Новости за 22.05.2020

When most people think about the significance of the 2018 midterms, they think about the House of Representatives. Democrats, propelled by voter antipathy toward President Donald Trump, retook the chamber for the first time in eight years. The breakthrough ended two years of complete Republican control of the federal government. It also paved the way for Trump’s eventual impeachment in the Ukraine scandal last fall.

The law is written in words, and words are not the same thing as people. In the 1973 landmark lawsuit Roe v. Wade, for example, the plaintiff “Jane Roe” was not the same person as Norma McCorvey. The latter was a poor young woman, 21 years old and long inured to abuse, seeking an end to her third pregnancy when attorneys Linda Coffee and Sarah Weddington found her, in Texas, in 1969. Vulnerable, scared, and rebuffed by Texan doctors, Norma was the perfect plaintiff.

Of the neologisms coined by early nuclear strategists to plan for World War III, “overkill” is the great crossover success. As a metaphor, it ranges as far from its original context as a word can—“The pony on her birthday was overkill”—but from common usage a child can intuit its first meaning as applied in nuclear war-fighting: When you can obliterate a city with 10 megatons, it’s excessive to use 20 or 200 megatons. As the firepower of Cold War arsenals began to exceed that required to destroy... Читать дальше...

“We will not wake up after the lockdown in a new world,” the author Michel Houellebecq recently and gloomily predicted. “It will be the same, just a bit worse.” But if the staggering death rate in the United States and the ongoing stumbles of the federal and state governments when it comes to helping people weather the economic collapse are any indication, “just a bit worse” might not even encompass the extent of the damage to come.

I was late filing this article. While I was writing it, my three-year-old son refused to nap. When I interviewed people, he interrupted to tell them stories. He climbed on my lap as I typed and twice accidentally smacked me in the face with his plastic dinosaur. He hit a keyboard shortcut and pulled up my photo library, and then he somehow changed my font to Calibri.

Before this pandemic hit, life was still difficult. I had to work all the time to meet my debt and keep on paying for my home and everything. I was doing house cleaning during the week, and I worked as an administrator in a carpentry company on the weekends. I would do all kinds of odd jobs to complement whatever I needed to pay my rent.