Newsweek July 15-22, 2022

2010 “Overwhelmed by curriculum standards, American teachers warn there’s no room in the day for a creativity class,” Newsweek wrote, citing students’ declining scores on the Torrance creativity test. The magazine asked: Is creativity learnable? “Well, think of it like basketball. Being tall does help to be a pro basketball player, but the rest of us can still get quite good at the sport through practice.” Children’s scores on the Torrance test have continued to plummet over the last decade, with some researchers pointing to overscheduled lives and constant, prepackaged entertainment as reasons. 1976 “The celebratory mood was at least premature and possibly dangerous,” Newsweek said of the Democratic National Party convention. “Carter remains a novice, however gifted, in national politics.” He would go on to win the election. This May, the 97-year-old…

NOT LONG AGO, JULIE OBER ALLEN NOTICED that her teenage son was constantly teasing her about being old. His attitude annoyed her, until she realized where he got it from: herself. “I make jokes about aging all the time,” she says. Allen’s own behavior surprised her. As a health disparities expert at the University of Oklahoma, she spends a lot of time studying discrimination—and here she was, letting all these negative beliefs about aging seep out in a constant stream of quips and self-deprecating humor. Allen got another surprise when she completed a study on the health effects of such “everyday ageism.” Not only are seemingly innocuous everyday slights highly prevalent, but the people most exposed to them were also more likely to have health conditions such as high blood pressure, diabetes,…

IN THE HOURS AND DAYS AFTER the Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, Democrats from President Joe Biden to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, as well as other elected Democrats from coast to coast, have echoed a similar message: Roe is on the line this November, and the path to undoing the damage the Supreme Court has done runs through the ballot box. The message boils down to: If you want to see the protections, rights and freedoms that were taken by six extremists on the Supreme Court restored, vote for Democrats this November. While the message is accurate, it is woefully insufficient. It also flies in the face of the reality of the last two years. The truth is people did vote. In record numbers in the middle of a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic,…

JULIA MITYAEVA’S SIX-YEAR-OLD daughter Sophia refuses to talk about the things she saw before the family escaped the fighting in Ukraine. Sophia, a vivacious kinder-gartner who likes to dress up in costumes and played a fox in her school ballet recital a couple weeks before Russia invaded her country, won’t let anybody else speak of it in her presence either. After sharing her family’s harrowing tale of escape with Newsweek during a nearly two hour interview recently, Mityaeva had a few questions of her own for the reporter: When the sounds of the playground are replaced by the thump of artillery shells and explosions hitting nearby, when a child is forced to leave behind everything she knows and loves including a cat named Garfield and a father named Sascha, can she…

WHEN RUSSIA’S VLADIMIR PUTIN BEGAN A MILITARY INVASION OF UKRAINE on February 24, 2022, it was widely assumed that Ukraine would surrender quickly. Instead, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky—an actor-turned-politician famous for playing an actor-turned-politician in the TV comedy Servant of the People—refused to budge, withstood multiple assasination attempts and rallied his people to fight. He pleaded with the international community to implement sanctions on the Russians and to provide weapons and ammunition for the Ukrainians. How did Zelensky accomplish this transformation? Where did he first take Putin’s measure? Read about it in this exclusive advance look from Ukrainian journalist and political commentator Serheii Rudenko’s upcoming Zelensky: A BiogrAphy (Polity Books, July 18), in which he explores Zelensky’s life and governing style, from his childhood through the beginnings of the war. IN…

FOR THE SECOND YEAR, NEWSWEEK HAS teamed up with respected research and data firm Statista to compile our annual list of America’s Fastest Growing Online Shops. We looked at online shops whose traffic and sales have been growing very quickly and selected the 1,000 best across 37 categories in eight industries: fashion and accessories; food, health and personal care; garden and craft; home living; leisure, games and hobby; office, electronics and media; sports, outdoor and motor; and universal providers—shops that sell everything. “Fashion (single brand)” is the largest individual category with 129 shops listed. We ranked shops on three criteria: revenue growth, traffic growth and technical details of their sites, like loading time and mobile optimization, which indicate how easy a site is to use and how long customers spend…