Новости за 01.04.2020

At the Naval Academy, officers-in-training memorize “The Laws of the Navy,” a many-lined poem by a Victorian English admiral that prescribes teamwork, obedience, and prudence at all times. “Dost think, in a moment of anger,/’Tis well with thy seniors to fight?” it scolds. “They prosper who burn in the morning/The letters they wrote overnight.” From training to retirement, there may be no more enduring truth for the military officer than this: Memos can kill careers.

In the movies, underdog sports teams always come from gritty, struggling, preferably post-industrial places. Major League wouldn’t work if it were set in Miami, instead of Cleveland. Rocky’s determination in Rocky is melded to Philadelphia: He draws his strength from the city itself, pumping his fists and jumping into the air after ascending the steps of the city’s art museum. Underdog sports teams are avatars for their downtrodden communities. They ultimately prevail by embodying the pluck and mettle of the people... Читать дальше...

Emergencies clarify. At an interpersonal level, the coronavirus pandemic has exposed our values and assumptions, the state of relationships, our judgments of responsibility and risk. Politically, it has thrown our social and economic priorities into painfully sharp relief. The language we use to make sense of this public health emergency is revealing, too. Pandemic rhetoric shows us how we imagine ourselves politically: not as mere populations, passive and subject to disease, but as publics, ready to take action together. Читать дальше...

Last week, I posed an admittedly taboo question to my followers on Twitter: “Is anyone enjoying this? Any parents, in particular? Are there any ways your life is better in this situation?” I was surprised by the response, from more than 30 workers around the country and across the world. Perhaps “enjoy” was the wrong word, they fairly noted, but they did find something positive in their new reality. “I do not enjoy the forest,” wrote Caitrin Keiper, a magazine editor who lives in Virginia, “but... Читать дальше...

Last week, as I waited in the social-distance line outside a medical pot store on Martin Luther King Boulevard in Fayetteville, Arkansas, I overheard two men in front of me talking. Both, like me, were white and in their mid-thirties. One, a former Marine wearing well-worn issue boots, said his rifle magazines were topped off and he had plenty of food; he hoped it was time for “the boogaloo.” The other man nodded; he hoped the civil war was going down soon, too, otherwise he’d need to get back to work. Читать дальше...

In 2009, Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus were childhood friends living in Ohio and working hard toward achieving the American dream. They had corporate jobs making six figures, suburban houses, and plenty of stuff. But it wasn’t all perfect: They also struggled with debt, addiction, and exhaustion. In the fall of that year, Millburn’s mother died, and his marriage fell apart. He started to realize that he was unhappy and unhealthy. “I wasn’t living the Dream,” he later wrote. “I was living a lie.”

It takes a long time to make a book. Publishers generally trumpet projects upon the acquisition of a manuscript or the signing of a deal. So when on March 2 of this year, Grand Central Publishing, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, announced that it would publish Apropos of Nothing, a memoir by Woody Allen, on April 7, the news was met with surprise—the equivalent of a midnight album drop in the staid world of books.