Новости за 19.08.2020

You probably haven’t heard of this year’s most important election for American climate policy. If you have, you probably didn’t realize what it was about. The Texas Railroad Commission, which will replace one of its three commissioners this year, has nothing to do with railroads. The 130-year-old regulatory body once worked with other countries to control the world’s oil markets. While it retains legal jurisdiction today over the shale boom that has seen record amounts of oil gush from West Texas... Читать дальше...

Operation Underground Railroad (OUR), a hard-charging sex trafficking “rescue” group with conservative roots, doesn’t just accept donations to fund its multimillion-dollar mission; it also lets donors in on the action. OUR is fueled by a hybrid fundraising and branding model that has—through six years of YouTube videos, hidden cameras rolling—promised results. “These young victims are preparing to be sold for sex,” an early video claims. We see them in a living room as men with long guns and body armor flood in... Читать дальше...

Back in March, or many lifetimes ago, Congress passed the Cares Act, which included a provision to send out one-time direct payments to people making less than $99,000 a year. This week, a team of university economists with the National Bureau of Economic Research, or NBER, published a working paper on how they spent it. According to the NBER, 15 percent of the polled stimulus recipients said that they had spent, or planned to spend, the entirety of the funds; 33 percent responded that they put... Читать дальше...

If you logged onto Instagram in the days that immediately followed the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, you might have found the platform to be unrecognizable. Rather than the typical array of photos, you likely encountered an eruption of highly stylized content that didn’t and still doesn’t have a name but which we shall term “Instagraphics”—slideshow-style infographics with titles such as “Transformative Justice 101,” “How to Talk to Your Racist... Читать дальше...

At the start of 1873, Leo Tolstoy was fresh from the success of War and Peace and aware that the world was expecting an equally monumental work of art, something that would match that book (he refused to call it a novel) in historical scope and philosophic profundity. As such, he was consumed with writing a primer to teach Russian children the alphabet. He was sure it would be his legacy. “My proud hopes are these,” he wrote to a friend, “that two generations of all Russian children, from those of the tsar to those of the peasants... Читать дальше...

In a June primary, a photogenic Zoomer Republican named Madison Cawthorn beat a candidate endorsed by President Donald Trump to fill the North Carolina House seat formerly occupied by his chief of staff, Mark Meadows. In the breathless aftermath, CNN ran a story introducing the “political newcomer” as “a staunch conservative” who was “partially paralyzed in a 2014 car accident” and who “is an owner of a real estate investment company and a motivational speaker.”