Soothed with the sound the king grew vain;
Fought all his battles o’er again;
And thrice he routed all his foes, and thrice he slew the slain.
It became clear early in Donald Trump’s presidency that many of his top officials shared a common trait: They were climate deniers. Though “climate denial starts at the top,” the New York Times’ Coral Davenport wrote in March, it was trickling down into a variety of high-influence position: Vice President Mike Pence, who once called global warming a “myth” disproved by the fact that his home state once had a cold winter; then-senior advisor Steve Bannon, whose news site Breitbart remains one of... Читать дальше...
Illustration by Guy Billout
“Considering how likely we all are to be blown to pieces by it within the next five years,” George Orwell wrote in late 1945, “the atomic bomb has not roused so much discussion as might have been expected.” Orwell was grappling with the political implications of the new weapon, about two months after the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed more than 100,000 people. If atomic bombs were cheap to build, he thought, they might level differences in power between nations. Читать дальше...
God is dead—and Philip Pullman killed him. So claimed Protestants and Catholics alike when Pullman completed his beloved fantasy trilogy, His Dark Materials, in 2000, and again when New Line Cinema released the film adaptation of the trilogy’s first volume, The Golden Compass, in 2007. “Pullman’s unholy fantasy ensnared me and nearly swallowed me whole,” Stephen Ross of the Christian Research Institute complained in 2007. “Only by God’s grace through my privileged training in the scriptures and... Читать дальше...
On November 20, 2008, sitting in my cell in Guantanamo, I swallowed food for the first time since 2006. It was a celebration of sorts. Earlier that day, my friends and I had listened to Judge Richard Leon announce his decision in our case, Boumediene v. Bush. It had taken nearly seven years and a successful appeal to the United States Supreme Court to compel the judge to review our case, but once he did, it only took a matter of days for him to realize there was no case against us. When he ordered our release... Читать дальше...
