Новости за 11.12.2015

I remember Sinatra who didn’t pal around with rich Republicans. During the early 1950s, at my Sunday school in St. Paul, Minnesota, one of the highlights of the year was the annual screening of The House I Live In, a short film starring a young and skinny Sinatra. In it, he told a gang of kids that racial and religious differences “make no difference except to a Nazi or somebody who’s stupid.” He sang about “The people that I work with / The workers that I meet. . . . The right to speak my mind... Читать дальше...

With the Paris climate talks coming to a close, participating nations are hashing out the details of how to hold each other to their carbon reduction goals and finance the whole transition to a cleaner world. Non-state actors are present, too; 400 cities signed a Compact of Mayors to set and track climate goals. And financial institutions have made big commitments to shift investment away from fossil fuels and better disclose climate-related business risks.

LE BOURGET, France—The circus ended today.

Every day on the train to the climate summit, I’ve passed a traveling circus from Italy. They set up an old-timey big top in a vacant lot beside the Stade de France, the national soccer stadium, where three suicide bombers pledging fealty to the Islamic State blew themselves up 28 days ago. The neighborhood is Saint-Denis, where police staged a gun battle with the suspected planners of the attack a few days later. A third of its residents are immigrants... Читать дальше...

Congressional Democrats’ latest push for gun control has landed in Washington with a thud. In the wake of mass shootings in Colorado and California, Republicans have once again voted down universal background checks, blocking the same measure that they defeated after the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012. They’ve also voted down a new Democratic bill to ban people on terror watch lists from buying guns—a proposal that some on the left have also criticized as an ineffective gun-control measure that would curtail Americans’ liberties. Читать дальше...

Compared to the conferences that came before it, Paris is going smoothly. So smoothly, relatively speaking, that there is still some sense of positivity amid the last-minute scrambling. As if to emphasize just how optimistic world leaders are feeling, negotiators released a draft agreement on Thursday that actually puts forward a more ambitious goal for global warming than many had expected going into the conference.

Anyone who frequents a contemporary museum or gallery knows more or less what Untitled means—that the artist who has produced this work has chosen not to name it and implicitly prefers that the painting speak for itself. Yet I suspect few pause to register how the label acquires its meaning from the convention it violates: Untitled signifies precisely because we have learned to expect that in the ordinary course of things, a painting will have a title. Every time our eyes search for one only to find its negation instead... Читать дальше...

This is the second story in a two-part series on AdvoServ, a for-profit company that operates a network of facilities for the disabled in several states. The first story can be found here.

Movie audiences, safely sucking on a soda straw and sitting in comfortably plush theater seats, love to watch desperate characters struggle against the elements. The survival movie crosses many genres—this year alone included Matt Damon’s sci-fi quest to stay alive in The Martian and the nature-thriller Everest—but nothing inspires the survival epic more than the sea. From All is Lost to Unbroken, the remoteness of the ocean tests the breaking point of the minds and bodies of men, which is why... Читать дальше...

International climate conferences are marathons punctuated by naps. You can tell the final hours of the Paris climate conference are near based on the number of people crashing on couches, chairs, and sleeping bags late into the night. 

An advertisement appeared in the Atlanta Journal for “The World’s Greatest, Secret, Social, Patriotic, Fraternal Beneficiary Order” on December 9, 1915. Next to this advert for the newly reformed Knights of the Ku Klux Klan was a poster for the film The Birth of a Nation, which celebrated and memorialized the original Klan and was just beginning its record-breaking run in the city. Three days earlier at the premiere, members of the Klan had reportedly paraded outside the theatre.

In America, the role of religion in politics is always grounds for op-eds and letters-to-editors, if not reams of articles and stacks upon stacks of books. This has especially been the case over the last several decades, thanks to the ascendancy of the Religious Right in the late 1970s and early 1980s. But the inverse concern—the place of politics in religion—also has its own hearty tradition of debate, unfolding sometimes in public but more often in the religious-specific publications of particular denominations. Читать дальше...

On a sunny morning in March, Marcus Westbury brandished his iPad as if it were a window into another world. The screen depicted the street we were standing on in downtown Newcastle, Australia, circa 2008. Decades of suburban flight, a devastating 1989 earthquake, and the implosion of the city’s steel mills had left the center a ghost town. More than a hundred empty storefronts lined the commercial strip. The neoclassical post office and the Victoria—Australia’s second-oldest theater—both sat vacant. Читать дальше...

LE BOURGET, France—When I meet new people here, the first question I usually get is a variation on, “Are these your first climate talks?” What they want to know is if I’m an expert like them—if I know the jargon, the unwritten rules, the backstories of who’s been fighting who since Kyoto ’97.

After an exhausting day of around-the-clock negotiations, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius released a new draft text for a global climate change agreement Thursday evening in Paris. This draft stands at 27 pages and 50 brackets, and reads much more easily than the heavily bracketed, 29-page version a day ago. Of course, there are some exceptions: There’s still as much uncertainty as ever surrounding how to define differentiation, long-term ambition, and finance.