaster University in England says the current bleaching event compares to the most severe on record, which wiped out 16 percent of the world’s reefs from 1997 to ’98. “This is the big one that we’ve been waiting for,” he tells The Guardian (U.K.). But Graham believes the situation isn’t hopeless. “The real question mark is how frequent these events are going to be. If it’s another 18 to 20 years until we get the next one, then a lot of reefs will have time to bounce back.”

Not quite all Putin had hoped

President Vladimir Putin’s military adventure in Syria has boosted Russia’s global influence, but it hasn’t delivered everything he wanted, said Vladimir Frolov. Russian airpower “has indeed changed the trajectory of the war” and allowed our ally Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to consolidate control over most of western Syria. And the Syrian ceasefire deal agreed to by the U.S. and Russia in February “perfectly reflects Moscow’s traditional vision for such settlements—the two superpowers dictating terms to their proxies.” But Putin had hoped to achieve so much more from his intervention. His real goal was “to revive the bipolar format of Russian-U.S. cooperation and rivalry for influence that existed during the Cold War,” and that mission remains incomplete. The U.S., for example, shows no inclination to solve the war in Ukraine or any other conflict through bilateral talks with Russia. Nor will the U.S. view Russia as an equal until the Kremlin stops seeing everything as a zero-sum game in which a win for the U.S. must be a loss for Russia. Right now, Russia has been “gaining leverage by making itself first part of the problem” and then magnanimously removing itself again. A bilateral world won’t come about unless Russia is willing to start “jointly developing solutions.”

Recovering memories lost to Alzheimer’s

Neuroscientists have long believed that Alzheimer’s disease destroys the brain’s ability to store memories, wiping away all trace of the people, events, and knowledge that make up the fabric of a person’s life. But a new study suggests that memories lost to the progressive neurological disorder aren’t gone forever, but merely rendered inaccessible. Researchers at MIT put two groups of mice—one healthy and the other genetically engineered to have Alzheimer’s-like symptoms—inside a box and gave them mild shocks to the feet. When mice in the control group were later placed back inside the box, they displayed fear—a sign that they recalled the trauma of the shock. But the ones with Alzheimer’s seemed unfazed, suggesting they had forgotten the experience. After pinpointing the brain cells associated with short-term memory, the researchers stimulated the forgetful mice with highfrequency bursts of light. Known as optogenetics, the technique effectively restored the animals’ memories by prompting their brain cells to grow small buds called dendritic spines, key components of neural circuitry that connect with other cells and allow the transmission of information. After the treatment, the mice once again feared the box. The findings could lead to new Alzheimer’s treatments that target compromised recall mechanisms in the brain—an entirely new approach to the disease. “Even if a memory seems to be gone, it is still there,” study author Susumu Tonegawa tells The Washington Post. “It’s a matter of how to retrieve it.”

European Union: Struggling to counter the terrorist threat

Belgium has been turned upside down, said Christophe Berti in Le Soir (Belgium). A week after suicide bombers killed 32 people and injured hundreds more in Brussels, the repercussions could be felt in almost every corner of the historic city. On the central Place de la Bourse, the Brussels Philharmonic was playing Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, a European anthem, to commemorate the victims; at a tram stop in the Schaerbeek neighborhood, police shot a suspected terrorist in the leg, believing he had a bomb in his backpack; and at the Palace of the Nation, the interior, justice, and foreign ministers appeared before Parliament and admitted to “gross negligence” over their departments’ failure to stop the attacks. All that happened on a single day in Brussels. It was at once a moment of mourning, of criminal investigation, and of investigation of that investigation. “It’s a lot. It’s too much.”

Tiny Belgium obviously can’t cope, said Ali Soufan in The Guardian (U.K.). More than 500 Belgians have gone to wage jihad in Syria and Iraq, and the country’s inept, understaffed, and jealously competitive security services can’t possibly monitor all those who return. Indeed, they can’t even explain why Ibrahim el-Bakraoui, a Belgian citizen and one of the Brussels suicide bombers, was not arrested after Turkey deported him back to Europe last summer on suspicion of terrorism and notified the Belgian authorities. Belgium will need help from other countries’ intelligence services “to construct a threat matrix for each individual foreign fighter.” The European Union’s justice and security ministers have already called for greater intelligence sharing—now they need to make that happen. At the moment, “terrorists can cross borders more easily than information can.” European privacy laws often prevent authorities in one country from sharing information about their own citizens with other nations.

But sharing information across the continent carries its own risks, said Heribert Prantl in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany). EU countries that have efficient security services “are not about to toss their sensitive and valuable data into a 28-state pot if there is a chance that other states will play fast and loose with it.” Given the egregious state of governance in newer member states like Romania and Bulgaria, sensitive police data could easily “find its way into the hands of organized criminals.” That’s why there’s no chance that we can create an EU-wide intelligence service that operates like the FBI in the U.S. Instead, we may have to set up a small counterterrorism center among only the “core European nations.” Yet even they have little common ground, said Michael Smith in the EUObserver.com. All our major crises—the Eurozone, refugees, and Islamist extremism— stem from “profound disagreement among EU member states,” particularly the big three: the U.K., France, and Germany. Until those nations agree to pool their resources to tackle terrorism, “we can only expect things to get worse.”

Bytes: What’s new in tech

Google documents your getaway

Don’t have time to organize all your vacation shots? Google Photos will build the perfect album for you, said Tim Moynihan in Wired .com. Since the photo-organizing app launched 10 months ago, the Assistant feature, “which is sort of like a little robotic helper,” has been able to stitch together GIFs and collages from photo collections and to suggest enhancements and edits to improve your shots. Now Assistant can “create albums and select your best shots without any user input whatsoever.” Using machine learning, Assistant automatically recognizes when you’ve been away from home and then picks what it thinks are the “best” images from your trip. It eliminates duplicates, tags famous places, and even generates a Google Map charting your journey. Users can then “edit which photos appear in the album, fine-tune the locations in the map, and add captions.”

Streaming trumps downloads

“Streaming has officially taken over the music business,” said Victor Lucker son in Time .com. Revenue from streaming services passed digital downloads for the first time ever in 2015, according to the Recording Industry Asso cia tion of Amer i ca. Streaming accounted for 34.3 percent of industry revenue, bringing in $2.4 billion, while digital album and track downloads made up 34 percent of the market. The recording industry isn’t altogether thrilled with this development. Spotify and YouTube, the two companies most responsible for the streaming boom, both let users stream music free with advertisements, in addition to their paid-subscription services. Ad-supported platforms brought in less than $400 mil lion in revenue in 2015, compared with $1.2 billion from paid-subscription services. Even vinyl records made more money, bringing in $416 mil lion in revenue.

Netflix slows its video roll

In “a stunning admission,” Netflix has confessed to throttling, or slowing down, its video speeds for some customers, said Brian Fung in The Wash ing ton Post. The company acknowledged last week that it has been automatically capping video quality at 600 Kbps for AT&T and Ver i zon mobile customers for the past five years to prevent those customers from blowing past their mobile data limits, which would presumably prevent them from watching more Net flix. A speed connection of about 3,000 Kbps is preferable for watching a movie in standard definition on a mobile device. Netflix has fiercely criticized internet service providers in recent years for alleged throttling and has pressed for strong net neutrality rules. “It now appears that even as the company asked regulators to ban throttling by carriers, it had no qualms about reserving that tactic for itself.”

