Новости за 21.01.2020

Impeachment has yanked the three senators seriously competing in the Iowa caucuses back to Washington for a trial that could last weeks, with only Sundays off for good behavior. This past weekend, during what was probably their last unencumbered stretch of campaigning before the February 3 caucuses, all three reacted in characteristic fashion.

Depending on the year of your birth and your streaming media habits, you may have a different point of reference—Bill Murray or Natasha Lyonne—for the phenomenon of living the same day of your life, over and over again. Either way, it is becoming harder to avoid the feeling, as the Democratic nomination process drags on, that it’s going to be 2016 for the rest of our lives. The plot twist is that the characters in this real-life endless loop are not trying to escape the trap; they seem content to rehash their arguments now and forever... Читать дальше...

In the two weeks since Donald Trump ordered the assassination of Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani, it’s both true enough and obviously, howlingly inaccurate to say that things have returned to “normal.” That just cannot possibly be the right word for the government’s ongoing state of clammy resting breakdown—and yet, as the situation seems to have stepped back from the briefly imminent prospect of an actual hot war, Trump has seemed more and more like himself. A day after the drone strike, when... Читать дальше...

Is man an animal? If there is a question that reverberates through the entire oeuvre of the French writer Michel Houellebecq, one presented with great emphasis in his most recent novel, Serotonin, it is this. The question can, of course, be qualified in various ways. One could add racial or cultural or class modifiers—Is the white man an animal? Is European man an animal? Is the bourgeois man an animal?—because those are the categories of “man” Houellebecq is interested in. But no matter how qualified... Читать дальше...

Last week, Chief Justice John Roberts appeared before the Senate and took a solemn oath. Then he requested that the assembled senators do the same. “Do you solemnly swear,” he asked, drawing upon the chamber’s rules, “that in all things appertaining to the trial of the impeachment of Donald John Trump, president of the United States, now pending, you will do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws, so help you God?” The senators collectively murmured their response: “I do.”