Новости за 23.03.2020

Rancho Gordo, a California-based seller of dried heirloom beans, reports that sales have quadrupled in the past few weeks. (A variety named Royal Corona remains its top seller, despite the name.) As anyone who has visited a supermarket recently might gather, beans seem to be the obvious choice for the coronavirus-panicked shopper: They are cheap, last a long time on the shelf, and are versatile. They also make a comforting stew or soup in times of crisis.

Since he could say the word, my son has been obsessed with the subject of microbes. At his insistence we have a library of children’s literature on the subject, books such as Meet Bacteria!, Inside Your Insides, and a particularly unsettling work about parasites called What’s Eating You? The fact remains that at 8 p.m. on a Tuesday night I do not want to read about microbes. I want to read the story about a beached whale that is a metaphor for loss and death. “No,” he says, and because he is a child enamored of precision... Читать дальше...

Emily St. John Mandel has a knack for explosive openings. Her last novel, Station Eleven, begins during a production of King Lear, in the long moment it takes the lead actor to stutter, fall backward, and drop dead. An audience member and EMT-in-training is already leaping his way on to the stage, kicking an usher as he goes.

President Trump claimed last week that the coronavirus crisis had turned him into a “wartime president.” Over the weekend, he signaled that he might aid the enemy. “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF,” he shouted on Twitter on Sunday night. “AT THE END OF THE 15 DAY PERIOD, WE WILL MAKE A DECISION AS TO WHICH WAY WE WANT TO GO!”

In late 2014, a young woman named Hoda Muthana slipped away from her Alabama home to travel to Syria as one more volunteer for the Islamic State. Over the ensuing years, her parents, Ahmed Ali and Sadiqa, experienced the rise and fall of the caliphate through their daughter’s WhatsApp messages, which morphed from semi-reassuring updates on her whereabouts to terrifying statements of ideological passion. She pleaded for her parents, who were from Yemen, to join her in Raqqa: “You and Mom have to come... Читать дальше...

Not long ago, just after the new year was rung in, Americans watched and worried as an exchange of rocket and missile attacks on Iraqi soil brought the United States and Iran to the brink of war. The rockets and missiles are still flying in Iraq—at least four attacks in the past week, likely by Iranian-linked militias, killing two U.S. soldiers and one Briton. The U.S. has responded with air strikes and increased sanctions, both of which put civilians at risk. 

There is cause for alarm. An epidemiological report from Imperial College London now guiding federal policy suggests as many as 2.2 million Americans could die if the authorities and public make little effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus in the United States. By isolating the infected and potentially infected and encouraging social distancing from the elderly, it is estimated that the toll can be halved to just over a million dead. The report goes on to suggest that the more intensive... Читать дальше...