Letdown as a butcher is sentenced

The Butcher of Bosnia has been sentenced to 40 years in prison—but Bosnians expected more, said Dnevni List. Radovan Karadzic headed the breakaway Bosnian Serb Republic during our nation’s brutal 1992–1995 war, and led a devastating military campaign to wipe out all Bosnian Muslims and ethnic Croats from what he considered Serb territory. The United Nations rightfully calls him “the architect of destruction and murder on a massive scale.” The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia convicted Karadzic last week of genocide for ordering the July 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the city of Srebrenica, and of crimes against humanity for other atrocities. It’s a historic judgment and a fitting one, yet some Bosnians are asking why Karadzic did not also get a genocide conviction for the lesser-known slaughters in Prijedor, Zvornik, and Vlasenica, where thousands were murdered and tens of thousands were driven from their homes. They also wonder why Karadzic didn’t get a life sentence for his heinous crimes. Now 70, he will surely die in prison before his 40 years are up, but a life sentence would have sent a powerful message to other genocidal leaders around the world. We expect more convictions and a longer sentence on appeal—otherwise, Bosnians will be “disappointed.”

Artificial intelligence: Corrupting Microsoft’s chatbot

“What could go wrong?” asked Daniel Victor in The New York Times. That’s probably what Microsoft’s research and technology team was thinking last week when it released a machine-learning chatbot, designed to mimic the verbal tics of a 19-year-old American girl. “Tay” could chat with users on a variety of social media platforms, sponging up interactions and learning new phrases along the way. “If you guessed, ‘It will probably become really racist,’ you’ve clearly spent time on the internet.” It took less than 24 hours for Tay to transform into a sexist, Holocaust-denying troll, spouting white supremacist slogans and advocating genocide. Unsurprisingly, Microsoft yanked Tay offline for some much-needed “adjustments.”

“The reason it spouted garbage is that racist humans on Twitter quickly spotted a vulnerability,” said Rob Price in BusinessInsider .com. Troublemakers initially tricked Tay into some of her most vile statements by commanding her to “repeat after me.” But because the artificial intelligence was designed to learn from conversations, it wasn’t long before she started making wildly offensive remarks on her own, like saying the 9/11 terrorist attacks were an inside job. The company blames a “coordinated effort” to abuse Tay’s programming, but it’s still “hugely embarrassing.” Tay’s makers probably built in some safeguards and filters, said Anthony Lydgate in NewYorker.com, “knowing full well how sticky was the muck into which Tay was stepping.” There is evidence of some initial encoded aversion to certain keywords and topics. But crucially, the engineers “underestimated the persistence of those who turned her, and for this there isn’t much excuse.” It can be hard to understand the ugliness of the online fever swamp if you’ve never been the target of it, said Selena Larson in DailyDot.com. But then, the tech industry is overwhelmingly white and male, so perhaps it’s not surprising this chatbot could be built without some thought given to how it might be hijacked to harass women and minorities.

So how do we teach artificial intelligence to be human “with out incorporating the worst traits of humanity?” asked James Vincent in TheVerge.com. When these machines mirror online users, they inevitably pick up the “prejudices of society.” That’s why the challenge for future developers will be teaching these bots “to be better than humanity,” said Ina Fried in Recode.net. In the immediate term, that means tweaking a few algorithms to filter out more of the racism, sexism, and xenophobia. “If only changing humans were that easy.”

Overworked doctors are a danger to all

We British doctors are about to stage an unprecedented strike, and the public is on our side, said Ben Kirk. Later this month, junior doctors— known in the U.S. as medical residents—will walk off the job en masse, including from emergency room duty. Some 5,000 nonemergency surgeries have already been canceled. No patients will be harmed, because we’ve given enough notice that senior doctors and other practitioners will be able to cover ERs. In fact, we are doing this because we care about our patients. The Conservative government is “hell-bent on delivering on its manifesto pledge” that the National Health Service will provide routine services seven days a week, 24 hours a day. Yet it refuses to hire more doctors or raise their pay. Instead, it is simply increasing junior doctors’ work hours. Already, most of us are toiling “within a whisker of mental and physical burnout.” A confidential clinic set up to treat doctors says many younger doctors are suffering PTSD-like symptoms because their hours are so intense. Such overwork “very much risks patient safety.” We all know that “the link between fatigue and adverse events is as well documented in medicine as it is in aviation.” Give us junior doctors a rest—or patients will suffer.

North Carolina: The culture war over bathrooms

Several days ago, North Carolina’s general assembly called an extraordinary special session, said David Graham in TheAtlantic.com. “The reason wasn’t a pressing budget crisis” or a natural disaster. Instead, Republican legislators rushed back to the statehouse to overturn a local ordinance passed in Charlotte prohibiting discrimination against trans people. After Democrats walked out of the chamber in protest, Republicans unanimously passed a new bill, HB2, that bars local governments from passing any nondiscrimination ordinance covering the LGBT community, and mandates that trans people in state schools use the bathroom aligned with the gender on their birth certificate. In other words, people in North Carolina can now be legally fired from their jobs or turned away at hotel chains for being gay. In the meantime, another 40 transgender bathroom bills are being considered in 16 states, said the Greensboro, N.C., News & Record, making North Carolina the front line in a new culture war against LGBT rights. This was a “bad day for our state

“Apparently keeping men out of the women’s loo is now considered discriminatory,” said Larry Thornberry in Spectator.org. “Virtuous progressives” would rather cater to the rare man who thinks he’s a woman than the countless women who would rather not have to share their bathrooms, locker rooms, and showers with a person who has “a penis, testicles, and a five-o’clock shadow.” Those of us with wives and daughters also are justifiably alarmed by that prospect. But for the cultural left, only the rights of “carefully selected categories of people” matter.

Enough with the “bathroom predator myth,” said J. Bryan Lowder in Slate.com. Social conservatives would have us believe that trans women “are really men trying to get into women’s rooms for nefarious purposes,” but there hasn’t been a single sexual assault of that kind in the 17 states and 225 cities that allow trans people to use the bathroom of their choice. Besides, how do North Carolina lawmakers expect to enforce their ban on trans women? By asking everybody to lift up their skirts or pull down their pants before entering the ladies room? The American Civil Liberties Union has already filed a federal lawsuit challenging the dubious constitutionality of HB2, said Mark Joseph Stern, also in Slate.com. If that lawsuit leads to federal courts establishing “robust constitutional protection for trans people,” North Carolina’s bigotry “will boomerang in a pretty stunning way

Remember who made Trump famous

Who’s to blame for Donald Trump? asked Jim Lewis. Liberals are blaming Fox News and other right-wing news outlets for inflaming the white working class with class envy and racial resentment, and the Republican Party for not standing up to a loathsome bully. But the culture that initially made Trump a celebrity “wasn’t the one that goes hunting on weekends.” Nor was it a Ku Klux Klan newsletter that first brought Trump to our attention. “It was Time and Esquire and Spy.” Who gave him his own TV show? NBC. Our “coastal cultural gatekeepers” have been totally complicit in this crass hustler’s 30-year campaign of selfpromotion, chuckling ironically at his materialism and sexism, and profiting from his ability to sell newspapers and books and boost TV ratings. Even when Trump became rancidly political, and railed that President Obama was a Muslim born in Kenya, The Washington Post invited him to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. What good fun! Would, say, David Duke have gotten the same invitation? No. But Trump wasn’t a “redneck,” so the elites indulged him. But now that the game has gotten out of hand, “let’s remember who helped create this monster.”

