Новости за 15.06.2017

The shooting in Alexandria, Virginia, which wounded House Majority Whip Steve Scalise and four others on Wednesday, has roused worrywart pundits and politicians who fret about the state of America today. “The United States is in a time of great danger,” John Podhoretz wrote in The New York Post. “I don’t want to invoke all the clichés of the past decade, but you know them all—we’re a divided nation, we’re all living in our own bubbles, we don’t even accept the same facts and we hate each other. Читать дальше...

In 2017, it has become commonplace simply to order a human for a few hours. Someone to hang pictures on your walls, or deliver banh mi, or pretend to love you. The marketplace of mediated intimacies so gently referred to as the “sharing economy” has changed how we buy things and the way we work. Once-unpredictable, even languorous experiences with food and sex and shopping have been replaced by discrete, algorithmically-directed transactions.

Perhaps no musical genre has been as maligned as progressive rock. But in The Show That Never Ends, his brisk and extremely entertaining overview of prog, Washington Post political reporter David Weigel makes the case that it was enormously innovative and influential—a link between the rebellion and creativity of the mid-1960s and punk, which eventually overthrew it. Though prog could be pretentious and overstuffed, the conventional wisdom about the genre dramatically understates how popular it... Читать дальше...

In 1972, Carol Merrill, a graduate student at the University of New Mexico in her early twenties, sent a letter to Georgia O’Keeffe at the artist’s adobe house in Abiquiú. O’Keeffe was 85 years old and an international celebrity. She had been showing her paintings for over five decades, and due to macular degeneration, had set aside her oil paints to begin a series of abstractions in watercolor. Merrill’s letter was short and to the point. “Dear Georgia O’Keeffe,” she wrote. “I want to meet you. Читать дальше...

Beth Ditto is an excellent celebrity. As the lead singer of Gossip (formerly The Gossip), she sang with an angry volume that stirred the guts. She’s extremely attractive but she doesn’t look like any other famous women. She’s open about being gay, which the culture can always do with more of. And in 2013 she was arrested for being drunk and yelling “Obama!” in the street, blocking traffic, thus cementing her place in America’s heart.

In the days and months before President Donald Trump announced he would withdraw the United States from the Paris accord, climate-change deniers were preparing for the worst. Trump twice postponed meetings about whether to remain in the agreement, raising questions about whether Trump would cave to overwhelming pressure from some of his closest advisers (not to mention scientists, corporations, and the international community). “His views are evolving,” Gary Cohn, Trump’s chief economic adviser and a supporter of the agreement... Читать дальше...