Новости за 18.12.2015

The first time John Ruskin noticed the gray clouds of the “plague-wind” was in 1871, decades into the industrial era. Walking home from work at the University of Oxford one spring day, the renowned English art critic looked skyward, to the “dry black veil which no ray of sunshine” could penetrate, and then back to earth, where the leaves of trees shook “not violently, but enough to show the passing to and fro of a strange, bitter, blighting wind.” Only the wind proved not to be so strange. In the months that followed... Читать дальше...

After witnessing the overwhelming popularity of Star Wars, director Francis Ford Coppola told George Lucas he should start his own religion.

From the start of her 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton has worked methodically to prove she is a candidate the environmental movement can trust—a process that will no doubt continue in the third Democratic debate on Saturday night. She’s come out against the Keystone XL pipeline and Arctic drilling, and just this week said she’s skeptical of offshore drilling. She frames climate change as “a real threat to our planet.” She’s rolled out policies that back up her claims that she’d expand clean energy and reduce fossil-fuel reliance as president.

In 1999, comic book writer Gail Simone noticed that his peers had a tendency to use the tragic deaths of female love interests as plot devices to incite male heroism. He calls this contrivance the “Woman in the Refrigerator.” The name originates from a 1994 Green Lantern comic, in which Kyle Renner returns to his apartment to find his girlfriend dead, mangled, refrigerated. The chilled body sends him justice-bound to destroy her killer. 

On the campaign trail, Bernie Sanders can’t help but be himself: Whatever the political weather this year, the Democratic insurgent was relentlessly on message, voicing outrage about inequality and corporate greed in his unmistakable Brooklyn accent. That’s why his fans love him so much—and it’s also what makes the Vermont senator a godsend for comedians everywhere. Here are the year’s best Bernie impressions, ranked in order of greatness:

In the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Islamophobia has become a powerful and divisive issue in American politics. The two main political parties are increasingly defining themselves by sharply different rhetoric and policies on the treatment of Muslims, both in the United States and internationally. These issues dominated the Republican debate, and are likely to be equally important when the Democratic candidates take the stage on Saturday.

Beyond the appeals to anti-Muslim xenophobia that have defined the Republican Party’s post-Paris consensus, the most recent GOP primary debate was an elaborate group sermon on the importance of being afraid.

Terrorism has pushed the economy to the margins of the 2016 debate—and off the stage entirely at Tuesday’s Republican debate. But the Federal Reserve’s decision on Wednesday to raise interest rates for the first time since 2006—an action that risks putting a damper on growth—served as a reminder that the economy may well return to the top of voter’s minds next year. The rate hike is very likely to figure into Saturday’s Democratic debate; Bernie Sanders, who’s built his campaign around a populist message about economic discontent... Читать дальше...

If you want to be a great writer, should you withhold your sentimental tendencies? The answer for most critics and writers seems to be yes. Sentimentality is often seen as a useful way of distinguishing between serious literature and the not-so-serious, probably best-selling kind. “Sentimentality,” James Baldwin wrote, is “the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion…the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel.” While sentimentality is false, grandiose, manipulative, and over-boiled... Читать дальше...

As urbanization, population growth and the rampant destruction of the natural world increase, human beings have become more and more isolated from nature—and at a significant cost.