Новости за 25.06.2020

As the protest movement responding to the police killing of George Floyd has erupted across the country in recent weeks, my now habitual encounters with police clad in full riot gear in my usually calm Brooklyn neighborhood has been a new and disconcerting experience. In certain moments, while listening to close-flying helicopters and begrudgingly following curfew mandates, as journalists are roughly arrested and beat up by police, I’ve found myself responding to the surreal scenes with some familiar cliches. Читать дальше...

When the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas announced it had seized another advertising website used by sex workers, QAnon followers loaded its Twitter feed down with patriotic congratulations and a predictable helping of conspiracy theories. (As one read: “Has anyone else been noticing all of the Human traffickers and Pedos getting busted in the last couple of weeks, while the news is showing us footage people throwing bricks thru windows and burning cop cars?”)

It is a remarkable thing that in our sharply divided political environment, John Bolton has emerged as a rare unifying figure: Almost no one approves of him. Bolton’s saga and that of his book, The Room Where It Happened, has now churned through several news cycles. The notoriously hawkish Bolton served as Trump’s national security adviser for approximately 18 months, from April 2018 to September 2019. Appalled by what he witnessed, he shaped his recollections into something with many of the same qualities as a book. Читать дальше...

Last August, Washington Post columnist Theresa Vargas wrote about a third-party poll on public perception of the name and mascot of the Washington NFL team. I won’t print it here because it’s a slur. Despite the fact that the company that conducted the poll did not provide methodology and—like the paper’s own 2016 poll on the subject—allowed respondents to self-identify as Native American, Vargas uncritically published its claim that “68 percent of the respondents were not offended by the team’s... Читать дальше...

Earlier this year, the Supreme Court took an adventurous leap into the twentieth century. The coronavirus pandemic had made it impossible for the justices to safely hold their planned oral arguments in person in March and April. Instead, the court heard those arguments by conference call and made the live audio available to the public. For the first time in the nation’s history, Americans could listen in on the action as the justices and the opposing sides deliberated over cases in real time without having to travel to Washington... Читать дальше...

The long debate around voting rights in Washington, D.C., which has been renewed this week ahead of Friday’s House vote on statehood for the capital, didn’t actually begin in that city. It predates the existence of Washington, in fact.