Новости за 06.04.2020

Hilary Mantel’s trilogy—Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, and now The Mirror and the Light—concerns the rule of Henry VIII, but the protagonist of all three books is his adviser, Thomas Cromwell. The first two books are now rightly famous, garlanded with a Booker each. They have become bywords for a style of writing the past that builds from one man’s psychology outward.

The Brooklyn Community Bail Fund opened for business in 2015, a heady time for criminal justice reform. The protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore had helped catapult conversations about police violence, mass incarceration, and the myriad injustices of the criminal justice system into a wider public awareness. For the first time in a generation or more, the United States seemed primed to reevaluate its commitment to mass incarceration and the institutions that fed it.


As the Great Pandemic takes hold of our world and forces all of us to separate ourselves from our closest family and friends, does politics become impossible? As I write, states are postponing their primaries. The most recent Democratic presidential debate was held without an audience. Even Donald Trump has halted his public rallies. And party officials may scratch the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee. We are entering a new era, of politics without bodies, of empty auditoriums and virtual voting. Читать дальше...

I’m what one therapist called a “class-straddler,” which I prefer to “class-transitioner,” because the truth is, there’s never not a foot of mine planted firmly in Valley View, eating processed food, watching stolen cable, and going to stock car races. A PhD and multiple major-city addresses can never change that being poor is written in my blood and my bones as much as it is sung from my tight skirts and cheap lipstick.

Brazil’s first known fatality was a 63-year-old housekeeper named Cleonice Gonçalves whose boss contracted Covid-19 in February while on vacation in Italy. The employer, who lives in the expensive Rio de Janeiro neighborhood of Leblon, suspected she was sick upon her return and sought testing but did not tell her maid, who came to work just as she had for decades.

Karl Marx was born more than two centuries ago, in 1818, and, given the enormous impact of his ideas, it should hardly surprise us that we are still trying to make sense of his life and legacy. In the English language alone, at least three major biographies have appeared since the turn of the millennium: Karl Marx: A Life by the British journalist Francis Wheen (2000), Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life by the historian Jonathan Sperber (2013), and Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion by the British historian Gareth Stedman Jones (2016). Читать дальше...