A great present should have at least one of these three qualities. Here’s what they are.
It’s a special kind of agony to realize, while exchanging gifts with someone, that they got you something way, way better than what you got them. A few years ago, I bought for my partner what I thought was a perfect anniversary gift: a bulk order of astronaut ice cream. In many ways, I nailed it. He loves freeze-dried ice cream, which you rarely see in the wild outside of science museums, and I had gotten a comical number of packages.
The problem is that his gift for me was an all-timer, a miniature painting that he had commissioned from an artist who specializes in painstakingly detailed watercolors. He had worked on it for months, and the image illustrated my favorite Google search: “owls kissing.” (Saccharine, I know, but I dare you to find me anything cuter.) Astronaut ice cream would have been an amazing present if given on a random Tuesday, but the occasion and the wild discrepancy between our gifts was hilarious and vaguely horrifying. I do believe that intention matters more than execution with gifts — that it doesn’t really matter what you give someone, as long as you put thought and love into it — but sometimes it would be nice to get a do-over.
This holiday season, I am out for blood, and by blood, I mean really good presents. Is transforming myself into the best gift-giver of all time too much to ask? Probably. In the interest of merely learning how to give better presents, I turned to several experts in the arts of gift-giving and etiquette, who shared their tactics and frameworks for gathering ideas and getting in a creative mindset.
“I’ve always believed that literally anything on earth, any object, any piece of trash, anything you find in a store, can be a perfect gift,” says Helen Rosner, a New Yorker staff writer who publishes an annual food-themed gift guide that is somehow both deranged and genuinely useful. “It can be a Tootsie Pop or a $10,000 diamond-encrusted cocktail shaker. What’s important is matching the right thing to the right person.”
Not every gift has to be life-changing, and a meaningful gift doesn’t have to cost a lot of money
Whether or not you’re in a position to buy a $10,000 cocktail shaker, it’s remarkably easy to start spiraling about finding the perfect gift for someone. Before you open a single browser tab, take a minute to remember that a gift doesn’t have to cause absolute emotional devastation (in a good way) in order to be successful.
“We often give ourselves this challenge of being like, ‘What is the gift that only I could give them? What is the gift that proves I know them so well?’ And that’s kind of impossible,” says Erica Cerulo, who runs the recommendation-filled A Thing or Two podcast and newsletter with her business partner, Claire Mazur. (Cerulo and Mazur previously co-founded the retail destination Of A Kind, which shut down in 2019.) A great gift doesn’t have to change someone’s life, Cerulo says: It can just be something that’s fun and nice and comforting.
Similarly, you don’t have to spend a certain amount of money for a gift to feel meaningful. Rosner did a book swap with family last winter, wherein each person had to choose a title from their own shelf that they thought another person in the group would enjoy. “Part of the gift was explaining: ‘I have read this, I loved it, and I think you would love it,’” Rosner says. “It involved spending zero dollars, it created amazing conversations, and it felt really personal and deep.”
Try to tick one of three gift-giving boxes
Because creativity thrives with constraints, Cerulo offered the following three-point framework for thinking about gift-giving: “Can I introduce someone to something they might not otherwise know about? Can I get them a nicer version of something than they would buy for themselves? Or can I make them feel seen?” If you can check one of those three boxes, you’ve probably got a good present on your hands.
Last summer, Cerulo and Mazur went to stay with some friends who were very generous hosts, cooking every meal. “All weekend we were running out for seltzer water, so afterward I sent them a really nice seltzer maker,” Mazur says. “We came back, and it was in use all weekend, and the kids had learned how to use it.” She describes this as a particularly satisfying gift-giving experience that ticked several of the boxes Cerulo laid out. It was something their hosts probably weren’t going to buy for themselves (and was luxurious in a way that only infinite seltzer can be), and it demonstrated that she was paying attention to their habits.
Making someone feel seen gets to the reason why we give people gifts in the first place. “The way that we express love to people through gift-giving is by reflecting who they are back to them, and also by showing them who we see them as,” says Rosner. You could get someone a $70 cut-crystal glass for their whiskey, for instance, but you could also track down the Pizza Hut Flintstones Kids glasses from the 1980s that they loved as a child.
