Новости за 22.10.2020

There’s been a bit of common wisdom circling among green groups in Washington. If Biden gets elected and Democrats take back the Senate—both, granted, big ifs—then any climate legislation they might hope to pass will have to squeeze by conservative Senate Democrats. Green groups worry about one in particular: West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin. 

There are two dominant political traditions in the West and the United States: that of liberalism, which dates back to seventeenth-century England, and that of republicanism, with its roots in ancient Athens and Rome. Adherents of the former tradition, which stresses individual liberty, strongly support the right to vote but vehemently oppose any claim that citizens have an obligation to participate in the electoral process. Supporters of the latter tradition, with its focus on the public interest (the res publica)... Читать дальше...

Over the past few weeks, when Diego Isaacs hasn’t been at his job in the produce department at the grocery store Harris Teeter in Charlotte, North Carolina, he’s been busy contacting as many people as he can about the upcoming election. Isaacs, an immigrant from Colombia who’s lived in the U.S. for 20 years, said he’s lost count of how many people he’s encouraged to vote this year, but has spoken to relatives and friends in Wisconsin, Florida, Georgia, and elsewhere who are, like himself, retail and service workers. Читать дальше...

Even if he’s handed a defeat in November, there probably won’t really be anything like a truly “post-Trump” politics for a long while: Donald Trump himself is likely to stick around one way or another and so, too, obviously, will the Republican voters who’ve already come to see him as their Reagan. Those who believe him to be the silent avenger of trafficked children will be with us for some time as well. With fully half of the Republican Party subscribing to the belief that “top Democrats are... Читать дальше...

No one knows what to do about the crisis in local news. Recent research from Pew Research Center includes a host of depressing statistics: More than 50 percent of all newsroom jobs have been lost since 2009. One in five media workers lives in New York or Los Angeles. One in four large newspapers has laid off employees since 2017. This year has, once again, been a nightmare for the media industry, with job losses in the thousands amid a raging pandemic. 

Speaking with The Washington Post for a cringe-inducing piece about the influx of people moving to Montana, Candace Carr Strauss, the CEO of the Big Sky Chamber of Commerce, offered a potential selling point: “We are 98 percent Caucasian,” she told the paper. “We haven’t, thankfully, seen a lot of the unrest other places have seen.”

How do you solve a problem like Martin Amis? Like Maria from The Sound of Music, he’s a clown to his detractors and a musician to his fans—the music of the well-tuned sentence, that is, and the clownery of the literary egomaniac. I’ve already checked to see whether any other reviewers have made this comparison before, because if there’s one thing Martin Amis hates, it’s a cliché. He titled his 2001 essay collection The War Against Cliché (“all writing is a campaign against cliché. Not just clichés... Читать дальше...

The Marathon County Historical Society sits in an old church building in Wausau, just up the Wisconsin River from the town of Mosinee. The lobby is large, a gift shop with books and paraphernalia in one area and temporary exhibitions in another. “Milking Time: The Evolution of the Dairy Industry in Marathon County” was on display on the day of my visit, in June 2019. I had called ahead, and a librarian was waiting for me. He settled me into the reading room and brought out a wide and shallow box... Читать дальше...