Новости за 21.01.2021

Donald Trump’s final speech, at a kind of half-hearted miniature rally, ended on a fitting note. “Have a good life,” a dejected and petulant Trump said. “See you soon.” Then the Village People’s “YMCA,” the anthem of his failed bid for reelection, started blaring. Trump waved goodbye and boarded Air Force One. Somewhere between Washington, D.C., and Mar-a-Lago, he made time to issue one final pardon—this one to favorite Fox News host Jeanine Pirro’s ex-husband, who had been convicted of tax evasion 20 years earlier. Читать дальше...

On Tuesday, an otherwise fairly boring confirmation hearing heralded a remarkable victory for climate policy. In response to several questions about climate, 74-year-old former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, now poised to become Joe Biden’s treasury secretary, called climate change an “existential threat” and said she would appoint someone at a “very senior level” to focus on rising temperatures. She pledged, as well, to create a “hub” for examining the risks global warming poses to the financial system. Читать дальше...

“When was the last time we really had terms with which or the occasion for questioning the quality of people’s work?” Kathi Weeks, professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University, asked when we spoke in December, which, at that point, had been the deadliest month so far of the Covid-19 pandemic, with 12 million workers’ unemployment benefits at risk, and the virus still spiking. “And not just the quality of what the labor process is like—is it a good job? Is it a bad job?—or the remuneration... Читать дальше...

“You don’t have to like it,” my late father would tell my siblings and me when we complained about our jobs. “That’s why it’s called work.” His career began in typewriter repair in the 1950s and, after a string of promotions, layoffs, and lateral moves, ended in middle management for a chain of grocery stores. He didn’t have to love his job; he loved us. By showing up to the office every day, he kept his family warm, fed, and educated. For him, that was enough.

Joe Biden’s inaugural speech was primarily about unity, an appropriate theme after the pathologically divisive presidency of you-know-who. But Biden also reaffirmed that government can address the nation’s problems effectively—a theme that, at least implicitly, repudiates the legacy of a much earlier predecessor who, inexplicably, became the most admired president of the past half-century.

Joe Biden’s inaugural address was studded with words and sentences that were hard to imagine any other president expressing at any other time.