Новости за 10.12.2020

In the lead-up to Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings in October, Democrats fretted that the party’s ranking member on the Judiciary Committee, Dianne Feinstein, wasn’t up to the task. Fear among congressional Democrats was “widespread,” according to Politico. The 87-year-old Feinstein “gets confused by reporters’ questions, or will offer different answers to the same question depending on where or when she’s asked,” and appears “frail.”

Imagine if the United States had quickly employed proven public health advice, updated regularly as new science came in, throughout the entire pandemic. Far fewer people would be dead or suffering long-term health issues. And in a few months’ time, a coordinated vaccine rollout could have halted the pandemic in its tracks and returned us to life as normal. The vaccines wouldn’t even need to be super effective to help stop the pandemic, as long as we were doing everything in our power proven to stop the virus’s transmission. Читать дальше...

Secretary of the interior isn’t the most high-profile Cabinet post, but it might be the most glaring example of how President-elect Joe Biden’s selection process is going awry. The clear front-runner for the job is New Mexico Representative Deb Haaland, who was elected to the House in 2018. Since then, she’s won the praise of tribal leaders, progressive lawmakers, and even some Republicans for her consensus-driven approach to Indigenous issues and public lands. If nominated, Haaland would also... Читать дальше...

Last Wednesday, Timnit Gebru, a staff research scientist and co-lead of the Ethical Artificial Intelligence team at Google, said that she had been ousted from the company over a research paper she co-authored and submitted for review. According to Gebru’s account, a manager had asked her to recant or remove her name from the paper, which raised ethical concerns about A.I. language models of the sort used in Google’s sprawling search engine. Gebru, one of the most prominent ethicists in Silicon... Читать дальше...

Asked during an Election Day earnings call about the prospect of a Donald Trump–branded television network, Fox News CEO Lachlan Murdoch was sanguine. “We love competition,” he said. “We have always thrived on competition.” Having consistently bested its cable news rivals, Fox was competing with the networks as well. “I will say the only difference today versus some years ago, as our audience has grown and our reach has grown, we see our competition as no longer only cable news providers, but... Читать дальше...

Few art forms on earth are more indebted to class privilege than Western classical music. For most of its history, it has relied on monarchs, aristocrats, and wealthy patrons even to exist. We have Haydn because of a prince, Mozart and Beethoven because of a baron, Stravinsky and Copland because of an heiress, and Wagner because of a king. We have an entire genre largely because, at Versailles in the seventeenth century, the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully was willing to indulge his employer, Louis XIV... Читать дальше...

Anyone who wants to know that Pornhub has engaged in abusive and exploitative behavior toward women need only listen to the women whose videos were posted to the free porn site without their consent. That includes the abuse of people like Rose Kalemba, who has written about how she had to impersonate a lawyer to get Pornhub to remove a video that recorded a man raping her more than a decade ago. That also includes the numerous porn performers who have spoken publicly about how Pornhub routinely... Читать дальше...