Новости за 19.11.2020

Millions of Americans who were reared on Law & Order and other courtroom dramas have a familiar, if slightly misleading, understanding of how criminal trials are supposed to work. The prosecution and the defense present their evidence and arguments to the court. A lawyer occasionally shouts something like “Objection!” and the judge drily responds with “Overruled!” or “Sustained!” The trial attorneys trade barrages of high-flown oratory. Then the jury deliberates and dramatically announces its verdict. Читать дальше...

A week and a half ago, a spell seemed to break: Donald Trump began profusely lying on live television, and several networks cut the feed. It was treated as a minor miracle, proof not only that the press had finally learned how to cover the president but also that, in the near future, the president would recede from view. A better world suddenly seemed possible, one in which Donald Trump did not own significant real estate in America’s psyche.

President Trump’s decision-making is defined by, if anything, incoherence. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that, in addition to golfing and undermining the election results, he is spending his last days in office making a hash of U.S. national security policy. He has replaced top leadership at the Pentagon with cronies; reportedly asked for options to strike Iran and its nuclear program; and now is planning to hurriedly withdraw thousands of soldiers from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia before he leaves office. Читать дальше...

What are we supposed to do with Barack Obama? He’s said at least twice over the course of the publicity tour for his new presidential memoir, A Promised Land, that his ideal reader is a young person.⁠ “Some 25-year-old kid,” he told The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg in an interview published this week, “who is starting to be curious about the world and wants to do something that has some meaning. I want them to read this and say, ‘Okay, this is not all rocket science; this is something I could contribute... Читать дальше...

The euphoria from Joe Biden’s long-count victory is like the last leaf clinging to a late-autumn tree. Before that stubborn final leaf withers on the branch, here is a hopeful—yet realistic—scenario for Biden’s first year or so in the White House.

I may not have written my King Lear during the pandemic, but I certainly have told a lot of stories. This is because I spend my days minding a six-year-old. Since we have nothing else to do but entertain each other, I tell her stories as I fix her lunch or as we walk around the neighborhood. Perhaps it is less that we tell ourselves stories in order to live than to pass the time, like the character-narrators in The Decameron who regale each other with tales every night while Florence is being ravaged by the Black Plague. Читать дальше...

We have so many numbers to describe how awful things are. Since February, the United States has conducted 170,315,721 Covid-19 tests, identified 11,603,800 cases, and tallied 250,300 deaths. In April, the unemployment rate hit a record 14.7 percent. Since the start of the pandemic, six million hungry Americans have enrolled in SNAP.