Новости за 25.05.2021

While politicos like to pretend otherwise, most presidential addresses to Congress contain very little that matters—they capture the public’s attention for a day or two, generate busywork for journalists, and are then promptly forgotten by all except historians, who parse them for meaning long after the administrations in question are over. In the present, they’re useful mostly as windows into the upcoming legislative calendar; viewers typically come away with a general sense as to what the president and his party want to prioritize. Читать дальше...

Nikole Hannah-Jones is a renowned journalist, recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for journalism. Barely a month ago, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill announced to much fanfare that she had been appointed to the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism in the Hussman School of Journalism and Media. That fanfare dissolved into jarring dissonance last Wednesday when the university’s board of trustees took the highly unusual step of overturning... Читать дальше...

In April 1994, the heads of the biggest tobacco companies testified before Congress that cigarettes weren’t addictive. A month later, across the country, a box marked “confidential” arrived for Dr. Stanton Glantz, a longtime foe of Big Tobacco and a professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco. The sender signed his name “Mr. Butts,” an allusion to a Doonesbury character. When Glantz opened the package, he found thousands of internal documents from British American Tobacco and its then-subsidiary... Читать дальше...

Last Friday was a busy, confusing day on the climate front in America. First, in the morning, the Group of Seven—consisting of the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, France, Canada, Italy, and Germany—released a 26-page communiqué outlining its commitment to mitigating climate change. Among the available routes highlighted by the global powers included a coalition-wide promise to phase out state subsidies for coal production. “We stress that international investments in unabated coal must... Читать дальше...

In Elysburg, Pennsylvania, there is a Vatican-trained exorcist and professed expert on spiritual warfare, who lectures and tweets about the “demonic” forces of our times. It might surprise you to learn what these latter-day Regan MacNeils bedeviling our safe suburban homes are: Black Lives Matter, Marxism, critical race theory, intersectionality, and wokeness. And this cleric is not the only exorcist very publicly conflating the Evil One with the left, real and imagined.

For as long as there have been police, there have been bestselling police biographies and autobiographies. In nineteenth-century Britain and France, bourgeois readers devoured police “memoirs” that peddled lurid glimpses into high-profile murders and tawdry street crimes alike. In the United States, readers thrilled to dime-novel sheriffs lassoing rustlers on the range and broadside exploits of Allan Pinkerton and his agents, women included, smashing conspiracies of anarchists, communists, and “Molly Maguires.” In the twentieth century... Читать дальше...

The man dubbed “the last dictator in Europe” lived up to his billing over the weekend. In a provocative dare to the entire continent, Belarus despot Aleksandr Lukashenko effectively snatched one of his most prominent critics out of the sky itself. The question now is whether the European Union—of which Belarus is not a member but a neighbor—can find the courage and coordination to answer his challenge.