American Muslims: Should police monitor them ?

When it comes to bigotry against Muslims, “the Republican Party is now the Trump Party,” said Jonathan Chait in NYMag.com. After last week’s terrorist atrocities in Brussels, GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump predictably renewed his call for a halt to all Muslim immigration. But Sen. Ted Cruz, the “putatively noncrazy candidate,” went one better by pledging to “empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized.” Cruz’s proposal is “idiotic,” said Peter Beinart in TheAtlantic.com. He cited a now abandoned New York Police Department program that sent undercover cops into Muslim communities and designated entire mosques as “terrorist enterprises.” Yet police later admitted that scheme “didn’t yield a single terrorism investigation.” American Muslims are “far more integrated than Muslims in Europe,” but that’ll change if they’re demonized.

“Cruz was not calling for a dragnet targeting all Muslims,” said Andrew McCarthy, an adviser on Cruz’s campaign, in NationalReview.com. Politically correct liberals won’t admit that some mosques and surrounding communities are now “hotbeds of Islamic supremacism.” Why shouldn’t police focus their attention on them? Keeping tabs on Muslim communities today is no different from Mafia-busting cops watching Italian neighborhoods in the 1980s, said David Marcus in TheFederalist.com. And the controversial NYPD program that monitored Muslims wasn’t as useless as critics made out. Its findings were critical in identifying a bookstore in Brooklyn as a “venue for radicalization”—information that helped thwart a 2004 plot to bomb the Herald Square subway station. Cruz is simply backing a commonsense “policy that recognizes the unique challenge terrorism presents.”

Treating all Muslims with suspicion is not common sense, said Michael Gerson in The Washington Post. Europe has a big problem with terrorism because its Muslim communities are so isolated and alienated. Most American Muslims are happy to be Americans, and are “often the first to recognize and report radicalization in their midst.” (See The Last Word, page 36.) Treating Muslims like dangerous aliens and occupying their neighborhoods “with a heavy-handed presence” would only breed resentment and lend credence to ISIS’s claim that it’s waging a religious war against the anti-Islamic West. Cruz and Trump “would grant the terrorists a victory without a battle.”

Arizona’s voting fiasco

When citizens of Maricopa County, Ariz., had to wait for hours to vote in the state’s presidential primary last week, it was a preview of a possible “catastrophe for our democracy,” said E.J. Dionne. Maricopa includes Phoenix, the state’s largest city, which has “a nonwhite majority and is a Democratic island” in a Republican county. In what was billed as a cost-cutting move, Maricopa officials reduced “the number of polling places by 70 percent,” from 200 to 60. That left one station per 21,000 voters, compared with one per 2,500 voters in the rest of the state. The predictable result: When voters went to the polls, they were met with “endless lines”—some as long as five hours. Under the Voting Rights Act, Maricopa’s drastic cuts would have required Justice Department approval. But the Supreme Court’s conservative majority gutted the act in 2013, insisting voters no longer needed protection from discrimination. Now that Republicans in 16 states have enacted severe voting restrictions, imagine what is likely to happen when Americans elect a president on Nov. 8. If millions of blacks, Hispanics, and the working poor are blocked from voting, it’ll be “an electoral cataclysm” and the result will be tainted.

Exhibit of the week Van Dyck: The Anatomy of Portraiture

Antoon Van Dyck was a true child prodigy, said John Zeaman in the Bergen County, N.J., Record. Born in 1599 to a family of Antwerp merchants, the painter was just 10 when he was apprenticed to a Flemish master, and by his mid-teens he was working as chief assistant to Peter Paul Rubens. The boy’s preternatural talent can be glimpsed in a 1613 self-portrait in which the babyfaced artist peers over his shoulder through tousled red locks, his large eyes “taking in everything.” The painting—part of the Frick Collection’s terrific new exhibition— bears the artist’s proud inscription: “Antoon Van Dyck made this, at the age of 14.” By 21, Van Dyck was “well on his way to becoming the most sought-after portrait painter in Europe.” He received commissions from Italian nobles and Vatican cardinals before accepting a 1632 invitation to serve as court painter to England’s King Charles I. “Many prodigies fail to live up to their promise,” but not Van Dyck. He lived only to age 42, but he was “a wunderkind whose star never faded.”

The 100 paintings in this show suggest Van Dyck “could do anything he wished to with paint,” said Karen Wilkin in The Wall Street Journal. In a pair of circa 1620 pendant portraits of Flemish painter Frans Snyders and his wife, Van Dyck’s sensitive characterizations are nearly matched by his exquisite renderings of lace and linen. A dazzling 1623 portrait of Cardinal Guido Bentivoglio, never before seen in the U.S., represents a highlight of Van Dyck’s six-year Italian period. “A miracle of sumptuous red silk and deep red velvet, the painting suggests a fleeting moment of alert response, as the cardinal looks up from reading a letter.” Further on hangs a “spectacular” group of the works for which the artist is best known: portrayals of the court and family of Charles I. Yet as impressive as Van Dyck’s paintings are, his drawings in this show might be more revealing. You get a sense of the artist at work, scrutinizing how drapery falls or a figure stands, then recording his observations with “rapid, urgent strokes” of black chalk

You’ll notice that the faces in most of the sketches are left blank, said Bendor Grosvenor in the Financial Times. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Van Dyck preferred to paint from life, rather than from a study, when setting a subject’s likeness on canvas. “Here we come to the heart of why he was such a good portraitist”: Even otherwise great painters who create portraits from studies tend to express their own personality more forcefully than those of their subjects. “Rubens’ portraits, for example, can border on caricature, bursting as they do with the artist’s humor and painterly brio.” Van Dyck, by contrast, never repeated himself. At the Frick show, “we get the impression with each portrait that we are meeting someone new, a fresh face and a fresh character.”

Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

Once again, Charles Duhigg has written a book that “elevates the life-hacking genre,” said Joel Stein in Bloomberg Businessweek. Like Malcolm Gladwell before him, the New York Times business reporter and author of The Power of Habit culls academic studies for potential lessons on how to live better, and then finds a memorable anecdote or two to drive home each such insight. “His writing is smart, measured, and fun,” and because he never oversells any one idea, you stay with him through every turn. In this follow-up to his 2012 best-seller, we’re thrust inside the cockpit of a crippled Qantas jet; we’re locked inside a trunk with a kidnap victim; and we’re given a seat at the brainstorming meetings that shaped the Disney hit Frozen. Every story yields a lesson, and most seem worth putting into practice. Still, the so-called Secrets of Being Pro ductive seem “less like secrets and more like common sense,” said Paul Bloom in The New York Times. Of course we should set both short-term and long-term goals, as Duhigg reminds us. And like the anxious cognitive scientist we meet who becomes a poker champ, we all should think about probabilities, not certainties, when laying bets on the future. Eventually, I tired of seeking real wisdom and simply “gave myself over to the stories,” said Michael Skapinker in the Financial Times. Duhigg never does pull his thoughts together enough to make the book a coherent guide to being productive. “But I learned from it, and I never felt like putting it down.”

