Новости за 16.12.2015

The head of Europe’s coal lobby has said that his industry will be “hated and vilified in the same way that slave-traders were once hated and vilified” as a result of the Paris climate deal, in an extraordinary diatribe sent to his members and press outlets.

Should only wealthy people be able to have kids in America? According to a new report, childcare center fees for two children is higher than median rent payments in every single state in the United States. Another recent report shows that childcare costs more than in-state college tuition in most states. After I pointed this out in an op-ed, and proposed a solution to make child care more affordable for working families, readers took to the comments section, the vast majority of which tracked the following sentiment... Читать дальше...

Tuesday night’s fifth Republican primary debate condensed into two hours what the candidates have spent the past month forging into partisan consensus: the myth that the November killings in Paris, France (a different country), and the subsequent killings in San Bernardino, California (the first of over 300 mass shootings in the U.S. this year to be carried out by Islamists), have radically altered America’s security outlook.

Editor’s note: This is an updated version of an article first published on April 27, 2015

Rand Paul should not have been on the Las Vegas stage Tuesday night for the fifth Republican presidential debate. The network hosting it, CNN, flouted its own rules for participation to squeeze him in on the ninth and final podium—funny enough, at the far right of the stage. The decision was rightfully protested by Rachel Maddow, whom I once worked for at MSNBC and who, five years ago, conducted perhaps the most significant interview of Paul’s political career. But I wonder whether she, like me... Читать дальше...

The young American director George Lucas has made three features: THX 1138, which was about the future; American Graffiti, which was about adolescents; and now Star Wars, which is a “future” film for adolescents. Neither of the earlier pictures was distinguished for novelty or depth, but THX 1158 tried to compensate with visual and technical ingenuity, and American Graffiti found some good objective correlatives, in cinematic method, for its study of small-town teenagers. Star Wars, Lucas’s most expensive picture to date... Читать дальше...

In John Waters’s film Female Trouble, Aunt Ida (played by ex-barmaid Edith Massey) reveals a sentiment that, I suspect, she has in common with many queer people: “the world of heterosexuals is a sick and boring life.” It’s not so much that marriage is incompatible with being queer, so much as it seems to interfere with all the fun parts: prolific sexual relationships negotiated outside an established set of mores, staying out late instead of running home to pick up children, living with your friends... Читать дальше...

Memory is faulty, it’s said, and on top of that it’s hard to describe. There are different kinds of memory and as many varieties of remembering: we can remember how to do things, that events happened, and the particular circumstances in which they occurred. The end of the year is a time to reflect, to remember the particular series of pasts that led here. The list that follows—a list of what we’ve already forgotten this year—is biased and necessarily incomplete, but hopefully you remember it as accurate enough. Читать дальше...

Roughly one hour into my screening of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the digital projector showing the print conked out. One minute, I was hanging with Han Solo, Chewbacca, and all my old pals, and the next, like that, I was plunged, sweating, disoriented and gasping, into the disappointing real planet we walk around in every day. About the original Star Wars, Roger Ebert wrote in 1977, that “my imagination [forgot] it is actually present in a movie theater and thinks it’s up there on the screen. Читать дальше...

It took five tries—and poll numbers plunging to the low single digits—but Jeb Bush finally had what could be described as a good debate on Tuesday night. Out of the gate in Las Vegas, he came out with clear, aggressive attacks against Donald Trump on foreign policy, and for the first time, he actually landed many of his punches. But while he called out Trump on some of his most extreme positions in the fight against ISIS, Bush failed to articulate any alternative strategy beyond being a more “serious” commander-in-chief. Читать дальше...

The Republicans might consider themselves as the party of freedom, but their true identity, as Tuesday night’s debate made clear, is the party of fear. All the candidates on stage, with the partial exception of Senator Rand Paul, painted a frightening picture of America as a country that, as frontrunner Donald Trump warned, is on the verge of disintegrating.

Republican candidates gathered in Las Vegas on December 15 for their fifth debate of the primary season. Read the highlights from the debate below and follow along at our blog Minutes, where we’ll be covering the action as it unfolds.

The Symbolic Moment came one morning about a month before the New Hampshire primary. This Week’s Campaign Manager was holed up in his office. The national headquarters of Hollings for President was nearly deserted, more like a warehouse than a political campaign. It had been that way for weeks. Staff had come and gone. Trips had been scheduled and canceled. But the dramatic groundswell of affection that we had hoped would propel Senator Ernest Hollings into the White House had somehow failed to materialize. Читать дальше...

In writing about Star Wars, certain conservatives love to do a twist on the old adage that “one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter.” Luke Skywalker and the other rebels against the Galactic Empire are usually seen as the good guys of Star Wars series but by now there is a venerable right-wing literature celebrating Darth Vader and the Emperor Palpatine as enlightened rulers fighting to bring order to the universe. Building on earlier essays by other writers in The Weekly Standard and The Washington Post... Читать дальше...