Newsweek 12/25/2020

1942 Newsweek reported on Christmas-time advances in Allied war efforts, such as the American and Filipino victory at Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, which marked the “first significant defeat for the Japanese.” In North Africa, the British also made significant gains thanks to a “brilliant stratagem” by Eighth Army commander General Bernard Montgomery at El Alamein. This year, U.S. and U.K. leaders are bringing troops home from Afghanistan in hopes of ending the nearly 20-year-long war there. President Donald Trump has vowed to reduce troops in Afghanistan to 2,500 by January. 1982 “Often more revered than read, the Good Book retains a powerful grip on the American psyche and remains the subject of national controversy,” said Newsweek. Between 2011 and 2019, the percentage of Americans who had never read the Bible grew from…

WARSAW, POLAND Mono-Mania On December 10 on the riverbank of the Vistula, in the Polish capital, a woman checks out a 10-foot-tall monolith, the latest in a string of objects/art installations that have popped-up throughout Europe and the United States — including a golden one in Columbia and a hollow one in El Paso, Texas. Do they come in peace? WOJTEK RADWANSKI BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA Fighting for Rights On December 10, demonstrators display green headscarfs, the symbol of abortion-rights activists, outside the Argentine Congress as legislators debate a bill to legalize abortion. Argentine lawmakers began discussions on a new bill to legalize abortion, reopening a debate that has bitterly divided the traditionally Catholic South American nation. EMILIANO LASALVIA PORTLAND, OREGON Couch Protesters Two protesters, in black, sit within an eviction blockade last Tuesday during clashes with police during an attempted…

@dorieclark Has Trump altered the course of U.S. conservatism? »P 14 THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC HAS OBVIOUSLY HIT A lot of businesses hard. But arguably no one more so than the owners of small businesses. To get some thoughts—and some help—I turned to Robert Herjavec, author, entrepreneur and one of the stars of ABC’s Shark Tank, which is now in its 12th season. The recent interview with Herjavec is part of Better, Newsweek’s series on LinkedIn Live (Thursdays, 9 a.m. ET/noon PT), where I talk with authors, business leaders and other thinkers to help us learn how to become a little bit better at what we do. And there’s no one better than Herjavec, founder and CEO of Herjavec Group, a global cybersecurity firm, and writer of You Don’t Have to Be a Shark,…

NATIONALISM AND POPULISM ARE THE GOP’S FUTUREby R.R. Reno IT’S LONG PAST TIME FOR AMERICAN conservatism to change course. We face a crisis of solidarity. Our political programs need to re-tie strands of society that have come undone. For conservatives, that means adopting a nationalist-populist platform. Nationalism does not mean nationalization. It is not an assault on our free market tradition. Instead, nationalism requires rebalancing policy priorities away from greater globalization and toward the restoration of an integral domestic economy. Economic growth should be more widely spread around the country, rather than clustered in super-wealthy cities on the coasts. Supply chains and key industries need to be brought back to America, not merely to ensure our security, but also to provide productive work for a wide range of Americans. Super-sized firms must be prevented from…

sky news “Hopefully it’ll help other people come along and do as I did.”—MARGARET KEENAN, THE FIRST PERSON TO GET THE PFIZER-BIONTECH VACCINE OUTSIDE OF A CLINICAL TRIAL THE WALL STREET JOURAL “I THINK WE’LL SEE SOME REDUCTION IN THE INFLUENCE OF SILICON VALLEY.”—ELON MUSK ON HIS MOVETO TEXAS Los Angeles Times “We have kids all over the country that need to save themselves and don’t know how. If I speak out, then maybe someone else with something wrong will have the courage to speak out, too.”—HALEY HODSON, RETIREDVOLLEYBALL STAR, ON HER CONCUSSION LAWSUIT AGAINST STANFORDANDTHENCAA“If we have too many contacts now before Christmas, and that ends up making it the last Christmas with the grandparents, then we will have failed.”—GERMAN CHANCELLOR ANGEL A MERKEL“EVEN TRUMP APPOINTEES & REPUBLICANS SAW THIS FOR WHAT IT WAS:…

BACK IN 1994, WHEN QUANTUM COMPUTERS existed only as so much chalk on a blackboard, mathematician Peter Shor invented what may soon prove to be their killer app. Shor trained his efforts on a calculation called “factoring,” which ordinarily nobody but a mathematician would care about, except it just happens to be an Achilles heel of the internet. If someone were to invent a computer that could perform this operation quickly, messages now hidden from hackers, terrorists, military adversaries, governments and competitors would be as easy to read as a Stephen King novel. Shor, of course, didn’t have such a computer. He was writing an algorithm, or program, for a hypothetical machine that might one day exploit the weird properties of atoms and subatomic particles, as described by the theory of quantum…