Новости за 16.01.2020

As the Virginia General Assembly prepared to vote on the Equal Rights Amendment on Wednesday, Democrat Jennifer Carroll Foy posed a question to her colleagues: “Which side of history do you want to be on? The world is watching—your mothers, your sisters, your daughters.” By day’s end, the body had decided: It approved the amendment, becoming the thirty-eighth state to do so, nearly 100 years after it was first introduced in Congress. 

As the last decade concluded, book publishers breathed a sigh of relief. The 2010s were characterized by a series of Amazon-related shockwaves—the growing power of the retail behemoth, the rise of e-books, a related Department of Justice antitrust lawsuit, and the decimation of bookstores both large and small. But publishers had survived. Once viewed as a competitor to physical books, e-books and audiobooks were now considered just two formats among many. Indie bookstores saw a dramatic rebirth during the decade’s final years... Читать дальше...

Vanessa Bain was less than a year into her gig as an Instacart shopper when the company announced it would no longer allow tipping on its app. Instacart instead began imposing a 10 percent “service fee” that replaced the previous default tip of 10 percent. The change had no impact on customers, who could be forgiven for assuming that the new fee would still go to the workers who shopped for their groceries and delivered them to their homes. “It was deceptive to customers,” Bain said. “They thought they were still tipping us... Читать дальше...

North Macedonia has existed, technically, for only about a year. Not the nation itself—that country, an outgrowth of the Yugoslavian collapse, will soon be entering its fourth decade as an independent polity. But “North Macedonia” only came into being in early 2019, when the Macedonian government in Skopje officially changed the country’s name from “Macedonia.” The name change eased an ongoing dispute with the Greek government, which claimed that Macedonian nationalists had designs on the similarly named region in northern Greece. Читать дальше...

“Read as little as possible of literary criticism,” Rilke warned Franz Xaver Kappus, the 19-year-old military cadet and addressee of Letters to a Young Poet. “Works of art are of an infinite solitude,” Rilke continued, “and no means of approach is so useless as criticism.” Rilke signed his works with his real name, unlike Elena Ferrante, who in her anonymity has tried to disentangle herself from the figure of the writer as individual genius that works in the “infinite solitude” Rilke described. Читать дальше...

Nothing twitches the loins of a Beltway take-monger quite like those three little words: Dems In Disarray. Pundits have no better reason to get out of bed and race to their sun-dappled desks than to type with trembling fingers that the Democrats are at each other’s throats again. When will they learn that the majority of this country are just simple, Applebee’s salad bar-enjoying Americans who want low deficits and a president who Gets Things Done, not leftist squabbles on Twitter? 

All of the pieces are finally in place for the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump. On Wednesday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi named a slate of seven managers—House members who will act as prosecutors in the trial—shortly before the House voted to formally submit the articles to the Senate. Later this week, Chief Justice John Roberts will swear in all 100 senators. The trial itself will begin in full next week.