So how do you make someone feel known? Unlock your phone and …
Keep a running list of gift ideas
Almost universally, great gift-givers are doing legwork throughout the year, not just in the weeks leading up to a birthday or major holiday. Many keep lists of potential gifts for their friends and loved ones, which they update every time someone mentions an item they’d love or when their internet travels turn up a particularly great present idea. You can do this in any way that suits you: Cerulo has a single note in her phone dedicated to gift ideas, Mazur keeps individual notes for individual people, and Rosner uses friends’ contacts as a place to log food preferences, birthdays, and present ideas.
If a friend mentions an interest that lends itself well toward vintage or handmade products, you may also consider setting up alerts on that subject on sites like Etsy and eBay. In the earlier years of their relationship, Cerulo’s husband used eBay to hunt down a vintage Vogue cover from the 1940s that was designed by Salvador Dalí. It was a long con that took him several years, but it was incredibly meaningful to Cerulo when she received it: She worked in magazines at the time and was obsessed with that particular cover, having seen an exhibit of Dalí’s art while studying abroad in college. “It just really felt like, ‘Right. You get it,’” Cerulo recalls.
Incidentally, devising systems for gathering gift ideas can help you steer clear of asking your loved ones what they want — something that Crystal L. Bailey, director of the Etiquette Institute of Washington, suggests avoiding. “It puts the onus on them to kind of figure out their own gifts, right? So if we can, in our relationships, really try to take notice of what someone appreciates and what they enjoy,” she says.
Write a mini-bio of the recipient, even if you know them well
Our closest confidantes are sometimes the most challenging people on our list. How are you supposed to distill your sister’s marvelous and unique essence into a single package? First, step away from the grandiose thinking. Second, get some perspective with a tactic that Mazur and Cerulo figured out while creating gift guides: Write a three-sentence description of the person you have in mind, paying close attention to their enthusiasms, obsessions, and interests. “I might say, ‘My dad is obsessed with sports, he thinks most kitchen gadgets are pretentious, and he’s been a lawyer his whole life,’” says Mazur. “Then there’s a little bit more room to get imaginative.”
If you’ve spent a lot of time looking at gift guides, this exercise can also help you break out of thinking about your loved ones in terms of consumer profiles. (I like gift guides, but they do have a tendency to, say, boil men’s interests down to whiskey stones and beard oil.) “It’s better to give something that’s like, ‘This is a gift for you’ — like you as a person, not you as some demographic category,” says Rosner. “I know you love Nutter Butters, so here are 17 packages of Nutter Butters.”
Don’t stress about gifts for people you don’t know well
From an etiquette standpoint, Bailey advises personalizing gifts to people you don’t know very well, without getting too personal. For a co-worker, a signed greeting card and a gift card aligned with their interests can be a good option. Perfumes, scented items, and clothing, on the other hand, can be a little too intimate.
This philosophy gets at a fundamental truth about buying a gift for your boss or your brother’s new honey: You’re not close friends, and that’s actually fine. “When it’s someone you don’t know super well, you don’t have to go through this crazy dance of trying to reflect themselves back at them and also the way you see them, because you don’t have that yet,” says Rosner. “This is a totally different type of gift communication where it’s just like, ‘I’d like to give you something that makes you a little bit happy.’”
In this situation, you just need to know one personal fact about the recipient. “It could be as deep as, ‘She’s really into pre-Prohibition cocktails,’ or it could be as shallow as, ‘I know her favorite color’s lilac,’” Rosner says. Avoid giving someone “the gift equivalent of mansplaining” — i.e. an entry-level item pertaining to their interest, like the Joy of Cooking for an amateur chef — or buying them something so esoteric that it looks like you’re trying to one-up them. For the cocktail aficionado, you might just find them the best ice cube mold, according to cocktail experts — a little gesture to show that you care to buy them something of quality.
When in doubt, turn to one of these categories
Several kinds of presents kept coming up in my interviews, so I’ve compiled them here. Consider this your cheat sheet to buying a reliably good present.
Books
Like Rosner, Cerulo and Mazur see books as an opportunity to bond with the recipient, whether or not you already know them well. You can give someone a book that you’ve read and loved, or you can buy them one that’s in line with their interests (a cookbook, a mystery novel, a birdwatching tome). “It creates longer-term relationship building that other things don’t,” says Cerulo.
