Новости за 30.04.2020

Andrew Cuomo has been cast as the anti-Trump in the coronavirus crisis. The governor of New York was widely praised in the national media for doing all the things that the president could or would not do. In contrast to the president, he has been focused, informative. He has shown his emotions, making it clear he understands the human cost of the pandemic. While Trump uses his daily press conferences to spread conspiracy theories, Cuomo has alternated between delivering hard truths and offering a shoulder to cry on. Читать дальше...

Tara Reade, an aide to Joe Biden in 1993, says that while working for him, Biden sexually assaulted her. Joe Biden himself has said nothing; his campaign’s position is that this never happened. It’s a strategy that, reportedly, Biden’s people think is working out for them, believing voters’ support will not be swayed, nor will they find Reade’s allegations to be credible. (History considered, these are safe enough bets.) So the presumptive Democratic nominee for president maintains his strategic silence... Читать дальше...

The coronavirus pandemic is permanently closing beloved businesses across the country, as they struggle to survive this necessary period of social separation without a reliable means of generating income. There’s no telling what our neighborhoods will look like once we’re on the other side of this crisis. The businesses we recognize as part of our local landscape may never recover, from our local coffee shops to our favorite hair salons. And, apparently, our hospitals.

Two music titans—one old, one young—snuck out new songs in the past month. In headline form, the news is that Bob Dylan is writing songs about dying and Beyoncé is consolidating her credibility as a rapper. Upon longer listen, however, Dylan’s “Murder Most Foul” turns out to be a sprawling reminiscence of twentieth-century culture, with him and JFK in the middle. Meanwhile, Beyoncé appears as a guest artist on a remix of Megan Thee Stallion’s song “Savage” and reveals herself to be a fan of legendary Atlanta rap outfit Trillville. Читать дальше...

Remember restaurants? I do, but dimly: candlelight, cloth napkins, a basket of warm bread. Food delivered in courses, by a smiling stranger’s hand. Food prepared offstage, invisibly, materializing at the table as if by magic. I miss the whole rigmarole: the cold cocktail after a hard week’s work; the clamor of other people, other lives; the hand raised to scribble the air for the check. This scene has the watery quality of a distant recollection, belonging to a little fishbowl of a universe where we once swam snugly together—a universe that... Читать дальше...

Photos of the small “reopen America” protests, which have made the rounds on social media over the past week, have revealed a spectacle as cartoonish as it is macabre: a rogue’s gallery of right-wing groups coming together to share in the spirit of defiance and, presumably, tiny droplets of mucus and saliva. The protests (and their backing by deep-pocketed funders) invited many comparisons to the Tea Party movement of a decade ago. Unlike that movement, these small protests are likely to die out soon. Читать дальше...

According to the National Multifamily Housing Council, 11 percent of tenants across the United States didn’t pay rent in April—a 4 percent jump from the same time period the previous year. While a widely circulated version of the survey conducted at the start of the month found that nearly a third of all renters hadn’t paid by April 1, more made either full or partial payments as the weeks stretched on.

The news on Tuesday that Representative Justin Amash, the independent congressman from Michigan, had formed a committee to explore running for president as a Libertarian was, if nothing else, impeccably timed. Just as the presidential race enters that dead zone between becoming and being, as the incumbent threatens public health through his death-by-a-thousand-cuts briefings, and as his challenger sequesters himself from public scrutiny and personal controversies, a new player has swanned onto... Читать дальше...