Новости за 20.05.2020

At a public appearance in Pennsylvania last week, President Donald Trump offered some fresh insight into how he views coronavirus testing. The country is still struggling to test for the virus at scale, which in turn is hampering our ability to return to anything resembling normal life before the pandemic. To the president, however, the testing itself is the problem. “When you test, you have a case,” Trump said. “When you test, you find something is wrong with people. If we didn’t do any testing... Читать дальше...

In the United States, we measure weight in pounds, distance in miles, and catastrophic losses in 9/11s. At press time, Covid-19 had claimed 88,754 victims in the U.S., a number that will surely be greater by the time you read this sentence. By our all-American metric, that’s nearly thirty 9/11s. We have, by far, the greatest number of Covid fatalities in the world. As we are so fond of chanting at the sporting events we won’t be attending en masse again before 2022: We’re number one!

Since the pandemic began, the flow of movie industry publicity—flashy premieres, packed-out festivals, drip-fed interview “exclusives”—has ground to a halt. There are no summer blockbusters, no lines around the block. All these still waters, however, can let smaller pictures float to the top.

On Sunday, The New York Times ran a story on the Democratic Party’s surging interest in big ideas to revive the economy in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Democrats, The Times’ Alexander Burns wrote, now hope to come to Washington in January ready to pass not only new coronavirus relief legislation, but climate and infrastructure bills “far larger than they previously envisioned,” as well as major new health care and worker protection bills. “Discussions are also underway,” he added, “about... Читать дальше...

Will the United States get a baseball season this year? Do we deserve one? What is at stake—economically, emotionally, mortally—in the effort to start up sports again? On Episode 8 of The Politics of Everything, hosts Laura Marsh and Alex Pareene talk to David Roth, a former editor of Deadspin and a frequent contributor to The New Republic, about the challenges and questionable wisdom of reopening sports in a country still battling a pandemic.

For the late, great novelist Robert Stone, modern American life could only be understood as a state of endless war. Though his combat experience was brief—he was an 18-year-old radioman on a U.S. ship in Port Said when the French air force attacked Egypt in 1956—he was drawn to both military and ideological battle zones while researching his novels. His visits to El Salvador shaped the dense, hallucinatory A Flag for Sunrise (1981). His trips to Israel and Gaza informed his longest and even more... Читать дальше...

Before cancer, I was a country.

Now—, I’m a fucking country

      Song: job gone, house gone,

            Wife diagnosed w/ Post-Traumatic Stress—


      I’m missing more organs

                          Than a looted church.
            Even my dog’s been repossessed!

            Know what I got left?

      2 years. The lifespan

            Of an average rat. My wife’s therapist

      Tells me I can use this time to find

                          Out who I really am. Читать дальше...

In his latest column in The New York Times, Ben Smith has made a bold allegation against perhaps the most famous investigative journalist in America. Ronan Farrow’s reporting on sexual violence and related abuses of power, he writes, has sometimes failed to “follow the typical journalistic imperatives of corroboration and rigorous disclosure.” Smith raises questions about whether Farrow did the necessary legwork—“the painstaking task of tracking down friends and neighbors a traumatized victim may have confided in soon after the assault... Читать дальше...