Food, beverages, and other consumables
Etiquette-wise, Bailey is a big fan of gifts that avoid encumbering the recipient with clutter. Food is a great version of that. It can be personal and nostalgic (Skyline Chili shipped to a Cincinnati ex-pat via Goldbelly), decadent but not ridiculously expensive (special salt or olive oil), or lovingly made at home (Cerulo’s husband prepares eggnog every year and bottles it for friends).
The biggest version of the thing possible
Here’s a shortcut to a great gift: If you know that someone loves a particular item, just get them a ton of it. Absurd volume is funny, knowing, luxurious, and a little bit teasing. It could be a huge box of pink Starbursts, or, as Cerulo once bought for Mazur, a “several-gallon jug” of Red Boat Fish Sauce.
“One pair of socks is tragic. Five pairs of socks feels dutiful. Ten starts to be a little interesting,” Rosner says. “But 100 is ludicrous. And that’s what makes it a great gift. You have to cross that line.”
Eliza Brooke is a freelance journalist covering design, culture, and entertainment.
Even Better is here to offer deeply sourced, actionable advice for helping you live a better life. Do you have a question on money and work; friends, family, and community; or personal growth and health? Send us your question by filling out this form. We might turn it into a story.
In several battleground states and competitive districts, these key swing voters put Democrats over the edge.
Democrats would not have had such a good election night without the support of independent voters.
These mystical swing voters don’t affiliate themselves with a specific party, tend to be more ideologically moderate, and represent a plurality of voters in the United States. But they are also hard to reach, often less politically engaged, and frequently confused with “weak partisans” (less energetic Democrats or Republicans) because they can have ideological leans.
They also tend to swing elections — and this year’s dissipation of the much-hyped “red wave” is partially a result of independent voters picking the Democratic candidate in competitive contests in swing states and districts.
Despite plenty of polling this year showing that independents were, like Republicans, primarily concerned with the state of the economy and inflation, they ended up making nuanced decisions in key statewide races — and that worked to benefit Democrats.
“This was a really complicated election with complicated issues, and for anyone to say this election was about the economy or this election was about abortion doesn’t really know what they’re talking about because [the issues] played different cross-pressures with different types of voters,” Bryan Bennett, the chief pollster at the progressive Navigator Research firm, told me. “With independents in particular, the economic record of the Biden administration was necessary, but not sufficient, and for a lot of voters, the Dobbs decision ultimately played a fairly decisive role in at least getting independents to a place where overall they were split, as opposed to overwhelmingly favoring Republicans for Congress.”
State by state, those numbers come through in news networks’ exit polling (which provides an incomplete but early look at how an electorate behaved during an election) and other post-election surveys. In Arizona, for example, Sen. Mark Kelly’s win over Blake Masters in the state’s US Senate contest was boosted by the support of 55 percent of independents — who made up the largest share of the electorate (about 40 percent). The Associated Press’s midterm survey also found that independents broke in favor of Democrats by nearly 20 points.
In Nevada’s Senate race, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto was able to win the support of 48 percent of independents, compared to the 45 percent of independents who supported Republican Adam Laxalt, exit polls show. That included strong independent support in the swing Washoe County, which Cortez Masto won in this contest (she lost it during her first election in 2016). The AP VoteCast survey shows a nearly 10 percent gap in favor of Democrats.
In Georgia, Sen. Raphael Warnock won 53 percent of independents according to exit polls, though they made up a smaller share (24 percent) of that electorate. That contest is headed to a December runoff. Sen. Maggie Hassan, the Democrat who won reelection in New Hampshire, meanwhile, won a similar share of independents: 54 percent of the group that made up a plurality of voters. And John Fetterman in Pennsylvania, who won his race by a 5 percent vote margin, garnered the support of 58 percent of independents.
In most polling leading up to Election Day, the numbers of independent support did not look as good as the exit polls, and vote totals, would end up being. A few factors led to that shift in support.
Republican extremism on abortion rights turned off many independents
Perhaps the most confounding result for pundits across the spectrum was how the negative perception voters, and especially independents, had of President Joe Biden’s job performance and the state of the economy did not translate into a massive swing for Republicans. But voters weren’t viewing their Election Day options through a single lens. Independents, especially, were weighing specific candidates’ stances on abortion rights against Democrats’ record on the economy as well.
