Новости за 25.11.2020

The workplace panopticon is coming home. The societal shift to work from home and Zoom-led education has been a boon for makers of digital surveillance software. Numerous apps now sell themselves as proctoring tools that track student eye movements, while similar products ensure that workers aren’t playing games when they should be laboring in a spreadsheet. These “productivity tools”—with Orwellian names like DeskTime, SPYERA, Time Doctor, and Hubstaff—have exploded in sales amid the pandemic... Читать дальше...

America’s biggest, most powerful book publisher is about to get even bigger and more powerful. On Wednesday, a number of outlets reported that Penguin Random House had reached an agreement with ViacomCBS to purchase Simon & Schuster, the nation’s third-largest publisher, for $2 billion. The resulting conglomerate would publish at least a third of all books sold in the United States, and transform Penguin Random House, already a superpower, into an industry-dominating behemoth, with potentially serious consequences for authors... Читать дальше...

It is an underrated source of dysfunction in our politics that too many people believe our system of government makes any sense at all. Even when we export democracy abroad (as in Japan after World War II), we seldom encourage another country to adopt a constitutional model with a strong executive and an independently elected, bicameral national legislature. The reason for that, as the wiser political scientists will tell you, is that the system is inherently unstable and prone to collapse.

The debate over how to characterize what the country’s been put through over the past three weeks will carry on for the rest of our lives. And Donald Trump’s waddle through the stages of grief is sure to last through January. But his election gambit is functionally over. Results have been certified in Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania; the General Services Administration has formally recognized Joe Biden as president-elect; and the transition team finally has a shiny, new dot-gov email address that means more... Читать дальше...

Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election by a margin that, though wider than originally feared, was narrower than feels comfortable in a country on whose stability the world depends. One reason is the rise of the American gerontocracy.

“Our long nightmare will soon be over” is a phrase that one wouldn’t have been shocked to hear issued from the lips of liberal pundits or Joe Biden supporters as it slowly became apparent, in the days following the election, that the Trump presidency’s days were numbered. It was perhaps more surprising to learn that those same words were uttered by an unnamed official from the Department of Homeland Security in a BuzzFeed article published on November 7, in the last paragraph of a piece that interviewed... Читать дальше...

Three-quarters of the way into Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson describes the humiliation suffered by Black passengers on a steamship in the American South before the Civil War. All women, and all free during slavery’s reign, they confounded the captain, who had to decide how to integrate them into the dining protocols aboard. The ship, a floating microcosm of antebellum society, followed social codes determined by the era’s prevailing hierarchies of class as well as race. Читать дальше...

Who would have thought, a year ago, that at Thanksgiving 2020 the nation would be waiting with bated breath for pharmaceutical press releases? But as companies have released increasingly positive news about their vaccine trials, public interest in these interim results has soared. So have financial markets, hoping for an end to the pandemic.

Past a certain point east, Sunrise Highway is a quiet drive in November. Strip malls, a hollowed-out Chuck E. Cheese, and a dwindling number of other cars making the commute back to the farthest reaches of Long Island are the only things to keep you company on the drive out. If you’re coming from the city, and you’re lucky with traffic, it’s about two hours until you finally see it—the 61-foot-tall reminder, standing at the gateway to the McMansion-filled Hamptons, that you are in fact on Native land. Читать дальше...

Last week, Tucker Carlson did something remarkable: He acknowledged, albeit with no small number of caveats, that the Trump campaign had provided zero evidence to support its most recent round of baseless allegations that millions of votes had been switched in the 2020 election. Sidney Powell, the conspiracy theorist who was then serving on the Trump campaign’s legal team and hoping that Carlson would accept the recent contraptions of her fevered imagination as real news, had run afoul of the Fox News host... Читать дальше...