Newsweek May 13, 2022

1976 “The President has generally been a lackluster contrast to Reagan on the road,” Newsweek wrote of Gerald Ford’s campaign against the former actor and California governor. Ford’s “habits were formed in 23 years as a minority member of Congress, reacting to rather than controlling events, and his people now worry at his apparent incapacity to convey that sense of motion and of vision required of Presidents.” Ford did win the nomination, but Reagan’s gregarious persona ultimately helped earn him the 1980 presidency—not unlike reality TV star and businessman-turned-president Donald Trump in 2016. 1982 “The attack on HMS Sheffield followed a lethal new script for naval warfare,” Newsweek wrote of the Argentines’ “smart” missile that sank the British ship during the Falklands war. This year the Falkland Islands commemorate the 40th anniversary of…

FEATURED EPISODE The Josh Hammer Show Conservative politics, law and culture LENIENCY FOR CRIMINALS? ▸ After 10 people were shot and 13 more injured on a crowded rush hour subway platform in New York, Hammer blames the breakdown of law and order on the fall of “broken windows” policing and the rise in the bipartisan criminal justice reform movement’s belief in an “overincarceration problem.” Plus: Elon Musk’s privatization of Twitter. HOST ▸ Josh Hammer, Newsweek opinion editor IN THEIR WORDS ▸ “You can only understand this in terms of the general culture of leniency for criminals.” DON’T MISS THE PARTING SHOT Your weekly dose of everything pop culture Drag’s Coachella Reveal ▸ What were RuPaul and Britney Spears’ influences on superstar Pabllo Vittar, the first drag queen to perform at Coachella? Plus: Alaska Thunderf*ck and Drag Queen of the…

ON NOVEMBER 4, 2020, BRIANNE DRESSEN walked into a clinic in West Jordan, Utah to take part in a clinical trial for AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine. A few minutes after getting the shot, her arm began to tingle and her eyes felt “weird,” she says. Her symptoms soon got worse. She developed a fever and chills and her arm went numb. At one point she grew so sensitive to light and sound that she sought relief in a dark room wearing earmuffs. By the time she got to the emergency room at the University of Utah Hospital in Salt Lake City, the numbness had spread from her feet upward to her legs. She had lost the ability to walk and could no longer control her bladder and bowels. “It was really scary,”…

AMERICANS ARE SCOOPING UP secondhand items at a record pace, thanks to a surge in digital resale platforms like Poshmark, Depop, thredUP and The RealReal. Now more traditional retailers want in on the action. This year alone, Americans will spend almost $179 billion on secondhand goods, up 96 percent from 2015, according to research from Mercari and GlobalData. By 2030, those firms contend, that number will nearly double to $354 billion—a growth rate 3.2 times that of the retail sector as a whole. And it’s not just a small segment driving the pre-used market: Three quarters of us, the Mercari/GlobalData research shows, bought at least one secondhand item last year. Those numbers are only part of the reason well-known name-brand retailers are now diving into the “new-to-you” business. This embrace of secondhand…

“TODAY I TESTED POSITIVE FOR COVID-19. I HAVE NO SYMPTOMS, AND I WILL CONTINUE TO ISOLATE AND FOLLOW CDC GUIDELINES.”—Vice President Kamala Harris“I was about to become 30, and I knew I was about to expire, and wanted to protect myself with a contract that would guarantee I kept working for years to come.”—MODEL LAUREN HUTTON ON HER 1973 REVLON CONTRACT“Why on earth would we hitch our wagons again to a crybaby sore loser who lost the popular vote twice, lost the House, lost the Senate, and lost the White House, and so on?”—GOP CONSULTANT BARBARA COMSTOCK“Human beings can love and laugh and enjoy each other’s company because we are afforded this space and luxury by a planet that cares for us.”—ACTOR CHIWETEL EJIOFOR“CRITICS ABSOLUTELY SERVE NO PURPOSE. AND I’M…

IN FEBRUARY, THE COMPANY FORMERLY KNOWN as Facebook lost $232 billion in value in the stock market—the biggest loss ever suffered by a U.S. company in a single day, a plunge equal to the combined market values of Netflix and Fedex. By the end of April, the stock had lost another fifth of its value. Meta Platforms, as the company is now formally known, can only wish that a brutal stock beating is its only problem. Meta faces serious threats on several fronts, and any one of them might prove existential. For the first time in its 18-year history, the number of people who use the once-ubiquitous-seeming Facebook social network has been dropping. Privacy protections added by Apple last year to its phone software are hobbling Facebook’s bread-and-butter ad business, which…