Bennett told me that Navigator’s midterm polling (conducted before and after Election Day, of voters who voted early or in-person) shows a strong split in how independent men and women were thinking of candidates, with more independent women choosing to support Democrats than independent men.
In data provided to Vox from Navigator’s midterm voters survey, those numbers show that for independent men, inflation was a top concern for half of them, while abortion was the top concern for 23 percent. Among women, inflation was the top concern for 46 percent of respondents, while abortion was close behind at 34 percent. Though the numbers differ slightly between Navigator’s finding and exit polls, the same 17-percent gender gap shows up: Independent men supported Republicans slightly more than Democrats, but independent women backed Democrats by a much bigger margin.
“That’s a very important piece of the story — the way that abortion played particularly with independent women,” Bennett said.
Daniel Cox, a pollster and director of the Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute, made a similar argument last week, about the influence of young women, who skew liberal, on Democrats’ success.
“When it comes to abortion and Trump-style politics, many swing voters were turned off by extreme Republican candidates, but this combination proved uniquely repellant to young women,” he wrote while synthesizing pre-election polling, early estimates on youth turnout from Tufts University, and exit polls.
Add to that the popularity of different elements of the Biden economic agenda, like the high popularity of the Inflation Reduction Act, and you get more of a picture of a choice election, where voters were not driven primarily by anger at the party in power, but by candidates and policy. Voters who were driven primarily by economic concerns appear to have voted for Republicans in congressional races, while those who were driven by mostly abortion rights, or a mix of issues, seem like they tended to vote for Democrats in those contests.
And another motivator: threats to democracy, and the vibes
The “vibes” were also off. Plenty of independent voters felt off put by Trump-aligned Republican candidates. Some disliked GOP candidates’ positions on abortion; others were repelled by other social and economic stances.
“We did see some movement, particularly among independents, over the course of the summer and fall, in terms of the perception that Republicans were too ‘radical’. That may very well be tied predominantly to Republicans’ association with being against abortion rights,” Bennett said. “Some combination of the Dobbs decision and the push for abortion bans — that being perceived as pretty extreme, and the January 6 hearings and conversation around political violence.”
That was a bet plenty of Democrats were willing to make. “It was all tied together,” Colorado Rep. Diana DeGette, who leads the Pro-Choice Caucus in Congress, told the New York Times. “People were thinking, ‘I’m worried about the economy. I’m worried about freedoms being taken away,’ and they were worried about democracy, too.”
Talking with successful candidates for secretary of state, who won independents by significant margins and beat back a wave of election deniers and Republican candidates trying to oversee election administration, another theme emerged: Many independents and Republicans were frustrated with candidates who seemed to care little about the integrity of elections, and who questioned the results of the 2020 election.
Kim Rogers, the executive director of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, told me that the advantage Democrats had this cycle was the wide swath of people in the middle of the political spectrum who just didn’t buy the outlandish claims many Republican candidates were making.
“There are a lot of independents and there are still Republicans that believe in the promise of democracy, in our electoral structures, and that they should be preserved,” she said. “When you’re talking to those folks, across the board, voters want somebody who will respect the will of voters. When you have people who are running to oversee elections that say they’re doing it so they can pick and choose the winners and determine outcomes, that is a natural ‘in your face’ to voters.”
Election denying candidates, and candidates aligned with Donald Trump, might have actually turned independents off from other Republican candidates on the ticket.
In Pennsylvania, for example, Attorney General Josh Shapiro won the gubernatorial race by winning independents (by 29 points) and political moderates (by 40 points) by historic margins against the far-right, election-denying, Christian fundamentalist Republican Doug Mastriano. Mehmet Oz, the more moderate Republican candidate for US Senate, was dragged down both by Mastriano and his own poorly run campaign, losing independents by 20 points and moderates by 30 points. Those varying levels of support also suggest a degree of split-ticket voting, which meant that independent and Republican voters were even more selective in the Republican candidates they did end up supporting.
