Новости за 23.02.2021

Last week, Facebook went nuclear. As Australia considered legislation to force tech giants to compensate media outlets, the social media company cut off access to news for Australian users and globally banned sharing of Australian news sources. It was a unilateral act of info-suppression against 11 million Facebook users down under, and it had reverberating consequences well beyond journalism (health care facilities and emergency services found their pages disabled). As I wrote at the time, Facebook was behaving like the Mafia... Читать дальше...

On December 13, 2019, Britain’s newly elected Prime Minister Boris Johnson welcomed “a new dawn.” The Conservative Party had secured its largest parliamentary majority since 1987. Almost 50 new seats had swung the Conservatives’ way, including many in the so-called “red wall”: working-class constituencies in north and middle England traditionally considered Labour strongholds. Johnson and his fellow Tories were jubilant. “Rejoice!” the front page of the conservative Daily Mail sang.

Consider a steak. When it hits the hot oil in the pan, your mouth can’t help but water at the aroma. That familiar crackle of fat beginning to fry and render is the sound of the maillard reaction: that wondrous molecular dance of the steak’s amino acids and sugars as they caramelize during the searing process. When you pull it from the pan—it’s only a few moments away now—and your teeth sink into the medium-rare flesh, you will experience the textural contrast of the unctuous interior and the crispy crust. Читать дальше...

On May 31, 1953, 20-year-old Sylvia Plath arrived in New York City. She was a rising senior at Smith College and already a published author, with three poems sold to Harper’s; she was also just a few months away from her first suicide attempt. Stepping off the train in Grand Central Terminal, she gained the attention of “two lovely muscular members of the US soldiery” who proceeded to help her with bags, escort her through the crowd, and travel with her in a taxi to her destination: the corner of Lexington Avenue and 63rd Street. Читать дальше...

Jonathan Karl, the guest host of ABC’s This Week, knew exactly what he was doing on Sunday when he asked Republican Representative Steve Scalise if the 2020 election was stolen. This was, on its face, a simple and straightforward question. No evidence of voter fraud has emerged over the past four months, and Joe Biden has been president since January 20. Karl may as well have asked if the sky was blue.

Blending fiction and philosophy is more akin to chemistry than art: It involves creating a synthetic element that rarely occurs in nature in stable form. Samuel Beckett, Albert Camus, and Ursula Le Guin have successfully married the two disciplines, but like many lab-created chemicals, works of philosophical fiction are often volatile and downright toxic. An extreme example can be found in the work of Ayn Rand, whose Objectivist novels can be considered a kind of radioactive waste—a hazardous... Читать дальше...

If Merrick Garland is confirmed by the Senate and becomes the next attorney general, his first priority, according to the testimony he offered on Monday, would be supervising “the prosecution of white supremacists and others who stormed the Capitol on January 6.” In both his prepared remarks and his answers to senators’ questions, Garland framed the siege as an attack on American democracy itself, and the job of the Department of Justice as “battling extremist attacks on our democratic institutions.”... Читать дальше...

In the wake of the winter storm that decimated Texas’s energy infrastructure and left millions without power or water, the predictable storylines have come and gone one by one: There was the early attempt by conservatives to shift the blame from the state’s privatized, largely fossil fueled grid to renewables. Then there was the Cruz family’s one-day escapade to Cancun. And now we have arrived at the price-gouging bit.