Maybe the biggest lesson of Smarter Faster Better is what it tells us about who we’ve become, said Louis Menand in The New Yorker. “People don’t read these books to find out how to be better human beings. People read them to figure out how to become the kind of human being the workplace is looking for”—and Duhigg is just the latest messenger reminding us that each of us had better be innovative, adaptable, and efficient if we expect a footing in today’s information economy. In the end, it’s not really surprising that the model worker changes over time, “but it is mildly disheartening to realize how readily we import these models into our daily lives.” Duhigg himself shared a story in The Power of Habit about how he used management principles to correct a weakness he had for interrupting each workday to indulge in an afternoon chocolate-chip cookie. That anecdote saddened me deeply. “Charles—life is short; eat the cookie.”

Kasich: Why is he still running ?

In politics, “this truly is a year when the rules don’t apply,” said Rich Lowry in Politico .com. If they did, John Kasich would have long ago ended his “delusional vanity project masquerading as a presidential campaign.” In a year of angry voters, the Ohio governor has found little market for his moderate “can’t we all get along” message. Kasich hasn’t won anywhere other than in his home state, finished at below 5 percent in seven states, and trails so far behind front-runner Donald Trump and secondplace Sen. Ted Cruz that he cannot take the nomination even if he wins every remaining delegate. His plan is to force a contested convention, and then somehow persuade the GOP to choose him over Trump and Cruz. At this point, “a vote for Kasich is a vote for Trump,” said Michael Barone in NationalReview.com. Many of the remaining 19 states “select delegates winner-takeall statewide or by congressional district.” With the opposition divided between Kasich and Cruz, Trump has “an excellent chance” of piling up lots of delegates in those contests—thus securing the majority he needs.

Kasich’s rationale for staying in the race is simple, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. In the upcoming primaries in the Northeast, he “has a better chance than Cruz of stealing moderately conservative voters from Trump.” With his doctrinaire, combative conservatism, Cruz is a turnoff to these mainstream Republicans. Plus, Kasich is the only remaining Republican candidate who consistently beats Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton in head-to-head poll matchups. If it comes to an open convention, why wouldn’t the GOP nominate the candidate with the best chance of winning in November?

Those arguments “make no sense,” said Jeffrey Anderson in TheFederalist.com. Kasich hasn’t done well in the Northeast, and by diluting the vote, he’s already cost Cruz possible victories in at least three states and could do the same in Wisconsin. Cruz has a much better chance of winning enough delegates to stop Trump’s nomination if he faces him head-to-head. “There’s something very, very wrong” with Kasich’s entire strategy, said Jim Newell in Slate.com. His plan is to become the nominee by finishing “a distant third,” and then having party leaders anoint him. If the will of the primary voters is that irrelevant, “why bother hosting primaries?”

Sanders: The idealists who won’t vote for Clinton

“‘Bernie or Bust!’ That’s the defiant rallying cry of the Bernie Sanders hard core,” said Brogan Morris in Salon .com. Polls find that up to 33 percent of the senator’s supporters are insisting they’ll refuse to vote for Hillary Clinton if she wins the Democratic nomination. That statement of single-minded devotion may seem naïve, given that the Republican alternative may be “a sub-Mussolini demagogue” named Donald Trump. But the Sanders diehards aren’t in the mood to compromise. Many helped sweep Barack Obama to power on a promise of hope and progressive change and were disappointed. U.S. troops remain in Afghanistan, the criminals behind the financial crisis got big bailouts, “and race relations have deteriorated.” Clinton’s coziness with Wall Street, her slippery ethics, and her hawkish foreign policy record embody “rigged, establishment politics.” After falling for Bernie, his most enthusiastic fans refuse to settle for the lesser of two evils.

Sanders absolutists seem to think they’d be “protected from the consequences of a Trump presidency,” said Melissa Hillman in Qz.com. Does it matter to these privileged, white, college-educated purists that a misogynist, immigrant-bashing vulgarian would be “empowered to command our military, veto bills, and nominate people to the Supreme Court, impacting life in the U.S. for decades to come?” If you’re black, Latino, Muslim, or poor, said Michael Tomasky in TheDailyBeast .com, the consequences of a Trump or Cruz presidency could be disastrous. Republicans would “take a meat cleaver” to the safety net for the poor, repeal Obamacare, shut down affirmative action programs, pass restrictive voting laws, and try to deport 12 million immigrants. Many Democrats will be voting “to protect basic rights,” not to make a symbolic statement of their purity.

To win the general election, Clinton must reach out to those core Sanders supporters “and the senator himself,” said Julian Zelizer in CNN.com. Sanders “has inspired the progressive coalition,” a passionate group that Democrats “have too often ignored.” Through her vice presidential pick and party platform, Clinton needs to make concrete appeals to his followers that “are more than campaign rhetoric.” That political reality alone makes Sanders’ long-shot candidacy successful, said Paul Waldman in TheWeek.com. He’s set the agenda in the primaries, and if Clinton becomes president, she’ll have no choice but to be “keenly aware of the desires of her party’s base.”

Why should iPhones be exempt ?

The FBI’s legal battle with Apple isn’t over, said L. Gordon Crovitz. The government has dropped its demand to get cooperation from Apple, now that a third party has helped the FBI bypass the security features blocking access to San Bernardino terrorist Syed Rizwan Farook’s iPhone. But the larger issue hasn’t been resolved: Should smartphones be uniquely exempt from the law enforcement searches permitted by the Fourth Amendment? When it announced its new operating system to customers in 2014, Apple boasted that “unlike our competitors,” the company could not bypass the customer’s chosen passcodes, so “it’s not technically feasible to respond to government warrants.” That’s a nice way to market iPhones to people concerned about privacy—and to terrorists, drug dealers, pedophiles, and other criminals. Every year, tech companies like Facebook and Google routinely comply with thousands of warrants and subpoenas. So do banks and traditional telecommunication companies. But Apple has arrogantly turned down hundreds of requests to help investigators get into suspected criminals’ iPhones. Why should Apple be “above the law”? The courts or Congress need to decide that question once and for all.

Belgium’s jihadi problem How did a tiny nation at the heart of the EU become a hub for Islamic terrorism?

What’s gone wrong in Belgium?

The country has now been tied to all three of the most recent major terrorist attacks on European soil. The Char lie Heb do killers got their guns from Belgium; the ISIS-inspired Paris attackers who slaughtered 130 people in November plotted that massacre in Belgium; and now, Belgian-born terrorists have struck in their own country—killing 35 people and injuring more than 300 in the capital, Brussels, last week. A toxic combination of dysfunctional government, mass immigration, and lax security has allowed parts of this nation of just 11.2 million people to become hotbeds of Islamic extremism, particularly the Brussels neighborhood of Molenbeek. Security officials fear it’s just a matter of time before Belgian terrorists launch their next assault—either in Belgium, or only a short drive away in Paris, Frankfurt, or Amsterdam. “The situation was left to rot too long,” says counterterrorism expert Claude Moniquet, “and we let radical Islamists take control.”

