Новости за 18.09.2020

The Jared Kushner Phenomenon—how this unpleasant and widely loathed man, the perpetual son, became so important to the Trump administration—would be very interesting if it weren’t so deadly. It would be funny, too, that he is so massively incompetent, so out of his depth that you can barely see the top of his unconvincing comb-over, if he weren’t one of the principal authors of the current pandemic crisis. He is the least effective psychopath in American history, managing to be both ruthlessly... Читать дальше...

I left a job as a secretary at a local Pasadena church in January in order to start working independently as an interpretive translator. My timing wasn’t the greatest. By March, everything shut down. The few clients that I had, because they were schools and churches, closed down right away. I was scheduled to take the judicial interpreter test on March 19, a job with a salary double what I was making as a church secretary, but that got canceled, too. That’s when I knew I was in trouble—I wasn’t going to be able to make my March rent. Читать дальше...

Everyone hates millennials. To Baby Boomers, millennials are lazy, entitled, spoiled, narcissistic, simultaneously stuck in our parents’ basements and wielding enough economic clout to “kill” entire industries—from diamonds, paper napkins, and bar soap to department stores, golf, and Applebee’s. To Generation Z, millennials are wine-guzzling solipsists, obsessed with “’90s culture,” constantly complaining about the difficulties of “adulting,” endlessly striving for a stability that will never materialize. Читать дальше...

We live in an anxious society almost pathologically obsessed with leadership. Self-help books package its secrets for frustrated middle managers. Websites offer listicles of tips for how to make leaders of your children. (“Teach them to be winners,” suggests Inc.com. “Surround them with leaders,” offers Lifehack.org, threateningly.) Universities offer undergraduate majors in the subject. And every presidential campaign inspires countless stories about men and women making “bold choices” and taking... Читать дальше...

Book publishers have had a chaotic year. There have been protests and walkouts over Woody Allen’s memoir and the industry’s lack of diversity—unprecedented activism in an industry with little history of mobilization. One Big Five publisher, Simon & Schuster, is up for sale; two have new CEOs. And then there is the ongoing fallout from Covid-19, which shuttered bookstores across the country.

Workdays in fiction aren’t like real workdays at all. Office novels will never adequately capture the deadening experience of exchanging your time for money, of watching your hours, like elastic bands, stretch out to the snapping point. They tend to lack the minute experiences that lend offices their particular flavor: hundreds of closed-lip smiles, hundreds of emails, hundreds of bland yogurts eaten at bland desks. Yet the workdays in Vigdis Hjorth’s novel, Long Live the Post Horn!, ring false for another reason altogether... Читать дальше...

Five years ago this week, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign hit a snag. The second Republican primary debate had not gone well, and he was taking so much flak for failing to correct an Islamophobic supporter at a rally in New Hampshire that he canceled an event in South Carolina scheduled for the next day. In just 72 hours, he seemed to go from dominant front-runner to an amateur making rookie mistakes. Heading to Iowa on September 19 for a meeting of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, where... Читать дальше...