Новости за 01.02.2017

Nitrogen narcosis is also known as raptures of the deep (“l’ivresse des grandes profondeurs,” as Jacques Cousteau put it), or the Martini effect. It is a consciousness-altering condition that affects divers at certain depths. While a diver is affected, she may feel euphoric and see things that are not really there. Like nitrogen narcosis, shark movies are great fun but sometimes they are not very good for you.

Black History Month began Wednesday, and this year’s theme is “The Crisis in Black Education.” According to the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, the group that founded BHM—this crisis “has grown significantly in urban neighborhoods where public schools lack resources, endure overcrowding, exhibit a racial achievement gap, and confront policies that fail to deliver substantive opportunities.”

Bob Padgett used to work for large insurance companies in northern California, assessing property damage from fires and floods. But he was also a talented classical violinist, and he would moonlight for different orchestras, which is how he came to plumb a century-old mystery called the Enigma.

The days since Trump’s inauguration have seen a stream of cabinet appointments and executive orders that have sparked outrage across the country. A new opposition is already forming, from the women’s march to mass protests against Trump’s ban on immigration from seven majority-Muslim countries. “At the very moment when establishment politics have been severely undermined,” Jedediah Purdy writes in our new issue, “the American left has been reborn.” But in order to achieve political victories,... Читать дальше...

In late October 2011, I was volunteering at the Occupy Wall Street library in lower Manhattan. Tucked into a corner of Zuccotti Park, the library was staffed mainly by anarchists of an exceedingly orderly bent. If society were suddenly freed from coercive institutions like libraries, these people would gladly spend the morning sorting donated books by Dewey decimal number—as they were doing in the mild fall weather. I was there for only a few days, but one conversation with a book borrower has stayed with me. Читать дальше...

Between 1932 and 1934, the Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco toiled away on the masterwork that would christen the basement of Dartmouth College’s new library. The resulting mural—3,200 square feet of arresting visual narrative that maps out, as its title declares, “The Epic of American Civilization”—is more than a grand showpiece. Orozco’s work is most striking today as a testament to the intellectual self-confidence that once characterized American colleges, and which has waned over the past decades with disastrous effects. Читать дальше...

One of the most baffling things that’s happened since congressional Democrats began organizing opposition to President Donald Trump and the GOP was when Elizabeth Warren—the Massachusetts senator whom many expected to help lead the Trump resistance—decided she would support Ben Carson’s nomination to lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

President Donald Trump has nominated Judge Neil Gorsuch, of the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, to the Supreme Court. There have been conflicting reports about how Democrats will respond. Some have suggested that Senate Democrats will keep their powder dry for a more pivotal appointment, while others have claimed that they are determined to filibuster the nomination. The latter is the more likely scenario; Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on Tuesday night said the Senate “must insist upon 60 votes for any Supreme Court nominee... Читать дальше...