Новости за 09.05.2017

“Good evening ladies and gentlemen, all art is fake.” Orange bouffant rustling, the newscaster speaks in the melody of her kind: “Maybe the mini-artist is a very small person.” Those words are Sol Lewitt’s—from “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art”—but the voice and enunciation and staging are CNN. The newscaster, played by Cate Blanchett, does a classic smize and holds her head very still while listening to a correspondent who is out in the rain, also played by Cate Blanchett. The newscaster is just... Читать дальше...

NPR’s Rachel Martin had a fascinating interview on Tuesday with Katharine Hayhoe, a renowned climate scientist and evangelical Christian, in which they discussed the toxic nature of the world “climate denier”—a word that environmental reporters, including me, use all the time to describe people who don’t accept the scientific consensus that climate change is real, man-made, and dangerous. Hayhoe argued that calling people deniers is “a good way to end the conversation,” and that it’s actually... Читать дальше...

You would have thought they were his people. The hundreds who packed a congressman’s town hall in Kingston, New York, on Monday night gave him a standing ovation. They waved signs and took photos of him. “Thank you! Thank you!” they chanted. But when the congressman took the microphone a few minutes after 7 p.m., smiling in a crisp suit and tie, he began by acknowledging what everyone knew: that most of the people there weren’t his constituents at all.

In early modern Europe, women of certain classes were allowed to leave their salons only to eat, sleep, and go to chapel. “Beware what women do in gardens, arbors and bowers, banqueting houses, galleries, turrets,” one manual published in sixteenth-century England put it. “They may (and doubtless do) many of them play the filthy person there.” The warning was clear: keep women out of public, or God knows what they might do.

The “war on science” notched another apparent victory late last week, as the Environmental Protection Agency fired at least five scientists on the Board of Scientific Counselors, an 18-member committee that advises the agency’s main science division. The New York Times reported that the agency was considering replacing the fired BOSC members with representatives from polluting industries. “The administrator believes we should have people on this board who understand the impact of regulations on the regulated community,” J. Читать дальше...

All eyes are on the Senate, after House Republicans passed the American Health Care Act. Will Senate Republicans follow suit? What can Democrats do to stop them? And what would a repeal of the Affordable Care Act mean for Democratic politics going forward.