Новости за 01.12.2015

World leaders have made their speeches and announcements and are starting to head home from the Paris climate conference. Before he left for Washington, President Barack Obama was optimistic about the chances for success. “I actually think we’re going to solve this problem,” he said.

On Monday, in Paris, President Barack Obama pressed world leaders to adopt an aggressive international agreement to curb climate change. To do so, he said, would be an “act of defiance” against the terrorists who killed 130 people in French capital on Nov. 13.

Every day, hundreds of millions of messages are posted on Twitter. Researchers often see this avalanche of data as a gold mine, allowing them to measure in real time the attention, views and feelings of a huge sample of the population.

LE BOURGET, France—It feels like the whole world has come together at the Paris climate talks, and I don’t mean that strictly in a good way. I mean it has literally felt for the last two days like the whole fricking world is here, and they are all holding press conferences, demanding their entrance badges, and lining up for baguette sandwiches at the same time.

Imagine aliens have abducted you. They’re kind enough creatures, however: Theirs is the slow-motion torture of trying to make you understand them. They flash their strange alphabet at you and prompt you with esoteric questions: Are you allowed to put this symbol here? To rearrange this into that? At first you struggle. Soon enough, though, you start to see patterns; eventually you begin to answer correctly.

Last Friday, 57-year-old Robert Lewis Dear allegedly opened fire on a Planned Parenthood office in Colorado Springs, wounding nine and killing three. None of the dead were seeking or performing abortions, but reports that Dear referred to “baby parts” in a post-capture exchange with law enforcement suggest that the massacre may have been motivated at least in part by anti-abortion sentiment.

The 2015 Paris talks (formally known as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change twenty-first session of the Conference of the Parties and the eleventh session of the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol—but let’s just call them the Paris talks) are going to draw about 22,000 official attendees.

The 2015 Paris talks (formally known as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change twenty-first session of the Conference of the Parties and the eleventh session of the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol—but let’s just call them the Paris talks) are going to draw about 22,000 official attendees.

Serious illness in America carries a kind of moral virtue—one that ennobles the victim of a medical tragedy—but we still view the frailty of old age as a pitiable curse. For all the advances in modern medicine and technology, most of us will require assistance in our latter years to carry out the basic tasks of living. “We need help, often for long periods of time, and regard that as a weakness rather than as the new normal,” writes surgeon and author Atul Gawande in Being Mortal.

Falsehoods fly out of Donald Trump’s mouth with such unstoppable frequency that it’s tempting to describe him as a liar. Among the recent Trumpian untruths is his claim to have seen a video showing “thousands and thousands” of Muslim Americans cheering 9/11 in Jersey City, New Jersey, an event there is no record of, video or otherwise. Trump has also retweeted and vigorously defended the claim that 81 percent of whites who are murdered are killed by blacks (the actual number for last year is 15 percent). Читать дальше...

When a web service shuts down, there is a predictable pattern that follows: a surge of social media outrage, a wave of lament from its core users, and, finally, a crop of post mortems analyzing what went wrong. When the beloved music service Rdio recently announced its impending closure and bankruptcy, there was the usual stream of reactions. The final act in the pattern concerns the future: Well, now what are we going to use?

The staggering success of Edmund de Waal, an obscure British potter-turned-writer, is among the strangest literary phenomena in recent memory. His first book, The Hare With Amber Eyes (2011), was an unlikely bestseller if ever there was one. “I don’t really want to get into the sepia saga business, writing up some elegiac Mitteleuropa narrative of loss,” he notes in its introduction. But this is exactly what the book is. A tale of splendor and sadness, it is a nostalgic reverie of the Éphrussi family... Читать дальше...

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Professor, feminist, TV host, activist, mom, rabid hip-hop fan. Melissa Harris-Perry works seven days a week balancing all her identities, and she isn’t stopping anytime soon.

Besides hosting her eponymous MSNBC news show and teaching political science and running an institute at Wake Forest University, she is also on the front lines of an intersectional fight for racial justice and women’s rights. 

After the White House launched the “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative... Читать дальше...

The right’s reaction to the deadly holiday weekend shootout at Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs—a white evangelical redoubt of a rapidly diversifying state—followed a predictable trajectory through what you might call the five stages of information loop closure.

One of my earliest assignments as an associate producer at NFL Films, the cinematic and mythmaking arm of professional football, was to splice together montages of the best plays, catches, bloopers, and hits from the week’s games, and synchronize them to the stirring orchestral themes for which the league’s film house is renowned. Sitting alone in an editing room on the postproduction wing of our New Jersey corporate campus, I shuffled through the clipped footage looking for the biggest, best collisions. Читать дальше...

The Paris climate talks (COP21), which began today, represent a critical moment for the world, on an issue that normally doesn’t see much progress. But there are a lot of reasons this year’s conference could be different. It’s why we’re putting together this newsletter for the next two weeks, to tell you what looks like progress and what looks like more delay and inaction on rising greenhouse gas emissions.