Новости за 28.04.2017

Tomorrow is President Donald Trump’s 100th day in the Oval Office, and perhaps no one has captured the problems of his young administration better than the man himself. Yesterday, Trump told Reuters, “I loved my previous life. I had so many things going. This is more work than in my previous life. I thought it would be easier.” It’s a pithy summation of how Trump was completely unprepared for his new job.

The Circle is a big honking sloppy mess of a movie, one that flops around so aimlessly that it’s baffling so many intelligent people had a hand in making it. It’s directed by James Ponsoldt (who made the excellent The Spectacular Now and the intriguing The End of the Tour), co-written by Ponsoldt and Dave Eggers (based off Eggers’s novel), and features a dream cast, from Emma Watson to Tom Hanks to John Boyega to Patton Oswalt to Bill Paxton, in his final film performance. It is a film of the moment... Читать дальше...

Twenty-five years is a full cultural cycle. A baby born in 1992 is now a fully grown adult. The early ’90s fashion revival has already come and gone. Although many things have not changed, including the default expectation of American police brutality against black people, the “look” of events on television from 25 years ago has now been codified into something we might call the visual history of a nation.

On New Year’s Day in 1970, President Richard Nixon appeared in San Clemente, California, for the momentous signing of the National Environmental Policy Act—the congressional statute that formally recast the government’s role from conserving the wilderness to protecting the health of the environment and the general public. In the previous decade, rising unrest over the link between pollution and poor health—spurred forward by Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking 1962 exposé Silent Spring and Lady Bird... Читать дальше...

In its final months, Hillary Clinton’s campaign depicted the election in Manichaean terms: the forces of light against darkness, love against hate, the guardians of a virtuous public against a world-historical bully. In this story, we lost the election not because we did something wrong, but because we did something right in a world that’s wrong. We fought the forces of misogyny, xenophobia, and white supremacy, but they were too strong; they overwhelmed us. And how could they not? This is America after all. Читать дальше...

Most analyses of President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office has focused on what he hasn’t accomplished. But when it comes to the environment, he’s been active indeed. He has signed at least eight anti-environmental executive actions. His Environmental Protection Agency has ordered delays and reviews of anti-pollution rules. And he has appointed a Supreme Court justice with an anti-environmental bent.

How far Ivanka Trump has come! Only seven years ago she was tweeting about the Trump SoHo spa’s newest candle collection. Last year she was tweeting about how to make it work as an unpaid intern and how excited she was for Juicero. Now she is one of the most powerful, unelected people in the entire world.

In the summer of last year, we recorded an episode of Primary Concerns with Glenn Greenwald, one of the founding editors of The Intercept, on the question of whether the media’s coverage of the 2016 campaign faithfully conveyed the stakes of the election. Glenn said yes; we said no.

In American Gods, Starz’s gorgeous, ambitious adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s 2001 fantasy novel, humans, be they slaves or migrants, bring their individual gods with them when they land in America. The country is populated with hundreds of deities, who will die if they’re starved of belief. If people start bowing before new deities—if they exchange Odin and Athena for, say, television and Twitter—the old deities go extinct. War ensues between the new gods and the old, spilling out into crocodile-themed... Читать дальше...