Новости за 10.02.2017

When Alabama’s sex-scandal–plagued Governor Robert Bentley stood before reporters Thursday to announce his appointment of state Attorney General Luther Strange to Jeff Sessions’s Senate seat, the most obvious question was: Is this a corrupt bargain to end the state’s criminal investigation of Bentley?

President Donald Trump is planning to exploit a terrorist attack. He made that explicit recently when he lashed out at federal judge James Robart for blocking his ban on immigration from seven majority-Muslim countries:

As the dour Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran wrote, “Speech and silence: We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.” Cioran, we now know, was wrong. In the third week of Donald Trump’s messy and overreaching presidency, nearly every time Trump opened his mouth—whether it was in a call with Vladimir Putin, in a rant about “Easy D” on Twitter, or in private talks excoriating Press Secretary Sean Spicer for getting owned by Melissa McCarthy on Saturday Night Live—the country’s sense of security... Читать дальше...

Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page called it “the most pithy, profound and requoted explanation of the many who have tried to explain the president-elect’s surprising success.” While FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver deemed it “a runaway front-runner in the ‘wrongest idea of 2016’ derby,” Fox News’s Brit Hume celebrated it as the “Smartest observation of the campaign.” I’m referring, of course, to a line from a September article in The Atlantic by Salena Zito: “When [Trump] makes claims like this... Читать дальше...

Even with their collaborators, elites have reason to worry that their power will not hold. Most of their potential followers, they suspect, are soft headed and faint hearted, and some might even sympathize with the victims. Were a determined army of victims to muster support among these sympathizers, they could overthrow the elites. To rule effectively, then, elites must reach beyond their collaborators to the rest of the population, persuading victims to act like bystanders and bystanders to act like victims. Читать дальше...

The fact that Judge Neil Gorsuch had to criticize the man who nominated him to the Supreme Court perfectly encapsulates the horrifying tension between Donald Trump’s power to shape the judiciary and his inclination to trammel over it. Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick, host of the podcast Amicus, joins the New Republic’s Brian Beutler to discuss the crisis of authority facing the courts and to the crumbling distinction between law and politics that could define the Trump era.

I find myself thinking a great deal lately about Mary Svevo, the character from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind who has had her memory erased but who loves quotations. She rattles off lines from Bartlett’s compendium when she has nothing else to say. These quotations cling to her cortex, forming a bridge between confusion and clarity. By repeating the wisdom of others, she manages to reconstitute some sense of holistic identity. Everyone in the film believes that her obsession is silly; but is it? Читать дальше...

In New York, the snow is here and so are the coats. By “coats” I don’t mean “coats” traditionally conceived. I mean the strange coats. The coats that are quilted into fleshy segments like caterpillars, the coats that come down past the knee. The coats like close-cut sleeping bags that must be creeping across town every night and enveloping the body of every second woman while she’s sleeping. It is the only explanation.