Another Week: Number 158

This installment of Another Week marks three full years that I’ve been posting these updates. They began in part as a test of my ability to create content on a regular basis. I guess I passed!

Our few days of reprieve from winter ended Sunday, as fog turned to rain, which turned to snow and wind by Monday morning. Meanwhile, in SanFrancisco, the Chicago Bears also got a cold jolt on Sunday night when Caleb Williams’ last-second pass fell short in the end zone, giving the 49ers a 42-38 victory.

CNN spent all day Wednesday — starting at 6 a.m. — covering the breaking news of 2026’s arrival in locations around the world.  They’re kind of confused about their identity these days. Sometimes they cover news, other times they air foodie shows about Italy, Mexico, or Spain. They might broadcast the Farm Aid concert, or a Christmas variety special, or a podcast about grief. It’s like a box of chocolates.

2025 ended here on Wednesday night. I was in bed pretty early, but my family’s group texts kept alerting me — and alerting me — that someone was wishing everyone else a Happy New Year! Yes, okay. Then the neighborhood fireworks cranked up, finally tapering off after 12:30.

In the morning, there were news reports about a horrific fire at a bar in a Swiss ski resort town.

Wednesday night and Thursday, I tuned into all four College Football Playoff games, but none of them really grabbed me.

On Friday evening, the Wolf Supermoon rose majestically over Mitchell School. Later, at 12:55 a.m. Saturday, CNN switched into breaking news mode after explosions were reported at Caracas, Venezuela.

What was happening was that — after months of blowing up speedboats to save the USA from the scourge of drugs, accompanied by the buildup of an enormous military flotilla and a CIA drone strike on a Venezuelan port facility — the United States went in and snatched Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, from their bedroom and flew them to New York to face criminal charges.

In his triumphant press conference later on Saturday, Donald J. Trump announced that the United States would now be running Venezuela — and that, regarding Venezuela’s oil reserves, “We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground.”

Anyone with access to, say, The Daily Show, should have seen this coming — yet the cable news people were flabbergasted. Nevertheless, they dutifully began building a litany of talking points to repeat over and over, hour after hour — always starting with the disclaimer that Maduro was a bad man and an illegitimate president. before expressing shock over the military action on a sovereign nation without even informing Congress, and citing Colin Powell’s  “Pottery Barn rule.”

One subject, however, suddenly and completely vanished from all cable news conversations: The Epstein files.

I walked 3.9 miles this week.

King Leopold’s Ghost, by Adam Hochschild

One nice thing about Kindle books is that, once in a while, a title you want to read might become available for an extremely low price.

This happened to me recently with King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, by Adam Hochschild, a book about the Belgian monarch’s colony — the “Congo Free State” — between 1885 and 1908.  The book was published in 1998. I read it this week.

It starts off telling the tale of Henry Morton Stanley, the famous (“Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”) African explorer who previously fought on both sides of the American Civil War. At first, it’s a preposterous and somewhat hilarious story — but it turns out to be a harrowing account of the fleecing of Africa’s natural resources through forced labor and torture that killed an estimated ten million people.

King Leopold is shown to be an unimaginably sick sovereign. He cares only about enriching himself, first through ivory and then natural rubber, without any regard for the human beings obtaining it for him. He’s a master at manipulating the media. He pretends to be combating illegal trafficking by “Arabs.” He obsesses over the building of a triumphal arch, new palace wings, and a golf course. A former servant testified that he paid £800 a month for “a steady supply of young women, some of whom were ten to fifteen years old and guaranteed to be virgins.”

I could only put this book down momentarily. It’s so well-written and expertly told that I was awed by Hochschild’s skill even apart from the monstrous crimes he unfolds. There are heroes here as well. They go to extraordinary lengths to bring the atrocities to light — and there are theories as to why, once exposed, the whole matter was promptly forgotten again by the world.

Only You (1994)

On Saturday night, scrolling through my mom’s cloud DVR, we settled on a movie that neither of us had seen before. It was recorded during TCM’s New Year’s Eve showcase, and it turned out that no one on TCM’s panel of six or so movie aficionados had previously seen it either.

Only You is a romantic comedy directed by Norman Jewison, starring the adorable Marisa Tomei and the dashing Robert Downey Jr. The film features gorgeous scenes in Italy shot by legendary cinematographer Sven Nykvist. American treasure Bonnie Hunt plays Tomei’s lifelong friend and sister-in-law, and she’s really good. There’s a cute story hook involving a mysterious name. This movie is a throwback to classic Hollywood rom-coms, and it references several of them.

Despite all this, though, Only You does not ultimately succeed. The plot gets carried away into sillyness. Tomei’s character dithers too much. The romantic soufflé deflates. It’s frustrating.