Новости за 01.04.2021

Seven years ago, on the eve of being elected to a second term as governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo completed a rite of passage familiar to all presidential aspirants: He published a memoir, All Things Possible. It is overlong at more than 550 pages, cliché-ridden, and hopelessly dull, which is to say a standard-issue political tome. Cuomo was paid a more than $700,000 advance by HarperCollins, and the book had an announced initial print run of 200,000. But five months after it was published,... Читать дальше...

In 2008, a man named Danny Young received just two votes for his candidacy to the City Council in Anamosa, Iowa: one from his wife and one from his neighbor. Both were write-ins, but he still won handily. Young’s ward had the same number of constituents as any of the other wards in his city, but since 1,321 of his district’s 1,379 constituents were incarcerated at the Anamosa State Penitentiary and couldn’t vote, his 58 non-incarcerated constituents had about 25 times the representational power of their fellow residents. Читать дальше...

The twentieth century ushered in the age of the uncanny. The concept, of course, has always been with us, as we see from the earliest of the surviving great epics, Gilgamesh, haunted as it is by the ghostly and the ghastly, by the terror of death-in-life and life-in-death. Freud in his essay Das Unheimliche identifies the uncanny as “that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.” The meaning here is slippery, as so often with this most furtive of revolutionary thinkers; nevertheless... Читать дальше...

No matter what kind of self-hypnotized state I’m in when scrolling on social media, I will always pause for a well-designed interior. The other day, I hovered over a video of a young woman giving a tour of her two-bedroom, rent-controlled Upper West Side apartment. The disembodied camera bobbed into the unit’s entryway, and I immediately became the “transparent eyeball” Ralph Waldo Emerson described when he spoke of man absorbing all of what nature (in this case, the New York City real estate market) has to offer. Читать дальше...

There’s an interesting turn of phrase that’s come to dominate the Biden administration’s rhetoric around immigration: “root causes.”

To meet the emissions targets outlined in the Paris Agreement, experts estimate the United States government will need to spend at least $1 trillion annually, or between 3 to 5 percent of GDP, for a decade. President Biden’s infrastructure plan, unveiled Wednesday amid much fanfare about its climate commitments, doesn’t come close.