Новости за 11.05.2021

Too many American workers have become layabouts living off the government dole. That’s the message—same as it ever was—being sent by some businesses and Republican politicians who think that recent difficulty finding low-wage workers is largely the result of overly generous unemployment benefits. Pull the unemployment benefits, their crude logic goes, and restaurants and stores will have all the workers they need—desperate and willing to take whatever is offered. Never mind raising wages or improving... Читать дальше...

They went to ground as John Kerry was “reporting for duty” at the Democratic National Convention, deftly avoiding the release of Princess Diaries 2 a few weeks later. They’ve missed the launch of Twitter, the birth of the gig economy, and Brexit. Now, after 17 years sipping tree roots in the soils of North America’s deciduous forests, billions of cicadas are reemerging into a world dramatically altered by the coronavirus. Fortunately, unlike the last plague that forced people indoors, almost as soon as these (harmless) cicadas swarm... Читать дальше...

For years, Donald Trump groused about the ugly architecture in Washington. And then, in December, in the waning days of his presidency, he handed down the “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture” executive order, decreeing that all new federal construction adhere to a traditional, classicist aesthetic. If Trump had had his way, the FBI would have moved from its appropriately treacherous and looming brutalist building into a neo-Palladian nightmare with monumental columns and a gold interior spray-painted to look like Versailles. Читать дальше...

The Covid-19 pandemic has laid bare many fault lines in American society, from the savage inequalities of our health care system to the collapse of federal governance into a quagmire of blame-shifting and conspiracy-mongering during much of the crisis. For longtime financial journalist Michael Lewis, though, the effort to comprehend and contain the spread of Covid-19 mostly represents a tragic parable of unheeded expertise and thwarted procedural efficiency.