Match of the day live

My husband’s boss, an executive at a multinational firm, came to our city on vacation and invited us to dinner. We made reservations at our favorite restaurant. When the bill came, the boss’s husband picked up the check and said: “We’ve got this.” We thanked them and said we hadn’t intended for them to pay. The next day, my husband received an email from his boss saying he just saw the credit card charge, which was larger than expected. He planned to ask the restaurant if there was an error. We were embarrassed; we ordered more to drink than them. So, we pulled up the menu online, totaled our share with tax and tip, and sent them a check. (It was $37 more than their share.) We apologized for not insisting on splitting the bill. Did we do the right thing? WIFE Well, you didn’t do the wrong thing, but you may have overreacted. In your view, the boss believed he was overcharged by about $40. That seems like small potatoes to make a fuss about, considering he hadn’t bothered to check … [Read more...] about The Boss Paid for Dinner, and Then Complained the Next Day. What Do We Do?

One of the notable dynamics of American life today is that conservatives report being personally happier than liberals but also seem more politically discontented. The political left has become more institutionalist, more invested in experts and establishments, even as progressive culture seems more shadowed by unhappiness and even mental illness. Meanwhile conservatives claim greater contentment in their private lives — and then go out and vote for paranoid outsiders and burn-it-down populists. These dynamics aren’t entirely new: As Musa al-Gharbi writes in an essay for American Affairs, the happiness gap between liberals and conservatives is a persistent social-science finding, visible across several eras and many countries. Meanwhile, the view that “my life is pretty good, but the country is going to hell,” which seems to motivate a certain kind of middle-class Donald Trump supporter, would have been unsurprising to hear in a bar or at a barbecue in 1975 or 1990, no less than … [Read more...] about How the Right Turned Radical and the Left Became Depressed

Before he met and married Meghan Markle , Prince Harry embarked on a number of high-profile relationships with women within the orbit of the royal family and British high society. Of his relationships, the most prominent was with Zimbabwe-born Chelsy Davy, whose family ran a big game farm in South Africa. Within months of their relationship becoming public, Davy was a figure of intense public interest—something Harry has since spoken of his, and her, discomfort over. In court filings, made as part of his ongoing lawsuit against the publishers of the British tabloid Daily Mail over historic phone-hacking and privacy invasion allegations, the prince said that Davy was the victim of unlawful information-gathering techniques such as wiretapping and bugging. The media intrusion, the prince said, made Davy feel as if she was being "hunted." In the end, he said, she questioned whether she wanted a "lifetime of being stalked?" Here, Newsweek looks at who Chelsy Davy is and … [Read more...] about Who is Chelsy Davy—Prince Harry’s ex he feared would be “harassed to death”

The roads surrounding the Jerusalén-San Luis Alto Picudito Indigenous reservation in Putumayo, Colombia, are treacherous on a good day. Made mostly of gravel and mud, they narrow to barely the width of a small truck in some places, and in others, especially after a storm, they yield almost completely to the many rivers with which they intersect. They also twist and turn and bump without stop. So, in the most difficult months of her pregnancy, when everything tasted like cardboard and it hurt even to sit or stand, Marleny Mesa avoided traveling altogether. This meant skipping checkups at the clinic in Villagarzón, which could take two hours or more to get to. But Marleny wasn’t overly worried. A nurse had assured her early in her pregnancy that her blood work was good and that everything looked fine. As a midwife herself, Marleny knew that making the trip would be riskier than missing a few doctor’s visits. But now, in the final days of her pregnancy, she could not shake the feeling … [Read more...] about The Incredible Challenge of Counting Every Global Birth and Death

Sports Video games NBA Gamers The cramped room in Midtown Manhattan was packed wall-to-wall with YouTubers—a relentlessly cheery bunch—the lot of them excitedly live-streaming, likes and comments bobbing across their screens. It was August, and the crowd was previewing the latest product from the NBA 2K video game series—NBA 2K18, which was released Friday to those who pre-ordered—and the event was crowded with elite gamers, social media stars, 2K staffers and, pocked about the room, honest-to-God, in-the-flesh NBA players. Security stood at the front door. Booze flowed from a bar in the back. TVs pinstriped the length of the room, cutting it into even rows. That was the main attraction, with the gamers lining up, jostling through the morass of people to get their turn on the joysticks (all of this, of course, beamed over the internet to 2K devotees). In a room full of presumed NBA fans it was somewhat disorienting to see these NBA players—Brooklyn Nets guard … [Read more...] about Virtual Meets Reality: Inside NBA 2K and Pro Basketball

