Новости за 24.04.2017

A slow week for new releases—it’s apparently all Boss Baby all the time these days—gives us only one major new release to discuss, Ben Wheatley’s Free Fire, starring Brie Larson, Cillian Murphy, and Armie Hammer. We disagree on it: One of our critics thought it was a fun experiment, but the other found it mostly tiresome.

A slow week for new releases—it’s apparently all Boss Baby all the time these days—gives us only one major new release to discuss, Ben Wheatley’s Free Fire, starring Brie Larson, Cillian Murphy, and Armie Hammer. We disagree on it: One of our critics thought it was a fun experiment, but the other found it mostly tiresome.

It’s hard to imagine a better metaphor for Donald Trump’s presidency than if, backed by a Republican-controlled Congress, he celebrates his 100th day in office by shutting down his own government. This outcome is by no means inevitable, but the odds of it are astonishingly high: Government funding runs out on Friday, and Trump hits the 100-day mark on Saturday.

For over 40 years, the people of Western Sahara have endured war and occupation—yet few outside of northern Africa have ever heard of them or their suffering. In 1975, their vast ­territory—some 100,000 square miles of desert bordering the Atlantic—was invaded by Morocco. Almost half of the traditionally nomadic Sahrawi population was driven into remote refugee camps in neighboring Algeria, where 165,000 remain to this day. An entire generation has been born and raised in these camps. 

Great memoirists are contortionists. They look at their own lives from above, below, ahead, and behind—bending their limbs and twisting their torsos into the kind of knots that shouldn’t be possible for humans. “I had placed myself behind my own back,” Augustine wrote of the years before he converted to Christianity, “refusing to see myself.”

As graduation season approaches, colleges across the country are locking down commencement speakers to address the class of 2017. Harvard got Mark Zuckerberg (a Harvard dropout). Hillary Clinton is speaking at Wellesley, Bernie Sanders at Brooklyn College. Joe Biden will speak to my seniors at Colby. But if this year is anything like last, other invitees will prove more controversial, sparking another round of debates over “no-platforming”: the practice of opposing campus speakers.

Neil Gorsuch’s first public vote as a Supreme Court justice was a sobering reminder that elections have life-or-death consequences. Gorsuch joined a 5-4 majority to deny a stay on the first of several executions the state of Arkansas is rushing to carry out, before the expiration of one of the chemicals it uses to administer lethal injections. Just before midnight on Thursday, Ledell Lee was executed. More executions are scheduled for Monday and Thursday of this week.