Новости за 04.09.2020

For all the effort expended over the past 15 years to bring punditry a step or two closer to the social sciences and into communion with statistics, the art of the political take is still, for the most part, the art of the quick draw. Our discourses and the technologies that now sustain them aren’t built to reward patience; as ever, the loudest and most important voices are those that can mold their predictions out of raw, uncomplicated intuition with speed and ease. Other, more careful and more... Читать дальше...

In the third edition of the college-level textbook Macroeconomics, the economists Andrew Abel and future Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke blithely assert that “since the earliest times almost all societies … have used money.” They say that money arises from the inefficiency of barter—of trading one good for another—because “finding someone who has the item you want and is willing to exchange that item for something you have is both difficult and time-consuming.”

For me, the year 1968 is symbolized by a single dark evening that haunts me to this day. I was at the campus paper, the Michigan Daily, when the bulletin came over the clattering AP newswire that Bobby Kennedy had been shot just moments after declaring victory in the California Democratic primary.

For decades, workers, millions of them—steelworkers and social workers, truck drivers and teachers—have been flooded with labor union phone calls and flyers every four years. But for many of them, when they retired or their factories closed or their unions shriveled due to attacks from Republicans like Scott Walker, the calls and door knocks stopped.

There are few symbols more potent in American life than the national flag. Colin Kaepernick helped fuel a movement by kneeling during a ceremony that honors it; President Donald Trump once proposed stripping the citizenship of anyone who desecrates it. But for all the reverence and affinity that comes with the Stars and Stripes—or perhaps because of it—state flags often fall far shorter in public esteem.

What do you do if you’re an oil company with too much oil? You find a place—any place—to put it. If people aren’t driving or flying as much, they’re certainly having things delivered. That’s where the oil comes in, delivering the raw materials to make the plastic enveloping all those Amazon and Postmates orders or to make bottles of water and various useless tchotchkes at home and abroad. 

In a recent interview on The Ringer’s 10 Questions podcast, Minnesota Vikings quarterback Kirk Cousins—a man who says he keeps a four-foot-tall pile of rocks outside his garage to remind him of his own mortality—explained that he’s not all that concerned about the pandemic and isn’t convinced wearing a mask really matters.

The event from this summer that best captured the chaotic energy of the GOP heading into the presidential election was not the Republican National Convention, with its high-decibel roster of party leaders, but the victory party for Laura Loomer at the airport Hilton in West Palm Beach, Florida. The far-right provocateur had won a six-way primary in the congressional district that contains Mar-a-Lago, and a host of her fellow agents of chaos, from Milo Yiannopoulos to Roger Stone, were there to celebrate. Читать дальше...