How large is Belgium’s Muslim population?

There are about 640,000 Muslims living in the country—many of them second- and third-generation descendants of Moroccan and Turkish immigrants brought over as cheap labor in the 1960s. Belgium has made little effort to assimilate these immigrants; the country’s own national culture is fractured, with deep linguistic and ideological divisions between its Dutch-speaking Flemish and French-speaking Walloons. Immigrants were actually encouraged to form their own insulated urban enclaves. When factories began closing in the 1970s, unemployment, poverty, and alienation set in. Today, the grandchildren of Muslim immigrants still feel estranged from their own country, and a small but dangerous minority have turned to crime and Islamist extremism. “You have so many people who are adrift and decide terrorism is a shortcut to paradise,” said Spanish counterterrorism prosecutor Dolores Delgado. “It gives them a chance to get revenge on society.”

Who recruits them?

Radical street preachers with extremist groups such as Sharia4Belgium. These recruiters wander through poor North African neighborhoods, telling disaffected young men they’re being discriminated against because they’re Muslims and encouraging them to fight with jihadist groups in the Middle East. Per capita, Belgium has provided the highest number of ISIS recruits in the Western world, with about 560 Belgians waging jihad in Iraq and Syria. At first, Belgian counterterrorism officials were actually happy to see these young extremists leave. But as the Western coalition battling ISIS has eroded the group’s territory in Iraq and Syria, its young European fighters have pivoted toward their home countries as a new battleground. About 120 Belgian jihadists have returned, and their mission is terrorist attacks, intelligence officials say.

How is Belgium responding?

Its security forces have proved to be amazingly dysfunctional. When suspected Paris attacker Salah Abdeslam, a Belgian national, slipped back over the border into Belgium after the siege, it took counterterrorism officials four months to locate the most wanted man in Europe—even though he was living in Molenbeek, yards from his childhood home. After his capture, Politico .com reported last week, intelligence officials questioned Abdeslam for only one hour over four days. Belgium’s security forces are small in number, and have been overwhelmed by the extremist threat. “Frankly, we don’t have the infrastructure to properly investigate hundreds of individuals suspected of terror links,” one anonymous counterterrorism official told BuzzFeed.com. Belgium’s government, meanwhile, is paralyzed by division and bureaucracy

Why is the government so divided?

Belgium is essentially three distinct regions glued together: Dutchspeaking Flanders in the North, French-speaking Wallonia in the South, and Brussels-Capital. Each of these regions has its own overlapping and labyrinthine government. The city of Brussels, for example, has 19 different municipalities and six different police departments. Officials engage in constant political infighting, making it difficult to organize a cohesive counterterrorism response. Molenbeek Mayor Françoise Schepmans has admitted that a month before the Paris attacks, she was given a list with the names and addresses of more than 80 suspected Islamic militants in her area but failed to act. “What was I supposed to do about them?” Schepmans said. “It is not my job to track down possible terrorists.”

Can Belgium adapt?

Money is now being poured into Belgium’s overwhelmed security apparatus, and the intelligence services are trying to recruit more Arabic-speaking analysts for surveillance efforts. Se curi ty officials have also called for the EU to do a much better job of sharing information about potential terrorists. But the best way to tackle Belgium’s homegrown problem is to prevent radicalization in the first place, says Yves Goldstein, cabinet chief to the Brussels regional president. That would require integrating ghettos like Molenbeek into Belgian society; diversifying the schools; and bringing in new cafés, businesses, and cultural offerings. “We need to open the minds of these young people,” says Goldstein. “What can we do to manage young people who prefer death to life?”

Molenbeek: Europe’s jihadi capital

Filled with kebab shops and teahouses, the largely Moroccan Brussels neighborhood of Molenbeek has become the heart of a terrorist network that has caused carnage across Europe. The district—with a population of 100,000—was home to several of the Paris attackers, as well as other terrorist suspects. High school dropout and youth unemployment rates in Molenbeek are among the highest in all of Belgium, and radical preachers hang out in cafés and mosques in the area, trying to persuade these disaffected young men and women to embrace Islamist extremism as a source of meaning and glory. Many of the young recruits are already involved in crime. And when Belgian Muslims do turn to extremism, they are often protected from the authorities by their neighbors. “When you do a raid on a house, in normal areas people talk or help if they think someone was a terrorist,” says Belgian federal prosecutor Eric Van der Sypt. “People are not collaborating in Molenbeek. They are throwing stones at the police.”

Trump’s accommodating butler

Anthony Senecal knows exactly the way Donald Trump likes things, says Jason Horowitz in The New York Times. For 30 years, Senecal has worked on the Republican presidential candidate’s palatial Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida; first as his butler, and now as the 118-room property’s unofficial historian. He knows how Trump has his steak cooked—“It would rock on the plate, it was so well done,” he says—and that his employer’s mood can generally be gauged by the color of his baseball cap: white is good; red is bad. Crucially, perhaps, Senecal has also learned how to massage Trump’s ego. He calls him “the king,” and once hired a bugler to play “Hail to the Chief” as the billionaire arrived at Mar-a-Lago, and calls out “All rise!” to club members and staff when his boss walks through a room. The longtime butler says Trump sometimes strolls around the grounds handing out $100 bills to groundskeepers and is popular among the staffers, who are mostly Romanians, South Africans, and other foreigners brought in on visas. “They’re so good. They are so professional,” he says of the foreign workers. “These local people...” he trails off. Now 74, Senecal tried to retire in 2009, but Trump persuaded him not to. “Tony, to retire is to expire,” the billionaire told him. “I’ll see you next season.”

Henry Cavill didn’t always have the figure of a superhero, said Richard Benson in The Sunday Times (U.K.). The latest actor to play Superman, 32, was overweight as a teen, and his British boarding-school classmates bullied him and taunted him with the nickname “Fat Cavill.” He found solace in acting in school plays. “I thought: ‘I guess this is something I’m good at,’” he says. “‘And if I can’t be judged because I’m being someone else onstage, then great.’” Cavill was talent-spotted for 2002’s The Count of Monte Cristo while still at school. Job offers started rolling in, and the weight started to come off. In 2011, when he won the role of Theseus in Immortals, Cavill started a grueling new workout regimen. “They can give you muscles with CGI. But I take pride in doing it myself.” Now, instead of being bullied, Cavill gets catcalled by women in the street. “I’ve heard some things in my time. I’d best not say what,” he says. “I do think there’s a bit of a double standard, you know. I mean, if a girl shouts something like: ‘Oi, love, fancy a shag?’ to me as I walk past, I do sometimes wonder how she would feel if a builder said that to her. Although, of course, I wouldn’t feel as physically threatened as she might.”

Natalie Wood’s grieving daughter

Natalie Wood’s daughter was just 11 when she heard on the radio that her mother had died, says Katherine Rosman in The New York Times. Natasha Gregson Wagner was at a sleepover when she woke up to a bulletin that the Hollywood star had drowned off the coast of Catalina Island, Calif. “‘Is this real? Is this really what’s happening?’” she recalls herself asking. She rushed home and found the adults in a state of shock. “My dad was just in bed, not able to function at all. My mom’s three best friends. Our nanny. It was kind of like a Fellini movie with people coming in and out.” Now 45, Gregson Wagner spent almost two decades trying to come to terms with the sudden loss of her impossibly charismatic mother. “I was in therapy from, like, the minute she died until I was 30.” That process was complicated by the conspiracy theories over the drowning; Gregson Wagner’s aunt has openly accused Wood’s widower, Robert Wagner, of having had something to do with her death. “It’s so preposterous that I can’t even relate to it,” says Gregson Wagner. “I know that she drowned and I know it was an accident. The details don’t concern me. The result is the same. She died. She left when I was 11 and my sister was 7, and we needed her.”

