Новости за 29.12.2020

For so many of us, the person of the year is Nothing. The thing that killed mom or laid out the elementary school teacher was Nothing. Nobody saw it. Either dad tracked nothing home from the grocery store or there was a fatal amount of Nothing smeared all over the produce. Maybe it was on the car door handle. Nothing got through the mask I wore to the drug store. Nothing is coming to help.

In my speculative fiction course this fall, my students identified a place and time we referred to as Dystopia TM, a sort of abstracted postapocalyptic landscape that has become as familiar a backdrop as Victorian England, 1950s America, or any white suburb on television. The polluted sky and water, the ruined city, rebels living in the outskirts, the authoritarian government that took over after some vaguely named Troubles, all of which might as well get a TM, too. My students raised the possibility... Читать дальше...

The Paris Agreement, which celebrated its fifth birthday on December 12, is among the most remarkable diplomatic achievements in world history, representing decades of work to arrive at a common framework for capping global temperature rise at “well below” 2 degrees Celsius. It’s also basically toothless—as is the body in which it was brokered: the United National Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC.

“I think Facebook is hurting people at scale,” said a software engineer when he left the company in the summer. “I know that I have blood on my hands by now,” lamented a data scientist who policed political misinformation campaigns around the world for Facebook until earlier this year. Another data scientist, in a farewell note earlier this month, wrote of the “many internal forces propping up the production of hateful and violent content,” adding, “It also makes it embarrassing to work here.”... Читать дальше...

When Laura Browning was pregnant for the first time, she knew what she wanted from her birth experience. She wanted a home birth with a midwife, ideally, and if that wasn’t possible, she wanted a nurse-midwife (who are typically hospital-based) to deliver her baby. She associated obstetricians with “quick in-and-out appointments” that lacked personal care and warmth. “I wanted to know who’s going to be delivering my baby—who’s going to be catching my baby—and have a relationship with them,” recalled Browning... Читать дальше...