Новости за 16.08.2017

Donald Trump has been accused of drawing a false equivalence between racists and anti-racists in his inflammatory press conference in Trump Tower on Tuesday. But if you listen closely to Trump’s remarks about the weekend clash in Charlottesville, they are actually much worse. The president goes out of his way to celebrate those who rallied under Nazi and white nationalists banners to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, and to denounce the counter-protestors.

The new Aubrey Plaza comedy Ingrid Goes West is about Instagram. The premise is fairly simple: Ingrid Thorburn (Plaza), onetime denizen of a psychiatric ward, becomes obsessed with pretty LA blonde Taylor Sloane (Elizabeth Olsen), an Instagram starlet. Ingrid manages to move to Venice Beach and to insinuate herself into Taylor’s life through a combination of stalking and strategic purchases (health foods, aspirational purses, hairdos). But the movie is not only about hating oneself and coveting other people’s selves... Читать дальше...

A week before this weekend’s “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, I got a call from a fellow journalist who was heading to Virginia and wanted to know if I was planning on bringing a helmet, a gasmask, or both. There had been much hype surrounding the rally, and both white nationalists and members of Antifa had engaged in a fiery tit-for-tat online about who was going to kick whose ass the hardest. “Virginia’s an open carry state,” my friend said. “Are you going to bring a flack jacket?”

Antonio Muñoz Molina is a writer at home in history, having fashioned novels out of the Spanish Civil War, the Holocaust, and the killing of a leader of the Spanish communist party. Like a Fading Shadow, the Spanish author’s latest novel to be translated into English, is a bold attempt at imagining his way into the mind and the life of James Earl Ray, the assassin who killed Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968. Ray, who was already an escaped convict when he shot King, spent two months on the run afterward. Читать дальше...

President Donald Trump on Tuesday introduced a new nemesis to join the “fake news” media, Crooked Hillary, and Mexican rapists: the alt-left. “What about the alt-left?” Trump raged at a press conference at Trump Tower, seething over demands that he condemn the white supremacists and neo-Nazis who descended on Charlottesville, Virginia, this past weekend. “What about the fact that they came charging with clubs in their hands, swinging clubs? Do they have any problem? I think they do.”

Given a second opportunity to revise and extend his original, ignominious response to the deadly, racist violence in Charlottesville last weekend, President Donald Trump instead descended to the lowest point of his squalid presidency. Flanked in the Trump Tower lobby by smiling cabinet officials, including Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao (and as Chief of Staff John Kelly looked on glumly), Trump volunteered praise for some of the white supremacists who rallied around a monument to the confederacy. Читать дальше...

Last summer, just weeks after being crowned the Republican Party’s presidential nominee, Donald Trump scored major political points by visiting flood-ravaged southern Louisiana. The flooding was America’s worst natural disaster since Hurricane Sandy, and yet, President Barack Obama had not yet interrupted his vacation to tour the damage. Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, hadn’t visited either. Victims felt ignored. But some saw hope in Trump. “It just lets you know that somebody on the... Читать дальше...

The political momentum on the left for Medicare for All, fueled by Republicans’ dramatic failure to repeal Obamacare, has been tempered lately by an attack of the piecemeals. Some liberals are warning that the political hurdles for government-provided health care cannot be surmounted at once—that advances must ushered in slowly and incrementally, to minimize disruption.