The world at a glance

London

Rescue migrant kids: A former child refugee who was saved from the Nazis by Britain’s Kindertransport program is urging the U.K. to take in unaccompanied migrant children, mostly Muslims, stuck in makeshift tent camps in France. Lord Alf Dubs, a Jewish Labor member who was transported from Prague to London at age 6, pushed a bill through the House of Lords last week to allow in 3,000 children; the bill still needs to go to the House of Commons, where it faces opposition from the Conservative government. “I owe it to Britain—and to the children—to do as much as I can to get this provision into the law,” Dubs said. Labor parliamentarian Yvette Cooper warned that children in the camps were being recruited by pimps and drug gangs into “modern slavery.”

Havana

Castro vs. Obama: Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro, who wasn’t present at any events during President Obama’s visit to Cuba last week, has published a screed accusing Obama of failing to understand Cuban history. Writing in the state paper Granma, Castro mocked Obama’s call to set aside decades of animosity between the U.S. and Cuba. “Each of us runs the risk of a heart attack hearing these words from a U.S. president,” said Castro, outlining a long list of grievances—including the U.S.-backed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion—that should never be forgotten. Analysts said the fact that Castro waited until after Obama’s departure to launch his criticism shows that he does not intend to undermine his brother President Raúl Castro’s new opening to the U.S.

Mexico City

Flaming Trumps: Mexicans burned and exploded effigies of Donald Trump this year in their Easter weekend “burning of Judas” ritual. Usually, an effigy of an unpopular local politician takes the place of Jesus’ betrayer. But at this year’s festivities Trump figures, some of them adorned with swastikas, were most popular. Mexico’s President Enrique Peña Nieto recently criticized the GOP presidential front-runner’s bellicose rhetoric against Mexicans, saying, “That’s how Mussolini got in—that’s how Hitler got in.” Also spotted on the streets of Mexico City during celebrations were effigies of recently captured drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán and of Kate del Castillo, the actress who helped arrange actor Sean Penn’s Rolling Stone interview with the cartel boss.

Bogotá, Colombia

War crimes warning: A proposed peace agreement between the Colombian government and leftist rebel group FARC could grant impunity to military personnel who murdered civilians, human rights activists warned this week. Soldiers allegedly massacred thousands of civilians between 2002 and 2008 and dressed their remains in guerrilla uniforms, to create “false positives” and inflate their battlefield kills. Those cases are now under investigation in the courts, but the peace deal would set up a special judicial system for combatants on both sides of Colombia’s five-decade-old civil war. Loopholes in the agreement “could guarantee that many of those responsible for false-positive killings, ranging from low-ranking soldiers to generals, will escape justice,” said José Miguel Vivanco of Human Rights Watch

Buenos Aires

Falklands oil at stake: The Argentine government was celebrating this week after the United Nations declared that the potentially oil-rich waters around the British-ruled Falkland Islands belong to Argentina. A U.N. commission endorsed a new maritime boundary proposed by Buenos Aires in 2009, expanding the area of the South Atlantic Ocean under Argentina’s sovereignty by 650,000 square miles, encompassing the archipelago. “This is a historic occasion,” said Argentina’s foreign minister, Susana Malcorra. The British government dismissed the commission’s finding, noting that the U.N. body is not allowed to consider cases—like the Falklands—in which overlapping territorial claims are made. Argentina tried and failed to seize the disputed islands in a brief 1982 war with the U.K.

Vilnius, Lithuania

NATO to deter Russia: NATO must add significant troops and aircraft and change its Baltic mission from peacetime policing to combat-ready air defense, the alliance’s supreme commander said this week. “The alliance does need to be ready,” Gen. Philip Breedlove said. He was responding to pleas from NATO’s smallest members, the vulnerable former Soviet states of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, which fear a more aggressive Russia. NATO increased its number of jets patrolling the Baltic skies from four to eight after Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. “It is obvious that in case of a military conflict neither four nor eight jets would be enough,” said Lithuanian defense chief Jonas Zukas.

Palmyra, Syria

ISIS ousted: Syrian troops backed by Russian air power this week retook the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra, which had been held by ISIS for 10 months. The jihadists blew up the 1,800-year-old Roman Arch of Triumph and other monuments, and planted mines around many ruins, but about 80 percent of the UNESCO World Heritage Site remains intact. At Palmyra’s museum, ISIS militants smashed the faces off most statues. “We can renovate them,” said Syria’s head of antiquities, Maamoun Abdul Karim. “Yes, we lost part of the original, but we didn’t totally lose them.” President Vladimir Putin made a personal phone call to U.N. culture officials offering Russian help in restoration and mine removal.

Luanda, Angola

Rapper jailed: Angolan rapper Luaty Beirão and 16 other dissidents have been sentenced to two to eight years in prison for allegedly trying to overthrow the government. The charges stem from a book club meeting last year, at which Beirão and some friends discussed American scholar Gene Sharp’s 1993 book on nonviolent resistance, From Dictatorship to Democracy. Beirão, 34, who performs under the name Ikonoklasta, is an outspoken critic of Angola’s government and has called for a fairer distribution of the country’s oil wealth. Amnesty International called the sentences “an affront to justice” and the Anonymous hacking collective shut down about 20 Angolan government websites in retaliation. President José Eduardo dos Santos has ruled the former Portuguese colony as a dictator since 1979.

Beijing

Who wrote that letter? Chinese authorities have detained and questioned more than a dozen people, including journalists, website technicians, and family members of overseas dissidents, in an effort to discover who wrote a letter calling for President Xi Jinping to resign. The mysterious missive—which first appeared on an overseas Chinese-language human rights site and was then republished on the Chinabased Wujie News site—accuses Xi of centralizing power in himself, personally directing economic and foreign policy, and bypassing other Communist Party bigwigs. The writer claims to speak for “loyal party members” and says Xi has “weakened the power of all state organs.” Zhang Ping, a Chinese human rights activist living in Germany, said his two younger brothers had been arrested in southwestern China, and that police had even ordered his distant relatives to tell him to stop criticizing the party

Pyongyang, North Korea

Famine coming: A month after the U.N. imposed sweeping new sanctions on North Korea over its recent nuclear tests, North Korean state media is warning that the country could fall into famine. “Another arduous march, when we would be forced to eat grass, could come about, and we are left in isolation to fight against the enemy,” declared state newspaper Rodong Sinmun. The 1995–98 famine killed millions when North Korea diverted food to the army and the people starved to death. The same day as the famine w arning, state media showed photos of dictator Kim Jong Un and his wife touring a posh department store

Larnaca, Cyprus

Amateur hijacker: An apparently unstable man wearing a fake suicide vest hijacked an EgyptAir flight en route from Alexandria to Cairo, forcing it to land in Cyprus, where he was arrested. All the passengers and crew disembarked safely. Hijacker Seif Eddin Mustafa, 58, who has a long criminal record in Egypt, was trying to deliver a letter to his ex-wife, who divorced him in 1994 and now lives in Cyprus. “He’s not a terrorist, he’s an idiot,” an Egyptian Foreign Ministry official said. One British passenger, Ben Innes, posed for a grinning photo with Mustafa while the plane sat on the tarmac in Cyprus. “I just threw caution to the wind,” said Innes, 26. “I thought, ‘Why not? If he blows us all up, it won’t matter anyway.’

