Новости за 10.06.2020

Over two weeks after the protests against the killing of George Floyd began, America remains firmly in the year 2020. 1968, with its sustained chaos and broad white backlash, is still a distant memory and, one hopes, a less potent allusion for our times. But many are still determined to believe the demonstrations we’ve seen will take a toll on the Democratic Party and the American left. Disdain for the protests on the right was carried into this week by National Review’s Kyle Smith on Monday.... Читать дальше...

For years, conservative and centrist columnists have been depicting college campuses as if they were the settings of horror movies. A virus is incubating and spreading. Every year, more and more people are infected with wokeness. The stakes might be small—a misconstrued story about Chinese food and Oberlin College is frequently cited—but, these writers argued, something much scarier is afoot. Every year, more snowflakes enter the real world, spreading cancel culture through every strata of society. Читать дальше...

One can only describe what unfolded at The New York Times last week as an outright shitshow. Following the publication of an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton that advocated for military crackdowns in cities across America amid a nationwide wave of anti–police brutality protests, dozens of Times staffers flouted their publication’s strict social media policy, tweeting variations on the message, “Running this puts Black @nytimes staff in danger.” While then–Times editorial page editor James Bennet defended... Читать дальше...

A city is a big thing—big enough that, typically, we must manage it in chunks: as a string of favorite neighborhoods, a well-worn subway line, a local park. These personalized territories are small and bordered by habit, but in the dual emergency of a pandemic and a nationwide uprising against racist police violence, they have been transcended by something bigger. Across America, cities are being fiercely contested and remade as collective space. They appear now in the birds-eye perspective, as... Читать дальше...

The ongoing protests against racist police violence, which have taken place in every state in the United States and are now in their third week, have offered endless illuminations of the political and moral urgency of the moment and the conditions that preceded it. Long-standing racial and economic inequalities—that allowed hospitals, education, and other community resources to starve while police budgets expanded—and the inadequate and often incoherent government response to the pandemic—which... Читать дальше...

In a dreary news conference broadcast live from Stockholm this morning, Swedish chief prosecutor Krister Petterson named the man he thinks assassinated Prime Minister Olof Palme in 1986: Stig Engström. Dubbed “the Skandia Man” in the press because he worked at the Skandia insurance firm’s office near the murder scene at the time, Engström died by suicide in 2000.

Mitch McConnell believes in one political god: campaign cash. Since he got his start in Kentucky politics in the 1970s, masquerading as a moderate Republican, he has been the Gordon Gekko of politics. After he was elected to the Senate in 1984, no one spent more time ingratiating himself with top GOP donors. As Alec MacGillis recounts in his biography, The Cynic, McConnell even met his wealthy wife, Elaine Chao, the daughter of a shipping magnate, while fundraising in 1987. By the late 1990s,... Читать дальше...

In 1962, at a girl’s boarding school in rural Tanganyika (present-day Tanzania), three students started laughing. When the teachers tried to get them to stop, the girls became violent. One became so overtaken with laughter that she started undressing; she was hospitalized for three days and treated with valium. Soon, almost the entire school began to break out in these episodes of uncontrollable laughter, fits that left them unable to attend class for weeks. The situation became so unworkable... Читать дальше...

This past Saturday marked the largest nationwide demonstrations against American police since George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis on Memorial Day. When hundreds of thousands marched across the world in what most newspapers praised as “peaceful” protests, it concluded a tense week of demonstrations across the country that often featured property destruction on one side and police batons, tear gas, rubber bullets, and mandatory curfews on the other. Many commentators strained to appear sympathetic... Читать дальше...

Amy Watson, a preschool teacher in Portland, Oregon, had been fighting a low-grade fever for almost a month when doctors started talking to her about cancer.

Jeff Bezos is having a good pandemic. Amazon, the company he started in 1994, has not only resisted the economic downturn, it has thrived: Its stock price sits hundreds of points higher than it did in March, and Bezos’s own net worth, which was depleted by his recent divorce—the most expensive in history—has ballooned by $32 billion since the start of the year. Over the last decade, he has purchased The Washington Post, invested in space exploration, and gotten a glow up. (Once the prototypical nerd—boxy khakis... Читать дальше...