Новости за 01.05.2020

Sports usually inject cathartic experiences into their supporters at regular intervals, and the current shortage can’t be good for fans’ health. As an interim measure, I recommend digging into the video archive of some less celebrated sport—the wallflowers to soccer or basketball’s prom queens, if you will—and following the rabbit hole to its end. My favorite stopgap-sport has been the unfashionable ballet of the green baize, also known as snooker.

On Monday, the Democratic contingent of the New York State Board of Elections decided to scuttle its own presidential primary out of concern, it insisted, for voters who might otherwise be exposed to the coronavirus at the polls. It was a mystifying explanation. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo had, by this time, already promised mail-in absentee ballots for all voters, and state and local primaries were still set to proceed as usual. The real objective of canceling the presidential primary, it would seem... Читать дальше...

On August 6, 1969, the actress Sharon Tate was found dead in her home on Cielo Drive, Los Angeles, eight months pregnant and so bloodied that her patterned underwear appeared red to the investigating officers. She’d been stabbed 16 times. In 2019, at the bidding of the writer, director, and foot-fetishist Quentin Tarantino, history rewound itself and replayed the scene differently, the bloody full stop at the end of Hollywood’s decade of free love reworked into a more promising ellipsis. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood... Читать дальше...

The empty refrain around “heroes” in “essential” jobs—the people expected to continue to show up to work, from health care to grocery retail and sanitation, while everyone else shelters in place—has by now become familiar. But increasingly so has its counter: One thing I’ve heard over and over since the coronavirus lockdown first started has been, They say I’m an essential worker, but they don’t treat me like one. 

It is the very beginning of May. The Democratic National Convention is scheduled for August. The general election is in November. Dozens of states and territories have not yet held their primary elections. And Joe Biden is still the presumptive Democratic nominee for the presidency, not the nominee.

Vivian Gornick specializes in personal narrative. Sometimes this means artful memoir: Her most admired book is 1987’s Fierce Attachments, about her relationship with her mother, and she sat for The Paris Review’s second-ever “Art of Memoir” interview in 2014. But over the course of her long career—she’s now 84—Gornick has applied her personal method to reportage, literary criticism, biography, and even oral history. In warm, intimate prose, she has addressed questions of selfhood, writing, and politics from many angles... Читать дальше...

The best way to fix an economy devastated by a pandemic, the president and other conservatives insisted from the start, was simply to send workers back into the fray. And now, a little more than a month after the first statewide stay-at-home order was issued in California—with more than one million reported coronavirus cases in the United States and a death toll of over 60,000—several governors have decided they’ve waited long enough. Last week, Governor Brian Kemp opened restaurants, gyms, and hair salons in Georgia; early this week... Читать дальше...

“Climate change,” Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell told the Joint Economic Committee last November, “is an important issue but not principally for the Fed. We’re not going to be the ones to decide society’s response. That is for elected officials, not us.” As of yesterday, however, it’s clearer than ever that the Federal Reserve is very much in the business of deciding how society navigates a warming world.

In close up, on television, at a glance, with the volume down, Donald Trump can from time to time look like a president. That effect becomes less convincing the more you pay attention, though. Even under professional lighting, Trump reliably looks like a photographic negative of himself; on his worse and wetter days he has the tone and texture of those lacquered roast ducks that hang from hooks in Chinatown restaurant windows. The passing presidentiality of the man dissipates utterly in longer shots... Читать дальше...

When the Department of Homeland Security released its criteria for “Essential Critical Infrastructure Workers” in March, it included a dizzying array of jobs across a host of industries: the flight attendants who wash their hands 20 times in two hours as they check seat belts and distribute drinks; the sanitation workers, still making their rounds through infected cities; and everyone along the food supply chain, from immigrant meatpackers to the grocery store workers, line cooks, and delivery drivers we encounter every day. Читать дальше...