Digis Mak

In the sample clues below, the links take you to explainers from our beginners series. The setter's name often links to an interview with him or her, in case you feel like getting to know these people better.The news in cluesCrossword depictions of the prime minister at the time of writing appear to have settled on three characteristics. There's the question of honesty, as in Picaroon's clue …7d List what fibbers do endlessly, one such as Boris (9)[ wordplay: word meaning “what fibbers do” minus last letter (“endlessly”) + what Boris is example of ][ INVENT – T + TORY ][ definition: list (as a noun) ]… for INVENTORY. Then there's the question of stability, as in Brunel's clue...1a Tory leader gets over quandary reported in the news (7)[ wordplay: first letter (“leader”) of TORY + cr...

B.and now the US supreme court's overturning of Roe v Wade hardly comes as a surprise. We've known this was imminent since the leak, a month or so ago, of Justice Alito's memo. And yet it still delivers a profound shock – in fact, a series of shocks. Stunned, we ask, how could this happen? as if we hadn't known, for weeks, that it was a more or less done deal.What's shocking is the actualization of the scary Handmaid's Tale scenario: our growing suspicion that Margaret Atwood's fictional dystopia – a society in which women are forced to bear children and brutally punished for disobedience – is closer to becoming a reality than we might have imagined. What's shocking is this proof of the court's desire and ability to control and punish women, to deprive us of our constitutional righ...

Now that Roe v Wade has been overturned, the legal status of abortion is back in the hands of state lawmakers. And this will have especially damaging consequences for Black women.It's no news that being forced to carry a baby to term can be a death sentence. From ectopic pregnancies to other life-threatening complicationspregnant people in these situations are often faced with a choice between their own lives and that of their unborn baby.In the case of African Americans, that risk of death is much higher. According to the CDC, Black women are over three times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related complication than white women are. And in some parts of the country, this disparity is frighteningly worse. A report by the District of Columbia's Maternal Mortality Review Committee...

Since he took office as US president in January 2021, Joe Biden has starred in several moments that have raised concerns about his health and his ability to lead the most powerful Executive in the world. That uneasiness to have reached the White House, whose communication team has written Biden a list of basic instructions for a meeting that the president was going to have with leaders of the energy sector. Among these instructions were those to “enter the room and greet the participants”, “sit in YOUR seat” (like this, in capital letters, so as not to create confusion) or “thank the participants”. Biden held up a piece of paper on which these indications could be read, something that was quickly captured on camera by Getty Images photojournalist Drew Angerer. As Business Insider pu...

Billions of dollars of value have been wiped off the cryptocurrency market in the last few weeks. Companies in the industry are feeling the pain. Lending and trading firms are facing a liquidity crisis and many firms have announced layoffs.Yu Chun Christopher Wong | S3studio | Getty ImagesThree Arrows Capital, a crypto-focused hedge fund, has to meet a deadline on Monday to repay more than $670 million in loans or face default, in a case that could have a ripple effect across the digital asset market.3AC, as it's also known, is one of the most prominent crypto hedge funds around and is known for its highly leveraged bets.But with billions of dollars being wiped off the digital coin market in recent weeks, the hedge fund is facing a potential liquidity and solvency issue.Voyager Digi...

Llooking at a map, the Sorrentine peninsula juts into the Thyrrhenian sea as if it's thumbing a ride. It provides the bottom curve of the Gulf of Naples and the top curve of the Gulf of Salerno, while its tip is a few miles from the island of Capri. The bone of the thumb is the rising and remarkable Lattari mountain range, while towns punctuate the coast, which dips steeply towards the sea. One of those towns is Sorrento, known by the Romans as Surrentum (but a village long before). Now it is a land of wine; before, though, it was a land of lemons and, myth-wise, where sirens (beautiful or monstrous, depending on whom you ask) used bewitching songs (rather than thumbs) to lure unwary mariners.There are other alluring reasons, too, and confidence around food; there are a good numbe...

Yon the summer of 1992, Ruth moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to study for a PhD in Jewish history. As soon as she arrived, she began searching for a place to go for Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest. Someone told her about a local prayer group. “They had a pot luck dinner once a month to which people brought different dishes,” she says. “I was told I should definitely join them.”When she arrived at dinner, she was seated next to David. He was in his second year of graduate school, and had been attending the group's events for a year. They began to chat and quickly realized they had friends in common. “I had come back from studying in Israel and I knew a lot of people who had gone to university with David,” she says. “He had also lived in Israel, too.”David thought she was “incr...

"ANDuphoria.” That's how Jim Obergefell describes his reaction to him on 26 June 2015, when, “after a lifetime of feeling less than, of feeling outside of society”, the supreme court affirmed the right to same-sex marriage in Obergefell v Hodges.The landmark civil rights case for which Obergefell served as lead plaintiff capped a string of court victories for LGBTQ+ people in the US, including a ban on criminalizing gay sex and the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. It appeared to signal a new era of tolerance and civil rights in the US.But just seven years later, Obergefell's mood has darkened.“People are terrified,” he says. “They're rightly afraid of losing the right to marry the person they love. How long before this court decides that the 2003 decision, Lawrence v Texas, isn't pa...

Asa teenager Lorn “Leak” Sreyleak looked forward to playing football every week with friends in his home town of Kampong Chhnang. But the 15-year-old couldn't help but send another team that sometimes practiced on an adjacent pitch. Led by a gruff coach affectionately called “Pa Vann”, or Dad, some of the players reminded Leak of himself: although he was born biologically female, Leak had known since childhood that he was a boy.The other footballers “seemed happy”, recalls Leak, who is now 25 and lives in Phnom Penh. “They could do what they wanted to do. They had freedom.”Lorn Sreyleak, one of dozens of teenagers across Cambodia to be drawn under the wing of transgender coach Van 'Pa Vann' Sovann. Photograph: Courtesy of Document Our History NowWithin a few months, Leak had worked u...

Winnie M Li's first novel, Dark Chapter, offered a fictionalized account of her own sexual assault, written in part, she has said, “to do justice to the survivors' experience”. Her follow-up of her, complicityis born out of the same urgent need to address questions of silence and suppression, and feels particularly timely in its depiction of the film industry and the men who control the stories (in every sense).Before turning to writing, Li worked as a film producer, a career she was forced to abandon on account of the PTSD she suffered after her assault, and she brings an insider's eye to a story that will be depressingly familiar to anyone who has followed the progress of the #MeToo movement in the entertainment industry. Sarah Lai, the narrator of complicity, shares some biography ...