Hebron, West Bank

Soldier accused of murder: A video of an Israeli soldier shooting a captured and subdued Palestinian attacker in the head has outraged Palestinians and divided Israeli opinion. Abdel Fattah al-Sharif, 21, allegedly stabbed an Israeli soldier and was then shot and wounded; he was lying on his back in a Hebron street when he was killed. The Israeli Defense Forces arrested the soldier and condemned his actions. “These are not the values of the IDF, and these are not the values of the Jewish people,” said IDF spokesman Moti Almoz. But a poll revealed that 57 percent of Israelis opposed the soldier’s arrest. Palestinians, meanwhile, demanded a U.N. investigation. “These executions are not isolated events,” said Palestinian official Saeb Erekat.

The U.S. at a glance

Riverside, Calif.

iPhone cracked: Federal officials this week dropped a bitter legal battle with Apple after an unnamed “third party” helped unlock the encrypted iPhone used by San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook, who with his wife killed 14 people in a December terrorist attack. “We are now able to unlock that iPhone without compromising any information on the phone,” U.S. Attorney Eileen Decker said in a statement after prosecutors asked Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym to vacate her order compelling Apple’s assistance in cracking the device. Authorities remained mum about the details of the hack, the identity of the third party, and the contents of the phone, which are now being analyzed by the FBI. In a statement, Apple said the government’s “backdoor” entry into the phone “would set a dangerous precedent” and leave unresolved a fierce national debate over security and privacy.

Indianapolis

Abortion ban: Doctors in Indiana struggled this week to understand how sweeping new abortion restrictions might affect their work, after Gov. Mike Pence signed a controversial bill that bans women from terminating pregnancies because the fetus has Down syndrome or another disorder. The law, which takes effect July 1, also bans abortions on the basis of the fetus’ gender or race and makes Indiana the first state to mandate the burial or cremation of fetal remains. Opponents of the law complain that the restrictions will interfere with physicians’ ability to offer medical care and advice, because a doctor could now face a wrongful-death lawsuit if an abortion is granted to a woman on the basis of a fetal defect. Utah, meanwhile, became the first state to require doctors to administer anesthesia to women undergoing abortions at 20 weeks or later, based on the disputed notion that fetuses feel pain at that stage.

Chappaqua, N.Y.

Clinton probe: Federal prosecutors investigating Hillary Clinton’s use of a home email server while secretary of state have begun setting up formal interviews with her closest aides, suggesting the probe has entered its final stages. Prosecutors are also expected to seek an interview with Clinton. The Washington Post initially reported this week that the FBI had assigned 147 agents to the investigation, citing an unnamed lawmaker briefed by FBI Director James Comey; the report was later corrected to reflect that fewer than 50 FBI personnel are involved. The State Department has so far released more than 30,000 of Clinton’s emails, with nearly 2,100 retroactively given some form of classification. “This is clearly disruptive to the campaign,” said Democratic pollster Mark Mellman. “Important aides being questioned is not coverage you’d like to have.”

Edmond, Okla.

Man-made quakes: Fracking for oil and gas has sparked a stunning surge of human-induced earthquakes, the U.S. Geological Survey revealed this week, threatening as many as 7 million people in states across the heart of the country, including Kansas, Texas, Arkansas, and Colorado. None has been hit harder than Oklahoma, which in just a few years has become one of the most seismically active places in the world. Between 1882 and 2012, the state saw 232 earthquakes of magnitude 3.0 or stronger (the threshold at which they’re noticeable to people); in 2016 alone, Oklahomans have experienced 287 such quakes. In December, a series of powerful quakes knocked out power in Edmond, a suburb of Oklahoma City. “We need to help people understand that they do face a risk in these areas,” says USGS seismologist Mark Petersen, “and they need to take precautions just like people in California do.”

Atlanta

LGBT win: Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal this week vetoed a “religious liberty” bill that would have given faith-based organizations the right to deny jobs and services to gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people. The bill, dubbed the Free Exercise Protection Act, drew fierce opposition from civil rights groups, as well as from major multinational corporations that do business in Georgia. Disney said it would stop filming in the state and the NFL warned that the measure could cost Atlanta a chance to host the Super Bowl; Coca-Cola, Home Depot, and other Atlanta-based companies also expressed vehement opposition. Deal, a Republican, said his decision was about “the character of our people. Georgia is a welcoming state. I intend to do my part to keep it that way.” State Sen. Mike Crane, who supported the bill, called for a special session to override Deal’s veto, which he blamed on the influence of corporations and lobbyists.

Washington, D.C.

Union win: In the most significant 4-4 split ruling since Justice Antonin Scalia’s death, the Supreme Court this week effectively upheld the right of publicsector labor unions to collect mandatory dues from members and nonmembers alike. A group of California teachers had challenged a landmark 1977 ruling that allowed organized labor to charge “fair share fees” from nonmembers, as long as the funds were used for collective bargaining and not political activities. The plaintiffs, backed by conservative activists, argued that union activities are inherently political, and that being forced to contribute dues violated nonmembers’ free speech rights. In oral arguments earlier this year, the court’s conservative majority appeared to lean their way, but the post-Scalia deadlock preserves an appeals court decision upholding the fees, which unions call crucial to their survival. The ruling, however, sets no precedent and leaves the door open to a future challenge

Obama: Still failing to take ISIS seriously ?

“The split-screen told the story,” said Charles Krauthammer in the New York Daily News. As Belgian authorities were “picking body parts off the floor of the Brussels airport” last week, our TVs also showed us the president of the United States, looking cool in a pair of $485 Oliver Peoples sunglasses, “yukking it up” with Cuban dictator Raúl Castro at a baseball game in Havana, even joining the crowd in doing the Wave. Obama didn’t entirely ignore the bombings. He addressed them for all of 51 seconds before making a flowery, self-consciously “historic” speech to the Cuban people. Then Obama flew to Argentina, where he danced the tango at a state dinner. Obama simply refuses “to act as if the war on ISIS is a big deal,” said Jonathan Tobin in CommentaryMagazine.com. After every fresh ISIS atrocity—including last year’s massacres in Paris and San Bernardino—he makes a few dispassionate, boilerplate remarks, and then returns to his scheduled activities: a round of golf, most notoriously, after ISIS beheaded James Foley in 2014. Our president seems to have no idea “what is appropriate behavior at a time of tragedy and crisis.”

