Новости за 24.03.2017

“Nothing suffices to the disaster,” wrote the dour French philosopher Maurice Blanchot in his seminal late work The Writing of Disaster. “This means that just as it is foreign to the ruinous purity of destruction, so the idea of totality cannot delimit it. If all things were reached by it and destroyed—all gods and men returned to absence—and if nothing were substituted for everything, it would still be too much and too little.” Blanchot, of course, was talking about *bong rip* life, man, but... Читать дальше...

To knock Life for being an Alien rip-off is to erroneously assume that this solid, junk-food thriller actually cares at all about originality. Let other people come up with blazingly unique storylines and nuanced characters—the fact that Life is totally familiar is what makes it work on its own modest, efficient terms. This is a movie about a bunch of people orbiting high above Earth on a space station that’s suddenly imperiled by a nasty alien life force that’s hell-bent on killing them. Life... Читать дальше...

In another news cycle, the story that broke on Wednesday about Secretary of State Rex Tillerson would have been a bombshell. Instead, buried deep beneath the furors over Russia, health care and presidential “wiretapping,” it hardly broke at all. But it should not get lost in the shuffle: The latest in Tillerson’s evolving email scandal goes right to the heart of that other terrifying thing about this new administration—its addiction to secrecy, and its unprecedented hostility to the usual forms of public transparency that democracy requires.

Political pundits, staggered by Donald Trump’s exaggerated boasts, false promises, and outright lies, have offered various theories for what’s wrong with him. Does he suffer from mental illness? Is he experiencing early-onset dementia? Andrew Sullivan recently argued in New York magazine that Trump’s chronic, stubborn dishonesty—unlike normal political fibbing—is “delusional” and “deranged,” a frightening sign that the president is living in an alternative universe. “There is no anchor any more,” Sullivan writes. Читать дальше...