On the night of May 30, 1964, the Alabama-born singer Odetta watched a thunderstorm explode over Brussels from her room at the Amigo hotel. She was on her first European tour, promoting her twelfth studio album. From the distance of half a century, her tour guitarist Peter Childs remembers how “radiant” Odetta looked as the lightning illuminated her face, rain pummeling the cobblestones below.
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You might say that, in 1788, the weather conspired against France’s feudal system of property ownership. Drought in the spring, hail in the summer, and a cruel winter crushed the agrarian economy. By the spring of 1789, the country was in turmoil. Displaced, unemployed workers “choked the roads and threatened reprisals against householders who refused to give them shelter or a crust of bread,” historian Georges Lefebvre has written. This was the prelude to the Great Fear, a legendary wave of riots that spread across the country in July... Читать дальше...
In a rare public statement on Saturday, former President George W. Bush urged Americans to come together in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. “Let us remember how small our differences are in the face of this shared threat,” he said in a brief video. “In the final analysis, we are not partisan combatants. We are human beings, equally vulnerable and equally wonderful in the sight of God. We rise or fall together and we are determined to rise.” This was met with predictable responses: praise for his statesmanship from the mainstream press... Читать дальше...
“But aren’t women really worse male chauvinists than men, I mean, most of them?” Warren Beatty asks the poet and director Sandra Hochman, a few minutes into her brilliant, anarchic docu-fantasia about the 1972 Democratic convention, Year of the Woman. Leaning down toward her, his frown a flirtatious parody of respectful curiosity, he insists: “Aren’t they more destructive to the women’s movement, basically, than men are…?” He isn’t actually talking about the conservative activist and author Phyllis Schlafly... Читать дальше...
As any American who’s passed a gas station in the past two months knows, global oil markets are melting down. Even before coronavirus lockdowns led billions of people to halt their daily commutes, cratering demand for gasoline, Saudi Arabia and Russia had increased production of crude oil, the main component in refined fuels, in an attempt to drive each other out of business. Oil prices plummeted. For a brief period last month, the price of a barrel of West Texas Intermediate Crude dropped 300 percent... Читать дальше...
Planet of the Humans—the Michael Moore–backed documentary about the alleged folly of green energy—is a mess. Since its April 21 release, numerous expert critics have detailed the film’s use of outdated and cherry-picked information. The climate movement and clean energy sector that director Jeff Gibbs and producer-protagonist Ozzie Zehner criticize in the film, outraged environmentalists have pointed out, doesn’t remotely resemble today’s reality.
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