Новости за 30.05.2017

Like a jilted spouse who has finally had enough, Western Europe is going its own way. German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced the split on Sunday, shortly after President Donald Trump concluded an official visit to the continent that created a deep rift in the heart of NATO. “The times when we could fully rely on others are to some extent over—I experienced that in the last few days,” Merkel declared, speaking at a Bavarian beer hall rally. “We Europeans must really take our destiny into our... Читать дальше...

The easy line about Denis Johnson is that he was a writer on the fringe, who wrote about people on the fringe. It’s not totally undescriptive. But there’s something reflexive and diminishing about it—as though because he wrote about about drunks and poor people that he was somehow peripheral. Great, maybe, but with a narrow field of vision.

So here we are, finally past the hundred-day mark. What we’ve learned about the president is self-evident—that the weight of the office has not changed him, and will not change him. What we’ve learned about the Republican Party and conservatism is unsurprising—that they’ve sold their souls to a demagogue, and will continue to do so. (Until his behavior threatens to cost them their majority.) But what exactly have we learned about liberalism, in defeat?

Back before he enfeebled the House speakership so that President Donald Trump could run a historically corrupt administration without facing pesky oversight inquiries from Congress, Paul Ryan pretended to feel so strongly about the integrity of U.S. government secrets that he would intervene in executive branch affairs to protect it.

At Amazon Books’s sixth location—its first in New York, the capital of books—I met the publishing industry’s worst nightmare. Joseph is 22, sharp-dressed and tall, a recent graduate of Notre Dame who is about to start work in finance. Asked what he thought of the bookstore, he told me, “It’s exactly what kids do. They go to the bookstore, find a book, then look how much it is on Amazon. I might read the blurb on the front of the book, turn it around, and see it’s $17. I take a picture of it—I’m a Prime member—with the app... Читать дальше...

It wouldn’t be hard today to find out what Gina McCarthy was doing on any given workweek from 2013 to 2016. The former Environmental Protection Agency administrator’s daily schedule is still posted on the department’s website, listing all “meetings attended by advocates, stakeholders, elected officials, and others outside the Agency.” So is her deputy’s schedule, as well as the schedules of every assistant and regional administrator across the EPA. The reason, according to the website, is “to... Читать дальше...