Новости за 26.02.2021

“Biden deprioritizes the Middle East,” a Politico headline declared. The president, wrote Natasha Bertrand and Lara Seligman, “is tired of dealing with the Middle East—and, barely a month into his tenure, the region has noticed.”

Dr. Oni Blackstock finished seeing patients one day in late December, and then she became the patient for a few minutes: She rolled up her sleeve and got her first Covid-19 shot. But as she chatted with the nurses—both at work that day and while filling out paperwork for the vaccine—she encountered the same line from several of them: “I’d like to wait and see.” While some of the nurses were clamoring to receive their own vaccines, others were wary.

It was Selina Sanchez-Cristobal’s day off, but she picked up the phone anyway. It was 2019, and she was the only employee running a 24-hour hotline for migrants who became lost crossing from Mexico to Texas; the calls rarely stopped.

Is any genre more vulnerable to the vagaries of ideology than the lavish artist biopic? The essential dilemma is how to milk the life for drama while also accommodating what was singular enough to merit biopic treatment in the first place: the work. Being juicier, the life tends to take over, rendering the art some half-accidental outcropping of painful experience. And a life story invites a moral—looking at someone else’s from beginning to end, you can’t help but see how it might have gone better. Читать дальше...

The Wikipedia article for the Covid-19 pandemic didn’t exist until January 2020. By June, it was one of the site’s most visited entries of all time. It became, according to Wikipedia’s project page of article rankings, “the biggest phenomenon Wikipedia has ever known.”

The long-standing idea of paying reparations to Black Americans for the costs of slavery, segregation, and other racist policies has lately gotten a boost. President Joe Biden has endorsed a commission to study the subject, and on February 17 the House Judiciary Committee heard testimony on H.R. 40, which would create such a commission.

For the last two and a half centuries, the only certainties in American life were death, taxes, and the census. Every 10 years, the Census Bureau would take a head count of every man, woman, and child living in the Union. Every 10 years, Congress and the states would use that count to reapportion almost every legislative seat in the country. And every 10 years, the quiet mechanisms that kept American civic life running smoothly have continued apace.