Новости за 13.11.2015

It’s too little to address the underlying causes of the United States’s lingering immigration crisis. And it’s probably too late to save his campaign from a polling deficit better measured in orders of magnitude than digits. But Martin O’Malley’s sudden realization that there are meaningful contrasts to draw between him and the other candidates on immigration may just be enough to rouse the Democrats from their creeping sense of complacency on the issue.  

Today, I am thrilled to introduce a new NewRepublic.com. Improving the reader experience of the site was at the heart of this redesign. We wanted to create a clean, uncluttered space that put our journalism front and center.

The Democratic presidential primary thus far has been marked by an endless battle over who’d be the most effective agent of progressive change. Hillary Clinton touts her tenacity, as well as her dealmaking acumen; Bernie Sanders points to the populist clamor in the country as the source of untapped political power; Martin O’Malley cites his record of logging progressive victories ahead of the curve as evidence of his political skill.

Lindsay Morris / INSTITUTE

At medical school, in the mid-’90s, my pediatric training took place in a Victorian hospital in Edinburgh called the “Sick Kids.” But it began before birth, so to speak, at the modern maternity unit a short stroll away across a park lined with elm trees. It was there in Edinburgh’s Royal Infirmary that I was obliged to deliver 20 babies and learned about the many perils that attend the first few minutes of life. When I’d been signed off as competent to assist births,... Читать дальше...

This is not meant as a slight: Todd Haynes is the quintessential art directors’ director. From the stylish, white-and-beige sterility of Safe (1995) to the glam-rock sheen of Velvet Goldmine (1998) to the sumptuous Technicolor of Far from Heaven (2002), Haynes has long been a pleasingly precise warden of the textures and patterns of twentieth-century metropolitan American life. Indeed, his inclination to not step beyond that century in his films but rather continue to mine it for material is instructive. Читать дальше...

Hillary Clinton secured the endorsement of a major environmental group this week, when the League of Conservation Voters Action Fund endorsed her as “the right person for the job.” LCV’s support carries significant weight in the environmental community, but the development has also reignited a debate within that community over whether Clinton’s approach to climate change is sufficiently aggressive—particularly in contrast to her chief rival Bernie Sanders, who among other things has promised to... Читать дальше...

The Democratic primary has unleashed a new wellspring of hope on the left for sweeping policy changes. The candidates have been knocking themselves out to propose everything from paid family leave to universal public college tuition—and to one-up each other. Progressives, who’ve watched the party hew to the center too many times, have reason to cheer. But the political reality is more sobering: Most of the far-reaching agenda that Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Martin O’Malley have embraced... Читать дальше...

I first learned about sex positive feminism in a graduate seminar at a large mid-western University. Every Tuesday and Thursday the long bare classroom would fill with students eager to talk about their hook-ups, their predilection for one or another kind of erotica and their general affirmation of the transformative capacities of the sexual act. For those who weren’t there, sex positive feminism stands for the precept that women are not free until and unless they are sexually free. In the competitiveness that graduate seminars breed... Читать дальше...

In 2007, the British publisher Orion released a series of abridged versions of classic novels that could supposedly be read in half the time of the originals. With titles like Anna Karenina: In Half the Time and The Mill on the Floss: In Half the Time, the series was meant for those who were too busy to “read books over a thousand pages long” and were burdened by “work and kids and all the other things.” The books drew the attention of The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik, who noted that the abridgment of Moby-Dick... Читать дальше...

‘Sir George Scharf’ by Walter William Ouless. This painting was bestowed on the National Portrait Gallery in London in 1886.Walter William Ouless / Wikimedia Commons

In May 2009, Professor Robyn Warhol traveled from her home in Vermont to Houston, Texas, where she joined her friend and colleague Helena Michie for a dinner party. With thirteen other diners, the two professors of English first prepared and then made their way through eight courses, including beef broth, haddock, steak, mutton, chicken, and chocolate profiteroles. Читать дальше...

As he prepares for the second Democratic Party debate, the most important questions Bernie Sanders has to ask himself are existential ones: What is the purpose of his campaign? Is it a symbolic crusade to raise the visibility of progressive economic issues and push the frontrunner Hillary Clinton to the left? Or is Sanders, as he and his campaign sometimes claim, “in it to win it,” and trying to become the Democratic Party’s nominee for the presidency.

The New Republic’s coverage of the second Democratic primary debate kicks off at 8:30 p.m. EST on Saturday, November 14. Whether you’re planning on spending your Saturday night watching the debate (no judgment) or not (so jealous), be sure to follow our live updates and analysis at New Republic Minutes, led by Elspeth Reeve and Jeet Heer.

In 2008, a new drug then known as PLX4032 was under study for metastatic melanoma—the malignant mole. Melanoma, when widespread, was almost invariably fatal, and there had been no drug that really worked in this condition, although the standard treatment is a drug called dacarbazine, approved years ago by the FDA. Frankly, everyone who has cared for patients with melanoma and treated them with dacarbazine knows it really doesn’t work. 

The apartment was very white. Every morning, I opened my eyes and thought for a moment that I had awakened into a Calvin Klein commercial. There was my black underwear against the white cotton sheets of the California King, a white shag rug on the industrial cement floor. The white walls were 13 feet high; the ancient metal radiators and exposed water pipes were painted white, and a white-and-chrome desk rested against the window near a white divan. The blue sky seemed to press in through the wall of windows. Читать дальше...

Of all the marketing campaigns, the most brilliant are the ones that flatter the consumer into thinking he doesn’t care about material goods. It worked for Patagonia, whose ongoing “Don’t Buy This Jacket” campaign instructs shoppers to restrain themselves, offering up a photo of one of their discreetly distinctive fleece jackets, then telling you to refrain from buying it impulsively, or lustfully, or to otherwise crassly consume a fleece you might not actually need. The ads explain that shopping... Читать дальше...

There’s a moment in the 1987 film Dirty Dancing when Max Kellerman, owner of Kellerman’s Mountain House, a family resort in the Catskills, reminisces about the long history of his establishment. “Bubbah and Zeda serving the first pasteurized milk to the boarders, through the war years when we didn’t have any meat, through the Depression when we didn’t have anything…You think kids want to come with their parents and take fox-trot lessons? Trips to Europe, that’s what the kids want.” It was the... Читать дальше...

This week the American Postal Workers Union (APWU) announced its endorsement of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primary, with APWU President Mark Dimondstein explaining that Sanders “stands above all others as a true champion of postal workers and other workers throughout the country.” Dimondstein cited Sanders’s support of the consolidation of mail-processing facilities and his attention to the U.S. Postal Service’s financial crisis as examples of the senator’s commitment to issues affecting postal workers. Читать дальше...