James' World 2

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Never believe anything in politics until it’s officially denied.

And even then, when it comes to Vladimir Putin’s health, you can still be forgiven for being at a loss about what to believe, given the bewildering frenzy of speculation over whether something is wrong with the Russian president.

The rumor mill about the now strangely puffy-faced 69-year-old has reached such a fever pitch that Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov this week felt it necessary to shoot down any suggestion that Putin was sick. “You know, President Putin appears in public every day. You can see him on the screens, read his speeches, listen to his speeches,” he said, speaking to French media TF1.

“I don’t think sane people can discern any sort of symptom of disease in this man,” Lavrov continued.  Sane or not, media have for months speculated over the state of the Russian leader, interpreting everything from his bloated appearance as a sign of steroid-use to implying the Russian leader has Parkinson’s and cancer. Video footage showing Putin fiercely gripping a table while looking uncomfortable during a recent meeting, making twitchy hand gestures and seeming to limp during Russia’s Victory Day parade, have only added to this free-for-all among armchair physicians.

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Russian President Vladimir Putin holds a candle during an Orthodox Easter service in Moscow | Alexander Nemenov/AFP via Getty Images

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Among the many looming ecological disasters that terrify us today, one that only a handful of people have contemplated as sufficiently looming and terrifying is the loss of the bats in our belfry. According to “The Darkness Manifesto” (Scribner), by the Swedish ecologist Johan Eklöf, most churches in southwest Sweden had bat colonies back in the nineteen-eighties, and now most of them don’t. Light pollution, his research suggests, has been a major culprit: “District after district has installed modern floodlights to show the architecture it’s proud of, all the while the animals—who have for centuries found safety in the darkness of the church towers and who have for 70 million years made the night their abode—are slowly but surely vanishing from these places.”

The presence of bats in the belfry, as a metaphor for disordered thinking, is usually taken to refer to the way bats would flutter around the upper stories of distressed churches, but a larger madness, Eklöf thinks, is responsible for their absence. A professor at Stockholm University, he is an expert in bats, which might suggest a déformation professionnelle in his interest in darkness, the way an expert in roosters might have a weakness for the dawn. He is able to tell us authoritatively that, though bats do indeed use natural sonar to echolocate their way around, their eyes see well enough in the dark to help in their navigation. (As so often, nature’s secret to survival is not one perfect plan but a little bit of this and a little bit of that.) Of course, Eklöf’s arguments escape the narrow world of roof eaves and pointy ears. Though the book is written as a sort of “Silent Spring” manifesto against the ecological devastations of light pollution, its considerable charm depends on the encyclopedic intensity with which he evokes the hidden creatures of the night.

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The Luxor Hotel’s “sky beam,” in Las Vegas, generates forty-two billion candlepower of light each night, confusing flying creatures that are drawn to its radiance. Illustration by Carson Ellis

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The Bible has a lot to say about the end times. Nearly every book of the Bible contains prophecy regarding the end times. Taking all of these prophecies and organizing them can be difficult. Following is a very brief summary of what the Bible declares will happen in the end times.

Christ will remove all born-again believers from the earth in an event known as the rapture (1 Thessalonians 4:13-18; 1 Corinthians 15:51-54). At the judgment seat of Christ, these believers will be rewarded for good works and faithful service during their time on earth or will lose rewards, but not eternal life, for lack of service and obedience (1 Corinthians 3:11-15; 2 Corinthians 5:10).

The Antichrist (the beast) will come into power and will sign a covenant with Israel for seven years (Daniel 9:27). This seven-year period of time is known as the “tribulation.” During the tribulation, there will be terrible wars, famines, plagues, and natural disasters. God will be pouring out His wrath against sin, evil, and wickedness. The tribulation will include the appearance of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, and the seven seal, trumpet, and bowl judgments.

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Crypto was sold as a sort of lifeline to Black communities, as a way to build wealth outside of the mainstream financial system that many people, understandably, mistrust. The crypto complex told the story of a potential for riches, a way for people left out of more traditional financial apparatuses to get in, bombarding the Black population with marketing and ads featuring celebrities such as LeBron James and Spike Lee. The industry made it clear: If you didn’t get in, well, you might just be missing out. Many Black investors picked up what marketers were putting down, investing in cryptocurrency at higher rates than their white counterparts — especially Black investors under 40.

