Новости за 05.01.2021

One hundred and forty-five years ago, the United States was locked in a constitutional crisis. Bloodshed and intimidation against Black voters and their white Republican allies in the South had suppressed their turnout in the 1876 presidential election. Some local Democratic officials stuffed ballot boxes to bolster Samuel Tilden’s chances against his Republican opponent, Rutherford B. Hayes. On election night, the disputed returns appeared to favor Tilden’s victory.

On Sunday, The New York Times published a piece profiling a handful of recent college grads, all outfitted with varying forms of geology or engineering degrees and struggling to find a foothold in the natural gas industry. With color-matched portraits of the hopeful oil executives set alongside glamor shots of drilling machinery, the piece was presumably designed to provoke empathy for these young, well-educated twentysomethings deprived of six-figure fossil fuel salaries. Judging by the Twitter reaction, it seems to have failed gloriously. Читать дальше...

Every day, a Twitter account run by Kevin Roose, a technology reporter for The New York Times, posts a list of the top 10 sources of the highest-performing links on Facebook in the United States.

On Monday, with a rollout full of social media fanfare and a declaration of intent on the New York Times opinion page, the workers of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, announced the formation of a union. Counting somewhere around 250 Alphabet workers in the United States as initial members—the number seemed to increase throughout the day—the Alphabet Workers Union argued that the “company’s structure needs to change.” Citing a list of complaints, from mistreatment of temporary workers to the recent firing of Timnit Gebru... Читать дальше...

For 48 hours in the lead-up to Georgia’s general election, Malika Redmond, director of a grassroots voter engagement group, was working without electricity. “I laugh now,” she told me. “Hurricane Zeta ripped through Georgia.… I was like, could there be anything else? You’ve got a pandemic, of all of the things that could be in the way.” Georgia voters are used to obstacles, she was saying. “Georgia voters are resilient. Black voters in particular.” 

“All I want to do is this,” Donald Trump told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger during a rambling, lie- and conspiracy-infested hourlong telephone call on Saturday. “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.” At another point in the call, which was published in its entirety by The Washington Post a day later, he asked state officials, “So what are we going to do here, folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give... Читать дальше...