Новости за 03.12.2020

On Monday, airborne sheep surveyors in San Juan County, Utah, observed a three-sided, 11-foot-tall reflective metal object nestled in the orange rock. After the Bureau of Land Management issued an official press release on the pillar, complete with alien jokes, the objet became affectionately known on social media as “the monolith.” This is a misnomer, since the -lith part of monolith means stone—this thing is metal. It may in actuality be three sheets of aluminum riveted together to resemble a massive unsegmented Toblerone. Читать дальше...

A life lived indoors has long been viewed as the height of economic attainment: Elites relax in palatial compounds while couriers fetch packages and convey news of the dangerous world beyond the gates. Even the restaurant is a relatively recent invention, a stop for harried travelers looking for a quick bite before it became a place people would go to voluntarily. Long before the pandemic closed down many public spaces, people in developed countries already spent 90 percent of their time indoors; they are... Читать дальше...

On May 30, in the midst of a world-threatening pandemic and a surge of protests for racial justice, President Donald Trump arranged a photo op that harked back to the confident heyday of the Cold War American consensus. He flew down to Florida to gaze at the heavens.

Few portions of political discourse are as predictably shallow as presidential Cabinet discourse. Who should run the Department of Transportation? An affable also-ran in the Democratic primary who once said something about trains? A moderate politician or a businessman who might bring the country together from their perch at the agency that handles civil aviation and our highways? “No,” a sage voice somewhere in Washington, or Delaware, says. “It should be Rahm Emanuel.”

Elon Musk isn’t known for being a practical, by-the-book guy. At different points, the newly minted second-richest person on earth has started a company to implant computer chips into human brains, championed the colonization of Mars, and gotten himself sued for calling a British rescue diver a “pedo guy.” His daughter with musician Grimes is named X Æ A-12. At times, his bizarre tweets and behavior—exacerbated, reportedly, by copious use of Ambien—have wreaked havoc at Tesla, his signature electric car company. Читать дальше...

In August, as families across the country prepared for the new school year, Smithsonian magazine spoke to more than a dozen anonymous tribal citizens about remote learning, public health protocols, and the rest of the fraught exercise of learning in a pandemic. A grandma from Oregon, who was also a former Bureau of Indian Affairs I.T. specialist, said that she had to step in to teach her grandchildren for two months because their parents still had to work full-time. A parent from the Kewa Pueblo... Читать дальше...

While newsletters have long been on the rise in the media landscape, 2020 has become the year they finally reached “so hot right now” status. Perhaps not coincidentally, 2020 has also been a year of atomization, consolidation, and contraction for the media industry. Large outlets, particularly The New York Times, have spent the year plucking media stars from smaller, typically digital, outlets. Many of the luminaries that haven’t felt the gravitational pull of the most prestigious media organizations have broken free... Читать дальше...