Новости за 04.02.2020

On Monday night, not long after the Iowa Democratic Party announced it was conducting “quality control” on ballots from the Iowa caucus, cable news’s talking heads and Twitter’s energetic touts began to suffer a breakdown. On CNN, it didn’t take long for Chris Cuomo to declare that the party had committed an “epic failure.” On Twitter, some reporters were insinuating foul play. Not to be left out, three separate presidential campaigns set about either casting doubt on the declared results or simply releasing some of their own. Читать дальше...

For Jeff Bezos, ownership of The Washington Post has come with a number of unintended consequences. Since he purchased the paper in 2013, it has been dubbed the “Amazon Washington Post” by the president, a moniker that may have cost Bezos’s main hustle a $10 billion cloud computing contract with the Pentagon. Bezos’s phone, moreover, was allegedly hacked by the Saudi government—possibly as part of the country’s plot to murder Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi. If Bezos purchased the Post to increase... Читать дальше...

Some things are worth preserving out of tradition. Every year, for example, my British mother makes a traditional Christmas pudding—a mélange of many different dried fruits and spices, treacle, and literal animal fat—which is then sealed in a Tupperware bowl, boiled for eight hours, and left to reside in a cupboard until Christmas Day, at which point it is reheated with further hours of boiling. Against all odds, it is quite delicious, but we all recognize that it’s mostly out of tradition that Mum makes it every year. Читать дальше...

These are boom times for multitasking, boom times for alienation, and, thus, boom times for content. Audiences need entertainment (give me more to do with my phone!), and capital has made the safe bet: If you build it, they (advertisers, subscribers) will come. The podcast harnesses the authority of Voice of America–style radio but updated for the spirit of our times: You choose what (and to whom) you listen. There is something for absolutely every taste (the only podcast I have listened to in... Читать дальше...

I have a friend who is a psychic. She has a handful of celebrity clients and performs at bachelorette parties. I had never tested her predictive abilities or asked for any kind of telepathic favors until a couple years ago, when I was torn about quitting my job, and I called her, frantic, a few hours before I was supposed to give notice. I should mention here that I am agnostic when it comes to anything that could loosely be categorized as “spiritual.” I sometimes read my horoscope, but only because it’s free. Читать дальше...

Climate-friendly billionaires are a bit of a paradox. Their multi-home, private-jet lifestyles spew prodigious amounts of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. Even those who donate massively to environmental causes tend to be doing more to warm the earth than your average meat-eating car-driver subsisting below the poverty line.

Four years ago today, then-candidate Donald Trump lashed out at one of his foes on Twitter. His target at the time was Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who had just won the Iowa caucuses. The real-estate mogul ultimately came in second place after leading in some polls before the contest. Trump did not respond to his rival’s victory with graciousness or humility. Instead, without a shred of evidence, he rejected the results and charged Cruz with electoral fraud.

In the run-up to Super Bowl LIV, the issue of the Kansas City Chiefs’ appropriative fans and the San Francisco 49ers’ genocide-referencing team name was hashed out at least a dozen times over in the mainstream media, including here, Vox, The New York Times, the Miami Herald, The Washington Post, and The Hill. For a brief period on Saturday and Sunday, my social media feeds were a steady stream of articles with lead photos of fans dressed in redface and headdresses. It felt like it could have been... Читать дальше...