Новости за 22.01.2020

Just over a year ago, hours after the new House Democratic majority was sworn in, incoming freshman Rashida Tlaib gave an impassioned speech to a crowd of revelers at an event sponsored by the progressive group MoveOn. It was a speech about identity as a motivational force for political action, one that referred not only to her own Palestinian heritage but the successes of other progressive minority candidates in the midterms, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the work of activists in her community. Читать дальше...

Last June, American journalist Glenn Greenwald presided over what appeared to be the most incendiary scoop in Brazil’s recent history, detailing a pattern of mendacity and manipulation in Operation Car Wash, the long-running corruption investigation that led to the arrest of former leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. On Tuesday, the other shoe dropped: Greenwald was formally charged, by federal prosecutors under the current right-wing Brazilian government, with cybercrimes. The criminal... Читать дальше...

Three weeks in, 2020 is already a banner year for authoritarian government surveillance. Last weekend, The New York Times’ Kashmir Hill reported that Clearview, an AI startup with connections to Rudy Giuliani and backing from Peter Thiel, had crossed a virtual Rubicon by making the internet searchable by face—and by giving facial-recognition database access to “hundreds of law enforcement agencies, ranging from local cops in Florida to the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security.” On Tuesday... Читать дальше...

On Monday, the body of 16-year-old Crow Tribe citizen Selena Not Afraid was found a mile from the Montana rest stop where she was last seen on New Year’s Day. Before then, Not Afraid, who friends and family called “Sal,” was like any other kid from Hardin High. But when she disappeared, she became something else, too: a name attached to a statistic. Her disappearance and death, along with that of 18-year-old Kaysera Stops Pretty Places, who was found dead in August, led to a write-up from The New York Times... Читать дальше...

Alan Dershowitz’s greatest impact on American law likely came at the beginning of his career. In 1963, Justice Arthur Goldberg tasked him to help build an argument against what had, until then, gone unquestioned: the constitutionality of capital punishment. Dershowitz—then a young Supreme Court clerk, now a Harvard University law professor emeritus—compiled some of the earliest statistics on racial disparities in the death penalty. Every case he found in which a rapist had been sentenced to death... Читать дальше...

Lauren Groff’s review of American Dirt, Jeanine Cummins’s new novel about a mother and son fleeing cartel violence in Mexico, is one of the odder articles that The New York Times Book Review has published in recent memory. It is less a work of criticism than a lengthy self-examination, with Groff, who is white, agonizing at length about whether it is even appropriate for her to review the book:

The house on 2928 Magnolia Street in West Oakland, California, is an unassuming three-bedroom with a faded-out porch and white siding gone slightly gray with time. For two years, like an estimated 46,000 other homes in the area, it sat empty. But even in its unused state, the obscure physics of the market pumped and laundered through it the kind of abstract “value” you can monitor on real estate sites like Trulia and Zillow, which tracked a steady upward trend for the property over the last five years. Читать дальше...

It’s absolutely clear quite early on—its second minute or so—that Like a Boss is a bad film, the sort without the decency even to be truly awful. It’s just a slipshod contraption of gags (not jokes, you understand) held together by the audience’s will to be entertained. We pay in hopes it will make us laugh. By the end I did, aloud, like the sort of mildly deranged person I always encounter at matinees in New York City. I hope I didn’t disturb the other two people in the theater.

The wealthiest man in the United States—and the world—built his fortune in part by strategically avoiding taxation as he established an online retail leviathan, which in turn allows him to invest in other industries, including media. He owns the biggest newspaper in Washington, thanks to which he wields enormous political influence and has earned the ire of our infamously thuggish president; and his flagship company, Amazon, now produces highbrow movies and TV shows. One of these, Alex Gibney’s new documentary Citizen K... Читать дальше...

On Sunday, after much fanfare, The New York Times’ editorial board announced its presidential endorsement, which was actually a decision to endorse two candidates: Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar. “Both the radical and the realist models” being offered in the Democratic primary “warrant serious consideration,” the board wrote, and so voters must decide which is “best suited for repairing the Republic.” 

On Tuesday, a pack of Republican Congressmen went public with a new suite of measures to fight global warming. Previewed by Axios, the plan is being heralded as a “sea change” in how the party thinks about the potential end of the world. On closer look, while the announcement shows how far climate activists have managed to shift the conversation in Washington, it’s also a package only a fossil fuel executive could love. It’s unlikely to pass, much less keep temperatures from rising.