Новости за 25.08.2020

In 1901, Italian doctor Francesco Cenci discovered that blood infusions from recovered measles patients could keep other people from getting the illness. A few years later, he discovered that the same treatment helped a critically ill child to recover faster. Similar cases were reported with diptheria, and the treatment was then used in the 1918-19 flu pandemic. Scientists would eventually discover that plasma, the yellowish, watery part of the blood in which red blood cells are suspended, contains antibodies to fight off infection. Читать дальше...

A teenage boy fidgets on a couch, his eyes darting around behind curtains of Ashton Kutcher hair. One of the 1,000 young subjects of the documentary Boys State, this boy, Robert, has just given a halting speech to an audience of teenagers in Austin, Texas, about something he doesn’t believe in. He personally supports abortion rights, he explains to the interviewer, but thinks his view isn’t the norm. “So I changed my view,” he says. “That’s politics. I think.”

The opening night of the Republican National Convention was a miserable pageant that tried in vain to insist that working people’s interests were at home in the party of big business and minoritarian rule. Around 25 million unemployed workers and their families are facing extreme hardship during a still-active pandemic and a catastrophic recession that economists now project will last for many more years, but the only nod to the crisis came when Trump convened a handful of frontline workers—a nurse... Читать дальше...

The overnight fall of Jerry Falwell Jr. from high evangelical grace feels in many ways like a Trump-era gloss on the fabled preacher sex scandals that have dogged our self-appointed Protestant moralists throughout the modern era. Instead of absconding with a church secretary like Jim Bakker or patronizing sex workers like Jimmy Swaggart, Falwell Jr. allegedly upped the scandal ante by arranging a threesome with his wife, Becki, and a pool boy. And instead of adjourning directly into the fleshpots of temptation, Falwell Jr. Читать дальше...

Monday was the first day of the Republican Party’s national convention to renominate President Donald Trump, and it dwelled on little else. The quadrennial conventions are typically used by the parties to lay out a governing vision and a policy platform, to elevate rising stars and honor party elders, and to make a direct case to voters who tune in. But if the first night of four to come is any guide, this year’s convention will be molded around a cult of personality. Speaker after speaker at... Читать дальше...

A quarter of the way through Héctor Tobar’s novel, his young, blond protagonist stands on the edge of National Highway Number 9 in Chile, thumb pointed south in hopes of hitching a ride. Drivers speed past, giving him puzzled looks, and only when a taxi stops does Joe Sanderson find out that there is nothing south of Punta Arenas. “This is the last town, the last place in Chile where people live,” the driver says. Nevertheless, the man agrees to take him to the end of the road, site of an old colonial fort and a “very, very cold” place. Читать дальше...

On September 20, 2017, Hurricane Maria, which had already devastated the island of Dominica, hit Puerto Rico as a Category 4 hurricane with winds reaching 155 miles per hour. The island had seen other storms—including Hurricane Irma weeks earlier. But Maria wiped out not just homes and buildings but also the island’s power and communications grid. Between the grid damage and a patchy governmental response, fatalities continued to accumulate long after the winds themselves had faded.

Monday was the first day of the Republican Party’s national convention to renominate President Donald Trump, and it dwelled on little else. The quadrennial conventions are typically used by the parties to lay out a governing vision and a policy platform, to elevate rising stars and honor party elders, and to make a direct case to voters who tune in. But if the first night of four to come is any guide, this year’s convention will be molded around a cult of personality. Speaker after speaker at... Читать дальше...

Speaking to Poets & Writers in the fall of 2017, Salman Rushdie admitted that he saw a silver lining in Donald Trump’s election. “It’s an awful thing to say,” he said, “that this thing that is very bad for America is very good for the novel.”

David Bossie knew he’d fucked up as the word started to emerge from his mouth. The 2016 Trump campaign veteran, now representing Maryland in the Republican National Convention’s roll call of delegate votes Monday morning, was supposed to say that the Civil War border state had been a vital conduit for runaway slaves and a home to abolitionists Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. That wasn’t what came out.

Six years before Jacob Blake was shot and critically injured by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the city made national headlines for a case that became the impetus for groundbreaking reforms concerning the use of deadly force. “Could it help provide a new faith in the justice system?” The New York Times asked at the time. Those reforms, however, were narrowly focused on making changes to how law enforcement investigates its own, the kind of reform strategy that once may have seemed like enough. On Sunday... Читать дальше...