Новости за 09.03.2021

Do Fox News viewers even know about the American Rescue Act, the $1.9 trillion stimulus bill that passed the Senate? They might not. The network, like most right-wing media, has largely ignored the Covid-19 relief legislation, instead fixating on silly culture-war controversies involving Mr. Potato Head and Dr. Seuss. In the days leading up to the Senate vote, the network was far more concerned with the availability of Dr. Seuss’s Scrambled Eggs Super than it was with any aspect of the bill itself. Читать дальше...

July 12, 2020, is the day Flynn Murray became a birder. That’s when the 31-year-old Brooklynite left her dog at home, grabbed her binoculars, and made it her sole mission to immerse herself in the avian world. In nearby Prospect Park, Murray found her spark bird—“a species that triggers a lifelong passion for birding,” per the Audubon Dictionary—in a green heron fishing on the lake.

It took a global pandemic for many of us to realize that we live in what Italian journalist and social theorist Marco D’Eramo calls the “Age of Tourism.” As he writes in his new book, The World in a Selfie: An Inquiry Into the Tourist Age, tourism is the defining industry of the twenty-first century. Tourism was an $8.8 trillion business in 2018, or 10.4 percent of global gross domestic product. It is also an industry upon which, D’Eramo writes, “a galaxy of institutions and businesses” depend... Читать дальше...

On Sunday, the day before the opening of the trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, charged with murdering George Floyd, protesters gathered around the county court building, in black T-shirts that read, “A man was lynched in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020.” The building has been largely emptied out, 58 judges sent home to conduct court business by video conference. “The fear of having the government center overrun is real,” Chief Hennepin County District Judge Toddrick Barnette told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Читать дальше...

“This is what they have done,” Robert Busch writes with weary outrage as he forwards me a photograph of a group of nuns, one of them wearing a “Stop the Steal” button, cheerfully joining President Trump’s January 6 rally in Washington, D.C. Busch, who lives in Redwood City, California, recently formed a study group on economic justice within the Thomas Merton Center, which is affiliated with the St. Thomas Aquinas Parish in Palo Alto. Like most of his fellow study group members, he calls himself... Читать дальше...

In 1991, Harvard Law professor Mary Ann Glendon came out with Rights Talk, a warning that Americans had embraced a divisive understanding of rights that would lead the country into greater and greater strife. Americans, she argued, tended to regard declaring a right as the solution to any problem—and the more absolute the right, the better. Getting your right honored allowed quick victory, often in court rather than politics; but the wrong people usually won, and even when the right ones did, it left polarization in its wake. Читать дальше...