In that way, poor Republican candidate quality hurt other Republicans, especially with independents and moderates, as my colleague Andrew Prokop has reported. Trump’s affiliation also weighed these candidates down, analysts at The Economist and the New York Times argue, and combined, you get a picture of a winning coalition: independent voters, and even some Republicans, feeling uncomfortable supporting Republican candidates and going with a safer, Democratic option.
The World Cup has exhibited Qatar’s soft power. Look closely to see its constraints.
Qatar is a player. In the Middle East and across the world, the petrostate of fewer than 3 million people plays an outsized role in geopolitics, media, and art. Its cultural diplomacy has established the country’s influence — and now it’s doing the same with sport.
The country’s absurd wealth is on display this month: It spent about $300 billion on stadiums and groundwork to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup, which kicked off Sunday. That money totaled more than all previous World Cups and Olympics combined.
Qatar exports more liquified natural gas than any other country. Its energy resources have made the royal family among the world’s richest, and with a $335 billion sovereign wealth fund, it is one of the biggest landowners in the United Kingdom, and owns a major stake in the Empire State Building.
Yet Qatar has arguably been a more strategic spender than neighboring oil-rich states. It has focused on successfully constructing domestic cultural and educational institutions for Qataris and creating a national identity. But it’s a national identity presented by the royal family that does not tolerate dissent and does not guarantee human rights.
The achievement of the first World Cup being convened in the Arab world embodies those tensions: Qatar is a state that uses its immense wealth and power to elevate itself and the region, that cares deeply about culture, and yet has few freedoms.
Qatar’s elaborate hosting of the World Cup parallels its art prowess
Doha rapidly developed in recent decades from a small port to a dramatic cityscape in what Qatari artist Sophia Al-Maria describes as “Gulf Futurism.”
Yet for all its lavish spending and foreign-policy influence, Qatar has managed to avoid criticism over the years for restricting rights for women and LGBTQ people and labor violations, including relative silence from its Western allies. (It must help that it’s home to the largest US military base in the Middle East.)
The incredible development of World Cup arenas mirrors Qatar’s staggering art investments. The sister of Qatar’s emir and the head of its network of museums, Sheikha al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, reportedly spends about $1 billion annually on art. That’s much higher than any major US museum.
Qatar has commissioned epic works by Western artists, like Richard Serra’s hulking steel plates in the desert (“East-West/West-East”) and Damien Hirst’s series of large bronze sculptures, some 46 feet high, of human reproduction from conception to embryo (“The Miraculous Journey”). Qatar has also bought some of the most expensive paintings in the world: Rothko’s “White Center” ($70 million), Cézanne’s “The Card Players” ($250 million), and Gauguin’s “When Will You Marry?” ($300 million).
There has been a huge emphasis on “starchitects” — largely American and European architects building outlandish structures that few other countries could afford, among them Rem Koolhaas and Jean Nouvel.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24222603/1063164338.jpg)
AFP via Getty Images
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24222599/1369938057.jpg)
Markus Gilliar/GES-Sportfoto via Getty Images
But Qatar, importantly, hasn’t only imported from the West.
It has created institutions that have helped forge its national identities as a Muslim and Arab country. The breathtakingly minimalist Museum of Islamic Art in Doha’s center, designed by famed Chinese architect I.M. Pei, contains a remarkable international collection. On the outskirts of Education City, among satellites of universities like Georgetown, Northwestern, and Virginia Commonwealth, is the Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, which contains one of the most extensive collections of 20th-century Arab art. (Qatar and the UAE are engaged in a cutthroat race to buy up Arab modern art from across the Middle East.) And part of the capital has a new downtown made to look old, called Msheireb, with many cultural museums including one focused on the country’s history of slavery.
“Qatar has always been much more connected, if you will, to that sense of their own past and their historical memory,” Kishwar Rizvi, a professor of art history and architecture at Yale University, told me. “There’s this global stage on which they want to present themselves,” she explained, but also a sense that, “We have oil, wealth, and all of that, but we also need cultural capital, because that also is part of what makes a nation.”
