Новости за 10.02.2020

Ahh, 1994. What a time to be alive. Ill Communication, Monster, and Superunknown were blaring from every boom box and Chevy Cavalier cassette deck. Final Fantasy 3 had a generation of socially awkward kids glued to a Super Nintendo. Forrest Gump was spinning a Boomer fever-dream of American history on the big screen, and Pulp Fiction was about the coolest thing imaginable.

There is something obviously insane about Parasite, a Korean film about the violence of wealth inequality, winning the top honor at an event that sends its honored guests home with $225,000 gift bags. (Highlights included $20,000 of “facial rejuvenation treatments” and a 24-carat-gold-plated vape.) But that level of dissonance is kind of Hollywood’s thing.

In the wake of Iowa’s caucus vote-counting disaster, political staffers and pollsters alike are reconsidering the state’s “first in the nation to vote” status. The quaint caucuses and infamous fry-forward state fair could disappear were Iowa were to be dethroned. But so too could one of Iowa’s largest industries, which has managed to carve out an outsized role in debates over renewable energy: ethanol.

If the news in the hours after the Trump administration assassinated the Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani felt like the six months leading up to the Iraq War squeezed into one evening, then the weeks after the killing resembled, with uncanny absurdity, those events played backward. We watched Mike Pence attempting to link Soleimani to September 11 and Mike Pompeo describing Iranians dancing in the streets—even as video showed many of them mourning—and we listened to the administration’s ever-shifting explanations for the strike. Читать дальше...

Are we on track for a catastrophe, or a meltdown? This somewhat gnat-straining debate has emerged around new modeling, some of which suggests that a much-dreaded “worst case scenario” of five degrees celsius of warming by 2100 is less likely than previously thought, and some of which suggests exactly the opposite.