Новости за 05.10.2017

The standard joke about the Nobel Prize in Literature is that it’s a prize for Estonian poets. There’s an insecurity underlying this joke—no one likes an annual reminder that they’re not as well-read as they think they are. But it also points to the Nobel’s value. Americans are notoriously unworldly in their reading habits and the Nobel, when awarded to writers like Tomas Tranströmer or Mo Yan, to use two recent examples, opens up valuable new horizons. This has led to the perception that the Nobel is the vegetable of literary prizes... Читать дальше...

Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go has several different directions: It looks backward, forward, and sideways. The setting is Hailsham, an academy strongly flavored by the British and postcolonial tradition of boarding school literature (“We loved our sports pavilion”). The novel flits past the canon of “school stories” like Tom Brown’s Schooldays, circles the Victorian classics of schooling (Jane Eyre, David Copperfield), and eventually settles on the wistful pastoralism undercut by dread... Читать дальше...

In 2012, a day after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Gary Willis wrote an essay in The New York Review of Books called “Our Moloch,” a reference to the ancient Canaanite god whose worship entailed the sacrifice of children. “The gun is our Moloch,” Willis wrote. “It is an object of reverence,” one so dominant and pervasive that it “has the power to destroy the reasoning process.” Gun worship, Willis argued, prevents us from doing anything about the manifest link between the extraordinary... Читать дальше...

One of President Donald Trump’s special gifts is his ability to humiliate his underlings. He has called Attorney General Jeff Sessions “an idiot” to his face, and convened his cabinet so its members could sing Dear Leader’s praises in front of the press. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s bizarre press conference on Wednesday, called for the sole purpose of denying reports of a severe rift with the president, is the latest example of the indignity of working for Trump.

New York, NY (October 5, 2017) —Over the past month, a string of hurricanes has devastated parts of the US and the Caribbean. Despite these natural disasters, many conservatives still stand by their belief that climate change isn’t real and largely man-made.

Early in the summer of 1991, the conservation biologist Jack Putz received a peculiar call from the owner of a vacation home out in Yankeetown, a village on the Gulf Coast of Florida. According to the caller, there was something wrong with the cabbage palms on his property.

Amid telling Puerto Rico that its suffering has “thrown our budget out of whack,” blaming residents for wanting “everything done for them,” and tossing rolls of paper towels into a crowd as if he were shooting hoops, President Donald Trump finally landed on something useful to say about the humanitarian crisis facing the American territory.

As we are all too well aware, in January, 2017, the Doomsday Clock was advanced to two-and-a-half minutes before midnight, a threat level that had not been reached for 30 years. The accompanying statement invoked the two major threats to survival: nuclear weapons and “unchecked climate change.” The call condemned world leaders, who are endangering “every person on Earth [by] failing to perform their most important duty—ensuring and preserving the health and vitality of human civilization.”

Amid telling Puerto Rico that its suffering has “thrown our budget out of whack,” blaming residents for wanting “everything done for them,” and tossing rolls of paper towels into a crowd as if he were shooting hoops, President Donald Trump finally landed on something useful to say about the humanitarian crisis facing the American territory.

The motto of the gang MS13—“Kill, Rape, Control”—pulsates on the screen, before cutting to a graffiti portrait of Ralph Northam, the Democratic nominee for governor of Virginia. Then a warning: Northam cast a “deciding vote” in favor of sanctuary cities, ushering in a wave of MS13 terror in Virginia. A separate ad features heavily tattooed Latino men who are meant to represent MS13 gang members. If you believe the ads, Northam would empty the state’s prisons and open the country’s borders to let... Читать дальше...