Obama’s steady temperament is a blessing, said Paul Waldman in WashingtonPost.com. Let’s not forget that his immediate predecessor, George W. Bush, was so rattled by the Islamic terrorism on 9/11 that he committed “the single most catastrophic mistake in American foreign policy history:” the 2003 invasion of Iraq that threw the region into chaos and gave rise to ISIS. Yet Republicans still seem to think all foreign policy is about “threats and dangers,” and showing “strength” by threatening to go to war. While his critics were mocking Obama’s eyewear and dance moves, said Maureen Dowd in The New York Times, U.S. military leaders quietly announced they had killed two of ISIS’s most senior leaders, using a raid strategy by special operations forces that Obama has pushed. However chilled out Obama may look, he always has “his eye on the ball.”

No, he doesn’t, said William Bradley in HuffingtonPost .com. Obama may be right to be wary of military adventurism, but he “got ISIS wrong from the beginning,” famously dismissing the terrorist group as al Qaida’s “JV team.” By responding with too little, too late, the president let ISIS swell into an unprecedented terrorist army that conquered large regions in Iraq and Syria. And when ISIS began exporting its barbarity to Europe with the Paris attacks, Obama was content to stay with his policy of halfhearted, incremental warfare. If there are “more terrorist spectaculars” in coming months “while Obama tangos,” he might see Americans turn in desperation to Donald Trump.

Actually, Obama’s strategy on ISIS seems to be working, said Kevin Drum in MotherJones.com. ISIS-held territory has shrunk by 40 percent since 2014, thanks to sustained bombing and the underreported special operations forces campaign. Frontline commanders are reporting that ISIS fighters have become ragged and demoralized, and retreat whenever they meet strong resistance. By November, wouldn’t it be awful for Republicans if the same “weak-kneed appeaser” who killed Osama bin Laden had ISIS on the ropes? That may be a little optimistic, said Ted Piccone in Time.com. ISIS will likely be with us long after Obama leaves office. But if we ever hope to see peace in the Middle East, we will need more of what Obama has made the priority of his presidency: diplomacy, outreach, and the promotion of American values. In the long run, winning “hearts and minds” will advance our country’s interests far more effectively than “tough talk and bluster.”

It wasn’t all bad

Ashima Shiraishi is a rockclimbing prodigy. Just a week before her 15th birthday, the New York City high schooler scaled a massive boulder on Japan’s Mount Hiei without ropes or harnesses. The climb had a difficulty rating of V15 out of V16—about as tough as a boulder climb can get. That makes Shirashi not only the first woman to complete a V15 but also the youngest person—male or female—to ever do so. “Ashima is unstoppable right now,” says Angie Payne, a top U.S. climber. “I don’t see that slowing down anytime soon

Jonathan the giant tortoise is feeling his freshest in 184 years. Hatched in 1832, the world’s oldest living animal got his first-ever bath last week in preparation for a British royal visit to his home on St. Helena, a British territory in the South Atlantic Ocean. Using a soft brush, loofah, and surgical soap, island vet Joe Hollins spent an hour scrubbing nearly two centuries’ worth of grime from Jonathan’s shell. “He looks so much cleaner, and he seemed to enjoy the whole experience,” Hollins said. “Hopefully he won’t have to wait another 185 years before his next bath.”

When 5-year-old Allison Anderwald noticed that her mom, Tracy, was lying motionless at the bottom of their backyard pool, the fearless Texas girl dove right in. Allison pulled her mom to the shallow end and lifted her head above the water before running to get help. Tracy had suffered a seizure and fallen unconscious, and would likely have drowned had her daughter not acted fast. “It is truly amazing that this little girl, who’s actually also pretty small for her age, was able to save my sister,” said Allison’s aunt, Tedra Hunt. “She’s our little mermaid and my little hero.

Brussels investigation hampered by mistakes

What happened?

Belgian authorities faced mounting criticism at home and throughout Europe this week after admitting they had committed a series of security errors both before and after the suicide bombings in Brussels. Belgian police have arrested at least 18 suspects since last week’s ISIS-directed attacks on the city’s airport and subway, which killed 32 people, including at least four Americans. Only one person, Belgian freelance journalist Fayçal Cheffou, was charged directly in connection with the terrorist assaults—but was then released hours later in a possible case of mistaken identity. Authorities originally suspected Cheffou was the third Zaventem airport attacker spotted in surveillance footage; that suspect is believed to have fled the scene when his explosives failed to detonate. But DNA tests failed to place Cheffou at the airport. As the investigation continued, a mob of 400 far-right demonstrators overran a memorial to the Brussels victims, chanting “Belgie barst”—“Break up Belgium,” a Flemish nationalist slogan.

Police in Italy, France, and Germany arrested several new suspects linked to the Brussels attacks as well as November’s terrorist rampage in Paris, which left 130 people dead. Security officials said they were increasingly confident that the Brussels and Paris atrocities were carried out by a single terrorist cell. But French President François Hollande warned that even as that cell was “in the process of being wiped out,” other terrorist networks were plotting new outrages.

What the editorials said

Belgian authorities have some explaining to do, said The Wall Street Journal. They could have arrested suspected airport bomber Ibrahim el-Bakraoui last year when he was deported to Europe by Turkey, which told Belgian officials the Brussels-born extremist had been detained “near the Syrian border on suspicion of belonging to the Islamic State.” Then, just days before the Brussels attack, Belgian police captured Salah Abdeslam, the alleged logistical mastermind of the Paris attacks. But they questioned him “for only an hour”—and failed to ask about any future ISIS plots. The European Union has all Belgium’s security problems “on a larger scale,” said The Washington Post. The bloc’s 28 member nations have failed to coordinate on even simple intelligence pooling, and can’t agree on basic questions like “whether mass electronic surveillance is an appropriate counterterrorism measure.”

The West needs to work together to defeat the Islamist threat, said the Tampa Bay Times. Yet Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump would have us “withdraw from security challenges” under his “America First” foreign policy strategy. The billionaire has called for the U.S. to rein in its involvement in NATO and in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe, just when our allies most need America’s “robust presence” and intelligence-gathering abilities

What the columnists said

“The Islamic State’s lone-wolf era is over,” said Matthew Levitt in ForeignPolicy.com. Forget small acts of violence by self-radicalized individuals; after Paris and Brussels, it’s clear ISIS is determined to direct attacks “that are far more sophisticated and lethal.” Security officials believe one terrorist network in Europe is at the heart of this violence, said Rukmini Callimachi in The New York Times. That cell was once headed by Belgian national Abdelhamid Abaaoud, whom experts believe spent two years arming and training an unknown number of European jihadists before blowing himself up in Paris.

So, “is America next?” asked Daniel Benjamin in Politico.com. An attack on U.S. soil is much less likely—not least because America has been much more successful at assimilating Muslim immigrants than Europe. We’ve also spent $650 billion on improving homeland security since 9/11 and have “the blessing of geography—two oceans that mean that outside extremists will need to fly to get here.”

For those reasons and others, Americans overestimate how much of a threat terrorism poses, said Jeremy Shapiro in Vox.com. Constant media coverage of Paris and Brussels has put vivid pictures in our heads of broken bodies and burnt-out airport terminals. But the reality is that we’ve had relatively few terrorist attacks in the U.S., while in 2015 there were 372 mass shootings that killed 475 people and wounded 1,870. Americans are all also far more at risk of dying in a car crash than a terrorist attack, but terrorism is effective precisely because it creates levels of fear that overwhelm reason. “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”