Новости за 19.05.2020

With more than 30 million people in the United States currently out of a job, it’s not terribly difficult to imagine not working. But the coronavirus-related economic shocks have lately made it hard to envision exiting the workforce with much dignity. Even retirement, which was once taken for granted as the sure (if distant) means by which we’d all seamlessly transition from our years of labor to our years of rest, now seems like a shakier promise than ever before with the economy in ruins. At the end of April... Читать дальше...

It’s been a rough spring for America’s long-shrinking coal industry. The United States is down to just 43,800 coal jobs, and as the coronavirus shutdowns continue to eat into energy demand, coal consumption is predicted to drop 23 percent through 2020. For the first time ever, the U.S. Energy Information Agency projects the U.S. will get more of its electricity from renewable sources than coal this year; experts now predict that the coal industry may never recover. While that’s good news for the atmosphere... Читать дальше...

Many of our political forebears pined for more polarization. For much of the last century, America’s two parties were so ideologically diverse that social scientists, politicians, and pundits fretted about the incoherence of their identities and the murky stakes of any given election. There were liberal Republicans—figures like New York’s Jacob Javits and Nelson Rockefeller—as supportive of civil rights and large government programs as some of their colleagues on the left wing of the Democratic Party. Читать дальше...

To think about Hillary Clinton is to enter a maze of counterfactuals. The smaller what-ifs and the bigger, more fundamental ones chain together in infinite combinations. There is the flurry of 2016 election questions: What if she had seen off competition from Bernie Sanders earlier in the Democratic primary? What if she’d been spared more investigation into her emails in October? What if she had campaigned harder in Michigan and Wisconsin? Then there are more personal, existential questions: What if she’d run for office earlier in life... Читать дальше...

“I live on a relatively grand scale, because that’s the way fashion is,” André Leon Talley wrote in his 2003 memoir, A.L.T. “By its very nature, it is larger than life. It’s fickle, it’s flamboyant, and it’s fabulous.”