Новости за 17.02.2021

Twenty-five years ago, Rush Limbaugh graced the cover of Time magazine. Wearing a striped shirt, an expensive suit, and a look of total contempt, he held his trademark cigar between two stubby fingers. A thick plume of smoke obscured part of his face, styling him in brimstone. The issue’s cover asked a simple, almost innocent question: Is Rush Limbaugh good for America?

The youth vote is one of the biggest what-ifs in American politics. The crucial 18-to-29 bracket typically doesn’t participate at levels comparable to groups over the age of 30, skewing national electoral profiles toward the older end of the spectrum. The 2020 election didn’t upend the trend, but surging youth turnout did send a crucial message to the Democratic Party, particularly on the issue of climate change: We care; now do something. 

One little-examined legacy of the broader intellectual embrace of race-reductive thinking is something we might call the Quest for Moses(es)—the shorthand branding exercise of privileging the content of individual characters in our debates on racial injustice. We see this tendency in much of today’s wokeness-inflected discourse, which leans heavily on appealing to the authority individuals considered to be exemplary, from differing times or historical contexts, in lieu of empirical arguments to... Читать дальше...

The vaccine rollout in the United States has been a national embarrassment. A doctor in Houston was fired for using ten doses of vaccine that would have otherwise expired and gone to waste. Local and state sign-up portals are impossible to navigate, even for tech-literate adult children trying to enroll their elderly parents. There is seemingly unending confusion about overall supply, which states are desperately low on shots, and when the country can expect vaccine production to scale up to meet the urgency of the demand. Читать дальше...

Not long ago, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was amiably shrugging off speculation that he was the leading candidate for the Democratic Party’s 2024 presidential nomination. An August poll found that he was leading in nearly all demographics—the first choice of men, women, voters over 30, and white voters; he led in every region except the West. He was even outpacing Vice President Kamala Harris by two points. The poll, he allowed, was “shocking.” Nevertheless, he pointed to New York’s Covid-19 response and his press briefings... Читать дальше...

What is writing about sickness for? In the 1990s, Anne Hunsaker Hawkins, a professor of humanities at Penn State, undertook a study of what at the time was a new, and burgeoning, genre: illness memoirs. Before 1950, book-length personal accounts of illness were uncommon, she noted; before 1900, almost unheard of. But by 1999, they were abundant. That year, Hawkins counted some 60 memoirs of breast cancer alone. Gilda Radner’s It’s Always Something, a 1991 memoir about the actress’s experience of ovarian cancer... Читать дальше...

What’s it like to be wrong? We have no idea. On Episode 25 of The Politics of Everything, hosts Laura Marsh and Alex Pareene discuss being right all the time. TNR staff writers Walter Shapiro and Matt Ford review their spot-on analyses of Trump and the Republican Party; Wired columnist Paul Ford talks about how the internet today looks exactly as he would have predicted in 2000; and the social psychologist Carol Tavris explains cognitive dissonance, the mechanism that protects people who do get things wrong—unlike the hosts... Читать дальше...

A transcript of Episode 25 of The Politics of Everything, “Mistakes Were Made, But Not By Us”

Donald Trump has once again wriggled his way out of his latest jam. Fifty-seven senators voted on Saturday to find the former president guilty of inciting the January 6 attack on Capitol Hill, including seven Republicans who made an unprecedented break from the ranks of their party. But the Senate fell far short of the 67 guilty votes needed to convict Trump. He now has the dubious honor of being the first president to be acquitted twice in a Senate impeachment trial.