Новости за 02.04.2020

A genuine national emergency has broken out in a presidential election year. The Trump Administration’s handling of that emergency has been disastrous, beginning with its glaring failure to track and contain the virus before it spread across the entire nation, and continuing to the present, with the president routinely making wildly inaccurate and irresponsible claims on national television, including one that directly led to the death of an American by drug overdose.

It’s hard to look at Robert Waltrip, the 89-year-old founder and chairman emeritus of death-care giant Service Corp International (SCI) and not see a striking resemblance to Henry Waternoose, the CEO of the fictional “Monsters, Inc.” from the Pixar movie of the same name—both in terms of looks, and the fact that both men’s businesses involved profiting off of the wailing of the most vulnerable. Under Waltrip’s leadership, SCI snaked its tendrils from its home state of Texas to suction up family-run funeral homes across the country... Читать дальше...

On a sunny Saturday in March, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said he was horrified to find people were still gathering in city parks. “It’s insensitive, it’s arrogant, it’s self-destructive, it’s disrespectful, and it has to stop now,” he said. He was right that the packed parks defied social distancing guidelines intended to slow the outbreak of the coronavirus, but the public scolding would have benefited from a little self-awareness: Both state and city responses to the pandemic had dragged... Читать дальше...

The first of the month has come and gone. For many people in this country, the anxiety that the day usually brings was compounded by the nationwide pandemic that’s upended life as we know it. Rent, phone, and utility bills, on top of the week’s groceries and childcare costs, were already an overwhelming burden. Now, thanks to the coronavirus, they’re an impossibility.

After two months of refusing to face the true proportions of the coronavirus pandemic head-on, President Donald Trump sought to reassure panicked citizens—and financial markets—in an address to the nation in early March. The president stressed, without any solid evidence, that America had been remarkably successful in containing the spread of the virus, and was making additional headway in streamlining effective and affordable treatment for infected Americans. The main new measure he touted, however... Читать дальше...

In the summer of 2016, a heatwave washed over Europe, thawing permafrost in the north. In the Arctic soil of Siberia, bacteria began stirring—anthrax, to be specific. The thawing, shifting ground exposed a reindeer carcass buried and frozen in 1941. The anthrax spores from the body found their way into the top layer of soil and the water nearby, before being picked up by thousands of migratory reindeer grazing in the area. Over two thousand reindeer soon contracted the deadly bacteria and passed... Читать дальше...

I know a lot of people who think we are teetering on the edge of an apocalypse. This possibility feels so close, in fact, that many of the jokes about it have already worn thin from overuse. When is the meteor coming? people say. Or, The season finale of America is really wild. The one I keep telling is about moving to California. I came here, I said, because when the Big One hits, I want to fall into the sea right away. I have no interest in being around for the Cormac McCarthy portion of the proceedings. Читать дальше...

The Atlantic, a magazine for which I once worked, recently teamed up with the National Constitution Center for a series entitled “The Battle for the Constitution.” The project draws upon a wide range of American legal scholars to discuss the Constitution’s fate in the Trump era. Past contributors range from Michael Gerhardt, Sanford Levinson, and Leah Litman to Richard Epstein, the New York University law professor and erstwhile coronavirus expert who was vaporized from orbit by The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner earlier this week. Читать дальше...

I never much liked the mask. What I used to think of as the “sanitary mask”—with all the fussy, germophobic implications that clinical word entails—is ubiquitous in the places where I and members of my family have lived, in Hong Kong, Japan, Korea. It is, for me, an aesthetic marker of East Asian culture: the dark eyes peering out over a pleated band of white; the ears looped in elastic string; the rest of the face, the very expression of the self, effaced.