Новости за 15.05.2020

Before picking up her new novel, All Adults Here, I did not think that Emma Straub was for me. A Vogue profile in 2016 described meeting up with the writer “in a tiny café” in Cobble Hill—the most expensive neighborhood in Brooklyn—“near where she and her husband recently bought a home.” Add the fact that Straub has written several novels about rich New Yorkers and owns a bookstore called Books Are Magic, also in Cobble Hill, and it was difficult to tell where Emma Straub ended and her books began. Читать дальше...

Trump administration villains flit in and out of the limelight depending on what particular disaster is most visibly unfolding at any moment. Sometimes these are members of his cabinet, receiving more coverage because of their corruption or because they’re suddenly in charge of baby jails; many fade away because they end up resigning, once Trump gets sick of the bad press, or feels they’re insufficiently loyal. Others stick around permanently, like Stephen Miller, absorbing (or perhaps feeding off of) wave after wave of criticism. Читать дальше...

At some point during the pandemic (what is time anymore, anyway?), Sweden—a high-tax, welfare-loving country where citizens generally seem to like and listen to their government—found a surprising libertarian fan base in the United States. To marshal support for reopening the economy in the U.S., conservatives started touting Sweden’s coronavirus response, which has largely foregone the type of lockdown measures practiced in other countries and instead relies on people to practice social distancing measures on their own. Читать дальше...

This year’s Atlantic hurricane season could be one of the most active on record, according to models from Pennsylvania State University’s Earth System Science Center. Hurricane season officially begins on June 1 but has been creeping earlier in recent years: Warm waters off the Florida coast this weekend could produce the season’s first tropical system ahead of schedule. And all while the country is still dealing with a global pandemic.

Though better known for partitioning Poland and touring Potemkin villages, Catherine the Great was also an accomplished writer, and not just of political tracts. She wrote fairy tales for her grandchildren, libretti for nine operas, and a book of proverbs, not to mention her memoirs (which took up three volumes). Catherine was particularly accomplished, however, as a writer of comedies: She wrote 14 in all, including an entire trilogy of plays condemning the rise of the Masons in Russia, two of... Читать дальше...

In May 1987, Justice Thurgood Marshall delivered a speech at the annual seminar of the San Francisco Patent and Trademark Association. That year marked the two-hundredth anniversary of the Constitution’s drafting in Philadelphia, and celebrations were planned nationwide under the guidance of former Chief Justice Warren Burger, who had resigned from the court a year earlier to orchestrate the proceedings. But not everyone saw reason for patriotic rejoicing. As he did so often during his final years on the court, Marshall dissented. Читать дальше...

For the majority of us, consuming art is a destination appointment. Museums and galleries put on physical demonstrations of an artist’s importance, arduously assembling exhibitions of figures like Hilma af Klint or Agnes Martin, so that we noncollectors can experience the auratic objects as they are meant to be, in person. The wavering gridded lines of a Martin canvas or Klint’s color-saturated abstractions are most striking directly in front of you. There’s a sense of devastation in seeing galleries closed since mid-March... Читать дальше...

What is “Obamagate” anyway? No one seems to really know, least of all Donald Trump, even though he has tweeted about it dozens of times over the last week. Asked by The Washington Post’s Philip Rucker on Monday what crimes he was accusing Barack Obama of committing, Trump kept it vague: “You know what the crime is. The crime is very obvious to everybody.”