The unemployment rate quite unexpectedly dropped to 13.3 percent in May, according to new data released this morning by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But not even the BLS really believes that.
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In the last week and a half, over 200 journalists have been maced, beaten with batons, teargassed, and arrested by police while covering anti-police protests. Many of these journalists clearly identified themselves as members of the media; in some instances, reporters appear to be targeted because they identify themselves. While some have been assaulted by protesters or vigilante groups, police are responsible for the overwhelming majority—over 80 percent—of attacks. The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker... Читать дальше...
From a distance, Le Magnifique looks almost like a scene from a cartoon. The hero of the statue, former Penguins center and captain Mario Lemieux, is skating one way with the puck dangling on the blade of his stick, every bit the menace in the open ice who earned the right to be called the best hockey player who ever lived. (In this town, Gretzky is always second. And after a few beers, an argument about what kind of numbers Sidney Crosby would put up during the stand-up goaltending era may also... Читать дальше...
During Ornette Coleman’s legendary 1959 run of shows at the Five Spot club in New York, there was a joke going around: “A waiter drops a trayload of drinks and a man says to his lady-friend, ‘Listen honey, Ornette’s playing our song.’” The punchline is a doozy, capturing the nightclub’s dankness (capacity: 75; ambience: urine), the hype around Coleman’s radical new sound, and the confrontational difficulty of his music.
Four months and several thousand news cycles ago, Harvard historian James Kloppenberg wrote in Commonweal about his former student Pete Buttigieg, then the rising star in the Democratic presidential primary field. A lifelong overachiever, the former South Bend mayor probably made writing “Reading Buttigieg” easy. At 38, he had already published a memoir, and two decades of academic papers, newspaper articles, and stump speeches were available to anyone interested in parsing his words to find out how he reached such heights so soon. Читать дальше...
The staggering excess of the New York Police Department, the largest municipal police force in the country, is hard to hide at this point. The NYPD commands 36,000 officers, a bloated budget of nearly $6 billion that the mayor all but refuses to touch, and a reserve of military-grade equipment collected in the name of anti-terrorism, including machine guns and armored vehicles. Since last Friday, the police have met ongoing protests in New York over police violence and the murder of Minneapolis... Читать дальше...
A few blocks from Capitol Hill, a woman raises a torch. She is a bronze replica of the Goddess of Democracy, a statue student protesters erected in Tiananmen Square in 1989 before being suppressed by the Chinese government. In the mid-1990s, her stoic visage was embraced by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, the organization that lobbied Congress for her creation. President George W. Bush spoke by the Goddess at her unveiling on June 12, 2007. “The sheer numbers of those killed in Communism’s name are staggering,” he said... Читать дальше...
President Donald Trump’s grip on the Republican Party is now so tight that it’s easy to forget the unease with which most of its establishment viewed him in 2015 and 2016. Some of that unease sprang from his racism, sexism, and authoritarianism, which Republican elites feared might imperil the GOP’s electoral chances. But much of it was ideological. Trump, after all, was not a movement conservative or a longtime Republican official. Prior to his reinvention as a presidential candidate, Trump had... Читать дальше...
