Новости за 08.08.2017

When Mel Gibson’s The Passion of The Christ came out in 2004, there was much talk of the blood. The violence done to the hero’s body by his torturers seemed gratuitous. It was as if the camera wanted to lick his wounds. But as Roger Ebert observed in his review of that movie, Gibson’s film provided “a visceral idea of what the Passion consisted of.” Violence is at the core of the Passion story, and so it is at the core of the movie adaptation: For many Christians, the physical torment undergone... Читать дальше...

In a Politico op-ed late last month, Jeff Flake, the pseudo-apostate Republican senator from Arizona, warned that his party was in “denial” about President Donald Trump. Conservatives, he wrote, “have maintained an unnerving silence as instability has ensued,” adding that this “unnerving silence in the face of an erratic executive branch is an abdication, and those in positions of leadership bear particular responsibility.” The press ate it up. “Flake makes waves with Trump takedown,” Politico declared days later. Читать дальше...

Back in January, after Donald Trump had nominated Steven Mnuchin as treasury secretary, I uncovered a leaked document from the California attorney general’s office that showed OneWest Bank repeatedly broke foreclosure laws under Mnuchin’s six-year reign as CEO and then chairman. Prosecutors in the state’s Justice Department wanted to file a civil enforcement action against the company for “widespread misconduct,” but the attorney general at the time, Kamala Harris, overrode the recommendation and declined to prosecute. Читать дальше...

In 1970, while I was a student at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York, I moved away from campus and into an old farmhouse outside of town. It took about fifteen minutes to get there, a longer drive in bad weather, which Ithaca had plenty of, freezing winters and heavy snows. The area was rural, country roads laid out in perfect mile grids. It was dairy-farming country, some farms to my eyes appearing prosperous, others worn down, others abandoned.