Новости за 13.05.2021

As you may well have heard by now, the Colonial Pipeline—a 5,500-mile system that provides the East Coast with nearly half of its gas supply—shut down last Friday after a ransomware attack by a group of European hackers. In the six days since the hack, the hackers have apologized for any inconvenience they’ve caused, Colonial has likely thanked its lucky stars that a new P.R. crisis has overshadowed its massive North Carolina gas spill, and people up and down the East Coast have more or less lost their damn minds. Читать дальше...

It’s a dark day on meme street. Elon Musk, one of Bitcoin’s high priests, seems to have turned against the cryptocurrency, sending its value tumbling more than 10 percent and calling into question an economic model that had depended on the public support of megamoguls to keep crypto prices frothy.

On Wednesday, after a speech that saw House Republicans quit the chamber in protest and a closed-door vote, Congresswoman Liz Cheney, a vociferous critic of the claim that President Biden stole November’s election, was removed from her post as Republican conference chair. We needn’t have sympathy for her or ignore her role in building the political climate she now decries to understand her ouster as a meaningful moment for the Republican Party. Speaking after a meeting with Biden at the White House... Читать дальше...

Early in the morning of April 1, Texas state Senator Bryan Hughes, a Republican who represents a rural district in the northeast part of the state, posted a video to Twitter from the Capitol in Austin. His hair was unkempt. There were dark circles under his eyes. But he spoke with a confidence attributable as much to the fact that few were watching as to the significance of the announcement he was about to make. “It’s a little after 2:30 in the morning and the Texas Senate has just recessed,” he said. Читать дальше...

Depending on which climate advocate you talk to, economic growth can either be the force that will deliver us from planetary destruction or the source of it. Most climate models assume growth is a given, projecting its bounties will eventually spur on decarbonization. But this risky gamble isn’t our only option, a new paper argues.

In 1975, Adrienne Rich wrote a letter to the editor in The New York Review of Books, scolding Susan Sontag for suggesting that contemporary feminists had played a part in promoting Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefensthal’s films. In response, Sontag called Rich, among other things, “anti-intellectual.” A few months later, Rich wrote to Sontag, asking to meet in person. In May 1975, Sontag agreed. Having already had the same lover—Lilly Engler, also Rich’s therapist and the subject of her Twenty-One Love Poems—the women met to talk. Читать дальше...

When I was an undergraduate, long ago, there was a legend at my college concerning a student who was up for a summa cum laude degree in English literature and failed not only to garner that high honor but to receive an honors degree at all. According to the legend, this happened because, during his oral exams, he confessed that he had never read the multivolume novel Middlemarchby British author George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans). The legend was assumed to be apocryphal, but also to indicate the English... Читать дальше...

As she fought to keep her job as the third-most powerful Republican in the House of Representatives, Liz Cheney returned again and again to the same argument. The GOP had a choice: It could continue to embrace Donald Trump and his lies about the 2020 election, or it could follow a more principled path. “The Republican Party is at a turning point,” she wrote in a Washington Post op-ed, “Republicans must decide whether we are going to choose truth and fidelity to the Constitution.” Cheney’s broadside... Читать дальше...