Новости за 08.12.2020

The recent good news on the coronavirus front—the vaccines are on their way—hasn’t negated the bad. Deaths and hospitalizations are on the rise, and the economic situation remains extraordinarily dire. We learned in last week’s job report that unemployment only dipped slightly last month as job growth slowed and hundreds of thousands of Americans gave up looking for work. Millions more, including over 20 percent of families with children, are behind on their rent. And researchers at Columbia University... Читать дальше...

Leslie Brody’s Sometimes You Have to Lie is the second biography we have of Louise Fitzhugh, the author of the beloved children’s novel Harriet the Spy. The other appeared in 1995 to little fanfare. Its author was the intriguingly named Virginia L. Wolf, a writer whose only other published book is a reading companion to Little House on the Prairie. The lack of public information on Fitzhugh is a bit confounding, not least because her claim to fame is a novel about collecting as much information on people as possible. Читать дальше...

The United States has a political class that mistakes its professional norms for ethics. Mainstream political journalists mindlessly grant anonymity to professional liars. Elected officials put collegiality and institutional procedure over the needs and interests of their constituents. And as for lawyers, they have refined this tendency into what amounts to a religion of self-justification.

“We’re working on the line and shoulder-to-shoulder. We have no space on the line, in the break-room, and in the lockers,” Sarah Seibert, who debones hams at a Smithfield’s Food plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, told the Worker Institute at Cornell University in a May interview about the workplace conditions she faced at the start of the pandemic. “When I heard the first person get sick in the plant. Before the first person gets sick I heard about social distancing and wash your hands. I emailed... Читать дальше...

This year marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of publication of Black Metropolis, St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton’s landmark study of Chicago. Black Metropolis appeared as World War II neared its end, with U.S. political leaders fiercely debating the best ways to bring about civilian reconversion and reconstruction. Drake and Cayton recognized that the outcomes of those debates would be critical for their fellow black Americans in the postwar decades. A pair of other influential studies published around the same time... Читать дальше...