Новости за 19.04.2021

Late last month, a pair of satellites operated by Starlink and OneWeb—two companies working to launch constellations of small, low-orbiting satellites that beam internet access all over Earth—almost collided, passing within nearly 200 feet of one another. As The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday, this was only the latest near miss: In late 2019, a Starlink satellite passed dangerously close to a European Union weather satellite. Apparently, the EU took the potential collision a lot more seriously than Starlink... Читать дальше...

Earlier this month, the right found the latest battle in the culture wars: America’s pastime. When Major League Baseball moved the 2021 All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver after Georgia passed a wave of voter suppression measures, the outcry was sharp.

On a Friday in early June 1941, Richard Wright addressed the opening session of the Congress in Defense of Culture in New York City. “Some of you may wonder why a writer, at a congress of writers, should make the theme of war the main burden of a public talk,” he began. He explained that it was for the simple reason that few things mattered “one-half as much.” Then he laid out his case against American involvement in World War II, claiming that the country’s intervention was not likely to change the outcome... Читать дальше...

In the summer of 2007, Thomas Gokey had just graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and he was thinking about how much his degree had cost him. His diploma was a simple piece of paper, but it came with a price tag of thousands of dollars—dollars that were themselves pieces of paper, transmitted to him in the form of student loans, which he now owed to the federal government. While chewing on this thought, he had an idea for a project that would occupy him for much of the next year. Читать дальше...

What gets left behind when a major oil company opts to go net-zero? Just because greenhouse gas emissions move off a corporate balance sheet doesn’t mean they disappear. That’s the upshot of a lengthy new investigation by Bloomberg’s Rachel Adams-Heard. 

As coronavirus cases ticked up in early November, something utterly bizarre happened in Massachusetts: In light of those rising numbers, Governor Charlie Baker issued a rule mandating that people would be required to wear face masks at all times while outdoors in public, whether or not they were around others. (Violators were subject to a $300 fine.) However alarming that surge might have been, the notion that this new rule would mitigate it was ludicrous: Approximately zero cases of Covid-19... Читать дальше...