The scene Monday night was not high on the list of Democratic fantasies about a Joe Biden presidency: A smiling Susan Collins, flanked by Republican Senate colleagues, stood in the icy White House driveway to announce, “We have just had a very productive, cordial two-hour meeting with the president and the vice president.”
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At first it may seem like Ramin Bahrani’s The White Tiger is another “poverty porn” film, a rising Hollywood genre in the mold of Slumdog Millionaire and Million Dollar Arm, in which Indian street urchins improbably rise from rags to riches. India’s abject socioeconomic and living conditions have been a cash cow for Hollywood studios capitalizing on caste oppression and economic backwardness. These movies stitch together digital-age Dickensian tales of token Indian individual exceptionalism, as if to say... Читать дальше...
In a Friday news conference, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was asked about a report from the state’s attorney general that showed that nursing home deaths from Covid-19 had been severely undercounted—did he have any regrets? “Federal guidance said that people who were in hospitals but who were presumed not contagious could go back to a nursing home which could handle them; not all nursing homes can handle them,” Cuomo explained. “And the nursing home had to by law say that they could handle those... Читать дальше...
Would you like to become a U.S. ambassador to a foreign country? You have two options. You can join the State Department as a career officer in the Foreign Service and spend a couple of decades rising through the ranks as a diplomat. If you’re competent enough, a future president might nominate you for a Senate-confirmed ambassadorial posting. It will likely be somewhere that’s not in Europe or North America, but that doesn’t make it any less important. You may get posted somewhere dangerous or unstable... Читать дальше...
Covid-19 is a trickster. Those who have lived with it the longest often describe the disease as if it knows what mischief it’s making. Miel Singletary Schultz, a 48-year-old “long hauler” and former sailing crew worker in San Diego, thought she had experienced every possible symptom when in October her skin began exuding tiny yellow crystals all over her body; a fellow long hauler suggested it might be uremic frost, the manifestation of a kidney disease. The skin discharge was not the most debilitating of her dozen-plus symptoms... Читать дальше...
