Новости за 12.02.2021

In the days leading up to the 2020 presidential election, the Lincoln Project, the viral ad-making Never Trump group, was riding high. Over the previous 11 months, the group’s videos and tweets had been viewed tens of millions of times and it had raised tens of millions of dollars. It had garnered the attention of Trump himself, who regarded the group as a thorn in his side and frequently groused about it, both in public and in private.

Earlier this month, Alondra Carmona, a high school student in Houston, learned that her mother had been laid off from her job at the Port of Houston. Her mother had kept the layoff a secret from her daughters for months, not wanting to worry them, but now the family was behind on rent and facing eviction. Carmona was a senior in high school and had been admitted to Barnard College with a scholarship. Still, the financial aid wasn’t enough to cover the full cost of attending college and Carmona had saved for months to make up the difference. Читать дальше...

If you’ve sent or received any mail over the last few months, you may have noticed that the United States Postal Service is not in great shape. After Louis DeJoy, a Republican fundraiser, took over as postmaster general last June, he quickly implemented a series of “reforms” seemingly designed to slow down service, leading to precipitous declines in the speed with which mail was delivered. Over the holidays, fewer than 40 percent of letters arrived on time.

Back in the early 1990s, Baptist pastor Gary Chapman released a book about human relationships. In its first year, the book barely made a splash, but the following year sales doubled. The year after that, they doubled again. By 2009, The Five Love Languages had reached the New York Times bestseller list, where it occasionally reappears to this day.

Little has changed in the year or so spanning the two impeachments of Donald Trump. His second trial, which began Tuesday, will likely be swiftly decided, this time to spare legislative bandwidth rather than presidential embarrassment. The former president is almost certain to be acquitted, as he was last January. And once again, Mitt Romney will be the man to watch in the jury box.

Britney Spears can’t spend her own money without permission or decide where she lives. She doesn’t have the right to choose who she spends time with, and can’t enter into contracts. Despite being an adult, for more than a decade now, every single one of these decisions and more have been made for Britney by her father, Jamie Spears. The new documentary Framing Britney Spears thrusts the legal arrangement, called conservatorship, into the spotlight. But it provides an incomplete picture. There is a broader, systemic issue at play. Читать дальше...

Watching the House managers present their case in Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial reminded me less of an actual criminal trial and more of the conclusion of the HBO miniseries Chernobyl. In the final episode, the beleaguered Soviet physicist Valery Legasov, played by Jared Harris, also takes part in a trial. On the docket were three nuclear plant operators officially deemed responsible for the catastrophe, as well as the system that produced them.