Perhaps because Qatar’s cultural investments have been so savvy, I’ve been taken aback by the ostentatiousness of its World Cup stadiums. One stadium is shaped like a traditional Qatari tent and another is made of shipping containers. Most of the marquee stadiums for world sporting events are showy or trying to represent the host country’s culture, but with this year’s, everything looks ornamental or too obvious.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24222611/1244601261.jpg)
Mohammed Dabbous/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24222614/1244940384.jpg)
Christopher Pike/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The starchitects’ result in Qatar is the lowest common denominator, a country reduced to stereotypes. “I think it shows a lack of imagination,” says Rizvi. These new stadiums stand in contrast, she says, to Le Corbusier’s modernist Olympic Stadium designed for Baghdad in the 1950s.
That lack of imagination is so striking because so much of Qatar’s soft-power prowess has had impressive results in art, culture, education, and media.
Can cultural diplomacy thrive without human rights?
I visited Qatar in 2016 to attend a blue-chip conference of artists and architects, all presided over by Sheikha al-Mayassa. Conceptual artist Marina Abramović equated her and Qatar’s royal family to modern-day Medicis, with the funds to support artists like Serra in creating monumental works.
That money, it seems, does buy the complicity of powerful people. “To just come and criticize, it’s such an easy way to close the culture forever, but I want to open this culture,” Abramović told me.
On the sidelines of the swish confab at the W Hotel Doha, I interviewed Jeff Koons, one of the world’s most expensive living artists and a frequent guest of the royal family. I asked him: Why Qatar? “I would say because of the openness of Qatar to ideas, to education, to the humanities, to psychology and philosophy and all the different things that can stimulate the public for growth and development,” he told me.
I pushed Koons to discuss reported labor violations, that his nudes could never be exhibited in the conservative country, and the fact that a Qatari poet was imprisoned at the time for a protest song. “Going back to some of the problems here in Qatar and these different things, I’m naïve of some of the aspects,” Koons told me. “I know that internationally there has been a movement to try to make working conditions better for laborers, and I think that a lot of problems, not only here but internationally, have been addressed to try to make situations where, if abuses take place, they’re corrected.”
Qatar is a monarchy with a large expat and migrant labor population that has very limited rights. Migrant workers can’t join labor unions. The Guardian has reported that 6,500 migrant workers died over a decade, and a Kenyan blogger who wrote about it was arrested in 2021.
Beyond that, women are stifled by guardianship laws, LGBTQ people lack rights, and internet activists have been imprisoned. The courts are not independent, the press cannot freely cover the country’s politics, and there are no serious elections for leadership and no political parties.
“If you’re in Qatar, and your rights are trampled on as a woman or as a queer person or anything, if you don’t like it, you’re just thrown into jail and good luck,” Wafa Ben-Hassine, a human rights attorney based in Washington, DC, told me. “It’s like you have certain rights and freedoms only if you belong to a certain class of protected people” — the wealthy or certain expats — “then they become not human rights.”
Qatar has largely eluded scrutiny over the years. Now that the country is getting so much attention, there have been some articles criticizing a double standard that Qatar is being held to. But Ben-Hassine said that scrutiny is merited.
“I’m happy that an Arab nation is hosting one of the most lucrative spectacles in the world,” Ben-Hassine said. “But it can be better, and it should do better. We should be clear-eyed about the state of affairs that this country has and aim to hold it to the highest standards.”
And it’s not just about Qatar. It’s about the world systems in which Qatar operates, and the ways in which the tournament serves Western interests, as Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik writes, at the expense of those who lack rights in Qatar.
Nasser Rabbat, a professor of Islamic architecture at MIT, put it this way: “I don’t want to absolve the patrons, the contractors, and the builders, from the amazing human rights violations they have sustained all these years. I’m not going to come to the defense of any of these countries in saying that their labor treatment is acceptable. It is absolutely unacceptable. But I’m not going to blame them as well.”
“Because, at the end of the day, those who are making the most amount of money from the construction boom in the Gulf are companies from our part of the world, from the United States and from Europe,” Rabbat told me. “They are responsible for the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands, of workers, but we too are responsible for those deaths. And we too have benefited from those deaths.”
So the World Cup — with the blitz of global media and the arrival of a million visitors — exposes Qatar to new pressures from the outside. In welcoming teams and fans from around the globe, the cameras may reveal the country’s limitations. Qatar’s deep investments in culture can’t shield it from criticism for the shallowness of rights there.