Новости за 15.09.2017

The face of the White House press operation has already undergone several iterations, with each embodying the administration in their own special way. First was Sean Spicer, who exemplified the administration’s comfort with telling bald lies and being openly hostile toward the news media. Then came Anthony “The Mooch” Scaramucci, who was Donald Trump’s vulgarity incarnate. Now we have Sarah Huckabee Sanders, whose style as press secretary is less shrill than Spicer, and less pelvic-thrusting bravado a la The Mooch. Читать дальше...

It has become a cliché—but no less true for that—to point out that so-called “natural” disasters tend to show us the fault lines in our society. The aftermath of major storms such as hurricanes Harvey and Irma, which blew through Texas’s Gulf Coast and across the Caribbean and up Florida’s peninsula respectively, lay out American inequality in almost unbearably sharp relief. 

Art is always political. Shoe design, ceramics, tapestry: all creative acts are made within historical and political contexts. But artists express their politics in different modes. Some critique indirectly, as in, say, the femininity-satirizing works of Sarah Lucas. But others work much closer to the headlines.

In April 1949, Raymond Chandler described his aspiration to write a transcending book, “which, ostensibly a mystery and keeping the spice of mystery, will actually be a novel of character and atmosphere with an over-tone of violence and fear.” Chandler was contemplating his most ambitious—and most uneven—novel, The Long Goodbye. He was also contemplating Ross Macdonald, who had just published The Moving Target, his first novel featuring the detective Lew Archer. At the time, Chandler was obsessed... Читать дальше...

Complaining about the Man Booker Prize is an important British tradition. Since its inception—as simply the Booker Prize, in 1969—it has been criticized for its imperialist overtones, its unwillingness to take risks, and, above all, its corrupt insularity. Though any writer from the Commonwealth was eligible, the winner was determined by a small and incestuous circle of London elites. In 2001 the comic novelist A.L. Kennedy described the Booker as being decided by “who knows who, who’s sleeping with who... Читать дальше...

The New America Foundation is reeling from controversy after its decision late last month to “part ways”—in the words of the group’s president, Anne-Marie Slaughter—with anti-monopoly crusader Barry Lynn and his Open Markets project. It’s a complicated story with diverging accounts, but The New York Times summed it up neatly: “Google Critic Ousted From Think Tank Funded by the Tech Giant.”