Новости за 21.05.2021

At the Associated Press, college activism is apparently a fireable offense. On Thursday, the venerable news organization sent an email informing staff that Emily Wilder, a news associate based in Arizona, had been let go. Wilder had been the target of a concerted right-wing smear campaign based on her membership in the group Students for Justice in Palestine during her time as a student at Stanford University, as well as her involvement in a protest against the Sheldon Adelson–funded Birthright program. Читать дальше...

On April 30, the online UFO community lit up with excitement. The New Yorker, the most luxe of news magazines, published a major UFO article by Gideon Lewis-Kraus alleging there was good reason for the U.S. government to get back into the business of hunting flying saucers. On May 16, CBS’s Sunday Morning and 60 Minutes broadcast stories about UFOs, with Florida Senator Marco Rubio sternly intoning about the importance of treating them as a potential national security concern. All month, major media have jumped on the bandwagon. Читать дальше...

“Social justice” might seem, at first, like a perfectly innocuous phrase, safe enough for brands like Aflac, Mountain Dew, Disney, and Pizza Hut to use in their public statements about racism and diversity. After George Floyd’s death, the pizza chain announced that it would “stand against oppression” and donate $3 million to “social justice efforts.” But even before Mitch McConnell soberly advised corporate America to “stay out of politics,” the right was crusading against the very notion of social justice. Читать дальше...

Celebrated author Philip Roth made a startling admission while speaking to a French interviewer nine years ago: He had asked his executors, the uber-powerful literary agent Andrew Wylie and ex-girlfriend Julia Golier, to destroy many of his personal papers after the publication of the semi-authorized biography on which Blake Bailey had recently begun work. His manuscripts, after all, were already housed in the Library of Congress; the Newark Public Library had his books, as well as many personal possessions. Читать дальше...

There’s a scene in Those Who Wish Me Dead where Allison Sawyer, a heavily pregnant side character played by Medina Senghore, blasts a bad guy in the face with a lit aerosol can before riding away through the forest on a white horse. The mere fact of a Black outdoorswoman getting such cool action in a natural disaster movie, a genre that frequently treats white characters as the only ones worth saving, is refreshing in itself. But Those Who Wish Me Dead, which stars Angelina Jolie as a smokejumper—those... Читать дальше...

It didn’t garner any “Dems in Disarray” headlines, but an important fault line emerged in April as Democratic leaders put forward dueling legislative proposals. As the country waited to find out the details of President Biden’s American Families Plan infrastructure package, which he had promised would include serious investments in the country’s childcare system, lawmakers jockeyed to influence his thinking.

A central problem in labor economics is how to raise wages without first killing off a significant portion of the workforce. Plagues have historically reduced income inequality by reducing the labor supply, with the necessary caveat that in order to enjoy this higher standard of living the worker in question must remain one of the living. The Covid-19 pandemic is following this pattern.  

Last August, as yet another season of historic wildfires ripped through the West and sent plumes of smoke drifting across the continent, reporters and editors everywhere began asking a version of the same two basic questions: Why does this keep happening, and how did it get so bad? They published interviews with the usual suspects—firefighters, Ph.D.-holders, and park employees, many of whom offered one of two basic answers: climate change and colonization.

The title of Joseph Darda’s new book, How White Men Won the Culture Wars, may land awkwardly for weary followers of recursive debates over cancel culture, wokeness, and the like. The loudest and most visible partisans in these battles are aggrieved white men, insisting that they’re scapegoats in unhinged identity-driven witch hunts and eagerly putting themselves forward as martyrs in ugly confrontations over free speech. How is it, then, that this demographic emerged as the victors of the modern... Читать дальше...