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| It's Saturday, which means it's time for the round-up of this week's top premium columns. |
| These are columns our subscribers loved or that people subscribed specifically to read. Subscribe, read, share and let us know your thoughts. |
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| By Thuan Le Elston |
| Will Smith slapping Chris Rock was not the only Oscar moment that made Sunday the night of cringe. Why are we not talking about the low skit that came at the beginning of the Academy Awards? |
| Co-host Regina Hall summoned Timothée Chalamet, Bradley Cooper, Simu Liu and Tyler Perry to go backstage with her for a COVID-19 test with her "tongue," then frisked presenters Josh Brolin and Jason Momoa before exiting. |
| Hello?! |
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| By Connie Schultz |
| Most of us feel something after witnessing this, and our responses are fueled by our life experiences. More on that in a moment. First, let us pause to lift the one voice that matters above all others here. That belongs to Jada Pinkett Smith. |
| We don't know what she thinks of her husband's decision to hit Rock. On Tuesday, a graphic posted to Pinkett Smith's Instagram account read only: "This is a season for healing and I'm here for it." |
| However, it is easy to know what she's had to say about her own journey with hair loss in a culture that does not celebrate bald women, especially if they are Black. Most white Americans have never thought about the ongoing burden of discrimination Black women have endured because of white standards for acceptable hair. Less than two weeks ago the House of Representatives passed the CROWN Act, which bans race-based hair discrimination. It has not passed the Senate. |
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| By David Bernhardt |
| Gasoline prices had already hit a record high the morning that President Joe Biden announced a ban on Russian energy imports on March 8. |
| The last time average gas prices topped $4 a gallon was in 2008, when George W. Bush was president. At that time, the White House worked with the Department of the Interior to expand American energy production. By contrast, the Biden administration has been curbing oil and gas drilling. This means that today's pain at the pump is unlikely to disappear anytime soon. |
 | | Checking gas prices in Buffalo Grove, Ill., on March 26, 2022. | | Nam Y. Huh/AP | |
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| By Jill Lawrence |
| In his new book, then-CIA officer Will Hurd describes participating in a 2008 CIA briefing in Kabul, Afghanistan, for members of the House Select Committee on Intelligence. He overheard several of them pressing for time to go rug shopping. A congressman then asked Hurd why the Taliban wouldn't coordinate with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. He replied that one was Sunni and one was Shiite. What's the difference? another lawmaker asked. |
| Hurd assumed he was about to make a joke. He was not. He really didn't know the history of the long-running sectarian conflict. |
| "This should have been easy stuff for these Washington, D.C., intelligence 'experts,' " Hurd writes. They were, after all, deciding how to spend billions in taxpayer money and whether to send U.S. troops to war zones. |
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| By Jill Lawrence |
| When you call someone a butcher, because his army has turned the sovereign democratic nation of Ukraine into a hellscape of slaughtered civilians and leveled cities for no reason except hunger for power and control, do you want that butcher to remain in power? No. |
| So President Joe Biden was stating the obvious Saturday when he said of Russian President Vladimir Putin, "For God's sake, this man cannot remain in power." |
| I found his words bracing and was surprised to see the White House immediately start walking back the apparently spontaneous addition to the closing of Biden's speech in Warsaw. |
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| By Ross K. Baker |
| Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, who was always seen as the most likely Republican to vote in favor of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson's confirmation to the Supreme Court, formally announced her support Wednesday – meaning the Senate's final vote to confirm Jackson will technically be bipartisan. |
| It's unclear how many of Collins' GOP colleagues, if any, will join her in backing President Joe Biden's nominee, despite the minimal political risks that would entail. |
| Why would Republican senators erect a phalanx of opposition to Jackson's nomination so formidable that perhaps only one of them would cast a vote in her favor? |
 | | Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson meets with Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, on Capitol Hill in Washington, March 8, 2022. | | Carolyn Kaster, AP | |
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| By Naomi Ogutu |
| I've been a rideshare driver in New York City for six years, and I take pride in my job and helping my passengers get where they need to go safely. But my safety is not a guarantee. I'm a mom of three. I need to know that I'll make it home to my kids at the end of each night. |
| COVID-19 is now competing with another potentially deadly danger faced by app-based drivers: violence. It seems like every time I turn on the TV or scroll through Instagram, I see stories of drivers facing violence, carjackings and even murder. |
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| By Carli Pierson |
| Whether it's Ginni Thomas or Hunter Biden, unethical behavior is always a bad look. But because they're connected to some of the most powerful people in the country, it's also bad for America. |
| On Thursday, social media buzzed with news about the text messages that Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, sent to Donald Trump's Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. The texts, from early November 2020 to mid-January 2021, pushed Meadows to try to overturn the 2020 presidential election, part of a resistance effort that eventually led to the Jan. 6 insurrection. |
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| By Ben Reytblat |
| On the night Vladimir Putin announced his special noninvasive operation, I did the only thing I could think to do: I called my dad. |
| Papa Reytblat, born in the small Ukrainian town of Korosten just after the Great Patriotic War, had been proclaiming for months that a Russian invasion was impossible. "Vladimir Putin is a lot of things, but he's not a schlemiel," he had said in Russian with a shpritz of his native Yiddish. |
| As the first kindergarten-seeking missiles struck Ukraine, my dad was sure: "Putin doesn't know what's coming. He messed with the wrong people." |
 | | Ben Reytblat is a writer and filmmaker from Staten Island, New York. He was a writers' assistant for the Netflix show "Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj." | | Provided | |
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| By Rex Huppke |
| Transgender Americans are being buffeted by waves of cruelty. |
| Laws being proposed or passed in states across the country are attempting to restrict access to gender-affirming care, access to high school sports and even access to books that address transgender issues. |
| Behind all these laws is the message that transgender people, adults or children, are not equals. That they are somehow an aberration, a subject to be avoided or stashed away in a box in a dark backroom corner of a library. |
| That is as cruel as it is baseless. And these laws are as damaging as they are opportunistic. |
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