Новости за 08.12.2017

Everything’s coming up Dollar General. “The economy is continuing to create more of our core customer,” its CEO, Todd Vasos, recently informed The Wall Street Journal. “We are putting stores today [in areas] that perhaps five years ago were just on the cusp of probably not being our demographic and it has now turned to being our demographic.” Joyful news for Vasos, who earned $8.5 million in 2016, and for his company, which is enjoying rising profits. His cashiers, who make minimum wage, have less to celebrate. Читать дальше...

The key to survival in Donald Trump’s orbit is knowing that you’re really only ever performing for an audience of one. Lose his approval and trust and you’re out. When Kellyanne Conway says that “a lot of people in the mainstream media interfered with our election by trying to help Hillary Clinton win” or Stephen Miller shouts that Trump’s national security actions “will not be questioned,” they’re fulfilling their one true duty, which is as much speaking to the boss as for the boss.

An unusual thing happened to me this week. A story that I wrote for The New Republic about the heated dispute over a proposed Costco poultry plant in Fremont, Nebraska, was published on the same day as another story on the same subject, written by Henry Grabar for Slate. It happens. Journalists know that certain microcosms reveal larger narratives; often we pick up the same frequencies. When I started to read the story, though, my concerns had less to do with duplication than a growing unease: Grabar had misjudged the essential story. Читать дальше...

Once upon a time, a certain kind of fairy tale goes, the most interesting and articulate minds in the world converged in dank Manhattan apartments to debate the merits of literary fiction and Trotskyist politics over cocktails. This is the story of the New York Intellectuals, of the minds and temperaments behind Partisan Review and eventually The New York Review of Books. There isn’t any real magic in this bit of cultural history, but there is fairy dust to be found in it all the same. For a certain kind of person in America... Читать дальше...

Minnesota Senator Al Franken on Thursday heeded the demands of his Democratic colleagues in announcing he would resign “in the coming weeks,” but he did so with some defiance. “Some of the allegations against me are simply not true,” he said. “Others I remember very differently.” Many of his admirers now portray him as a fallen idol who let down the liberal cause. “It hurts not just because his supporters thought he was better than this, but because so many people were depending upon him,” wrote ThinkProgress’ Ian Millhiser. Читать дальше...