Новости за 18.06.2021

Last week, I criticized West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin for announcing that he would vote against the For the People Act on purely performative grounds. Manchin’s op-ed criticizing the bill did not name a single provision that he opposed; he simply refused to back Democrats’ signature election reform measure because Republicans happened to oppose it. (He calls this bipartisanship.) I doubt Manchin read my column. But he’s taken a step since then to stake his positions on the bill’s actual contents. Читать дальше...

Paper Trail

In the fall of 2019, on my first visit to Yale University’s Sterling Memorial Library, an exhibition of Janet Malcolm’s writings, curated by Eve Sneider, lined the corridor leading to the rare books and manuscripts room. Perhaps it was serendipity, or perhaps it was fate, but it certainly felt eerie, as Malcolm’s specter loomed large over the book project I was at the library to research—then titled, in a less-than-subtle homage, The Convict and the Conservative.

The influence of Malcolm... Читать дальше...

I started reading Janet Malcolm the year I came to the United States. Encountering her work felt like emerging from ignorance—revelatory and more than a bit humbling. At 23, I was embarrassed not to have heard of her before. If the most quoted parts of The Journalist and the Murderer sounded dimly familiar, it was only in the same way anything well put feels recognizable. Pre-Malcolm, I was like one of the subjects of her stories, fatally lacking in self-awareness and quick to judgment, despite... Читать дальше...

President Joe Biden has proposed a tax increase that you may not have heard about. It would make the tax code more progressive without extracting even one cent from the wages of the rich or the poor. Nor would it take from the investor any of the dividends or capital gains that accrue from wealth. Nor would it appropriate any portion of that wealth itself. It’s kind of a magical tax, one that aligns perfectly with the American ethos of rugged individualism.

India Walton greets me alone at her campaign office, which is actually just a one-desk room in a co-working space, sparsely decorated but for a few books, stacks of campaign lit, and a whiteboard where people have left each other messages both practical (“I’ll call you at 5”) and motivational (“We will win because we can!”) A few minutes later, she’s guiding me through the streets of downtown Buffalo, New York, like it’s her home—which it is, the place where she was born and raised and had her... Читать дальше...

A week after the G7 patted itself on the back for agreeing to charitably hand out 500 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines, (“a drop in the ocean,” as Amnesty International put it) a very different group of leaders will convene virtually on Friday to hash out a more durable way to bring the pandemic to an end. As the climate crisis accelerates, the meeting may also preview an alternative to the G7’s underwhelming climate dithering in Cornwall last week.

On June 10, 2019, John Lewis took to the floor of the House of Representatives to tout a piece of legislation that he and his colleagues, including some Republicans, had worked on for years. It was to be a major legislative achievement, and he wanted the public to know it. “This is not a Republican or a Democratic bill,” Lewis said. “It is an American one,” a vital effort to reinvigorate a failing government agency.

As a lifelong fan of musical theater, it gives me no pleasure to admit that it’s an art form with often iffy ideological undercurrents—a landscape surely made worse by its fanbase: A 2019 report found that Broadway audiences are 74 percent white and boast average household incomes of $260,000 per year. So anytime genuinely left-of-center lyrics manage to creep into the libretto of a smash hit, it can be downright exhilarating. This is perhaps doubly true when they crop up in a film adaptation... Читать дальше...

In the September 1970 issue of the radical feminist magazine off our backs, an anonymous author asked, “Who are our real allies in a revolutionary struggle?” Half a century later, a writer posed a similar question in Marie Claire: “How Can I Become a Better Ally?”