The coronavirus pandemic has been defined by so much loss. Of lives, jobs, relationships. Of normalcy. But amid that upheaval, there have been occasional moments of hope, small positive changes borne from the chaos of the past three years. Hundreds of you wrote to us about the ways that pandemic disruptions surprisingly reshaped your lives for the better. Some of you found time to start a new business venture or fall in love. Lockdowns allowed you to spend more time with your children or parents, or prioritize your own happiness through daily morning walks, new recipes or oil painting. In June 2020, I adopted a sickly kitten, a responsibility I wouldn’t have been able to take on had I not been newly working from home. Now she’s almost 3 years old and a lovable companion for whom I feel immensely grateful. Reading your pandemic silver linings genuinely improved my week. I hope you enjoy them, too. Here’s some of what you shared, lightly edited for clarity. “In the spring … [Read more...] about Californians Share Their Pandemic Silver Linings

In 1980 an ecologist and an economist chose a refreshingly unacademic way to resolve their differences. They bet $1,000. Specifically, the bet was over the future price of five metals, but at stake was much more -- a view of the planet's ultimate limits, a vision of humanity's destiny. It was a bet between the Cassandra and the Dr. Pangloss of our era. They lead two intellectual schools -- sometimes called the Malthusians and the Cornucopians, sometimes simply the doomsters and the boomsters -- that use the latest in computer-generated graphs and foundation-generated funds to debate whether the world is getting better or going to the dogs. The argument has generally been as fruitless as it is old, since the two sides never seem to be looking at the same part of the world at the same time. Dr. Pangloss sees farm silos brimming with record harvests; Cassandra sees topsoil eroding and pesticide seeping into ground water. Dr. Pangloss sees people living longer; Cassandra sees rain … [Read more...] about Betting on the Planet

PUTUMAYO, Colombia — In a rebel-held town deep in the jungle, Joel ran drills beside his comrades, line after line of them in camouflage and boots, rifles at their sides. “To the right!” their instructor shouted. For Joel, 36, this scene was familiar. He had spent six years in the army, fighting on the front lines against a brutal insurgency that had terrorized Colombia for decades. But now he had a new employer: an illegal armed group that included the same insurgents he had spent his military career battling to defeat. “I know it shouldn’t be like this,” he said recently, cradling a rifle in his lap. But after he left the army, he said, he’d struggled to make ends meet. Then came an offer of a salary of $500 a month, nearly twice Colombia’s monthly minimum wage. Now, “my children live better lives,” he said, “because I can feed them.” Colombia’s peace accord, signed in 2016 by the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, was supposed to … [Read more...] about Deep in Colombia, Rebels and Soldiers Fight for the Same Prize: Drugs

Prince Harry is "well within his rights" to weigh in on U.S. politics because he lives in the country and his "wife and children are citizens", according to a discussion on a new episode of Newsweek 's The Royal Report podcast. Chief royal correspondent Jack Royston and royal commentator Kristen Meinzer discussed Harry's address at the United Nations last week marking Nelson Mandela International Day where he likened the "rolling back of constitutional rights here in the United States," with the war in Ukraine and COVID-19 pandemic. Discussing the content of the speech where the prince also revealed the touching association he holds between his mother, wife and Africa , Royston said: "it's always nice to see him speaking about Diana and about Meghan." To this, Meinzer added that it was the political heart of the address which "stood out to me even more." "We all know that royals are not supposed to wade into politics, even though just last week on this show we were … [Read more...] about Prince Harry Is ‘Well Within His Rights’ to Comment On U.S. Politics

The suspected betrayal of U.S. informants in China by a former CIA officer is "one of the biggest losses and intelligence failures in modern history," a former counterintelligence official told NBC News. "There was a period of time when reporting to the U.S. intelligence community out of China dried up almost completely, and you don’t rebuild that base of information overnight," said Frank Figliuzzi, who was an FBI assistant director in 2011 and 2012. That assessment comes a day after the Justice Department announced the arrest of former American spy Jerry Chun Shing Lee , 53, for illegal possession of classified information — including the real names of other CIA operatives. Lee, a naturalized U.S. citizen who served in the Army and worked for the CIA for 13 years, is suspected of funneling information to China that caused the deaths or imprisonment of approximately 20 American agents , sources familiar with the case said. Ex-CIA officer … [Read more...] about FBI created job for suspected spy Jerry Lee to lure him to U.S.