Now, cryptocurrencies are trading well below their 2021 highs. Many NFTs have plummeted in value and are essentially worthless. Some high-profile projects and companies in the space have imploded, and it’s not clear what, if anything, customers who put their money into those entities will get back. All is not totally lost. Investors who got into cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and Ethereum in the early days are still ahead (assuming they haven’t lost the coins or had them scammed away). Crypto often goes through boom and bust cycles, and it’s unlikely the ecosystem is dead.

Still, Black investors were not generally among that early group to dive into crypto, as the Atlantic’s Annie Lowrey notes. Instead, many of them got in late, and some appear to have bought high and sold low. According to a recent LendingTree survey, Black crypto investors were likelier than white crypto investors to say that they had borrowed money to make their investment and that they had sold their crypto for less than it was worth. In other words, some Black investors have been left holding the bag.

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The crypto crash might have been particularly painful for Black investors.iStock/Getty Images Plus

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Across the country, there’s a silent frustration brewing about an age-old practice that many say is getting out of hand: tipping.

Some fed-up consumers are posting rants on social media complaining about tip requests at drive-thrus, while others say they’re tired of being asked to leave a gratuity for a muffin or a simple cup of coffee at their neighborhood bakery. What’s next, they wonder — are we going to be tipping our doctors and dentists, too?

As more businesses adopt digital payment methods, customers are automatically being prompted to leave a gratuity — many times as high as 30% — at places they normally wouldn’t. And some say it has become more frustrating as the price of items has skyrocketed due to inflation, which eased to 6.5% in December but still remains painfully high.

“Suddenly, these screens are at every establishment we encounter. They’re popping up online as well for online orders. And I fear that there is no end,” said etiquette expert Thomas Farley, who considers the whole thing somewhat of “an invasion.”

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An age-old practice that many say is getting out of hand: tipping

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After days in the hospital, the doctors had ruled out a long list of infections, as well as scary conditions like leukemia. That left them circling around a rare type of childhood arthritis called systemic onset juvenile idiopathic arthritis, or sJIA, in which the innate immune system, the body’s first line of defense against pathogens, goes haywire. Young children are tormented by daily spiking fevers, a fleeting rash, and arthritis. Some develop a life-threatening immune activation syndrome. Untreated, destructive joint damage can occur. We were in shock.

But the doctors mentioned a drug that they’d probably want to try — anakinra, a biologic drug that blocks a key prong of the immune system and quells inflammation. Like most rare disease drugs, anakinra (also known by the trade name Kineret) was obscure, but I’m a health and science reporter and I’d heard of it. In 2020, I interviewed a pediatric rheumatologist, Randy Cron at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who wanted to test whether anakinra could help people with severe covid-19.

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Muscular dystrophy came for my vision first, although I did not know it at the time. On the second Friday morning of April 2020, I realized quite suddenly I couldn’t read out of my right eye. I could see, but I couldn’t distinguish words. In the bedroom, I asked my wife to place a book I had never seen on the dresser. With my left eye covered, I turned around and: nothing. The cover was blended like the clouds of a Bob Ross painting. Four days later, an ophthalmologist examined me. I hadn’t noticed anything wrong with my left eye (yet), but he certainly did. You have cataracts, he told me, in both eyes, at age 31.

Two months later, I started feeling this immense ache up and down my arms. Then I began losing strength in my hands, which I noticed while changing the oil in my car. With the wrench in my right hand, I went to loosen the plug on the oil pan, and my wrist and fingers felt like Jell-O. When I tried to let go of the wrench, my fingers instead curled toward my palm, contorting my hand like a claw. It was the same if I tried opening a jar or turning a doorknob. 

Soon after, I noticed my jaw and tongue cramped up every so often, making it difficult to speak intelligibly. For a year I saw an orthopedist, and then physical therapists at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore who put me through a month-long regimen of stretching activities to see if that would fix the problem.

When I knew the physical therapy wasn’t working, the orthopedist ordered an electromyography exam. These are tests that measure the electrical activity in your muscles and nerves and are one way to determine if you have pinched nerves—which, for a while, I and the doctors suspected was behind my faulty grip. But when the doctor stuck a tiny needle into the skin between the thumb and wrist of my left palm, the unmistakable noise from the machine next to me was that of a dive-bombing plane. He told me it was a sign of some sort of mistake in the ions that enable muscle movement and told me I would need to see a neurologist.

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Illustration by GQ

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Melissa Schriek for The New York Times

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